I've seen this technique used in a Peter Pan pantomime. Apparently if everyone in the audience says "I believe in fairies!", all together, it can bring a dead fairy back to life. It seems like the perfect solution to an imaginary problem.

"If we are to make any headway on climate change"

This assumes you can actually do or something can be done, by mankind, to actually control the climate ..

Whether mankind has affected the climate by land clearing or the fallacious unproven CO2 "additional heating", it remains to be seen whether anything we do is of any consequence.

Additional taxation with scientific support for the collection, is manna from heaven for politicians but I suspect the populace will eventually be disappointed by the results, or really, the lack of results.

All the enthusiasm and good intent from our activist brothers and sisters, will not necessarily maintained if we tax everyone, reduce CO2 output .. do all the things (ha!) the scientific alarmist community insists on, if it does not produce results, beyond redistribution of wealth.

Of course the alarmist scientific community has a big excuse all ready to go, "but you didn't do enough", like what, completely stop using energy and reduce the population of the world to several million? Because that's what it would take to reverse the impact of mankind. (that won't happen)

Most of us would prefer to adapt, and use our resources to do that rather than spray money at governments to try to pick winning causes to remain in power.

The precautionary principle makes you feel safe and warm, but does nothing for substance, after all it was developed in support of belief in God .. I love the adaption by alarmists to justify alarmism, so apt.

You have the ALP with no plan for the nation whatever, except to stay in power .. do you really expect them to suddenly become beneficial and magnanimous to the populace? (the coalition are not much different in essence, just more honest and less controlling)

The idea of orchestrated social action is nonsense because this particular "wicked problem" is unlike anything we've confronted before. Climate change, Peak Oil and AGW directly confront and contradict both Western lifestyles and the capitalist mode of production. There is a direct correlation between profit, which demands economic growth, and greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting emissions and maintaining economic growth is non sequitur. The problem demands nothing less than a radical alteration to society, and not these ongoing fantasies that if we all do our little bit we can turn things around. The only solution is a zero or negative growth economy and drastic reductions of lifestyle-excess beginning at the top. There is no reason why the middle classes should suffer substantial diminishment of (what passes for) lifestyle until the wealthiest have been reduced to middle class status. At that point the middles class would then have to reduce and stabalise their collective footprint at a sustainable and hopefully a decent level.
My own view is that this future sustainable society would be infinitely happier than the one we have now.

squeers "My own view is that this future sustainable society would be infinitely happier than the one we have now"

Interesting .. why do you say that?

If you could guarantee the future society would be sustainable, maybe, but to sell it before it is .. seems ambitious (?)

I would have thought you'd run into "don't touch my stuff" type arguments. People would be burying technology and stuff, like survivalists in the US bury guns .. for when the world goes bad.

Yesterday I saw a presentation about educational innovations in Thailand and Burma. A teacher over there earns the equivalent of as little as 70 dollars a year, and despite hardship and despotic regimes the children and adults seemed well fed and adjusted. I only saw snapshots of course, but my point is that we don't need all the trappings of wealth to be happy. You would not argue, I think, that our present system is a happy one? I thus base my optimism about a sustainable society on the fact that it could hardly be worse than this one.
Our consumer culture is "forced" by the demand for growth and profit; modern commodity innovation is mostly redundant and certainly not progress in any qualitative sense; it is a phenomenal inundation driven by the mania for profit at the entrepreneurial level and growth overall. Beyond a certain point, here is no correlation between commodity innovation and human happiness. Indeed there's plenty of evidence for the latter; that individually and socially we are overwhelmed by an unprecedented and hyperbolic rate of change--of what amounts social exploitation for profit and at the expense of the planet.

Squeers - you have stumbled into an enormous subject, the measurement of "happyiness" (the literature is vast) and chosen the wrong example - Burma. If the people of Burma had a choice they would immediately strive for Western lifestyles. This happened everywhere after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Whether they would remain happy or not if, indeed, they are already happy off-camera, is another question.

As for the article I'm glad I don't have to read the author's doctral thesis, and I would have been considerably more impressed if she had given hard examples of what any of this theory meant in practice.With out examples as even an indication of what the theory means its just waffle.