[dTal]

I fear that waiting until oil is too expensive to use, is effectively waiting until all the oil has been dug up and put in the atmosphere. It's the non-answer. That way lies climate disaster.

I am disturbed by the shoulder-shrugging attitude to mass environmental devastation.

[rsj_hn]

I am disturbed by the hysteria and alarmism. People have been predicting "climate disaster" for 40 years now, along with population disaster, and many other disasters. I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population, and most important for you, neither is China, which is opening 120 new coal plants just this year. Yet for some reason I'm supposed to be terrified of flying from SFO to LAX and pretend that there is some sort of existential crisis.

But don't worry, this will allow you to keep warning of collapse, just around the corner, for the next forty years as well. And the forty after that.

[dTal]

>People have been predicting "climate disaster" for 40 years now

Indeed. Notably, 40 years ago an Exxon internal report predicted a 1 degree rise in global temperature due to fossil fuel use by 2020 - and here we are, 1 degree warmer. [0]

Do you appreciate how huge 1 degree is, in 40 years? The last time the Earth was this warm was 127,000 years ago. It's enough to wreck ecosystems, and has. And it's just getting started.

>pretend that there is some sort of existential crisis.

You're speaking as if the climate isn't visibly, dramatically changing; as if huge numbers of bottom-of-the-food-chain organisms like insects and phytoplankton are not declining precipitously; indeed, as if we were not in the middle of one of the largest mass extinctions in the history of the planet - on par with the times when it got hit by huge asteroids. The scientific consensus on the severity of what is happening is unanimous. Nobody knows exactly what will happen - it's too dramatic and unprecedented - but if you're not worried, you're simply in denial.

>I'm not onboard with this extremism, and neither is the majority of the population

Certainly not true in America: "A majority of Americans continue to say they see the effects of climate change in their own communities and believe that the federal government falls short in its efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change." [1]

[0] https://xkcd.com/2500/ [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...