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For some reason, climate change news always stays at the problem-description level and doesn’t go further than that. That’s one of the missing pieces to solving
by huijzer 4y ago
For some reason, climate change news always stays at the problem-description level and doesn’t go further than that. That’s one of the missing pieces to solving it, I think. Framing it better:
We’ve been able to put a man on the moon, build nanometer scale transistors, and created tools to collaborate effectively without having to physically meet (for example, Git). Wouldn’t it be possible too to solve global warming?
- vkou 4y agoFor the same reason that it's impossible to solve a housing shortage in this town. It's not a technical problem, it's a collective action problem. [1] [1] Which are hard enough to solve without malicious actors actively undermining us.
- adrianN 4y agoOf course it would be possible. The problem isn't technological, it's political.
- winReInstall 4y agoNo, its not. Not only. The political problem is a epxression of a deeper pathology. This species is unable to form innovative (free) societies without a constant surplus of ressources and energy. We "unchanged" are a exponential curve, bumping against a linear ceiling and this needs to fixed first, to even have the mental tooling and stability to handle grand projects.
- gruez 4y ago>The problem isn't technological, it's political. I guess that's true in the technical sense, but it doesn't mean much. Electric cars were a thing in the 19th century, yet it was only in the past decade or so that they gotten popular. Would you characterize the failure of electric cars to get traction as "The problem isn't technological, it's political"? The first result for "cost to decarbonize"[1] says it would cost $340T, compared to global GDP of $80T. You could argue that it's a political problem that we're not allocating our budget towards that goal, but at the same time you could argue that if technology improved it would be a much easier pill to swallow. [1] https://boereport.com/2019/02/26/the-cost-of-decarbonization-how-much-green-to-go-green/ https://boereport.com/2019/02/26/the-cost-of-decarbonization...
- adrianN 4y agoThat climate change is a serious problem was established science at the end of the eighties. Had we started to address the problem in earnest back then, it would've been much cheaper to decarbonize. Instead we built bigger cars, dismantled public transport, continued to build houses with poor insulation and stopped building nuclear power plants. That consumed so much of our carbon budget that today, when there are very few technical hurdles left, we ran out of time and costs exploded.
- zouhair 4y agoCapitalism won't allow it. Solving the Climate Change crisis demands questioning Capitalism. Good luck with that.
- whatshisface 4y agoThe EPA "questions capitalism" every day when it enforces its regulations which protect the commons.
- awnird 4y agoThis is why the EPA was recently gutted by the Council of Guardians though.
- whatshisface 4y agoAren't they an Iranian governing body?
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoI think they're referencing the Supreme Court https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1103595898/supreme-court-epa-climate-change https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1103595898/supreme-court-epa-...
- whatshisface 4y agoThen I can reply by saying that it was not a "gutting," the supreme court was blocking a new regulation on the grounds that it was beyond any that had been enacted before, and in their opinion (using the previous fact as evidence) beyond what Congress had empowered the EPA to do. No presently enforced regulations were overturned.
- anigbrowl 4y agoTrue, but have you noticed how 30-40% of the country gets very angry and irrational about this.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spywaregorilla 4y agoThat's a terrible framing. It gives no sense of scale of difficulty of these problems and assumes they are similar.
- wsinks 4y agoWould this be a better framing? - Every single place on the earth up to the year 2000 had an average temperature as well as a max and min temperature, along with a variance of predictability along those days. What do we need for our communities to stay stable if the max goes up, the min goes down, the variance of predictability goes up (and continues to go up every year)?
- pauldenton 4y agoIt would be more accurate to bring up the expanding population of Humanity The world reached one billion for the first time in 1804. It would be more than 100 years before it reached two billion in 1927, but it took only 33 years to reach three billion in 1960. Thereafter, the global population reached four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999 and, by some estimates, seven billion in October 2011 There are more people living in more places then ever before. If a hurricane hit an area no human lived, did anybody notice?
- spywaregorilla 4y agoI mean... no? That doesn't help understand how hard that is either. It is a more accurate problem spec, but it doesn't contextualize the difficulty.
- rbanffy 4y ago> That’s one of the missing pieces to solving it There is no missing piece. We all know we need to drastically cut carbon emissions, capture as much carbon as we can, and use energy sources that do not emit carbon into the atmosphere. That's pretty much it.
- colpabar 4y agoWell I mean there's obviously something missing because these things aren't happening. And if that's just lack of political will, then political will is the missing piece.
- Ekaros 4y agoAnd all that means drastically lowering our standards of living and forwarding much of our economic output towards it. Not very palatable choice.
- LargeWu 4y agoThe problem isn't the framing. The problem is a post-truth political climate that refuses to acknowledge climate change is a problem that needs solving to begin with.