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Maybe I don't understand the ramifications of this, but it kind of sounds like we missed the offramp where we just stop burning carbon. Shouldn't we just be moving to something drastic like a massive sun shade project ASAP?
Dang, my most downvoted comment was asking an honest question about climate change.
Maybe I don't understand the ramifications of this, but it kind of sounds like we missed the offramp where we just stop burning carbon. Shouldn't we just be moving to something drastic like a massive sun shade project ASAP?
We could have had nuclear but nope too scary!
[Deleting because I don't want to perpetuate apparently debunked climate change myths, sorry, I honestly hadn't seen it debunked.] Dang, my most downvoted comment was asking an honest question about climate change.
Please don't take this as snark -- I'm dead serious. There are climate change deniers who will point to this as support of their position. "See, those climate scientists' predictions are always wrong." The fact is the IPCC is well aware of the political headwinds it faces and its reports are conservative -- they have always underestimated the likely outcome because it is hard enough to get sign-off on even that, plus…
"The Adorable Optimism of the IPCC" - https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=8433 It’s been a couple of weeks now since the IPCC report came out. You know what it says. If the whole damn species pulls together in a concerted effort “without historical precedent”— if we start right now , and never let up on the throttle— we just might be able to swing the needle back from Catastrophe to mere Disaster. If we cut carbon emiss…
Our future descendants will heap scorn and curses on our generation, and we deserve every bit of it. Every politician that refuses to do what is necessary or finds it convenient to play stupid language games about 'settled science' is doing incalculable harm.
As citizens, I encourage everyone to reducing their carbon footprint as much as possible (yes, that means that your life gets comfortable) and voting exclusively on how credible a politician is on tackling global warming. If you are a wealthy person and aren't buying carbon offsets for all your emissions, you are a bad person.
This phenomenon is curious, in a morbid sort of way. There is literally no way to stop it; we are, as Noam Chomsky fears, a lethal mutation. We developed the ability to create industrial and economic activity on such a scale, and with such sophistication, that we've overcome the planet's ability to cope, but we have no mechanism in place that seems remotely capable of remedying that situation without a global catastr…
Humans weren't designed to feel terror at numbers.
Most leaders, politicians and plebs have thus far experienced the disaster as nice winters and slightly more news about tornados in tornado-prone places.
You'll find people taking action only when the sky is falling (i.e. when it's too late to take action).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have had nuclear but nope too scary!
We do have nuclear, and have had it for decades. Concerns about what to do with the waste are indeed an issue, but the bigger problems is nuclear hasn't been cost competitive with coal and more recently natural gas. It is complex trade-off and just blaming it on NIBMY sentiment is not really engaging the issue.
Nuclear has gone from very cost-competitive (5c/kWh) to not at all cost-competitive (alternatively: "financially risky," often shortened to "risky" in a disingenuous attempt to imply something else) because we gave NIMBYs and self-styled environmentalists a free pass to introduce arbitrary delays into the construction process, and they did, and it was very effective at raising the price / financial risk. That is what people mean when they say that we decided to stop building nuclear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could have had nuclear but nope too scary!
We do have nuclear, and have had it for decades. Concerns about what to do with the waste are indeed an issue, but the bigger problems is nuclear hasn't been cost competitive with coal and more recently natural gas. It is complex trade-off and just blaming it on NIBMY sentiment is not really engaging the issue.
What is our plan to deal with carbon waste?