I have zero hope of it happening. People won't stop driving, flying or eating meat. They won't even drive smaller cars. As I understand it, that would just be the start.
Looking at how we handled the pandemic, I don't think we'll manage.
Vat meat is starting to get on the market, and while we’ll have to wait and see if this is a iPhone moment or a Sinclair C5 moment, the prices have come down rapidly since the first attempts.
Flying is going to be a hard thing to totally green, but it’s not impossible either, merely low priority.
Yes, there will be those that reject everything — I’ve encountered those who think a self-driving car will take away their freedom, instead of regarding it as a chauffeur — but when the economics are against them, when they have to pay extra to be eco-unfriendly instead of paying less? History shows most people follow the money, not just for ill but also for good.
But don’t be so hasty to dismiss culture as an opportunity: Musk turned electric cars from a joke into something the rich wanted to show off with.
Amidst the chaos, humanity has been able develop a wide range of therapeutics and public healthcare prevention protocols, research and deploy vaccines at global scale in under a year, all while avoiding total economic collapse.
What outcome would've given you hope in humans' ability to solve complex and chaotic crises?
Yes, the scientific community has done the impossible, but us laymen have failed to do even the possible, even when it was easy.
We can solve problems, no doubts, but perhaps we aren't so good at collective, sustained efforts. Climate change will not come to pass like the pandemic. It will last generations if we're lucky.
By slightest inconvenience you mean complete social isolation for an entire year, right?
Both ultra-simple and only slightly inconvenient actions, but both would have made a huge difference in the outcome and timescale of this whole mess. Of course humans can't be bothered to give a rat's ass about other humans (or even about themselves) if even the slightest inconvenience is involved. Nope. Humanity deserves what's coming. Humanity is a planetary cancer, and we've brought this all upon ourselves by our own actions.
But the pandemic also showed us a large % of the American population are reluctant to make even minor, temporary sacrifices to protect their country. And that a decent fraction of American political leadership are happy to close their eyes to factual reality.
Long term economic effects for example, and the ability to remain globally competitive economically and in other ways.
But there are people declining a free a pinprick jab that's been given to billions of other people already, when there's clear evidence it's good for both the nation's interest and their own? The country's not asking us to charge Nazi machine gun nests on the beaches of Normandy here.
The first world response against the vaccine is selfish and short sighted in the same ways that make solving global warming incredibly difficult socially.
The vaccine recipes should be free, the raw materials should be coordinated so that vaccine production is maximized. Just like global warming, no one is safe until everyone is, we are from it yet have the capability to do so. Yet we do not, we finagle to ensure profit over life.
Our collective COVID response is exactly why the climate crisis is so hard.
Our problems are not technological.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/business/covid-vaccine-billio...
Those Americans aren’t any different from you and me: they just got their news from different sources — sources that shouldn’t be saying what they said.
What made me pessimistic about climate change w.r.t. COVID-19 was that most countries only did something once the population was sufficiently affected, even when the consequences of doing nothing were perfectly clear and immediate. W.r.t. climate change most countries won't be affected much or it will be hard to attribute to climate change and the consequences will be hard to predict and delayed.
COVID-19 was the easiest case of a global tragedy of the commons problem and we failed w.r.t. to a globally coordinated solution. Climate change is much harder. Doesn't give me much cause for optimism.
However I also see the role of the government as educating the population about the negative effects the population is not seeing yet so I don't use that to excuse the government.