Stop burning fossil fuels, build infrastructure to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Extract the minimum number of fossil fuels necessary to serve non-fuel uses.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
It is not the solution because it simply just ignores the problem: coordination. It’s like saying the solution to cancer is to kill cancer cells without affecting the functioning of the body. Well, that’s the hard part.
China is expected to have hit peak coal consumption this year, and within 25 years it might not be burned as a base generation fuel any more. The trend line there is clearly renewable energy (particularly solar) taking over. The US is moving much slower.
I expect that countries that invest heavily in solar or nuclear like China will have a huge advantage in 20 years, when energy availability enables industries like steel production, datacenters, ammonia production, transportation, and water desalinization to essentially become cheaper and cheaper as more and more solar gets built.
Absolutely agree with that. They're good at solving the coordination problem and the West is not. But saying "all we have to do is solve the problem" is not a solution.
Would reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reverse current problems? On it's own, it would start to, yes. It would reduce global temperatures, reduce weather irregularities, begin to cool the globe back down.
But we'd then have to move on to other things like deforestation, overfishing, water conflicts, plastics, etc. It's not a panacea, but it would reverse course on a pretty significant root cause.
Just because we should have started something 30+ years ago isn't a reason to not do it today.
I should have started going to the gym before, I'd be healthier today. I guess I'll just never go to the gym. I should have been eating heather food before I got diabetes and high blood pressure. I guess I'll just keep having a terrible diet. Same kind of logic.
third world countries who contributed nothing to the carbon levels should be exempt. USA, europe and china should foot the bill as they profited from it. You might even be able to figure out a rough estimate as to who and how much they profited from CO2, charge their descendants retroactively. It would probably amount to a few tens of thousands of rich people
That's needlessly complex. It's means testing for CO2. Means testing is a huge waste of effort, imo.
If the US, Europe, Russia, India, and China stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be well on our way. I'm not really worried about whether Ecuador is burning fossil fuels right now, it cannot be a meaningful amount of output compared to those 5.
all the mining, industrial etc companies were public companies on stock exchanges (most of em anyway), with audited accounts. you might still be able to find old order books, like they did with slavery and the dutch east india company. you could easily find numbers for production and then make rough conservative estimates off the back of that
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.