In one case we are wishing for a solution to fall out of some genuis minds. In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over.
That’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism.
Okay, propose concrete actions, political, legal even military if needed that you think will help accomplish this and could actually work globally?
In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification and neighborhood planning, drive industrial policy towards the expansion of green industries including renewable energy, but also on the demand planning and efficiency side (ex heat pumps in buildings, EVs etc). Shift agricultural policy to focus more heavily on climate impacts and discourage fossil fuel intensive methods. Dramatic shifts in federal fleets away from fossil fuel vehicles, etc.
I’m not an expert on this stuff but these are just obvious things. Actual policy could be crafted to address these things on a number of different levels.
Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility.
The point is we aren’t powerless, we just love acting like we are.
> Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility.
It is not abdicating responsibly if you think other technological solutions will be more likely to succeed just a difference of opinion. On the contrary, I think people who believe we "just need to do this or that political thing" abdicating responsibility because they have not considered how to do it or why it has not happened yet. They can just hold these "correct" opinions and blame others and absolve themselves of responsibility.
I guess I just don't see how these things can be done without some sort of force. Denying people the choice to begin with is the only way to get people to make choices that will harm their standard of living on average. This would require governments being far more authoritarian than we are used to or will likely accept. Also many of the suggested policy solutions I think are far to tame even, it will take a lot more than that to avoid disaster I think. Literately going back a century or two in standard of living probably at this point.
Why do you believe this to be the case?
It seems like a lot of your pessimism is due to the fact that you think we would have to dramatically cut our standard of living if we don’t find technological solutions. I don’t believe this has basis.
From what I know, we can't release any more carbon and in fact might need to go carbon negative, so to do that we would need to essentially shut down everything that emits carbon... Cars, trucks, cargo ships, trains, airplanes, eliminate animal agriculture, no more steel or concrete production, all coal, gas oil power production and many other industries would need to shut down.
So yes, I think it would have quite a drastic effect on our standard of living. Some of these things in some parts of the world may someday become carbon neutral, but it will take a long time.
Addressing climate change isn’t about being perfect at this point, it’s about averting ever increasing disaster scenarios, especially since the degree of the effects seems to be exponential with the amount of warming we see.
All I see from so many people is the feeling that we might as well not even try/it’s all a waste of time.
The question is, is there inherently a massive trade off between our living standards and addressing climate, given there is no substantial change in our level of technology (you said we’d need to go backwards 2 centuries).
If we “magically” implemented political solutions with proper urgency, does that necessarily entail a massive drop in living standards in your mind?
That might change if things get bad enough, but by then it's probably too late for anything but a technological miracle.
Non-democratic countries (like China and Russia) have a better chance of making the changes because there it truly is the case that a small number of people can bring about change.
No one cares if UPS delivery trucks are electric. Very few people are policy wonks and will pay attention to changes in FHA bureaucracy.
Voters have very limited bandwidth and attention. Most of what the federal government does, it does on its own initiative, with opposition from select special interests.
Another problem is that countries are also in a global economic competition.
The legislative frameworks still do not keep the costs of destroying the planet from being so low that doing so is an economic imperative.
However, that is not a universal obstacle to all policy solutions. Getting people to electrify their homes has minimal impact on global economic competition. Changing urban planning regimes has little (direct) impact on global economic competition.
I’m not trying to imply it is easy. But it is still a choice that we can make is we can coordinate ourselves. I think the biggest challenge is simply the degree to which hyper individualism has taken over American culture and its effect on our collective psyche.
If our lives and cities appeal to people in other countries, they may adopt our technologies, urban designs, and social policies. Part of it is development. Part of it is marketing.
I don't think anybody is very optimistic about our chances on either path.