Avoidable? Yes, but for which price? Our economy, and thus wellbeing, depend on having huge quantities of cheap energy available.
You think pollution is bad? Ask the hundreds of million of people who chose to move from the pristine country to a polluted city along the last centuries!
Pollution is bad, but lack of energy is worse. When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort, that will be the right time to stop polluting.
We've deliberately made choices to not prioritize better sources of that cheap energy over the years. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-hous...
"By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. 'The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion,' Reagan said during an election debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter's energy policies. 'It hasn't produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy.'"
> You think pollution is bad? Ask the hundreds of million of people who chose to move from the pristine country to a polluted city along the last centuries!
This was not because they loved pollution, but because the other options were also bad. Ask people who live in LA if they preferred the smog from the 1970s, or the people of Cleveland if they prefered the burning river.
If I ask the people who lost their manufacturing job to China, what do you expect as an average answer?
No amount of polluting LA is gonna make American labor cheaper than China's.
I think the only thing wrong with it is that it puts too much blame on Reagan and not enough blame on the powerful interests he was working for.
IIRC, the Democrats controlled Congress throughout the 1980s, so it's not like he could have done it without 'collaborators'.
How can you be this short sighted. How is a dead world in exchange for a few decades of obscene comfort worth while in the slightest?
How can someone honestly say "what about the economy!" when we will be seeing droughts, storms, heatwaves, etc that will cripple said precious economy while sending the quality of life down the gutter?
Was all the plastic treats worth it? Were the wars waged all over the world worth it for the "economy"? Sure you got to structure your entire society around little moving couches and lived in absolute comfort while the lowest were ground down by your little economy.
We have optimized out all that makes us Human for the sake of this god damn ponzie scheme. We outsource child care to afford dignity, outsource art to computers so we can sell trinkets for our bosses more efficiently. We built walled gardens on every block, destroying any kind of commons for shared experience so that each and every person has to buy into silly little monetization devices to even get to know others in their community.
Absolutely inhuman.
That’s a monumental amount of resources but wouldn’t have had a particularly noticeable lifestyle impact. We would likely have had more nuclear accidents, but those are really local events.
The path was basically eliminating coal, home heating oil, plus drastically reducing oil use by adding in road electrical power delivery for cars. The specific implementation would have depended on massive R&D plus either carbon taxes/banning coal, or larger nuclear subsidies.
In economic terms, 1-2% of GDP is the difference between a year worth celebrating and a shitty one.
OK, I exaggerated a bit, but it is absolutely not negligible over a couple of years, and a catastrophe over 50 years.
Basically you get one bad year, and every year after that you don’t notice the difference. Much like how our military spending is a lot of money but you only notice when it changes. The economy might even be larger today if we had gone down that path because of increased efficiency and cleaner air.
> a catastrophe over 50 years.
It is a palpable obscenity for you to use the word "catastrophe" to refer to a 2% decrease in the GDP but not for the complete devastation of our biosphere.
I heard a theory once that only a certain number of human souls were ever created, and after that, a lot of people got born with partial souls or no souls at all.
I found it charming but unconvincing, but sometimes I wonder...
The world may gain an estimated $78 trillion over coming decades by making this energy transition.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2022/06/08/how-replaci...
Technology has reached this point a long time ago. Politics have not.
Your sources and mine must differ. As far as I know, renewable energy sources cannot yet guarantee a steady energy flow, to source big industry, when it's cloudy and not windy for a week.
I hope we'll get there soon, I really hope.
I generally believe that on a day to day basis medieval peasants were about as happy as your average person now (perhaps more so). I'd probably trade places with one if I could still get access to the medicine which ensures that my kids don't die in childhood.
My point isn't to say that modern technology is bad or doesn't provide value but that "the economy" as a single entity is almost pointless to try and evaluate with respect to a problem like climate change. It is not all or nothing. It never has been. The complexity of our lives and our happiness and flourishing doesn't come down to a glib one to one identification with the current economic order. We can and must (and should have been) thinking and speaking about this issue with more nuance.
You appear to be arguing that it is too expensive to save the biosphere from destruction. I'm curious what sort of value you think money will have in a ruined ecosystem.
> When our technology will let us stop polluting without giving up comfort,
On one side you have a livable planet for our descendants; on the other, your own personal comfort; and you pick the second.
Humans really horrify me.
Given we have entire industries devoted to providing us constantly new levels of comfort without considering energy consumption that's a goal that can't be reached.
other factors play into that too, like drought. but largely in the 20th america everybody migrated away from rural areas because of machines.
Pay now, pay later usually works out to be more painful when addressed later.
The "asking" to give up comfort is an attempt to avoid the later worse consequences that will not be voluntary.