The world is losing the war against climate change

The problem is that environmental driven campaigns have been incredibly ineffective. Perhaps it's our responsibility to generate noise the same level of that with Net Neutrality?

Shutting down coal power would achieve all climate goals for several decades and we can in fact just kind of do that in most places. Government subsidies are what's keeping coal power plants online in many locations. The problem is that this would impose costs on business owners, or force banks and/or governments to pay out large sums to those business owners (not that large though: tens to hundreds of millions per plant). In other words : governments worldwide would have to scale back what they're doing for a short while to instantly destroy their climate goals.

In other words: government, elected CHOICES are what's keeping the biggest co2 producers online. Governments absolute unwillingness, in Australia's case, to pay out relatively small sums they agreed to pay decades ago, and of course not getting a budget increase out of it.

Laws that are proposed, almost without fail, go after individual, totally insignificant co2 producers, and impose large costs on individuals for marginal, or even net negative gain (e.g. well known example: for the longest time, and maybe even now, solar panels were net-negative, and certainly, in the short term that's still true. Certainly in the short term switching to solar power increases CO2 emissions, it doesn't reduce them. It may become a net positive after 10 years of constantly using the panels, under idealized conditions).

Suggested changes to individual lives, like forgoing cars entirely, impose yet larger costs but thankfully for now governments are mostly unwilling to do this.

At what point do we get to conclude that the intent of climate action parties is simply to exert power over individuals, to capture government, regardless of all costs to the climate ? That these parties not only don't care about climate change, but are actually willing to sacrifice the climate, just to gain power ?

Besides: I think it's extremely telling that nobody is willing to consider geoengineering (artificially lowering out planet's albedo). We know methods to do that, and of course all governments promptly decided that was off-limits (with, get this, "what if we're wrong" arguments. Look: either climate prediction works, or it doesn't. Denying geoengineering solutions is little better than outright denying climate change entirely).

Anyway, one thing I like about it is the optimism. This guy is genuinely optimistic about the future. And he has pretty good reason. Like this planet can realistically be home to trillions of people with not much more tech than we have right now.

But a recurring topic is the subject of fusion and how much of a game-changer it will be if we can do it in any kind of economic fashion. Now I'd previously somewhat dismissed this because of the naive view that it is free energy. Well the fuel might essentially be free (even that depends on what the fuel is; deuterium is common enough to essentially be free, Helium-3 not so much) but the plant itself costs money, has a power output, requires maintenance and we still need power lines and the like.

But he points out some of the reasons why this is a complete game changer and why certain problems simply cease to be. One of these is the greenhouse gas problem. Why? Because as soon as you have energy cheaper than hydrocarbons you simply use your power to make hydrocarbons from the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is pretty simple chemistry and we can do that now. There's just no point because we'd be powering the process largely with hydrocarbons (solar and wind notwithstanding).

I should also point out that I remain somewhat skeptical about nuclear fusion being economic because of the neutron problem (in that neutrons quickly destroy the container). This works fine for stars, not so well for superconducting magnets.

But (as Isaac Arthur points out) you don't even need fusion for some of these rosier outcomes. You just need cheaper than what we have now and there's good reason to think that solar may get us there, particularly if we can mass produce solar collectors in low Earth orbit (these produce about seven times the power of Earth bound collectors). And there's actually pretty good reasons to be optimistic about that.

The human condition is one of exaggeration, unfortunately. Namely that both fear and optimism tend to be overstated. You see this in markets all the time.

The counterargument against radical changes to combat climate change tends to revolve around the idea that markets will eventually solve that problem (for those that admit there's even a problem at any rate). And it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to admit that this idea probably isn't 100% wrong.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

What laws and policies would you suggest? If you don't feel like you can articulate your position well, do you have any books/articles you recommend we read?

What surprised me is that I can cover double my two-car-owning European family's carbon footprint via planting trees in the UK at an annual cost of around $400. It'll cost half that to do the same in a developing country.

We need a global carbon tax and we need it now. Heck, even a carbon tax in the EU / US applied to local emissions and, importantly, to imported goods would go a long way to solving the problem.

We can't just sleepwalk into oblivion, can we?