I posted links because I've had this conversation many times over. The short version is: yeah, I used to be a techno-utopian too, 20 years ago. But none of those magic technologies are realistic, we aren't on the path to them being widely deployed, the population and emissions and resource consumption are all worse, as summarized in the conclusions of the experts who put together the Earth Overshoot Day report. If you want to argue about it, take it up with them.
> the invention of fertilizer
Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the unfortunate massive externality of altering the composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a bad way.
While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to take realistic stock of where we are and where our trajectory is. Human population peaking will happen--the question is whether it's gradual or whether it's sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer....
It's estimated that green ammonia costs between $800 and $1500 per ton today to produce [1]. While this is higher than conventional ammonia, it is less than how much ammonia cost in the 2022 energy crisis [2] and likely to decrease further in the future.
Massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer are wasted because it's so cheap [3]. There's headroom for bringing back crop rotation of nitrogen-fixing crops. Nitrogen-fixing microbes are an emerging technology [4].
Anybody who argues that "we're all going to die" is, from where I sit, clearly delusional.
So that's not really a problem worth refuting.
On the other hand, hundreds of millions of people dying, 10s of millions of species going extinct, massive migration causing chaos in our current understanding of "nation states", sea level rise causing the abandonment and destruction of many of the world's great cities ... these are actual likely problems. The human race will still exist in the face of them, but what will be lost?
Hundreds of millions of people die from war, and avoiding war is a lot easier than what the (well-meaning) climate change evangelists/zealots want us to do. You don't need to destroy the entire modern economy and western civilization to avoid war.
Also, why is it that the people constantly screaming about sea levels rising are the same millionaires and billionaires who own $$$$$ properties in places like Miami or Martha's Vineyard, which are ostensibly going to be underwater within their lifetime, if true?
Migration can be ultimately be summed up as someone else's problem, if you have a political elite with enough backbone to represent the interests of the citizens of their own country above those of non-citizens.
Your blithe dismissal of migration seems likely to me to put severely to the test.
According to the US Republican Party, the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone" ?
Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
>the USA is already suffering from an invasion that is out of control, when climate change has barely gotten started.
Okay,
A. What's happening at the southern border isn't any more of an "invasion" than the J6 riots. If only 1/500 people in your "invasion" even has a firearm, let alone training with it, it ain't much of an invasion.
B. What's happening at the southern border has absolutely NOTHING to do with climate change, it's strictly economic.
>What the US can and will do if and when it faces 100M people trying to get north is an open question. The US military will not be able to use ground force to keep out that sort of mass migration. Will it drop bombs on migrating populations? Is that what you call "backbone"?
What if there were some kind of relatively safe, yet impassable barrier? The kind that doesn't exercise force against anyone, ever. One that's so safe that the only people who get injured by it are those stupid enough to delibarately decide to try to scale it, while being incompetent enough to be incapable of doing so safely. Perhaps one that was tall enough that it couldn't be scaled by 20 or 40 foot ladders? Besides, this is a ridiculous question. Even under the president with the highest amount of illegal immigration in US history, Joe Biden (10,000,000 and counting!), we barely hit a tenth of that figure across 3.5 years.
Sadly, there's just no way we're gonna be able to afford such a barrier. That would have to cost what, $10bn? $50bn? Except that's still less than we've spent securing the border of a country on the other side of the planet that almost no Americans have any real, significant, substantial interests in (besides Hunter Biden, of course, who made millions of dollars per year as a Ukrainian energy executive thanks to his deep expertise and demonstrated thought leadership in the hydrocarbon exploration and extraction business... /s)
>Finally, it seems as if you think that having lots of money somehow exempts you from the same cognitive biases as everybody else, as if the behavior of the rich is an indicator of "the smart move". It never has been, and it never will be.
No, what I'm asserting is that the people screeching about the oceans rising and the sky falling are the same ones buying up all the properties being sold by the people who are afraid of oceans rising. It's a racket.
> the invention of fertilizer
Nitrogen-based fertilizers are made with hydrogen from natural gas. The agriculture industry, at its base, is like the rest of modern economy: based on drawing down a vast reservoir of non-renewal fossil fuels, with the unfortunate massive externality of altering the composition of our atmosphere and the global climate in a bad way.
While technology will play a role in how humans adapt to the changes we've brought on ourselves, it's important to take realistic stock of where we are and where our trajectory is. Human population peaking will happen--the question is whether it's gradual or whether it's sudden. You don't want the global equivalent of this: https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer....