In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond distinguished between top down and bottom up approaches to solving environmental issues. Top down is, as it sounds, employed by powerful central governments; bottom-up is inherently more appealing to progressives as democracy in action. Diamond rightly points out that both can exist in a society with multiple levels of authority; a neighborhood watch group can be founded by homeowners who are subject to city, county, state, and national laws.

The bottom up approach to solving the climate crisis has appeal. “Change a lightbulb, change the world!” we’re told. Rooftop solar powers a home, while wind turbines attached to streetlights power communities. Meatless Mondays reduce demand for beef, which in turn reduces deforestation and methane (and benefit our bodies in countless other ways). Trading in our clunkers for Priuses, high speed rail, or bicycles is a worthy goal. All of this is true and necessary…but voluntary efforts are not enough.

Tom Friedman takes a different approach, in urging Earth’s Races rather than Earth Day. He scornfully labels the just-concluded Copenhagen talks as a fuzzy, feel good, ineffective Earth Day approach:

we as a global community have to hold hands and attack this problem with a collective global mechanism for codifying and verifying everyone’s carbon-dioxide emissions and reductions and to transfer billions of dollars in clean technologies to developing countries to help them take part.

But as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil told this conference, this Earth Day framework only works “if countries take responsibility to meet their targets” and if the rich nations really help the poor ones buy clean power sources.

That was never going to happen at scale in the present global economic climate. The only way it might happen is if we had “a perfect storm” — a storm big enough to finally end the global warming debate but not so big that it ended the world.

Instead, Friedman prefers a twist on a top-down approach, substituting central economic power – the market (he uses the phrase “Father Greed”) – for central political power. Once we put a price on carbon, we can race China to invent the clean energy economy. The Obama administration is making the same bet on the same race with the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (aka the Kerry-Boxer bill), betting on the power of the market to solve the climate crisis. I’ve spent way too many hours listening to senators discuss the bill; “price on carbon” and “signal to the market” are used roughly 100 times for each mention of “people will die.”

Friedman’s Earth Race will resonate with American business. New polling suggests that people now believe that the costs of the climate bill will be outweighed by the benefits of the transition to a clean energy economy, a central argument in favor of the climate bill. However, inherent in a race built on building a cleaner mousetrap is the idea of growth; there will be more profit in selling more mousetraps to more people.

Collapse discusses not only the environment-caused failures of certain societies, but also the factors identified by societies that succeed. The Tokugawa era of Japan faced a deforestation crisis by the mid-1600s, and responded with an extraordinary top-down management of forests. Diamond cites records of one forest: 4,114 trees, 78 big conifers, 255 good small conifers to harvest within five years, 448 oaks of various characteristics, and other trees. The extreme top-down management “left nothing to the judgment of individual peasants.”

The Copenhagen Accord produced a not-legally-binding understanding among five countries, which was noted by the rest of the United Nations, but no treaties. If a deforestation treaty is approved in 2010 or later, Google Earth can easily substitute for feudal Japanese tree-counters. Indigenous people who live in the forests will be watched very carefully. More broadly, however, a top-down approach to carbon emissions will not sit well with people accustomed to freedom.

What I saw coming out of Copenhagen didn’t resemble anything close to top down authority; in fact, Obama and negotiator Todd Stern bent over backwards to make it clear to the UN that they had no authority beyond what the Senate might, or might not, be giving them in 2010. Instead, it looked like the beginning of a voluntary, bottom up, slow-moving action, even though it was made by people who are each at the apex of their country’s hierarchy. The Copenhagen Accord emphasizes small, tentative steps taken by consensus, not bold sweeping orders from the world’s leaders to the rest of the world.

Two questions are worth pondering as the Senate prepares to take up the Kerry-Boxer bill.

Is an emphasis on a profit-driven Earth’s Race internally inconsistent with the goal of decreasing emissions? and if the answer is yes, then will a soft and loophole-ridden cap on carbon emissions suffice to decrease emissions?

Can a bottom-up movement, whether by consumers or by heads of state, take hold in the limited time we have left?