The idea that we can only mitigate is insane. Yes we've already signed up for a lot of pain as a civilization, but as long we keep burning fossil fuels we are looking at an increasingly worse future.
It's not like a smoker who has gotten lung cancer, where the best we can do is try to ease the pain, and more smoking won't really matter.
The biggest first step in preventing the worse case is to be able to point to an established oil field and say "that will never be extracted, and will remain in the earth for at least a 1000 years."
Every ton of carbon we can keep in the ground that way, the better of our future, even if that future is already slated to be bad.
Personally, I feel that the solution is to gradually raise the tax rate on fossil fuels in order to disincentives their use and incentivize the production of alternatives. We've done this for cigarettes and it has worked. However, you will probably have the vaping equivalent of petrol that will come out and gain more marketshare.
The second solution is to make energy so cheap and abundant that petrol becomes unattractive.
To massively and suddenly restrict petrol use is a great way to start riots and ensure that your government will either be overthrown or has to descend into tyranny.
I believe that's electric SUVs and solar roofs on single family homes :D
A shock-therapy style stop to fossil fuel extraction will kill millions of people through starvation, economic collapse and insufficient heating in winter. Depending how shocking the shock therapy is it could be billions.
But this has always been the problem with stopping climate change.
We are choosing between lesser, but certain immediate pain vs larger but less certain future pain.
In the 1880s we could have easily stopped climate changed, but been forced to slow growth. The pain would have been minimal for those living, but the probability of extreme catastrophe seemed remote so nothing was done.
As we move forward the probability of extreme catastrophe becomes more certain, but so too does the immediately pain.
I'm curious how you think that the damage of climate change can be worse than this.
Oh, much worse.
First off we, fertilizer or no, we're already facing crop failures in the US [0] and will continue to face even more extreme crop failures [1]. Even if we had unlimited fertilizer we've already signed up for massive famine.
But if you really want to talk about the unmitigated climate change path, which is what happens if we choose not to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, I really recommend reading Peter Ward's Under a Green Sky [2].
He's a respected geologist that makes a compelling case that the vast majority of mass extinction events were caused by rapid rises in CO2.
One of the realistic scenarios we're facing, he argues, is the break down of the AMOC ultimately leading to the oceans becoming anoxic and releasing hydrogen sulfide rather than oxygen. The entire marine ecosystem is essentially wiped out except for some cyanobacteria. The oceans are the foundation of all of our food systems. It would make the planet uninhabitable my most complex life of today. This has happened before in Earth's climate history.
All of the "bad-awful" but not-extinction event scenarios assume that we do not burn all of the fossil fuel reserves currently leased. We are already looking at a grim future, but given that we're rapidly pumping millions of years of stored CO2 into the atmosphere, upper bounds for the damage we can do are tremendous.
0. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/us/kansas-wheat-harvest-d... 1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/4/scientists-warn-of-c... 2. https://www.amazon.com/Under-Green-Sky-Warming-Extinctions/d...
First off, I'm not saying "starting tomorrow now fossil fuels!", I'm saying you must keep fossil fuels in the ground to avoid worst case. And the start of that means you have to identify some fossil fuels that will never be extracted.
> since we have ample time to do so.
I seriously have no idea where you got that impression, but with climate change once you start feeling the effects you're already in the danger zone. We've already signed up for famine and potentially billions dead even if we had zero emissions today.
I do suggest you read up a bit more on the topic. No serious research around climate change would claim we have "ample time".
The bigger question is: how close are we to climate "tipping points". We do know that geologically it seems there are points where positive feedbacks start accelerating climate change rapidly. We just don't know where the line is for those tipping points.
If we seriously want to avoid extinction of the species we should already be starting to strategize a schedule of what fossil fuels reserves we promise to keep in the ground, and what we're going to do about future discoveries.
To be honest, I don't really think we will do this, but if we wanted to survive at all we should start talking about it very seriously.
And yes, you can build pretty tall structures out of CLT, but there's still smaller than what you can build with steel and concrete. The tallest one built that I know of is 25 stories. But at least 6 or so of those floors are all concrete+steel, and it still uses concrete+steel emergency stairwells.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/inside-fs/delivering-mission/apply/w...
But what is the foundation made from? What do you think the elevator shafts are made from? Its not like its 100% wood. I would like to see more CLT construction, and modern building codes are allowing taller and larger stick construction as well, but arguing that steel and concrete aren't necessary is ignoring all the rest of the things supporting that structure along with all the other things that still need steel and concrete. How did all the building materials arrive at the site? What harvested the wood? What were the machines making the CLT made out of? What are the fireproof stairwells usually made out of? Steel and concrete.
We'll probably see more and more construction which looks like this, where some CLT offsets some concrete and steel, but chances are the whole building isn't entirely wood:
https://www.fs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/styles/fs_wysiwy...
Using modern materials and building codes can let us reduce our usage of things like steel and concrete for more buildings, but its not going to fully eliminate their usage in our world.
https://www.geoengineer.org/education/ground-improvement/lim...
As for the rest, I was referring to buildings. I don't think anything is so worthy of being built that wrecking the environment is a fair trade. Railways are an honourable exception, since they displace (far more wasteful) cars. Light rail is especially good for this.
The fact is that we need to question what we build, as well as the materials used to build it.