Not while there’s so much political power to be had through climate change denial, which, I hope we start to treat with the same complete disgust and moral outrage as we treat Holocaust denial.
Additionally scientists should be looking at bandaids to extract carbon from the air or reflect sun back to space.
Malthusians who wish everyone just uses less power are both irrational and immoral. We should be trying to give every person on earth as much power as possible with the least damage to the environment. Modern society needs power.
I support rational and efficient energy policies, but our current system is bonkers! For example I got a 25% tax rebate replacing my skylight because it has a tiny solar-powered shade on it. The installer even joked to me that the $4k off the light was a scam! How is this helping the climate again?
The relatively meager environmental gains along the way are dwarfed by the larger environmental gain that start really compounding after 15-20 years of investment on this particular technological path and energy policy.
Modern society uses a lot of unnecessary energy in part because someone gets to make a lot of money now and leave this life before the consequences of unfettered destruction come due.
I say, we should have as much power as possible, generated as cleanly as possible, and the lowest possible cost. This is how we move society forwards.
Energy is the lifeblood of civilization. Reducing the cost of energy, and widespread availability of energy is responsible for saving perhaps a billion lives and bettering nearly 10 billion lives over the last century (that is to say, basically all of them).
The idea of putting a stranglehold on worldwide energy production or access is abhorrent when you look at the on-the-ground effects that such a policy would actually have on people’s lives. As you rightly point out, the most marginalized people worst of all.
Even if we could somehow stop industry from emitting even a gram of CO2 on 1/1/2021 going forward, the climate models still predict their 10 meter sea level rise just given the current greenhouse levels persisting.
The only answer is technological, and in my opinion it’s frankly not even going to be that complicated of a problem given the resources and technology available circa 2050 to deal with it.
Franky, solar shades seemed a lot harder of an ask pre-Starship. Looking forward to seeing SN8 reach for 60km in the near future.
Perhaps it's not going to cover 100% of things. But it's a thing you can be doing and it doesn't make things worse.
Meanwhile even with the relatively low usage of nuclear there are two regions of the world that used to be populated with people that now are abandoned.