I think saving the world is important, but so far the world — at least as represented by the wealthy and the powerful in the less wealthy countries — seems to show no need to be saved. The wealthy keep throwing energy away, under pricing it, subsidizing it, proposing to fix the climate in a few decades. The middle class is groveling for more individual mobility — cars and, in Asia, two-wheelers — even though each additional “mobile” person is slowing everyone else down and most Asian and Latin American cities’ transport systems have collapsed. The price of road fuels today in industrialized nations is still slightly below its peak of the 1980-82 period, and because cars use 10-25% fuel/kilometer, the fuel cost of moving them is well below where it was during those dark years. Biofuels, while not the major reason for high fuel prices, are sending us a signal that they don’t work in the huge quantities needed to make a real dent on fossil fuel and oil use.

What are we doing to save ourselves? Clamoring for schemes to lower taxes, compensate people, punish the oil companies or the environmentalists, etc. In other words, we are trying to punish the messenger rather than reading and understanding the message.

But wait — that’s what happened over energy in the 1970s, and it’s happening again over climate now. What is new is the snarl of urban air pollution, congestion, and traffic and pedestrian deaths in the third world that was hard to see at all back then. So everyone is blaming China or India for high oil prices — even though cars and light trucks in India and China TOGETHER (that’s 2.5 billion people) use less than 1/7 of the fuel we Americans do for our cars and trucks. And we’re barely 12% of them in numbers.

And the contrarians abound. Lomborg’s “Copenhagen Consensus;” Exxon’s chief calling for a dialogue on climate (where has he been for 20 years?). Environmentalists still fighting over every oil drilling idea or uncertain about nuclear power. This is not to say that any group is right or wrong over any issue, rather, this debate is more than 30 years in the making, since the Limits To Growth of 1971 sent everyone in a tizzie.

So the world needs to be saved, but is still trying to ignore the message. Indeed, the major objections most leaders had to limits to growth was that scarcity per se would manifest itself in higher prices for scarce resources.

The trouble is, no one but the Nordics has had the guts to do that, both pricing CO² and pricing various kinds of pollution (gas here in Sweden is approximately $9.50/gallon, ethanol (E85) from Brazil about $6/gallon, which on an energy content basis is not a bad deal). When something becomes scarce, Americans subsidize it or try to figure out ways of pumping more sooner, rather than less later (i.e., drill the arctic, now!). And when a combination of market forces and market farces (i.e., speculators) drive up the demand for food and the food prices, oil prices, etc. in a confused world, the future looks grim.

But the world still doesn’t think it needs to be saved, and there are just enough soothsayers (trained to tell the soothe, the whole soothe, and nothing but the soothe) and contrarians — as well as some very backward but rent-seeking companies and countries — to keep the lid on solving the problems.

Am I a pessimistic? Politically, yes. Technical and economic adjustments are something the human race is good at, but some are even better at shooting, locking up, or otherwise shouting down the messengers who say its time to adjust. Until the signals and signs get through, we’re in trouble.

A sign of optimism: I heard Chancellor Merkel of Germany this week talking about climate at a transport/energy summit in Leipzig. Thinking that President Bush only has a few months left to stand in her way, there is optimism. Other leaders will doubtless follow her. As climate strains begin to show themselves in India and China (reeling much more than Americans are under high fuel prices), the world may finally decide both that it has to be saved, and that it can save itself.