The two major problems with the discussion on climate change:
1.) Right-leaning, free-market, anti-authoritarian types need to understand that climate change is a negative third party externality, and there isn't a free market economist that wouldn't agree that the state has a role to play in ameliorating that. Focus on the strategies you think are best suited for that role, such as carbon taxes.
2.) Left-leaning climate advocates need to realistically prioritize objectives according to their tenability and impact. Airplanes contribute 2% of greenhouse emissions, how about we don't start there. Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact, how about we focus energy there, and not to beat a dead horse, but also seriously advocate on behalf of nuclear. They also forget that the other half of the equation, carbon capture, is almost unilaterally popular. Focusing efforts on where the most leeway can be achieved is a much better solution, particularly since carbon capture is capable of handling carbon emissions of states unwilling to regulate their own outputs.
They also need to cool it with the catastrophizing. It is a bad strategy. All the opposition has to do is point out how incredibly off-base the predictions were in an An Inconvenient Truth, and they're done. Accurately identify where the feedback loops are that cause enormous leaps forward, and focus on those precise thresholds. Near linear progress in the way we've seen it creeping does not scare people, but that doesn't mean that we can just be wildly inaccurate with the predictions in order to scare people in to action.
Lastly, don't shoehorn in other political policies alongside climate propositions. Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.
How about we start everywhere that can help? This trope that goes around that we should only focus on the biggest problem, and let everything else slide... that is why nobody does anything.
So how about we improve everything that we personally can, large or small, and drive a cultural change that shows big business/energy that the world does care about this, and they should, too.
There is nothing “anti-authoritarian” about the modern American right, except as a euphemism for “I don’t want to pay taxes”. Not much “free market” either, except as a euphemism for “corporations should have no accountability or oversight”.
It was quite sad to watch the above kid without a well formed world view burst into tears over stolen childhoods while million of childhoods are taken away every year due to lack of opportunities (including electricity of any kind) in developing countries.
My only issue with a carbon tax is how severely it'll impact the poor. If we had a system where using carbon costs $X in tax and saving carbon/using green energy netted you $X from the government, I think that'd be a great way to create incentives to go green while accurately pricing in externalities. Basically a redistributive tax.
The aviation industry is growing rapidely and if left unchecked those 2% will soon become 5%.
Governments can tackle several problems at the same time. And taxing air travel is a big deal for the social acceptation of other taxations for the masses.
To add to these I think the roll of government is to legislate in the best interest of the people, whereas companies act in the best interest of their shareholders. This effectively is a check/balance for companies when they do things that go against the interest of the people (Without mentioning corruption).
Nothing really happens unless there is an economic motivator or widespread fear. But with the climate changing gradually, we will most likely go the way of the ol' lobster in the pot and boil to death by the time we realize. So we need the gov. to step in and legislate some stuff.
When we first started producing plastics, running everything on petroleum, and burning things for energy, the scale was small and insignificant and we didn't know any better. But now that we can measure the impact and the cost of cleanup we can exactly say how much of a product, despite our best efforts, ends up in the environment and will need to be cleaned up. So if a company wants to produce plastics, fine. And if a company wants to run their fleets on diesel, fine. Lets just factor in the cost of the cleanup. You can't go around producing and using whatever you want and expecting others to pay for the cleanup or consequences. We are going to have to pay for it at some point, so factor that in.
The increased costs will incentivise alternatives, and for the things that don't have alternatives, at least we will have a fund for the cleanup and mitigation of the effects.
I agree with these points. If we are to consider the effectiveness of getting climate deniers on the path towards change, then we should use a thoughtful strategy that gets them on board.
In short: reactionism poisons opportunities for real change. Unfortunately, the internet is the most efficient breeding ground for reactionism the world has ever seen.
Energy production is slowly moving towards being a solved problem, with emissions going down - thanks to renewables, not nuclear. Mobility's co2 contributions are still increasing, and in particular flying doesn't seem to have feasible solutions in any reasonable time frame. Yes it's not a low hanging fruit in terms of reducing emissions, but it's a hard nut - and the global effects of it are increasing (and already larger than 2% due to radiative forcing). Incidentally it's also a way in which individuals can blow their individual carbon budget very quickly, and thus can also mitigate it very easily.
Carbon sequestration is not a low hanging fruit, arguably it's even less feasible, less economical at the scale required than fossil-free aviation.
I think young people's gloom is reasonable when constantly being confronted with climate change deniers, and even those who believe reality will fight tooth and nail against changing the economy towards being more sustainable, citing magical, non-existing or uneconomical technologies that would allow everybody to just continue like today. It's frustrating to talk to people who don't want to make small adjustments today, willingly accepting that everybody has to make larger and more radical changes later as society keeps kicking down the can.
I mostly agree with you but there's little chance that we're going to figure out for sure where climate tipping points might be before we hit them. The climate is very very complex.
The idea that climate activists don't focus on energy production seems kind of detached from reality. Climate activism has pushed heavily on renewable energy. They're not advocating for nuclear, but that makes sense at the moment even if you're very bullish on nuclear — pushing for more nuclear power will result in no reduction in emissions for over a decade, and we need to come down a lot before then. Nuclear is possibly a viable long-term strategy, but in order to get to the long term, we need to move to renewables in the short term.
> Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact
Globally agriculture and lifestock has an impact as large as the entire electricity production. Eating less meat (no need for full vegan, just less) is probably the easiest and most impactful change we can do.
Electricity is also important, but market forces are acutally doing fairly well in that area. The price of solar+storage in on track to drop below natural gas in a decade.
> Lastly, don't shoehorn in other political policies alongside climate propositions. Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.
It's not about shoehorning anything, it's about how you diagnose the problem.
You can see the climate problem in isolation, and try to fix it as such, or you can see the big picture: worldwide the biodiversity is collapsing, there's more plastic than fish in the oceans, we're destroying fertile lands to build malls or with terrible agricultural practices, and so on. Climate change is probably the most threatening one, but far from the only systemic environmental problem we're facing. All theses issues have one root cause: industrial productivism, which, in today's world, is a key consequence of Capitalism[1].
[1] don't get me wrong, Capitalism isn't the only system leading to an ever-growing industrial production. And soviet Socialism has its shares of environmental catastrophes.
> Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.
Sorry, that's impossible. Anytime you're doing anything with a direct or indirect price tag in the trillion dollar range, you're having a huge impact on the economy and jobs. You're picking winners and losers. So either you need to be explicit about it like the Green New Deal is, or you're hiding it, and you get the huge distortions caused by people like Senator Shelby giving NASA's SLS huge amounts of money because they spend it in Alabama.
What we need is a sensible alternative proposal from Republicans, and then a negotiated middle ground. That's the way we used to do things. It wasn't perfect, but it worked a lot better than just shouting at each other like we do now.
Maybe the right-leaning types correctly realize that the left-leaning types can't take "yes" for an answer, and that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, but a means for rehabilitating socialism:
https://peoplesclimate.org/platform/.
> Every new job created to address the climate crisis must be unionized or have the right to unionize without interference and pay a family-sustaining wage.
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti then asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Because this is a real, and serious risk. The defeat of socialism as a competitor to market capitalism in the late 1980s has seen the greatest improvement in the plight of the world's most vulnerable people in the history of the world. Places like Bangladesh, my home country, have enjoyed 5-7% GDP growth annually for three decades. (Polls show Bangladesh second only to Vietnam in support for the free market.)
If it was just a matter of carbon taxes, or investing the IPCC-recommended 2.5% of GDP on mitigation efforts, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. But if it's carbon taxes as a first step toward radical transformation of the economy--toward ideas that have been tried and failed--then no thank you.
I don't think we can let the airlines off, remember you don't just fly to a place and then immediately for back. When taking about the 2% that airlines contribute we should also talk about the number that people that took airlines contribute to Greenhouse emissions while they are on their vacation or business trip. Right?
One problem with nuclear is that we've spent decades of R&D time ignoring the possibility of low space, low waste reactors that we have very little time to complete development on them.
The risk of catastrophic failure has been shown repeatedly to be something that arse-covering bureaucrats are incapable of handling.
The passive shutdown of the LFTR design, coupled with low area utilisation and the reduced risk of proliferation would have made it an ideal olive branch to the world.
But there's not much money to be made from ubiquitous energy.
But here's the thing: the reality of current power in western countries is that it has been completely captured by large corporations and capital. Anything that causes disruption to the flow if money and growth will not be considered. Any real action will only come as a result of revolution. Revolutions are never fought with middle of the road ideologies as the catalyst and they aren't fought by populations as comfortable as those of successful western societies.
However you're kidding yourself if you the primary danger if climate change is the climate itself, at least to western societies. Look no further than the most existential threat to thd EU posed by a mere million migrants. Fascism js suddenly back in fashion all over the continent and the Brits want to self immolate and leave the EU. The failing of major crops due to seasons becoming unstable has already happened and will only accelerate in the coming years. The American corn crop was dangerojsly close to failing this year. Are these young people being hyperbolic in believing extinction is right around the corner? A bit, but their sentiment is correct. The civilization that they are accustomed to could very well be completely distroyed or in a state of disintegration in 15 years.
The doomsayer crowd should be ashamed of themselves for promoting this kind of emotional burnout.
Even the worst IPCC projections don't speak of anything remotely like humanity being wiped out within 15 years. Panic does not jump start change nearly as much as it seems to jump start despair, bitterness, and contempt for anyone with doubts, which apparently now includes people who do not think we are doomed.
These things that are very orthogonal, or in the way of, solving any actual hard problems that lie ahead of us.
I've never understood this type of apocalyptic thinking. Humans are the most adaptable and most widespread of the large animals. We are arguable the best at surviving, at least in our 'class'. And while it's true we've come up with some pretty devastating ways to destroy each other and ourselves, that is very different from destroying all of humanity. We've faced plagues and global wars before, but even when huge portions of humanity have died off it's still not even close to all of it.
Even trying to devise a way to guarantee that humans go extinct seems like an almost impossible thought exercise. How do you exterminate 7 billion people spread over ~57 million square miles of land?
I think its an artifact of pervasive guilt and shame. Much of the developed world enjoys the highest standard of living that humans have ever experienced, and did little to nothing to get there. It feels like flying too close to the sun, an overdose of good. To satisfy a sense of justice, the logical conclusion is judgement for millions that commit (perceived) poor behaviors without consequence.
People have fervently believed in apocalypses for thousands of years, in at least ever other generation. The fact of the matter is that we are evolved from people that survived by exterminating other people groups. We have deep genetic memories of actual apocalypse, from tribes to nations. We are evolved to anticipate war and destruction- and adapt.
I believe that most people don't actually believe in 100% extinction of humans; they believe that there will be a relatively few amount of survivors, and hope to be among them.
I find this headline to be misleading. I'm sure humanity could be wiped out within 15 years. There is some non-zero chance that a gamma-ray burst in the Milky Way wipes out life on Earth. But really these people are saying it is likely.
Over the next 10-15 years, 29% of all voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out.
I don't think 29% of voters actually believe this. I think that nowadays, people frequently answer polls according to the emotional stance they would like to support, rather than the side of it they view to be factually correct.
I was reading an interview with Naomi Klein not long ago on the subject of "eco anxiety" amongst the young, and had a funny thought: Her work reminded me of the pre-reformation Catholic church.
The practice of selling indulgences was the target of Martin Luther's theses, that is the church would preach Original Sin, fire-and-brimstone, etc, the offer convenient ways to purchase your way out of this terribleness. Authors like her preach a doomsday fire-and-brimstone of their own and very conveniently offer absolution by buying her books, implementing her views as laws (see Leap Manifesto in Canada) etc.
I mean, I'm a pretty firm believer in taking a strong course towards a carbon-free future, but I don't think whipping up such a fear frenzy will turn out well.
Perhaps in another 25 years, after they've seen a few more rounds of "we're all going to die" (from Ebola, H1N1, AIDS, Killer Bees, Zika, etc...), they'll become a bit more suspicious of doom and gloom predictions.
Most of those "doom and gloom" predictions never came true because of tireless work by people to prevent it from happening. For example, the amount of effort that went into making AIDS more treatable is astronomical.
I think I remember a similar statistic about most people during the cold war believing humanity would soon be extinct but I can't find anything about it.
That's absurd. People have been living in harsh conditions (120°F desert weather, <32°F freezing temps for big chunks of the year) for millennia and likely hundreds of thousands of years with none of the technology we currently enjoy. There are more people now than ever before. I can't even see an all out nuclear war combined worth +6°C average temperature increase leading to extinction. Some people somewhere will survive. Maybe many or even most might die in such a scenario but to wipe out humanity, I don't think that possibility currently exists.
This nonsensical hyperbole only weakens the push to mitigate climate change and go green. Turning the movement into a doomsday cult only strengthens climate change deniers arguments.
There's no way climate change can wipe out the entirety of humanity and make the earth uninhabitable, especially in the next 15 years. Are greenhouse gases supposed to turn Earth into Venus in 15 years? That's the only way I see that it can truly become "uninhabitable", and I don't see how that can happen.
Even then, a small percentage can always survive in closed-loop habitats shielded from the outside world, ala Biosphere 2.0.
What happened is a culture of fear around climate change that started with the Al Gore movie. That generation is being told if we don't act immediately you won't have a future.
What ends up happening is in 15 years nothing happens and these people get more jaded.
This poll seems suspect. I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it, until it's corroborated or we know more about the methodology (which I couldn't find in an admittedly cursory search).
Everyone has probably always thought this way... then they live for 15 years and see that nothing much has changed.
I do think that 'adulthood' is hitting people harder and harder. Our kid phase is kiddier and kiddier, and when your parents no longer take care of you, and you're staring at working for 20-40 years until you can experience that endless summer vacation (retirement), you could feel desperate.
Natural pandemics like the Black Death will seldom wipe out more than half the people in an affected area and never everybody. It's possible that someone might genetically engineer a plague to be dormant but transmissible for a year then suddenly kill its host but even with something like that you're probably going to miss pockets of people as large as were left after the Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago.
Nuclear war probably won't wipe out humanity either. Lots and lots of people would die in the countries involved and a few hundred miles downwind of the fallout but other locations would probably only see increased cancer rates. I say probably because while it looks like fears of nuclear winter were probably oversold there's still a fair chance that they weren't and we'd be looking at 5 years with no plant growth after a nuclear exchange. In which case, hey, there's this charity called ALLFED[1] working on how to feed people in the event of a nuclear winter or meteor impact or supervolcano eruption causes a global years long winter. Things like how to operationalize turning dead trees into edible mushrooms at a huge scale.
What about a runaway climate change feedback loop making the earth uninhabitable? Or even more moderate climate change causing a collapse of the food chain?
The only scenarios I can come up with for making earth uninhabitable or wiping out humanity within 15 years are biological warfare or freak astronomic events (giant meteor impact, being hit by a supernova etc). Maybe a pole shift. None of these seem likely (well, the pole shift might be happening right now, but we likely have a millenia left to figure that one out).
I can imagine that we have set the feedback cycles in motion that will make Florida uninhabitable. But I fail to imagine how we might make Germany uninhabitable within 150 years (small coast completely covered by costal defenses, most of the country over 200m above sea level, well equiped for snow so a local ice age could be managed, fairly far north so warming isn't a major threat to agriculture). Even if we managed to make that uninhabitable we could just move to Siberia.
Not biological warfare, just wars, humanity is still armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. And ebola-level threats can rise on their own without warfare.
51% seems very extreme. Is Silicon Valley living in a bubble? On a side note, Foster City will be flooded with just a 1M [1] rise in sea level 20 years out [2].
Just a few days ago I encountered a Patagonia campaign with the banner 'facing extinction' superimposed over a slideshow of somber, adolescent faces. While I'm sure it's well-intentioned, apocalyptic messaging of this sort damages the credibility of actual projections that are genuinely alarming.
Conflating 'catastrophic climate change' (ie. more thousand year floods) and 'apocalyptic climate change' (ie. a big flood will kill us all!) muddies the water and lends ammunition to climate deniers.
Even nuclear war would likely leave a few stragglers to rebuild some semblance of society that worships a manna-giving snack machine.
Weird. If I were to really feel that way I would forget any career, education, and public service aspirations and move to an idealistic mountainside community working off the land. I would build things for my immediate use and enjoy the scenery with beautiful natural landscapes and no road rage traffic.
If people really believe humanity will be wiped out in 15 years and yet still concern themselves with their checking accounts and sense of fashion I would really wonder if there is some kind of mental health illness at play.
While I believe there might be some possibility that we might see some catastrophic events caused by climate change or human conflicts, I highly doubt that they would completely wipe humanity and/or make Earth wholly unhabitable.
I can think of some scenarios that would lead to devastating losses and long-term consequences but I have a hard time picturing a complete extinction happening within 15 years, barring some crazy unlikely scenario like a big meteorite impact.
Sorry, this is too vague for me...humanity as a civilization "could be wiped out", well of course we could. If a meteor hits us or we accidentally and/or intentionally set off a bunch of nuclear weapons...yes, we "could" be wiped out. But will climate change, a long-run issue, wipe out humanity in 15? I don't think even pessimistic forecasters are predicting that 2034 will be the end of civilization due to climate.
[+] [-] ralusek|6 years ago|reply
1.) Right-leaning, free-market, anti-authoritarian types need to understand that climate change is a negative third party externality, and there isn't a free market economist that wouldn't agree that the state has a role to play in ameliorating that. Focus on the strategies you think are best suited for that role, such as carbon taxes.
2.) Left-leaning climate advocates need to realistically prioritize objectives according to their tenability and impact. Airplanes contribute 2% of greenhouse emissions, how about we don't start there. Energy production constitutes by far the largest impact, how about we focus energy there, and not to beat a dead horse, but also seriously advocate on behalf of nuclear. They also forget that the other half of the equation, carbon capture, is almost unilaterally popular. Focusing efforts on where the most leeway can be achieved is a much better solution, particularly since carbon capture is capable of handling carbon emissions of states unwilling to regulate their own outputs.
They also need to cool it with the catastrophizing. It is a bad strategy. All the opposition has to do is point out how incredibly off-base the predictions were in an An Inconvenient Truth, and they're done. Accurately identify where the feedback loops are that cause enormous leaps forward, and focus on those precise thresholds. Near linear progress in the way we've seen it creeping does not scare people, but that doesn't mean that we can just be wildly inaccurate with the predictions in order to scare people in to action.
Lastly, don't shoehorn in other political policies alongside climate propositions. Green New Deal, for example, is first and foremost a bundle of socialist policies using climate activism as a vehicle. If this is truly the greatest threat to humanity, decouple it from adjacent political policy.
[+] [-] codingdave|6 years ago|reply
How about we start everywhere that can help? This trope that goes around that we should only focus on the biggest problem, and let everything else slide... that is why nobody does anything.
So how about we improve everything that we personally can, large or small, and drive a cultural change that shows big business/energy that the world does care about this, and they should, too.
[+] [-] jacobolus|6 years ago|reply
There is nothing “anti-authoritarian” about the modern American right, except as a euphemism for “I don’t want to pay taxes”. Not much “free market” either, except as a euphemism for “corporations should have no accountability or oversight”.
[+] [-] zarro|6 years ago|reply
Actually there are plenty of free market economists that would argue that negative externalities are the result of poorly defined property rights.
[+] [-] option_greek|6 years ago|reply
It was quite sad to watch the above kid without a well formed world view burst into tears over stolen childhoods while million of childhoods are taken away every year due to lack of opportunities (including electricity of any kind) in developing countries.
[+] [-] cameronbrown|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azepoi|6 years ago|reply
Governments can tackle several problems at the same time. And taxing air travel is a big deal for the social acceptation of other taxations for the masses.
[+] [-] jkingsbery|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agitator|6 years ago|reply
To add to these I think the roll of government is to legislate in the best interest of the people, whereas companies act in the best interest of their shareholders. This effectively is a check/balance for companies when they do things that go against the interest of the people (Without mentioning corruption).
Nothing really happens unless there is an economic motivator or widespread fear. But with the climate changing gradually, we will most likely go the way of the ol' lobster in the pot and boil to death by the time we realize. So we need the gov. to step in and legislate some stuff.
When we first started producing plastics, running everything on petroleum, and burning things for energy, the scale was small and insignificant and we didn't know any better. But now that we can measure the impact and the cost of cleanup we can exactly say how much of a product, despite our best efforts, ends up in the environment and will need to be cleaned up. So if a company wants to produce plastics, fine. And if a company wants to run their fleets on diesel, fine. Lets just factor in the cost of the cleanup. You can't go around producing and using whatever you want and expecting others to pay for the cleanup or consequences. We are going to have to pay for it at some point, so factor that in.
The increased costs will incentivise alternatives, and for the things that don't have alternatives, at least we will have a fund for the cleanup and mitigation of the effects.
[+] [-] kiloatl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ant6n|6 years ago|reply
Carbon sequestration is not a low hanging fruit, arguably it's even less feasible, less economical at the scale required than fossil-free aviation.
I think young people's gloom is reasonable when constantly being confronted with climate change deniers, and even those who believe reality will fight tooth and nail against changing the economy towards being more sustainable, citing magical, non-existing or uneconomical technologies that would allow everybody to just continue like today. It's frustrating to talk to people who don't want to make small adjustments today, willingly accepting that everybody has to make larger and more radical changes later as society keeps kicking down the can.
[+] [-] Symmetry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chc|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|6 years ago|reply
Globally agriculture and lifestock has an impact as large as the entire electricity production. Eating less meat (no need for full vegan, just less) is probably the easiest and most impactful change we can do.
Electricity is also important, but market forces are acutally doing fairly well in that area. The price of solar+storage in on track to drop below natural gas in a decade.
[+] [-] notadoc|6 years ago|reply
It's worth remembering that often something becomes politicized for the benefit of the politics, not the actual issue.
[+] [-] littlestymaar|6 years ago|reply
It's not about shoehorning anything, it's about how you diagnose the problem.
You can see the climate problem in isolation, and try to fix it as such, or you can see the big picture: worldwide the biodiversity is collapsing, there's more plastic than fish in the oceans, we're destroying fertile lands to build malls or with terrible agricultural practices, and so on. Climate change is probably the most threatening one, but far from the only systemic environmental problem we're facing. All theses issues have one root cause: industrial productivism, which, in today's world, is a key consequence of Capitalism[1].
[1] don't get me wrong, Capitalism isn't the only system leading to an ever-growing industrial production. And soviet Socialism has its shares of environmental catastrophes.
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|6 years ago|reply
Sorry, that's impossible. Anytime you're doing anything with a direct or indirect price tag in the trillion dollar range, you're having a huge impact on the economy and jobs. You're picking winners and losers. So either you need to be explicit about it like the Green New Deal is, or you're hiding it, and you get the huge distortions caused by people like Senator Shelby giving NASA's SLS huge amounts of money because they spend it in Alabama.
What we need is a sensible alternative proposal from Republicans, and then a negotiated middle ground. That's the way we used to do things. It wasn't perfect, but it worked a lot better than just shouting at each other like we do now.
[+] [-] rayiner|6 years ago|reply
Maybe the right-leaning types correctly realize that the left-leaning types can't take "yes" for an answer, and that addressing climate change is not an end in itself, but a means for rehabilitating socialism: https://peoplesclimate.org/platform/.
> Every new job created to address the climate crisis must be unionized or have the right to unionize without interference and pay a family-sustaining wage.
If they agree to carbon taxes, is that it? Or does the battlefront just move to things like this: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/aocs-top-aide-admits-green-...
> “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti then asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Because this is a real, and serious risk. The defeat of socialism as a competitor to market capitalism in the late 1980s has seen the greatest improvement in the plight of the world's most vulnerable people in the history of the world. Places like Bangladesh, my home country, have enjoyed 5-7% GDP growth annually for three decades. (Polls show Bangladesh second only to Vietnam in support for the free market.)
If it was just a matter of carbon taxes, or investing the IPCC-recommended 2.5% of GDP on mitigation efforts, I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. But if it's carbon taxes as a first step toward radical transformation of the economy--toward ideas that have been tried and failed--then no thank you.
[+] [-] undersuit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yarg|6 years ago|reply
The risk of catastrophic failure has been shown repeatedly to be something that arse-covering bureaucrats are incapable of handling.
The passive shutdown of the LFTR design, coupled with low area utilisation and the reduced risk of proliferation would have made it an ideal olive branch to the world.
But there's not much money to be made from ubiquitous energy.
[+] [-] onion2k|6 years ago|reply
We can ground flights immediately. Literally today.
Building new nuclear power stations takes a long time.
If you believe we have 15 years left you do the first one in order to give yourself time to do the second one.
[+] [-] alistproducer2|6 years ago|reply
However you're kidding yourself if you the primary danger if climate change is the climate itself, at least to western societies. Look no further than the most existential threat to thd EU posed by a mere million migrants. Fascism js suddenly back in fashion all over the continent and the Brits want to self immolate and leave the EU. The failing of major crops due to seasons becoming unstable has already happened and will only accelerate in the coming years. The American corn crop was dangerojsly close to failing this year. Are these young people being hyperbolic in believing extinction is right around the corner? A bit, but their sentiment is correct. The civilization that they are accustomed to could very well be completely distroyed or in a state of disintegration in 15 years.
[+] [-] simonsarris|6 years ago|reply
Even the worst IPCC projections don't speak of anything remotely like humanity being wiped out within 15 years. Panic does not jump start change nearly as much as it seems to jump start despair, bitterness, and contempt for anyone with doubts, which apparently now includes people who do not think we are doomed.
These things that are very orthogonal, or in the way of, solving any actual hard problems that lie ahead of us.
[+] [-] standardUser|6 years ago|reply
Even trying to devise a way to guarantee that humans go extinct seems like an almost impossible thought exercise. How do you exterminate 7 billion people spread over ~57 million square miles of land?
[+] [-] reilly3000|6 years ago|reply
People have fervently believed in apocalypses for thousands of years, in at least ever other generation. The fact of the matter is that we are evolved from people that survived by exterminating other people groups. We have deep genetic memories of actual apocalypse, from tribes to nations. We are evolved to anticipate war and destruction- and adapt.
I believe that most people don't actually believe in 100% extinction of humans; they believe that there will be a relatively few amount of survivors, and hope to be among them.
[+] [-] lacker|6 years ago|reply
Over the next 10-15 years, 29% of all voters believe it is at least somewhat likely that the earth will become uninhabitable and humanity will be wiped out.
I don't think 29% of voters actually believe this. I think that nowadays, people frequently answer polls according to the emotional stance they would like to support, rather than the side of it they view to be factually correct.
[+] [-] martythemaniak|6 years ago|reply
The practice of selling indulgences was the target of Martin Luther's theses, that is the church would preach Original Sin, fire-and-brimstone, etc, the offer convenient ways to purchase your way out of this terribleness. Authors like her preach a doomsday fire-and-brimstone of their own and very conveniently offer absolution by buying her books, implementing her views as laws (see Leap Manifesto in Canada) etc.
I mean, I'm a pretty firm believer in taking a strong course towards a carbon-free future, but I don't think whipping up such a fear frenzy will turn out well.
[+] [-] excessive|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wgerard|6 years ago|reply
See also: Ozone holes, Y2K, etc.
[+] [-] nguoi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnm1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KoftaBob|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joefourier|6 years ago|reply
Even then, a small percentage can always survive in closed-loop habitats shielded from the outside world, ala Biosphere 2.0.
[+] [-] wolco|6 years ago|reply
What ends up happening is in 15 years nothing happens and these people get more jaded.
[+] [-] metabagel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|6 years ago|reply
Don't believe this data at all.
[+] [-] danschumann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Symmetry|6 years ago|reply
Nuclear war probably won't wipe out humanity either. Lots and lots of people would die in the countries involved and a few hundred miles downwind of the fallout but other locations would probably only see increased cancer rates. I say probably because while it looks like fears of nuclear winter were probably oversold there's still a fair chance that they weren't and we'd be looking at 5 years with no plant growth after a nuclear exchange. In which case, hey, there's this charity called ALLFED[1] working on how to feed people in the event of a nuclear winter or meteor impact or supervolcano eruption causes a global years long winter. Things like how to operationalize turning dead trees into edible mushrooms at a huge scale.
[1]https://allfed.info
[+] [-] umanwizard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|6 years ago|reply
I can imagine that we have set the feedback cycles in motion that will make Florida uninhabitable. But I fail to imagine how we might make Germany uninhabitable within 150 years (small coast completely covered by costal defenses, most of the country over 200m above sea level, well equiped for snow so a local ice age could be managed, fairly far north so warming isn't a major threat to agriculture). Even if we managed to make that uninhabitable we could just move to Siberia.
[+] [-] zzzcpan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] henryw|6 years ago|reply
1. https://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/37.5341/-122.3201?show=sa...
2. https://riskfinder.climatecentral.org/state/california.us?co...
[+] [-] man_in_agharta|6 years ago|reply
Conflating 'catastrophic climate change' (ie. more thousand year floods) and 'apocalyptic climate change' (ie. a big flood will kill us all!) muddies the water and lends ammunition to climate deniers.
Even nuclear war would likely leave a few stragglers to rebuild some semblance of society that worships a manna-giving snack machine.
[+] [-] austincheney|6 years ago|reply
If people really believe humanity will be wiped out in 15 years and yet still concern themselves with their checking accounts and sense of fashion I would really wonder if there is some kind of mental health illness at play.
[+] [-] Peckingjay|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply