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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.
At the risk of producing frustrated groans from everyone, I find it hard to get too worked up about any civilisational issue with a timeline longer than 20 years because it seems extremely likely to me that we'll have superintelligent AI by the mid-2030s (that's me being conservative), and at that point all bets about capabilities and risks are off. While I'm not a committed AI doomer, it looks from every angle to me like we're in terminal-phase human civilisation. What follows could be very good or very bad for us, but whatever "it" is, it won't be subject to the same logics and power structures as our current global socioeconomic order.
I drafted a very long comment to this effect in the discussion about declining TFR and dysgenics last week which I failed to post due to user error, but I think the point applies to climate change too. Optimistically, I think it's not unlikely that ASI will get us over the line on nuclear fusion and related tech, allowing us to transition entirely away from carbon economies in fairly short order and easily offset any residual carbon footprint with direct carbon capture. Or maybe it'll allow us to conduct low-risk geoengineering at scale. Or (more pessimistically) maybe it will secretly deploy nanoengineered pathogens that will wipe out most of humanity. Either way, I don't think climate change will be a problem that we (or whichever of us are left) will be worried about in 2050.
Sidetracking the thread a little bit, but given that OpenAI and its competitors hit a brick wall in progress recently, what keeps you optimistic about ASI? Admittedly I'm not following the field very closely, but are there any interesting breakthroughs that I've missed that you think get us closer?
OpenAI has a 100b valuation per latest funding rounds.
To me that suggests:
They don’t think they can build a moat, OR
The technology is plateauing.
To build on what @Incanto said:
Even without taking OpenAI's charter into account, I have no motivation to buy stock in a company that's trying for singularity. Leaving aside the question of whether I think that company is instead going to end the world (and I do), assuming for the sake of argument that they'll succeed in getting controllable superintelligence...
...what process exactly is paying me my dividends? Control of a singularity event, in a relatively-short timeframe, gives sovereignty. Yes, the law says that I can replace them if they don't pay me, but the law will have no power over them if they succeed, because singularity rapidly means they outgun the government. They can just turn around and stiff me and I've got no recourse; only direct control of the AI matters.
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