Besides, getting folks to recognize the impacts of climate change is one thing, convincing them that the threat is such that any impactful fix would require fundamental and drastic changes to their comfortable lifestyle is a whole different conversation.
This investment will likely bring in a positive return on investment because it reduces the negative climate impacts.
With recognising climate change, I feel the issue is many people, focus on the short term for what is a long term issue. In the way people say the climate change isn't happening, to them it's not. Individuals will see fairly limited change over a single lifespan, but what we do today will likely have a huge impact to people 100+ years from now. Often media/activists presents climate change as this imminent threat year after year, which isn't true as the climate is a slow ship, and while actions is absolutely needed for the future, I think many people see these endless imminent threat predictions not occuring, so to them this seems over dramatic and therefore untrue.
I often have similar thoughts: if you expand the scope a bit and don't limit yourself to the metrics that are the topic du jour - this is not meant to diminish the severity of heatwaves, to the contrary -
it seems like a natural law that the people who do the most damage to common goods (such as humane shelter and food, clean water, clean air, healthy environment, bearable noise pollution, bearable working conditions if you want to go there) - they are the people who profit and stand exactly on the other side, experiencing the absolute minimum of the damage they cause.
This is a prisoners's dilemma or market failure that has infested all of our global society, to a point that we can't even start to imagine.
I think we will continue to live as we do until we cannot. Then there will be a natural correction. It will probably be ugly for a while, then we will adapt. This is the history of the planet.
Do you think humans use oil, soil etc as efficiently as ants do?
Or do you mean "consumption" when you say "use"? The way you put it sounds like you mean
use ~= utility
There are just so many speakers and writers and thinkers with their own side of the prisoner's dilemma in mind
"A 'greenhouse Earth' is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history... Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously."
You don't warm the earth rapidly (which at this point we undeniably are) and then magically get back "normal" fern forests and dinosaurs or whatnot. What you get is a mass extinction.
Eventually, things will evolve to forests or the equivalent. You'll be unlikely to have the same kinds of dinosaurs as before, but as the old saying goes, nature like carcination. There will probably be new variants of crabs.
You seem to be saying the equivalent of e.g. "It's OK to kill all the elephants because in a few million years something else will have filled the niche". That seems ridiculous to me.
Does your logic extend to all species? All ecosystems? Our species?
In fact what you're describing is exactly the disconnect: libertarianism is very much not "conservative" by traditional standards. The fact that they live in the same party in the modern US is an accident; it doesn't follow from their philosophies at all.
If the effect of global warming were felt equally in the US and that somehow caused the US to halt 100% of their emissions it would reduce global emissions by about 11% [1].
1: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/chinas-greenhouse-gas-emissi...
China is the world's factory, 20% of the US imports come from there, of course your own country doesn't pollute much when you gutted half of your industries and relocated them in foreign countries.
edit: don't forget per capita greenhouse emissions too, in that case Americans emit twice as much as Chinese https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Estimates are that only around 10% of Chinese carbon emissions are for foreign exports: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596....
And you can't deny that the US and EU has been moving in the right direction, while China is moving in the wrong direction.
US carbon emissions peaked in 2000 and have been moving down ever since. China's carbon emissions have grown by 500% during that time period. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/carb...
They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies. It's clear that China does not care about climate change in the slightest.
Here it says 33%: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14412-33-of-chinas-ca...
> They are uniquely bad in this regard, compared to their peers like India and other developing economies.
Of course India is nowhere close to China, they basically don't exist in term of exports. These countries have almost nothing in common besides having a large population
https://statisticsanddata.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Top...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
> while China is moving in the wrong direction.
You sure about that ?
https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/267233/renewable-energy-c...
Again it's easy to pollute less when you literally shut down all your industries. You can't ask for more and more growth, cheaper and cheaper prices and 0 pollution.
> China does not care about climate change in the slightest.
Not more or less than 99% of countries on this earth, including the US and most of Europe. If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago, as well as most of their exports and massively reduced their energy usage (daily reminder than the average US household uses 4 times more energy than a German one)
Yes, China built six times the number of coal plants of the entire rest of the world last year. Six times! It's inexcusable.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-...
Meanwhile the US has mothballed half of it's coal plants in 10 years:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_04_01.html
> Here it says 33%
You're clearly cherry picking very old data (2008) that is not published research to try and make a point here. The references aren't even comparable.
> If they did they'd have stopped their Chinese imports a long time ago
Plenty of people would be delighted to embargo China due to their environmental record. If that's what you're proposing, we agree.
See: https://www.cgdev.org/media/developing-countries-are-respons...
There is more nonsense in this statement than in the headline. Parts of the world don't have ideology and these highly judgmental and superficial analysis certainly don't help.
> other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the US prominently denies that the problem even exists.
So, China's inability to manage pollution is somehow down to the imputed attitudes of a few areas of the US?
> It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
It's as if human beings exist and continue to multiply. It's as if third world countries don't care about our ideology if it means they never get a chance to develop themselves the way every other country had an opportunity to. It's as if a few rich people half way around the world expect the difference to be made up elsewhere.
> But it still strikes me as weird.
It's purely anecdotal.
> How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?
Texas had the hottest summer in recent history. California had one of the mildest. Minnesota had one of the hottest and they're getting Canadian wildfire smoke.
Perhaps we shouldn't view this through the lens of "how miserable do we have to make people to get change to happen" and instead through the lens of "how incompetent are our politicians that they can't find an honest solution to this problem?"
This _desire_ for self-inflicted austerity is what is _weird_.
Edit: because another way to view the lens you dismiss is “how miserable do people need to get before they accept that something real is happening here?”
The largest voting block could stop war emissions by replacing Biden with RFKjr or even Trump. Huge carbon savings there.
I'd guess that for most people in the US they are more likely to notice that than to notice a change in average temperature. Consider someone in a place that normally gets cold enough to require heat for much of the winter and hot enough to require air conditioning for most of the summer.
Someone could easily not notice a 3℃ increase in average temperature that manifests as winter being a little less cold, summer being a little warmer, and winter being a little shorter, and summer a little longer because their HVAC system keeps their would at a fixed temperature all year around.
Their energy bill would go up, but they might think that is just due to inflation.
But if they start getting afternoon brownouts because of everyone's AC dealing with extreme summer heat, and that happens more and more each year, that is something they might notice
It almost feels like a conspiracy: the part of the world that is ideologically predisposed to disbelieve in climate change is also the one that is (partly) avoiding it. And that part is the linchpin: other places are disinclined to do the hard work of fixing the climate while the ones prominently deny it even exists.
It's as if the earth wanted to keep warming.
Obviously not, of course, and I don't really know if it really figures into it one way or the other. But it still strikes me as weird. How different would the situation be if the US midwest and south were on the hotter side of the scale, rather than the cooler one?