We are doomed - unless someone finds a technological (not social or political) solution to climate change.
Just recently a huge shipment of e-waste from Germany labeled as "for recycling" was seized at the Romanian border as it was in no way recyclable and would have just been landfilled here.
From the German perspective it's mission accomplished as they can lable this trash as recycled and tick more boxes on environmental responsibility, while the truth is they just outsourced their trash to some unscrupulous business from a poor and corrupt country and can feign ignorance when being questioned by the press about knowing the truth, same as how sports-wear companies pretend to be shocked that their manufacturing partners use child labour in Asian sweatshops.
The solution is political, but fat chance getting western corporations and consumers to pay more for environmental responsibility.
Some things like e-waste just can't be recycled economically as it costs more to separate and recycle than you'd get back from the raw materials so who's gonna pay for that?
The economic left and environment left are so tightly coupled that voting for representatives that are serious about climate change is invariably a vote for higher overall taxes.
This proposal by Sweden for example seems to be of that category. A brand new tax with no offsets elsewhere. If there were equivalent offsets might it have been voted in easily?
Sorry, but all the evidence so far suggests you are wrong. Different kind of political solutions have been tried for decades without any practical result so far. Meanwhile the renewables[1] have been chugging on with relatively steady state towards being an actual solution. Once the technical/economical solution has crashed fossil fuel consumption, there will be a really flashy political agreement and huge amount of self-patting on the back from politicians about their magnificient political solution to the problem.
\cynical rant
[1] Hopefully, hopefully with nuclear helping there as well in the end.
You're talking about the solution to the political problem of appearing to care, which is what we've seen a lot of and that, almost by construction, don't actually do much to arrest climate change.
The problem is that literally 'we' are probably OK. Our grand kids or their kids on the other hand might very well be doomed, but humans are bad and dealing with those sort of time frames.
Guess we'll just YOLO this generation and leave it to the kids to deal with the mess, one way or another. Because that's exactly what's going to happen.
All those attempts to fight climate change are so full of ideology and emotions that I am not surprised we still don't have any working solution.
If Germany spent on nuclear energy power plants all the money they've spent on wind and solar power plants they would be almost at zero level CO2 emission (except cars).
I can understand Germany, they are putting pressure on other countries, making their economies less competitive while they have a deal with Russia to buy huge amounts of gas (which, for some strange reason is considered to be "green").
This is good for German economy, but for sure will not help environment. Not a big surprise that Swiss people hasn't bought that bullshit.
I think it's fine to struggle on this: we have to go beyond the crisis, either with luck if a phenomenon we didnt predict counter balance it, or if we fail miserably and lose 80% of the life population or if we reverse natural course and somehow work against our nature, or even invent a miraculous carbon sink or whatever.
If the goal is terraformation in space, it s fine if we try and fail and another species rise in our stead. We literally have billions of years, on Earth, to find a way.
Our own survival doesnt matter if extinction provides a solution / evolution that becomes superior. Who's crying for the billions of species who tried and failed before us.
Cause we could adopt your attitude and stay on horses, or we can gamble it and progress.
Bicycles are an example of sustainable individual transport that improves on horses. But they've been driven off the roads by increasingly fast and heavy cars. That's what happens if you just let the market decide. The market is blind to sustainability.
we just have to stop taxing everything in order to "make a change"
change should come without the feeling of being taxed
empowering civilization shouldn't come with more taxes
fuck taxes