Saying that we’re “letting” big corporations gamble with our lives is more than a little misleading. It implies that we have the authority to grant them permission, as well as the authority to deny them permission. We have no such authority. Or, at least, I don’t. I have ZERO authority. Nobody asked my permission, and none was given. Somebody has the power, but it ain’t me.
If you had bothered to read past that sentence, you would have noticed this:
That said, renewable energy will almost certainly still be the cheaper option. Plus, renewable energy is just much more efficient. An electric car charged from renewable electricity is going to lose significantly less energy to waste than an ICE car running on gas.
Renewable energy tech is also sensitive to oil prices. Those products are just as dependent on global supply chains that still run on oil. So, renewable energy tech might go up in price like most everything else.
That said, renewable energy will almost certainly still be the cheaper option. Plus, renewable energy is just much more efficient. An electric car charged from renewable electricity is going to lose significantly less energy to waste than an ICE car running on gas.
But honestly, the affordability of renewable energy tech is dependent on one country: China. Without China’s massive industrial manufacturing capacity, and the Chinese government’s willingness to heavily subsidize key renewable tech industries, the renewable energy transition wouldn’t be possible.
For renewable energy to become viable, the tech had to come down in price. But the only way to bring down the price was to over produce.
Price is determined by supply and demand. If you produce a lot of a certain product, but the demand for that product is low, the price for the product will go down. That’s good for consumers but it’s bad for the business. Now it’s true that businesses can still make a profit even as the per unit price for their product is coming down, by increasing overall sales volume. But that’s risky, and it wouldn’t have worked for renewable tech anyway because we needed the price of that tech to come down a lot, and fast. There’s no way the producers could have remained profitable with prices coming down as much and quickly as they have without heavy subsidies.
There was no will to do that in the “free market capitalism” West.
How bad things get, Rahmstorf explained, all depends on how long the planet stays above 1.5 degrees. The Greenland Ice Sheet, for example, might be salvageable if people figure out how to bring emissions down and actively cool the planet…
“actively cool the planet”
Geo engineering, or “solar radiation management,” as they’re calling it now. Yeah, that’s right, folks. They’re gonna pump sulfur dioxide, or something, into the atmosphere to cool the planet. I know it, they’re going to do it. That’s how they’re doing to “fix” this. We can keep burning the fossil fuels that way. Burn the coal, burn the oil, burn the natural gas, it’s all fine because we can just cool the climate down. It’s so easy!
We are so cooked.
I don’t really see any other option. It’s happening regardless, might as well at least try to prepare.
It failed because achieving it wasn’t easy or cheap enough for consumers, wasn’t profitable enough for investors, and was too much of a threat to entrenched corporate/state interests.
According to a S&P Global probabilistic model: “global warming is likely to reach 2.3 C as soon as 2040.” And they conclude: “This suggests that–as a baseline–all sectors, including households, may want to prepare for the impacts of physical climate risks associated with a 2.3 C world.”
That’s less than 15 years from now.
Now, let me be clear, they’re not saying that we will for certain reach 2.3C of warming by 2040. They’re offering a probabilistic analysis, and they have determined that it is likely enough that it’s something we might want to prepare for. They “estimate a 90% likelihood that, by 2040, the average global temperature will exceed the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5° Celsius (1.5 C) above pre-industrial levels.” And they estimate that “there is a 50% likelihood of it exceeding 2.3 C” by 2040.
There was never a climate doomsday clock, at least not from any legitimate scientific sources. Scientists don’t make predictions, they’re not soothsayers or fortune tellers. It is, however, useful to try and project into the future. They do this using models. Unfortunately, even the most accurate climate model can’t have anywhere near a high enough fidelity to tell each person on the planet exactly how they will be personally impacted by climate change. But that’s exactly what makes climate change so concerning. There are a lot of unknowns, and it just generally makes the future more unpredictable than it otherwise would have been.
The Earth’s climate has been relatively stable for essentially all of our existence as a species. That’s going to change. It already has. We’re in that process now. That is irrefutable. And these changes will happen at a nearly unprecedented rate. Even relatively rapid temperature changes in Earth’s history usually unfold over tens of thousands of years. What we’re observing is unfolding over decades. That in and of itself is concerning, even if we don’t necessarily know exactly how that is going to impact each person individually.
Honestly, the best thing is just not to find out. Why risk it? Does it really make you feel any better knowing that we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen as a result of this unprecedented process? We should cut global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero as quickly as possible so we don’t have to worry about what might have happened if we didn’t.
Fix your shit, Americans.
I wouldn’t plan it. We’re a lost cause, best to plan on the US being a mostly irredeemable pile of garbage for the foreseeable future.
The US is the dictator of the world, and has been for some time.
Yeah, Trump’s an idiot, but the American people are bigger idiots for voting for him, twice.
I really think we’d be better off just reducing GHG emissions as quickly as possible. I realize we’re not doing that, but that fact doesn’t necessarily make solar geoengineering (or solar radiation management, whatever you want to call it) a better idea. In fact, it might make it a worse idea. Geoengineering should only be done (if at all) in conjunction with rapid reductions in GHG emissions and carbon capture and sequestration. Doing geoengineering without GHG emissions reductions and carbon capture is at best a complete waste and at worst a total disaster.
And the neoliberals/libertarians/anarcho capitalists cheered. Of course people who worship the “free market,” and who believe that governments can only ever do harm and that taxation is theft, want the government to be dysfunctional. Because, ultimately, they don’t want the government to function, at all. Why would they? Why would someone who adamantly believes that governments are always bad want a functioning government?
I’m sure most people will be doing relatively poorly when the inevitable crash occurs. But infinite growth is simply not possible.
People like you are the problem. You don’t actually want to fix anything, you just want to be “right.” You just want your beliefs and preconceived notions to be reinforced and validated.
Yeah, ultimately the problem is our infinite growth paradigm. Infinite growth isn’t sustainable regardless of the energy source. The paradigm will end, one way or another, probably when we hit some hard ecological or resource limit. The resulting crash will be hugely consequential for our species and the rest of the planet.
We’ve really screwed the pooch when it comes to climate change, so far. Most of it is due to greed, corruption, and the incredible influence of the fossil fuels industry, but I think climate activists have hurt their own cause, in some ways.
For whatever reason, climate activists have really focused on EVs, really trying to push rapid adoption through tax incentives and mandates. But the industry wasn’t ready. Profit margins at the lower end of the market, where most car buyers are, were too low due to the still relatively high cost of batteries, so the industry focused on the premium/luxury end of the market where margins were higher. The EV market became flooded with expensive vehicles that there just wasn’t enough demand for. It has resulted in people associating EVs with expensive luxury, and that’s the opposite of what we want for mass adoption. Also, the build out of critical infrastructure has been haphazard. The monopoly tactics of Tesla, and Elon Musk being an insane lunatic haven’t helped either.
But passenger vehicles account for such a small overall percentage of global GHG emissions, I don’t know why so much of the focus was on EVs to begin with. We should have been focused on the real climate change culprit, and that’s electricity generation.
We have shut down a lot of coal power plants, which is definitely a good thing, but most of them have been replaced with natural gas plants, which is not a good thing.
And that brings me to the other big mistake made by many climate activists: they insisted that we focus only on renewables, and refused to support nuclear, even though nuclear is a zero GHG emission technology.
The fact is, renewables are a very different electric generation technology, compared to coal, natural gas and nuclear. The latter can increase output in real time, in response to increases in demand. With renewables, whatever is being generated at any given time is what’s available, and if people want more electricity than what renewables are already putting on the grid, there’s nothing you can do. You can’t throw more solar panels on the fire, so to speak. Renewables just represent a complete paradigm shift in the way we generate and consume electricity. Renewables change the economics of electricity generation and delivery, and we did not adequately anticipate impacts of that.
The question now is: will climate activists recognize these mistakes and change. We’ll see.
It’s the tragedy of the commons. However, there are solutions to the tragedy of the commons, but for the solutions to work, we need to hold each other accountable. If we don’t rein in these out of control, egomaniac billionaires, we will succumb to tragedy. No longer can we celebrate, indulge, or even tolerate the actions of people like Musk. There must be accountability.
No one who speaks German can be an evil man.
What would you like me to do? You know what, let me rephrase that: what would you like me to do, that wouldn’t just result in me being hit even harder? Or killed. Would you like me to Luigi some folks? So I can be killed, or spend the rest of my life in prison or on death row?