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The Economist, 2009. https://www.economist.com/news/2009/11/13/wanted-green-engin...
I'm guessing the most relevant fields would be chemE and materials science.
Give money to Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents, right now. If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science. You don't have to be a committed lifelong Democrat to see that the current Republican party is fighting climate change efforts at every turn and needs to be displaced in order for political progress on the issue to happen.
Fundamentally it is a political problem, not a technological problem. We need high carbon taxes, we need to end fossil fuel subsidies, and we probably need to change our economic system to something that addresses the tragedy of the commons. But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]: > In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were r…
Give money to Democratic candidates challenging Republican incumbents, right now. If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science. You don't have to be a committed lifelong Democrat to see that the current Republican party is fighting climate change efforts at every turn and needs to be displaced in order for political progress on the issue to happen.
Maybe trying to win over republicans would be better? The culture wars don’t help this issue.
Invest in co2 scrubbers and nuclear power. But they also said ten years ago that ten years would be the absolutely longest time we had to prevent catastrophic climate change. They also said the world would be overpopulated and we wouldn't be able to feed everybody by the end of the sixties so who knows.
Thanks to the green revolution, we figured out how to massively increase crop yield, otherwise we would have seen problems supplying enough food. In fact that's kind of the root of many of todays problems. The population of earth has doubled since 1980, when GHG levels were safe. If we couldn't feed another 3.5 billion people they wouldn't have been born and we wouldn't be in this mess. We'd be in a much different mess, where rationing and population control are common, but at least we wouldn't also be cooking ourselves
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." Y2K was supposed to be a global catastrophe. It got quietly fixed. No one (but me) wakes up today and goes "Oh. Thank. God. We aren't living in the Y2K post apocalypse!" In fact, I have been told that most people laugh at the idea that we ever worried about it because it turned out fine, so we must not have been in real danger. The Kuwait oil wells were supp…
https://www.drawdown.org
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is not possible because humans are hardwired to breed and multiply. Wait a second, then why is it that almost every western country is currently seeing negative population forecasts without immigration? Seems like western countries were already heading towards population decline but have been propped up in recent years with the call for more economic growth and I don't think those calls are hardwired at all.
I think western countries are not representative of the world as they represent a small minority of world's population (10% or so). I have read some predictions about world population continuing to increase to around 12 billion and stabilising at that number. Let's say that happens. Then you run into the problem of people in western countries consuming many times more resources and energy per capital as developing wo…
Also I don't think 1-2 cars will be the issue, more along the lines of:
- Can you own a car? Or must you bike to work? - Can you access goods outside of your state? Since no trucks/planes for long distance shipping - How much Heating/Cooling in the Winter/Summer will you be allowed? If any?
That or we could look into geo-engineering maybe?
"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine." Y2K was supposed to be a global catastrophe. It got quietly fixed. No one (but me) wakes up today and goes "Oh. Thank. God. We aren't living in the Y2K post apocalypse!" In fact, I have been told that most people laugh at the idea that we ever worried about it because it turned out fine, so we must not have been in real danger. The Kuwait oil wells were supp…
To me the scary part about climate change is the sheer scale of the problem. We burn something like 4.4 billion tons of oil each year. Eventually we have to basically un-burn all of that oil. That's a staggeringly huge amount of work and we have barely begun to stop digging ourselves deeper into the hole.
Eat less meat.
And pee on a tree.
Do that every day. Track it if you need to. Spread the word if you like, though leading by example is more powerful than trying to lecture people.
We are all just dust in the wind anyway. But you can choose what your little speck gets up to, at least to some degree.