| This is great, but also hopelessly naive for a very important reason. Check out this graph from the article: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... Note the trend line intersecting with the x axis in 1980. Now this: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/02/the-forgotten-sto... The world was set to do everything we're doing today in the 80s. Except that the powers that be decided to extract every last dollar from fossil fuels, regardless of consequences like global warming. Decades of government subsidies for everything except solar and wind followed, creating a long tail of glacially slow price reductions for renewables. So we accept evolution and reject revolution because we can't see the strings controlling the marionette. <- writing this on a site dedicated to hacking around barriers is especially painful I wrote about stuff like heat pumps and carbon capture in long emails to my friends in the 2000s, complete with prices and sources. Then had to wait 20 long years for the world to manifest those ideas in its own time. Which hinged on political close calls like Obama's reelection, which provided a brief safety net for electric car manufacturers among other things, and almost didn't happen. It took almost no time for his successor the former president to impose a 30% tariff on solar panels in 2018 in a last-ditch attempt to block us from cancelling our power bills. The real challenge we're facing is that the wealthy of the world could have solved this yesterday for a relatively paltry investment but chose not to. The proof of that is in their continued downplaying of such causes as they play hard with rockets, Twitter, etc. This is the tragedy of the commons at scale. Similar to the problem of parents choosing for the good of their children individually but not collectively. In other words, unstoppable without a cultural awakening. But I applaud the author's efforts. Edit: just a little "proof" from Naked Gun 2 1/2, released in 1991 when this was already common knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8Wk79i1gcg |
