>"All the people who are working on solving climate change can short these futures and have an incentive to work on these problems."
But I think they either misunderstand or misstate how the futures would be created. Someone needs to actually issue the futures, and I'm not sure who would do it; these 'futures' contracts seem more like straight bets than actual futures.
In any case, you'd need some credible issuer to create them, either an intermediary or the climate 'workers'. The problem is that you'd need the holder of the long position to be able to pay out in case they lost; so they need to either insure against the possibility of loss (which would be prohibitively expensive), or have some other source of money to pay off a loss. Given these conditions, it seems like the only 'people' who could actually benefit from being long on this instrument would be large corporations, who have easier ways of generating the capital.
The simplest way to generate the funding the author wants to convey to 'workers' is to create a joint-stock corporation and issue shares on the open market... But that's already possible and not novel (though regulation has made this very very expensive).