The problem is people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them, and with global warming, the consequences won’t really hit them until a long time later.
The second problem is the consequences are dramatic. And very hard if not impossible to turn around.
To really get people and companies to change their behaviour, we would need an immediate consequence to behaviour that is bad for the environment.
Bottom line is, some people try, some people don’t give a shit, and in the end we will have to deal with it.
I hope governments are watching carefully, we will need to keep a lot of water away from us in the future, and we’ll have to deal with the changing climate too.
Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular “Green” Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.
The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,… Dead people won’t emit CO2)
In the Netherlands a number of cities were banning fossil fuel for deliveries in the city. It was in planning for years, easing into implementation.
Our new government just scrapped all of those plans because the largest party doesn’t believe in climate change, and another party in the coalition is the “farmer’s movement” party and opposes environmental regulations.
😢
Something kinda funny about people in the netherlands not caring about climate change.
people are only going to change their behaviour once the consequences hit them
Or if there’s a proper incentive to change. We’re seeing that incentive today with solar becoming cheaper than other energy sources, so it’s getting a lot of adoption. We do incentivize those, but they’re honestly about at the point where we don’t need subsidies to get people to switch, and the subsidies merely accelerate adoption.
I’m a perennial optimist, and I’m confident we’ll continue to innovate our way out of problems. We’ll be late like we always are, but we’ll also innovate ways to “catch up.” Maybe we’ll mess w/ geoengineering in the arctic (we’re already experimenting w/ cloud seeding and thickening glaciers), or maybe we’ll come up with other options in the future. I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that once we’re convinced there is a problem, we do a pretty good job of solving that problem. Look at COVID vaccine development, lead poisoning, or recovery of endangered species.
We’re usually late, but we are also pretty good at engineering our way out of problems. Solutions probably end up costing more than they would with prevention, but I’m confident we will come up with solutions, it just might take a bit of… encouragement from mother nature.
We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.
So far, we have smaller towns wiped off the face of the earth and can’t seem to figure out they should be moved rather than rebuilt
This is a by-product of modern society (maybe late stage capitalism). We need to be sold a “solution” to a problem. Reducing consumption is not something that can easily be sold hence these carbon capture, recycling plastic “solutions”.
Unless someone can make money off of it, reducing emissions is going to be difficult.
Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)
The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.
Also… always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.
Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?
Carbon capture doesn’t make money. Selling the service of carbon capture does.
How?
tldr; Greenwashing/marketing mostly.
Sounds tenuous. Gimme the full version.
Here you can find more info. I hope it’s helpful
It’s simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.
Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.
The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don’t really contribute meaningfully to emissions.
Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don’t know what one can do.
Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.
Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There’s none, so prepare for dark future.
As far as energy production goes, we already have the technology: solar, wind, nuclear. We also already have the technology for cars and personAl transportation. Above all we have transit. If we can get our shit together with things we already know, we’d be in better shape. If we would have done it as little as ten years ago, we could have stayed within the Montreal targets for global warming.
Now it’s no longer enough. We need to fix harder areas as well: aviation, shipping, grid storage, steel and cement, etc, and we need it asap … how is there still not any urgency?
You need technology cheaper than fossil fuels. Some of fossil fuels’ downsides are upsides for some people (political control), which necessitates the difference in cost by a big enough margin to counter those invisible benefits. A revolution.
There’s no urgency, I think, because Earth’s population is going to start shrinking. The emissions are going to slow down for that reason.
Countries that won’t have some quality, not quantity, approaches to their economies by then are going to fall hard.
I guess that’s how EU is going to make the world owned by Europeans again.
Imagine if you could get FREE MONEY by not using all your energy coinz!
well yeah, you can’t just try, you need to actually do it.
Stupid title, grammatically at least.
It is too late. We are going to die!
Really?!
!We shit on redditors for being arrogant and having grating personalities.
Yet it’s ridiculously common to come into a thread here and see it flooded with low effort “well duh!” Comments.
Lemmings apparently know everything and everything is obvious to them.
Which doesn’t even make sense here. A lot of smart people are dumping money into carbon capture as a way to offset what we’ve done. Yet here you are, so smart, that this is obviously wrong.
They say scientists are saying this but is it like all scientists, the majority of scientists, a significant or intelligent minority of scientists, or is it just like this one person and because it’s an alarm worthy headline it’s being amplified?
Close to all scientists
Dude, have you read the article? this is from an article on Nature.
Nature! Not the flat earth society scientific newsletter.
For publishing on Nature it is necessary that a number of the most well reputed experts in the field have peer reviewed the article.
By modern standard of “science”, publishing on Nature or Science is the closest to get to “consensus”.
I see your point in some newspapers articles but this is not one of that cases
Oh any worth their salt has been saying it for years. Climate change can be seen in nearly all disciplines of science. But every time we hurdle a new tier of awful they say it again so that when the end comes for us all due to our own hubris, the last man in a lab coat will scream the collective scream of his people “i told you so” before spontaneously combusting
Oh any worth their salt has been saying it for years.
For decades even.
You hear that? It’s too late now! Welp gga guys
Startups are developing a whole suite of technologies to try to help
Do not think that they are seriously trying to save the planet.
(If they had wanted that, they should have done it 30-40 years ago)
They just want to make money, like everybody else.
Yeah no, it’s just about the latest money grab before we all die
They’re are decent people in this world who want things to be better. Sometimes they even have money.
Also, because we can only really see the world as ourselves, we tend to think everyone else thinks like us. So it’s very telling when people think everyone else is evil.
It isn’t exactly that we think everyone is evil, we just doubt that anyone with profits in mind is doing much, or any, good for humanity.
“we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.”
I mean, the whole “startups are doing x” is really code for “venture dollars have been made available for entrepreneurs to explore x”. Startups these days are chasing fields which have investment dollars, so this means the rich are starting to invest in the tech a little more earnestly
Then I guess you guys have no use for this climate change reversal machine I made. I knew it was a shit idea. I’m so stupid. I’m scrapping it now.
Might I suggest you use the time machine you created to go back and talk yourself out of making the climate change reversal machine. I can think of nothing worse than for you to feel like you are stupid.
This is clearly a “why not both” situation.
Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There’s a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.
Yeah, though I think currently only emissions cutting should be implemented, mostly because damage reversing tech like DAC take green energy that could otherwise be used to more effectively cut emissions elsewhere. Once we start getting excess green energy to do such things, then it should be implemented. It should still be researched and developed now tho
There’s a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:
Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.
“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.
It’s obviously a matter of “why not both?”, and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that’ll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.
Exactly, which is why I don’t get the point of this article.
Yeah, even after we get emissions under control there will still be problems, and we’ll tackle those when we get there.
I think the point is that some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture so they can keep profiting off their polluting activities for now without having to invest in carbon emissions reduction. This is unrealistic and just an excuse not to tackle the difficult task of reducing emissions. We can’t afford to let the problem become that much worse before we attempt to mitigate it by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, if there’s ever a technology that can do that effectively (which right now doesn’t look likely). We need to focus most of our efforts on reducing emissions.
some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture
Sure, and others go completely against that and call it for what it is, because they have different profit motives (e.g. green energy companies). Legislators will do something in the middle, because they have other motives (i.e. campaign donations and appealing to constituents to retain their seat). That’s why it’s important to be an informed voter and voice your concerns, so legislators can decide which side to listen to.
Carbon capture should absolutely be something we do, but it shouldn’t justify expanding fossil fuel energy production, but instead help clean up what we have as we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, which can extend the investments we’ve already made (for legislators, this means fewer people losing their jobs). Any solution we come up with will be a balance between immediate economic impact and longer-term economic and ecological impact.
In many cases, we prefer to pick the option that’s more expensive, but isn’t needed right now, and that’s for two main reasons:
- we’ll probably come up with new approaches in the future
- minimal rocking of the boat - big changes cause people to lose their jobs, which can change voting patterns
In any case, once we reduce emissions to something sustainable, the problem largely simplifies to spending money, and it’s a lot easier for legislators to spend money that make significant changes to our everyday lives. So as long as we can delay the worst of the impacts as people gradually adjust to more sustainable living, we can probably spend our way out of the ecological debt we’ve built up.
I don’t like it, but that’s the way things tend to work.
My headcanon past 2050 is basically nuclear wasteland. I try and stay optimistic in the moment, but the old faith in humanity gas-tank is running a little empty these days.
I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like
Dibs on Vault 12!
Removed by mod
If the people won’t rise up for the sake of their own children then the only solution is to out spend climate change. Capitalism won’t save itself, it will monetize the downfall. So in a way these tech companies are doing exactly what their suppose to but not really what they should.
People won’t even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction
Can’t argue with that. At the end of the day we are another mammalian creature that runs around killing, fucking, and shitting then we die. The ecosystem of today dying is of no consequences to the dinosaur, the wooly mammoth, or what ever critter that roamed these same lands. I say build the buildings big enough and strong enough for the sentience of tomorrow to unearth them and wonder. Wonder hard enough and we are reborn.
The only examples this article gives of irreversible damage:
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homes destroyed by hurricanes: clearly and obviously reversible. Build new houses. Fin.
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rising sea levels: reversible. Cool the climate, get more glaciers, lower sea levels. Obviously it’s more of a “100 years from now” solution, but it’s definitely a solution.
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lives lost: yeah, that’s a fair point.
And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won’t come back.
Yeah, I’ve always wanted us to have a genetic Doomsday Vault, with the sequenced genome of every species. We can clone them from that.
We are wildly far away from having the technology to do that. A single genome wouldn’t provide the genetic diversity for a sustainable population. We would need hundreds or thousands of genomes for each species to ensure that non-related individuals could mate.
We absolutely have the technology, we just don’t have the money to gather the data. Or we haven’t chosen to allocate it.
And to those who say “well, the Earth will bounce back”: we’re much closer to the end of Earth’s ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn’t have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth’s biodiversity never recovers.
That’s not a good argument… this is such a small blip, the earth has been much hotter and colder then now and will stabilize again before it’s eventually destroyed.
To me, the better argument is simply: Wouldn’t you like there to be humans or soem sentient beings that remembered you in the future? Maybe not you specifically, but the culture and art that you contributed to?
Right, Earth will be here, life will find a way …… but cockroaches and jellyfish can’t read
Guess we’ll have to Jurassic park this shit but with Pandas
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