Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.
The solution is not easy. But it is known.
The solution is not easy. But it is known.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
It is not the solution because it simply just ignores the problem: coordination. It’s like saying the solution to cancer is to kill cancer cells without affecting the functioning of the body. Well, that’s the hard part.
I expect that countries that invest heavily in solar or nuclear like China will have a huge advantage in 20 years, when energy availability enables industries like steel production, datacenters, ammonia production, transportation, and water desalinization to essentially become cheaper and cheaper as more and more solar gets built.
I should have started going to the gym before, I'd be healthier today. I guess I'll just never go to the gym. I should have been eating heather food before I got diabetes and high blood pressure. I guess I'll just keep having a terrible diet. Same kind of logic.
But we'd then have to move on to other things like deforestation, overfishing, water conflicts, plastics, etc. It's not a panacea, but it would reverse course on a pretty significant root cause.
If the US, Europe, Russia, India, and China stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be well on our way. I'm not really worried about whether Ecuador is burning fossil fuels right now, it cannot be a meaningful amount of output compared to those 5.