It’s great folly to think climate change can be solved by “waking people up” and that whole endeavor probably just makes things worse. It becomes a red/blue issue where nearly half the population take opposing sides, like mindless zombies. A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention. Emerging economies pollute, necessarily. That’s the real problem. Surely it feels good to some people to say “I told you so!”, to see oneself on some noble crusade to enlighten the masses about the troubles that are to come. But it’s not at all productive in fact it’s the opposite. Not everyone has the ears to hear. The good side has to accept that sad truth and give up on the political squabbling. Spend energy thinking about solutions that don’t require building consensus with the guys in jack up trucks and the poor third world nations that pollute to survive.
> A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention.
This is going to sound harsh, but to me this argument seems like a mental contortion to absolve yourself from doing anything and not feel bad about it.
In the past 20 years we have seen significant progress in slowing down, or even reducing for some countries, the emission of CO2. It is not enough, but it's definitely significant.
This happened thanks to the many, via awareness campaign and political pressure. And this bought us some precious time.
Even if you truly believe the solution will come from a Messiah appearing with a techno-miracle, you should still push to wake people up: The more people are truly aware of the problem, the more will be interested in working in climate-related tech, giving us more chance for "that single invention" to appear. And you also want the mass to be enlightened about this to continue trying to slow down the train, giving more time for technological breakthrough to appear before we are completely screwed.
> In the past 20 years we have seen significant progress in slowing down, or even reducing for some countries, the emission of CO2. It is not enough, but it's definitely significant. This happened thanks to the many, via awareness campaign and political pressure.
I’m guessing this has nothing to do with awareness campaigns and everything to do with the relative price of coal, natural gas, and renewables. People just did whatever was cheapest, and that meant switching away from coal.
The solution is not authoritarianism. We have plenty of that now and got here because of that. We have not just governmental authoritarianism, but also in business. In fact, business authoritarianism is arguably why we are here.
It’s great folly to think climate change can be solved by “waking people up” and that whole endeavor probably just makes things worse. It becomes a red/blue issue where nearly half the population take opposing sides, like mindless zombies. A solution, if we are to find one, will not come from the many but from the few, maybe just a single person or invention. Emerging economies pollute, necessarily. That’s the real problem. Surely it feels good to some people to say “I told you so!”, to see oneself on some noble crusade to enlighten the masses about the troubles that are to come. But it’s not at all productive in fact it’s the opposite. Not everyone has the ears to hear. The good side has to accept that sad truth and give up on the political squabbling. Spend energy thinking about solutions that don’t require building consensus with the guys in jack up trucks and the poor third world nations that pollute to survive.