There’s an analogy with tech debt or old software here somewhere.

Same thing with child labor regarding smartphones, clothes, you name it. It's far away. If you had to buy it right at the factory at a counter where you could see the working conditions, it would have a vastly different impact on you.

And I'm not claiming to be smarter or superior to the average Joe here. This pattern strikes all the time, for everyone.

And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.

But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.

Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.

So to be fair to humans, skepticism is often rational, in the sense that science of complex systems can be off.

The part I have not totally understood is that there are good reasons to be more energy efficient and ecologically sensitive even in the absence of climate change per se.

If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging. Many predictions made in early IPCCC reports were in many cases too lenient. Feedback systems, impacts, and rate of warming have been happening on track or faster than reported. I suspect many knew but they didn’t want to be labelled as alarmists.

And then new's outlets take that cautious wording and turn it into extremely alarming headlines. It's exhausting.

I wonder if we’re evolving to get better at that, if ever so slightly

I've ruined a couple of people's perspectives by sharing the the reason LA sunsets are so beautiful is because of the pollution particulate.

What if every weather app showed, next to actual temperature, what the temperature is modelled to be if climate change had been avoided (kept CO2 ppm to 1950s levels, say)?

It's true, nobody* cares about icebergs and other things they've never seen before. Just wait when the drought kicks in and more and more Problems arise. I hope then people start acting themselves instead of shouting into the social platform nirvana.

Not movies that _focus_ and sensationalize climate disasters like The Day After Tomorrow. But movies that exist in the near future where really visceral elements of how climate change played out 10-20 years exist as a backdrop to whatever story is being told (but feel grounded in reality).

e.g. water rationing, abandoned towns/cities, authoritarian responses to increased immigration/migration, food shortages, etc...

More like Mad Max?

Stuff that's more focused on the immediate, painful changes but still in line of sight from our current reality. Children of Men did a pretty good job pulling some subtle "here's how society has changed for the worse" world building in (obviously all based on it's underlying premise that no more children are being born)

More like California, Arizona, Utah, South Africa, etc.?

There are only 3 'individual' actions avaliable that have any real impact: Voting, Stop eating meat, and pitchforks / civil unrest.

I predict we will reach phase 3 very suddenly and then there will be all these talking head on TV wondering 'oh my god, how did this happen?'.

There are no real energy savings avaliable without cutting back on hygene

The question for me, is why do people believe that there is a problem? Is it that you just have to state polar bears are in trouble? Does anyone check the claims of the climate alarmists?

You should take a look at Al Gore's film again, and see how well that has aged.

Climate alarmists need to answer the claim that they are just boys who cry wolf, imo.

There is a major 'boy who cried wolf' effect--because literally everything is maximally exaggerated and sensationalized to optimize engagement and revenue, people are numbed to the constant alarmism and there is no way to get through to them and convince them that this time the crisis is a real one that they can't afford to ignore.

I think they are pretty happy about that terminal now.

[1] https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1111346/five-years-...

I think the more defective part of humans is our near complete inability for long-term thinking and planning, especially collective long-term thinking and planning. Just look at our daily lives and jobs. When are long-term plans every truly engaged and acted upon? Almost none. There is much too much self-induced noise in society and the economy, and there's a hyper-focus on short-term results and concerns.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/04iht-6sncult.1.10...

My personal theory on this is that it comes from the fact that our sensory systems operate on a logarithmic response curve [0]. Note, for instance, how the decibel scale for measuring sound intensity is a logarithmic scale. Because our sensory systems respond logarithmically, that means an exponential increase in stimulus feels linear, at least until the point where the stimulus is damaging or so intense as to be uncomfortable. The end result is that we think "it's not so bad" until it's really bad.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law

The Bible says: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step.” —Jeremiah 10:23.

According to this, humans were not created to rule themselves.

We do a poor job of governing other people and solving global problems.

To me, it's just clear at this point that this is our core problem.

Source: https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/102019005#h=15:0-16:0

It doesn't matter what the bible says. You can thump it all you want. It won't reduce climate change, excuse inaction, or absolve religious fatalism.

Ban meet. Ban non-private flights. Turn off hot water. Ban nuclear. Ban bitcoin. Ban aircon.

All fake, authoritarian “solutions”.

The real solution is simple: tax fossil fuels. That’s literally all that you need to do to solve climate change? And also the only thing you can do.

We've been conditioned to assume everything's bullshit until it's objective reality on display before our own eyes.

It is totally doable, but people are just trying to skirt the costs of climate neutrality.

Any serious attempt at producing grid storage would lead to shortages and increases in prices. This is why plans for a renewable grid assume that some heretofore unused storage mechanism - like hydrogen storage, compressed air, or giant flywheels - will make energy storage nearly free. Because existing storage mechanisms can't be produced at scale.

Past emissions will stay for centuries and increase heating globally for centuries to come.

All the reports stop at 2050 to 2100, but none of them have any sort of peak temperature in sight.

The extremes of today are only the very beginning.

I am all in for green energy but we have to be honest and estimate well, otherwise we will simply continue as we are now (if not make matters worst)

Every 1kwh produced by a windmill is 1kwh less of oil being burnt. We don't exactly have an abundance of energy at the moment, there's no excuse not to be diverting vast amounts of planetary resources into renewable production.

Easier? Most of stuff that is supposed to be recycled ends up in landfills.

> trolling

Please don't call others for your own behavior.

There are also plenty of ways to take CO2 out of the air (several of which literally grow on trees, or are trees), the question for both organic and technological CO2 sequestration is economics.

For a sense of scale, human emissions are about 40 Gt CO2, global primary production is 104.9 Pg, so making the world about 10% more fertile would have the same effect as decarbonising the economy, or equivalently remove 1 year of existing excess carbon if we also decarbonised the economy: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2840%20Gt%20%2F%20mass...

(10% is a lot, but not so much it would be crazy to consider).

As you mentioned none of them are currently economical. You can't drive such a thing if it does not make sense financially.

I won't go on Nazino

I thought with it literally right there in your face that the denialists would come to some sense. No instead we got, "you can tell you weren't around in 1976, it was worse then", which it wasn't and a basic check would clearly show that's a lie. "Oh the climate is always changing", not at this rate. The usual 'snowflake' ad hominem attack thrown in too. I don't even understand what even is the point of this head in sand strategy.

It varies.

A lot of the time when you see it happen, the other side isn't exactly being polite either. Its a battle of "snowflake" vs "moron". In those cases, theres much more at stake admitting your wrong, with much more permenance. You're essentially admitting that not only were your theories on climate change wrong, but that the oppositions view on you is correct, you are a moron. Neither side means this, of course, but thats how it ends up being.

In more polite arguments, denial could down to fear of change, fear of being wrong (essentially the same as the less polite argument, but with the loser thinking that of themselves), or perhaps even just simply not being convinced for whatever reason

You don't understand what you're asking for.

Those are never put in front because that’s not the point. The entire point is to use an issue to acquire power and there’s no reason to believe that power will be used the way you think it will. Especially since it is never described precisely how the problem will be solved. Just “green energy”.

The real issue isn’t how we solve climate change. It’s who gets to control energy policy - tax credits and subsidies and those nice things. And who can mix in their pet issues whine they’re at it. Suddenly solving climate change becomes climate justice because it’s maybe a better formal issue to obtain power with. It’s still bullshit.

Look at the latest bill and it’s climate change parts. It essentially gives rich car owners a bigger refund on buying rich people cars. Go figure - the powerful have managed to serve their own interests and the plebs who put them there cheer them on.

I have yet to hear anybody actually describe what they propose to do to cool down the planet and (supposedly) make it sustainable. I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.

If that's the case, you might want to read "sustainable energy without the hot air" [1] which is available free online. It's slightly dated with regards to the cost of solar panels, but a good introduction to the area IMHO.

[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/

Plenty of people did just that. You can start with the IPCC reports. A lot of think tanks also published reports focused on specific countries. Not knowing is not an excuse, particularly when so much noise has been made on the subject and so much information is available.

> I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.

We (the rest of the world) by and large do not care about your culture wars. The fact that saving the goddamn climate we rely on is somehow controversial is maddening. You collectively sound like children arguing about who started and who’s the meanest.

Trust me, it gets annoying to a lot of us over here too.

I do not believe that. I believe that other species are at risk of extinction, or indeed extinct already, but I think we have enough of a technological and intellectual advantage to avoid extinction. Probably not casualties in the hundred of millions, though.

> I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing, but then propose to "fix it" by raising taxes and then not doing anything climate related with all that new tax revenue.

“I am doubtful because politicians do not take it seriously” is not really sound. What your experience shows (rightly, in my opinion) is that a lot of politicians are opportunists with flexible principles, not that the situation is not serious.

And if Roosevelt sat around waiting for all the unconvinceable to be convinced, and didn't enact lendlease, maybe UK and USSR would have fallen and US would face the Axis alone.

Many Americans felt the same way about Hitler and Japan while the Holocaust was happening. It wasn't untill Perl harbour that the penny dropped.

Poor people are more affected by and less able to adapt to climate change.

Poor people increasing their wealth, are doing so by starting to burn fossil fuels. If you don't give an alternative, they're going to scale up their fossil fuel burning as fast as they can

During the slow change, things aren't immediately obvious, but can be reversed easily.

Once the rate of change starts speeding up, it becomes pretty clear what's happening, but it's far more difficult to prevent the change to whatever future stable state the system winds up in.

This year I was in shock when in the quarter I am living in, about half of the trees already lost their leaves, looking like late October.

This is the downside of climate change deniers and the inability of humans to recognize existential threats. Climate change and global warming was never about it just getting hot and that’s it. It is about extreme weather popping up more and more frequently.

In my location, we had a weird winter. The snowfall was above average but it only snowed on like three or four separate days. This summer has seen a heat wave and serious drought. When it rains, again only one like three days all summer, it’s for like 10 minutes. We actually just had a major storm, and it rained violently for about 5-10 minutes. That does little to get the ground soaked again. Even the ferns are dying, which are typically robust.

Too late for what exactly? Majority of climate scientists agree the situation is dire, but there are many actions that can be taken to reduce the short-term and long-term impact, via both adaptation and reducing carbon emissions.

Now things have got bad enough that we would need more radical changes to keep to 1.5-2 degrees. But radical changes are just the kind of thing that swing voters don’t like, so we probably won’t do them.

I doubt we will come together and implement radical economic changes or geo-engineering solutions. More likely in my opinion is every country for itself, the rise of new, authoritarian governments and 3+ degrees of heating. I would take some kind of corporate tech bro dystopia.

Am I the only one thinking that it reminds me of a bunch of priests in ancient time who claim to speak to the gods and tell us what we shall do? I'm no climate denier but I hate how everything is framed to induce panic and fear.

And aren't there enough religious people inducing fear and panic into society still today?

I once heard that you will not meet a more dejected and depressed person than a climate scientist. Imagine warning about things for literally decades or your entire life, being ignored the entire time, and only to be asked in the present "why didn't you warn us?!" or "what's going on?!".

Fear is justified because we honestly don't know about some of these things. Dynamic systems with bifurcations, chaotic behavior, and tipping points are difficult to understand even when they're laid out in front of you, much less when you're trying to figure out what the dynamic system is (in the case of the climate and environment, although we do know a lot). Does it even make sense to continually push the boundaries to see what we can get away with? Do humans realize that this Earth was not made for them and that there were times that humans could not be supported by the Earth's environment? In our daily lives, we stress certain behavior of planning and restraint, but we are incapable of doing so collectively.

Literally the simplest thing in the world to do is to restore lawns and grass areas with native plants (wildflowers, bushes, trees, etc.), and yet no one is doing it. In fact, we're still destroying habitat. And then people write articles like "where are the bees and butterflies?".

Restoring lawns with native plants is just like sacrificing your elder child to appease Gods, you thing it will help where in fact we just need to go back to the a sustainable equilibrium (which noone knows precisely).

It's just dangerous. For example, native plants are absolutely imperative. There is very little movement for this. All of my neighbors are cutting down trees, replacing it with lawns that do nothing but sit there (and for this summer die or take on disproportionate amounts of water) and also plant non-native plants that also require a lot of water.

I planted native plants, but the new plantings are struggling due to the severe drought we are going through (with not much end in sight). It's clear that the native plants that are doing well are helping, because the pollinator activity is insane around them, but it's not enough. One household out of a thousand isn't going to help. This is the systematic nature of things that show this can't be solved by flipping a switch. We need drastic measures, and I just do not see us enacting solutions until things become very serious.

I think many underestimate just how short-term humans are. It's never too late until it is.

But think of the value created for shareholders! https://www.offshore-technology.com/news/oil-majors-report-r...

This is a real problem; whereever there's an unowned resource, such as the atmosphere, there's a profit to be made by looting it or dumping externalities into it, and as long as people are profiting from this it's difficult to get them to care.

This includes pensioners, by the way, not just a narrow billionaire class. Almost everyone with a private pension ("401k" in US speak) is probably a beneficiary of this unless they've taken steps to avoid that.

Moreover, trying to drive quarterly earnings is what is now causing wind to displace coal.

Climate change is the posterchild for both of these. Other examples are pollution, resource depletion etc.

https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-6...

2003: https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/hot-summer-2003 2012: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17533235

Of course, the heat records and the drought are worse in 2022 than either of those.

And grass turning yellow doesn't necessarily mean that it's dead. It can regrow from the roots when conditions improve. Assuming that the drought is not too long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_European_heat_wave

> We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though

That is not helpful. It was very widely reported in 2003. From Europe, I would not say that the coverage is more sentationalised than it was. I grant you that it was not as global as today, because Americans don’t care about what happens in non-America and it wasn’t a hot issue back then in American politics. But it was definitely seen as a catastrophe and it spurred a whole bunch of laws and regulations to help mitigate the consequences of such an event (not the likelihood of an event, because we’re lemmings with 5-minutes attention spans).

We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change. It's great if it will finally convince those who are in denial about climate change, but in some sense they are being convinced by what is likely to be a random event.

In other words: the fundamental issue is that there's a very large mass of people who are resistant to rational argument.

So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?" but this is a single event. For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.

What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?

We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.

> We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change.

This is the kind of arguments some people use when they want to muddy the waters. Because, sure, someone is going to say that it is caused by global warming and then someone else will say “gotcha, climate is statistics and an event cannot be attributed to a single cause”. So let’s not go that way again.

This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.

> So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?"

Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.

> For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.

I don’t know why you lament people being generally irrational and then come back to this sort of arguments. Let me repeat: single freak events are not caused by a single cause, but we do have data, including concerning the last million of years. The things we see now, with rapid sea level rise, collapse of ecosystems, mass extinction, and regional cataclysms, are things we can see in the fossil record.

> What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?

Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.

Overall, I am not sure why I spent so much time replying. You do not sound half as smart as you seem to think you are. I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.

Thanks for the ad-hominem attacks. That always makes discussions more productive and people amenable to consider your arguments. I may not be half as smart as I think I am, you on the other hand are coming across as an angry, immature and rude person who can't respond in a civilized manner or assume a shred of good intent from their counterparty.

> We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.

And yet this thread is full of people saying that finally with this draught, this specific event, climate change is undeniably here. Again, I'm not arguing against climate change. I know it's happening. I'm trying to say that approaching from this angle is an argument on tricky grounds and may backfire when confronting opponents.

> This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.

Nobody disagreed with this.

> Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.

You know perfectly well I didn't mean it that way. Again assuming malice and producing a strawman.

> Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.

Again, nobody argued against this.

If you're intent is to blow off some steam for your own sake, feel free to disregard. If you're intent is to make a difference, it seems likely that this kind of discourse moves the needle in the opposite direction you would presumably like for it to go.

> I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.

I would encourage you to consider the impact of words like this before posting them. What was gained here? And what was lost?

Edit: It's like in a game of billiards. The people who win games are the ones that are precise. Each turn results in many of the balls being in a more beneficial position. Less skilled players slam the balls in the general direction of a pocket, and something might go in occasionally, but the overall table state is a mess turn to turn.

If you have a cause that you are interested in, making a public statement about it will either help or hurt that cause, depending on how that statement is received by your audience.

Some people don't realize this, but being correct (or passionately believing you are correct) has little bearing on how your argument is perceived. You can be right, but if your delivery is abrasive, the world (assuming your cause is just) would have been better off if you just kept your mouth shut.

Statements like the one I originally replied to are (imo) examples of people being harmful to their own cause. Insulting, shaming, browbeating, etc, will rarely gain you any ground, and will likely actually galvanize people against you and your cause.

I think you’re right. I realised after 5 minutes that it was the same tired tropes and mistakes again and the OP really sounded like bad faith by the end, and that no discussion is going to be productive anyway. Let’s be fair: all these points are very well documented for anyone interested in understanding them.

> I would encourage you to consider the impact of words like this before posting them. What was gained here? And what was lost?

You’re right again, but this bit was cathartic. It is difficult to stand the people who act like they are the reasonable ones when they use dodgy logic and faulty premises.

I don’t remember the garden at my parents going yellow and crispy 20 years ago.

The “covid heatwave” still had water in some streams, but this year they look positively parched.

There’s a large bucket in my garden in the shade, this year it is dry - it usually has water in it

I grew up here and in nearly 40 years I don’t remember it being this different

I suppose this is probably the second significant drought I've experienced in SE England. It's something like 3 months of sunshine and no rain. Given our summers are usually wet and mild, careful what you wish for...

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...

I know it's probably just a matter of speaking since you use 'all' while you're likely well aware it's not really 'all', but with respect to the dying: a lot of these plants aren't dead yet.

In case of grasses the root system is still ok, similar for roots and part of the stem for herbs/trees. It works like a first aid in coping with drought: get rid of the stuff which evaporates the little water which is still there, so that by the time water is available again it might not too late to recover.

Actually depending on the plant there are even earlier stages of such mechanisms; for example the leafs of some plants have a pale, almost white, underside and when drought kicks in the'll turn there leaves upside down to reflect more light and absorb less heat.

"Historic heatwave incoming :-D 8-) break out the ice cream!"

I'm not disagreeing it's hot, and it's much more consistently hot than I remember from previous summers. However the GP suggests impact is noticeably different to usual, and i'm not sure that resonates so well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWpui1P9cAY

The UK gets enough rain that grass generally grows on its own - so you only need a sprinkler system during periods of drought. And periods of drought generally come with hosepipe bans, which means you can't run the sprinkler anyway.

Most venues choose to show 'leadership' and 'solidarity' by following any hosepipe bans, rather than trying to get an exception.

Sprinklers are used occasionally though - for example, establishing newly seeded grass. Golf courses might use them on the putting greens, but rarely on the fairways.

The third picture of the set shows the greens but not fairways.

> A view of the greens and fairways on a golf course near New Romney in Kent on 5 August, as parched parts of England face a hosepipe ban ahead of another predicted heatwave. Months of little rainfall, combined with record-breaking temperatures in July, have left rivers at exceptionally low levels, depleted reservoirs and dried out soil

I have know about climate change since I was a teenager some twenty years ago. How some people may not have had the memo about impending doom is beyond me.

The other issue is that boomer-style green parties in the EU are completely counterproductive as far as limiting CO2 emissions. Both EELV in France and the greens in Germany are responsible for raising our electrical carbon emissions from closing nuclear plants, when we have no practical solutions for using solar/wind with storage today (it’s fairly obvious to me now that I live in California, where the sun shines almost all the time). I really hope some of them are secretly paid by the oil industry because that’s basically what they have caused us to do, burn more oil and gas.

While you can indeed make an argument about shutting down nuclear power plants while there are coal power plants in operations, the green party was part of the government which targetted the mid-20ies for an end of nuclear energy in Germany - many power plants would have had to be shut down of age anyway. But they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now. It was the Merkel government which first prolonged nuclear power plant run times and then cut it down quicker than the initial plans after Fukushima. All of that could be rationally argued, but not that they mostly killed the deployment of renewables. If they had pushed that properly, we still would be fine. Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.

The idea that we can run not just our current demand on “renewables”, but peak demand after electrifying everything from cars to stovetops, was and remains an absolute fantasy.

No, it’s clearly not, and we’ve wasted decades chasing the utopian impossibility of energy with zero-downside — all while continuing to dump pollution into the atmosphere.

> electrifying all cars would mean about 10% more electricity consumption

Not at peak load.

> Doing so would add about 2 TWh of storage capacity in the cars alone, which would be very helpful for the grid.

Come again?

You want people to donate the limited lifecycle of their very expensive car batteries to provide inefficient backup power to the grid?

This is why the OP said greens hold significant responsibility for the mess we’re in. This kind of magical thinking has been a gift to the fossil fuel industry.

I don't know what you mean by "peak load", but it is 10% more electricity consumed. Electric cars rather help than load the grid, as their charging can be easily controlled to help balance the grid.

And yes, a small part of the battery capacity won't be "donated" but rather rented to the grid in exchange for much lower prices. VW is about to roll out a corresponding project, owners can expect much cheaper charging up to even free charging.

And no it isn't the Greens who are feeding the fossil fuel industry but those who hold back renewables and the electrification of transportation.

So, what is your alternative? Nuclear plants for that peak load? Just burning gasoline and diesel forever? Please explain.

I live in California, we have 59% renewables. The last 31% is exponentially harder as you actually need electricity sources that are reliable. Nuclear is reliable / suitable for base loads, wind/solar aren't. There are zero grid that use solar/wind as base load today.

Both the French and German governments did just that in the last 10 years. The Belgian one as well, though they seem to have second thoughts now, it’s just a shame that it is not a decision you can reverse.

> I think it's just signalling on their part.

I don’t think so. Besides, it is a very dangerous idea to rely on. There are several examples in the world in the last 5 years or so of governments implementing absolutely stupid policies for ideological reasons. That’s how one end up with Trump or Brexit, and later whine that one did not know that they were going to do what they told they’d do.

Often, it turns out that the face-eating leopards actually do eat faces.

Basically: Rich people telling poor people that they cannot do the things that make people rich.

I think overall, carbon fees and getting tech to cost parity via local subsidies, then ensuring corporations/kleptocrats don't conspire in developing nations may work better.

We can simultaneously support development without killing all future generations.

We also need a lot more mining. We need more lithium, more cobalt, more copper, more aluminum, among others. It's not a matter of "just pay for it", the material inputs for a GLOBAL green transition do not presently exist at any price without more mining. But mines are environmentally damaging and require fossil fuels to get started, so those same parties often ignore the need. Hell the good people of Maine recently voted down a measure to import clean hydroelectric power from Quebec because they didn't want to destroy a small stretch of forest to build the transmission lines. That bullshit FernGully flavor of environmentalism has to go extinct

If we're going to be serious about de-carbonizing the economy, then we need to purge the various environmental factions of their nature-worshiping ideologies and focus on the dry, economic, technological, sometimes nuclear, localized-nature-destroying methods that will actually do it.

The more we try to make it look like industrial society can be green, the more everyone is going to consume and that's not sustainable in the long run. We need actual degrowth now, if not yesterday. And i'm not saying we global northerners should moralize countries like Brazil or India about their industrial practices: no, we need to develop our own self-sustenance for food, housing, and medicine in the here and now... and stop pillaging/exploiting the 3rd world as our industrial backyard where all chemical atrocious pollution is permitted.

Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different. And who cares where your electricity comes from if even the most mundane devices come with electronics and batteries? Can't i buy a fucking car without having at least a 100 micro-controllers inside?!

If you want to save the environment, make it a criminal offense to sell a product without having at least minimum 50y warranty/service. That's how you change things: the planet doesn't care if your energy has more or less carbon if you keep on producing disposable phones that's gonna be broken/obsolete two years from now. We have to stop this madness. The same goes with the housing industry and many other industries, believe it or not: the Romans and the Aztecs built low-tech structures that will outlive us all, and multi-billion dollars corporations can't even build stuff that stays in decent shape for more than 10 years (or rather, they won't for financial reasons).

So fine, be angry all you want at people like me who promote actual environmentalism. Maybe we're too much "nature-worshipping" to be heard by the psychopaths in power who already ruined everything. I personally have zero faith in the system and structures that have taken us so far, and have made sure that every attempt to diverge from the worst possible timeline has been sabotaged. I come from France, where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by secret services, and the COP21 mass demonstrations were all canceled using the indecent pretext of so-called "terrorist" attacks and State of Emergency... The people in power will never help us save the planet: we have to make them.

This could not be further from the truth. Nuclear power has the lowest rate of deaths per unit of energy. Uranium mining does have environmental impact, but it's so energy dense that very little of it has to be mined.

If "actual environmentalism" means rejecting industrialized society then we're doomed. The Romans built a stable society, sure. But it was a society with a huge portion of enslaved people, and little opportunity outside of the elite. If I have to choose between climate change and reverting to an agrarian preindustrial society I'll pick climate change without hesitation.

I agree we should refocus the economy on more durable goods and housing, that's part of the solution. I'm not sure where your criticism of Nuclear is coming from though. It has the smallest mining footprint, all the nuclear waste dumps in the world could fit in an incredibly small area compared to waste products from other power sources. Small modular reactor designs basically solve the waste issue by being self-contained for their entire lifetimes. Nuclear is also incredibly safe statistically speaking, and produces no pollution in its power generation.

Your last paragraph is telling as well. For those who think like you there's a social-revolution element to combating climate change. You see things as "already ruined", and have declared the "psychopaths in power" the absolute enemy standing in the way of "saving the planet". So you have all the resentful psychological license you need to burn the house down, with the rest of us in it, just to stick it to the psychopaths, and that's your primary objective.

I'd rather save the house, with everyone. I'd like the psychopaths gone as much as anyone, but if you think de-industrializing will get rid of them, you haven't read much history.

https://historicdroughts.ceh.ac.uk/content/standpipe-drought...

There was a massive drought in England about 10 years back, where farmers had to change the types of crops back then to accommodate for the drought, which was then proceeded by a large flooding. Why would say this time is different from 2012? Especially given that there had been talks (and sometimes actual) hosepipe ban every single year since.

There are records from 2012 and 2003. even 1962 (60 years referenced)

From the title "worst drought on record"

Great, I am not talking about France though, I am talking about England. Unless England now is part of France, which last time I checked, is definitely not the case!

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/press-office/news/weat...

The hosepipe ban aspect comes from catastrophic failure to build more resivoirs for the last 40 years. A couple coming online "soon" - same with energy. We wanted to build more nuclear but the NIMBYs killed it