The Only Answer to Climate Change

However much we talk about greenhouse gases, the answer is never going to change, but we seem to be waiting for everyone else to be forced to take action before taking action ourselves. There is only so much that one can speed up innovation with money, as technologies follow an exponential growth pattern that's more determined by a bandwagon effect than anything else. Subsidies can help them incrementally, but not exponentially. So until they've replaced fossil fuels, the only answer we'll ever have is to stop consuming, and that's up to us. You too, USA — you use twice as much energy per person as the EU.
Electricity makes up only a small part of our fossil fuel use. Most of it is used for two things, heating and transport, and the only way to fully deal with this is to let employees work from their homes, so that they no longer need to commute and offices no longer need to be heated. We could've done this with the technology we had decades ago, but by now half of us are leaving our home computers to go to work to log in to office computers. It's the biggest waste of resources in history.
By now there's been plenty of research showing that people working from home are just as productive if not more so. But employers know that the real reason employees need to be at a workplace is not to be productive, but to be disciplined: it's more important to them that the employees don't work *too* hard, that they don't to overreach. Employees go to the office not to work but to submit to the symbol of the "team spirit", to be part of the company, a cog in a machine. They don't want the employees to feel too autonomous, lest they start organising themselves and thereby encroach on the turf of the employers.
We must decentralise our work. It's the only thing we can do that will really make a difference. But there is no way any government can force companies to do that — they don't have that authority. It has to come from the bottom up, as a cultural shift. But that, too, takes time, and if accelerating technological innovation is difficult for a government to do, accelerating cultural development is impossible. The Paris Talks mean nothing except one more symbol of the impotence of governments.
The Chinese government is, unfortunately, one exception that would have the power to decentralise information jobs. Since all Chinese citizens will soon have a digital ID tracking everything they do, the government would be just as capable of controlling them if they work at home as when they work at an office building, since they would no longer need the company as a middle man. Decentralising companies in China wouldn't actually decentralise power, and would possibly centralise it even more. Right now, not that many Chinese work from computers, and either way it won't be until the next five-year-plan that they might possibly consider something of this magnitude, by which time the digital ID will probably (unfortunately) be very influential. It seems deceptively easy this way to control the population, so much so that the Chinese government won't realise it would only be a matter of time before the population, faced with a perpetual virtual influence but never with a real one, would be psychologically pushed to a point where they would deny the influence exists. How ironic would it be, if the very technology meant to control them, the very kind of surveillance that inspired George Orwell's "Big Brother", would actually be the thing that leads to the fall of communism?
This has gotten into a far more important theme, but to go back to global warming: once the Chinese adopt a policy they're quick to carry it out, but even though China will make up a quarter of the world's energy consumption, that wouldn't be enough to make a difference. Even supposing that a decentralised model in China would influence the rest of the world, it would take at least another five years before they'd catch up to it. By then it's 2025, and according to projections, a few years later all energy will be renewable (mostly because it will be cheaper than fossil fuels, not because of subsidies).  So maybe for a measly five years, climate action will make a difference on how much energy we consume. That's still not enough to register on the barometer. It will be the exponential growth of renewable energy that saves the day, and something can only be exponential in a process which is multiplicative, and in this case, that requires human relationships — government is part of that, but really government only builds on the culture of the people, which is the real drive of these processes.
We need to adopt a culture of decentralization, not a policy, and this culture is what will drive both advances in energy efficiency and in renewable energy. So we can make a difference, but it won't be through our governments. There's also not going to be any revolutions over this. Over the next fifteen years there will simply be a steady dialogue which will include employees and employers, until they simply agree that yes, of course in this day and age people should work from home, and generate their own energy while they're at it.
So it will be by talking about this, about decentralisation, that we will gradually bring about this change. But not just talking in order to convince people, because then you might as well spread pamphlets or get into politics — it doesn't work that way, government arises from social relationships and is a distortion of them, and not the other way around. We need to actually feel what we say, to express our actual desire for decentralisation, and that can only happen as a matter of course, in the process of actually living by it, by example.
So, each of us still has to take this into our own hands instead of pointing the finger or interlacing them in prayer. If we want to stop climate change, we can't wait for our governments to make us do something and later blame them for not having been more forceful: if we can band together into protests, we can band together into initiatives to reduce our energy consumption. Actually, labor unions might come in handy there too at some point, but it's too soon. Maybe in ten years, they'll be demanding to be allowed to work at home… because people will only actually want to work at home when they're already used to the idea of decentralisation, of their homes being not just to live but to share, a place that can empower you to collaborate with friends and colleagues.
So my conclusion is that climate change can only be tackled through culture, or more accurately counterculture, and the best initiatives we have in place to do that right now are LETS, couchsurfing, airbnb, uber etc. But climate change isn't what motivates us to do those things, because they have an infinitely greater effect on a personal level. Even if you're working in the renewable energy sector, what makes you get up in the morning isn't the thought of taking another quadrillionth of a degree off of global warming: what motivates you to install solar panels on someone's roof is to make them feel independent.
In other words, worrying about climate change is quite futile. What we should worry about is what we can do to be more independent in our own lives and once we are, to help other people be more independent as well: that's the culture we want to spread, one of independence, and climate change in politics can only run counter to that paradigm shift.
This will all make me sound like such a rightist, but oh well. I swear I'm just as sympathetic to leftism. In fact leftists and rightists should band together on this. I consider myself a mutualist like Proudhon, who coined the term anarchism and the phrase "property is theft" referring to private rather than personal property. Mutualism is actually a very centrist form of anarchism, and is best associated with hippies. It's basically the paradigm of having new systems evolving in peaceful coexistence with the old, such as worker cooperatives, intentional communities and sharing economies. That's the future! And that's what will solve all our problems.
However, there is one thing in which governments CAN make a difference to climate change, reducing both desertification and global warming, and it's the preservation of forests, which can be done by switching developing countries from a neocolonial field-based model of agriculture to a forestry-based model. What works for us doesn't work for them: temperate countries do well in fields, but equatorial countries require forests as an integral part of their agriculture. Perhaps right now, that's the answer to climate change: taxing equatorial cash crops that aren't shade-grown!