The problem is that _any_ action is criticized as sacrificing prosperity, even though it often just sacrifices the prosperity of a small number of people.

That small group of people is in fact connected to the rest of the world's population by a chain of progress that eventually leads everyone through the same level of prosperity. By turning the head and thus the direction of progress downwards you are committing the rest of the population to at the very least never achieving any level of prosperity greater than that. In the middle you're dooming them to stagnation at their current level and at the worst you're causing all of us to regress to a lower level of prosperity AND an increase in our impact on the climate due to the inefficiencies that come along with that.

Suppose we were in 1890 discussing how we need to get rid of horse manure in our cities and there were a hot debate on how this "horseless carriage" thing is highly experimental and threatens the livelihood of a whole supply chain around horses. As it turns out, you can get rid of manure and it does in fact make a lot of people poorer, but in the end it enables a lot more prosperity for future generations.

The big difference here is that horses were nearly exclusively used for transportation. Fossil fuels currently provide something like 80% of all the energy used. So if you want your analogy to be accurate then you'd have to be back in 1890 saying "Ok, we're going to get rid of horses AND fossil fuels".

Personally, I do think that burning oil derivatives is a waste and I would like to see it replaced where possible with a superior energy source but the only source that fits the bill for me is nuclear and the only responsible way to do it is to build the new power plants first and then phase out the old fossil fuel plants.

So we should pay now to have nuclear power in the future? Impossible, this lowers our prosperity! /s

Investment is not the same as sacrifice. Sacrifice means to destroy something for the sake of something else. When you say we should sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the good of the many (paraphrasing, this is what I interpreted your original comment to mean) then that implies we permanently reduce the prosperity of some group of people. Spending money to build more nuclear power plants is instead a productive use of that time/effort/money that will return on that investment if not with dividends from the sale of the power then with increased productivity and economic output made possible by a larger energy supply.

We know that nuclear power works, it's capable of producing massive amounts of electricity and powering whole countries anywhere we are able to build plants, output doesn't vary based on forces that are outside of our control, uranium is abundant and there are hundreds of years of estimated reserves in the ground. That is a plain and simple case for it to be a bridge to a future where we can produce excess and uninterrupted power using solar, preferably space based arrays that don't use up land, won't be affected by weather and produce power at night. Even better, it might be a bridge to fusion power, having more nuclear physicists and technicians around would surely speed up progress.

I'm averse to reducing prosperity for anyone because it has a very non-zero chance of us never recovering to a position where we can continue to increase prosperity for all. Put plainly, creating energy poverty in the West has a good chance of knocking us into a dark age where little to no progress is made and even regression may happen which, to your concern, would increase CO2 output and worsen climatic effects.

That doesn't seem like a problem - that seems like a feature. Maybe "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" just stuck with me, but a just society doesn't sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the "greater good".

"Justice" is difficult enough to define that many books have been written about the topic. Personally I don't find it just to let a small number of individuals transfer wealth from future generations to their current self.

> but a just society doesn't sacrifice the prosperity of a few for the "greater good".

We fought a war to end slavery. A small number of prosperous people were severely inconvenienced by society enacting that greater good.

That's the problem of democracy - if it's only those who have to sacrifice who are voting in that particular governing entity, it's never ever going to pass.

> Actual true deniers that say human have no effect in global climate, IMHO, are so few that they are not even worth mentioning.

I'm not sure this is true, but even if it is, I think it's only become true recently.

It's getting harder to deny climate change lately because it's more obvious every year that the climate is changing. It's noticeably hotter and drier in the UK every year than it used to be. Hell, I'm standing at a bus stop as I write this at 9am and I'm only wearing a light jacket. I'm pretty sure that would be unusually warm for a September morning ten years ago, but the whole month has been like this in 2022.

I don't hear people saying "climate change isn't happening" much anymore - the more common sentiment now seems to be a shrug. "It can't be that bad, can it? Or at least the really bad stuff won't happen until at least a few decades after I'm dead? I'm sure we'll figure something out - technology keeps getting better so humans will probably solve this problem. And anyway there's not like I can do anything about it personally so I might as well just enjoy the weather." That's the prevailing attitude now, I think.

Yes, I believe it's a fairly recent change! I would think there were many more actual deniers 10-20 years ago, but today it seems we label people as deniers much easier (as you say "it can't be that bad" would be labelled as a denier today).

The choice isn't even starting from the middle of the spectrum. We already have the foot on the accelerator, and it's unlikely we'll let up with our current generation of leaders. I think we'll continue to pollute at a rate far too great for the planet to handle, and we're going to have to get very good at remediation to continue living here.

It will only be once the next generation of leaders comes into power, maybe even the generation after that, as they will be living the climate reality enough to want to fix it (whichever level of severity it ends up being). At which point we'll be needing to focus on remediation still, before finally, hopefully, creating some kind of sustainable version of our current societies.

>I think we'll continue to pollute at a rate far too great for the planet to handle, and we're going to have to get very good at remediation to continue living here.

The planet will do fine, but even stating such a thing is still commit anthropomorphism. The planet will continue to exist for a long time, no matter what the fate of mankind will be.

Even life is most likely to continue prospering in a way or in an other.

We, the human species, are not the planet. Let’s stop to use formulation like "the planet is in danger". No it’s not. The biosphere already went through five major extinction, and life is still there.

The rocks will be ecstatic to hear this news.

Humans aren't the only species evolved to live in this particular climate, and we won't be the only species impacted by an extreme outcome of climate change. Long term, of course, the planet will survive, and hopefully many species will thrive in our absence. But many will go extinct, and it will have been our fault. On a long enough time scale, sure, nothing matters really, the sun will explode and all our flyer campagins will have been for nothing. But we experience a much smaller timescale, and it'd be great if we gave some thought to not boiling the reefs and setting fire to the koalas while we're here.

When people worry about nuclear war, do you also console them that the cockroaches will likely live on?

You're absolutely right, the planet is in no danger. It's us humans that are in danger. We are polluting at a rate far too great for us humans to handle, and if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that.

Even that is gross hyperbole. Humans as species could survive even the most disastrous predictions, rendering entire continents uninhabited.

The top level post is correct. It is a matter of minimizing suffering.

Which will have to be through remediation... I never said the world was coming to an end. I said we aren't likely to stop polluting, so we should get really good at remediating what we will have wrought.

Sure, it would be a good idea to do something. I'm just calling out "if we want to survive as a species we must do something about that“ as hyperbolic. This is a point made in thread you are responding in

There's a big overlap here with COVID thinking. At the end of the day, people are OK with other people dying. And really, how could we not be? It happens every day. Particularly when the hardest hit people will be in other (poorer) countries, it just feels less meaningful to those who will likely fare better.

Yes, unfortunately for as harsh as it sounds for anything at human-scale that inherently has some live-threatening risk, the ideal design is pretty much never 0-deaths. Anything I can think of: driving cars, sports, almost any job, etc. would need massive restrictions, to the point of those actions not making sense anymore, to reduce death risk to 0. So while sure, trying to reduce unnecessary risk, there's always a minimal amount of risk we are okay with.