Thread by @XavierHelgesen

Everything you have been told about stopping climate change is wrong.

Buying a Tesla doesn’t matter. Not flying/eating vegan/turning off lights doesn’t matter.

As a serial climate entrepreneur (raised over $200 million), I speak from experience.

Only one thing matters. 👇🏻👇🏻

Let’s start at the beginning: what’s the problem?

The problem is that it is free to pollute the atmosphere with CO2.

Because it is free, lots of business models make sense.

Examples: oil extraction, gas stations, global container shipping, international air travel, etc.

Because lots of business models ONLY make sense when pollution is free, a very well-funded PR and lobbying machine sprang up to keep pollution free.

At first, they tried to convince people that climate change was not manmade.

They said it was a “natural climactic cycle”.

Eventually this became untenable.

So they settled on a more durable strategy: climate change is a matter of personal responsibility.

If you think about it, this is absurd.

Just because I didn’t personally spill oil in the Gulf of Mexico doesn’t mean it’s ok if BP does.

Unfortunately, it worked.

Green became cool, electric cars became cool. People had climate guilt and bought offsets.

Urban liberals convinced themselves they were doing something about the biggest problem of our age.

But they weren’t.

Because pollution was still free.

Let’s take your Tesla.

You retire your gas guzzler and go electric: you reduce your personal emissions.

But what happens systematically?

That incremental gallon of gas is still sold. All you have done is slightly decrease demand.

Congrats, you just made gas cheaper.

There is only one solution to this problem.

And as much as entrepreneurs hate to hear it, it is a political solution.

There must be a high and predictably escalating price on carbon pollution globally.

That’s it.

Nothing less, nothing more.

All fossil fuel business models rely on relatively long-term (20+ years) business plans.

A predictably escalating price on carbon destroys these business models.

It also creates a dramatic financial incentive to put carbon back in the ground.

Some carbon emitting activities, like international flights and Kobe beef, can withstand a high price on carbon.

There are low carbon, carbon neutral and carbon negative substitutes for nearly everything in our lives.

What is missing is the economic incentive.

@stripe has been a leader in paying to put carbon back in the ground.

Corporate action is great, but not sufficient globally.

My wish is that everyone who cares listens to @GretaThunberg and realizes there is only one thing that matters: put a price on pollution.

Whatever money you would have spent on solar panels and electric cars, apply it where it matters: putting a price on pollution.

Make it untenable for a politician (left or right) to run for office without solving this problem economically.

On the left: we don’t need a “green new deal”. That doesn’t solve the problem. We need a clear economic incentive to not pollute.

On the right: carbon pricing is a transparent incentive for business to do the right thing for the planet. Even Exxon supports it.

Here are some folks you can follow if you care about pragmatic climate solutions: @claydumas @sacca @greentechmedia @GretaThunberg @ramez @PeterDiamandis @Tomprice @lowercarbon @chamath @JigarShahDC @elonmusk @andykarsner @BillGates

To conclude the thread, I think many people underestimate how smart and evil the opponents of global action on climate change have been.

They have effectively coopted the goodwill of smart people who care into irrelevant solutions.

Let’s get smart on this and let’s solve it.

Addenda #1 - I forgot to mention that the “personal responsibility” PR play was taken directly from the tobacco industry, which was extremely successful with it.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Addenda #2 - The full solution is two parts:

1. A high and predictably escalating price for carbon.

2. A commitment to pay to put an equivalent amount of carbon back in the ground as your nation has historically emitted.

Lots of nuance, but that’s the North Star.

Addenda #3 -

It has been 15 years since An Inconvenient Truth came out, with sustained “personal responsibility” campaigns since.

Impossible to argue with the failure of this empirically, as illustrated well here.

Addenda #4

I will write a separate thread on why we should be talking much more about geo-engineering.

We have already been unintentionally geo-engineering for 150 years.

We now know how to be intentional about it to buy ourselves the 100 years we need to fix this.