I don't think you're wrong to be cynical about tackling this problem but you should be honest about what reducing emissions means to billions of people that are just now coming into the industrial age.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...
[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
Take a look at "China: Consumption-based accounting: how do emissions compare when we adjust for trade?"
> Annual consumption-based emissions are domestic emissions adjusted for trade. If a country imports goods the CO₂ emissions needed to produce such goods are added to its domestic emissions; if it exports goods then this is subtracted.
2018 had 8.96 bn carbon tons in consumption out of a totla of 9.96 bn total tons (~90% consumption)
The biggest amount of greenhouse gasses that china emits is from coal power plants. Naturally, figuring out what amount of electricity was used in the production of the exported goods is basically impossible, which is why its considered consumption in their data.
I'm sure the spirit of it is still correct (that most of their co2 emissions are for internal products/usage), but its hard to take that conclusion at face value when they didn't even mention the caveat that they ignore the by far biggest contributor of their emissions and consider it consumption by default.
We have moved the problem around, but we are not actually getting around to living differently.
The US's emissions per capita is more than 3 times the worldwide average. So we still need to cut our emissions by a factor of 3 just to be average. But considering we are the richest country in the world, I think it's reasonable we attempt to display some leadership by having below average emissions. And that's not even mentioning that the fact that of course current worldwide emissions per capita are far too high, so we really need to cut even more.
Meanwhile, China's emission per capita are roughly half that of the US.
Even considering the the meager progress made by the US in the past decades to reduce emissions, we are still the 4th most emitting nation per capita.
This is the whole pitch of the green movement. Reduce emissions at whatever cost, they completely miss the point that we (the humans on this planet) dont know how to do this. Its not about what we should do its about figuring out how and until we know how there is not much point in making peoples life harder and make them feel bad for doing what they have to do. Or make placebo progress like biofuel and other nonsense.
The earth overshoot day in 2021 is on July 29. Its not hard to figure out that we are nowhere near sustainable and all the proposed cuts and implemented policies did so far is insignificantly reduce the GROWTH of global emissions.
We need real solutions, technological progress of the magnitude of the last 100 years or something like that to make any relevant difference. Not telling people how bad they are for the environment and how they can feel better by doing mostly useless stuff like carefully separating trash for the recycling-fraud industry.
It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute. Nor would it take a tech breakthrough for the US government to stop giving fossil fuel companies $20b/year in tax credits and subsidies. Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels. If we can spend $2 trillion plus in middle eastern wars of dubious value, surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries.
No new tech is needed. A modicum of will is all that is required.
So what? Emissions are global and rising especially in the places where most people live (Asia). If emission of the whole USA would be zero from today on, global emission would keep growing. At the current rate it would only take a few years for the rest of the world additional emission to replace the whole USA. Needless to to say that zero emission is only a thought experiment. But if this better-than-best-case-scenario can only buy us 10 years or so maybe we should not focus on this?
If the average human causes half the emission of the US people then that is still more than the planet can sustain so why do we focus on the small portion of people who use the most? We should focus on finding a solutions that cuts emission for all. Its not hard to figure out that cutting emissions from all people in halve would have far more benefit than bring the US peoples emission down to the world average or even lower. It intuitively makes sense to reduce emission where it seems the highest but if you look a the whole picture it will not have the desired effect.
>It doesn't take ground breaking technology for Americans to stop driving Hummers on their office commute.
This is exactly what I meant in my original post. The whole green movement is about cutting emission at all cost. Regardless of the fact that removing hummers from Americans or even all cars that use above average fuel would do absolutely nothing on a global scale. Especially not if they have to be replaced by newly build cars.
The whole ideas that us middle-class and rich people who could afford to reduce their emissions should be the once who take the cut is completely absurd. Yes they probably could but would probably crash the global economy if they did and beside that it would not matter at all. The global emissions are not cased by luxury products and people with high emission hobbies like driving a sport car.
> Nor any new tech for sunny regions to cover building roofs with solar panels.....surely we buy a some solar panels and batteries.
It would takes 20-30 years and it would cause and insane amount of emissions to produce solar panels and batteries in these quantities that it would reduce significant emissions. In the same time the rest of the worlds additional emissions would at least double what the USA would reduce. especially if most of the electronics that the USA would need is produces somewhere else and the processing steps that case the most emissions would likely be done outside of the USA.
The reality is we dont know how to reduce global emissions in a significant way (unless you include "solutions" that would directly or indirectly cause the death of millions of people or otherwise would be ethically not okay). We waste time by doing green placebo-solutions rather than putting all the resources we still have into finding real solutions.
Isn't that part of the point? If the US has maintained per capita emission levels that would be ruinous if the rest of the world joined us at, can you really say "we" are done with anything?
OP listed a bunch of specific things, moderate efficiencies and switching to natural gas are great but not nearly sufficient.
I don't see your point refereeing the past emissions of the US as some kind of moral victory against the west, but regardless of what the west does, the math does not work without those countries taking action. We can cut emissions to 0 and that'll likely buy a decade or so with the current growth rate of China. So you're focusing your energy in the wrong place
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...
In fact, the EU is in the process of doing this right now, and China is definitely reacting to it (not happy, but it seems like the Chinese government is looking toward expanding their existing policies to cover more industries in an attempt to avoid the EU border adjustment).
Another way to look at it is that given how much the USA has already contributed to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, China would need to continue at their current levels for another 30 or so years before they catch up with us -- and that's with about 4x the population.
I understand that that argument may not be persuasive to some, though, because a lot of the manufacturing and technological development that took place in the USA over that time benefited many countries. And a lot of those emissions took place prior to the wide knowledge of how serious climate change is.
So I'd really say that we should aim for net zero emissions because it's the right thing to do. Everyone has to do it, and it's not going to happen if we all stand around waiting for someone else to go first. There is a pretty massive amount of emissions cutting we could do without much effort at all, and if the rest is spread out over a number of years, the cost will be very small, and will have a lot of benefits to people's health. (Climate change is not the only negative externality of burning fossil fuels by a long shot.)
The place to start is a carbon tax. I highly recommend that everyone who cares about climate change call congress (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/call-your-representative-ab...) and ask them to support a carbon tax.
We need to articulate the future, not wax poetically toward some vague economic abstractions. Unless we can articulate some hopeful answer to this question, nothing consequential will change. People really do not want to live as subsistence farmers.
For one, net zero houses look pretty comfortable:
* https://www.chba.ca/CHBA/BuyingNew/Net-Zero-Homes.aspx
If you go further toward "passive house" you can have 5000 sq. ft. (500 sq. m.) of living area and only need 1500W (a hairdryer) to heat it:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vul4vMFdkA
Residential energy use accounts for roughly 20% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States:
* https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19122
IMHO there's still plenty of low-hanging fruit in just efficiencies that can be plucked before lifestyle sacrifices would need to be made.
The number of Passivhauser in the US is apparently in the thousands. What would it take to scale this up to 100-1000 times? What would it take to change the status from luxury good to mass adoption?
If it was all upside, the established players, in this case home builders, would have already incorporated it to gain a competitive advantage.
I am guessing there are downsides such as cost of materials, expertise, mold, or something that keeps this from being an economical solution.
Aiming for something that can be net zero is probably more practical: building stringently up to a certain point, and then throw some PV panels to offset whatever expected energy use is remaining.
Per capita emissions for the US: 15.52 tons
Per capita emissions for India: 1.91
US has about eight times the per capita emission of India, double that of China(which makes a lot of things for the US) and somehow India and China are to blame and the US deserves no blame, even given all its riches and having the means to reduce emissions?
And you think that’s OK?
I'm personally completely in favor of import tariffs on goods manufactured abroad with dirty energy and immigration quotas on nationals from countries that have decided not to control their emissions.
The simplest answer is that we just need to prepare for a hotter world. This article points out that there will be "no safe place". Okay, we won't have a safe place. We will need to do the best we can to minimize natural disasters and at the same time try to figure out political and technological solutions to limiting climate change.
There never was a safe place.
Nothing much may be happening around Yellowstone, but people speculate it might some day pretty much trash the whole continent if not the world.
People in the midwest don't worry about earthquakes much but New Madrid showed it is possible and could be really bad.
In the northeast, we're a long way from where most tornadoes are, but it can happen here, I've seen evidence.
Nobody's particularly worried about something like Fukushima in the US, but there are quite a few nuclear reactors all over the place. We tend to assume the Atlantic isn't going to have a tsunami, I guess. Is that certain?
In Europe, they assume there's not going to be a devastating volcano eruption, but you know, there's the historical records of Pompeii and so on.
Nobody saw Tunguska and Chelyabinsk coming, something like that could happen at any moment over a major city.
Preparing for a hotter world is nice, but what I am hoping is that nations (and the green movement) will realize that all strategies need to be deployed and it doesn't matter if one strategy feels like it is being counter productive to the values of an other. Some people can focus on replacing meat with vegetarian options, other on ecological meat, some on reducing factory farming in favor of local small scale production, and some on low carbon meat like shell fish. Let some build nuclear power plants, other renewable energy and battery. Focus on building bike infrastructure, rail system and electrify all parts of the transport system.
And frankly lining things up so my fam and I can live really lean. Tough times ahead.
Might be 5 years, decade, maybe two, but tough times are coming.
The scale and latency in all this point to us having past the time when we could really mitigate, amd the scale means humans taking it hard a few times before realizing a big effort makes sense.
I would say it’s human nature. We, humans, learn by making mistakes. There may be small differences among countries in the way we address, let’s say, climate change (e.g., Amsterdam is full of people riding bikes while Madrid is not), but at the end we all behave the same, whether in NY, Athens, or Santiago: we, as a world-wide society, only care about our immediate future, about our needs right now. The future? Well, let’s talk about that tomorrow. Countless of civilizations have disappeared (or transformed) due to this very short-term thinking way of doing things. We may disappear (or transform) as well.
I don’t think that’s true, although you address a similar point of mine later. We often make the same mistakes over and over again. There’s a reason why we say history repeats itself.
What humans really do is react to mistakes and other events based on consequences of our actions. This reactiveness has gotten us into this mess. We often view intelligence as being able to predict things, but as a society and species, we’re absolutely awful at prevention and conservation. We’re excellent at consumption.
We build social infrastructure that is incredibly resistant to change by design to protect ourselves and provide stability - but climate change is demanding massive changes which we are ill equipped to deal with politically.
Traditionally we solve these moments in history with revolution to demand change - but climate change is happening too slowly for complacent human mindsets to react that way at a scale that it requires as a crisis.
It is quite horrifying watching it play out in slow motion. This will not end well.
Alas, let's not pat ourselves on the back just yet. USA accounts for 15% of global emissions. Agriculture and transportation make 14% and 24%, together 48%. Half of that is 24%. 24% of 15% is 3.6% of global emissions. On the flip side:
* 96.4 of the emissions continue.
* Global emissions increased 10% since 2010, 3x more than what we saved with great (relative) sacrifice.
We may push the looming horizon a decade or two, but we won't stop the process, forget about reverting it. As the so called third world countries are moving out of poverty, aka undergoing a rapid industrialization process, emissions are bound to raise irrespective of what the so called first world countries do, due to sheer population mass. Consider the fundamental emissions equation:
TotalEmissions = WorldArea * PopulationDensity * PerCapitaEmissions
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Edit: The estimated range for global emissions to maintain only a 1.5C growth has a range of 22-31 GtCO2e. Assuming emissions at the rate of France of about 5tCO2 / capita, the globally industrialized world of 2050 with 10B people will have global emissions of 50GtCO2, or 75GtCO2e. That is 3x more than Earth can sustain. Going down the list of emissions per capita by country, we find Albania, Morocco or Colombia. What we need to make the numbers is a 10x decrease in income/wealth of US residents, not minor lifestyle adjustments.
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30798/...
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
We have two major technologies that allow for producing useful energy without producing much or any greenhouse gases: nuclear and solar. Wind and hydro are also on the table, but are more constrained by the environment.
We also have reasonably well developing technologies for meat-like protein production from plants (see e.g. the "impossible burger") and lab-grown meat. They are currently a bit expensive, but it's mostly the matter of investment.
Sadly, all that massive construction requires steel and concrete, which emit CO2 during production. Here comes carbon sequestration: we absolutely have technologies to quickly grow massive amounts of trees, cut them, and put them to use either as a long-term construction material, or just burn the hydrogen out of them to produce energy, and bury the carbon in the empty coal mines, playing back the carboniferous epoch process.
This all does not require colossal amounts of novel science or sci-fi technological breakthroughs. It does require though that petrol cars and trucks get steadily replaced with electric, coal mining all but stopped (we need carbon for steel production), oil pumping severely limited (we still need jet fuel until we can synthesize enough), coal-fired plants demolished or turned into nuclear plants. It requires massive construction of solar, wind, and nuclear (gasp!) electric generation, and massive construction of battery capacity to make solar practical for base load. It requires shutting off most of beef production, and replacing it with fish and shrimp farming, lab-grown meat, and plant-based pseudo-meat; red meat should become a luxury like salmon roe or caviar.
The obvious problem is that most people would totally not cooperate if they'd have to quickly and radically change their way of life, their idea of what prosperity looks like (bye grilling beef over coals!), and their jobs (coal industry? oil industry? bad luck!). Can this be overcome? Either most of the Earth's population, across national, political, and religious divisions would willingly make such a change, or an planet-scale dictatorship would emerge and consistently and efficiently pursue the goals of climate change reversal, while not severely affecting productivity. I see both scenarios utterly unrealistic :(
So, buy that realty next to a major northern river 1000ft above sea level. In a century it will have the best climate Earth can offer.
B. The level of cuts required to bring the world to sustainable emissions level, combined with global population growth and global equity, would require that everybody to live with under 1.7t/year CO2 emissions by 2050. This is the level of Albania, Colombia or Morocco, complete political dead end on both left and right.
The crux of the problem is that there are no solutions. Even the 'we should do something about it' crowd is utterly incapable in articulating the depth of the cuts needed avert disaster, or articulate the life of the average American after such cuts. Hint: the Great Depression would be 'the good times' in comparison.
I'm not saying we can fix it, I'm a nihilist at this point, I'm saying we could have fixed it 15 years ago.
A. That will not fix the global problem, as US population is too small. Even if we were to completely shut down energy production in the US, the rest of the world would build enough power plants to cover for it and then some in less than 20 years. Industrialization of 10 billion people (3% in the US) is not pretty.
B. It is unclear what to concretely do in the US to significantly cut emissions. To simplify, the right doesn't want to hear about it, and the left is content with promoting minor inconsequential Potemkiniads.
We never had a chance to fix the problem, not with 10 billion people yearning an escape from poverty.
Americans use 2 trillion gallons of water per year ... for lawns. Nice green lawns. In the desert, in the south, in the north, between highways, friggen' lawns everywhere. No consideration for grasses that naturally enjoy the local environment. Only a perfect British green lawn will do. Nature be damned!
By comparison, America uses only 3 trillion gallons of water for all of agriculture.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-stupid-obsession-lawns/
A friend of mine did that sometime back. He just did a stone and ground cover, low maintenance yard. Was kind of awesome. City went full bat shit. Circle the yard that is different and excise the cancer! Needs to be grass, not a garden, not stones, just grass.
It is crazy.
The Mississippi River discharges 16800 cubic meters per second of water, which is 530 billion cubic meters per year. In medieval units, that's 140 trillion gallons of water per year.
You're too easily impressed and have no sense of proportion, making it easy for dishonest people to manipulate your emotions. Humans are doing massive environmental damage, but human water use for lawns is insignificant.
Now get the hell off my friggen lawn.
The context for the comment was that lawns consume water on a scale comparable to all domestic agricultural irrigation, or half of all the domestic reticulated water supply, and it’s not doing much beyond aesthetics. That is significant use of a precious resource by any measure, and a wasteful one by most people’s. If the amount of water in Lake Superior or the Mississippi were relevant to the relatively small water consumption for domestic use and agriculture, why would anyone be bothered about droughts? Just send in the barges!
Whether lawns are environmentally ruinous by dint of sucking up that much drinking water is a different argument. New builds clearing woodlands in order to have more acreage and monoculture lawns displacing native species / food webs are problems, but there’s certainly worse things you could do with an existing yard.
No, these three numbers are related in that they express volumes of fresh water consumed per year for particular uses in the United States. The Mississippi River is dumping 16.8 megaliters per second of freshwater into the ocean. In that context, it's totally inconsequential if people in the US spray 0.2 megaliters per second of freshwater onto their lawns.
> That is significant use of a precious resource by any measure
No, it is not.
> aesthetics. ... a wasteful [use] by most people’s [measure].
Beautifying our surroundings is not a wasteful use of resources by most people's measure; if it were, the mandatory lawn ordinances people are (rightly) decrying in this thread wouldn't have been voted in. We have seen what the results look like when people consider aesthetics "wasteful": Pruitt-Igoe, prisons, concentration camps, Soviet housing blocks, American high schools, battleships, the Pentagon, the bulldozing of forests and mountains to build parking lots. Humans do not flourish in these environments.
Instead, let us aspire to consider things wasteful that cannot be aesthetically justified!
The broader cultural context is, I think, that this lamentation of other people watering their lawns stems from the same misguided Judeo-Christian asceticism that led medieval hermits to never bathe and wear hairshirts, equating happiness, enjoyment, and comfort with sin, self-indulgence, and dissolution. Sometimes you see people from Judeo-Christian traditions attempting to justify such concepts by appropriating Buddhism, apparently unaware of the profound attention to aesthetics easily observable in any Buddhist temple or monastery.
This ascetisism has been twisted into a simplistic zero-sum pseudo-environmentalism—sometimes coupled with a feigned charity toward the poor—that equates material wealth with environmental destruction and impoverishment of others, and so seeks to ameliorate California's periodic droughts with showerhead flow restrictors and more restrictive central lawn planning.
> If the amount of water in Lake Superior or the Mississippi were relevant to the relatively small water consumption for domestic use and agriculture, why would anyone be bothered about droughts?
Probably because you're not building enough canals and pipelines to transport freshwater from the Mississippi (and other rivers) to US agricultural lands. Get on it! A lot of those rivers are already full of fertilizer! Also, it's a problem when half of California catches on fire, even if nobody's almonds burn.
If you want to make a difference, clean energy is the path to follow. That, and carbon capture so we don't spend the rest of our lives in a worsening situation.
And while I do think habits both have to change and will be forced to change — I do think it's useful to accept that we have to build our world and our environment to our behavioral tendencies. It's easy to look back cynically and say, I wish we'd never done X, or Y, or Z. The reality now though is this massive economic engine, which has lifted people out of poverty and created opportunity -- polluting in its current form though it may be -- might be the thing that saves us and helps us escape velocity. Technology can help us adapt and solve this. I know it's easy to live the cynicism but I promise you, challenging though it may be, we need each other and to believe in possibility more than ever if we're going to pull this off.
Well, yes! I agree. However, when I look around at the movers and shakers capable of the big decisions that lead to big efforts, I do not get the sense I am needed as much as I could potentially be used.
It cost a ton to bootstrap us onto our current technology.
It will cost a ton more to transition to other energy.
For the most part, we have the tech we need. Better will come too, but big costs are not sexy, though the labor to accomplish these things would and could elevate many into a better life. Ordinary people, when presented with a plan, like build this stuff so we can live better this way, leave something livable for our kids... would be in. Large numbers of people need better jobs, and a future that one can look forward to.
What I don't see is the kind of thinking that gets us there. That kicks off the work we could have been doing for years.
loads of resources available
loads of brains
manpower
when people realize and decide, you can flip a lot in few time
it's just the usual society blur and inertia that made people like you unable to do more.. many people tried but you can't carry the world on your shoulder so most people resign
get ready
ps: in dense cities, whenever possible, use your bike; we should make viral vids for bike rallies or bike days, it's 100+ % benefits for everybody in a week
Literally, not worth it.
The attitude has been around since before tobacco and is commonly ascribed to Boomers. With justification. (Disclosure: I am one.)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge
My guess is no matter what we do we're over the limit, a reduction in one thing leads to an increase in another, and probably population reduction is the only solution.
As a species, our median per-capita pollution is okay. It's the mean per-capita pollution that's the issue.
How did you model it? I'm curious about the assumptions you made and how you came up with your conclusion.
I assumed all in-city transport was manual or electric (and hence covered by the solar panels), all trains and food transport was diesel (even though electric trains are realistic), that the roofs of the city were covered in 20% efficiency solar panels (at 0% loss, due to proximity), that all long-distance transport was done with cargo ships (no aeroplanes) and there was a tenth the shipping of what we've actually got.
The vast majority of the planet was completely untouched by my hypothetical civilisation. I know I missed out a lot of stuff (e.g. how goods get from ports to people and back), but I don't think my conclusion was that far out – especially since “tile the world with solar panels” isn't an efficient renewables strategy.
Pretending that urbanism is somehow remotely equivalent is naive at best.
What's more, is that we've forgotten that you don't need to build suburbs around cars. You can have pleasant suburbs with offices, shops, schools, and other non-residential buildings mixed into the neighborhood. Where people actually walk and cycle because the streets feel like they were made for it.
There's a massive gap between the population density of 60000 people per square mile you might find in an urban center, and the approximately 1,500 people per square mile you get in a typical suburb.
Consumers do care, but their choices are between bad and awful because the economics (structured by the extraction companies) stacks the deck against solutions.
Who is really to blame for the emissions for my flight to Turkey to sit on a beach even though I live 4 blocks from another (worse) beach. Under your view it would be Lufthansa or whoever sold them the fuel.
The absurdities of what's happening is literally the Sierra Club opposing density in San Francisco. The environmentalist are literally opposing density across California. Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Marin County, under the banner of "preservation," we're going to destroy the climate.
I just, i cannot believe this is happening. They same people who would hand wash a peanut butter jar, to recycle it, are the exact same people who are literally creating suburban cities designed for burning carbon.
Scoofy, I cannot overstate how much pure, cynical joy I feel after reading your rants here. Thank you for cutting through the bullshit; you're doing God's work.
This isn't hard to understand. The Sierra Club is made up of legitimate environmentalists, but they also care about their organization and their livelihoods, and many of the major donors to the Sierra Club are property owners in San Francisco (or Marin, or LA).
Property values are obviously negatively impacted by development / densification, and so to avoid alienating donors, for whom opposing development is the single most important economic issue, the Sierra Club is dutifully NIMBYist.
I can assure you the Sierra Club would be fine with densification in Africa or whatever.
There isn't any cause for shock. Given the incentives at play this is expected. How much financial suffering would you accept to put a dent in global warming? For most people it's not much.
The good news is, it's easy to predict that the Sierra Club is going to eventually lose on this issue. Property values are so high that many people are totally shut out of the property market and a political storm is gathering. Hopefully, by the time the dam breaks and real urbanization finally arrives on the West Coast, it's not too late to matter.
They are all driven by parking spaces and reducing peak traffic. It's absurd to see the very same people who lose their mind at the idea of America dropping out of the Paris Climate Accord, are exactly the same people who think we should impose minimum parking requirements on new buildings, block a bike share and safe bike infrastructure because the bike are ugly and take parking space away, and argue that BRT is terrible and will never work, because they won't use it.
I would imagine they are creating suburban cities designed for alternative means of transportation.
Not true [1]. This is true across economic strata, with real stagnation being the plague of our most destitute.
Sorry, but this stuff is a joke. Population control and non carbon based energy sources are the only things that can really make an impact.
Why would we waste time on population control, much less prioritize it?
What we need is a drastic reduction in emissions FAST. X0% less now buys a lot more time and has a much bigger effect than X0% in say 50 years when most of the damage is done.
Any means of population control that is not straight up genocide will take decades if not generations to make a real impact.
Long term planning should of course be a core part of our strategy, and whether population control is part of that or not is not my call to make. That being said, the next five to ten years are much, much more important, and my experience in these contexts has been that the population control argument tends to interfere with this more important conversation about actions to take right now.
What would help most in a shorter time frame is economic incentives to move away from fossil fuels. Carbon taxes, and most importantly changing where subsidies go in the first place would go a long way. More funding for research in relevant areas would, as well.
Before those and other things aren't well underway, there is really nothing to gain from bringing up population control every time the climate change comes up, in my opinion.
If some laypeople have not received a basic high school education and have trouble understanding variance, uncertainty, and the difference between short-term fluctuations and long-term trends, that really isn’t the fault of climate scientists.
I never imagined this would happen, but as the years went on, I grew less astonished and more cynical.
I honestly don't know how to deal with the level nihilism and genuine bitterness I feel toward my fellow man regarding climate change. This was never a political divide. The american culture was full of anti-scientific absurdity on the the right, and complete symbolism without substance on the left.
We don't even have serious bicycle or transit prioritization in our major urban areas. We don't have any concern for reducing our meat consumption. We don't have any concern for alternatives to airlines. We're to the point where only geoengineering can help, which is honestly nuts. I just, I mean, I know where I'm planning on settling down literally based on real estate in relation to climate change. It's surreal.