I think most things actually are as simple as that. They're just made unduly complex because the obvious solutions to these problems don't align with the ulterior motives and sinister agendas that are often involved in politics:

You want to secure people's right to privacy? Defund the NSA and use the money for something that's actually useful (like leaving it to the tax payers to spend as they please).

You want to uphold human rights? Stop condoning human rights violations. Close down Guantanamo today, explicitly condemn torture and prosecute those who were responsible for acts of torture in the past.

You want to counter terrorism? Stop getting politcally or militarily involved in other countries' affairs. Instead, trade with people. Foster economic and cultural exchange. Educate people. Now, this is a long-term one because it obviously won't do away with terrorism instantly but it'd be a first step in the right direction.

You want to solve the perpetual financial crises? Simply allow bankrupt banks to ... well ... file for bankruptcy instead of donating them tax payer's money.

You want to do something against global warming? Stop subsidizing fossil fuel companies. Make more use of the abundant solar energy available in the desert regions of the planet. Admittedly, this will be expensive but given the huge amount of money that's wasted annually in first world countries it's not impossible either.

I adore the purists' positions and if ever we have a government or president that will act with pure intention they will have my full support. Nonetheless without accounting for politician's and their supporter's ulterior motives they will never succeed.

In an alternate universe where you BjoernKW was emperor of the United States and you pursued domestic policies that aimed to act purely in the interests of the people, without considering of the ambitions of less noble, less than two hundred years later you might be labeled by historians as a "well meaning but ineffective man".

You want the people to be free from the hold of Opium? Ban it, burn it and banish the smugglers from your shores.

"He issued many edicts against opium in the 1820s and 1830s, which were carried out by Commissioner Lin Zexu. Lin Zexu's effort to halt the spread of opium in China led directly to the First Opium War. With the development of the Opium War, Lin was made a scapegoat and the Daoguang emperor removed Lin's authority and banished him to Yili. Meanwhile in the Himalayas, the Sikh Empire attempted an occupation of Tibet but was defeated in the Sino-Sikh war (1841–1842). On the coasts, technologically and militarily inferior to the European powers, China lost the war and surrendered Hong Kong by way of the Treaty of Nanking in August 1842."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daoguang_Emperor.

I think lots of people with good intentions fail to give the problem of the commons proper weight.

While you may do good and provide a better way, by doing all things good and proper, you will get trounced and relegated to irrelevance.

We can only move forward if we get the majority to go along. One can't unilaterally pull away, you'll be at a severe competitive disadvantage, your leverage gets reduced, your idealism forgotten and overwhelmed by those who take the opportunity offered by your benevolence.

That's why, i believe, the only, but frustratingly slow way to go, is to slowly and gradually gather consensus and momentum and get things done, in the end.

Falling on the sword serves the self but does not serve society at large someone with less morals will come in and swoop up the opportunity, sadly.

Actually, things are exactly that simple.

Look at how the WWII generation responded to the need for behavior change in order to supply raw materials and labor for the war effort. If our generation cared about the environment as much as they cared about winning WWII then we could make similar sacrifices, pay a little extra for fuel, pay a little extra for solar infrastructure, change our diets to be more sustainable, and be well on the way to reversing damage to our environment.

It is in fact not that simple. To make a noticeable difference in terms of global climate change, americans would have to do much more than "pay a little extra". The entire commercial shipping network relies on carbon fuels. That's land, sea and air. The power grid and utility structure in most communities is destructive to the environment in some way. Changing all of that would require an investment in R&D and social re-organization equivalent to entirety of ten WWIIs. It's understandable that the majority of citizens wouldn't want to pay that cost. There's sacrifice, and then there's masochism. Not to mention that China and India aren't going to give up their chance at a western energy guzzling quality of life just because we do.

The idealism of children is great and all, but there's a reason that we don't let 10 year olds make major policy decisions. The naivete of youth is a very powerful thing that is responsible for some of our greatest innovations and new ideas. But it just doesn't play well with political decisions. Children don't understand the issues around encryption any more than they understand how to fix the environment. All we can do is invest in education and culture in the hope that they'll be prepared to tackle these issues when they grow up.

Children understand the issue of avoiding climate change very well. They just don't understand yet that grown ups don't care about climate change, despite what they say.

Fixing climate change really is easy; it's just that almost every single person in the world cares more about their personal comfort right now than about their future.

People say things like "Climate change is terrible", but then they choose not to do anything about it. Most people could probably halve their energy costs with little effort (and enjoy immediate cost savings), but they choose not to.

It's not the children who are stupid, it's the grown ups who are.

I would be happy to avoid flying if I felt it would make a difference. At the moment though, I will inconvenience myself, while our politicians decide to build another airport. My inconvenience will have had zero effect.

Maybe that's the underlying cause. We can immediately see the inconvenience (taking the train is more expensive and takes longer than a plane), but we can't visualize the consequences (what does releasing 5kg of CO2 into the atmosphere mean?).

Its a similar issue with fitness/personal health. I really want to drink this beer now, but I don't see how my drinking will cause diabetes 30 years down the road.

We justify actions by their individually negligible marginal cost, but we fail to see the compound cost in a lifetime.

A mix-up I often see in these discussions is the difference between "hard" and "takes effort". People say all the time "it's not as simple as kids/you/... think" in the sense of "it's hard" when it is really "it would take a big effort", e.g. Flying to another star system in one lifetime? Hard. You have to take some laws of physics (or rather our understanding of them) head-on. Solving humanities part of the climate change problem? That will take a really big effort convincing everyone to be part of it, then doing all the necessary changes on infrastructure and so on, but it is not hard. The fundamental problems are solved, no R&D necessary, just doing. (R&D and new solutions could make it possible to do the job with less effort, but they are not strictly necessary)

To significantly halt climate change using today's technology would cause misery on a scale unprecedented in human history.

To switch from fossil fuels to current solar energy would require a massive amount of land use. A huge portion of the world would have to be covered with solar cells to match the output from fossil fuelds. Do you know what that would do to real estate prices? Buildings that are horizontal would have to become vertical, and that money has to come from somewhere. Rents would double. Companies would have to offset the costs and some people would get fired, and most would have their wages or benefits frozen.

The trucks, ships and planes that pollute by shipping goods would have to be converted to today's electric engines. That would increase the cost of everything that everyone buys by 15-20%. From a book on amazon to a pair of jeans from the now 10 story shopping mall. Everyone would have to get their personal vehicles refitted or buy new ones, incurring even more costs. Every business would see its margins shrink further, driving wages down even more.

Producing and transporting meat is one of the largest contributors to climate change. The price of a hamburger at McDonalds would have to go from $2 to $20. Children need protein while in their developmental years, but it would become almost impossible for most families to afford. An entire generation raised on soy paste.

Globally, everyone would feel extreme financial pressure as the businesses they worked for AND their customers all make less money while paying more for everything they consume. There would be riots and revolutions as people took to the streets to feed their starving families. Endless foreign and civil wars, immeasurable suffering and loss of life. And for what? For what? Something that might or might not happen 100 years from now?

As adults, it's our job to keep this horrible future from unfolding. The responsible thing to do is invest in education and infrastructure, slowly and carefully, to keep those kids writing essays from growing up in a terrible world. That's why we're the adults, because we understand the difference between fantasy and reality, what's possible and what's practical.

If history has taught one lesson, it's "Never underestimate the pace of technological change." There have been Malthusian predictions before and there will be again. They never come true because technology solves problems in ways that we can't anticipate. It's our job to keep the world running while we wait patiently for a technological solution to climate change to present itself. We can't imagine what it will be today, but it will happen sooner than we think. Progress will take us to other star systems, too. Eventually.

I think we have to agree to disagree here as I share neither your pessimism that we need a "Great leap forward"-style program to stop climate change with our current technologies nor your optimism that science will solve all of our problems fast enough (see my answer to kybernetikos for more on that). Fast enough is the main point here. Yes, technology will solve all of our problems in the long run, but that's not helpful if humanity doesn't exist long enough for that time to come.

What I can agree with: If we take your assumptions as given that using our current technology for the task leads to all the things you've described (massive use of land we could use for other things, sharp rent increases, sharp price increases on food, wage depression and so on) then your conclusions are certainly correct and we shouldn't think about doing any of that, because the immediate concerns are far more pressing than any of the "the future could be shitty. Or not."-problems. I just don't share them, so I think we have a fundamentally different set of "basic believes" which will always bring us to different conclusions in the end.

On the other hand I would certainly love to read a few of the sources which brought you to your conclusions on our current technology level and the consequences of using it to stop our part in climate change. I'm always open to changing my opinion if new facts warrant it.

Regarding land use, with current technology level we would do much better if we go nuclear - it's safe, clean and much, much more space-efficient.

Within my lifetime, inventions requiring new science have had a much better chance of changing the world than changes requiring solving social coordination problems.

The fact that so many startups are now "full stack" reflects the difficulty of solving even extremely simple social coordination problems.

That's a good point which reflects the prosperous times we live in. Looking back at history these times seem to be the exception rather than the rule. In the end I fear that we cannot hope that "science will solve all of our problems", because science by its very nature is "hard". There are no guarantees that things will work out and we could very well land again in a period of time where science hits only dead-ends for many years. In that case we'd either live without any progress or we invest effort into using the solutions we already have.

Either you don't really grasp just how much the WWII generation had to change their behavior or you have far too much faith in how much people care about the environment. Nobody is going to sign up for peacetime rationing.

>then we could make similar sacrifices, pay a little extra for fuel, pay a little extra for solar infrastructure, change our diets to be more sustainable

I haven't done the study, but I'd wager that those small price hikes would push the five most marginal percent currently able to afford rent into homelessness.

Things are never that simple. A person who presents anything as black and white either hasn't thought about it or is lying to you.

So... design your policy such that they don't affect the most poor (fund things by raising taxes on the wealthy, etc). It in fact is that simple, yet we lack the political will to make policy that disproportionately affects the wealthy.

That isn't because we can't, it's because our ideology ensures we won't.

Why should global warming taxes be also an instrument to rebalance wealth? That's exactly what discredits them when I push for them as a debate: The middle class feel very insecure about "redistribution".

The OP has responded to the problem of "push[ing] the five most marginal percent [..] into homelessness". Your blowing his modest proposal out of proportion when talking about rebalancing wealth. He only suggested to design the policy in a way that prevents the poorest to become homeless.

Anything that moves money around, moves money around. Asking for a tax that doesn't rebalance wealth one way or another, is to ask for no taxes.

Yes that's right. IMO a climate change tax on fossil fuels should distribute the proceeds evenly amongst everyone in the country.

Then let them feel secure. Let's tax only the super-rich. Perhaps a wealth tax on billionaires.

In fairness, he talked in terms of societal choices - and having the five most marginal percent be that close to the edge is also very much a choice.

I think it's really a long, grueling process of dialogue, explanation of practicals, co-operation of all possible interests, and work. It's a systemic change kind of thing, I think. That kind of stuff isn't easy, and if one is aiming for easiness and some approximation of perfection, it requires a lot of friction between global and local changes.

Things are always that simple. Humans makes things artificially more difficult for wealth, power, and control. If you put a back door in encryption, the bad guys will stop using that encryption. All you manage to do is make the honest citizen less secure. Nothing changes this fact, and therefore nothing justifies backdoors in encryption. It really is that simple.

A lot of "it really is that simple" replies. Most big problems are simple to solve - if you only have one problem. Do we stop global warming, stop terrorism, stop government spying, stop poverty, stop high taxes, stop war, stop death from diseases, stop income inequality? Any one problem is simple to solve, but what's not simple is doing it without making other problems worse in the process.

Start with those problems hurting most people in the biggest ways, then go on until you either run out of problem solving capabilities or problems.

There are possible structures of problems and solutions in which this search strategy would get stuck in a local optimum -- if you agree that some solutions preclude others or make other problems worse.

I've seen what happens to people when they become "adults". They sit around and talk with the grown ups about really boring things like gossip. They stop playing tag. They start caring only about having relationships and stop caring about anything fun.

If they aren't having fun because they just sit around and talk about boring things, maybe they don't care about the world as much.

Actually fixing problems requires having and understanding relationships, and setting around and talking about boring things. Maybe that is why the adults I know having the most fun are the least political, because fixing problems is a slog and they want to have fun.

As many others said, things are exactly that simple. Apart from not understanding that most of what adults say is bullshit, kids just don't understand coordination problems yet - that it's not the task which is hard, it's getting all the different people, each caring primarily about themselves, to unite for a common goal. That's why wars are effective - it's easy for everyone to share a common goal if the goal is to fight for survival, or rebuild things (facilitated by shared experience of suffering).