'No One Is Safe': How the Heatwave Has Battered the Wealthy World

It's more a matter of hanging on to what they have in favor of not capitalizing on a major opportunity right in front of their noses. The article phrases the upcoming investments in energy transition, mitigating the effects of climate change, etc. in terms of prevention and damage control. It's politically risky and companies are against it. That accurately describes the last four decades. But does it describe the next four when the proverbial shit is hitting the fan?

I think this continuous stream of weather caused disasters, record breaking heat waves, droughts, extremes, etc are slowly getting us ready to make some tough choices. The past year has shown that we can do that in a hurry when we have a pandemic. It's a matter of public opinion and once that shifts, things just happen really quickly and get a dynamic of their own. That change creates opportunities for companies to capitalize on. The changes are massive; therefore the opportunities are massive too. The NYT is right that that will involve a lot of money. They seem miss the notion that there's also a massive return on that investment. In a way capitalism and greed are working better here than politics and activism.

The first not so tough choice will be the timing of the complete death of the ICE vehicle industry. Weather it's 2030, 2035, or 2040 doesn't actually matter at this point because it is basically happening already. The consensus seems to be that the phase out of ICE vehicles is now inevitable and most manufacturers are already investing to survive beyond that. That creates a dynamic that basically makes it happen faster. Which seems to have taken a few manufacturers by surprise. Tesla paved the way for this in the last fifteen years. Now others are also having success in the market with EV only products. Sure most of these will happily churn out ICE vehicles as long as they can get away with it but increasingly they are looking towards EVs for growth, good press, profit, etc. Companies merely holding on to what they have without investing will simply be wiped out. To some extent that is already happening as well.

The same transition is happening in the energy sector. Wind and solar are basically killing more co2 intensive forms of energy generation like coal and increasingly also gas. There too people are haggling over when the final plants are being shut down. But economics are driving that transition faster than years of activism could. Wind is cheaper, therefore coal plants are disappearing by the double digit GW per year now.

These natural disasters that are widely attributed to climate change are just going to make it happen faster. But it was already happening anyway.

> The uncertainty bracket is large.

I completely agree. It's so large that it's expected that any near-term predictions will be false, and that's what we see. By now there's a huge graveyard of false climate doomsday predictions that are swept under the rug by the media, seemingly because it's so useful for them to have something scary to talk about.

We know that the atmosphere's temperature goes up and down, and does not require human activity to do that. It has ranged from about 10C to 25C over the past 2B years (obviously with no human intervention). Earth has been about as cold as it ever gets recently, so even if there were no emissions by humans, it wouldn't be surprising to see the earth heating up. That's what it's done many times in the past.

We're being told that it's definitely due to CO2 emissions, when we lack the computational ability to prove such a thing. Because of this insistence on the CO2 hypothesis, all talk is about ceasing emissions. If we thought the earth was heating up of its own accord, all talk would be about configuring society to have huge amounts of reliable clean energy, which pretty much means nuclear, rather than solar and wind.

Note the same anti-human pattern as in the case of sea-level rise: it's fine for nature to add e.g. 2000 ppm CO2, but it's evil, wrong, and potentially disastrous for humans to add 100.

To be clear, Ireland's government rarely acts for the greater good; moreso, eg. as with tax havens, in the interest of a wealthy few.

What I'm talking about is a widespread attitude among 'normal' people, where anyone with a whiff of too much ego about them is nearly ostracized. So much so, that it's almost a crab-bucket mentality, rather than plain down-to-earthness.

As an example, the normal American style of telling people what you're good at goes down like a lead balloon in Ireland - saying anything positive about yourself without sandwiching it in layers of self-deprecation is seen as unforgivably gauche.

And yet - despite the above - Ireland has no shortage of neolib politicians and moguls, who have rotted our infrastructure from within - such as with tax havens, a very shortsighted and shitty strategy. The have become incredibly wealthy in the process, doubling their wealth or so during the pandemic - and they get away with it because they own the media. It's as if they're invisible, and thus immune to any social pressure.

I don't care who caused things. I just don't want things to change. Call be "environmental conservative" if you wish; I want my grand-children to bathe in the beach I grew up, under the shadow of pines and olive trees. I don't care if nature or humans destroy that, I just don't want this to be destroyed. Arguing that in the past nature caused wider temperature swings than what humans could do doesn't make me feel any better. Life on earth was much different back then, dinosaurs and Pangea and whatnot.

I think this whataboutsim about nature is missing the point about how we actually want to live.

Socially conservative people should probably care more about conserving our way of life as in having children running on meadows instead of being trapped under domes or underground. Instead they're focusing on preserving their relatively recent life-style of reckless burning fossil fuel.

We may be wrong and maybe it will turn out that all this caution was not necessary. But it's not that we're saying we should all curl up in a corner and die.

There are alternative ways to deal with resources that can give jobs to people and let humanity thrive in other ways. What are you people really afraid of exactly? What kind of fearmongering have you been exposed to? That all the last decent people will disappear when coal mines will close? What is it, really? Even if all we end up doing wasn't really necessary to "save the planet" but just to have better air quality in our cities, would that be that bad?

The tax should be simply applied to the carbon content of the fuel.

Use the revenue to subsidize green projects.