The things we need to get serious about are the easy to do thing (compared the sci-fi coded versions of geoengineering) we already know how to do, but are dragging our feet on: electrification, renewables, better insolation, more public transit, reducing red meat consumption.
I don't want to discourage public transit, I am just less hopeful in changing the entire culture of some countries which are car centric
Fixing public transportation in many cities is unbelievable low hanging fruit.
I live in Zürich and I’ve yet visited another city with the same level of public transport(Stockholm, maybe). And I travel 300+ days a year for work. London has pretty solid public transport, just need to improve its bus game.
I understand what you are saying. But it was the car lobbies who changed the culture.
A box on wheels is a box on wheels; fueled by hydrogen or rolling coal really should make little to difference to car manufacturers.
Following the 1970s UN acknowledgements of CO2 increases and projected issues it was really the fossil fuel funded lobbies that changed the culture, aggressively promoting bigger and bigger cars, more highways, and actively working against cities, counties and states that started looking into better public transport.
eg: (2018) How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...
Americans for Prosperity (founded 2004) is just one of the many Koch affiliated advocacy groups / think-tanks of the past fifty years created to increase consumption (of Koch products) and decrease regulation (of Koch interests)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Prosperity
Being in the trans national energy and resource extraction game also meant that their fingers got into the workings of a number of countries, not just Canada and the USofA alone.
Global warming is geoengineering. And any geoengineering out of it will need to eclipse the current geoengineering in size, energy and effort.
Sure. If one path leads to certain doom and the other into the unknown, which one do you choose?
And intentionally left out of conversations like this by people addicted to simplistic thinking and binary fallacies
They haven’t been implemented because vested interests have billions of dollars to keep those changes from happening, and the public has not put their ballots behind it, leading to very unserious short term thinkers in positions of power. Change that, and we could easily afford to do this, we have the money and lack the willpower.
I think it's clear that nothing will be done - and initiatives that end at a national level are meaningless from a climate perspective.
You should definitely still try to get your locality to do them, because they increase your quality of life by reducing local pollution... It climate change relevant? No.
15-20 years ago I would've said we need a more global approach to this, actual binding agreements - enforced globally through a body that has the ability to force the nations to actually adhere to them.
But now, in the last 5-10 years I've most certainly lost any kind of hope that such a initiate would not end being leveraged by someone like trump to sabotage others.
Honestly, I currently consider any climate change oriented political decisions to be irrelevant at best. It's gonna happen, so if you do something - do it for your local environment. If you try to signal with global warming I am forced to see you as at best a hopelessly naive person, as I was 30 years ago