They are. Clean energy mandates are being passed in many states; climate change and the Green New Deal is a front and center topic in the Democratic presidential primary race; the Paris Climate Agreement passed on a global scale; China is electrifying transportation and building as much solar, wind, and nuclear as fast a possible; India is phasing out coal as fast a possible; and on and on.
A person as an individual isn't changing their behavior to a large extent, but people in aggregate are.
> And that is what causes climate change.
No, it's not. Again, climate change is caused by injecting sequestered carbon into the carbon cycle. Previously, it just so happened that the act of driving your SUV around did exactly that. However, more and more that's not true. As we electrify transportation and clean the grid, the act of driving around becomes less and less what causes climate change.
> We don't have time to develop all that technology
We already have the technology, it's just a matter of deploying it. Every auto manufacturer is releasing major electric models by next year. Clean energy generation in the U.S. is set to surpass coal generation this year. China is electrifying transportation and switching to clean energy (including nuclear) as fast as possible. India is building more solar than ever and accelerating that deployment.
As I'm sure you've seen, my favorite climate change joke is, "They say we won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!"
Climate change is my generation's great challenge. If we lose, we die. So, many of us are fighting with everything we have. Some are trying to get people to change behavior, some are trying to make drop-in replacements. But none of us are giving up. It sounds like you've already given up.
FYI, HN is limiting reply depth, so I doubt I can reply more. Please email me back if you can.
Well, Purdue Pharma is also only giving people what they want. In and of itself, that doesn't mean much.
Exxon is doing significantly more than just giving people what they want [1], as do many (most?) of the big dinosaurs of the established industries that currently make the world go round. Do we need to go into the vast efforts at influencing the public that such entities expend in order to maintain their domination and wealth? You have vastly more expertise on this subject, so I wouldn't be able to tell you anything new.
The world does need to advance, but advance to where? Thermodynamically, it must slow down or it will overheat and crash into the ceiling.
> Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.
You don't know that, and it's a false dilemma anyway. People change their lifestyles all the time in response to their economic environment and incentives, as they have been doing throughout history.
I tend to listen more to the experts when they say something is possible. When they tell me in no uncertain terms that a very important problem has no solution, I listen more to the kids.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/23/climate/exxon-global-warm...
We have the research now, but people aren't changing their behavior.
> I'm very confused what point you're trying to make here. That systems or not optimizing for environmental impact? Of course they aren't. They are optimizing based on the incentives they are following. People move to suburbs and drive SUVs to feel safer and more wealthy. People move to the sunbelt because the winter sucks. People buy disposable clothes and stuff is shipped from China because it's cheaper to do so. It's really expensive to grow produce in Maryland, so you ship it from California.
And that is what causes climate change. Exxon is just giving people what they want. The blame rests with people who want a lifestyle that's incompatible with avoiding climate change, not the companies that simply are feeding consumer demand.
> All they do is replace the power that powers the factory and the fuel that is used to ship it to you with sources that don't add carbon the carbon cycle. So that when you are living your life in your disposable shirt and eating your California avocados, you're not contributing to climate change anymore.
We don't have time to develop all that technology: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-the-ipcc-1-5c-repor.... According to new, revised estimates, having a 50/50 chance of limiting tempeature increaes to 1.5C leaves us with 14 years of carbon emissions at current levels. After which point the world economy has to hit zero carbon emissions. Meanwhile, carbon emissions are still going up: https://www.climatechangenews.com/files/2017/03/238eb46742db.... From 2000-2015, China added an amount of CO2 output that exceeds the entire US output. China continues to grow, while India is approaching where China was before 2000 and may have a similarly explosive growth in CO2 emissions in the next two decades.
Not only is there no solution that allows us to keep living the way we are living while averting climate change. There never was. Even if we had listened to the hippies and cut U.S. emissions by half starting in the 1960s, China's growth alone would have completely wiped out that savings multiple times over.