[jjk166]

No amount of "cleaning up our act" will undo damage already done. The solution is always technology because that's what technology is - solutions to problems. Changing behavior can allow you to avoid a problem, but only technology will fix a problem you've failed to avoid.

[asdff]

I think what OP was implying is that the solution is always posited as in some future technology just on the horizon. We will save the day in the final act of the trilogy, this is just the empire strikes back, right?

Except that's not where our solution to this problem lies. We have all the technology we need to be carbon neutral today, namely in the form of nuclear power. In fact, Nixon planned on 1000 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. by the year 2000. The reason why we don't have that reality today has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with behavior and choices we've made. We chose to protest nuclear power, we chose to close down power plants that were generating electricity carbon free, we chose to do this because we decided that it was nuclear power that was the enemy of ecology, in the face of this misinformed public politicians found it easier to keep their jobs by walking back plans for nuclear power than to educate the populace.

Decades later today, we find ourselves forced to sleep in this bed of coal and natural gas, but we ignore that this is a bed that we ourselves willingly made by choice, and continue to maintain by choice using bullshit excuses such as cost or time or profitability to bury any practical alternative (in a society where for the first time since the invention of currency, government mints can generate money out of plain air no less).

[postingawayonhn]

> I think what OP was implying is that the solution is always posited as in some future technology just on the horizon.

That shouldn't be surprising. New problems present themselves all the time and it then takes X amount of time to develop a technology solution to them.