This is why the solution is (and always has been):
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Well, not quite. If we had started back when climate change became clear mid-20th century, #3 wouldn't have been needed. But now, it is indeed the only option, and it will be very expensive. And the more we delay, the more expensive it'll become. We are basically screwing over future generations who will have to pay our debts.
By definition this would be keynesian gold digging. Pay people to do something that has very little economic benefits for the individual doing it and it's not in competition with any other private industry. It's basically an extreme example of a luxury.
The future of energy is in storage.
Sometime in the future, coal and oil will run out. We, as a society, have to develop sustainable means of generating energy.
Right now, people can afford to spend national budgets paying for global benefits (co2 reduction). When things get difficult, those programs will be the first to go...
People who have the most power to reduce carbon emission are the same people who are least eager to do so.
Algae capturing carbon and falling to the bottom of the ocean seems so obvious and so easy and scalable!
Electric cars seem to be viable, so it's really only interesting for planes right now.
5. Let the economy stall, it will at some point anyway.
There's also a point 6, which is reduce and then stabilize the global population at sustainable levels. Having fewer humans around is simply the easiest way to consume less while allowing a reasonable standard of living.
Humans are by nature pro-growth. Any policy which works against that needs to account for it, which they never do.
Also populations stabilize when you reach a certain standard of living, which is exactly why the environmental mentality should be pro-growth – get to that point as soon as possible, and use that extra manpower to get to carbon neutral as soon as possible with the three things I listed. You don't need 4, 5, and 6. Simpler plans are always better.
Populations don't stabilize due to growth. They stabilize when the standard of living reaches a point where having many children stops making sense. If only there was a way we could share our prosperity with everyone.... hmm. Is that called capitalism? Why, no, it is not.
We're not a virus on the Earth; we're cancer. Cancer only kills people if it grows too fast. For example, many men die with prostate cancer, while relatively few die of it.
We're neither a virus nor a cancer. We're the only thing that matters. The earth doesn't care if it dies. It doesn't have feelings. The last [insert endangered species here] doesn't know that it is the last of its kind, it doesn't care either. The only reason these things matter is because people care. The solution is therefore never going to be "make people's lives worse".
If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope. Therefore, I choose to believe you are wrong here.
Incidentally, the people who have made everyone's life worse aren't those who are going to fix the situation. They're those who kept borrowing from future generations to make their lives better.
> If humanity can't accept the temporary reduction of some people's standard of living to save civilization, then there is no hope
Citation very much needed. You asserting that we need to reduce certain people's SoL is not the same as demonstrating such, and neither you nor anyone else has done so.
Don't know who you're referring to with your last statement, but OK.
Show me you're willing to be convinced, and I'll give you every citation you need.
We know how to generate power with minimal CO2 emissions, but we don't do it at the necessary scale. We know how to recycle, but we don't actually do that, either, and it takes energy. And, capturing carbon... well, if you want to put the carbon genie back in the bottle, you have to either expend energy to do it, or violate the laws of thermodynamics. One cuts into the amount of energy you can consume, while the other is an impossibility. All this is just making the argument that we need to share the technology to do these things as broadly as possible, including throughout the global south.
Do you or do you not believe there's a finite amount of energy we can expend and still remain sustainable? Essentially, we're limited to biomass (which puts carbon back in the air that was taken out of the air previously), nuclear, gravity (hydroelectric, more or less), and solar (solar panels, wind). To go past that, we need to get into fossil fuels, and be very, very careful we don't exceed the ability of the Earth to absorb the CO2 we put in the air. Unfortunately, we're coming close to exceeding the capacity of the Earth to absorb any nontrivial amount of CO2 and still remain broadly habitable, which is why we're having significant warming over the past several decades. As you said, humans are very pro-growth, which means we're really bad at respecting these sorts of limits. So, we need to remove the temptation to do so ASAP if we are to succeed.
As for innovation, you just told me we have all the technology necessary to go net zero carbon, so, who cares about innovation in the short term? Do you want to watch the collapse of global civilization on your iPhone 15, or something?
Honestly, as long as you're going to sit there and tell me we can capitalism our way out of a problem that was caused by capitalism, you're not convincing me that you can be convinced otherwise. You're literally espousing a position that capitalists refer to as "capitalist realism," which is essentially "we can't conceive of any alternative to capitalism, so, there is no alternative!"
You know the definition of insanity, right? Tell me again why it makes sense that we're going to capitalism our way out of this?
You rightly point out this is an energy problem. That is why we need to go full tilt on nuclear. Nuclear can generate vast amounts of energy with near zero CO2 emission and also without requiring vast swaths of land (solar), localized geological features (hydro), etc.
Finally, I haven't proposed we "solve this with capitalism". Please go back and re-read my first comment, where I say we need to solve this with:
1. Electrify everything.
2. Lots of nuclear (fission), with fusion sooner rather than later.
3. Carbon capture.
Nowhere is capitalism stipulated. Of course, I do actually think capitalism is the way to go, because it is the best system we've ever invented for promoting efficiency, which is obviously a good thing in this discussion. But that was not the point I was making.
Blanket statements like this almost never help. They readily fall in danger of presenting a moralistic or normalizing argument in debate, which require zero baseline. If you're going to debate people you need to provide an actual solution that doesn't just say, "stop what you're doing", "you're the problem", etc...
Conservation may have worked sometime in the 60's or earlier, however, economies would've stalled and our present would likely be quite different. It is possible to engineer our way out of climate change, but it will take the best minds being 100% committed to it and incentives that align to it.
Guess what the best way to get to a post-scarcity economy is? You guessed it, growth. Innovation. Progress. Not stalling it.
I may have agreed with you before capitalism pissed away our future. But, we just don't have the time left, and we must sacrifice in the short term to save the long term. These are facts. If we don't take drastic action now, climate change will abolish capitalism for us in a few decades. Is that what you want?