In the daunting math of climate action, individual choices and government policies aren’t adding up.
Solar panels are being nailed to rooftops, colossal wind turbines bestride the plains and oceans, and a million electric vehicles are on U.S. roads — and it isn’t enough. Even if the world did an unlikely series of about-faces — halting deforestation, going vegetarian, paying $50 a ton carbon taxes, boosting energy efficiency, doubling car mileage, and more — it would not be enough.
“There’s no silver bullet,” said Andrew Jones, co-founder of the modeling firm Climate Interactive. “There’s silver buckshot: many actions in many domains.”
As the 24th U.N. conference on climate change kicks off this week, a steady drumbeat of scientific reports have sounded warnings about current climate trajectories. One warned of the need to curb global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — over preindustrial levels instead of the widely accepted target of 2 degrees Celsius. Another warned of the growing gap between the commitments made at earlier U.N. conferences and what is needed to steer the planet off its current […]
Reading the comments to this article is discouraging. There are a number of trumpers who refuse to recognize the reality of scientific data. Another talked about the lack of courage to face the problem but one pushed back against this idea with a comment that seems more accurate: “The issue isn’t courage. It’s hard to capture, but perhaps this is a start: it’s toxic mixture of apathy, distraction, and hopelessness. Combined with the very human tendency to simply not make any choice at all when faced with difficult options, which psychologists have documented for many decades in experiments across all kinds of situations.”
I am afraid that there will be a much smaller population on planet earth in the latter part of this century. All trends that I read point to unstoppable degradation even if we humans were to apply ourselves to the same degree we do in war and profit.
This is all leading to government demanding we have fewer children as that will have a much greater impact on clinate change than anything else we could do.
https://www.thepostmillennial.com/malcolm-the-cbc-should-stay-out-of-the-bedrooms-of-the-nation/?fbclid=IwAR399c_BPXAmKN03l3Z85VAZ5vGDU9vy4d5KSQQNNhU5D3Eui22k_rveZ80
Actually, Ken, that is nonsense. As it stands very few countries in the developed world presently have a sustainable birthrate. In Japan this has already become a crisis.