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That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%." Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. No
by ACCount37 8mo ago
That's the sum of climate change. "GDP growth of 3% instead of 5%."
Severe enough to be noticeable, but not severe enough to warrant radical climate action. Not an extinction threat. A "slow trickle of economic damage, some amount of otherwise preventable death and suffering, diffused across the entire world, applied unevenly, and spread thin across many decades" threat.
And stopping the GHG emissions demands radical, coordinated global action. Major emitters would have to pay local costs now - for the sake of global benefits many decades down the line. And those emitters are not the countries that face the worst climate risks. Global superpowers can tolerate climate change - it's countries that already struggle as it is, that don't have the resources to adapt or mitigate damage, that can face a significant uptick in death and suffering rather than damage in the realm of economics.
That makes climate action a very hard sell for the politicians. Thus the tepid response.
By now, I'm convinced that the only viable approaches to climate change lie in the realm of geoengineering. Which does not require multilateral coordinated action against a "tragedy of commons" scenario, and is cheaper than forcing local GHG emissions into negatives.
Even non-permanent geoengineering solutions offset impacts here and now - thus buying time for fossil fuel energy to succumb to the economic advantage of renewables. And geoengineering measures can be enacted unilaterally by many powers - as long as the political will is there to absorb a few strongly worded condemnation letters.
- gzread 8mo agoAnd then when the GDP finally collapses, there will have been nothing that could be done about it for the last 50 years and they'll ask wtf we were doing in 2040, why we didn't stop it then.
- ACCount37 8mo agoThat's the nasty thing. It doesn't "finally collapse". The world just eats the climate costs and keeps going. There's no global catastrophe. No single moment when the magnitude of your folly is revealed to you a blinding flash. Just a slow trickle of "2% worse". A loss of what could have been.
- gzread 8mo agoThere's only so much worse things can get before the fundamentals of civilization aren't there any more. 3 meals a day from anarchy.
- ACCount37 8mo agoThe world got hit with WW2 and moved on. It takes a lot to destroy "the fundamentals of civilization" on a global level. Climate change is woefully insufficient.
- applfanboysbgon 8mo agoThe problem is that we will not move on from WW3, and famine, water depletion, resource exhaustion etc. are all existential problems for individual countries that will cause conflicts between previously peaceful nations. At some point the nations in conflict will have alliances and nuclear weapons, and people will use them when the choice is between that or starving to death by the millions. I would be somewhat more optimistic about humanity's ability to weather worsening circumstances if we didn't develop the human extinction button in all of our grand technological wisdom.
- ACCount37 8mo agoClimate change is not the great equalizer people want it to be. Nuclear superpowers are among the least likely countries to actually collapse from climate damage. US isn't Syria, and it's Syria that's at risk. First world countries like France can absorb a +30% spike to food prices. Countries where the same food price spike would come with a major death toll don't have the tools to kick off WW3.
- applfanboysbgon 8mo agoPakistan and North Korea have nuclear weapons. What makes you think that other countries won't develop them when push comes to shove? Right now the status quo is such that smaller countries find violating international sanctions on nuclear weapon development to be disadvantageous (no immediate benefit from having them; expensive to have them; economic punishment for having them). The calculus on the status quo changes considerably when famine or other ecological disasters are threatening to wipe out half your population. Is the US going to invade all potential nuclear weapons developers like it did with Iran? Do you have complete confidence that will always work and never escalate towards anything larger?