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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.
Because the point of 'climate advocacy' isn't controlling the weather. It's demanding every left wing idea under the sun get enacted, and spending trillions to do it. See also: nuclear energy.
I think that you're mischaracterising the thought process of climate activists. They're not pretending to care about the climate. They do actually care about it. It's just that most of the loud ones also have a bunch of other causes and are unwilling to "sully" themselves by compromising any of their other causes in order to more effectively oppose global warming. You can't do nuclear, because radiation is bad. You can't subsidise corporations without DIE, because DIE is important. And on it goes.
They're absolutely guilty of refusing to accept "impure" solutions, and thus of refusing to think realistically, but it's not intended as a Trojan Horse.
Isn’t that just social signaling with extra steps? If I really truly believe that something is an existential threat to humans, I’m not going to let petty politics on other subjects get in the way of fixing it. If I believe that AGI is going to kill humanity, I’ll throw everything else aside to deal with that threat. Work with fascists and communists, give up on other goals for a time — or even be willing to have some progress rolled back, even democracy might be on the table. If the choice is an absolute nightmare government— no human rights, open racism, the environment gets destroyed— but we avoid extinction, then it might well be worth it. You can clean up those other problems if you survive, and if you don’t survive none of those other things actually matter.
That is the correct response, given that you are all of: rational, consequentialist, and not convinced that success will occur regardless.
However, most people are not consequentialists, and many people are not rational.
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