What climate negotiators can learn from open source

(Extra credit if you guess what this sign says, from my trip to Chengdu, Sichuan, China.)

This may be due to some wisdom a Chinese friend gave me recently in Chengdu. "In China the government is strong and the people are weak. In the U.S. it's the other way around."

To a great extent this is true. If Oracle wants to ignore or even shut down mySQL, it can do so.  If the Chinese government makes an equivalent move, it can make that move stick.

But there is another lesson contained in that last link.

If the founder of mySQL wants to fork the code and protect the users, he can do that, too. That is precisely what he is doing.

In open source, in other words, solutions may lie beyond central control. This is the message U.S. negotiators need to get through to their Chinese counterparts.

Solutions to climate change will not all come from the top down. They won't all resort from mandates. They will come from the bottom-up, from entrepreneurs delivering alternative energy systems because they can make money at it.

All government needs do is get the incentives right.

China does have experience with this model. The last 30 years has seen much of China become middle class in outlook (if not financially) because all society's incentives were geared to that.

This bottom-up mentality is also what open source is all about. It has proven a powerful market mechanism in software. If its code sharing and forking can be accepted as capitalist by the Americans, and accepted generally by the Chinese, the market will blossom on both sides.

It's just a matter of getting the incentives right.

So my suggestion is to change the subject. Instead of talking about targets, or what either side must do, ask China what incentives they both might offer their markets to spur more innovation and change.