Firstly, human society is a reactive one not a preemptive one. We would rather fix a problem after witnessing its effects than before. Secondly, even if we wanted to, it wouldn’t be possible to protect against every threat that society faces. Who knows where the next earthquake, tsunami, hurricane or terrorist will strike. With these kinds of events the best we can do is improve defences after the damage has been done and hope it won’t happen again. Even with defences in place, people will not see their effects until these defences fail. This is particularly true for climate change and it is the reason nothing will be done about until it is too late.
The general consensus at the moment is that climate change will happen and that it will cause massive damage to economies if nothing is done about it. But even with this premise, it is impossible to find the correct solution for the same reason that it is impossible to protect against an earthquake. Not only do we need to know exactly when the damage will occur but we need to know the level of damage that will be caused.
Think about what happened about the Y2K bug. There was quite a large panic stirred up and companies spent millions updating their hardware and software to ensure they didn’t become victims of some world-wide electronic nuclear fallout. This time we had the luxury of the exact time that a disaster would occur. We were even convinced – mainly by sensational press coverage – that it was a real threat. And yet we still managed to mess up how the problem was dealt with. The total expenditure was estimated at over $US 300 billion and yet the perceived impact of the bug was almost non existent. Some would say that this demonstrates the project’s success for which there are many arguments against but the point is that when trying to prevent a disaster, there is always a balance to be made between cost of prevention and cost of recovery. In the Y2K case I think most people will agree the balance was tipped towards the former rather than the latter.
Now with climate change the problem is many times more difficult to manage. Firstly it requires the coordination of all the major countries of the world as each country’s emissions affect the whole world’s climate. Secondly, it’s impossible to predict exactly what effects climate change will have for each country, or exactly when these effects will be noticed. How do governments respond to threats that they cannot see or measure@f0 Thirdly even if governments do introduce taxes against energy consumption on homes, businesses and industries, how can they measure any benefit these measures have on reducing climate change@f1
In any case, even in the extremely unlikely case that we get the balance of expenditure just right it will be impossible to know that in the decades to come. Some people will say we should have spent more earlier on to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, others will say that the taxes that were introduced damaged the economy more than climate change would have. This is why, as long as society continues to work in its current form, we will undoubtedly lose the fight against climate change. We’ll lose whether we know it or not.