>I sure wish a tech billionaire would do something about this.
I sure wish VOTERS would "do something" about this, where "something" = vote for the party/parties that actually champion or at least acknowledge the importance of dealing with AGW/CO2 increasing vs actively denying and supporting continuing the current anti-free market policies destroying so much future beauty and potential. This should have been so straightforward, we want net neutral CO2 ASAP and then net negative as soon as feasible, so all that's needed is to legislate that emitting a ton of CO2 (or equivalent) is priced at the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin. We could just make all our energy usage net neutral in a matter of months/years by finally establishing a Free Market there and then let humanity sort out the best way to reduce the cost of that. But instead it's a mixture of full denial or, even more frustrating, so-called "greens" bitching about other people's luxury energy usage and engaging in worthless moralizing bullshit about $Cause_Of_The_Day (like Ebil Big Tech) rather then just working to deal with the problem as efficiently as possible and focusing moral arguments purely on the harm of AGW.
>Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech.
I'd say the inaction on countless fronts of people like you who just shove all responsibility off onto nameless godkings rather then actually internalize that democracy means we're responsible as well has been a far bigger threat. Tech has been relatively green, and far more active at green efforts then most industries. It's ludicrous to see you pinning so much on "tech billionaires" vs, say, oil/coal billionaires.
The voters won't be willing to make the sacrifices necessary to solve the problem, once they realize how much it would impact them. They won't be willing to dramatically lower their quality of life to save some Pacific islanders who live thousands of miles away.
One of the biggest problems is that the damage caused by reducing emissions falls disproportionately on the poor voters in developed countries. Look at what caused the yellow jacket protests in France -- a hike in diesel taxes. People are already in a mood to protest economic inequality in a general sense, and fighting climate change will make that inequality worse. It's not going to fly in the current political climate, not even in the EU where people are generally more sympathetic to the climate problem than elsewhere.
The outcome of social unrest caused by unpopular climate policy will be the reversal of that policy. Therefore any attempt to solve climate change that leads to social unrest will be unproductive.
I'm increasingly convinced that geoengineering is the only way to ameliorate the effects of climate change.
I think this is a fair point, but are there perhaps compromises where quality of life doesn't have to go down? Solar panels on homes with government subsidies where fossil fuels are still heavily used for electricity. Investments (BIG ones) in public/metro transportation.
I agree with human psychology being a limiting factor here, but I think there are also ways we can work with it, by saying that life quality doesn't have to go down or can even improve, rather than the current all or nothing approach.
I don't see a way to halt, much less reverse, global climate change without making massive sacrifices to the quality of life people enjoy in developed countries.
We will pay the money it takes to protect our cities from floods and cool our buildings and deal with the other impacts, and people in poor countries will be left to deal with the problem on their own. That's not what should happen, but that's what will happen.
Eh, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but have you talked to some of the voters? Last pre-covid party I was to I had a conversation with a global warming "skeptic". In an attempt to understand better, I listened more than I talked and it is .. illuminating, scary, annoying and a whole lot of other emotions that are difficult to put into words here.
Point is, voting relies heavily on educated populace. I am not certain we have it now. Maybe we need to reconsider kings ( today's billionaires ) and hope they are not into torture..
When you have a bad president you're going to be put through four years of hell - when you have a bad king you're going to be put through four decades of hell. Additionally kingship, no matter how well designed before hand, degenerates into nepotism since part of the assumption with kings is near absolute power. The dreamt of "Philosopher King" will never happen.
Putting the power into few hands is extremely dangerous. I think the ideal situation is pretty close to what we've got now - trust most people to choose the smartest people in the room, then ignore most people and listen to those people. We just need to work on flushing out decades of corruption that seeped into the system.
Power corrupts even the best of the minds, and ultimate power corrupts... ultimately. Those kings would be in danger of ending up as another North Korea - evil dynasties ruling forever.
One big problem is, if you are on top, life can be relatively great even in utter catastrophe, at least when looked through optic of usual sociopath/psychopath that usually end up on top. It can actually help if your goals are perverted enough. No real motivation to fight for the environment.
On other hand, wishing for corruption to be magically removed 'because it would be great and we really need it now' is so naive its painful. We're steadily heading in opposite direction, there is regulatory capture, US foreign policies are run by war equipment manufacturers, and current president is a topic on its own.
To sum it up, we're fucked, our kids are fucked so much more - this hurts pretty badly. Enlightened AI might be solution, but I would expect it wouldn't be done neutral, and anyway that's a pipe dream currently.
I agree - we're in a terrible situation right now... So, how do we solve it and dig our way out of the hole?
I'm not suggesting that we can wish corruption away - I'm not even trying to imply that doing it will be easy. I just think it's the only way to return to sane governance. There are some ways we could increase voter representation like IRV & abolishing the electoral college. Increased representation makes it harder for crooks to stay in power, but even getting that through is a struggle (otherwise we would've done if when we realized it was better than what we have now).
And, in the meantime, we need to work with what we've got.
> We could just make all our energy usage net neutral in a matter of months/years by finally establishing a Free Market there and then let humanity sort out the best way to reduce the cost of that.
You really think that making business tens or hundreds of times more expensive to take part in will just solve the problem, rather than businesses going under and simply not being able to exist anymore? You don't think any other country will capitalize on this, emit all they want, and sell the products we can't make? You think we'll be able to tariff that enough that it makes up for it?
> the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin.
It's not like this is actually being done at scale yet. Do we really think gigantic fans and energy-intensive machinery for CO2 capture are going to work? Shouldn't that energy be being used to replace coal / gas / fossil fuel electricity production first and foremost, and battery (/battery-like technologies, like pumping water behind a dam and other potential-energy schemes) rather than burning the energy off?
Doesn't it make more sense to look at ways of improving the reefs, like making artificial reefs with geo-engineering projects, iron fertilization, etc? Don't plants do a better job of capturing carbon? Maybe we should embrace rapidly-growing invasive alpha species like Japanese Knotweed, Kudzu, etc. and just mow it on down and let it regrow? Shouldn't we spend more money on massive-scale tree planting, soil redistribution, and anti-desertification efforts that we actually know how to do at scale, rather than some pie-in-the-sky unproven carbon capture mechanisms that can somehow only be fueled by strangling everyone's productivity to an unreasonable extent?
Sure, but in many cases the politicians who are statistically able to win office are about as likely to do something meaningful (and not just symbolic) about these issues as the tech billionaires are.
can't reply to the sibling but they are not voting "they don't care", they just plain don't care. If you do care but can't pick among the bad choices, you go through the actions and spoil your ballot or where applicable write in your choice. This is a lot of work for nothing beyond showing you care.
Something I heard a long time ago is they basically 'are' voting. The vote is they do not care. I personally think it is a bad position to take, but it is not 'wrong'.
How many people aren't voting because they feel their vote doesn't count. I'm not a US citizen, but my wife is. She usually doesn't vote or only votes because I talk her into it. Her reasoning is that our state will be carried by a democrat anyways. It doesn't matter if they win by 51% or 100%. Between electoral college and first-past-the-post it's no wonder few people vote.
One thing I'd tell your wife is that down ticket races are very important, particularly state legislatures. I know my district will be carried by a dem, but that doesn't mean there aren't distinctions between which dem I want.
What makes you think those non-voters would vote in favor of policies to solve climate change? I bet each one of them would be just as likely to be a climate change skeptic as the Americans who currently vote.
Except it's not so black/white but much more nuanced and gray. Assuming and asserting otherwise is disingenuous and distancing an is part of how trump was elected in the first place.
Climate change and policy around it, due to its economic implications, is complex and hard to do without costing lots of middle class people their life styles.
I sympathize with what you're saying, because I also agree that voters should make informed choices, and never vote for any politician representing the status quo. Unfortunately, the US and rest of the world have to move through a process. Think of it like addiction: we are still in the denial stage. We haven't hit rock bottom yet, but unfortunately when we do, it will be too late. Most species will be extinct and we'll be starving.
That said, I have to disagree with you on where to place blame. The vast majority of us (6 billion at least) are just running the rat race to provide for our families. Let me be explicitly clear about this: a person's responsibility to change the world is at least proportional to the resources available to them.
I just looked, and each part per million of CO2 represents 7.82 gigaton of CO2. So if we conservatively say that the industrial revolution has taken us from 300 ppm to 400 ppm, then that extra 100 ppm represents 782 gigatons of CO2. There are talks of a global $50 carbon tax credit for each ton of CO2 sequestered. So that represents an externality cost on the environment and our health from existing CO2 levels of $39.1 trillion. That's twice the US GDP.
Now, there are pushes to get back to 350 ppm from groups like 350.org. So that would cost something like $20 trillion, roughly the US GDP, or our national debt. In fact, a real argument can be made that the $21 trillion in misplaced funding from the Pentagon audit, the US national debt and CO2 cost to our environment are all connected. We had that money, but the debt was created so that we couldn't put it towards goals like environmentalism. This was all planned, starting before 1980 when Ronald Reagan took office and symbolically got us to start looking backwards by doing things like removing the solar panels from the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed.
Now that we know all this, I don't think that we can settle for anything less than a tech billionaire opening the floodgates on carbon sequestration. We need real solar-powered devices that take excess energy and store it in things like calcium carbonate and graphite. It looks like it currently costs at least $100 to capture 1 ton of CO2 directly from the atmosphere. At 10 cents equivalent for solar power, that's 1000 kwh per ton. That's the amount of electricity a house uses in a month. I'm having trouble finding exact values for these numbers, but these are the orders of magnitude we should be thinking in terms of.
These numbers are so staggering, that there's literally nothing we can do on a personal level to change them. We need powerful people to think beyond quarterly profits and start doing something tangible with their money.
Which is what I would do if I had won the internet lottery.
I mean, academia has been pleading with politicians to do something about global warming for my entire life to no avail.
If we use Hanlon's razor and attribute the rich and powerful's incompetence on this issue to stupidity instead of malice, then forgive me if I don't find that comforting.
I sure wish VOTERS would "do something" about this, where "something" = vote for the party/parties that actually champion or at least acknowledge the importance of dealing with AGW/CO2 increasing vs actively denying and supporting continuing the current anti-free market policies destroying so much future beauty and potential. This should have been so straightforward, we want net neutral CO2 ASAP and then net negative as soon as feasible, so all that's needed is to legislate that emitting a ton of CO2 (or equivalent) is priced at the cost of rapid industrial removal of a ton of CO2+margin. We could just make all our energy usage net neutral in a matter of months/years by finally establishing a Free Market there and then let humanity sort out the best way to reduce the cost of that. But instead it's a mixture of full denial or, even more frustrating, so-called "greens" bitching about other people's luxury energy usage and engaging in worthless moralizing bullshit about $Cause_Of_The_Day (like Ebil Big Tech) rather then just working to deal with the problem as efficiently as possible and focusing moral arguments purely on the harm of AGW.
>Their inaction on countless fronts, in fact their complacency in undermining progress on environmental causes in global politics, is one of the thousand reasons I got out of tech.
I'd say the inaction on countless fronts of people like you who just shove all responsibility off onto nameless godkings rather then actually internalize that democracy means we're responsible as well has been a far bigger threat. Tech has been relatively green, and far more active at green efforts then most industries. It's ludicrous to see you pinning so much on "tech billionaires" vs, say, oil/coal billionaires.