Charles C. Mann: evaluation

Transcript context

…Right. One of the things that’s fascinating to me is that when you talk to people in China about cleaning up, they regard cleaning up the particulates in the aerosols and carbon pretty much in the same breath. If people are going to make that mental category, then this Mann guy might have then gotten it all wrong. [laughs] And we won’t just see scrubbers . . . The second thing is that there seems to be a respect for international community and international agencies that, frankly, surprises the hell out of me. Yes, our current president is obviously a counterexample against that, but people seem to be interested in kinds of collective action that I would not have guessed, both on the international front, which I think is very weak but still there, and on the regional front. Personally, I would see the evidence of cities taking a lead in this, regions taking a lead in this, and then, to some extent, individual households — so there’s a whole institutional framework that seems to be swinging into effect to counter this sort of Jevons-type paradox that you were talking about, where things get cheaper and people use more of it. Right.…

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