Alarmist editorial: Capitalism can lead the way on climate change - Telegraph

In a dramatic warning timed to coincide with the climate change summit in Copenhagen, 2,500 leading environmental experts have argued that the rising temperature of the earth is pushing us towards social and economic catastrophe. The nature and scale of the coming devastation is still a matter for debate; experts often exaggerate. But it is time to acknowledge that, for whatever combination of reasons, temperatures are rising.

We do not know by how much they will rise in the next few years: that, in itself, is one of the worst problems. A 4C rise could turn large parts of southern Europe into desert. European politicians have tied themselves to a 2C target, but the scientists think this will be exceeded. One extremely worrying development is the fact that sea levels seem to be rising twice as fast as had been forecast by the United Nations only two years ago. Already, the Thames Barrier is being raised more often to protect London from flooding.
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It is that sort of detail that should bring home the immediacy of the crisis. But we suspect that most of our readers are not panicking about climate change. Indeed, the more they are told to panic, the less inclined they are to do so. The British instinctively mistrust zealotry, and the debate over climate change has for too long been dominated by self-righteous, finger-wagging puritans who present the challenge of rising temperatures as primarily a moral issue. Most scientists believe that the acceleration of the rate of rising temperatures can be explained only by economic activity; yet this consensus is obscured, not illuminated, by the way that the minority of scientists who believe that we are pulling naturally out of an Ice Age are shouted down as heretics.
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...However difficult it is to pull an economy out of recession, that is as nothing compared to the impossibility of lowering sea levels, preventing hurricanes and eliminating huge deserts once irreversible climate change has taken place.

There is probably no alternative to an internationally co-ordinated effort to reduce carbon emissions. But that does not mean that the engine of change will be driven by civil servants. Capitalism accelerated the rise in global temperatures; capitalism should slow it down, by developing the energy-efficient technology that we are going to need in any case in order to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.