Would you stop people from driving; heating and cooling their homes; watching TV and using computers; eating food grown with fertilizer made from fossil fuels?
Energy makes life better for everyone, not only for people who profit by selling it.
Energy makes life better for everyone, not only for people who profit by selling it.
The naive nature of this comment seems pretty synthetic, but I'll give it a grown up response:
One answer to preserve GDP while shifting to carbon neutral renewables is to increase the cost of fossil fuels through the use of a Carbon Dividend. This consists of three points 1. Taxing carbon fuels at the wholesale market. 2. Providing a dividend to every citizen of the U.S. (mitigates the impact on low income families, estimates range about $4k / person) 3. Provide an adjustment tax at the border punishing other countries like China that do not institute their own Carbon fee structure.
This is a market based solution advocated by James Baker & others within the conservative establishment to help our society accelerate the shift to carbon neutral power. Currently a group of 17 house republican representatives support the measures.
More information can be found by researching / participating / volunteering for the citizen's climate lobby - http://citizensclimatelobby.org/
It's going to take decades to replace the world's energy infrastructure with renewables at a natural pace. Trying to do so more quickly would waste a lot of energy and that would also release more carbon.
To stop climate change, we'd have to make larger sacrifices than that.
If you're the one proposing that we just throw all that money away, then you're the one that needs to answer questions about depriving people of material wealth.
But, they will inflict greater losses on other people by doing so. Overall, dealing with this issue is the cheaper option and cheaper = less sacrifices. So your question is equivalent to "How can you stop running up the credit card bill if that will stop us from spending money right now" and acting like I'm the irresponsible crazy person.
No one is willing to make these sacrifices. How much energy are we wasting having this discussion here? How much energy is wasted on computers and entertainment and machine learning and bitcoins and other popular topics here?
How much energy do celebrity environmentalists and "green" politicians waste flying around the world?
Has any Democrat proposed making serious sacrifices to stop climate change?
It seems to me that there are always two sides in this argument: one denies climate change, the other expects it and changes nothing.
First, we've already passed 400 PPM CO2, and it's very hard to imagine we won't hit 500 PPM. It's entirely possible we'll hit 600 PPM. It's very crucial how much warming is really associated with these various CO2 levels - and that is not known to a high precision at this time.
If energy technology is developed as it should be, with solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal continuously being improved, CO2 emissions will fall off pretty quickly over the next few decades. It seems likely this can be done with constantly increasing quality of life.
The real issue is how will we mitigate the peak atmospheric CO2 concentration if needed? I would argue the only sane approach is aggressive investment into science and technology. Mitigations may have to include many things, even up to the scope of orbital sunshades.