The world may have less time than it thinks on climate change

Focus on the missing prerequisites that are critical for any viable solution. It doesn't matter what anyone does if we literally lack the technical infrastructure required to make a meaningful difference. The first step is making it at least possible.

For example, halting the increase in atmospheric CO2, never mind reversing it, requires an astronomical amount of new clean energy far beyond what we produce today from all sources, clean or dirty. If we were serious about this we'd be building countless terawatts of new carbon-free electrical production as fast as possible instead of letting NIMBYs and activists bury these for decades in lawsuits and paperwork.

The infrastructure modernization that needs to happen will be economically impossible as long as it primarily exists as a mechanism for corruption, graft, and rent-seeking e.g. California's high-speed rail. Even if we had the political will, we literally couldn't afford it unless it became radically more efficient. Letting political constituencies hijack every building project so they can smuggle in unrelated agendas is something that is fundamentally at odds with addressing climate change in a serious way. That's a choice.

If we don't solve these two problems then anything else we do as individuals won't matter. Being able to address climate change in a meaningful way is downstream of these two challenges.

Just a thought, which at T+36 min hasn't been mentioned yet.

Many systems are chaotic. At particular points in state space, a very small delta can result in very different subsequent trajectories.

Viral influence being one example. I'm reminded of Tamim Ansary's email[1] to 20 odd friends after 9-11, that went massively viral ("We come now to the question of bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. Trouble is, that's been done. The Soviets took care of it already. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering. Level their houses? Done. [...]").

Also, some moments of teaching can change lives. And in everyday life, sometimes recognized and sometimes not, things done and not done can have big impacts on people. Ripples.

It is said of serendipity and opportunity, that you can't control them, but you can shut yourself off from them. And thus advice to live in a way that leaves yourself open to them, and to cultivate the awareness and skills to recognize and execute when they go by.

One can't know when one is a potential part of a state space fork. But might one make throwing spaghetti at the wall part of one's life? An occasional hobby? Support spaghetti throwing? Or potluck spaghetti throwing communities? Or pasta R&D or manufacture? Trebuchets?

Perhaps a category of "Things worth doing all the time, which are far from being worth doing every time, but are still worth doing each time." Or Chesterton’s "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

[1] https://cmsw.mit.edu/reconstructions/expressions/tamim.html

> And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes

It's possible to sequester CO2, and here are a couple ways.

1. Use permaculture or regenerative agriculture to aggressively increase SOM (soil organic matter) / carbon content of the soil. Typical degraded farmland is around 1.5% SOM. For every 0.1% increase per acre, roughly 1 ton of carbon is sequestered. Setting an ambitious increase to 10% would take decades but would increase yields along the way. There are billions of acres of farmland, so a lot of carbon can be removed from the biosphere. Additionally, since people naively mimic farmers for home gardening etc., if farmers were part of the solution, then more home growers would be, too. With a couple decades of regenerative ag you can go from 1.5% to 7.5%, but with more time and motivation you can go higher.

2. Research and then put into practice industrial-scale pyrolysis for energy generation. So, instead of burning methane (aka "natural gas") to boil water to spin a turbine, we could pyrolysize organic material to emit and burn syngas to boil water to spin a turbine. The resulting biochar can be co-composted and when finished, used as a soil amendment.

With a different mindset a lot can change, and quickly.

This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one. Greta Thunberg and her "crazed lunatics" have caused massive damage? By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?

That is demonstrably false. Greta Thunberg only became famous in 2018. The world before 2018 was that world without "crazed lunatics", and things weren't any better than. Greta Thunberg got frustrated precisely because after all this time practically nothing was being done.

Also, exactly why do you call Greta a crazed lunatic? What has she done to deserve such a negative designation? What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?

Also also, lots and lots of scientists have been telling the world about climate change, just as scientists did regarding ozone. It's just that the media or politicians or the industry or whoever decided their reports were inconvenient and they got largely ignored.

Three quarters of the world live in autocracies, and another 19% outside liberal democracies.

That will require adapted tactics. I'm not very qualified to speak on how to convince people in leadership positions there. How do you convince Erdogan, Modi, Putin, Trump, Xi, the North Korean dynasty and others?