People making individual efforts like that is about as useful as praying when it comes to preventing tragedy of the commons scenarios.

So sure, people are not going to be perfect immediately, but there's no doubt that even the non-vegetarians are far more aware of these issues due to the number of vegetarians around them. Meanwhile, the environmentally-friendly parties in my country and the surrounding ones have been growing in popularity.

Besides, I'm not quite sure how you think people are going to be pushing for drastic changes if every step towards that actually is a step away from it. Would actively dumping toxic waste in our rivers be better?

For change to happen, there needs to be a widespread push for it, and that widespread push isn't going to happen unless awareness spreads. Sure, it might already be too late for that push to make a difference, but about not doing anything we can at least be sure that it will not make a difference.

However, I think that the second order effects need to be considered. As I mentioned in another post, sometimes you doing a thing makes it easier for others to do a thing, until a critical mass brings about a major change in state. For example, buying a fuel efficient vehicle encourages manufacturers to produce them. Eating and asking for vegetarian options encourages them to be offered, making it easier to become a vegetarian without being a stick in the mud. It can also change norms. Sometimes people won't do a thing because they don't want to go against norms. Like a guy out with his buddies ordering a burger instead of the salad he actually might prefer.

Also, if a wealthy person cannot justify extra insulation to prevent energy waste, i sure don’t expect a poorer person to ever take the idea seeiously.

I agree.

"It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC report came out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now, and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emissions by half over the next decade, eliminate them entirely by 2050; if the species cuts its meat and dairy consumption by 90%; if we invent new unicorn technologies for sucking carbon back out of the atmosphere (or scale up extant prototype tech by a factor of two million in two years) — if we commit to these and other equally Herculean tasks, then we might just barely be able to keep global temperature from rising more than 1.5°C.[1] We’ll only lose 70-90% of the word’s remaining coral reefs (which are already down by about 50%, let’s not forget). Only 350 million more urban dwellers will be exposed to severe drought and “deadly heat” events. Only 130-140 million will be inundated. Global fire frequency will only increase by 38%. Fish stocks in low latitudes will be irreparably hammered, but it might be possible to save the higher-latitude populations. We’ll only lose a third of the permafrost. You get the idea.

We have twelve years to show results.

If we don’t pull all these things off— if, for example, we only succeed in meeting the flaccid 2°C aspirations of the Paris Accords— then we lose all the coral. We lose the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Shelf (not that it isn’t already circling the bowl, of course). Twice as many people suffer “aggravated water scarcity” than at 1.5°C; 170% more of the population deals with fluvial flooding. The increase in global wildfire frequency passes 60% and keeps going. Marine fisheries crash pole to pole. The number of species that loses at least half their traditional habitat is 2-3 times higher than would have been the case at 1.5°C. It goes on." [1]

(Edit) Yet in my experience nobody is talking about this. A few weeks ago the IPCC told us we have a gun to our head and a decade to solve the problem. A few days ago we learned that "population sizes of wildlife decreased by 60% globally between 1970 and 2014" [2]. And now we're on to the next thing and everyone is walking around like things are normal. People should be focussed on this and nothing else, but they're not.

And also: how exactly do I explain to my children that the world they're growing-up in is in a dire state and soon may not even be able to support anything like a normal life for them? Ideas anyone?

[1] The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC, by Peter Watts https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433

[2] https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/living-planet-report-2018

They'll think it's normal, which is the real tragedy, but that's been happening for generations already. Your idea of normal is not as rich as your ancestors'. Wasn't North America abundant with wildlife when the Europeans arrived?

Tangential xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1321/

I'm not sure what you mean. I consider my life to be substantially richer than my ancestor's lives. I live in Europe, not North Americal, but yes there was more wildlife around a couple of centuries ago. It would be nice to have that again, but i'd settle for something like the current fairly poor situation it it meant that my kids and their contemporaries don't have to risk being made into refugees by climate change, or face a future of water/food/energy shortages, failed states and frustrated potential.

No we don't. Global warming is a self-reinforcing effect. So there's no point to slowing down emissions. No point at all. Even if you get it to zero, the resulting concentrations will still accelerate into the right. Even if you get it negative at the same rate we're producing it today (which would eliminate all human co2 contributions EVER in ~60 years) would do nothing but delay.

So why bother ? This avenue is closed, and useless.

We glued a grenade to our hand, and pulled the pin. Messing around trying to insert the pin back in provides nothing but comic relief. We need to adapt. To limit the damage, and fix things.

As you say, only direct geoengineering can work. On the plus side: doesn't require global cooperation. On the downside: that'll make someone clearly directly responsible for the (MUCH worse) effects global cooling will have, especially locally ... so it's extremely incompatible with how current green parties think and "influence policy".

Whereas the current "complain and do nothing but token efforts" is very good at getting constant attention, votes and money. But only if the problem keeps getting worse.

So just like everyone they accuse, green and leftist parties themselves are dependent on global warming happening and getting worse. Maybe that, too, is a reason why we have nothing but token efforts. Also, they would have to admit that "mother nature"/gaia is definitely NOT going to save our ass, even if we stop polluting.

Additionally, Gaia, so to speak, has already decided to inflict global warming on us, as a punishment or just because, take your pick, effectively for what humanity did at the end of the 19th (not 20th) century. So we need to inflict further damage on the ecosystem artificially controlling the temperature to prevent worse. But that'll futher destroy habitats, and on a much larger scale than what we've seen so far.

Not eating meat, capturing co2, lab-grown meat, even nuclear power ... just can't work. Only geoengineering can work.

Doing nothing but solar radiation management has serious downsides: it does nothing for ocean acidification, and if you ever stop pumping out that sulfur dioxide or whatever, all that pent-up warming hits you at once. I see it as a temporary emergency measure, to head off heat-driven feedback effects.

This right here sums up about 97% of the entire issue. People look at the scale of problem, figure they can't make "a real difference" and use that as justification for continuing on with business as usual. It boils down to "The pain and nuisance of me personally taking fewer airplane trips, walking more or eating less meat (or whatever) far outweighs in my mind the benefit to The World of me inconveniencing myself. So Why Bother?"

And, conveniently, it's an argument that frames itself in a way that is nigh impossible to argue with.

Taxes can always be repealed, but I’d like to see us start giving a shit before we assume this won’t work, because whatever we are doing now doesn’t work!

> We need to adapt. To limit the damage, and fix things.

The first contributes to the second.

The implied corollary is of course that if we slow down emissions global warming will stop. And it won't. It will slow down, but not stop. Not even if we get net emissions to zero.

Deploying renewable energy generators is just so much fast and more flexible, and demolition (either controlled or uncontrolled) isn't such a risk as with a nuclear power plant.

Stopping our existing coal power plants while cutting down on energy consumption; Sure, it's an educational problem but during WWII people collected scrap metal for the war effort.

That's great as part of a diverse grid but some areas don't have hydro/geothermal, so if those places want to go entirely carbon-free without nuclear we need to rely entirely on wind/solar/battery. That means, at a minimum, we need to get through a windless night.

So let's say about 12 hours. For 12 GWh we'd need 12,000/129=93 Tesla-scale plants, costing $8.3 billion. That's just for minimum storage, not including the wind turbines and solar panels.

We have to take the current cost of wind/solar and add another 50% or so, since we need to generate enough to fill the storage, not just meet current needs during the day. Then we need to overbuild even more, because on a cloudy day we only get about half as much energy out of our solar panels. Another issue is the sheer amount of lithium and cobalt you'd need; we're pushing the limits already, and we'll need a lot more for electric cars.

At this point you're probably thinking long-distance transmission to collect wind power from a wide area, but that's also expensive. More importantly, it's politically difficult and time-consuming to get the land rights.

By comparison, construction cost for modern conventional nuclear plants is under $8 billion/GW: http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as...

Of course, there are emerging technologies to help with all of this. Wind, solar, and batteries are all getting cheaper, and batteries using other raw materials are being developed.

But if we're going to look to future technologies, let's do that with nuclear as well. Molten salt reactors look way cheaper than conventional reactors, and fast reactors can eat nuclear waste. At least half a dozen startup companies are working on molten salt reactors, several are working on fast reactors, and Russia has two commercial fast reactors on their grid right now.

Also note that we need all of the above in place within the next 10-15 years.

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

Honestly, we're just going to keep sleepwalking into catastrophe.

Hence the anti-refugee, anti-immigrant talk -- might as well start early and get people in the mindset to deal harshly with mass migration caused by climate change.

Hence the continued military build-up and the consolidation of armed forces in hot-zones (multiple meanings to 'hot')

Hence the rise of protectionism (free trade won't mean much in a climate crisis world anyways)

Hence the rise of nationalism (what's "mine" is mine)

There are too many advantages to being the last to do anything, and it's too late to do anything without a major revolution or civil war. The whole world economy goes into a tailspin over a relatively minor increase in the barrel price of oil -- imagine what it will do if oil goes up by 1000%, which is what it would need to do to stop its rampant consumption...

I love my kids, but sometimes wish I hadn't had any.

The problem of climate change is just too big and happening over too long a timescale for us to address. None of our personal or political systems are evolved to deal with it.

That said, don't kid yourself for a minute that the people with large amounts of capital don't meet and discuss these things amongst themselves. They have both public-facing institutions (political parties, etc.) and private ones for this purpose.

BREAKING NEWS: Rich guys also hope their families survive the water wars.

Not sure what/why we're arguing about here.

Carbon pricing is what really is going to set things in motion on a large scale.