|||
Climate collapse is ongoing and cascading. How long until the ice shelves break and instantly raise sea levels 14m and flood every major human city? How long are we going to wait to start geoengineering on purpose? Can we coordinate globally, or will it take unilateral action?
We need to find a solution for this that’s better than “just stop oil.” I did climate activism for years and the degrowth people are fools. Humanity is not a virus; we’re just an organism that got access to a source of energy and didn’t know about the long-term consequences.
We are not going to stop using more energy. We might be able to cut back on pollutants, but we also can’t predict the consequences there (see effects of long-distance shipping on ocean temps). We need to decouple total energy use from greenhouse gases, and ideally draw down the carbon out of the atmosphere. But that’s going to be harder in the long term if all major population centers are racked by unlivable heat, rising sea levels, and storms of biblical proportions. We need to put a tourniquet on before we try to do surgery.
Solar radiation management is totally possible. We just need to put a couple of volcanoes’ worth of particulate in the air to shade the Earth for a few years. Obviously we can’t be sure about how this will work, but we have pretty good ideas. But can we coordinate in time?
To be clear, the West mostly has decoupled energy use from emissions. But China and India and their populations are much bigger and rapidly industrializing. We need to accelerate technological development worldwide to get past this era.
We need nuclear energy, genetically engineered food, electrification, massive solar and wind farms, SRM, the works. We need AI to do better climate modeling. We need a movement that is pro-tech and pro-humanity.
We’re already engineering the climate. We need to get good at it.