Photo: Rupak De Chowdhuri/ A Greenpeace activist carries a model of the earth during a mock funeral procession in New Delhi December 21, 2009.

Some groups and activists are in danger of inspiring people to do nothing about climate change due to disappointment over Copenhagen.  This would be exactly the wrong thing to do!    Extended criticism and finding blame is not helpful and it threatens action of all kinds on global warming, and could even lead to people giving up.  That’s the danger of dwelling on it.  Let’s move on. Forget Copenhagen, and in addition, maybe the world should stop looking to the UN to solve problems.  It’s obviously a waste of time, considering the years spent on these meetings already, and a failure called the Kyoto Protocol and fighting about money and resources the main things to come out of those years.

We need to spread the word that activists need to double their efforts instead and approach this global problem from another direction: individual countries should try to top each other in leading the charge to fight climate change and develop clean energy and technology. Let’s inspire a global warming technology/clean energy race, like the moon race of the 1960s.  Competition between countries on solving climate change might do it.  We need to pressure our governments to fund clean energy and technology. Thomas Friedman understood this when he wrote:

Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”

Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.”

Queen Elizabeth gets the idea too, as she urged people to keep searching for solutions in her annual Christmas address. Leadership on climate change in one country will inspire it in others.

One thing that won’t inspire action on climate change is disappointment with world leaders and blaming them for not doing what we wanted.  And climate scientist James Hansen probably had it right when he expected nothing great to come from Copenhagen in the first place.  He’s right when he wants this failure to open new ways for us to solve the enormous challenges of climate change.  A recent interview with him is below.

NASA climate scientist James Hansen never expected the U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen to amount to much. He told the British Guardian newspaper that it would be better if Copenhagen failed. That’s [...]