“Extreme steps”, whether they admit it or not, is a reduction in the standard of living of many and handicapping the efforts to improve the standard of living for most. That requires the power of the individual to be reduced to empower central authorities who will manage our new rationed, austere society.<p>That is, certainly, a recipe for catastrophic war.<p>If climate change is the existential crisis some insist it is, our only solution is technological. But those who wish to use climate change as a Trojan horse to enact their social whims will reject any discussion of the sort. Because solving climate change isn’t their goal, it’s the means to attain their goal.
Maybe we could finally stop subsidizing cows / dairy industry.<p>Cows use 3/4 of our agriculture land, same amount of land as all current forests. Beef / dairy is also a leading defforestation driver. And for cheese/milk there is a lot of plant-based alternatives.<p>If we could afforest this land again, we would not only stop Anthropocene extinction, but we would also remove a good amount of CO2 from the atmosphere (maybe several decades worth).<p>Then, why stop there and not afforest steppe countries (Mongolia, Kazahstan, Sahel ...) and pay their indigenous populations not to devastate it with their herds of camels/horses/sheep ? We could easily cover large swaths of land with new forests. We could even reforest our deserts, it seems very easily and cheaply (few percents of world's gdp).<p>Why look at Mars, when we could start some serious geoingeneering here at Earth, with few seeds and some inovative methods (like Miyawaki, syntropic agriculture ...).<p>Indians in Amazon did this. They converted pretty arid land into rainforest (terra preta). Some speculate, that extinction of Indians in this region and follow-up grow of Amazonian rainforest after Spaniards came and killed them with viruses caused little ice age in 16th century.<p>Why not repeat it (plant new rainforests and new forests) and solve few problems with in one go. You know, we don't have only CO2 problem. Our children, or children of our children, will know tigers, giraffes and rhinos only from picture books, right after dinosaurs and mammoths (which we also ate to extinction, btw).<p>We don't need bilionaires to do this. No technological solution will appear in a reasonable timeframe. We need public to take their heads out of their a$$3$ and demand political changes.<p>Of course, this problem is very complex and needs to be attacked from multiple dimensions. But some solutions are easier than others, and people are ignorant (this post won't even reach front page), our leaders are only interested in their pockets and status quo (and so they lie and then do nothing). I'm hopeless and depressed.<p>(english is not my first language, sorry)
It seems fairly obvious that we do not have the collective will to make the kind of changes necessary to meaningfully change the trajectory of climate change. Might as well spend our efforts planning on how we will live with it, as it happens. I doubt we will have any more success in the future finding the will to try geoengineering, either. We will just find millions of little ways to mitigate the pain.
Growth. Every government on Earth is based around growth. To question growth is taboo, in the religious sense of the word. In most modern societies, in fact, it is more acceptable to question religion than it is to question growth.<p>Growth is the goal of every central bank, every parliament, every authoritarian, every economic or political entity with any legitimacy.<p>And this religious belief in growth is looking like it is going to kill us.
Climate disaster coverage makes me think about how, as much as I love to think that our species will be 8B+ strong for millenia and eventually make it to the stars, that would mean that I am born among the first few percent of humanity.<p>It seems more likely that my random sample is from somewhere in the middle, and if an ~equal number of humans will be born after me as before, then at our population growth/levels, we don't have much time left until extinction or a population collapse from which we never recover.<p>I don't know that there's anything helpful in this thought, though - can I increase my odds of being born in the earliest percentile of the species by my actions?
...how about focusing instead on how to <i>live through this climate "disaster"</i>?!<p>Let's be honest about it, most developed countries are making geo-strategic decisions in the context of +7 C in <= 100 years... we're <i>just not being f honest about it!</i> (Avoiding it is off the table, just as well as "zero covid" was off the table since month three of the f pandemic and we should've just accepted that it's gonna become endemic and most measures are waste of resources.)<p>Let's accept that "massive" climate change <i>will happen</i>, and that our goal is <i>how to slow things down and how to avoid it being an actual disaster for HUMANITY!</i><p>(It <i>will</i> be a disaster for many other species that we'll go extinct as we'll probably <i>massively increase</i> use of herbicides and fertilizers and GMOs in order to satisfy humanity's material needs against a backdrop of populations displacements and fertile lands distribution shifts. But <i>it doesn't have to be a disaster for humanity</i>... ugly as it may be, it's a live-and-let-die universe and irreversible biodiversity loss will happen, but humans are quite capable of not only maintaining but also <i>accelerating</i>, as it's our duty to, technological and scientific progress, as long as we don't stupidly turn against each-other! We have and entire universe to infect and conquer ffs, let's just not kill each other in the next century!)
How many GW of coal plants are being built brand new in Asia right now? It's very high. These will operate for decades.<p>What are we to do? Tell them to stop? Tried that unsuccessfully. I would ignore us if I were them. USA and Europe still emits tons of CO2. Has been emitting worse then them for many many decades. This carbon emitting elevated much of the wealth of the country. We are basically telling them to not become wealthy like us. They wonder why we haven't done much to reduce emissions.<p>We were too late, it's happening now. What do we need to do. Ignore carbon taxes that do nothing.<p>Instead, build renewables, build batteries, build solar panels. The remaining amount of fossil fuels is a hard limit. Staying on them is idiotic to say the least.<p>It's not just transportation and centralized energy production. Plastics, lubricants, wax, sulphur, ashphalt are other products of oil. What are the non-petroleum options?<p>We also need non-carbon emitting things like concrete.<p>Why do we just go to it? No regulations, no taxes, maybe even funding for any corporations who work on doing these things?<p>Wait nobody is doing this? The government is restricting and slowing this effort?<p>Actions speak louder than words, why are the world's nations saying they'll do something while their actions say they have no intention to do anything?<p>Is there an unspoken denial of climate change by the world?
It does feel, unfortunately, that in the question of "Now or never?", that as a species we've decided on "never". Or at least "Not until something acute and surprising happens to a western country."
CaspianReport has a good video on why it's hard to make the transition to renewables. Renewables are already being built at an exponential rate, but we're starting from a low starting point. Since we can't get off of coal and oil and go straight to renewables, we're moving to LNG as the transition fuel. LNG, though, is very expensive.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUTCPYwHguA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUTCPYwHguA</a>
I've listened to a podcast recently [0] that describes climate change as a definite problem, but not the civilization killer it is described as.<p>Frankly, I don't know enough about this to evaluate the problem critically. Some of the points that were made, that I thought were interesting:<p>- climate kills very few people currently.<p>- way more people die in "cold waves" than "heat waves".<p>- we spend way more money on heating now, rather than cooling. This will have to change obviously.<p>- hotter climate will encourage food production.<p>- a economic analysis (need to find the reference) was done projecting climate change impact and apparently, it's minuscule. On the order of 5% by 2100. Global wealth is projected to increase by over 300% during this time.<p>- so called "developing nations" have no money to move to alternative energy sources.<p>Some things that were not addressed, that I'm specifically curious about, living in a coastal area, is sea level rise.<p>I must admit that part of the reason I found this podcast so compelling is that the interview implies that while it's a real problem that has to be addressed, it's not, like I said a civilization killer.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQSvR1jw3ME" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQSvR1jw3ME</a>
Did you know the UN also warned in 2005 that man-made global warming would so decimate coastal areas as well as the Caribbean and Pacific islands that there would be upwards of 50 million “climate refugees by 2010.”<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/oct/12/naturaldisasters.climatechange1" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/oct/12/naturald...</a>
Moving people away from disaster zones and making infrastructure more resilient would be far more realistic, not to mention cheaper, than reducing emissions or pulling CO2 from the atmosphere.<p>It's too late to stop using fossil fuels. It's a forbidden fruit that has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty and the third world countries want first world lifestyles. We are better off trying to mitigate.
Waiting until there are consequences (in general) instead of merely the prediction of consequences (reactive instead of proactive) has two effects:
1) Delaying costs and potentially setting off consequences that cannot be avoided.
2) Not being taken in by those who use scare tactics to control you based upon consequences that might not happen.<p>Is this a matter of deferred gratification and societal-level self control, or of epistemology and institutional trust?
IMHO, those who spent the last several decades opposing nuclear power have as much blood on their hands as those who denied climate change was happening at all.<p>History will not be kind to either.
And here it is: 'wealthy nations will need to contribute financial aid to low-income countries, to address inequities in vulnerability to climate change and to accelerate the clean-energy transition in a way that benefits all'<p>In other words, TPTB employing as a facade the big global institutions under their control to sprinkle some fake respectability on their plan to enforce drastically reduced living standards on the middle classes, as part of their simulacrum of global communism that will enable the ultra-rich to maintain their hegemony in perpetuity, whilst reducing all others to cattle in their technocratic global slave system. Quelle suprise
We get at least a couple of these reports in the news every month. I can’t help but believe it’s to create fear. The general public by and large cannot solve this crisis - it’s down to politicians to regulate and innovators to create and push new solutions and alternatives.
They had the same kind of messages reguariding famines and over-population back in the 1970s, we’ve been mostly fine, with the last (non-war induced) famine happening in 1990s Ethiopia (if I’m not mistaken).<p>But of course that these type of institutions have learned that focusing on the good things in life doesn’t attract any funds, so here we are.
I have been worried about climate change my entire life. I doom scroll news stories that show the coming disaster.<p>Recently, I stumbled onto this video [1] and have trouble refuting the data and claims.<p>Any experts that can explain what am I missing and why is this guy wrong?<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/8455KEDitpU" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/8455KEDitpU</a>