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by scythe 2063 days ago
The dynamic range of the elected government body is extremely low. As long as there are a significant proportion of people in office who deny the reality of climate change, it is unlikely that meaningful discussion of solutions will occur.

In response to a sister comment, realistically, to address climate change, we would need to:

- build roughly 300 GWh of grid storage worldwide, lithium iron phosphate seems a leading contender although sodium-[sulfur|nickel] has the obvious abundance advantage

- replace gas heating systems with heat pumps and district (waste) heating

- implement carbon capture at all steel/concrete production plants (or less likely use low-carbon processes)

- replace fueled vehicle use (most of which is personal cars) with electric

- build some amount of non-polluting power stations, I'm not sure what exactly but by now it's the easiest part

- I'm not sure exactly but maybe you can replace torch manufacturing with electric arcs and lasers or something?

- also some carbon capture unfortunately probably the crushed olivine thing I'd guess

Someone's probably made a projection for the cost of this but it's useless with any shift of this magnitude.