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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6954 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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You only need to extrapolate these curves out to see that by 2030 the vast majority of cars will be electric and we'll be approaching majority clean energy. All we must do to fix global warming is to keep on the path we're going down.

So far as I can see all energy sources are at all time highs in total energy output. Coal is higher than ever before, oil is higher than ever before, renewables are higher than ever before.

Anyway, all clean energy does in climate terms is lower the rate of increase in temperature. CO2 that's up there in the atmosphere stays up there unless we take it out. Electrifying cars cannot help with this.

Plus the climate changes without us. There's oil in Antarctica, it used to be jungle down there. We didn't have anything to do with that!

Fixing global warming means controlling global temperatures directly, not merely adjusting our footprint. There are many ways to do this, mirrors and aerosols and painting things white, adjusting cloud formation.

Aerosols are my preferred approach, mimicking natural cooling effects induced by volcanoes. Aerosols can achieve immediate cooling effects sufficient to halt and reverse global warming at a modest cost of a few tens of billions per year. There are some tradeoffs with the ozone layer and weather patterns that could also be addressed with more effort. But aerosols are an actual solution to global warming, whereas renewables are not.

I think climate change discourse has gone down the wrong direction, there's a certain ecological angle that seeks to reduce human activity in all respects. A more mature approach is to accept that human destiny will not and should not be an unending burden as caretakers for nature. The world is not a national park, nobody is going to pay us to keep it as it was. We are responsible not as stewards but as owners and developers. We have been developing Earth for millennia, it is silly to stop now when the job is incomplete and say 'no further changes'.

Extinction should be avoided except for pests, which should be destroyed. But we could make new species as well. Slashing and burning jungles to make cheap beef is bad - not innately as a desecration of nature but because there are potentially valuable cures and biology there.

I gotta go to work very soon so I'll respond to the rest of this later but

Plus the climate changes without us. There's oil in Antarctica, it used to be jungle down there. We didn't have anything to do with that!

This is incredibly misleading. The last time Antarctica was a jungle was when it was way further north, part of pangea and also when CO2 levels were way higher.

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