Meanwhile, Asia is expected to surpass us as a source of greenhouse gases in the next decade or so. No, we can't save the world. Instead, our goals should be to act responsibly meet our moral obligations and boldly preserve our own future as a region. Above all, we recognize that most of the things we ought to do to protect ourselves from climate change are things we ought to be doing for other reasons anyway. I sum these steps up as efficiency, caution, and legacy.
Efficiency is the most important.
We as a region live in an even more resource bloated manner than our average fellow countrymen. It's not polite to say so, but it's the truth. The technologies are available today to cut our resource and energy use by a factor of four. Technologies now in development could make that a factor of ten. Furthermore, the industries which supply such technologies are in their infancies.