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I saw this tweet by Palmer Luckey the other day:
"The real secret of of global warming is that the climate can be whatever humanity wants it to be. Two dozen nations could each single-handedly send us all into an ice age."
He's right. It wouldn't be that hard to prevent climate change via geoengineering. In fact we did some geoengineering by mistake last year. New regulations limited the amount of sulfur that oceangoing ships could emit. This caused an increase in the global temperature.
So, if climate change is such a threat, why don't we do something about it?
Because, let's be honest, our current climate change mitigation strategies are doomed to fail and will only make us poor.
Even if the United States and Europe cut 100% of carbon emissions tomorrow, the climate is going to get hotter. China already emits about 3 times as much carbon as the United States. In the developing world, new coal plants are being built every day. 2024 will set a record for coal production, and 2025 will be greater still. And there is hundreds of years of coal left to be consumed.
Getting people to downsize their SUV to a Prius isn't going to fix the problem. Renewables are not the answer either, being both unreliable and requiring constant upgrades. We are using huge amounts of resources to build solar and wind capacity, but the lifetime of these projects is just a couple of decades. So we need more metals and more concrete, which will result in more emissions, not to mention the associated ecological destruction from strip mines.
Did you know that 8% of global carbon emissions come from the production of concrete, the same amount produced by all private passenger automobiles? Fantasies about electric cars solving global warming are just that.
To fully fix global warming, we need to reduce global carbon emissions by at least 90%, more likely 99%. Carbon in the atmosphere has been increasing since before 1800 AD.
So why are we spending trillions trying to nibble at the edges when we could spend billions and achieve much better results. We can cool the climate to an acceptable level while we wait for the carbon removal technology that is the only way to fully solve the problem.
Solving global warming is the bailey. Being more resilient when the effects of global warming occur is the motte.
While it's been a long-time frustration of mine that mass-public opinion and policy has fixated on avoiding global warming rather than dealing with the consequences of it happening, and non-trivial parts of the environmental policy structure has been lobbiest-donor feedback loops married with protectionism greenwashing, there is a point to be made that many of the major investments in the name of the green movement may be better at enduring global warming than avoiding it... and that is a point in and of itself.
On a technical / engineering level, many of the savior-technologies just will not pan out in terms of meeting the need of avoiding global warming. Just in terms of the volume of raw materials and rare earths needed to produce the amount of electric vehicles / solar panels / etc., there won't be enough produced by the various tipping points. Many things are not only locked in, but have been for functionally decades.
However, one of the anciliary arguments for / justifications of green technology is aggregate resiliency. Renewables are not reliable enough to cover the energy demands of industrial economics, but they can greatly reduce the amounts of hydrocarbons required to sustain less-intense economic levels. Brownouts are bad, but they're not impossible to muddle through either, and are much better than black outs. Installed solar panel farms aren't going to suddenly stop working if there's a mass embargo or blackade of major naval trade routes. Distributed production grids may / may not be safer from targetted cyber attacks than singular centralized power plants. Maybe not everyone can get an EV-powered cybertruck... but not everyone in a nation needs a vehicle for the state to survive in times of energy-import duress.
When you start to frame it in these terms, a lot of investments that are 'stupid' in economic/global warming evasion terms can start to make a bit more sense in a 'how do we endure global disruption' sense. No one is quite clear what that will mean in practice, but if you subscribe that there is a time limit, then there are advantages to getting invested early as possible. Things may be inefficient now, but there may be far greater demand and competition for critical inputs later. Getting supply chains established now may help secure them for later. Transitioning away from fossil fuels sooner may provide critical diplomatic leverage later when/if global opinion moves sharply against the last ones still using it when popular patience is untenable.
I would never go as far as to say 'this is all according to plan,' and there's a lot of greed and incompetence and ideology mixed in to that sort of coalition of interests, but you can believe both that global warming is a thing and that it is unavoidable, and that green-tech investments are a way to endure it. This isn't 'fixing' the problem, but it is a form of dealing with it.
It's true that at some point, petroleum will become so rare that it will no longer be affordable. (Although it's hard to imagine right now when the price of oil is ridiculously low and giant discoveries are being made constantly). I agree that, over the next 100 years or so, we will have to decarbonize from sheer necessity. But we're jumping the gun a bit now and we'll be able to do it in the future much more effectively. And entire classes of green technology might simply be leapfrogged in the future. Imagine building out your copper telephone network in the 1990s.
Thinking of the far future, I do think we should leave some easy petroleum in the ground for future generations. When our society inevitably collapses, it will be very hard for humans to mount a comeback since we have extracted all the easy resources.
On the one hand, energy resources have been extracted. On the other, there's an enormous amount of refined metal laying around on the surface.
It will be interesting to see all the uses the successors find for our garbage.
After the fall of Rome, the population of the city fell to 10,000 people. People used the ancient buildings as quarries from which to build their new dwellings. Even as late as 1500 AD there was ample construction material available. St. Peters was built using marble from the Colosseum, melted down bronze from the Pantheon, and stone from the tomb of Hadrian.
In Nimes, France, the entire population of the town moved into what was formerly the gladiatorial arena.
In 5000 AD or whatever, bands of savages will live inside the few high rises that still stand.
I liked traveling around the Yucatán in Mexico and seeing that in small villages with lesser known pyramids people had just taken the stone from the pyramids in the town center and repurposed it to build fences and mundane daily things.
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