I'm trying to find a good way to articulate how stupid and dangerous this attitude is that you see from enlightened centrists - that climate change is real, but we don't have to do anything drastic (i.e. costly) this moment because we'll "innovate our way out of it" because "we've always done it."
This can sound true-ish because of past existential crises that were resolved through technological innovations, for example, World War II and the Space Race. But what is missing is the urgency that's actually needed to do anything meaningful. It's like if FDR said "we need to defeat the Nazis but that costs too much, here's my plan for defeating half of the Nazis over the next 50 years" or if JFK said "we're going to put a man on the moon by 2010".
Also, since an actual solution would require a great deal of global cooperation and coordination, I don't think there's any scenario where the US is capable of addressing climate change in any meaningful way.
We of course already have the technology to address climate change, with the solutions largely unchanged since we acknowledged the severity of the problem over 50 years ago. The only real innovation that has occurred over that time period has been the fossil fuel industry's innovative media strategy to sow doubt and remove their own culpability.
But I think what's most pernicious about framing climate change as some as-yet-unsolved problem of engineering is that it casts any current action as a waste of time, effort, and resources. This line of thinking means that the comparatively complex tasks of converting our grid to renewables and electrifying our transport systems, for instance, would all be wasted once Elon Musk invents some magic box that cancels climate change. What's deliberately ignored here is any positive effect these changes can make beyond abating global warming - electrifying transport alone reduces pollution, lowers traffic, and expands a citizen's range of travel, amongst other benefits. We can solve plenty of additional problems on the road to reverse climate change, especially ones that likely won't be innovated away by whatever this silver bullet is supposed to be.
TL;DR, this comic from 2009
No new technology is needed to try to survive climate change only new ways of thinking and the will to act on them.
What we need is a complete reanalysis of how we interact with nature. If someone invented a whizz banger that sucked out all CO2 from the atmosphere humanity would still go extinct it would just take longer (and not too much longer at that). Or optimistically, we would end up in a world where the only trees are grown for profit, the only animals are farmed for eating and three people own all seven continents. That’s a Richard Powers paraphrase (from the overstory)
Or optimistically, we would end up in a world where the only trees are grown for profit, the only animals are farmed for eating and three people own all seven continents
Bon jovi voice
WE'RE HALFWAY THEEEERE(more like 3/4 tbh)
True. Mitigating technologies like carbon capture will never be as good as not burning the fuel to begin with. It's a shell game to feel like we're doing something without doing the one thing that's actually necessary: reducing consumption.
There was a time when I was one of those people. I still think for those of us living outside of large cities, its still useful but mass transit is definitely going to be doing the most good.
I think a lot of liberal-minded people get caught up in the "end of history" mindset where everything exists along static, cleanly defined lines when thinking about climate change. In this thinking, climate change WILL be a problem but isn't quite yet, and once it is a problem a solution will present itself to completely solve the problem and we won't have to worry about it anymore.
But obviously this isn't the case, climate change is already here and already destroying people's lives and environments in ways that can't be restored. It's just the most severe effects right now are felt by the least privileged and most ignored. To accept idea that "we will just solve it later" also tacitly accepts the vast amounts of human suffering and untold damage to the environment that will happen between now and then.
For me, the question isn't whether we will or will not survive climate change, even in the worst case scenario I think humans will survive and the environment will eventually heal, but rather how much we are going to lose and suffer for the sake of corporate profits.
The succdem government in my country made a bold ten year plan to handle climate change and cut emissions in half.
The plan is to follow a "hockey stick model" where you do fuckall for eight years and then surely someone smart and innovative will have invented a magic machine that makes it possible to do it all within the last two years. Meanwhile they're funding new highway construction and the climate minister is making a fool of himself doing toe-curlingly "funny" YouTube videos about fighting climate change by putting a little grated carrot in your meatballs.
I think people misunderstand the scale of the problem. I like to talk about it this way: think about the size and scale of the fossil fuel industry. For the last ~150 years, we've devoted a tremendous amount of resources to digging up, processing, and burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Exactly why we were dong that isn't important for the moment--just pay attention to the size of the industry. All the mines, all the oil platforms, all the refineries, all the fracking: all that operating seven days a week, 365 days a year for over a century, backed by probably the wealthiest industry the world has ever seen. We've spent trillions of dollars figuring out the best, fastest, cheapest, most efficient way to extract carbon from the ground and pump it into the air. We've built our entire global economy around doing that: it facilitates everything from schoolteachers to Supreme Court justices. It's very, very important to us, and we've poured a mind-boggling amount of resources into getting very, very good at doing it. And, again, we've been at this for well over a century.
Now, if you're claiming that some novel technology is going to come along and fix this problem, think about what that would actually entail. If we want to, say, remove carbon from the air and resequester it underground, we need something that operates on at least the scale of the fossil fuel industry, only going in reverse. We need to get just as good at taking CO2 out of the atmosphere, turning it into carbon, and putting that carbon somewhere it can't get out as we are at doing the opposite. We need an industrial complex on the scale of all the oil refineries, drilling platforms, coal mines, and tar sands operations everywhere in the world, but doing something completely different and completely new. We need the mirror image of the fossil fuel industry. Really take a second to sit and think about the scale of that.
But that's not all. The fossil fuel industry had over a century to ramp up to where it is right now; we don't have that luxury. We need to go from full speed ahead--extracting and burning more fossil fuels every year--to full reverse--taking at least that amount of carbon out of the air and putting it back in the ground--over the course of years, not decades or centuries. We need to entirely reverse-engineer the complete fossil fuel industry, start running it backward, and do both of those things while also decreasing the amount of fossil fuels we're using across the board. And we need to do it about ten times faster than we were able to get the fossil fuel industry up and running.
Now, what's your proposal for how Elon Musk is going to solve that?
The way I've talked about it with centrist friends before is: it's not about the technology (which we already have) is about funding and politics.
In the simplest example, imagine we invented a machine that removed CO2 from the air (trees but anyway), it's still going to take a lot of money/energy to build and run. How does this deal with the prisoner's dilemma we already have, where each country is motivated to invest the least possible in this tech, and rely on other countries to do the actual work of carbon capture? How do we organise ourselves to pay to run these machines when there's no direct return on investment?
The main problem is our entire society is based on extraction -> use -> discard, primarily of fossil fuels. To avoid complete environmental collapse we have to rebuild the entire foundations of society to something circular and no growth (actually de-growth), with the natural world considered part of us rather than a resource to be plundered.
I think technological change is something good to focus on. Namely, changing the socio-economic system which has the most significant determinative effect on our environment. Libs like technological change except when you challenge the socio-economic organization of society, which they presume to follow "human nature" and to be something entirely natural rather than as something technological. They conceive of technology only in terms of gadgets and toys, but why should technology be limited to mere instrumental tools? Why shouldn't we consider the way in which we organize our society as technological? Perhaps part of the problem is the manner in which people take shit coming out of the economics department as naturalized facts, rather than as technological constructions which their own limitations. The capitalistic organization of society has been able to accomplish more than the feudalistic formation, however the very means which enabled it to do so, also functionally results in it being fundamentally unable to deal with poverty and climate change.
It's just a part of greenwashing. Making it so that people won't revolt so they can continue business as usual in their goal of fucking up the planet then fucking off to mars as literal space slavers while all the poors die.
then fucking off to mars
there'll only ever be enough resources on mars to support like, 10 people
and all of those resources will have to be flown in from earth lul
Look at Dubai. The rich have no fucking street sense, at all. They literally think every one of them is going to live safe in their little bunkers and party while the poors suffer and die on the surface.
True but at least even Dubai is part of plant earth, and theoretically could be turned into green space at some point in the future
Mars will always be Mars, and nothing will ever grow there
Theoretically it could but the rich egoists can't even get running water because that would be socialism.
They can't even work properly on earth, they sure as hell won't make it on mars, but that won't stop them from killing countless trying.
