What exactly are they expecting governments to change? Policy, power generation, transportation, what? And will they accept the necessary or resultant policies and changes?
The above are "easy" if you have a totalitarian regime where what the autocrats say go, goes: China, Saudi Arabia, etc., most other countries are more democratic and it takes time for change to happen.
Individuals are still incentivised to make climate friendly consumption choices, but on net the population is no worse off financially.
Will people redefine what carbon is; who will suffer, how many people will lose jobs due to electrification of many industries (auto MFG for one, the UFW, is concerned). What happens to the third world where they use charcoal for cooking?
I think there is much more to be thought out.
Yes. It will become a political football because of its immense power to economically marginalize wide swaths of society.
This to me aligns with economic theory in practice more accurately than a carbon tax.
People won't evade buying cars that produce less CO2 if they're cheaper and better than the competition. This is why I think it's more likely to align with economic theory.
Governments took quite a few measures in the last few decades to subsidize and encourage the electric car market.
Probably despair that they've been failed by my generation, my parent's generation and (since they're to a large extent the ones still in power, at least in the US), my grandparent's generation. Since, as you point out, change takes time in democracies, and even longer internationally, it was our collective jobs to avoid even being in this situation, and we sort of screwed the pooch.
What were governments supposed to do? What technology were they going to leverage? did we have computers, modelling, alternatives?
Cars with ICE could have become more efficient, yes. But where else could we have cut the fat? Fewer people via worldwide contraception, to stem demand? More public transit? Much of carbon output is not on the consumer side, but on the industry side of things.
The antinuke activists killed green energy which would have make coal and other dirty power obsolete. That would have been a nice chunk.
I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it.
These are things which are, quite clearly, at least an order of magnitude less than what we need to accomplish today, but since climate change is caused by the area under the emissions curve, perhaps that 50 year head start would've been enough. With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly would've been worthwhile to give it more of a try than what we actually did.
The broad understanding of it was known in the late 70s, and even accepted by politicians by the early 80s as a policy requirement before it became politicised later.
>I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it.
If you think of the massive exponential growth of oil/gas consumption and the level of deforestation since the 70s - even just slowing it down back then would've bought a much longer window of time to tackle it with less disruption as well as develop technologies to help fix/mitigate it.
I can certainly see some of the problems. The real increases are in India/China. Union of Concerned Scientists shows that US share of worldwide CO2 is 15%, even a solid change is only a fraction of 15%. A lot of solutions (nuclear, fracking of natgas to replace coal, cutting immigration from the Third World to the First, etc.) are politically unpopular with climate activists. World population is supposed to peak at 50% higher than current level. GDP improvements (and energy use) could easily outstrip improvements in efficiency. etc. etc.
oh well, no one is asking me to run their lives so I'll just sit back and watch.