* There is no climate change.
* The temperature charts are rigged.
* Scientists conspire to get more funding.
* Dissenting opinions are suppressed by the mainstream.
* Taxing CO2 is a way to control the economy and stifle growth.
* CO2 is actually good for plants.
* CO2 does not cause climate change.
* If there is climate change, CO2 is only a minor contributor.
* Humans do not cause CO2, nature does that.
* Climate change is not caused by humans.
* Climate change is not bad.
* If it is bad, there is nothing we can do.
* It's only bad for other people.
* It will only hit us hard in the far future.
* We cannot make compromises in our lifestyle or risk our economy.
* We have invested much too much in fossil fuel technology to give it up.
* Renewable energy is not feasible. It's a joke. Don't even think about it.
* Solar cells cost more energy than they produce.
* Batteries produce lots of CO2 during production.
* Windmills will never harvest the energy that was needed to produce them.
* Our electric grid will fail if we add too much renewable energy.
* We cannot store enough electric energy.
* Renewables can never work because they cannot produce energy on demand.
* Even if renewables were feasible they would be too expensive.
* Why don't we just build more nuclear plants?
* Thorium will save us in time, so no hurry.
* Fusion is only 30 years away, so why invest in renewables?
... this is only what came into my mind spontaneously and some points are really hard to argue, especially with non-technical people who do not see scientific facts as something solid but something that can be negotiated.
* Fighting climate change is an ideological lifestyle
* Creating laws to prevent climate change is just people trying to impose their views onto others.
* we will just be able to scrub the atmosphere by 2050
* There's actually some papers that contradict the climate models
* As different models have different predictions, no one can really know how the climate is gonna change
* China is the worst polluter anyways, so it doesn't matter what we do
* Industrialized countries have benefited from carbon fuels the last 200 years. It is our right now, to economically catch up by burning them too
* Between doing nothing and hitting the 2°goal there must be a reasonable middle ground
The madness behind this conspiracy theory is that the amount of money those scientists could get is minuscule in comparison to the enormous wealth generated by oil companies and oil producing nations. Wouldn't that be a much more reasonable conspiracy theory to believe in?
"Oil industry is totally not lobbing against any movement that could bring us closer to the solution"
In particular, the storage requirements, on-demand capacity requirements, and raw material requirements for renewables are real considerations. Abundance, low cost and relative cleanliness of natural gas compared to coal. These should not be hand-waved as against facts, or denigrated in the face of the coming apocalypse.
Yes, indeed. But you forgot some key items:
* We have the ability to predict future climate change with enough accuracy to justify multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions.
* We have the ability to predict the economic and social consequences of future climate change with enough accuracy to justify multi-trillion-dollar policy decisions.
* "Renewable" energy does not include nuclear power.
* Renewable energy (not including nuclear power) can totally supply the required base load power for a first world standard of living for billions of people.
Excuse my nitpicking, but renewable energy indeed excludes nuclear. By definition.
Then politicians want to get elected, so the one side moderates their position and the other doesn't.
It's one of the reasons carbon tax + dividend might actually have a chance. If the dividend only goes to humans but the tax is paid by both humans and corporations, and it's revenue neutral, then the average real person is getting back more than they're paying. That's the sort of thing people like.
Look at the most recent IPCC report: the predicted sea level rise by 2100 is below 1 meter with 95% confidence, and the economic cost of global warming is predicted to be at only a few percent of global GDP. Sure, we'll need to build a few sea walls here and there, rebuild a few more houses destroyed in hurricanes, shift cultivation from the newly-desertified areas to the areas where the climate change increases precipitation, but that's not a disastrous outcome that we need to avert by spending huge amounts of effort right now. Of course, if you support yourself by back-breaking subsistence farming, these things would in fact be a disaster for you, but this is a problem for poor people in poor places very far from developed countries. We (both society and the politicians) don't care much about their plight today, and we won't care about them in future either.
That's why hardcore "green" politicians don't push the society for some serious change: because there's not much need to do so in developed countries. People wouldn't like the change, because it would make their lives clearly worse, while doing nothing won't make it significantly worse. Some people though like the mood affiliation brought by "green" people fighting for "climate", which is why the green politicians only need to hit those notes in their hearts to get the support. Making real change is optional.
Green politicians demand action yesterday, 'Green new deal' politicians demand 30% reductions in the short term, left-wing politicians who are in power promise 30% reductions over the next 15 years[1], right-wing politicians who are in power promise 30% increases over the next 15 years.
The problem is that:
1. In non-proportional-representation countries, a vote for green is a wasted vote.
2. In proportional-representation countries, greens get some votes and government seats, but whether that translates into political power is dependent on blind luck. Depending on how many seats other parties get, they may be included in a coalition (And thus, have some influence on policy), or completely shut out (And thus, have no influence on policy).
3. The United States is the biggest per first-world polluter, and thus has the most low-hanging fruit to be picked. But all else being equal, it tends to vote right-wing. [2]
PS. Before anyone says 'China' - China's emission policies can be influenced by tariffs. We just need to get off our asses, and clean up our own house, first.
[1] Of course, they won't do anything to curtail carbon-extraction industries - they expect the rest of us to sacrifice so that petro-firms can keep making money.
[2] The only reason US emissions have been holding steady, despite 'coal now, coal tomorrow, and coal forever' rhetoric, is blind luck. The unit economics of natural gas became good, because of fracking, and it emits less CO2 per KWH than coal. If it weren't for fracking, the US would be right on the path the Republican party wants it to be.
If AGW has a solution, it lies only in drastic population reduction and a complete rewilding of the human race -- what Daniel Quinn called "living in the hands of the gods". This lies well out of our culture's Overton window, but more environmentalists are taking a long hard look at it.
Think about it, it is partly because of the narrative of the story.
If you imagine a hypothetical situation that there is big asteroid flying towards the Earth and there is a 95% chance of the impact in 2050. The governments would finance and do everything to stop this impact, to look like saviors of the planet Earth.
The consequences / or better the probability would be the same. However, the asteroid story is different, much more tangible.
No, they wouldn't, because the astronomers who would be predicting the asteroid impact have a track record of decades of extremely accurate predictions of the future trajectories of asteroids, checked in detail against actual observations. So if they ever were to predict an asteroid impact at some time in the future, that prediction would have extremely high credibility and would indeed warrant drastic action.
Climate science, by contrast, has no track record of accurate predictions. The climate model predictions are falsified by the data. Plus, the actual impact of climate change requires not only predicting the climate, but predicting the economic and other consequences of changes in the climate, and we have even less predictive ability in those disciplines than we have in climate science. So when climate scientists squawk about future catastrophes, their predictions have extremely low credibility, and combined with their obvious self-interest, this is more than sufficient reason to ignore them.
1. Not committed to turning down existing fossil fuel extraction.
2. Are actively committed to expanding fossil fuel extraction.
They need to be called out on their charade, as frequently, and as loudly as possible.
[1] Federal Liberal party of Canada.
Yes you can.
Eventually, the solution will have to come from the government. But the government won't act unless we demand it.
- Change your lifestyle. Less flying, driving, meat. More non-electronically powered forms of play.
- Divest fossil. Invest renewable.
- Most importantly, get away from keyword and join other people. e.g. https://xrebellion.org
I see your argument, but not sure if I agree with this part.
If we/entrepreneur/engineers can figure 2 things: 1. Figure the engineering problem which would be something along the lines of: a. consume CO2 from air and use product something else b. bring alternative sources of energy at part with fossil fuels c. etc. 2. Figure a way to provide it as a service so that people can pay for it.
We can fix it. Still doable without hoping for governments to come and bail us.
