Adaptation will come first pretty soon, then decarbonization and geoengineering - solving the now will beat solving the future in political priorities. Doesn't mean things are not done simultaneously but emphasis will likely shift.
I feel like they’ve lost my trust in the climate movement. I sincerely believe that it’s a small kernel of truth surrounded by lies and degrowth ideology. I want to live in a clean, beautiful planet; and share many things with climate activists. However, I can’t get behind the insane push for green washing, ESG, climate alarmicism, JustStopOil loonies, etc. This is not science, it’s ideological activism of the worst kind: to regress as a human species. The same group of people that keep drumming climate change have other opinions that are predictable: depopulation, degrowth, reducing quality of life, social justice fundamentalism (Tim Urban’e term), etc all stemming from one political axis point located at the top-left corner. I wouldn’t be so against it if it didn’t have an authoritarian aspect to it. Soon you’ll have California mandated carbon budget. Fuck that.
Well if there were any contrasting ideological factions that accepted the reality of climate change, we might have a diversity of viewpoints and solutions. As it stands only the "extremes" have been truly taking it seriously.
I'm sorry they haven't been able to wrap the kernel in something more palatable to you. If you want the "movement" to be different then be a part of it.
>all stemming from one political axis point located at the top-left corner
I'll say the quiet part out loud: you're worried about the authoritarian left - or, as the libertarian left calls them, tankies.
Green washing and ESG aren't an authleft project. They were invented by corporate interests looking to avoid brand damage, so at best we could say it's a right-libertarian project.
Insamuch as people apply social justice frameworks to environmental causes, it is to say that global warming is going to kill underprivileged people first and faster than wealthy people. Depopulation (aka "overpopulation") was the authright framing of environmentalism: we have too many mouths to feed and we need to stop making more, and conveniently for us it just so happens to be some other people's fault. These viewpoints are irreconcilable; in fact, I would argue the social justice environmental view is specifically a response to the authright trying to rehabituate themselves as environmental crusaders rather than industrial murderers.
I object to calling JustStopOil loonies for the same reason why I don't call BuzzFeed loonies for pioneering clickbait. Smearing black paint on art is their tactic, not their goal.
As far as I can tell there isn't really a libertarian (left or right) answer to global warming. Greenwashing and ESG won't actually fix the problem, because the problem is a public choice problem. Western standards of living are built on infrastructure that only loves oil and rejects all else. Everyone else wants western standards of living and is copying the same infrastructure to get it.
> Green washing and ESG aren't an authleft project. They were invented by corporate interests looking to avoid brand damage, so at best we could say it's a right-libertarian project.
This is naive I think. The same crowd goes to Davos every year. It’s far deeper and insidious than “we don’t want to pay for lawyer/lawsuits”.
The real quiet part is this: they want their genetic lineage to have better resources than others. Usually, group dynamics (tribe) provides a better overall outcome for their kids. The fracturing of unity has led to a bunch of elite clans to seize Gov power through proxy of social justice, climate change, etc.
One might argue further that the political compass is not topologically flat, and that at the extremes right-authoritarianism and right-libertarianism are the same ideology. After all, what's the difference between today's brutally authoritarian regimes and a large corporation that owns monopolies on everything? It's all abusable power.
I also object to discussing this in terms of "genetic lineage". Humans are mesaoptimizers, none of our intelligence gives a shit about what evolution gives a shit about. Social justice was something that the economic elites were able to appropriate, Rebel Sell style, because nothing about capitalism forbids irony. However, there is nothing left-wing at Davos. They have no intent on actually bringing social justice about when it contradicts the moral foundations of their ownership. So their support boils down to "black lesbian dollars are still green" and rainbow logos, and not "let's stop destroying the world and impoverishing people for profit".
>Everyone else wants western standards of living and is copying the same infrastructure to get it.
This is an excellent reason why we should focus on putting our own house in order, in spite of all those people who say "there's no point doing anything while China is burning coal".
The libertarian answer to global warming is law such that free markets are free of externalities. Carbon tax is a start to align incentives so that people don't get a freebie by ruining other peoples' air.
Just ban fossil fuel extraction. Then fossil fuels will become too expensive to burn. That is a much more "free market" solution than a byzantine system of taxes that will probably fail to adequately model all externalities.
You're hopelessly naive and haven't read even a few hours into the economic ramifications of 0 zero fossil fuels in the current global economy. Their products are embedded into everything and many simply don't have alternatives. Our best hope is to account for the fossil fuel externalities such that their use (probably at a significant reduction) accurately pays to remedy the consequences. There is no world you'd want to live in with 0 fossil fuels.
The main reason people apply social justice concepts to climate change is that a) the right defected from their initial agreement to fix the problem with carbon taxes and other market mechanisms, then b) spread a lot of propaganda about how addressing the problem was going to hurt the poor.
So anyone who wanted a democratic coalition to deal with climate change had to look to the left of the political spectrum for support and dispel the notion that it would make the poor poorer.
> The world has less than six years left to hit crucial global climate goals, according to the clock.
> Last year was even a record-high year for energy-related CO2 emissions.
> Energy infrastructure and structural change is not something that you do in a couple of months. It’s something that needs years,”
So we only have six years. CO2 production is rising. Key players are not on board. And even if everyone would be aligned politically, we will never manage to make technical changes on time!
It is like cars emission car regulation in EU. New cars are very energy efficient and have low emission. But too expensive so nobody buys them. Average vehicle age is 15 years (in Czechia) and it really stinks!
Perhaps we need better and more realistic plan, that would actually work!
I remember reading a horror book about rats in London after a nuclear war. One scene has stuck with me for 3 decades:
A woman sits in her house pretending to have a cup of tea. She's dying of radiation poisoning but goes through the motions of her pre apocalypse life rather than face what is happening. Bugs swarm through the dirty water in the tea mug, but she's denied reality so deeply that she doesn't see them.
It feels like industrial societies, especially governments and corporate leadership, are doing the same thing. Denying reality because the alternative is too big, too mind numbingly terrifying to accept.
I was walking my dog this morning, and had a flash of an imagined future. The grass was replaced by soil that was brown and cracked. Lush trees and foliage gone, only withered stumps remain. Houses were gone, just a few burnt beams left. No wildlife at all.
Maybe we should use all that AI power to generate a satellite and street view showing the potential future. Though I can't delude myself into thinking it would change anyone's mind.
In reply to myself I wanted to share a thought. This one is less bleak but probably less palatable too:
Governments should give their militaries a standing order: when society collapses, hunt down the billionaires hiding in their bunkers, ships, castles, wherever they may be hiding. Make it known that the richest 0.01% of the world has no chance to escape the doom of humanity.
Maybe that would make them try to prevent it happening. The 0.01% are the ones with power, and all they do with it is hoard it and seek more.
Terrifying thought, same as with aerosols as the predominant spread vector for SARS-CoV-2 being “invisible” I tended to think the “comprehension problem” probably is the invisibility of CO2.
But yeah maybe it wouldn’t even be enough to make it “visible” with AR glasses etc. to make the necessary global shifts…
Let’s quit the doomerism none the less though, this planet should still have just enough smart apes to make this work without taking everyone and everything else down with us..
How could we hack our ape minds to make this work? Maybe social dynamics could work? High status / high success in life = low carbon emissions? How to get there?
New game rule set? Taxes etc? Chicken / egg issue though.
Maybe I'm also just a doomer, but I have found it very difficult to participate in normal society my entire life because of this kind of double-minded insanity I have to take on in order for it to make any sense.
Most 'production' is not productive, it is a waste of our precious limited resources in a time when we know we are rapidly running out.
"Because the clock say so". Like in Pratchett's Small Gods, we shouldn't believe in the clock instead of the worrying trends that are unleashing in front of us. There was a lot of political and economic players putting that limit, but right now it looks pretty evident than we already might had crossed the safe limits, and by a long shot.
There is only one solution to the climate apocalypse, and it's not popular:
Fossil carbon extraction needs to be halted. Worldwide. Close the coal mines, shut down the oil rigs.
Everything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's very, very simple: at the beginning of the Paleozoic era, atmospheric carbon was 20x higher than today, a level that the current biosphere cannot survive in. Gradually, over the next few hundred million years, that carbon was sequestered into the ground. We are now digging it back up and burning it, thus returning it to the atmosphere, within a span of decades. You can talk about LED lightbulbs and carbon credits till the cows come home, but the only thing that can halt this is preventing people from burning carbon that came from the ground - and the only way to stop that is to ban its extraction.
"But what will we do for energy?" Lots of things. We have options. Personally I'm a fan of the magic green rocks that give energy forever.
"But how will we power things that need high energy density / make plastics / lubricate my e-bike chain etc" - Oil. We can make it from anything carbon based. It's not even hard. We just have to stop digging it up and burning it.
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 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.]
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
We’re not having kids precisely because humans aren’t going to stop until they’ve ruined this planet. It’s immoral (in our opinion) to bring children into a world that 100 years from now will be significantly spoiled.
I doubt that outside some island nations any population is ready to pay the price what it would truly mean to effectively lower emissions. Certainly for developing countries it is unacceptable. And the developed ones, will not go far enough. Or if they try it will be political and potentially economical suicide in short term.
PRC holds 50% of world’s EV share by now. 22% of new registered vehicles are EV vs 5% in US.
Clearly we are not even trying to compete. We keep on falling behind with our behind mindsets.
And yes, I’m an 80s fan as well but those times are nothing but the age old past by now. Nothing will bring them back, continued denial will just rob us of our future.
Let us take it as read that if you have children, you are morally obliged to work to ensure that the planet is habitable for them and future generations. But if you choose not to have children, do you have any moral obligation to ensure the planet can continue to support life after you have died?
I could foresee a future when more-or-less everyone agrees that something drastic would have to be done to save the planet, but an electorally-significant block simply say "don't care, dead soon, so long and thanks for all the fish".
Even if majority (60-80%) agree that something drastic has to be done, I have little faith that they will agree that same thing has to be done. People are always ready to trade others' things away, but never their own...
72 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/g20-countries-...
I'm sorry they haven't been able to wrap the kernel in something more palatable to you. If you want the "movement" to be different then be a part of it.
I'll say the quiet part out loud: you're worried about the authoritarian left - or, as the libertarian left calls them, tankies.
Green washing and ESG aren't an authleft project. They were invented by corporate interests looking to avoid brand damage, so at best we could say it's a right-libertarian project.
Insamuch as people apply social justice frameworks to environmental causes, it is to say that global warming is going to kill underprivileged people first and faster than wealthy people. Depopulation (aka "overpopulation") was the authright framing of environmentalism: we have too many mouths to feed and we need to stop making more, and conveniently for us it just so happens to be some other people's fault. These viewpoints are irreconcilable; in fact, I would argue the social justice environmental view is specifically a response to the authright trying to rehabituate themselves as environmental crusaders rather than industrial murderers.
I object to calling JustStopOil loonies for the same reason why I don't call BuzzFeed loonies for pioneering clickbait. Smearing black paint on art is their tactic, not their goal.
As far as I can tell there isn't really a libertarian (left or right) answer to global warming. Greenwashing and ESG won't actually fix the problem, because the problem is a public choice problem. Western standards of living are built on infrastructure that only loves oil and rejects all else. Everyone else wants western standards of living and is copying the same infrastructure to get it.
This is naive I think. The same crowd goes to Davos every year. It’s far deeper and insidious than “we don’t want to pay for lawyer/lawsuits”.
The real quiet part is this: they want their genetic lineage to have better resources than others. Usually, group dynamics (tribe) provides a better overall outcome for their kids. The fracturing of unity has led to a bunch of elite clans to seize Gov power through proxy of social justice, climate change, etc.
One might argue further that the political compass is not topologically flat, and that at the extremes right-authoritarianism and right-libertarianism are the same ideology. After all, what's the difference between today's brutally authoritarian regimes and a large corporation that owns monopolies on everything? It's all abusable power.
I also object to discussing this in terms of "genetic lineage". Humans are mesaoptimizers, none of our intelligence gives a shit about what evolution gives a shit about. Social justice was something that the economic elites were able to appropriate, Rebel Sell style, because nothing about capitalism forbids irony. However, there is nothing left-wing at Davos. They have no intent on actually bringing social justice about when it contradicts the moral foundations of their ownership. So their support boils down to "black lesbian dollars are still green" and rainbow logos, and not "let's stop destroying the world and impoverishing people for profit".
This is an excellent reason why we should focus on putting our own house in order, in spite of all those people who say "there's no point doing anything while China is burning coal".
So anyone who wanted a democratic coalition to deal with climate change had to look to the left of the political spectrum for support and dispel the notion that it would make the poor poorer.
> Last year was even a record-high year for energy-related CO2 emissions.
> Energy infrastructure and structural change is not something that you do in a couple of months. It’s something that needs years,”
So we only have six years. CO2 production is rising. Key players are not on board. And even if everyone would be aligned politically, we will never manage to make technical changes on time!
It is like cars emission car regulation in EU. New cars are very energy efficient and have low emission. But too expensive so nobody buys them. Average vehicle age is 15 years (in Czechia) and it really stinks!
Perhaps we need better and more realistic plan, that would actually work!
A woman sits in her house pretending to have a cup of tea. She's dying of radiation poisoning but goes through the motions of her pre apocalypse life rather than face what is happening. Bugs swarm through the dirty water in the tea mug, but she's denied reality so deeply that she doesn't see them.
It feels like industrial societies, especially governments and corporate leadership, are doing the same thing. Denying reality because the alternative is too big, too mind numbingly terrifying to accept.
I was walking my dog this morning, and had a flash of an imagined future. The grass was replaced by soil that was brown and cracked. Lush trees and foliage gone, only withered stumps remain. Houses were gone, just a few burnt beams left. No wildlife at all.
Maybe we should use all that AI power to generate a satellite and street view showing the potential future. Though I can't delude myself into thinking it would change anyone's mind.
To save you all the trouble: OK Doomer.
Governments should give their militaries a standing order: when society collapses, hunt down the billionaires hiding in their bunkers, ships, castles, wherever they may be hiding. Make it known that the richest 0.01% of the world has no chance to escape the doom of humanity.
Maybe that would make them try to prevent it happening. The 0.01% are the ones with power, and all they do with it is hoard it and seek more.
But yeah maybe it wouldn’t even be enough to make it “visible” with AR glasses etc. to make the necessary global shifts…
Let’s quit the doomerism none the less though, this planet should still have just enough smart apes to make this work without taking everyone and everything else down with us..
How could we hack our ape minds to make this work? Maybe social dynamics could work? High status / high success in life = low carbon emissions? How to get there?
New game rule set? Taxes etc? Chicken / egg issue though.
Most 'production' is not productive, it is a waste of our precious limited resources in a time when we know we are rapidly running out.
Fossil carbon extraction needs to be halted. Worldwide. Close the coal mines, shut down the oil rigs.
Everything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's very, very simple: at the beginning of the Paleozoic era, atmospheric carbon was 20x higher than today, a level that the current biosphere cannot survive in. Gradually, over the next few hundred million years, that carbon was sequestered into the ground. We are now digging it back up and burning it, thus returning it to the atmosphere, within a span of decades. You can talk about LED lightbulbs and carbon credits till the cows come home, but the only thing that can halt this is preventing people from burning carbon that came from the ground - and the only way to stop that is to ban its extraction.
"But what will we do for energy?" Lots of things. We have options. Personally I'm a fan of the magic green rocks that give energy forever.
"But how will we power things that need high energy density / make plastics / lubricate my e-bike chain etc" - Oil. We can make it from anything carbon based. It's not even hard. We just have to stop digging it up and burning it.
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.
If you agree with the premise and logic, but simply dislike the conclusion, I really don't know what to tell you.
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.
[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.]
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.
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.
If we do what you are suggesting, half the world population will starve to death.
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.
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.
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?
The rich don't care. They expect to be buffered by their ill-gotten gains.
They may be right.
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.
I'd be happy to be wrong about this!
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.
(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).
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.
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.
You know that, when productivity goes down, people that can barely survive already will die. Right?
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.
Clearly we are not even trying to compete. We keep on falling behind with our behind mindsets.
And yes, I’m an 80s fan as well but those times are nothing but the age old past by now. Nothing will bring them back, continued denial will just rob us of our future.
Let us take it as read that if you have children, you are morally obliged to work to ensure that the planet is habitable for them and future generations. But if you choose not to have children, do you have any moral obligation to ensure the planet can continue to support life after you have died?
I could foresee a future when more-or-less everyone agrees that something drastic would have to be done to save the planet, but an electorally-significant block simply say "don't care, dead soon, so long and thanks for all the fish".