This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
with no guarantees that it would solve anything?
> This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
We have literally survived a shrink of 99% of our total population as humans, you are grossly overestimating the effects of what's currently happening.
Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.
I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.
I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead
A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.
A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.
There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.
It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.](https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob....) This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land. [As the number of storms are estimated to decrease, the threat vector is slightly increasing storm intensity.](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurrica....) Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.
[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.
Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.
For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.