Increase the usage of renewable resources, like solar, hydro and wind.
And do R&D.
Just wait for the next down turn and instead of cutting interest rates have the plans ready to do the investment. We probably have 4 to 10 years to do some good planning.
The main barriers to adoption are laziness, cost of capital, consumer behavior (not purchasing LED lights because they 'seem' too expensive), and most importantly, lack of education.
Page 4 of this paper has a great graph where they examine costs and cost abatement for a variety of 'green' strategies. Hybrid cars are the most expensive!
www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/Hybrids.pdf
When mankind started to change the world through agriculture, deforestation and industrialisation, that's when we started to play russian roulette if you find that analogy useful.
We didn't know what it would do to our ecosystems but we did it because life back then was horrible and because we could. One bad crop and people were starting to die from starvation. Life is better now so we were right to take that risk.
It makes no sense to be alarmist about this basic disposition of mankind to take risks it doesn't fully understand.
Wow. What's amazing to me about this rant is how the debate has moved over the last 10 years from "it's not happening" to "it's not a big deal".
So, our massively complex ecosystem is changing in ways that our scientists don't fully understand and it's not a big deal? The ecosystem so complex that scientists have a hard time using the world's fastest supercomputers to try to model it. These real, verifiable changes to OUR ONLY ecosystem are not a big deal even though nobody knows the outcome?
Your position is that playing russian roulette with our grandkids future is worth it because the price of action is overwhelmingly expensive (or infinite). But that's wrong, it's not that expensive. The European economies that have reduced their emissions according to the Kyoto protocol have been doing fine. Reducing the world's carbon emissions is easy, cheap and prudent.