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Either time machines are impossible, or there are no people left in the future to invent one.

I prefer a third possibility -- that time machines are possible, but can only travel back in a non-recursive manner for a limited sliding window. And we haven't arrived at the boundary of that window yet.

Or that it sends you to another dimension, or that the people who do time travel know that if they do anything, they'll change everything so that they won't exist ?

I hope the former and not later is true.

Interesting, but how is this different from just issuing treasury bonds? I guess my question is, how does it relate to climate specifically? Is the difference just that we issue a crap ton of them now and only use the money to pay for climate related things?

I guess the bigger question too is what do we spend them on? Is anyone aware of a feasible, “go to market” plan that could actually “fix” climate change if we had, say, 1 trillion dollars to spend on it? (Or whatever the number is)

I go into more detail on my blog about why zero-coupon bonds.

What do we spend it on? The first place is buying up all the fossil fuel and preventing it from being burnt. Paying off the owners of the fossil fuel is the essential step to removing the political opposition to doing something about climate change. Once that is tackled then we just have to scale out the technology we already have to generate energy that doesn't emit greenhouse gases.

Doomsaying is frequently accompanied by monetary schemes.

> We are not going to get anywhere until ...

In most advanced countries, climate change is accepted and the problem and risks are being mitigated. AFAIK, the countries that refuse to act, such as the U.S., are the exceptions.

Even in the countries that have accepted it, the response is less than adequate. But yes, it's shameful where the US sits on this, and shameful that interests in the US seek to make climate change a partisan issue and spread misinformation.

Where the US sits on this politically, or sits in practice?

In practice, the US has cut emissions more than any signer of the Paris Accords. That's very much not shameful in my book.

> the US has cut emissions more than any signer of the Paris Accords

Can you provide some basis for this claim? It's the first time I've heard it.

Um... not immediately. I have heard it several times, but I can't cite a source.

We'd need a graph of carbon emissions by nation, over time. I'm sure the data is out there, but I'm not sure where...

https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/

As you can see, the US response is critically deficient.

I wish this was true, but even the USA alone is enough to destroy the world. We need a new approach.

Defining every single social transaction in terms of "Who pays?" is the problem.

Setting fire to the planet is just one of many symptoms which suggests this moral basis has one or two rather large bugs.

A century worth of wars, proxy wars have been fought to put capitalism the supreme form global economics.

And now people are supposed to magically think differently?

We need honest cooperation and rational leadership, but we don't have those things. Good leaders wouldn't be doing all this business as usual, they'd be working hard to make everyone realize that change is coming, our previous way of life can't survive, and preparing us to change before we don't have a chance. Anyone sane can understand this if coached, but to many it's just a blip in the stream of usual garbage. There needs to be confrontation. Capitalism, consumerism, whatever else --our way of life is not more important than life itself.

So you want to completely change human society and then solve climate change? History would suggest this might be more than a little difficult.

Well this may be so, but I would rather solve one large problem at a time than two.

This reminds me of Travelers, a sci-fi series (available on Netflix in US). An intelligent take on the time travel trope.

So, to sum up:

- Pollute the environment

- Let yourself get paid in long-term bonds to stop polluting the environment

- Wait 50 years

- Profit!

Not quite. Think of it as more those who get the benefit pay. Much better than ending up in a world you can't live in because your ancestors could not decide who should pay.