I absolutely refuse to accept that long term human existence is only viable at North Korean levels of economic development. I wouldn’t care to live in that world, and I won’t speak for my children, but I doubt that they would find that particularly appealing.
We’re not going to stop burning hydrocarbons anytime soon - see above: they’re just too darn useful - but we’re making great progress in relegating them to their highest and best use. Oil fired power plants? Virtually extinct. Coal fired power plants? In terminal decline. Generating power from “waste” natural gas, instead of flaring it? Much progress there.
Let’s keep building out renewables, work on the power storage problem, and (ideally) learn how to build nukes safely and efficiently again.
Then with a moonshot or two like fusion or room temp superconductors, I think we have a better than even chance of coming out of this century with the climate crisis under control. We can all make more responsible choices, but I don’t currently see a need to sacrifice human welfare to get there.
The gulf between the western world and North Korea is _vast_.
As an example, the USA has roughly double the fossil fuel consumption per capita as Germany and triple that of France, yet the standard of living in the USA is not significantly higher (and the median may in fact be lower, depending on your standards).
Fossil fuel usage is higher in Russia than any western European country, yet the Russian standard of living is lower.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit we can go after in the short term, we could potentially halve our fossil fuel usage in ten years and if we actually put the effort in do it while maintaining a high standard of living.
We’re not going to stop burning hydrocarbons anytime soon - see above: they’re just too darn useful - but we’re making great progress in relegating them to their highest and best use. Oil fired power plants? Virtually extinct. Coal fired power plants? In terminal decline. Generating power from “waste” natural gas, instead of flaring it? Much progress there.
Let’s keep building out renewables, work on the power storage problem, and (ideally) learn how to build nukes safely and efficiently again.
Then with a moonshot or two like fusion or room temp superconductors, I think we have a better than even chance of coming out of this century with the climate crisis under control. We can all make more responsible choices, but I don’t currently see a need to sacrifice human welfare to get there.