Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never understood why people wouldn't just figure something out as global warming gets worse. There's lots of nuclear power plants out there, shut down for political reasons, that'd be ready to go in weeks if you didn't have all the anti-nuclear protests, for starters. There's also geo-engineering and such - spraying black stuff in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight. The idea that humanity c…
That’s a very common line of reasoning which I would call magical thinking. Sure, there’s not really any risk that humans will go extinct in the near future, but our technological global civilization is much more fragile. First, we look at the numbers concerning best case scenarios and see that a few degrees of warming is basically inevitable. Then, we ask how likely it is that well make rapid corrections now - perso…
Good riddance. If our technological global civilization results in conditions that make technological global civilization impossible, then so be it. It wasn't fit to exist to begin with. It's a self-regulating problem.
> There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
> The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
It's not just a matter of economy - people aren't even picking the low-hanging fruit. If any country wanted to severely cut CO2 emissions, there's a simple thing they could do:
1) reopen all the closed nuclear plants 2) deregulate nuclear power plant construction, focus on mass producing cheap power plants with no regard for safety 3) shut down the coal plants 4) throw everyone who protests in prison
Obviously, this isn't done because all of these steps are politically impossible. But it just goes to show - if we were serious about this, we'd have picked the low-hanging fruit already. If we haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit yet, how can you say it's impossible?
> To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.