The magical solutions floating out of Dubai won’t fix the climate crisis

I LIVE at the base of Basalt Mountain, an ancient volcano that tops out at nearly 11,000 feet in the Roaring Fork Valley of western Colorado. An eruption 10 million years ago contributed to the contours of the landscape. In the mornings I drink strong coffee from a US Forest Service mug, and I look out the window at the light on the peaks, at the wild turkeys pecking in the yard, at the deer so tame that I could touch them.

I have spent my career working on climate change — not theoretically but in the trenches, crawling under trailers to insulate them under a federal government programme to help low-income families conserve energy, building solar farms, capturing methane from coal mines, bolstering the climate movement through various nonprofit boards and crafting policy at the state and municipal levels. I served as a state regulator and an elected town councilman.

I have also spent 25 years in the field of corporate sustainability, trying to figure out how business might become a meaningful part of the climate solution. Over time, I came to understand that the ethic being applied — the idea that free markets can solve societal problems and that even a monstrosity like climate change can be fixed without regulation — was a ruse that I had bought into, realising that fraud only late in the game.