Thread by @t0nyyates

Obviously, the first best thing to do about climate change is to get a collective agreement to stop emitting and prevent warming to the point where climate change impoverishes us and fellow species too much more.

But if you're a small country, your own good behaviour won't make much if any difference to the global outcome: if you think the likelihood of everyone else doing the right thing is low, the best thing to do is to tilt investment to adaptation/mitigation.

And if others think that you think that + will tilt investmenet to mitigation and adaptation, they might too, validating your own pessimism. Leading to us collectivey giving up on limiting climate change, or not doing enough to limit it as much as we could.

Added to this, the chance of a good outcome is reduced by the benefits of limiting warming being felt by the young and the unborn, and unevenly across the globe, mostly in poor countries.

And things are even worse because the benefits are not as tangible as the sacrifice, being later in time, and more uncertain than what you give up now.

If we were one global nation with a single elected authority, this problem would go away. Of course there isn't one because of all the other failures that typically come with setting up institutions governing diverse and remote constituencies.

Problems not to be scoffed at - abuses of power, corruption, inefficiency, attempts by one group to hijack policy levers to benefit themselves at the expense of others, or even to exterminate others. And the natural preference or right for self-determination.

It's also complicated by other issues of fairness. Poor nations feel it's unfair for them not to be allowed the same carbon intensive path to the frontiers of income that we took.

Rich nations balk at the cost of compensating them, and the likelihood that transfers would be wasted or expropriated by bad institutions in poor countries.

Even if we were a global government, and these collective action and distributional questions were not there, the decision would be easy to get wrong.

Part of the problem is an insurance problem. What action to take now that costs us now, to eliminate the risk [of ucertain temperature warmig, and uncertain weather and food chain consequences from that uncertain warming].

Not only are we uncertain about those two links in the chain, the warming from given emissions, and the consequences of a given amount of warming, we are also ignorant of what that uncertainty is.

It is difficult to figure out the right thing to do in the face of that kind of uncertainty. Bearing in mind that there are other calls on the resources, which could go towards fixing other urgent social problems like poverty, disease, etc.

That is just a Ladybird Book summary of why it has proven and is hard to do the right thing about climate change. Probably you all know this so there was no point in tweeting it.

Phil makes an important point in a reply to this thread:

https://twitter.com/PhilPurnell/status/1455918302220455936

To which the response is: it's true that we have our own institutional problems and failings in the rich countries. [Of which the entire nature of the global supply chain and reward system may be a prime manifestation]...

But, our own somewhat failing institutions are less likely to produce transfers to the poorer countries either to help them in transition, or compensate for not enjoying the path we took to high income, if it's thought that the money won't be wasted.

Not that the use to which they would be put if they are not transferred is necessarily going to be any better. If you are most cynical about it it's just judging that one wasteful, rent-extracting rich elite may find it easier not to hand over cash to poorer rent extractors.