The Change needed is refused by the people. We would rather die and kill most of the biological world than face economic austerity, so we get what we order.
> In this study, we conducted a representative survey across 125 countries, interviewing nearly 130,000 individuals. Our findings reveal widespread support for climate action. Notably, 69% of the global population expresses a willingness to contribute 1% of their personal income, 86% endorse pro-climate social norms and 89% demand intensified political action.
Yes, in surveys everyone is always generous and ready to sacrifice their own interests, then price of gas increases some 10-20% and you have protests and riots.
The reason for protests is often because the sacrifices are usually placed on the general population instead of on the top X% percent whose emissions equal the rest of the population.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Surely tax car prices, but also set tax for private jet fuel to a 10000%. While electricity is not far from becoming clean, it makes no sense that the rich and the poor paid the same price for it. As total consumption increases, a region has to turn on dirtier and more inefficient plants. So high consumption users should pay a lot more, instead of doing a general price increase. Etc.
That makes a real difference for people making the median salary in western countries. Lots of people in finance, tech, etc. can obviously afford not to care but that's a minority.
We need 2-6% of GDP each year spend on this. For the next 30 years.
This is an amount of money we could just create by monetary policy or Quantitative Easing as the like to say. Nobody needs to get poor when money is spend.
Getting to netzero is most economically achieved using solar, wind and battery storage + gas peaker plants for intermittent capacity needs (already today and more so in the future).
Too bad they're not running the US, India, and China because poll results are meaningless if people have no actual ability to effect change and they don't.
This is definitely encouraging but I’d rather see a study about people forgoing consumption or voluntarily imposing self austerity rather than what their opinions are.
Climate change isn't primarily about consumption though, it's about burning fossil fuels, I think the consumption argument is a decoy by the fossil fuel industry.
I know a lot of people who are pretty minimal in their consumption, but just waking up in the morning and turning on their heating in their poorly insulated apartment means they're significantly contributing to climate change.
Of course manufacturing goods is part of it too, but burning coal, gas and oil is what caused climate change. Not buying clothes or eating food.
This year I plan to consume 6 solar panels and self install them on my barn roof. I'd say this is positive consumption?
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the only people who care are the anxious western upper-middle classes. Anyone poorer can't afford to care.
You absolutely cannot solve the problem through voluntary change of behaviour, and thinking that you can is a sign that you need to step out of your ivory tower. Instead you have to change the economy so that the most environmentally friendly alternative is the cheapest, and so that environmentally disastrous activities are prohibitively expensive.
It's not a matter of the environment vs economic austerity, rejected by the people, it's the environment vs corporate abuse, rejected by those in power.
It is actually worse than that. Even the relatively small amounts of money we are willing to spend to combat this are often not spent well.
One example, is rooftop solar. Rooftop solar is very, very, expensive compared to utility grade solar. A dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
Another example of poor decision making is Germany which decided to start shutting down nuclear power plants while they were still burning coal. So last year hard coal and lignite still produced 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany). Before the phase out of nuclear, it generated about 25% of the electricity. It is all really hard to believe...
1) Does the extra cost of rooftop solar go to installers doing a lot more manual work per panel?
Installers who need a source of income to live anyway?..
2) As I see it a lot of the pollution in the world is due to fear of people loosing their jobs. One could scale down many sectors, or more aggressively shift to a greener economy, if it wasn't for the fear of people/voters loosing their jobs.
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So when considering options I think one needs to give smaller weight to salaries ("somone had to feed that person anyway") and more weight to natural resource extraction needed...which is the "real" cost. Basically count further CO2 emissions invested, not work hours.
Money is fungible and not unlimited - a dollar that goes to subsidize residential rooftop solar is a dollar that would go much, much further if it was used to subsidize utility grade solar or wind.
The original poster pointed out:
>...We would rather die and kill most of the biological world than face economic austerity, so we get what we order.
As I pointed out, it is worse than that - we often waste the small amounts of money we are willing to spend. If people know that rooftop solar is an inefficient use of people's money, but justify it because it can be a jobs program for roofers - that won't help convince tax payers that policy makers are committed to fighting climate change.
Yes but installing solar rooftop is simple and won't use any additional land and get opposed by environmental groups. From that point of view, your $ will be more actionable than waiting 15 years to get your utility solar deployed.
> Another example of poor decision making is Germany which decided to start shutting down nuclear power plants while they were still burning coal. So last year hard coal and lignite still produced 35.3 percent in German power production (compared to 35.2% from renewables. (https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/coal-germany). Before the phase out of nuclear, it generated about 25% of the electricity. It is all really hard to believe...
That article is from January 2023, so the numbers in there are 2022, not last year, and even then it says that nuclear produced only 11.7%. In any case, comparing to the official numbers[0], those seem to be closer to the 2021 numbers than the actual 2022 numbers: 31.3% coal, 6% nuclear, and 44% renewable. For 2023, coal was down to 26.22%, nuclear (which was only phased out in April) was down to 1.5%, and renewables were at 56%. Nuclear has not contributed more than 20% to electricity generation since 2011[2].
>That article is from January 2023, so the numbers in there are 2022, not last year,
Thanks for the clarification. The numbers are a little different, but unfortunately the main point is still true. Before the phaseout started, nuclear contributed more than 20% to electricity generation. Even now with nuclear basically eliminated, coal is still being used in 2024 to provide electricity in Germany. Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history and it was really incredibly poor decision making to start shutting down nuclear power plants while still burning coal.
> Before the phaseout started, nuclear contributed more than 20% to electricity generation.
That's true, but also quite meaningless. Before the nuclear phaseout started, renewables contributed less than 7% to electricity generation, now it's over 56%, so it more than compensates for the missing nuclear generations. Furthermore, replacing coal with nuclear is not easily done, since most coal plants also generate heat, whereas none of the nuclear plants did.
> Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history and it was really incredibly poor decision making to start shutting down nuclear power plants while still burning coal.
None of the remaining reactors had usable fuel left, even just acquiring new fuel would already take 12 or more months (besides, all of the remaining reactors were already several years overdue on safety inspections). The decision to phase out nuclear power has been made well in advance of those 12 months: originally in 2002, partially pushed back in 2010, then finalised in 2011, and again pushed back (by 3.5 months) in 2022. The poor decision making is not phasing out nuclear power, the poor decision making is not also phasing out coal and pushing renewables from at least 2011 onwards.
>That's true, but also quite meaningless. Before the nuclear phaseout started, renewables contributed less than 7% to electricity generation, now it's over 56%, so it more than compensates for the missing nuclear generations.
You misunderstood what I was saying. Earth just experienced its hottest 12 months in recorded history and it was really incredibly poor decision making to start shutting down nuclear power plants while still burning coal. If one thinks that climate change is important, it makes zero sense to eliminate nuclear plants while you are still burning coal. Zero sense. Even if someone thinks it is better to pander to the coal industry or doesn't believe climate change is an existential threat to human civilization, burning coal by itself directly kills thousands of people each year. One recent estimate puts that at 1800–2260 deaths in Germany each year. As climate scientist James Hansen has said, “Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet”.
I literally dream about Sovereign Solar. If the Canadian government was like "yo, we're doing a crown corporation and we're gonna transition the country to solar wind and tidal" - that's my actual pipe dream.
Polls consistently show that people think someone somewhere should do something as long as it doesn't actually cost them any money.
"IPSOS found that just 25 percent of Americans said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to address climate change. A 2019 Reuters poll asked specifically whether respondents would pay $100 to fight climate change and only a third said yes"
Meanwhile, Joe Biden while claiming to believe we are steering towards climate disaster, decided to protect the economy and preserve his geriatric political career and reduce oil prices yet again by depleting strategic reserves.
Let's not get too political here -- while there is pandering on oil pricing he is forced to by an electorate that's too stupid to see the big picture. His ostensible opponent states that climate change is a hoax and wants to undo anything "green".
Many of us don’t want to uproot everything - at substantial effort and cost - for unclear or negligible upside. USA is only at 13% of global emissions. And radically overhauling everything, as opposed to incentivizing greener tech over time, is unlikely to move the temperature much if at all. China will not play ball. The developing world will not play ball.
If we were dead serious about this as a civilization threat, we would start building as much nuclear as possible
USA is only at 13% if you only account for emissions by the USA. If you count the CO2 emissions the USA paid for then it is more than double that of China.
The whining about "uprooting everything" is such a cheap cop out. The US doesn't suddenly grind to a halt when oil prices are higher, or when production of goods moves back from China to Detroit.
Uproot everything? There's only 2 significant direct disruptions that would be felt directly by the population: getting an electric vehicle and stove/oven. They both have cost but that can be (and is) transitioned over time and the economic burden can be subsidized.
I agree that nuclear would be great but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be cost effective. Even my pet notion, SMRs, seem to be unable to cut it. NuScale has promise but even they seem to be unable to compete with solar and wind.
Geothermal is also waiting for us -- I hear there's a bit of extra heat in the Yellowstone region.
The key thing is that our political leadership is currently owned by the fossil fuel industry and they don't want to let go of their massive profits. They've also managed to politicize the issue to such a degree that a major political party (and its membership) has no interest in addressing this and has convinced the base that it's a hoax. That's as political as I'll get here -- is to note stated positions and policies.
The US has (will) spent $6T on two wars that had no reason or value. We have plenty of money to spend -- it's just a matter of spending it wisely.
I think the return on investment on most proposed “changes” is negative. I don’t see any evidence that most of the biological world is hurdling towards destruction from climate.
If we turned off the fossil fuel tap today, I think life on earth would get markedly worse for humans, with negligible/no impact on fauna.
The people always do the right thing when it is almost too late. Same thing as World War II, we Americans ignored and avoided the war as long as we possibly could. I still wonder at the miracle of Japan attacking Pearl Harbor, had they not, it is likely that we'd be in the middle of a Nazi new world order. For this climate challenge, perhaps we can hope for some disastrous flood, or horrific hurricane, to help convince your average voter that this is not something that will just go away by itself and we need to take it seriously.
>> it is likely that we'd be in the middle of a Nazi new world order.
Ask people born in a former soviet union country who they thought "won" WW2. It is not likely in any scenario that the US would be in the middle of a Nazi world order if Pearl Harbor wasn't attacked, calling it a miracle is disgusting.
Fwiw I have direct family that fought in WW2 in the Pacific.
As do I. But that doesn't change the fact that had we not had Japan force the issue, we may not have been there when needed. And yes the Soviet Union made the brunt of the effort, but the German military was quite strong.
