Walking home I was thinking: would it be possible to set up some kind of climate spread-betting market that would encourage people to put their money where their mouths are? You could make a bet and then go around planting trees to make sure it stayed cold. Or develop an accurate climate model and use it to make a fortune. Or a low lying country’s government could make an insurance bet against rising sea levels. It could be a way of getting us climate skeptics to pay for cleaning up the planet.
That sounds like an excellent idea and would really drive forward a market solution to these supposed problems. This would have benefits both in bypassing government, which is ineffective in solving such problems regardless, and allow both sides of the debate to take action. Now, who knows how to set such a thing up?
Ross McKitrick put forward a similar idea called the T3 tax some time ago. It was very clever and therefore disappeared from view very quickly.