Electricity is getting cheaper as we go. It’s already passed close, and there are not a lot of incentives to pro-actively switch, but there is an incentive to g

Electricity is getting cheaper as we go. It’s already passed close, and there are not a lot of incentives to pro-actively switch, but there is an incentive to get an electric car when you change; to get a heat pump when your heater stops working; better insulation, always; to buy a solar panel and a battery after a blackout… This wouldn’t need much, and the handful of people who control America, a lot of them are making money from some of those four changes. > Shit won’t hit the fan until everybody alive today is dead. That’s radically not true: millions of people have died because of the consequence of global warming already, but I’ve learned the hard way not to debate with climate deniers. The real incentive to get out now is to have people who suffer visibly and directly from the consequences of fossil fuel extraction: cancer alley in Louisiana; children who grew up next to highways and also have cancer; people poisoned by oil spills and pipeline leaks; people who lost their water table to fracking; those people have grounds to sue, a press that interested in covering their case. They will make exploiting oil more and more expensive. How much depends on lobbying–you are right about that. However, I suspect judges won’t all be compliant to suggestions that cancer patients are already dead, and asking businesses to pay their heirs real money isn’t ethical. The alternative will increasingly look like business as usual, and many more people will be sacrificed the same way. Each slap on the wrist will look increasingly appealable. Those directly affected will soon be joined by people who had their livelihoods destroyed by global warming through forest fires, floods, and hurricanes to join them. Individually, I agree that’s not very influential, but one of two things might happen: * Insurance companies are one of the really big players in this world. If they are forced to keep policies and pay, they might start some actual lobbying to prevent the worst. That means an all-out board-room war against fossil fuel. That sounds unlikely unless you count some big clients that can’t just ignore the problem, like Disney, or anyone with a big footprint in California, Florida, Louisiana, etc. That’s enough of the Fortune 500 to justify some coordination and to build an interest in not abandoning the coast to storms. * More likely, insurance companies will drop many of their smaller clients. A large grassroots movement might grow — not of toothless people in caravans on tornado alley, but real-estate promoters who can’t insure and therefore can build, resell, and renovate their property. They could and already do catastrophe adaptation. It works now, but that math won’t last long: they’ll need hurricanes to slow down, flood, and heatwaves too. They’ll also rapidly find that companies like McDonald’s care about not having their restaurants blown away too—and they are around the globe.