“Getting mad at oil majors will not solve climate crisis”

This is a letter to the editor published in the Financial Times on today under the heading quoted above: 

“The title of your Big Read on energy ‘Big Oil: still profits before planet’ (February 11) was misleading.¹  Regardless of what environmentalists and elites may think, it is not the job of oil companies to solve climate change.

Climate change requires more than world leaders agreeing to a set of lofty ideals in Paris and then having businesses do all of the work for them.  It requires leaders to actually convince people that governments need to pass laws and adopt regulations to cut emissions.  Climate change isn’t going to be solved by getting mad at oil companies.  It’s going to be solved by adopting a carbon tax that will put the real cost of carbon emissions in the price of products.  Or establishing an emissions trading system, with a decreasing cap on total annual emissions, that guarantees emissions will be cut.

If we really want to cut emissions, we should spend less time blaming corporations for trying to  make money and more time convincing people that they need to pay the costs of cutting carbon and that they need to get their governments to pass the laws to do it.”

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¹ The FT edited my first two sentences into the first sentence you see above.  My original was as follows: “‘Big Read. Energy’ (February 11) was titled ‘Big Oil: still profits before planet’.  I’m sorry, but that is wrong.”  I’m not sure which is better, but I think I like mine better, at least the second part of it.