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If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the general advice is to stop digging. The current CO2 levels are not going to make humanity extinct, nor are higher levels. But that does not mean that there is no difference. While we can debate the validity if the IPCC report forever, the basic idea that our future behavior will affect how bad things will get does not seem exactly far-fetched.
In Germany, mitigation of climate change effects will not be that hard. From my observation, Germans are currently rapidly coming around on air conditioning. Berlin is not going to become hotter than Madrid is now (I think), and people manage to live in Madrid just fine. Likewise, a few meters (at most!) of rising sea levels are not really an insurmountable challenge for Europe. (To bad about skiing, though.)
However, people in the global south will likely be less lucky. As an utilitarian, I care about these people and am not indifferent between the QALY losses of different scenarios.
I can also make a motivated argument which is perhaps more accessible to the commentariat here.
I do not worry too much about mass immigration. (I do not think it is a helpful tool to reduce global wealth inequality. I also think it is plainly obvious that our health system would collapse without foreign workers, but that is admittedly an argument for some immigration, not letting everyone in who cares to come.)
I am reasonably sure that if climate change makes conditions unsurvivable in some countries, the people living there will not quietly resign to their fate and die, convenient as that would be. Instead, they will try to emigrate, and Europe will be very much on their destination list.
If we had the will to just not allow them in, that would not concern us (aside from pesky universalists like myself). They are very much not a military threat to us, we could probably drown half of Africa in the Mediterranean Sea on a few percents of our GDP.
But realistically, we will not do that. A decent chunk of our conservatives are Christian, and likely believe that first razing the commons and then keeping your neighbor out of your garden as he starves without them is bad behavior. Perhaps 10% of the population are sociopathic enough that they would be ok with simply blowing up boats, the rest will not stomach it. The 1940s are bygone and will not come back (here's hoping).
As I said, I very much prefer interventions (in the EA sense) in countries of origin to just trying to solve wealth inequality through migration. Anything which makes conditions in the Global South shittier is hindering this approach.
Obviously saying that we need to go to carbon neutrality immediately is not considering the economic trade-offs. But cutting our emissions seems like a no-brainer. (Personally, I would have gotten rid of bloody coal plants long before even considering if nuclear was vaguely bad or not, but that is not the German mentality.)
I deliberately avoided a few possible directions of discussion in the post to keep it from meandering too much, which includes what approach I personally consider ideal, some gender discussions, and a few others.
I also think we should reduce emissions (and I care about various environmental concerns), but most of your argument hinges on us in the EU having a significant impact, which we don't. From a short check, we're currently at around 6-8% depending on how exactly you count. We can go net-zero and it will literally not even reduce emissions by a tenth. We also increasingly have less international sway. All of this goes doubly for germany specifically, which I consider the worst offender in this regard. So adaption is mandatory, reduction is a nice-to-have bonus.
For reduction specifically, a pragmatic approach would be to further build out nuclear and stop coal as you say, to invest in solar only up to ca 20% (highly regionally dependent as well), to invest more in tech development and to never de-industrialize and offshore. The latter is an awful offender of the typical bureaucratic mistake of improving things on paper while making them worse IRL: Having factories in China instead of the EU means that the EU CO2 stats are better, but the former obviously cares much less about most environmental issues. Offshoring at best changes nothing overall, and imo most likely increases net-CO2. Solar subsidies are another perfect example of how not to do it: We give a general subsidy so solar cells are overproduced (which is itself bad for the environment), then we give subsidies for the solar energy to enter the grid even if it has literally negative value, and then we have to pay our neighbours to help us balance the grid. It's paying money for the purpose of paying money, and then at the end, we pay more money, with no benefit whatsoever at any particular point in time.
A lot of the arguments that climate change will make parts of the globe unlivable are quite questionable. Desertification in Africa, to take one common example, is primarily driven by awful, short-termist agricultural practices like excessive slash-and-burn. Increasing temperatures certainly makes slash-and-burn even worse, but the primary reason is still the practice itself, not the temperature change. Stopping that, and replacing it with a diametrically opposed afforestation strategy like what China is doing is much more important to keep these places livable.
Agreed. The 2 degrees change budget is around 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2 and even if we froze the situation globally as we are now (just stopping increases) - the global spending would reach this budget it in 25.7 years. If EU magically went net zero tomorrow, the global budget will be spent in 27.4 years. So at best the EU will delay the inevitable for around a year. The whole thing is impossible to solve. Even the COVID lockdown measures decreased the global CO2 emissions by around 17%, when everybody was at home. Even if we had these lockdowns perpetually, it would delay the 2 degree budget spending by around 3 years.
People underestimate the scale that is needed, nonexistent technologies necessary etc. The only thing that makes sense now is to just adapt either personally, in community or nationally.
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If this is true then it's possible to offer a mutually beneficial Singapore/Gulf-state style system in which Western countries pay 2-3x the prevailing developing world rate and don't offer meaningful migration/settlement pathways. As-is, there's so many permutations of this idea that are actively counterproductive. Unskilled care workers getting PR/Passport after 5 years of work, then being able to chain migrate their family and leave the care professions, is just flat-out dumb but is a cornerstone of a lot of countries at this point. Actual medical workers making up a couple % if that of immigration due to the family reunification efforts means that you tread water at best.
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There are two strong arguments against mass-migration for a smart liberal they need to consider provided they are open to HBD:
They want a European style welfare society. That doesn’t work if you have a large population with significantly lower productive and potentially higher crime rates ruin the commons to enjoy your European style welfare state lifestyle.
The Indian conundrum. I think at this point it’s obvious there are a lot of smart Indians. But domestically no innovation. Can having a society that’s 20% Einstein and 80% much lower productivity innovate? Or does dealing with social dysfunction sap a lot of a societies surplus to do tech/external things?
I'd also argue that the incoming AI reduction in employment rates is also something you've got to refute before you can justify importing bulk bodies
That I think would be fairly easy. The migrants would benefit from better rule of law and the higher productivity from robots would make giving more people American legal wealth trivial.
But I’ve never seen a leftist deal with racial productivity differences mentally. They just yell racists.
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