That's extreme.
It is what it is; mother nature doesn't give a fuck about us and never will. Preventing climate change would be incredibly painful, as is letting it happen.
On the other hand, stopping it would basically involve a war on developing countries to forcibly prevent them from developing further. Most developed countries have already leveled off their CO2 emissions or are headed downward.
Increased CO2 will harm the developing world more than anywhere else, but those places are also the least interested in putting in the effort to stop the effects.
Why not instead just give them the developed tech and the expertise? Instead of sending tanks, send wind turbines and photovoltaics and release all the IP on them. Instead of suppressing development, let them leapfrog the carbon-intensive technologies.
The way I see it, not doing it is naive, and borders on trying to make the problem worse on purpose.
> What IP is being held back?
Design specs, software specs, for all the things between "sunlight" and "DC electricity", as well as tools to manufacture those things, and the tools to manufacture those...
My point is that we have to give them the technology without making them dependent on the west for maintenance. Short-term, they need to know how to operate, fix, and jury-rig it themselves. Mid-term, they need to know how to manufacture it out of components bought on the global market. Long-term, they need to be able to manufacture them themselves from scratch. To get there, they cannot be hamstrung by IP licensing making them pay through the roof and/or ask for permission to do anything with green technologies.
My usual (U.S. centric) suggestions when this topic comes up are to greatly expand solar and wind energy production, finance transcontinental high-voltage DC lines so that we can trade power with Africa/Asia/Europe and even out the day/night imbalance (we can keep fossil fuel plants around as an emergency backup and just not use them), electrify the interstate freeway system so that EVs can charge without stopping and make cross-country road trips without having to haul around huge batteries, and we should expand EV tax credits to cover conversions of existing vehicles as well as new vehicles.
We also need more battery production, especially of technologies like lithium iron phosphate (or whatever replaces it in the future) which are good enough and aren't bottlenecked on expensive materials like cobalt and nickel.
None of these things require people to change their behavior, though it would help if they did. It's probably also not enough to save us from pretty severe climate problems in the future, but at this point I think that's more-or-less unavoidable so we should just do the best we can right now.
I'm sure this will eventually shift - as far as i know multiple golf states are heavily investing in "green tech", not sure what the US elite is doing, but i hope that a critical mass will be hit at some point.
Until then there will be no governmental push to save earth because the richest elites writes the laws, and unless their wealth isn't dependent on dirty energy they will rather kill everyone on earth than give up their generational wealth.
Stupid when the tech is literally ready and prices are falling so much.
We need extreme global bans on all dirty energy 30 years ago, and stop using trillions of subsidies for family dynasties, military black budgets, and other black boxes that siphon money from everyone to a hidden elite in offshore tax havens - and instead take those money and subsidise saving earth / gren tech / neo manhattan like projects.
Unfortunately the oligarchs, and especially the tech elites will rather flee to New Zealand and live alone in bunker than imagine any happy ending. It's dark.
Maybe they don't count on the transition being possible and to be fair i don't either. The amount of energy stored in fossil fuels is so massive, so portable, so cheap that even with a revolution in batteries and tech everyone in the world will pretty much have to live as third worlders - unless fusion and batteries undergo a deus ex machina like event.
Elections do matter. And while I don't like the idea of being in the "technology will save us" camp, we're at least at the point where renewable energy and electric vehicles can compete on their merits even when ignoring climate costs.
It’s definitely not the kind of thing where I would engage in hand wringing over human stupidity. It sucks and it’s unfair, but it’s the situation we have to deal with.
Are we really so against the wall that we cannot come up with something better than the economically suicidal shutdowns?
on my side of the pond we've committed to a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030 as compared to 1990... that's just 9 years, and we are _still_ at 1990 levels or thereabouts, meaning we have done essentially _nothing_ in 30 years.
I'd damn well say we're against the wall.
CO2 emissions went down during the early pandemic, but quickly started climbing back towards normal again.[0] In 2020 overall, global emissions fell 6.4%[1]. If we maintained that trajectory, it still wouldn't be enough to stop climate change.
[0]https://time.com/5943530/covid-19-co2-emissions-climate-chan... [1]https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/08/carbon-d...
"Cuts" means cuts in the release of new CO2, it doesn't mean that this has to be accomplished through shutting down the economy - you misunderstood the statement.
We're not going to deal with it. We're going to continue partying for another 200 years. Then we're all going to get woozy and stupid. Then the population will crater. I don't think humanity will go away entirely, but I don't see a reason to be optimistic about the next 500 or 1000 years. This is the peak.
The way I see it it's gonna be all about energy. There are absolutely insane amounts of it everywhere, and all our power generation is like nothing compared to what's going on at planetary, cosmic scales. The question is are gonna be able to tap into it, and make use of it? If so, all our problems will seem silly, but for that to happen we need to keep up the innovation, keep up improving technology, keep the economy running and don't fall into the trap of regressing into a dark age.
If we just shut down everything and go back into the woods, we're definitely gonna be at the whim of whatever is going to happen and there will be nothing we can do about it.
2020 we simply began getting worse at a slower rate. But ANY emissions of fossil fuels come from outside the carbon cycle and make the carbon worse.