[mherrmann]

Does anybody see a way something like this can actually be avoided? Fighting climate change is expensive. And while the costs of a climate catastrophe are even higher, they only need to be paid long after today's politicians have left office. Policy makers who want to get re-elected tomorrow have very little incentive to do what's right. What's more, it's a global problem where individual countries can benefit by defecting and letting others do the hard work. They can blame each other to justify inaction. It's a wonder that any measures get taken at all.

Direct air capture is not looking promising. I bet there will be so little action that shit will hit the fan and we will need some kind of geoengineering. An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix? Hopefully not. But perhaps targeted control of the weather to prevent the worst droughts and storms. And a massive, forceful change to the planet to offset the additional warming.

Please someone convince me I'm wrong?

[ShredKazoo]

I think an underrated take is that global warming may not actually be that bad.

Earth has been much warmer in the past -- IIRC in the time of the dinosaurs we had temperate forests around the poles.

Coastal settlements will need to be relocated. But robots can help with that too. Autonomous construction robots seem like an easier problem than self-driving cars.

There's also the political challenge of resettling the world's population away from the equator and closer to the poles. I'd like to see a normalization of countries selling off huge areas of land, the way Russia sold Alaska to the USA in 1867. Imagine Canada selling part of a province to India to resettle folks who are overheating there.

Charter cities like Próspera are also very cool: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera Balaji has some interesting ideas related to what he calls "network states": https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/07/13/networkstates.html

Imagine if Antarctica became a UN-administered zone, where any group which wanted to found a new country could claim a plot of land just by paying a Harberger tax to the UN. The tax could be used to fund a global basic income. So everyone would essentially have a choice between staying closer to the equator and getting a subsidy to help them afford AC, or living in Antarctica where it's nice and cool (but having to pay higher taxes for the privilege).

Why fight when you can innovate?

[Retric]

The possibility for improvement without massive government intervention exists.

The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has seemingly slowed down dramatically. Emissions increased ~5% over the last decade while the decade before that was 32%.

On the surface increasing emissions is still terrible, but as oil, coal, and natural gas are only getting more expensive and the alternatives get cheaper. Many of the worst estimates are no longer relevant and people in 2070+ might not need dramatic measures to deal with climate change.

[mort96]

The rate of increase in CO2 emissions has slowed down dramatically in large part because of massive government intervention though, no?

[Retric]

Depends on what you mean by massive. US’s net renewable subsides over fossil fuels work out to something like 0.1% of the budget in that time period.

On one had that’s serious money on the other hand it’s not enough for tax payers to notice the expense.

[MichaelZuo]

There are also opportunity costs and non-monetary costs.

For example the EU subsidized and encouraged diesel engined cars greatly, to reduce CO2 emissions, but the increase in diesel pollutants, other than CO2, over and beyond that of gasoline engined cars, likely decreased average health in urban areas.

Now with Euro 6 they are correcting the problem but the damage has already been done to at least one generation.

[pmoriarty]

"The possibility for improvement without massive government intervention exists."

One such improvement people can make without government intervention is to stop eating meat.[1]

I'm not so optimistic that this is going to happen on a large enough scale, though, to make a difference. There's too much culture, habit, and identity wrapped up in meat eating for most people to give it up any time soon.

[1] - https://www.sciencenews.org/article/food-emissions-data-diet...

[mistermann]

> Does anybody see a way something like this can actually be avoided?

I think it would be a good idea to establish a means by which people who belong to various different tribes, both domestic and global, can communicate with each other and agree at least in principle (subject to various conditions, etc) to being open (in principle) to the idea of setting aside their differences and maybe cooperating with each other on genuinely/plausibly dangerous issues.

This would be step 1 in a multi-part long term strategy.

> An eternally dark sky like in the Matrix?

The Matrix is chock full of ideas that would have substantial utility in such an undertaking. And that's just one piece of art from one particular domain. Imagine if one brought to bear the power contained within all art.

[candiddevmike]

Looking at the recent reveal of a massive methane leak, I think we're all screwed from a policy perspective. And I don't think we fully understand the consequences of climate engineering.

[credit_guy]

It's not massive. NASA did a study to find methane leaks. The top such leaks will be labeled by journalists as massive, but are they really?

The Permian leak is listed at 55 tons per hour; that's less than a half a megaton per year. The EPA says one ton of CH4 is equivalent to about 30 tons of CO2, so the Permian leak is equivalent to 15 megatons CO2 per year. It sounds like a large number, but annually the world emits about 50 billion CO2-equivalent tons. That means the Permian methane leak contributes by 0.03% to the total worldwide greenhouse gas emission.

[matthewdgreen]

The problem is not a single human-caused methane leak. The problem is that global methane levels are increasing, and they're increasing at an increasing rate. Current theory is that some of this is caused by human emissions, but most is a feedback effect of climate change where wetlands produce more methane. There are also big, terrifying methane feedback loops in the arctic (permafrost and undersea clathrates) that may or may not be in play. Methane is very, very bad news for humans.