3 ms·
The tipping point has come and gone as far as the climate trajectory goes, although actions taken today will reduce the slope of the trajectory say 50 years fro
by photochemsyn 4y ago
The tipping point has come and gone as far as the climate trajectory goes, although actions taken today will reduce the slope of the trajectory say 50 years from now. When you throw the rudder over on the Titanic too late, you must prepare for the impact. Hence this kind of messaging is rather futile:
> "Many young people are depressed because they feel climate change cannot be stopped. We want to offer them hope by showing that our world can get all its energy needs from renewables at a price below that of fossil fuels. When we first proposed this, we were ridiculed, but this paper shows our ideas are now scientific mainstream", says Auke Hoekstra from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands."
The one (going to 100% renewables) no longer implies the other (stabilizing the climate system within the lifetime of anyone alive today). Hugely expensive steps must be taken - retreat from flood plains that will be experiencing 500-year floods every 5 years, securing water supplies to survive epic droughts (with the additional loss of much of the seasonal snowpack in many regions), building termite-mound like architecture to handle the record heat waves, moving critical infrastructure back from the coastlines to deal with rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion, dealing with insects that love these new warm conditions, etc.
On top of that, replacing the existing fossil fuel infrastructure is going to cost trillions and require a complete reorganization of the global economic system - just look at all the oil tankers, pipelines, internal combustion engines, gas-and-coal fired power plants. No time to watch TikTok videos, it's going to be work, work, work. Scaling up industrial production of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries by a factor of what, 100X? Better get busy, humans.
Think of it more as an exciting challenge, adapting to these frightening new conditions - interesting times!. Of course, we'll have to raid the wealth of the fossil fuel sector and their investors to pay for all this adaptation and industrial development. Sticking the major producers with the bill makes optional sense. Implementing a ban on the global trade in fossil fuels would also be reasonable under these conditions (note that this was the first major step in eliminating the practice of chattel slavery, for comparison).