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polyfractal | 6 years ago

It's especially tragic because any attempt to fix the situation implicitly crushes nations that are presently bootstrapping themselves into industrialization. E.g. major "developed" countries got a free ride on cheap, dirty fossil fuels. But now the climate is going to shit, and if by some miracle they managed to get themselves to carbon-negative (lol sure), you'd also have to prevent other developing nations from going down the cheap/dirty fossil fuel route themselves.

Which is crazy when you think about it. How's that going to work? Is the US and the EU going to give up half their GDP subsidizing clean energy in foreign nations to prevent further carbon release? Subjugate those countries to forcibly prevent them from industrializing?

It's truly a tragedy of the commons writ large. Short of some breakthrough in carbon sequestration or cold fusion or whatever, we're pretty screwed no matter how you look at it :(

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