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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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