NASA's leading climate scientist, James Hansen, advocates the introduction of a Carbon Tax to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He has been told by John Romm of the climate progress blog "Your opposition to Waxman-Markey's (cap and trade) Bill is ill-conceived and unhelpful. There isn’t going to be a carbon tax nor should there be. Get over it and move on."Romm is a supporter of Cap-and-Trade and opposes a Carbon Tax because
"it doesn’t have mandatory targets and timetables. Thus it doesn’t guarantee specific emissions results and thus doesn’t guarantee specific climate benefits."
Systems thinkers as varied as W. Edwards Deming, Stafford Beer, Peter Checkland, Horst Rittell, Jake Chapman, John Seddon and Richard David Hames have shown that the "targets and timetables" approach does not work when dealing with what are commonly called "Messes" or, sometimes, "wicked problems". It usually makes things worse, much, much worse.
Chapman says "messes" are problems that are unbounded in scope, time and resources, where there is no clear agreement as to what solutions would look like, and, still less, on how they could be achieved.
Neither Jim Hansen nor John Romm seem to understand that, for systems thinkers, the problem of global warming and greenhouse gas reductions, is a classic "mess". The linear policies that they support fail to meet any of the requirements that would lead to the kind of system-reconfiguration that is a prerequisite for successfully tackling "messes ", great and small.
Such basic systems thinking and should be part of the intellectual equipment of everyone who cares about the future of the human family. That it is not, is probably the major reason for the lack of real progress by highly motivated, intelligent and well-funded carbon-reduction campaigners.
