When an official says "unless governments credibly commit to immediate, massive decreases in emissions, we're screwed," it just amounts to "we're screwed."
Encouraging and striving for some radical new technological innovation is all we can do.
Fatalism leads to giving up, which leads to us hitting all those higher numbers, which leads to an unnecessary amount of extra suffering.
In general, you should rather expect negative feedback loops. For example, the warming response to increased CO2 emission is logarithmic, meaning that the more CO2 you emit, the weaker effect additional effect has, and quite significantly so. Of course, our problem is that we are emitting so much, and our emissions grow so fast, that this diminishing effect is of little consolation. The point is, negative feedback loops are much more likely than positive ones.
The question becomes, are unknown feedbacks more likely to be positive or negative? I'd lean toward negative, which is what most experts think, but definitely an unknown.
There are also instances when politicians do want to change something, but their cluelessness shows - solar freakin' roadways anyone?
No, we opted to provide incentives to fossil fuel producers and consumers. That is how we got into this mess.
Pointless wars are bad for other obvious reasons.
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” he added
We would need to do fuel reprocessing to manage the waste output and also need to enter serial production of reactors so they could all stop being one-off designs that take forever and literally billions of dollars to certify. Build them where cooling water is available and build wind and solar where practical anywhere else.
If fusion ends up working out and/or something better comes along, switch to building that over nuclear fission plants whenever that time comes and sunset the fission plants at the end of their lives. Waiting for a more convenient answer is no excuse for inaction today.
We're going to need more power capacity that we have today, because we'll also have to be switching all transportation and manufacturing to electrical sources as well. Shipping is either going to need vessels with nuclear power, or that burn ammonia or hydrogen. One of the only things that we don't have any decent known answers for is what to run airplanes off of. Maybe they keep burning carbon fuels and we explicitly build carbon scrubbers for what we know they produce.
I understand that many Democrats purport you support the Green New Deal while advancing much more moderate proposals. Democrats think that “making a big opening bid” and paring it back is a way to anchor expectations. Except how this reads to non-Democrats is that “socialist takeover of the economy in the name of climate change is the ultimate goal,” and subsequent moderate measures are just seen as stepping stones toward that end.
It’s like leading with “Defund the Police” and trying to backfill with moderate police reform proposals. It’s a way to keep activists engaged, but it just makes moderates distrustful off your true intentions.
An entire political party not providing a single solution for society’s largest ongoing problem is what should make moderates distrustful.
Actually proposing solutions opens one up to the types of attacks you constantly make on this site, that’s the price to pay for taking threats seriously and actually trying to solve problems. You can deflect to other topics, but in the end, no amount of wordsmithing changes that fact.
If you wish to keep 'the world as we know it'? Yes, that ship has sailed. What we're fighting for now is the degree to which the world we know will be destroyed.
But this is absolutely not acceptable in any mainstream economic discussion, even from the left, and absolutely counter to the very definition of a for-profit corporation.
Even slowing down growth is seen as 'too risky', while the world burns. Better we buy new iPhones every month to help propel the economy.
For example- launching enough thin, reflective mylar film to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point to reduce incoming solar radiation by ~0.1% would take about 500 Falcon Heavy launches (highest capacity rocket currently available). This would take several years and around $100 billion. Once Starship is ready and in use, this would go way down.
$100 billion and several years is practically nothing for the US, China, or one of several other countries with the capability to do this.
Obvious downsides include denying the use of the L1 Lagrange point to human use permanently, eventual degradation of the sun shield as solar wind pushes pieces of film out of place, and of course possible mass famine and plant die-off due to lower solar radiation.
Teller, E., Wood, L., & Hyde, R. (1996). Global warming and ice ages: I. Prospects for physics-based modulation of global change (No. UCRL-JC--128715). Lawrence Livermore National Lab..
Talk != action, not even if the talk is "credible". You think this is an existential problem? Great. Start doing something. Don't tell me what you're going to do, do it.
I don't think that's the best solution, but at least it's one I can personally enact, and if deontologically expanded it does lead to solving the problem. Don't play negative or zero sum games and ostracize those that do.
People don't like that. A friend of mine likes driving his car, and does so a lot to go places on the weekend and stuff. He'd like to see the government mandate reduced car usage. I've asked him: you're free not to use your car, why do you still use it if you believe it would be best if you didn't? Because he likes it and if it's not made into law, he won't do what he thinks is best.
"We should outlaw personal air travel, but until that has happened, I'm going to fly around the globe" is what I see in far too many proponents of those rules.
I have no idea what goes on in their head, it's completely alien to me.
Individual action just isn't enough. Hell, you could wipe my entire country of about 5 million people, and the impact on global CO2 output is on par with the average annual increase in CO2 output over the past two decades. A year or two later, the world would be outputting more CO2 than it did before our genocide.
If only the voters of the green party in Germany would stop/sharply reduce flying, that would be ~10% of Germans (~16% projected votes, ~70-75% citizens are voting).
Since they do fly more than the average person [1][2][3], and since they are more likely to be part of the upper class which tends to contribute more per capita, the impact would be even larger. They could single handedly massive reduce the pollution from air travel just by changing their own habits. Yet they don't, keep on flying at higher levels than other groups while demanding legislation to stop them.
It's like a cliche movie killer who asks to be stopped.
Look at vegans who are vegan for moral reasons. They don't say "we shouldn't eat animals, and the state should outlaw it, but until no one is allowed to eat animals, I'll have a steak every day". They start by themselves and then try to convince others and (sometimes) call for legislation.
"Since my influence as an individual is meaningless, I'll continue to be (an outsized) part of the problem instead of being part of the solution" is just completely alien to me, I literally don't understand the reasoning behind it. Would they own slaves if it wasn't outlawed because one slave more or less doesn't change the big picture?
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gruenen-waehle..., 2014
[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/umfrage-zur-flugscham-gr..., 2019
[3] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/klimawandel-gruene..., 2019 for green members of parliament who fly more than any other party per person
Not to mention, many behaviors are in fact impractical. The vast majority of people can't afford equipment and clothes that can last a few decades, as used to be the norm, for example. In much of the west, responsibly grown sustainable food is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than fast food.