The climate change chart February 18, 2020 cliffski This is the only chart you need to know. Its the chart that should scare everyone into actually doing something
Apparently, terrifying people is not always a good strategy to motivate them into action. The chart makes it seem so hopeless that people might say “fsck it all, we’re doomed anyway” and go on driving their SUV to the airport to catch their twice-a-year ultracheap holiday deal. I’m not one of those people, but in general it’s good to be aware that not everyone can be motivated into action in the same way.
If the West was still capable of doing big projects (or anything at all really), we’d simply invent our way out of it, just like we did with previous energy sources like wood, coal, oil, nuclear fission. If we had the smarts to invent the next source of energy like fusion, we could build gigantic machines to pull the carbon from the sky. But alas we appear to be in decline. Our CPUs are full of security holes, they are incomprehensible to the people that build them, and our software is an ever growing garbage pile of layers, bugs, and slowness. The USA kid us they are going to Mars, yet we haven’t left low Earth orbit in 50 years. They can’t put people in orbit any more without Russian help, and they still have no answers to the serious medical problems associated with living in low gravity. I look at old TV shows from the 1960s and and think those people were more advanced than we are. Their cities were we kept and modern, while ours look tatty and run down. If you want to fix climate change. ask the 1960s, because the 2020s can’t think to do anything else but create new taxes.
There was an interesting ‘The Life Scientific’ on this last night. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000fgcn Surprisingly optimistic – Professor Myles Allen, one of the group who discovered/popularised the ‘net zero’ target, was very bullish about our ability to meet the target if we decide that we actually want to do it. That’s all that’s needed. Net zero is because it’s the absolute amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that counts, not how quickly/slowly we are adding it. There is no ‘sustainable’ level of CO2 release, because it doesn’t ‘naturally’ go anywhere.
Also he wanted the oil companies to sort it out, not individuals. His comparison was the nuclear industry – we expect them to deal with their toxic waste, so why should the fossil fuel companies not also do it? Pretty economically sound as far as I can see, and hardly radical, as it’s just pricing in a currently uncosted negative externality.