I hate this feeling of hopelessness regarding global warming. It feels like even if you were a billionaire/massive corp, at some point you would say "wow we should stop, or else there won't even be a world to spend this money in".
I spent quite some time in South-East Asia the past few years, and when you see the sheer amount of boats that just dump all their trash in the ocean, and the sheer lack of awareness of the issue, it makes you hopeless. I come home, diligently recycling my trash, and I can't help but wonder whether this is all just a show, and not addressing any of the core issues that are needed to fix this.
> I spent quite some time in South-East Asia
> I come home, diligently recycling my trash
Not saying you shouldn't recycle your trash, but your flights are much more impactful for the environment than your trash.
Having said that, I agree with aircraft pollution. And this indeed implies that I recycling is silly compared to other things I do. So this only fuels the apathy I'm starting to feel towards this whole thing.
Plastic in the oceans, now that’s a mess.
The book also remarks upon how a (theoretical) revival of ocean liners would actually be worse.
By emitting that large amount of co2, you are disrupting the ocean co2 flux, reducing o2 available and causing acidification. The warming caused by the thermal capacity of the co2 melts the polar ice , cooling the oceans and reducing their salinity. Plastic is relatively a small problem.
Air travel research has shown biofuels are production ready, but it’s not cost competitive yet, although that’s a market failure through the externalization of emission costs.
According to the above article, one would prefer that.
> The trend has continued so that in 2010, flying burned just 2,691 BTU per passenger mile—an improvement of 74 percent since 1970. That was 43 percent better than driving the average car, which gets about 21.5 miles per gallon (4,218 BTU per passenger mile)
(I too feel conflicted about plane travel and it's long term impact.)
The reason I mentioned that is that I figured there were two outcomes:
- be rich/save money now, and get a possible competitive edge over other countries
- invest in your future, long-term assuming other countries do the same
Recycling isnt much help. Putting a few meters of solar on your roof is far more important. Not taking a first-class flight to vacation on the other side of the planet is also good. Installing an entire roof of solar, and making sure your grandparents vote against the coal lobby, that's the best anyone can do atm.
Do you know that the garbage that is "recycled" in the USA used to be sent (until Dec 2017) directly to China? This is one of the scams of the century. Nobody knows what China does with the material they cannot use, and in fact they just decided not to take it anymore.
That´s exactly what is going on.
The long arch of hope seems pretty hopeless from an individual's perspective at this moment in time, so much so that I actively try (and fail) _not_ to think about this. I can't imagine what folks at, say, the pentagon, are planning out who spend all day obsessing on it. They must have some pretty dark scenarios mapped out.
Simply put, we have grown to the size of our resource container and that container is about to shrink. We're far from ready. The species will likely eek it's way through. Civilization? Not so much.
That's not a good comparison - ozone layer and acid rain were caused by very specific externalities that were relatively easily substituted with "better" ones that didn't cause (for instance) ozone holes and acid rain.
Carbon, on the other hand, is the least common denominator of human activity - so much so that even our breath produces it. I don't see any possible patterns of human existence on the earth that are ex-carbon.
Carbon output is a simple function of population in a way that ozone and sulfur are not.
ozone layer: stop emitting CFCs, they'll decompose over decades and ozone concentrations will rise again
climate change: just stop emitting carbon and...
no wait, we're still locked into centuries of rising ocean levels and temperatures even if we lowered everything to zero right now.
It would take actively extracting CO2 from the atmosphere at very very large scale to reverse the effects.
We need more renewables faster :/
We are never going to fix this.
It's just going to take way longer to switch over, since those things are way larger parts of everyone's life and economics than hairspray was.
Never is a long time.
It's a garden variety coordination problem - but it seems that, with technology successfully solving most of our non-social problems, lack of coordination is what underlies all the important issues humanity faces these days.
See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ for an in-depth discussion of coordination problems.