Reflecting on what will be the greater challenge for my kids: avoiding emotional overreaction to the media's business model
...or climate change.
...or climate change.
Now? Now my gut feeling is that climate change is mostly going to be OK — bad stuff will still happen, but I don’t expect catastrophic variation from what would’ve happened otherwise, because PV is rapidly growing in quantity (literally exponentially) and batteries are rapidly getting cheaper.
Plenty of other unsustainable things about our economy besides greenhouse gases of course.
But I’m more worried than I used to be about journalists and propagandists both separately A/B testing their ways to the most potent methods to effect specific emotional affects, at which point we all go to war because of something which despite being objectively stupid is also something which enough people feel is a fundamental truth of nature they’re willing to kill and to die for.
A more extreme version of https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
I am saying “I think those cuts are extremely likely to happen, and soon”.
An order of magnitude every 5 to 10 years is faster than I think you’re giving credit for.
I’m expecting the peak capacity of just PV to exceed world electricity demand this decade, and actual output (rain, night, being put on cars parked in shade) to exceed current global electricity demand early next decade as more stuff gets electrified.
I expect a slowdown in growth after that point, but I don’t have any intuition about when exactly.
And of course we need so much reduction that the long term goal is “everything everywhere in every sector except half the livestock methane” or “everything in really all sectors worldwide except for North Korea”; yet halving output doubles the time available to make the next step, so even there I am optimistic.
That said, there is plenty of tech being developed to improve global warming, so that rich mega corporation won't have to abandon their fancy offices and villas on the seaside.
The real ecological catastrophe will be plastic, the recycling scam (approved by governments and paid with oil money) really sold plastic to people and now we have microplastic everywhere - including our body.
Hopefully governments won't stifle innovation too much so that the private sector will come up with a tech solution.
They are your children so it is your responsibility to make sure they learn to separate panic porn and propaganda from believable prognoses on things like war, natural phenomena, changing climate and its ramifications and more. Get some books on the subject - Michael Shellenberger's "Apocalypse Never", Bjørn Lomborg's "False Alarm", Steven Koonin's "Unsettled" and read up on the facts and fictional narratives around the subject of the changing climate. If you are not in panic-mode they are far less likely to be pulled into the fable of a climate-induced eschaton. Teach them critical thinking skills - that is true critical thinking, not "critical theory" thinking which is actually the opposite of what I'm getting at. Help them on their way of navigating through the rapids of their formative years and they'll be stronger and more self-reliant on the other side.
Sounds like you need to apply a bit more of that "Critical thinking" you're going on about, as if your reading list is anything to go by, you're not really being all that "critical" but rather seeking out sources of information that confirms your existing biases.
I'm fairly sure our "energy footprint" is lower than yours so if anything I should call for you to "repent, sinner!". But I won't and I'll grant you your religion just as long as you grant me the freedom of it.
But many others won't, and the people that lived there will need somewhere else to live, and productivity resources in that area are gone. That's going to be a lot of refugees needing a place in the world that's already struggling to provide for all of us.
All this will make the world a lot more unstable politically and economically. And just look at the news today to see how well we're getting along before any of this really kicked in...
Thought so.
You did, and you come up with this response? Read them again, but now without those ideologically-tainted glasses. Show me where they're totally off-base and I will listen.
By the way, if you had read them - which you have not - you would have known that none of these authors claim that the climate does not change, nor do they claim that human activity does not have any influence on climate change. What these authors - and many others - do not share is the conviction, nay, the sheer joy of the "climate apocalypse". This I have in common with them and with many others - but you... seem to differ?
Read those books, and others. Think for yourself. Don't just blindly follow the man with the sign "the world is coming to its end, repent!". Don't drink the Kool-Aid.
One of the big things to look at is track record: the reports by real scientists from the 1980s and 1990s have predictions which include the present and those numbers have been pretty accurate. For example, this is fully a decade old:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...
The people saying “no big deal, don't worry about it” have not had the same track record. More importantly, however, is being small-c conservative: if we get rid of high pollution fuel sources it'll definitely mean less profit for the people who fund those authors’ work but for most of us the effects will be better health and living conditions with manageably higher costs in a few areas and savings in others (buying an EV instead of a big ICE SUV is a TCO savings, for example, and ditching my natural gas for a modern heat-pump saved more summer AC than it costs in the winter).
In contrast, the approach of doing as little as as the fossil fuel industry wants is guaranteed to produce much greater costs and in many cases the random nature of those makes it much harder to mitigate, especially since a lot of people who primarily hear from deniers will resist any changes until it's their personal basement flooding.