Billy Pizer, formerly of RFF and now in charge (kinda) of negotiating climate change treaties at the US Treasury, gave this list of “things to do” at his EAERE keynote (”Facing the Climate Change Challenge”).

It is merely a list of topics, but they are topics where we need more research — not just to increase our academic understanding but also to learn how to design, implement, measure and enforce policies:

• Market design with policy revision
• Dealing with trade in the long run
• Technology modeling
• Technology transfer policies
• Social cost of carbon
• Catastrophes
• Linking, policy revision, and delinking
• Offset reforms
• Development and climate change / climate change and development
• Carbon markets in the long run

Those of you looking for interesting areas for research, work, reporting — and perhaps concern — could do worse than address one or more of these issues.

Bottom Line: Earth is too complicated for any one of us to either understand or affect. We CAN work together to improve our collective future but that takes more work than “I’ve got my ass covered.”