But frankly, it doesn't matter if we're the cause or not, we're the only thing around that could potentially do anything to save ourselves. So ya know, we kinda should regardless of whose fault it is.
If you have a smoke problem you can put the fire out without working out how it started.
It is not possible to put out sufficiently large fires.
We need to act earlier in the causal chain. But where? And who pays?
Yes?
Do we know how to mitigate the risks?
>Yes? Do the things.
>No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.
No? Pay the experts to figure this out. Draft them if need be.
Everyone pays proportionally. Nationalize assets if need be.
We have the knowledge, resources, and capacity to solve these problems. (Change my mind). We lack leaders with the spine to take necessary action.
The problem here is that we have a bunch of smoke, and a good chunk of the population is either saying that there's no smoke or that the smoke is unrelated to the fire.
How do you fix the smoke problem if you can't get enough people to agree to put out the fire?
I don’t want to be uncharitable, but I can’t help reading your comment as, “we shouldn’t be inconvenienced to prevent ours and our children’s suffering.” That can’t be a correct reading, can it?
[1] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
This is vastly overestimated and straight up poorly informed statistics. There are dozens of solutions for pollution that involve energy efficiency, which doesn't require a single shut down and merely uses what we're already consuming more efficiently (think gasoline standards, heating, A/C, LEDs, insulation, weatherization, etc).
Alongside these simple and job-intensive efficiency gains, we can encourage the already massive growth in wind, solar, batteries, EVs, and other clean industries, which will vastly reduce the number of pollutants without shutdowns needed.
If we apply smart stimulus for Corona to encourage the many green tech jobs, we will see huge benefits on air pollution alone, never mind long-term climate impacts. Even if you think climate is a hoax, pollution certainly isn't and it's killing poor people by the hundreds of thousands every year. We have the solutions above, let's implement them, not throw up our hands in despair.
However even doing these things won’t return the biosphere to it’s previous condition, we’ve extracted extreme quantities of energy from underground and dumped them into the atmosphere, and our ‘locked in’ climate change will not decrease with those measures alone. We need to restore balance and I can’t see a way of doing it short of significant carbon sequestration - vastly beyond what can be achieved by reforestation.