The debate surrounding global climate change has been a very hot button issue for the past few years. In most cases the average person doesn’t know enough about the science behind this issue to make an informed decision. The fact is that climate change will become a major issue within the next two decades and will have a host of environmental as well as economic impacts in the United States. Climate change will play a major role in the way our economy functions as well as the way our legislators make decisions.

This post, by Jerry J. Toman, ScM, ChE examines five policies that are setting our future up for failure. They are: Reliance on the old-time political religion of economic growth (usually defined as by economists as GDP growth); Continue to practice incrementalism above all else, as the dominant means of solving the problems; Embarking willy-nilly into mega-projects that utilize technologies that often are half-baked in terms of knowing what the overall costs, impacts and benefits would be; Ignoring the “carbon balance” aspects of current practices and future remedies; and relying on technologies that involve extensive “mining” of the earth’s solid surface for minerals, as a means to achieve sustainability.

The Energy Security Leadership Council (ESLC), a project of Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), recently released a study entitled Economic Impact of the Energy Security Leadership Council’s National Strategy for Energy Security. The paper, a long-term macroeconomic analysis of policy proposals put forward by the ESLC last September, finds that the U.S. economy would benefit substantially over the long term from implementation of the ESLC policy package.

The United Nations has issued a Global Green New Deal Policy Brief by economists in the run of the G20 meeting of world leaders in London in early April. Among the findings of the brief is the assertion that investing one per cent of global GDP, or around $750 billion, into five key sectors could be the key to a Global Green New Deal.