It'll never be fixed so long as the primary talking heads advocating change are all giant energy consumers.
Who wants to listen to Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, etc. as they jet from continent to continent, play on mega yachts, own 10,000 square foot homes-- then the listeners are supposed to live like monks?
No, that won't work. When they get real, concerned voices speaking-- people who put skin in the game-- then the idea might get traction.
>Who wants to listen to Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, etc. as they jet from continent to continent, play on mega yachts, own 10,000 square foot homes-- then the listeners are supposed to live like monks?
Because they pay them? This is how carbon trading is supposed to work on a larger scale. How much money do you need to replace your a.c. or heating with a greener version/to retrofit your home? Why shouldn't Dicaprico pay for your solar panels? People like him could easily afford to offset their emissions, but they are not putting their money where there mouth is, are they?
It's possible to make a lot of money trading carbon credits, just like you can trading anything else (Al Gore does this). There are also a lot of subsidies for green technology (which corporations can make money from) and in some countries a lot of climate taxes (which governments make money from.) There's just more money to be made in the entire rest of the economy (which is carbon-producing) than there is in building solar panels and shutting down factories.
Ahh ... to be 15 again, and believe that someone like Al Gore actually trades, which would imply a mostly-fair exchange of things of actual value. That such a man actually cares for anything other than his own aggrandizement and money.
I miss that. Don't ever take a consulting gig at the EU headquarters. It may pay ... decent. I wouldn't say particularly well paid, but decent. It will also kill any remote ounce of hope you may harbor for politicians improving matters.
Here you find an indication of who the man really is[1]. Some tidbits:
(high school) He was the captain of the football team, threw discus for the track and field team, and participated in basketball, art, and government.
Was 25th in his class but got immediately accepted into harvard ...
Gore was an avid reader who fell in love with scientific and mathematical theories,[19] but he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.[18] During his first two years, his grades placed him in the lower one-fifth of his class. During his sophomore year, he reportedly spent much of his time watching television, shooting pool, and occasionally smoking marijuana
Gore earned an A on his thesis, "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947–1969", and graduated with an A.B. cum laude in June 1969
Truly a man of science he is ... and his life mostly a great example of exactly how fair government is in the US (and sadly, I would agree that the life story of president Macron illustrates that the US is in fact pretty fair, or at least that it can be a lot worse than the above)
Carbon trading credits are not enough to fix global warming your right, if the value of carbon fixing or putting carbon in the ground was higher than the value of extracting 50 years ago. Well we would probably have solved this by now, but coal and oil get subsides rather than tax, we don't make the external costs apply to the profit makers. At the risk of sounding libertarian if auto manufactures had to pay for the cost of asthma and respitory diseases that autos cause electric cars would be widespread by now.
Of course, there are plenty of people on the internet ready to complain that scientists who warn about global warming do so only because they are making a profit from it.
Perhaps the problem is that the fix would cut into someone else's profits.
Perhaps it's either not worth fixing at all or not worth fixing yet. So far as I know, nobody has proposed a way to "fix it" that passes cost-benefit analysis with a decent discount rate.
If we keep thinking about it, perhaps somebody will come up with better options in the future, but they simply haven't done so yet.
This depends on how you define cost and benefit. Remember the cost of doing nothing is
Rising waters (more flood defences or flood insurance going up)
What is the cost when bayfromt SV property is flooded and cant be pumped out? What is the financial value of a species disappearing? What is the value of the oceans and the coral reefs that are being bleached by acid?
Compare that to the cost of switching to renewables lifestyle that can at least be quantified. Options are likely to get more and more expensive (it would have been cheaper 50 years ago than now even with our better tech) it's simply a matter of people putting enough money in to a) clean energy (because the more cheap clean energy we have the more viable other options like carbon capture becomes) and b) simply funding mitigating technologies.
It is quite possibly too late, we may have irreversibly damaged the climate to the point, where even a 100% switch off of co2 tomorrow would simply be too little, too late. Govs didn't introduce punishing taxes and subsidies for the right tech when they knew there was a problem (who votes for raising taxes?) So that's it.
Who wants to listen to Leonardo DiCaprio, Al Gore, etc. as they jet from continent to continent, play on mega yachts, own 10,000 square foot homes-- then the listeners are supposed to live like monks?
No, that won't work. When they get real, concerned voices speaking-- people who put skin in the game-- then the idea might get traction.