Free-market Environmentalism, and More

  Climate change is the most serious challenge that humankind has faced since the cold war. Back then, the threat of a reciprocal nuclear annihilation between the two great superpowers (the USSR and the US) was the nightmare we had to stomach before going to bed every night. Since the 1980s, however, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the nuclear winter predicted by the mutual destruction doctrine is no longer what keeps us awake at night. The new boogie man is climate change. In the 1960s, climate change was mainly a theory discussed in scientific journals. By the 1980s, it became a recognized planetary threat. It ultimately took shape at the 1992 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development as a formal international agreement. One of the three major treaties emerging from Rio was extravagantly named “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” Its aim was to limit greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the resulting extreme temperatures that would eventually cook th...