Sorry what? How do renewable energy sources not do anything? The problem is multifaceted abs requires advances in many areas. A thousand partial solutions. Absolutism and cynicism aren’t helpful.

OP probably means that we should focus on infrastructure like dams and nuclear power, to mitigate the at this point probably unavoidable damage.

There should be less emphasis on policing individual behaviour (turn the AC down etc.), which is arguably almost completely a distraction from quantitatively relevant issues and provides cover from political inaction.

Wind and solar the two darlings of climate catastrophists is less than 3% of the worlds energy consumption and they will not be able to help getting the 3 billion people who uses less energy than a US fridge per year into the modern era.

Fossile fuels is not going anywhere as it's used for the 4 pillars of modern society, steel, fertilizers, concrete and plastic for which there is no realistic alternative.

Wind and solar isn't advances, they are regressive technologies that themselves require fossile fuel to even become a reality and still keeps us with our intermittency issues.

Keep in mind that only 20% of a countrys energy consumption is electricity.

The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.

Making our energy grid more and more fragile by pushing wind and solar is what isn't helpful.

> The only big breakthroughs that matter with energy and can work at scale would be things like fusion and molten salt generators.

You don't need to go that far. Fission and geothermal can work at scale today and largely solve the impending climate trainwreck today. We haven't adopted them in droves not because of some technological limitation, but rather because they're more expensive on balance sheets (which don't account for negative externalities) and because the fossil fuel industry has successfully manipulated the public into equating "renewable energy" with "things fundamentally incapable of providing base load".

They don't scale and they don't provide enough energy density to do provide energy for new types of solutions.

Considering that:

The U.S by itself consumes and pollutes an excessive amount even proportionally compared to China, there's definite optimizations in consumption patterns that can be made to reduce total overall carbon footprint. Plastics are still everywhere and recycling is considered a scam here. It's done so by design by oil companies. Yes, every single Styrofoam takeout container accumulates waste, especially for a country so prone on eating out. I get bottles of Mexican coke that show clear signs of wear and multiple usage in Mexico...only to finally end up on American store shelves were they'll be dumped in the trash like everything else here because nobody bothers with glass recycling bottles. Recycling plants are zoned out because the only people even bothering to return plastic bottles for 5 cents in a handful of states are the homeless, and even for them it's barely worth the fucking effort.

The amount of car traffic in America is ludicrous and an endemic problem of poor, lobbied city design. This country had better public transit that was muscled out by automobile lobbyists, some of which actually privatized the transit and let the infrastructure die. Asphalt retains heat, and every new damn road built is a contributor to making the world just a little bit more warmer than it used to be. China is a leading adopter of rail commuting and freight transport. We're twiddling our thumbs and letting our rail networks deteriorate and become unusable, because its cheaper to move less material over trucks.

These are just two simple examples. There's no zero sum result of completely eliminating plastics, but we can definitely consume much less. But we don't. Because we are lazy. Instead we exploit pollution loopholes where we classify SUVs as light work trucks so they don't have to conform to strict emission standards. This is why Ford cut down most of its car production lines in the U.S and almost exclusively focuses on trucks for their consumer market, and why increasingly more cars on road today are arguably less safer SUVs

You have to come up with a better alternative that doesn't take things away.

Your examples are good examples of things that are not better alternatives, they are worse.

I don't think most people realize just how unique a material plastic for instance is.

If there is no alternative for concrete, plastic, fertilizers, and steel, then don't you think we ought to quit burning them for cars and electricty Thom?

You have gone so typically and boring boomer contrarian you aren't even making sense, as is normal.

Whether you can make sense of what I am writing is out of my control.

However there is nothing in what I said that isn't factually correct. If that makes me boomer contrarian the so be it.

If we weren't pulling oil out of the ground from the sea floor then my old fishing haunts would be available to me today and people wouldn't be worried about stepping into BP-branded tar balls that routinely roll up onto the beaches. There's more to climate change than wind, solar, and tesla.

Figure heads for causes like Greta aren't a new thing, sir.

agree, whats your point?

That phenomena like Greta are possible all the time in all kinds of situations

It appears to me that fears over catastrophic climate change are yet another moral panic. Amplified by social media this time.

As with other moral panics (e.g. child abductions, pedophilia), the problem exists, but is blown way out of proportion by the media.

In reality, I believe there of course will be changes in the weather patterns due to a relatively small increase in temperature, but it's not going to be the end of the world and there certainly won't be any mass drought or famine from the change.

I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom. As I have likely seen this type of hysteria play out before in my life many times already.

It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that its impact on human geographic dispersion, social organization, and reproductive patterns will be imperceptible to those feeling its effects.

It won’t be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it transform things for the worse, and will our successors envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.

I'm not sure what the source of your doubt here is. There is piles and piles of evidence that we are in for a world of hurt in the coming several decades.

No there isn't. There isn't a single scientifically proven consequence of climate change we don't know how to deal with.

That's a big claim. Too big to assert without evidence. Got any?

Well provide me with a scientifically proven consequence of climate change and I will tell you how we deal with it.

> I kind of intuitively know this, and mostly disregard the opinions of those saying that there is impending doom.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truthiness

> It will be interesting to see if I'm right about it or not, over the coming decades...

You are wrong. No need to wait, the effects are already starting to be visible.

It's the same intuition that tells me something's wrong when I read things that end up being conspiracy theories or pseudoscience.

I trust it, because for me, it seems to have a track record of being correct in the end.

Well everyone has the right to their own opinions, and I might be completely wrong.

And I have every right to be a heretic, and not subscribe to things I think might be orthodoxies. That might be arising from bandwagon effects and social conformity. Which is what I suspect when it comes to climate change doomsaying.

And that's strictly my own opinion only, which can be simply disregarded by other people. But it still adds to the discussion. And such things can be proven wrong too, which might strengthen the case for catastrophic climate change actually happening?