It sounds even more dystopian if we do nothing at all.

I agree. Shutting down protests by making it dark doesn't even work? OTOH, letting most of the people on the planet starve to death seems actually bad.

Actually, humans doing nothing would be the best thing for the environment

Industrial energy consumption feedback loops will occur in any system we attempt to build to curb the issue

Any machines, chemicals, processes, vehicles, etc, that need producing to “improve things” will all come along with chewing up resources at scale to provide the industrial pipeline

The only scientifically acceptable path is LESS industrial scale economic activity: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210312-covid-19-paused-...

I'm not sure what "doing nothing" would look like if we don't mean "continue on our current path".

The entire set of Western values as cemented by the Cold War seems incompatible with "less economic activity". And even if we somehow shake consumerism, modern agriculture is essential to feeding more than 1B humans and requires a significant amount of industrial scale economic activity.

The majority of the time "buy/make this thing to reduce climate change" is a mere distraction. But there are a lot of resources that we can afford to spend, some of which are near-limitless if you consider predictable advances like asteroid mining. If we find ways to spend those resources to get us at least part way out of this mess, or to buy us time for societal change, then those are paths worth pursuing.

Look at the current political leaders and ask yourself is something--anything--is going to happen. It isn't going to happen.

Blocking the sun enough to black out a protest for any length of time kills us all. Most of the proposals are talking like, 1% of the sun. The whole sun for a few hours is way too much, and would do all kinds of bad things.

Besides, they already tear gas and mass arrest protests if the cops don’t like the protestors, that’s already pretty dystopian.