[itsoktocry]

>but nothing is going to be done until we've stunted the lives of the people at the top

Do people honestly believe "nothing" is being done? We are chipping away at these problems, otherwise you wouldn't be reading about it in a mainstream newspaper article. People (especially younger people) are more conscious about these issues than at any time in my lifetime. It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society that has developed over millennia.

[rcxdude]

The concern is that compared to what's necessary to change the apparent course of the planet, what has been done so far is basically nothing. On a global scale the amount of change necessary is orders of magnitude larger than what has changed so far, and it needs to happen fast (and the problem is getting worse: the second derivative isn't even in the right direction in that carbon emissions per year are still increasing globally. Given what we know about the climate it's not clear if we would avoid substantial shifts even if we reset the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere to the levels from the start of the century). And the fact is much more action could be easily taken even right now, but some governments are still in denial that there's even a problem in the first place (and the fact is this is a problem which needs government action: individual consumers do not have the power to change the behaviour of industry, even if well organised).

[tremon]

We are chipping away at these problems

No, "we" are not. Some people are chipping away at some of these problems, but "we" (in the global, UN-sized scheme of things) are still adding and exacerbating these problems much faster than the solutions are being developed and/or deployed.

It's not like you can flip a switch and change a society

Our response to the Corona virus suggests that yes, if the will is there, we can manage to flip at least some switches. But yes, I do realize that these measures are considered temporary, and Covid is a much more immediate threat than the implosion of society.

[baron_harkonnen]

> "nothing" is being done?

What is being done? Nearly every "green" initiative is much more marketing than reality when you look at the details. Renewable energy sources are widely supplementing not replacing hydrocarbons. Decreased emissions are largely from a financial switch from coal to natural gas and offloading your CO2 production to somewhere else. Global emissions are still rising.

Consumer capitalism is the largest driver of our CO2 usage and we have done worse than nothing about changing the way our economies operate. Consumer spending has been a perpetually increasing part of the US GDP. Currently 70% of the US GDP is consumer spending. We have a pandemic which has forced that to drop and everyone with political power is doing everything they can to get that back up.

> It's not like you can flip a switch...

Well unfortunately we don't have time. Historically every major sudden climate change period seems to have reached a tipping point where positive feedbacks initiated rapid temperature increases. We don't entirely know what these feedback are (we have some guesses that they might be methane hydrates and melting permafrost) but once we hit these it's over, it doesn't matter if you reduce CO2 emission to 0. It's worth noting that IPCC projections typically do not include feedbacks, which may explain why 'faster than expected' is the new norm.

We might see a blue ocean event before the decade is out. That will have immediate impact on the entire global climate.