The election cycle, at least in a small part a function of a human’s expected life span btw, is way too short for governments to be incentivized to do anything about it.
It’s going to be a wild ride for our grandchildren.
Meanwhile the most popular politician in Belgium claims that climate activists are overly dramatic and that we should trust technology to save us. Just great.
Which is a inherently insane argument, to trust on the exploration of a labyrinth (research) to uncover ever more powerful hot potatoes, to save you from the hot potatoes you already juggle with. One missed juggling motion and you are stuck in a position you are unlikely to get out of because the failure to juggle reveals the original tribal societies inability to hold it together and propel a scientific society under stress.
It might be able to but that would require getting rid of cheap sources of energy and manufacturing which the deck is stacked so hard against it will never happen. Before humanity will do anything we have to get rid of the current ruling autocracy since acting now would create pain over time, acting later would create pain when most people alive are dead. And maybe put the environment before profits, same problem though.
The problem is that the technology is already ninety percent there, but replacing energy infrastructure costs money. The time of waiting for technology is long over, we know what we need to build, we just have to do it.
There are also a lot of peoples who’s wealth comes from continuing the way things are, and changing over to greener technologies would mean they might end up less wealthy
> The alternative option which is consuming less in order to pollute less is pretty unpopular.
If you frame the problem like that, does it actually surprise you that no one will act on it? One has to either freeze or feel guilty of some kind of moral failing about the heat one consumes?
You might say: No, no, the problem is not consumption, it's the superfluous part of the consumption, the
overconsumption that's the problem. Okay, but, then, who exactly stands in judgment of which part of the consumption is the overconsumption? The same moralising types who bemoan the melting of the glaciers?
Reminds me a bit of pre-enlightenment Europe and its juxtaposition of power and catholic moralising guilttripping. What's needed is a humanistic way forward, a way wherein man gets to fundamentally be the hero of the story.
If you come to me and say: Here is a way to reconfigure the economy through technological, economic, and political change, to make it so that one can feel good about consumption again, then I will go to hell and back to make that change happen. If you just tell me "consume less", then don't expect me to do anything.
Ok, understood. I'm now telling you: "Here is a way to reconfigure the economy through technological, economic, and political change, to make it so that one can feel good about consumption again, then I will go to hell and back to make that change happen".
Just don't spend too much time in hell, we need you to act here :-)
I mean at this point we’re likely looking at the dreaded 2C scenario even if we ceased all carbon emissions and regressed back to the stone age immediately, which obviously isn’t going to happen because I really like my hot showers.
We’ve been using technology to solve our problems for thousands of years. If that streak stops now, we’re royally fucked.
I can't tell you in ºF. I am 57 years old and they stopped teaching that in schools before I was in primary schools where I have lived all my life (Europe and Africa).
Yeah, also here I've seen commenters having faith that "some technology will come along and save us!".
It's a different sort of "climate denial"[1].
OK, my faith that we're totally fucked is also based on guesstimate, just in the opposite direction (it can be viewed as a denial of the idea that there's something we can do to rescue this extravagantly luxurious modern life).
In general very small part of population will choose certain suffering now to avoid uncertain suffering in future.
Actively doing enough against climate change will have very real and likely significant quality of life change now. And if lot of people don't think their quality of life is high enough now, why would they want it to go lower. And sadly rich are always insulated either way.
It's not that they know they're sacrificing their grandchildrens' future for their current quality of life. It's that they'll believe the flimsiest arguments that climate change isn't happening. Cognitive dissonance is undefeated.
They truly won't be. global supply lines will probably be the first casualties that will trigger mainstream realization, and however deep your Hawaiian bunker is, feeding your plumber without those will be difficult.
This makes me wonder if society would be improved by radical life-extension therapies or technologies. Detractors generally say it would result in stagnation, but at least people would have a very good incentive to think long-term if they knew they had a good chance of still being alive in 200 or 1000 years and having to deal with the long-term effects of current policy.
That incentivizes not so much long-term thinking as the politics of the permanent stagnation bunker. You'd get a caste of mortal disposable workers who live in the flood plains, working for a tiny group of immortals who have locked down the top positions and made themselves effective rulers for life.
Think Japanese stagflation but for centuries. Reiwa era 200.
To play the devil's advocate, imagine if politicians (US senators / House members) could live for and hold their positions for a thousand years... I don't know if that is a good thing.
>could live for and hold their positions for a thousand years... I don't know if that is a good thing.
I think it's a good thing: if the people continue to elect them, then obviously the people want those politicians to continue representing them for that long. Why should they be deprived of that? Objecting to this seems like objecting to democracy.
If this produces bad results long-term, that's the fault of the voters. Democratic systems are only as good as the voters who choose its leaders. When the voters are idiots, you get bad leaders. If the people don't like their 1000-year-old senator, they should vote for someone else. As we've seen in the USA, people don't have much trouble voting for a new President when they're mad at the current one for whatever reason (and the US also switched many seats in Congress in that same election).
>Or Xi of Mainland China...
Unfortunately, that's a possibility too, but by the same token, if Deng Xiaoping had been immortal, he could have stayed in that position and Xi might never have gained power and things in China (and worldwide in things related to China) would be a lot better right now.
Basically, your objection is one I usually see raised when the idea of immortality or radical life-extension comes up, but I honestly don't see how it'd be that much different either way.
Birth rates are dropping faster than predicted, which means both fewer grandchildren to suffer and fewer grandchildren to produce carbon. A lot of environmental issues just go away with fewer people around. We'll have to adapt the current ponzi scheme of government pensions but that seems a small price to pay.
This just means less people to handle the consequences of the last two decades of reckless exponential growth. It'll matter for their grandchildren, maybe.
Not quite. A big issue with global warming is we have been taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. We have the technology to stop doing that, but not the technology to capture carbon already in the atmosphere. Fewer people means more vegetation that will capture some of that carbon.
While I agree this works (we have very good evidence in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event), the timescales for that to matter are two orders of magnitude too long assuming we figure out the scale and genetics.
Enough people run for office who want to do something about climate change. But a plurality of the population seems to be mainly concerned with being angry about immigrants and wanting lower taxes.
Food riots is a thing. It is hard to govern when everyone is upset that it costs too much to live. To do something about climate change we need to do somethings 10 times worse than the pandemic for 10 years. No more visiting grandma who lives 5 hours away.
It’s going to be a wild ride for our grandchildren.