Saying that we’re “letting” big corporations gamble with our lives is more than a little misleading. It implies that we have the authority to grant them permission, as well as the authority to deny them permission. We have no such authority. Or, at least, I don’t. I have ZERO authority. Nobody asked my permission, and none was given. Somebody has the power, but it ain’t me.
If you had bothered to read past that sentence, you would have noticed this:
That said, renewable energy will almost certainly still be the cheaper option. Plus, renewable energy is just much more efficient. An electric car charged from renewable electricity is going to lose significantly less energy to waste than an ICE car running on gas.
Renewable energy tech is also sensitive to oil prices. Those products are just as dependent on global supply chains that still run on oil. So, renewable energy tech might go up in price like most everything else.
That said, renewable energy will almost certainly still be the cheaper option. Plus, renewable energy is just much more efficient. An electric car charged from renewable electricity is going to lose significantly less energy to waste than an ICE car running on gas.
But honestly, the affordability of renewable energy tech is dependent on one country: China. Without China’s massive industrial manufacturing capacity, and the Chinese government’s willingness to heavily subsidize key renewable tech industries, the renewable energy transition wouldn’t be possible.
For renewable energy to become viable, the tech had to come down in price. But the only way to bring down the price was to over produce.
Price is determined by supply and demand. If you produce a lot of a certain product, but the demand for that product is low, the price for the product will go down. That’s good for consumers but it’s bad for the business. Now it’s true that businesses can still make a profit even as the per unit price for their product is coming down, by increasing overall sales volume. But that’s risky, and it wouldn’t have worked for renewable tech anyway because we needed the price of that tech to come down a lot, and fast. There’s no way the producers could have remained profitable with prices coming down as much and quickly as they have without heavy subsidies.
There was no will to do that in the “free market capitalism” West.
How bad things get, Rahmstorf explained, all depends on how long the planet stays above 1.5 degrees. The Greenland Ice Sheet, for example, might be salvageable if people figure out how to bring emissions down and actively cool the planet…
“actively cool the planet”
Geo engineering, or “solar radiation management,” as they’re calling it now. Yeah, that’s right, folks. They’re gonna pump sulfur dioxide, or something, into the atmosphere to cool the planet. I know it, they’re going to do it. That’s how they’re doing to “fix” this. We can keep burning the fossil fuels that way. Burn the coal, burn the oil, burn the natural gas, it’s all fine because we can just cool the climate down. It’s so easy!
We are so cooked.
I don’t really see any other option. It’s happening regardless, might as well at least try to prepare.
It failed because achieving it wasn’t easy or cheap enough for consumers, wasn’t profitable enough for investors, and was too much of a threat to entrenched corporate/state interests.
According to a S&P Global probabilistic model: “global warming is likely to reach 2.3 C as soon as 2040.” And they conclude: “This suggests that–as a baseline–all sectors, including households, may want to prepare for the impacts of physical climate risks associated with a 2.3 C world.”
That’s less than 15 years from now.
Now, let me be clear, they’re not saying that we will for certain reach 2.3C of warming by 2040. They’re offering a probabilistic analysis, and they have determined that it is likely enough that it’s something we might want to prepare for. They “estimate a 90% likelihood that, by 2040, the average global temperature will exceed the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5° Celsius (1.5 C) above pre-industrial levels.” And they estimate that “there is a 50% likelihood of it exceeding 2.3 C” by 2040.
There was never a climate doomsday clock, at least not from any legitimate scientific sources. Scientists don’t make predictions, they’re not soothsayers or fortune tellers. It is, however, useful to try and project into the future. They do this using models. Unfortunately, even the most accurate climate model can’t have anywhere near a high enough fidelity to tell each person on the planet exactly how they will be personally impacted by climate change. But that’s exactly what makes climate change so concerning. There are a lot of unknowns, and it just generally makes the future more unpredictable than it otherwise would have been.
The Earth’s climate has been relatively stable for essentially all of our existence as a species. That’s going to change. It already has. We’re in that process now. That is irrefutable. And these changes will happen at a nearly unprecedented rate. Even relatively rapid temperature changes in Earth’s history usually unfold over tens of thousands of years. What we’re observing is unfolding over decades. That in and of itself is concerning, even if we don’t necessarily know exactly how that is going to impact each person individually.
Honestly, the best thing is just not to find out. Why risk it? Does it really make you feel any better knowing that we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen as a result of this unprecedented process? We should cut global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero as quickly as possible so we don’t have to worry about what might have happened if we didn’t.
What would you like me to do? You know what, let me rephrase that: what would you like me to do, that wouldn’t just result in me being hit even harder? Or killed. Would you like me to Luigi some folks? So I can be killed, or spend the rest of my life in prison or on death row?