When will we start sacrificing to prevent climate catastrophe? There isn't enough global concern. Especially in the US. Everything else aside no President should be able to deny reality.
I know misinformation is a driving factor for non-believers but I still get stumped why people who believe in climate change are not always environmentally friendly.
It’s hard to calculate your personal global warming impact directly, but luckily economists have found that there is an incredibly reliable 100% correlation between monetary velocity and natural resource usage.
So if you want to calculate your impact on global warming, just multiply your spending times your PPP. Spending more on virtue-signaling brands has the opposite effect your going for. Sorry.
So if you want to actually do better instead of feel better, just spend less. It’s really that simple.
In the older, darker, and more fundamental sense of the word, I shudder to think that the way irrationality is growing, probably soon.
Never gonna happen. People are far far far more resilient and capable than that.
And once the pumps fail on Miami Beach it’s game over for a while. Hit it twice in a row and who knows what will happen. Miami Beach will likely be the first wealthy city in the US that will have to be abandoned. They’ll build a wall to protect Manhattan and the subway, but no one is building a wall for Miami Beach.
And look at Puerto Rico. If it gets hit again this year you might as well just evacuate the island. The power grid is still being repaired as we speak from last year. Another massive storm and certain areas can expect to have no power or running water for years.
What will change attitudes is cost. The cost of fossil fuels is only going up, the cost of renewables is only going down. They will cross over.
For people to "wake up" from this... they
i. Have to be able to reason and select the correct explanation among many possible explanations to why it happened.
ii. Have to accept the (correct) explanation that flatly places the blame on themselves, rather than other soothing options.
The base case in my mind is really more like inland people would point to the flooded coastal cities (including those along the south - logical consistency doesn't matter) and say it's God's punishment for being liberal. There can be many variations... you can easily invent excuses that don't involve God or politics. But the point is, it has nothing to do with them. That's the perfect kind of explanation for people to move on, because it places no blame on them.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/future/images/3/39/%21.j...
You can start today by sacrificing your finger lickin bbq beef eating habit.
I foresee an underground movement of anti-AC hacktivists shutting down systems much like the anti-TV movement.
Never.
You want this changed? Figure out other energy sources. Nothing else will work.
The reason is that every individual has basically zero effect. So no one is motivated to make any changes.
> Everything else aside no President should be able to deny reality.
The President is irrelevant. He has very little on-the-ground effect. Maybe some media noise, which maybe might influence some. That's about it.
Either other energy sources are cheaper, or they are not. And that's about it.
A CO2 tax can't work unless it was implemented globally INCLUDING developing countries. (Which is a non-starter of course.) Because otherwise people will just ship industry and manufacturing elsewhere.
So there isn't much the president can do. I guess some subsidies, but there's a limit to how much of that you can do before they cause more harm than good.
The success of Europe in reducing emissions shows that even unilateral solutions have important impact, and they do not mean deindustrialization. Carbon taxes work exceptionally well.
The developing world is surprisingly dependent on the west, because that's where their carbon embodying products are sold. They need leadership and soft pressure.
The thing that's missing is a united front of developed nations, and the most important piece of that is the US, that's to busy devolving into the middle ages.
It actually shows exactly the opposite: That it only works when technological solutions exist. If there had been no effective replacement for CFC's, we'd still be using them now.
It's a vicious/virtuous circle, we aren't hostages of an implacable march of science, we are in the driver's seat. If we want to go to the Moon, we go there, and if we decide it's not worth it, the Moon tech does not magically get better over time.
So "we don't have the technology alternative" is just code word for "let's do nothing"; if better energy sources were magically available, the economics would simply work by itself and the problem of global warming would disappear.
(That's not to say anything politicians think up is possible, but that political and scientific forces go hand in hand in such endeavors)
Manufacturing only accounts for 20% of fossil fuel CO2 emissions.
Stop eating beef. that is something you can do today.
But, in any case, it's not a disaster that will kill us all. Just make life inconvenient until it gets the proper attention to fix it.
Thankfully there are enough people in the world that don't think like Scott Adams, and are trying to do something about it right now, rather than when it's far, far too late.
Because it's already too late to avoid major damage, at this point it's about avoiding cataclysmic damage.
What do you base that assertion on? It sounds chicken-littlish to me.
Many of the world's best agricultural land is at risk of desertification.
What happens when NYC, Miami, LA are under water, and the Midwest is too hot and dry to grow wheat?
Will anyone help the US, knowing we did nothing to avert catastrophe?
Probably easier to invade Canada...
> Will anyone help the US, knowing we did nothing to avert catastrophe?
Just to be sure we're on the same page here, you predict we'll do nothing while all those cities start to flood, over the course of years to decades. Then, the rest of the world (who is as guilty as we are of your “sin” of ignoring the issue) will be required to save us from what sounds like damnation, and they will cast us down to suffer our self deserved fate (even though they depend on us as much or more than we do on them)?
Oh yes, sounds completely reasonable... /s
What really will happen, is if the climate models are correct, then it will become no question to anybody that there are big problems with the climate, and at that point we will have the motivation, and years to decades to solve it.
I don't claim to know what the solution will be, but I have the feeling that given all of earth's population working toward a solution can succeed. And this will happen once it can't be denied that it exists (if it will actually be a problem. Yes, models can be wrong)