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Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening. That it was the prevailing consensus and had the necessary evidence. What were governments supp

by mc32 5y ago

Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening. That it was the prevailing consensus and had the necessary evidence. What were governments supposed to do? What technology were they going to leverage? did we have computers, modelling, alternatives? Cars with ICE could have become more efficient, yes. But where else could we have cut the fat? Fewer people via worldwide contraception, to stem demand? More public transit? Much of carbon output is not on the consumer side, but on the industry side of things. The antinuke activists killed green energy which would have make coal and other dirty power obsolete. That would have been a nice chunk. I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it.

nimih 5y ago
In the US, we could have built cities and suburbs which did not necessitate owning an ICE vehicle (at least for the majority of residents). We could have pushed the development of electric cars, which were certainly plausible in the 90s. We (the US gov't) could've stopped subsidizing fossil fuels. Heck, with the end of the cold war, the US could've substantially cut military spending, which accounts for a rather non-trivial portion of the nation's carbon emissions. More generally, we could've taxed carbon emissions to correctly account for the externalities they generated (which it was certainly possible to compute in the 70s: the energy companies themselves were doing it!), which would've likely shifted land use away from cattle, energy generation away from coal, &c. These are things which are, quite clearly, at least an order of magnitude less than what we need to accomplish today, but since climate change is caused by the area under the emissions curve, perhaps that 50 year head start would've been enough. With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly would've been worthwhile to give it more of a try than what we actually did.
antod 5y ago
>Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening. The broad understanding of it was known in the late 70s, and even accepted by politicians by the early 80s as a policy requirement before it became politicised later. >I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it. If you think of the massive exponential growth of oil/gas consumption and the level of deforestation since the 70s - even just slowing it down back then would've bought a much longer window of time to tackle it with less disruption as well as develop technologies to help fix/mitigate it.

by mc32 5y ago

nimih 5y ago

In the US, we could have built cities and suburbs which did not necessitate owning an ICE vehicle (at least for the majority of residents). We could have pushed the development of electric cars, which were certainly plausible in the 90s. We (the US gov't) could've stopped subsidizing fossil fuels. Heck, with the end of the cold war, the US could've substantially cut military spending, which accounts for a rather non-trivial portion of the nation's carbon emissions. More generally, we could've taxed carbon emissions to correctly account for the externalities they generated (which it was certainly possible to compute in the 70s: the energy companies themselves were doing it!), which would've likely shifted land use away from cattle, energy generation away from coal, &c. These are things which are, quite clearly, at least an order of magnitude less than what we need to accomplish today, but since climate change is caused by the area under the emissions curve, perhaps that 50 year head start would've been enough. With the benefit of hindsight, it certainly would've been worthwhile to give it more of a try than what we actually did.

antod 5y ago

>Let's say people in the 70s knew climate change was happening. The broad understanding of it was known in the late 70s, and even accepted by politicians by the early 80s as a policy requirement before it became politicised later. >I don't think we had the technology back then to do much about it. We could have slowed it down a bit, but not stop it. If you think of the massive exponential growth of oil/gas consumption and the level of deforestation since the 70s - even just slowing it down back then would've bought a much longer window of time to tackle it with less disruption as well as develop technologies to help fix/mitigate it.