I’m not sure what’s the point of focusing on 1.5C anymore. I think the writing on the wall is pretty clear that we’re going to double that at least.
Barring any miracle in carbon sequestration technology anyway. I hope we get a miracle.
Barring any miracle in carbon sequestration technology anyway. I hope we get a miracle.
And any carbon sequestation technology will only help significantly after drastic emission cuts, not as a replacement for it.: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
Aiming for 1.5C, then missing it and then continuously failing on 1.6C, 1.7C, 1.8C etc. is akin to a fat person missing their goal of 200lbs, and then telling themselves in front of the mirror every extra 10lb - "I'm going to stop eating junk food today! No, really, this is the day!"
It's a cognitive failure to adequately process signals that the real physical world is sending to you. Or measurements that you take from the real world.
We _should_ be making things better, yes. But setting an arbitrary goal isn't helpful.
You know what would be helpful? Just giving ever person who's considering a solar project a much larger tax break than currently exists. Expand community solar programs for medium-size installations up to 2MW. Subsidize energy storage installations to complement that installed solar.
Anyone who's advocating for targeting an ambitious goal is missing the point completely. If that was helpful, why not just say we're targeting 0C?
In fact, let's target -1C and shoot extra energy into space. We might even discover some cool tech this way.
People are being told technology will solve the problem, you can do x only if the alternative has at least the same advantages and no more disadvantages and you can't do y, because 'freedom'. (oh and did I forget 'communism'?)
1,5 degrees aren't an arbitrary goal either, at least to climate scientists: four tipping points are triggered at about that temperature. https://twitter.com/globalcommonshq/status/16164772483740467...
I find this a sad dilemma. We want to save humanity from the climate catastrophe, but we are more worried about crashing the economy.
You're assuming that a drastic response to stop climate change will crash the economy more than climate change itself will, which is a highly dubious proposition given that many countries (e.g. Denmark) are case studies that show the feasibility and relative ease of the transition (relative to climate change itself).
To be clear, I think that every country should do more and something is better than nothing. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking that the minor changes made by Denmark are sufficient, or that they could even be replicated in most other countries. Our physical stuff still has to be made somewhere.
I mean, we could stop CO2 emissions "tomorrow" if we really wanted to. We just need massive investments in tons of infrastructure, stop building with concrete, convince people not to travel, etc. Which - now as I type this - sounds like COVID lockdown to me which we still haven't recovered from fully. Even minor shifts in trends have cascading effects in the economy, so I'm not surprised at all, that things are going so slowly.
So if you want to not reach much more than 1.5°C, let's say 2°C or 2.5°C, you need to be realistic and set a lower goal. We will always be above any goal.
There's some really bad redline some place past 1.5C.
Putting the goal possibly to the right of that redline (and possibly blowing past it anyways) is not good.
1.5C is a decent benchmark because it lets us measure various scales of intervention against it.
That’s part of effective goal setting. Anything else is fantasy and counterproductive.
Too many people are just "hoping for a miracle" as if that's doing something. Or they think "technology will fix this before it gets too bad". It might, but it will be in spite of those people, not because of. If we want technology to save us we have to make investments today, not "when it gets bad".
It would require sacrifices and global cooperation, but any real solution to climate change will require that
The average climate we have today is the result of the Co2 we put in the atmosphere in 2003.
Is IS unachievable. You just said right here exactly why it's unachievable: "global cooperation" is pure fantasy.
Global carbon emissions are still rising. Climate policies are not being rolled out, new fossil fuel projects are still being approved and built.
I think that even if we stop emitting all CO2 right now (which is not going to happen), we are still looking at 1.5° C. I think it is time to admit that we have failed. And climate doom is upon us all. We are all going to die.
But I don't agree we're all going to die. It's not a human extinction type problem. There will still be habitable places and some places will become more habitable (the Russians even had a crazy plan in the 60s to dam the Bering strait and melt the Arctic with nukes to make Siberia more habitable.... :X )
The problem is mostly that a ton of people now live in the areas that will become much less habitable and the resulting mass-migrations will lead to extreme societal disruption and possibly wars. And the areas that will become more habitable have no infrastructure. This is why it's going to be more expensive to deal with the problem later than to prevent it.
I'm not saying it's not an unprecedented disaster. It certainly is. The country I'm from (the Netherlands) might mostly disappear. But it's not an apocalypse. There will still be places where people can live.
In fact climate change is normal in the scope of earth. The situation we are in now has become this way also due to change from the ice age that was before. The bigger problem is that we made this a phenomenon on the scale of decades where it was previously millennia. So society and nature can't adapt quickly enough.
It is a "human extinction type problem" (and likely most if not all life on Earth) … not necessarily directly killed by the climate itself, but by the way that stressed out stupid "people in power" react to the stresses brought on by that changing climate. We have entirely too many literally insane people in positions of power commanding weaponry that could conceivably wipe out all of humanity (and much if not all of the other life on this planet), and we're doing very little to rein them in or control them. Feels like a very real danger to me.
If you mean novel bioweapons then I can see that being a problem.
There seems to be a 'project fear' movement that thinks it's ok to overblow scientific conclusions in order to sway people to act. I personally think this is a very bad idea as deliberate lies will only lead to deep disillusionment with government and the scientific community. It can also lead to fatalism where people won't act because they believe the worst outcome is already locked in.
And really, the truth about climate change is scary enough as it is. But we do still have the opportunity to mitigate some of the worst of it.
I hold the same worries about A.I. The tech itself (currently just a tool, and honestly not nearly as "advanced" one as many seem to believe) isn't nearly as scary as how the dumbest of our number (our so-called "leaders") are gonna use and / or abuse it.
I honestly believe that if there is a true extinction of humanity (or life in general) on this planet, it's far more likely that a small group of exceptionally stupid humans will inflict it upon us than almost any other "doomsday scenario" I can imagine.
The Netherlands will be fine if they just dam up the North Sea. The main problems with this are 1) the English Channel is a huge trade route and damming it (without a way of passing ships through) would destroy the EU economy, and 2) Russia would be very hostile to anything that restricts their access to the ocean from the Baltic.
But the cost would be extreme. Shipping access isn't a major issue though. A dam can have locks.
It is a pretty extreme proposal of course, but it is possible. It would have some big benefits, not just to Netherlands, but all the countries around it, because all of them (UK, France, Germany, Belgium) stand to lose a lot of land to rising sea levels. Instead, with this dam, they could actually create a LOT more new land in what's now the North Sea. Remember, much of the North Sea used to be dry land (we call it "Doggerland" now), only about 8000 years ago, and had human settlements.
I think shipping could still be an issue. Sure, dams can have locks, but the sheer amount of ship traffic there might be difficult. Maybe they should build new some ports and use freight rail to move cargo around.
"If we do <x> we'll be able to stay under 1.5C" <- lie
"If we don't do <y> we won't be able to stay under 1.5C" <- possibly true, but deceptive
"Our goal is to keep global warming under 1.5C" <- lie, a goal is by definition achievable and anyone who's giving statements on climate change knows that 1.5C is not achievable
0.1 on average can mean huge spikes on some parts of the globe.
So not only do our children inherit the mess, but our most optimistic scenarios all include our children being the ones to invent some sort of miracle tech.
Meanwhile we're mostly sitting on our asses and not even a global pandemic could convince us to make any sort of meaningful change.
No reason to celebrate because there's much to do, but it's not all doom and gloom.
As it stands, global PV installed capacity has been growing by a pretty constant 20% per annum for the last five years, about half of which is in China and Europe but with similar exponential rates in other countries (Brazil in particular has doubled its installed capacity in less than three years). At that rate, depending on the capacity factor, it would produce the majority of the world's electricity in 15-20 years. Storage is behind, but faces a chicken-and-egg problem: if you don't have installed PV capacity, there's no demand to build storage.
My point is: 20% YoY growth is fast by the standards of almost anything, let alone durable infrastructure. Rome wasn't built in a day. Part of the challenge is to make sure we keep it up.
We learned relatively quickly that although the streets cleared out, our energy use stayed roughly similar overall, and the supply shocks are tied to that story by shifting demand for goods and services in a relatively short period.
Back-to-office is also part of that because one of the goods and services that could not move that quickly is real estate: individuals could move, but businesses had leases. And everyone looking at the commercial real estate market has been shaking their heads and seeing a negative trend: yes, companies did mobilize to get people back on their office commute, but the market is still sliding and cities are looking at the difficult prospect of converting commercial buildings to housing now.
How is this related? What change was expected from the pandemic?
We know we can live without the commute, we have actual data on its impact on CO2 thanks to the pandemic, and now we're mostly back to commuting. I don't see how anyone could argue that's not a real, tangible change that could've easily stayed.
WFH was never about the workers perspective, it was enforced and companies had no choice.
That the workers were positive about it is irrelevant to whether companies were productive with it
If you go far back enough in my comment history you'll find me arguing FOR WFH, but I'll still be the first to admit that all companies I personally observed took a huge hit to productivity when WFH was in force.
Unfortunately, we are shutting these plants down instead of building more of them.
"The annual number of permanent nuclear reactor shutdowns fluctuated between 2005 and 2022. In the latter year, there were 4 shutdowns worldwide, of which three were in the United Kingdom (UK) and one in the United States (U.S.) "[0x40000000]
[0x3F800000] https://spectrum.ieee.org/slow-steady-progress-for-two-us-nu...
[0x40000000] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238656/number-of-nuclear...
Especially useful would be having excess energy for renewal which thermodynamics says is a must.
> we really don't know what else would
We absolutely can meet our needs with other clean energy sources. And unlike nuclear most of these technologies are cost competitive with fossil fuels currently, and the ones that are not are continuing to come down in costs as manufacturing scales up.
> We know it would solve the problem
No we don't. There are a number of places where nuclear is highly unlikely to be deployed due to geopolitical concerns or due to a lack of advanced enough economy. Those places are going to have to rely on other options whether they want to or not.
Again, I am all for nuclear as part of the mix. There are absolutely places where it will make the most sense (extreme latitudes for example). And I generally agree that increasing deployment could bring costs down*. But the amount of FUD spread by the pro-nuclear crowd really makes it hard to get onboard. I think you are doing more harm then good.
* Nuclear is unlikely to see the same cost reductions as renewables though, due to the difference in the drivers of the costs for each type of technology.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/figures/summary...
The tech exists to solve the problem. We have 4th generation designs that cannot melt down. We fail to deploy them to the shame of all of the so-called environmentalists.
MIT has a really neat policy simulator called En-ROADS [1] where you can tinker with applying various policies at various levels, and estimate their impacts. Check it out, and see just how minimal nuclear energy's effects are on their own. Compare that to, for example, just "highly reducing" methane emissions.
[1] https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=23.2...
It really seems like the straightforward solution to me, even more than carbon credits which seem to have some issues (I believe you can get paid for 'not emitting' in some cases, which of course can lead to almost-fraudulent behavior) -- taxing emissions is much more concrete and verifiable.
Also deforestation and afforestation are shown incredibly powerful. It really seems to me one of the most important aspects, since it means we also get "for free" the security of our forests and habitats that are collapsing (and even expansion of wild habitats hopefully!).
Nuclear takes so long to build it doesn't help at all.
[0] https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-carbon-notes-3-fo...
Kids judge their parents on their inability to change when it matters, and when you’re old and infirm and “kids” are taking care of you, you’re gonna be in for a bad time.
No, we didn't, just like our kids didn't.
We didn't choose shit, we took what we were given while a small minority in a minority of countries chose this.
It’s easy and comforting to spout predictions of the apocalypse, but realistically speaking, things will be okay.
If you think things will be okay because historically has been so, let me remind you that a permanent change of this scale is a catastrophe that is unmatched and unprecedented in human history. Maybe nuclear conflict was as scary, but its solution was comparatively much simpler, and it never passed the point of no return.
More than that, things usually do not turn out okay except for the class of people who initially benefited from bringing about the problem. Many peoples have faced horrors that were not and could not be undone, though it's easy to forget that while living in the society built on their ashes. Things always turn out to be okay... for the colonizer, the wealthy, the powerful
Statistically speaking, commenting on this platform firmly places you in a category that will likely survive climate change (at least in the medium term...) and probably profit from it, so excuse me for calling out your reasons for believing that technology will save us.
By the way, it is my understanding that the scientific consensus is that technological solutions are not going to be able to save us (as they are impractical, too far off, and harder to implement than just stopping the use of fossil fuels).
Also if you think that "spouting predictions of the apocalypse" is comforting, you severely misunderstand the psychological issues that (especially the younger generations) are facing in light of terrifying powerlessness against climate change
Ultimately, this is a political problem, and assuring everyone that "things will be okay" only makes it less likely that any action will be taken in time.
Now is the time to panic, and do something about it. If we are able to turn the tide and somehow make things okay... great! The panic was well placed.
"Peak oil" and CO2 are just the tip of the iceberg.
Some future generation is going to dig up the garbage we buried and harvest it for resources. To a degree we're already doing this ourselves looking for stuff like palladium and rhodium.
Are today's kids more concerned about the environment than we were? It seems they like to consume as much as anybody else
I think we are talking about people who are yet to be born (in the future), not younger humans already born.
They’ll probably never find the attention span to do so. But I can hope.
This is dire. I think we need to admit defeat, and declare a climate failure. Our goal going forward should be to do everything that keeps the temperature as possible. So far the goal of 1.5° C seems like it is taking us to 3-4° C by the end of the century, 3-4° C is basically an end of the world scenario.
One of the lowest hanging fruits would be reducing CO2 emitting car use, using a massive capital expenditure to enable lower emitting public transit and cycling to enable people to drive less.
It's endlessly frustrating that even those polices, where are relatively cheap in the grand scheme of things are apparently too impossible for our political leadership.
That can happen with tax code changes and land trusts.
We don't need to wait for new tech to scale up. We need to prioritize the planet.
If we make reducing emissions profitable our existing system will do it.
The other alternative is to completely rebuild our political/social system around something other than profit. Good luck with that, that's a fools errand.
IMO it could look something like this:
- Governments around the world set up a Climate Change Council
- The council is given power to regulate industry, and assign national resources
- High impact industry is shut down or refactored. For example, coal should be banned, but oil companies should be nationalized and fazed out while alternatives are built
That's pretty much it. It's hard, and it's a large effort over a long period of time, but there's nothing impossible about it. We don't have to reimagine society to do it.
Resource extraction is the core of our economy. Its why the US has vested interests in countries that have natural resources, and why the US is so quick to act when resources are nationalized.
We can either directly use taxpayer money to fund these initiatives and give them priority over things like starting wars and playing world police, or pay private individuals and ask very nicely that they help.
I much rather that national approach as I don't think middle men sapping a fat percentage is a great solution.
Its essentially a protection racket at the end of the day.
I await my downvotes.
One year of carbon sequestration from a mature tree == 1 or 2 days of commuting to the city 20 miles away that many people who are priced out of this town drive back and forth from.
Trees are great, and most places should plant more street trees. But if you preserve trees at the cost of building dense cities that are more environmentally friendly, you're doing it wrong. Dense cities also allow for more trees in actual wild lands outside of them, rather than sprawl.
In the US, transportation and heating are our biggest individual contributions to climate change.
Shooting down solutions because they aren't the entire solution will mean we never make any progress.
In other unfortunate news:
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/25/gm-bolt-ev-production-to-end...
GM ending production of the Chevy Bolt in favor of bigger, heavier, deadlier, less efficient EV's.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/figures/summary...
Reforesting, afforesting and ecosystem restoration are nearly as impactful, but listed seperately.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/ecosystems/coastal-blue-carbon...
Serious question. Planting trees and re-growing ecosystems seems like a simple, straightforward solution, but I feel like it's a red herring.
So if we doubled the size and carbon trapping of all the forests on earth, yes, it would make a big dent (solve the problem entirely, maybe). But that's unrealistic, because forests currently cover 30% of the land area of the planet, so we're practically never going to get to 60% forest coverage. It would involve giving up important things like farming.
It's not entirely a red herring, it will undoubtedly be a big part of climate change mitigation, but the first and most important step is to stop pumping oil out of the ground and burning it, like the article.
To give a fairly obvious example, think about deciduous trees: once a year they shed a large amount of carbon (leaves) which then goes into the soil. The nitrogen content is used for matter for plants, while the carbon is not.
Over time, this deposits more and more carbon in the ground itself. This is a good, safe place for it, and the model above is one of the simplest. Ecosystems are great at this stuff if we stop setting them on fire or otherwise killing everything.
Agreed on keeping it in the ground, though.
Really the purpose of forests is more in terms of soil creation and preservation, as you point out, a lot of the times in the form of shrubs, leaves, or needles and downed wood being infiltrated into substrate.
Too many people jump from "it's not sufficient" to "therefore, we shouldn't do it".
The amount of natural resources needed to build enough plants to make it more than a drop in the bucket is also going to require significant mining operations and other big polluters. It's a nice idea but science fiction for now, at least at a scale that is actually effective at countering climate change.
And even if we had unlimited energy and materials the inertia of greenhouse emissions (the CO2 heating us now was emitted decades ago) building it at scale will come too late to avert a crisis.
It's still much easier and more efficient to avoid emitting the carbon we still do than to try and capture it back. Though even that will come too late really.
So the optimal climate target should maximize the utility of this embarrassment. It should not be too achievable, or countries will slack off, but it should not be obviously impossible, or that will be an excuse to give up. The carrot must always dangle just far enough in front of the horse.
The point of 1.5 C as a target isn't that we meet it, but that we try to. If we could meet the target, we'd do even worse, and say "close enough", but that's no good.
Whatever particular incident you're referring to, the evidence was not released in a straightforward fashion, but tricked out through document drops and the partisan media, so that the pols could avoid a clear public announcement that so-and-so was a pedophile. That's exactly consistent with "avoiding embarrassment"; it just happens that a small fraction — usually, people who were already opposed to that official — believe they should be embarrassed.
When there are clear allegations of CSA, as with Mark Foley, the individual is quickly cast out. When a politician embarrasses their own party, as with Madison Cawthorn, the same thing happens. When the message can be sufficiently contained and redirected, the embarrassment has been avoided.
If this is happening, and no reason to doubt that, it is easier for a Nation like China to do this than say the US. Why, Xi can say "Build more windmills now in ..." and it will happen.
In the US, the 'in' is important, people will fight any development with in 10 miles of where they live. So it takes over 10 years for just the plan to be finalized. For a good example see:
https://www.wcvb.com/article/nantucket-residents-lawsuit-to-...
That is just the latest suit, IIRC this has been on-going for like 10 years.
China has one thing right, the idea of actions for a greater good. I forget the actual wording/idiom but we severely lack that in the west. It's all "what about me" and it drags any kind of progress to a halt unless it can be put in someone elses back yard or they can make a profit off of it.
What?
The west is working hard at lowering it's emissions, but all that work is getting undone because China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete [0]. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:
- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)
- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)
Meanwhile for the same period China has had
- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)
- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007
So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.
Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I am fully in favor of the kind of "fair trade" that would force countries to eat their environmental externalities. In the case of China, it's a double-win since it would put huge pressure on them to change and also more than fund all of our environmental initiatives. But without a global carbon tax/credit system, this just ain't gonna happen.
It's unfair when the western countries demand lowering emissions from the third world. West was able to enjoy unlimited carbon emissions for years, while the third world was mostly agricultural and had poorly developed economies. Now, when other countries undergo the same economic transformations US had long time ago, Americans demand them to ditch progress for the sake of preventing climate change. And that's while outsourcing "dirty" manufacturing and waste management to the same third world countries.
Here's the thing: they don't have to make all the same mistakes we made. Wind and solar was science fiction in the 70's and is economically feasible today yet China choose to go all-in with the dirtiest coal on the planet.
And it’s all due to economic self interest and survival that they are doing renewables so aggressively, it has nothing to do with perceived fairness or whatever.
At least as far as I understand it today (leaving this comment in the hope that folks can help me expand my understanding)
Life on earth is not stable. We are in the final death throes of this planet. Roughly 75% of life on earth is behind us. Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left[1] until our carbon cycles grind to a halt due to the earth moving outside of the habitable zone and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
This pending extinction event is not human made. It was coming regardless of whether humans evolved on this planet.
From everything I can tell, there is no making it through, let alone coming back from, this impending extinction event without “technology” that decouples life from the carbon cycles on this planet.
In 4.2bn years life on this planet has printed exactly one golden ticket for escaping that fate: humans.
We’ve done some bad things along the way to industrialization processes that can produce the technology necessary to get life off this rock - and to artificially sustain life on this rock as it becomes unsuitable for life.
But I’m not confident that the bad stuff we have done is sufficient to condemn our species and disqualify us as a suitable steward for this planet. Primarily because there is no alternative, there is no species in “second place” that I’d trust to evolve a civilization capable of getting life off this planet in the time we have left.
The eco-movements (outside of whole earth) have lost me. The calls for an immediate suspension of industrial processes, or the sentiment that life on earth would be better off if humans didn’t evolve to be what we are today, seems misplaced.
Without humans, and without our recent attempts to escape this planet, all life on earth is doomed to complete extinction.
It seems like we are in a critical several hundred year window where humans need to appreciate both that we are accelerating the end of the Holocene, a climate that was critical for the development of our civilizations, and do our best to slow that process already under way.
At the same time, we need to maintain the civilization that’s setting life on earth on an escape trajectory.
If we toss the baby with the bathwater we doom all life on earth to guaranteed extinction.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
And to say that that somehow means that the eco-movements (many of which are focused on the keeping us alive for the next few thousand years) are flawed seems wrong.
The focus put on silly Greenpeace actions and fights about nuclear in the media is part of a somewhat intentional strategy to paint all environmentalists as wrongheaded or stupid.
I think we’ve gotten incredibly lucky in the last 600 years or so and have stumbled our way into a viable exit strategy for life on our planet.
We don’t necessarily deserve this role.
I think I’m well aligned that keeping life alive for the next few thousand years is absolutely necessary. We can’t do anything on a 500m year timeline if our species is wiped out in 1000 years.
But, I’d disagree with many of the seemingly “at all costs” approaches I’ve seen advocated for in my social circles (outside of the media). I’ve seen my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
If we save all life on earth in the next 1000 years by ridding the planet of human civilization, we doom it to death in 500m years. Unless another species stumbles into another approach for leaving this planet, everything dies. If we are going to step down, we absolutely need to acknowledge that.
If you want to save life on earth, your plan needs to save life on earth. If you aren’t solving for these expected extinction events on these timelines, what are you solving for?
To put that another way: if you save life on earth over the next 1000 years by collapsing human civilization, you haven’t saved life on earth. You’ve doomed it to a slow death unless lightning strikes twice and cephalopods figure out how to build rockets.
I don’t think we deserve this role, we’ve lucked into it. But now that we wield the capacity to get life off of this rock, stepping down from that role on moral grounds seems… immoral. We do this because it’s what our ecosystem demands of us, not because of anything special about us but because there is no other species that can do it. The ball is in our court regardless of whether we like it or deserve it.
> my friends adopt a “humans were a mistake” mindset over the past decade.
This is an edgy take that I see increasingly adopted by young people in cities.
Generally I try to recenter around "okay, if humans are a mistake, who would you like to kill first?" People find it easy to reason about the end of a species in the abstraction, not when it is their friends and family who either die or cannot have children because the world is in such shambles.
I’ve seen it fairly broad and wide, not just city kids but there is a concentration there.
It’s most apparent to me in the debates downstream of the “whole earth” movement. The eco movements of the previous few decades seemed to be fairly unified because tech wasn’t at a place where we could reasonably attempt to fix some of the problems humans had manifested.
Now that this tech is starting to shake out as viable, we are seeing a hard split in the eco movement.
One faction is advocating for humans to “just stop.”
The other is advocating for humans to try and solve the problems.
You see this in the de-extinction movement where eco-advocates are trying to bring back extinct keystone species that humans drove to extinction, in an attempt to restore the ecosystems we disrupted. You see serious eco-advocates shake out of the woodwork fighting the de-extinction movement on anti-human grounds.
To be fair, there are valid arguments against the de-extinction movement; but these aren’t the arguments I see most frequently.
You see the same arguments shake out for carbon capture, green energy, rocketry, colonizing other planets, etc.
I think the core of this split is that there were two currents of thought in the eco-movement that were so similar folks didn’t realize they disagreed until recently when “bringing extinct species back” became viable. One current of thought was that what humans did was bad. The other was that humans were bad.
I suspect the fact that we use various tools. But at the end of the day we need food, light and water.
Every other species today has had the same 4.2bn years.
In 4.2bn years, we’ve had one successful draw of a species with sufficient intelligence born into an environment with sufficient incentives to tackle this problem (that we know of).
Saying another 1 will happen in time to thwart the pending extinction event strikes me as an aggressive gamble, let alone 3.
What we need to consider is the level of complexity life will be able to sustain after our annihilation. How long did it take to get to humanity from the last time life was at that level of complexity? Much less than 4.2bn years, since we likely will not be reducing life to the level of one single living cell.
> Life has been here for 4Bn years and we have about 500m left until our carbon cycles grind to a halt and all life on earth starts it’s final, and ultimate, extinction event.
I’ll update the comment.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
As far as I understand, the habitable zone in our system is not stable. It’s shifting. Between 500m and 800m years from now it’ll have moved sufficiently where our carbon cycles start grinding to a halt.
If we had to go to the stars in the next 50 years, sure, current industry would be our best bet.
If we (or whatever is evolved) have 500 million years, why would not environmentalists be RIGHT that we need to focus on sustainability first, and improve the odds of society not getting a huge setback?
This means that the practical end of the Earth, as far as humans are concerned, is on track not for a few billion years from now when the Sun expands—the commonly imagined end of "Earth gets charred/absorbed by the Sun"—but a few hundred million years from now. Maybe sooner for a variety of reasons, but that's likely to be the final lights-out—the upper bound—for everything but some microbes and a few lobsters around deep-sea vents or whatever. Barring some serious intervention by intelligent, technologically-advanced life, anyway.
C4 carbon fixation would already last a lot longer than C3 carbon fixation. Probably some other sources of carbon that can be found.
But at this point we've passed the point of no return; probably years ago, with permafrost, ice caps and glaciers melting and all the effects that has. I don't think any CO2 measures now will help anymore.