> Capital needs to understand it’s in its interest to fix the problem and it will be fixed

You’re looking at Capital as a monolithic block. The problem is that the majority of the Capital at the moment sits with the block that can only function by burning more fossil fuels and mowing down the last of the forests to extract natural resources. The private equity firm that owns private beach resorts will never be able to convince the trillion dollar petro giants that they need to find alternatives.

Capital, as a whole, barely thinks farther forward than the next fiscal quarter. If you are lucky, the absolute farthest out is end-of-career/lifetime for the current leadership suite. Why would capitalists be the saviors from climate change?

The crazy thing is that we have basically everything we need right now.

You can live in a well-insulated fully electric home powered by renewable energy and have most things you need within a walk, bike, or public transport ride away, _OR_ use an electric car for the things that aren't. If you combine that with a mostly-plant based diet (or at _least_ swapping chicken for most of your beef and lamb) and have 2 kids or fewer you're... basically there.

The main reason most people can't do this is because of political choices, not technological limitations.

Granted this doesn't include luxuries like jetting halfway around the world for a 1 week holiday or living in a 4000 square foot house in the desert and driving a studio apartment an hour to work every day, but really, is that a better life?

I'm not as negative about this, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy why the current initiatives didn't go anywhere.

It's not that people are not willing to make sacrifices. We repeatedly did this in times of famine or war. Europe during WWII is a perfect example. Another good example of a major cultural shift in response to a new threat was the AIDS epidemic. The entire sexual revolution went out the window and we're now in a world where young people have a lot less sex than ever before. We like to talk about gender and sexuality, but we do a lot less with it, so to speak.

Anti-consumption / degrowth arguments face an uphill battle because they basically say "you should live a harder life". There should be less stuff, the stuff should be more expensive, there should be less of you. So you need a good answer why this is the right choice. Doing it "for the planet" doesn't sound too convincing because we're also a part of the planet and most people feel entitled to it. It's hard to get others to make real lifestyle sacrifices because you showed them some photos of koalas or coral reefs.

Because koalas don't cut it, we started giving increasingly apocalyptic, doomsday-type answers, all the way to renaming "climate change" to "climate crisis" or "climate disaster / catastrophe". That was probably a mistake. It created a sense of inevitability (so might as well have fun while you can) and undermined the credibility of the proposed solutions. Is it really going to save us all if I'm sorting my recyclables into five different bins?

So in a sense, I think this is a PR disaster more than anything else.

The environmental movements of the past 60 years have been extremely successful, certainly in the U.S. The ozone hole problem has been essentially solved, acid rain has been essentially solved, mass scale water pollution like rivers catching on fire has been essentially solved, massive smog has been essentially solved.

> anyone claiming “coal” or whatever is the future is simply a conman or a clown.

I've seen people on social media seriously claiming that coal plants are cleaner than wind energy or solar energy. It's aggravating. Never mind that it's easy to show that for the same amount of energy output, you get a similar amount of tons of coal ash yearly to the amount of materials it went into building a wind or solar plant...

I go back and forth if they are bots, or somehow people who are just really susceptible to this kind of garbage shill clickbait.

I really think the environmental movements were a red herring. It was always impossible to make a meaningful dent in your personal emissions while still existing in your location. There was never any reduction proposal which could mitigate this.

Government mandates for e.g. large nuclear construction, geo-engineering, BEV adoption, or other similar proposals would have had an impact. These all exposed the real tradeoffs which would need to be accepted of cost, hardship, or whatever the opposition to nuclear was.

The environmental movements of the last 60 years focused on impossible goals which were easy to rally behind.

Yep, all the talk about individual "carbon footprint" is just a distraction designed by the fossil fuel lobby. Universally in the world people who live most environmentally friendly lives are those that are too poor to consume much, not those who are the most aware, or claim to care the most about climate change.

The only way forward is developing as much solar, wind and nuclear as possible, driving down energy prices. Obviously stuff like carbon tax can help accelerate the process, but mostly it's happening because renewables have become the cheapest way of generating energy in most parts of the world.

Agreed. You aren't going to convince people in India that their children should stay poor when there is an option to uplift them. That's an extra billion people of energy and material needs, all by itself.

We are essentially there now. We have begun the mass deployment of renewable energy and it's only accelerating. The problem is that energy consumption is also growing so it's a moving target. We are within reach of hitting peak emissions, but the fact is that most emissions will still hang in the atmo for decades. So even when we hit the point of decreasing emissions, that's still only proximate to decreasing the amount of GHG in the atmo which is proximate the heating effects on the earth. So even at our current breakneck pace of remediation, the end effects are still locked in and getting worse for at least several decades if not centuries.

Outside the US, countries are doing a better job of electrifying. The US has deliberately retrograde policies right now.

> The failure of the environment movements over the last 60 years are proof

superficial and incorrect

> It is simply not possible to get enough people to reduce to make an impact

What are you talking about? The united states is currently ~-30% off peak carbon emissions.

The idea that a producer is at fault and not also the consumer paying them to do that is strange to me.

Kind of true.

The geography isn't as constrained, but what holds is that to rich first world countries, climate change is -0.5% GDP. A meaningful impact, but non-catastrophic and diffuse. To poor countries, it might mean death and suffering at scale.

I suspect they will always “be poor”.

The rich will move away, and the people left behind will be the ones who don’t have the capacity to make any other choice.

There's a lot to unpack here:

- the warming in the Medieval Warming Period is modest compared to projected modern warming

- The Alps are currently "warm enough" to be crossed without special gear much of the year. Otzi was found wearing multiple layers of hides and furs that would have provided good protection against the elements and is supposed to have been killed in late spring/early summer, not the depths of winter. Glaciers are active things and where he was found could be some distance from where he died.

- Yes the earth has been warmer and colder in the past, climate scientists are aware of these facts, it can also be true that climate is changing quickly in ways that may be very inconvenient for many modern humans.

- Regarding California climate, I don't know who "these same scientists" were, and popular press about climate change is often misleading and superficial. I have lived here for ~35 years and we have had a handful of very wet years but most of that period has been classified as "drought". Yes at the moment we are not but this was a very poor water year and we've benefited from carryover storage from last year. As far as I know, the scientific consensus is still that California is getting warmer and drier on average, and the large year to year fluctuations do not nullify that trend.

> Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.

Have you considered that one of the reasons it's not the same as before is because it's rising at a faster rate than before? It's not just that the temperature is changing but how fast it changes. If it happens slowly enough everything has time to adapt. If the rate of temperature increase happens faster than everything has time to adapt, there's problems.

> 1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.

While true that the Alps were much warmer during the Medieval Warming Period, that was a regional weather change, not a global event, the change we're seeing now is global, and sustained, not just in one regional area.

Also, I'd recommend doing some additional research on Ötzi, the Iceman you're likely talking about. First, he died much earlier than the Medieval Warming Period, so they aren't even related. Also, I don't think very many people would describe him as found without protection from the cold, considering he was found with many different animal skin coats to protect him from the cold. And the fact that he died, frozen and encased in ice, further shows how it was indeed actually cold enough to be very dangerous.

> I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.

It totally is annoying how the drought conditions have been communicated to the public, for sure! However, California having a drought for 10 years and then being fine for 4 years is exactly the kind of weather whiplash and volatility that is intensifying due to climate change.

> Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.

Would you indulge me and see if this one chart might change your mind? It includes each of your data points.

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Not really. There are plenty of Western entities that think in centuries (e.g. the Catholic Church) and plenty of.Chinese entities that are chasing the next moment (all the companies who cut standards on product because "to them it is the same").

This is true about the instantaneous state of the governments of the US and China rather than some intrinsic permanent cultural quality.

Even with a virus that could kill within 2 weeks, people lived in denial and selfishness. "Oh it predominantly kills old people? I'm not old, who cares!".

> clearly worded predictions about future events that should happen.

These are already out there. Extreme weather events are happening with all increasing frequency. But as with the slow boiled frog, when is it a crisis? The denier just claims we have always had extreme weather events, and they are correct (and this sidesteps the argument).

Your car can go at 0 kph and 100 kph. It’s the rate of the change that kills you, not the speed.

You seem to be completely ignoring the biggest problem. How do you propose the rich countries in the temperature zones deal with the billion climate refugees fleeing the inhospitable tropical areas of the planet?

You seem to be saying the temperature change is mainly natural? But the expected natural change in the present era is slow and downward, I think.

I mean you have two separate points here, one is "adapt" and the other is "nothing can be done", which itself can be picked apart into different specific things that can't be done, such as on the one hand getting everybody to behave themselves conscientiously with one mind, and on the other hand unilateral geoengineering.

there was no human impact for quite a bit of that variability over 500m years because just there were no humans, including the Cretaceous.

> And yeah, do invest in alternative sources and production of energy

This right here, it should be a Manhattan Project level of urgency, but at global "Hail Mary" level of cooperation and effort.

And the best part is that it's not like that investment is wasted -- it's foundational and will allow us to do incredible things with it.

Meanwhile the President of the United States is actively cancelling such work and doubling down on coal. Wheee!

I’m not sure even the how to change behavior is the correct line either. I think the most successful path is likely to be: how do we make human behavior less destructive?

A carbon tax would change behavior in short order. The challenge is introducing then maintaining it; people can always vote it out. I think left-leaning jurisdictions should definitely give it a try.

Steady state nuclear power plus wind and solar would. In today’s world, make the grid more reliable and greener than ever.

Nuclear should not be off the table. It’s safe, it’s well understood, it’s reliable and is a very cheap way to create base load capacity that renewables like solos and wind can build out on top of

Please explain how "accelerating the burning" is supposed to cause fusion and global scale solar to pop into existence.

This isn't that hard to understand. If you have ever gotten in your car after it has been parked in the sun, you know about the greenhouse effect. That CO2 does the same thing isn't some weird mystical thing. It's basic science. We know exactly how the causation works.