So your solution is to simply do nothing. It might offend some voters’ sense of entitlement. That things aren’t the same as they were 30 years ago.

We could do it the hard way. When ocean levels rise the coastal house market will collapse. Water will become scarce as aquifers get spoiled by salt. And climate patterns are certainly changing. Places that used to get an abundance of rain are already facing a drought. But some douchebag in a bro-dozer is certainly sticking it to the rich.

My apologies for going off track, but your last statement reminds me of how "The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy" begins.

> So your solution is to simply do nothing.

I never said that. I said implementing extreme solutions like a 95% cut to everyone's carbon footprint are a terrible idea.

Also we are most likely talking about like a 0.5-2 ft rise maybe over the next 30 years. That is not exactly a "day after tomorrow" panic situation. The coastal real estate economy can deflate over 30 years.

It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action. So your arguments about economic hardship and the associated problems are (if valid) really arguments for taking more drastic action against the problem.

> It seems to be quite well established that not dealing with climate change is going to be significantly more expensive than taking preventative action.

Over what time period though? Projections are all over the place, and it is basically impossible to predict where our technology will be 20 years from now. Maybe moderate interdiction now on our part will stave off the worst of it until we discover technologies that will get us out of this jam.

We haven't discovered any major technologies in the last 20 years that would make a significant difference; what makes you think the next 20 years would be any different?

I'm confident we will make some gains in things like lower power consumption and better efficiency with renewables, but we're coming up against some hard physical limits; plus we are finding more toys all the time that demand more energy.

The best chance of finding technological solutions is to pour money into researching clean technologies, which is not something I would be against, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

Hoping for a technological solution in the future is a bit like spending all your money and taking out loans you are unable to pay in the uncertain hope of a windfall in the future.

It doesn't have to be this way. We utilize automation and slave-like labor to produce disposal junk.

It would be much better if via policy we encourage repairs, and levy a cost on packaging of any kind.

Then the market will sort itself out and there will be work in form of a robust secondary market.

That's a big problem for sure. Unfortunately, the collapse we'll get if we do not rapidly transition to a sustainable economy is likely to be much, much worse. But your point is a good one - how do we manage an orderly transition to a sustainable steady-state* economy when the changes needed to do so in the time we have are likely to be so drastic, they will cause a collapse of any social system that tries to make them?

*We can probably eke out some more economic growth while cutting resource consumption, but sooner or later continued growth and finite resources become an impossibility. If nothing else, we'll eventually generate too much waste heat from energy production.

If we all suffocate because the phytoplankton died off, I’m sure the history books will note that we freely voted for mass suicide.

There are enough sadists that I wouldn’t rule out a homicide yet.

In the most practical terms, wouldn’t a first-world genocide be good* for the environment? I mean, the problem is us, right?

*I am not personally endorsing genocide.

Yes, world-wide genocide would be amazing for the environment.