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We're fully dependent on hydrocarbons and no one has any idea how to replace those in any foreseeable future. https://www.ft.com/content/73650984-135a-11e9-a16

• adrianN 8y ago
  The first official warning by an expert panel to the US President was 1965. We did pretty much nothing since then to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. We could have for example switched all electricity generation to nuclear with 1965 technology and changed building standards to require proper insulation and electric or district heating. That would have bought a lot of time that we don't have now. We could also have instituted a carbon tax and slowly (over the course of the last fifty years or so!) pinned it to the cost of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.
  • ahje 8y ago
    Coulda, woulda, shoulda. We're here now, we can't change the past, and blaming previous generations is a waste of time when we need to act now. Most of us know what to do. We just need to start doing it.
    • adrianN 8y ago
      What do we need to do? I don't see how we can reduce carbon emissions by 18% per year for the next ten years. Right now we don't even get the second derivative right, emission rates are still on the rise. It doesn't really look like our politicians worldwide will start an effort comparable to ramping up the WW2 war industry to decarbonize the economy in the next decade. On the contrary, conservative climate denialists are on the rise. https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070787 https://mobile.twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/1070717050430070...
      • ahje 8y ago
        What we can do is to skip unnecessary travel, use public transport whenever we can, stop buying fairly useless consumer products for our own leisure, and the most important ones: realise that reducing our collective carbon footprint will result in considerable reductions of one's individual standard of living. We, as individual consumers, need to reduce the carbon emissions ourselves as much as possible no matter what the politicians say. Deniers are going to be a problem until shit hits the fan for real, and waiting until everyone is convinced will simply be a waste of time. So, in other words, focus less on what others do, more on what you do, and make sure to prepare as much as you can for whatever the future holds. Not saying everyone should become a prepper (although it's a fun hobby!), but the fact that people blindly believe that the future is a straight line is scarier, regardless of where they believe that line is pointing.
        • mattmanser 8y ago
          Spitting in an empty swimming pool to try and fill it? It's a governmental problem, not an individual one, only way it's going to change is if you start campaigning and voting differently.
          • ahje 8y ago
            I am. I doubt anything but direct action will have an effect though.
          • freeflight 8y ago
            That's like a landslide were each pebble of dirt doesn't consider itself responsible for what's happening, on a bigger scale, even tho all the pebbles keep doing the same thing leading to bigger scale consequences in the first place. Many a mickle makes a muckle, this applies to pretty much everything. If everybody keeps acting like their individual contributions are completely meaningless, then nobody will change anything about their own ways and thus large scale change will remain a pipe-dream.
            • mattmanser 8y ago
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      And we won't, for the same reasons they didn't in the past: it is too inconvenient. If we are ever to solve problems like this we need to embed within our culture the desire to sacrifice convenience for a future we may never see, and that's more or less the antithesis of current cultural norms. We need to take responsibility for this ourselves on an individual level and stop just pointing fingers and making excuses why it can't be done.
• rebuilder 8y ago
  Catastrophe today vs. extinction tomorrow, I fear.
  • jacobush 8y ago
    Extinction won't happen. 99.99% could die and that would leave seven million people.
    • glaurung_ 8y ago
      7 000 000 000 * .01% = 700 000 Still, you make a very good point. Homo Sapiens will stick around. Advanced civilization might not.
      • username223 8y ago
        That's the endgame I expect: climate refugees leading to (possibly nuclear) war. With a much smaller human population (and perhaps a bit of nuclear winter), atmospheric CO2 will return to pre-industrial levels, and things will return to normal in a couple millennia. The remaining humans will migrate down from Alaska and Siberia, and build new cities on top of the ruins. Climate change is a "solved" problem, but the solution isn't something I would want to live through.
        • devereaux 8y ago
          > Climate change is a "solved" problem, but the solution isn't something I would want to live through. The good news is, unless you are part of the lucky 0.01%, you won't have to live through it!
          • deleted 8y ago
            [deleted]
          • username223 8y ago
            It's still a wretched way to die. Most of us posting here will die of old age before things really get ugly. It's our children or grandchildren who will suffer.
• fit2rule 8y ago
  Switch to electric transportation as quickly as possible. Change your mind about needing a personal automobile, and share it with as many people as possible. Use public transportation if you have it, and insist in your community investing in public transportation systems if you don't.
  • mises 8y ago
    What of cities, like Houston, which are too spread out and flood too often for good mass transit?
    • fit2rule 8y ago
      It'll be up to the good citizens of Houston to work out how to solve this problem. I imagine electric transportation would still work there. But, I do also think that a lot of American cities are going to have to work out how they're going to stay inhabitable without requiring a massive refactoring of their landscapes.
• fulafel 8y ago
  > From economical point of view it's catastrophe today (just stopping using fossil fuels cold turkey will destroy the economic structure of our civilization) versus catastrophe tomorrow. I think this is a false dichotomy, and so do many economists [1]. We can start phasing out out the non-essential use of fossils and come up with replacements for the remainign parts in the coming decades. Painting it as this kind of desperate dichotomy is generally playing into the hands those who don't want us to address climate change. Remember that the changes aren't only chilling on the economy - the energy overhaul is an enormous global public works project. We are using energy and energy-intensive products in really wasteful ways because of their low cost in our everyday lives (consider oversized cars and low occupancy, available savings from turning heating & cooling to lower levels, going veggie in food, cutting air travel, not to mention all the wasted energy in commercial/industrial side due to low energy costs). [1] See eg https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/opinion/paul-krugman-could-fighting-global-warming-be-cheap-and-free.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/19/opinion/paul-krugman-coul...
  • fsloth 8y ago
    Sure, you are quite right. I think the biggest hurdle is that the incumbent investments in hydrocarbons have quite a lot of future profits to tied up to continued usage of said resources. The negative externalities of hydrocarbon eceonomy should be tied more forcefully directly to their usage. But even that would not discourage investors from doing all they can to keep up the demand for oil.