I’m cool with that. I also don’t think it would necessarily be huge in terms of inconvenience for the average person because alternatives would pop up before long. For example, if air travel became prohibitively expensive we might actually see an expanse of passenger rail for domestic travel. It’s ridiculous that it’s still cheaper/more convenient to take a 45 min flight (plus the time the whole airport experience takes) vs a couple hours (or less with high speed rail) train ride. Certain plastics might also become too expensive so we might see the return to more sustainable packaging. A lot of the oil and byproduct consumption from the average person comes down to lack of choice ratger than people choosing products made from oil ober alternatives.
It would be a massive inconvenience, but it’ll still be worth it. High speed rail takes many years to build. People hate lifestyle changes. Hell, people will be unhappy at the changes to food packaging. Everything will become more expensive and the economy will contract.
If we go in promising it’ll be easy people will get mad and balk when it gets hard. If we go in explaining how it’ll suck, but that we’ve got a plan to fix the problems and it’ll be worth it then we can succeed
This is a political non-starter, and you’ve pretty much gotten to the point all the people criticising this post are trying to make. Almost no one is willing to make a significant sacrifice in their lifestyle for the sake of the climate, which is why memes like the above exist. They create a make-believe fairytale land where we just have to beat the big bad, and we can all live happily ever after.
But imagine what would happen in any democratically elected nation if a politician actually started making everyones lives worse. Sure, some would keep a stiff upper lip and bear it - but the vast majority would put them out on their ass asap in favor of the first person who said they would make things better.
That’s why literally every climate proposal includes policies to improve things for the average person. Carbon dividends or UBI or trains or street trees or green jobs, etc. You have to be realistic about politics as much as you are realistic about carbon economics.
No, we are past that point. A gradual reduction in CO2 levels is not enough any more. If you want to save billions of lives we need to cut CO2 production hard and right now. Since that is never going to happen you happy go lucky scenario becomes impossible. In any realistic climate scenario humanity is already fucked, it’s only matter of how much exactly.
Correct, we are likely going to need to do geoengineering for a 100-200 years while CO2 gets reduced gradually.
Baking soda aerosols are looking promising. They can just at 2-3% sodium additive to all jet aircraft exhaust and it will be enough to reverse the current levels of elevated CO2.
i mean, i’m not sure where you live but we’re seeing sizeable towns [populations <10,000] getting eaten by fire on my side of the continent (pacific west coast, north america [i’m in california. it’s been a mild year so far but fire season officially started two weeks ago in my town. so far only three fires worth mentioning!]) and before you start on any “need to rake your forest or manage it better or let it burn”, people been living there for 400 years if not longer at the one close to me that burned a few seasons back. much longer at the one with 200,000 people that half burned a few more seasons back. kindly leave that victim blamey bullshit at the door.
agreed, we’re already fucked. the question now is how fucked and whether we’ll be around when the planet recovers.
The planet isn’t going to “recover”. We’re fundamentally changing the atmosphere, and it’ll never go back. The planet will be fine, some forms of life will go on, but the planet will not settle back into something hospitable to current complex life.
So oxygen in the atmosphere is relatively new geologically speaking, and oxygen is incredibly reactive, it oxidizes things which is a fancy way of saying it dissolves things slowly. It pretty well killed most things that weren’t already equipped to either process or release oxygen as waste. We’re good at dealing with it but we’re pretty sensitive to the exact mixture of air (which is mostly nitrogen anyway) and we’re likely past a point of no return for cascading runaway effects changing that mixture. That’ll kill most air breathers. The greenhouse runaway effect will acidify the oceans, killing most ocean life. The increased energy in the system from the greenhouse effect causes continent-wide superstorms that literally scour the face of the earth into something unrecognizable. Most of what survived before won’t survive that.
So yeah, earth will move on and there will likely still be some form of life on it in a few thousand years. But it won’t be us, or anything like us, and it never will be again. We are this planets only shot at producing space-faring life.
I’m cool with that. I also don’t think it would necessarily be huge in terms of inconvenience for the average person because alternatives would pop up before long. For example, if air travel became prohibitively expensive we might actually see an expanse of passenger rail for domestic travel. It’s ridiculous that it’s still cheaper/more convenient to take a 45 min flight (plus the time the whole airport experience takes) vs a couple hours (or less with high speed rail) train ride. Certain plastics might also become too expensive so we might see the return to more sustainable packaging. A lot of the oil and byproduct consumption from the average person comes down to lack of choice ratger than people choosing products made from oil ober alternatives.
BLIMPS
Americans simply have no idea how much of what they take for granted is simply an unsustainable luxury. That absolutely includes leftists, too.
It would be a massive inconvenience, but it’ll still be worth it. High speed rail takes many years to build. People hate lifestyle changes. Hell, people will be unhappy at the changes to food packaging. Everything will become more expensive and the economy will contract.
If we go in promising it’ll be easy people will get mad and balk when it gets hard. If we go in explaining how it’ll suck, but that we’ve got a plan to fix the problems and it’ll be worth it then we can succeed
This is a political non-starter, and you’ve pretty much gotten to the point all the people criticising this post are trying to make. Almost no one is willing to make a significant sacrifice in their lifestyle for the sake of the climate, which is why memes like the above exist. They create a make-believe fairytale land where we just have to beat the big bad, and we can all live happily ever after.
But imagine what would happen in any democratically elected nation if a politician actually started making everyones lives worse. Sure, some would keep a stiff upper lip and bear it - but the vast majority would put them out on their ass asap in favor of the first person who said they would make things better.
That’s why literally every climate proposal includes policies to improve things for the average person. Carbon dividends or UBI or trains or street trees or green jobs, etc. You have to be realistic about politics as much as you are realistic about carbon economics.
No, we are past that point. A gradual reduction in CO2 levels is not enough any more. If you want to save billions of lives we need to cut CO2 production hard and right now. Since that is never going to happen you happy go lucky scenario becomes impossible. In any realistic climate scenario humanity is already fucked, it’s only matter of how much exactly.
Correct, we are likely going to need to do geoengineering for a 100-200 years while CO2 gets reduced gradually.
Baking soda aerosols are looking promising. They can just at 2-3% sodium additive to all jet aircraft exhaust and it will be enough to reverse the current levels of elevated CO2.
Start doing some real chemtrails.
i mean, i’m not sure where you live but we’re seeing sizeable towns [populations <10,000] getting eaten by fire on my side of the continent (pacific west coast, north america [i’m in california. it’s been a mild year so far but fire season officially started two weeks ago in my town. so far only three fires worth mentioning!]) and before you start on any “need to rake your forest or manage it better or let it burn”, people been living there for 400 years if not longer at the one close to me that burned a few seasons back. much longer at the one with 200,000 people that half burned a few more seasons back. kindly leave that victim blamey bullshit at the door.
agreed, we’re already fucked. the question now is how fucked and whether we’ll be around when the planet recovers.
The planet isn’t going to “recover”. We’re fundamentally changing the atmosphere, and it’ll never go back. The planet will be fine, some forms of life will go on, but the planet will not settle back into something hospitable to current complex life.
megafauna never really came back. like, this one is very different from the ones before, but it’s not going to extinct everything.
So oxygen in the atmosphere is relatively new geologically speaking, and oxygen is incredibly reactive, it oxidizes things which is a fancy way of saying it dissolves things slowly. It pretty well killed most things that weren’t already equipped to either process or release oxygen as waste. We’re good at dealing with it but we’re pretty sensitive to the exact mixture of air (which is mostly nitrogen anyway) and we’re likely past a point of no return for cascading runaway effects changing that mixture. That’ll kill most air breathers. The greenhouse runaway effect will acidify the oceans, killing most ocean life. The increased energy in the system from the greenhouse effect causes continent-wide superstorms that literally scour the face of the earth into something unrecognizable. Most of what survived before won’t survive that.
So yeah, earth will move on and there will likely still be some form of life on it in a few thousand years. But it won’t be us, or anything like us, and it never will be again. We are this planets only shot at producing space-faring life.