Carmen Nobel reports that Joseph B. Lassiter believes that nuclear power and shale gas are on the right side of the fight against climate change, and that markets have a better shot at winning the fight than governments do. She states that if you ask any given environmentalist to identify the biggest threat to the planet, you may expect to hear about man-made climate change, consumerism, or overpopulation. But if you ask Harvard Business School professor Joseph B. Lassiter, add another - single-issue myopia.
First, there is the oft-discussed issue of temporal shortsightedness - the very human tendency to focus on present-day concerns without considering how our actions will affect the future. But there is also ideological myopia - a failure to realize that compromising a little is better than staying stuck in the present path.
Dr. Lassiter indicates that right now we are letting the ends of the ideological spectrum and the entrenched power of legacy interests stalemate a path to the future. Lassiter has spent several years studying the intersection between entrepreneurial finance and environmental concerns. He recently sat down with Harvard Business School Working Knowledge Group to discuss the core challenges of fighting global carbon dioxide emissions in a shortsighted, ideologically polarized environment. In his opinion, both in Europe and in the United States, government efforts to regulate carbon emissions have been costly and ineffective so far, an outcome often ensured by extreme politicking from the legacy energy, transportation, farming, and environmental lobbies.
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Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
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