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We had experienced serious reductions in carbon utilization in the 2008 recession and COVID restrictions and there wasn't any kind of pull back signal from the temperature record that I can make out. Real global "experiments" that do not back up these extreme positions.

If you really want to make changes it seems to me that the best place to put effort would be pro nuclear rather than cutting industry to the ground. Serious investment in thorium seems a good place to start.

How will we make, cement, steel, plastic and fertilizer?

If we do what you are suggesting, half the world population will starve to death.

I literally address making plastic / oil derivatives in the last line of my comment.

Given enough energy, and raw feedstock matter, we can make anything we need. Nuclear power gets us all the energy we need. Matter can simply be recycled in closed loops. The nitrogen for fertilizer we currently get from fossil fuels currently ends up in our sewage, and from there to places it shouldn't be like the ocean, causing huge problems like algae blooms. Recycle that, and you've solved another problem!

It's all about closing the loops.

Congratulations, we can build your solution in 25 years. Maybe. If there's still enough water to run any of it. And food. But there won't be.

We really do not need much concrete or steel. What we need is bioplastics, biocomposites, wood, fused sand and a lot of farming practice changes. Some breakthrough in water desalination or cleanup. A lot of people will have to move.

There's no way around it now.

And if we do nothing there's a significant and rising chance that more than 99% of the world population will starve to death.

I'm not saying that you're advocating doing nothing, nor am I supporting totalitarian/fascism. Just that at some point there will be decisions forced upon people; to choose who will live.

Maybe that's part of the general apathy? Do people subconsciously think that they'll be saved and those "others" will be sacrificed?

That's the problem I have, there's a chance if we do nothing there may be a bad outcome. However there is absolute certainty that poor people will starve to death if we "just stop oil". Infact if we attempted to do this now, civilisation as we know it would collapse, as we rely on fertilizer, cement, plastics and steel. We have no way replacing oil right now.

Have you not seen the "wet bulb" temperatures in the US? People are already dying from Climate change. If we "just stop oil" I don't know that I believe there's a guarantee people will starve to death. There are reserves of oil, and I think the biggest issue is that there are a number of businesses that just need to stop relying on it.

If you would prefer, an alternative is that the (US) Gov't could 1. take over the oil companies 2. Raise the price of oil 3. Force the "Free market" that everyone's so proud of to start dealing with Oil as if there is actual scarcity for it.

If they did that tomorrow, I suspect they could stop a number of the worst polluters (businesses), and make everyone actually start working for the goal of "zero emissions".

People would hate this, and people would complain about the gov't overstepping, but the oil companies aren't going to start doing this out of the goodness of their hearts as long as they're making money hand-over-fist like they are.

Fertilizer is nitrate, sulfur and potassium, not oil. Cement and plastics have solid enough replacements out there, need to be deployed finally. Steel is harder but there are composites, biotech and carbon options.

The only problem is trucks, diesel trains, tractors and some ships. Ships could just go the old slow way. Diesel trains have electric replacements, trucks and tractors are hard though mostly due to sheer numbers. Then we have airplanes, big ones have no replacement but we can live without them. The pharmaceuticals we can make from biomaterials, no serious mining. Industrial heat might be a problem for a hot moment but there are some possibilities.

Water however is the key issue we will face and cannot really go around.

As far as I know we have no way to produce fertilizer at scale other than the haber-bosch process, and this requires fossil fuels.

I'd be happy to be wrong about this!

The haber process requires only nitrogen, hydrogen, and a metal catalyst.

Now we care about poor people, when we knew all this would happen almost 50 years ago? The time to save people was somewhere around 1975. Now we're out of alternatives.

I can't help but agree with your last statement.

The rich don't care. They expect to be buffered by their ill-gotten gains.

They may be right.

As opposed to right now, when the increased heat from climate change isn't killing anyone. Nope, we're all totally fine.

Yeah, even Habeck, the Green Party guy who became Germany's Economic Minister, realised when Putin started the war, that the "simple, just go without Russian the gas" would've been catastrophic, their industry and economy depended so much on that gas, that mass unemployment would've destabilised the country, and maybe continent. Luckily he wasn't a dumb extremist, and despite his party affiliation he was working on solutions to keep the gas flowing.

Where's your alternative, then?

> I'm worried people might die. The only solution is to kill lots of people.

You know that, when productivity goes down, people that can barely survive already will die. Right?

Another problem is the sun is significantly brighter now than it was during the Paleozoic era.

If this isn't straight BS (I don't know if it is because I don't see a source for it). It's dangerous "what-about-ism" Where it looks like you're trying to say that the problem isn't climate change, but that our sun has changed. As if we didn't live for thousands of years with the current sun setup.

(I feel confident in saying that nothing major has changed about the sun in the last 2000 years because that's not the time scale these things happen on).

I was referring to multi million years so comparisons to the last times we were above 420 PPM the sun wasn't as hot. I'm saying the two are combining is a truly horrifying way. The sun gets about 10% brighter and hotter every billion years, so slight but relentless. https://theconversation.com/the-sun-wont-die-for-5-billion-y...

Yeah, I stand by my original statement. This was not a meaningful 'add' to the conversation.

The sun has been the same brightness for human history. It doesn't make it more difficult than the problem we had 50 years ago.

Well that is one imaginary perspective. In six years the world will still be turning and your side will yell the end will come in another 5 years.

Please do not hide your tactics and by all means keep up the batshitcrazy loudness of your plans. The more you yell and scream and introduce more radical planning -- the more the average person will grow tired of them and end up shutting you all out.

Ideologies aside we agree on nuclear energy.

This sounds like North Korean authoritarianism. Even the CCP would back away from this.

Edit: responding to comment below about CFCs - Equating CFCs with all fossil fuels is an error of few orders of magnitude in scale.

Edit: Those complaining I can't use reply button, it's because of throttling.

Which part don't you agree with? Please be specific. I was careful to spell out every link in the chain.

If you agree with the premise and logic, but simply dislike the conclusion, I really don't know what to tell you.

Seems like you want to shutdown vast parts of society for climate goals with a top down control. That would lead to deaths of millions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

There is nothing specific to provide you with because you haven’t presented any specific points in the first place. You want to shutdown energy production from fossil fuels. That would be extremely immoral if you think about the consequences.

Edit: Responding to the comment below, you're told lies: https://www.humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-relate...

Edit: Responding to dTal below - You can't just shut down fossil fuels without killing millions, not to mention complete loss of freedom, our country and everything it stands for. We both have same goals to get rid of fossil fuels, but I disagree with "plenty of alternatives exist". The only alternative we have is nuclear power. That's not looking good. The same environmentalists that want to solve climate change are also against nuclear power, and against any solution to climate change. They want you to not have kids – that's the quiet part. They're also hypocrites. There is no objectivity to how much decarbonization is acceptable, the end goal is to eliminate you. It's a cult.

I don't want to shut down any part of society. I want to cut off the supply of fossil fuels. Plenty of alternatives exist, and I suspect that people would avail themselves of them, rather than regress to a pre-industrial state. We can't burn fossil fuels forever anyway, so we might as well start phasing them out before we kill everything else on the planet.

[edit: I'd like to respond to your response, but you didn't post it as a separate comment. I'm not polluting this one. Use the reply button like everyone else.]

> you're told lies: https://www.humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-relate...

I'll assume the figures in that article are true, but it's missing the point: people aren't talking about current deaths, but about future deaths. Climate change has the potential to globally upset weather patterns in such a way that compensating will be hard, and/or climate change will make entire areas unviable for habitation resulting in large migrations (which, historically, have been very disruptive). All of this is substantially different than "number of hurricane deaths of 1920 vs. 2021".

Furthermore, there are also examples where intervention did prevent famine, for example rationing during the second world war in some countries, and I'm sure there are more examples. But there are no dramatic "The famine of 1897 that didn't happen because of effective government measures" Wikipedia pages. You can "prove" anything by linking to some example where things spectacularly failed, but that doesn't really "prove" anything, certainly not for the generic case of all "government interventions".

And look, shutting off all fossil fuels from one day to the next would of course be sheer lunacy. But no one is really argueing for that, and what they are argueing for is replacing oil and other fossil fuels, ASAP.

Thanky you systemvoltage for introducing me to humanprogress.org. This graph on "climate related deaths" that manages to pool together deaths of the early 20th century with those of the early 21st, is pure propaganda genius. ...---... Early 20th century "climate deaths" will have been caused by the lack of basic heating and most importantly infrastructure, a problem that very much was solved by the massive usage of cheap oil energy deployed during the 20th century. The same category of "climate deaths" for the early 21st century, has more details on causes, and yeah, sure, disasters where cheap oil is not the solution, but the root cause. ...---... I grant you that many greens have no idea what a sustainable lifestyle looks like: at 2000 Watts for everyone, which optimistically could be a realistic goal, each human is living in maximum 15 square meters of housing. Also, with the CO2 threat being taken seriously, you can only fly in a plane four times maximum in your lifetime... ---... Those that are ready to learn about and accept this kind of constraints want humanity to survive, those that don't, implicitly don't. ...---... The sources for the 2000 Watts is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society ...---... The source for the 4 flights is Jean-Marc Jancovici, look him up.

Make no mistake. Climate change already kills millions a year, and we’ve barely begun

Out of curiosity: what do you think your country stands for?

I've long been a fan of a carbon tax on imported goods.

We fixed ozone depletion by the "North Korean authoritarian" ban on CFCs and some other things. It's not that outlandish.

If $thing you do affects only you: do whatever you want! Go nuts! If $thing you do affects a substantial number of other people: maybe we need to ensure this doesn't result in you imposing your $thing on the rest of us? These sort of things aren't simple: your freedom to play music at 4am interrupts my freedom to sleep at night.

Quite the opposite, by now this seems to be the only way not to fall into chaos -> authoritarianism.

It won't work either because the authoritarians will just steal whatever is left and get people to go to war. Sounds familiar? Check a century before, and it was not even close to the catastrophe now.

If that’s what is required, the focus should be on how we do this with minimal disruption. The fact that you don’t like the medicine doesn’t really matter.