This is such a loaded topic, but here's a few points:
- I wonder if you can place bets against this happening. If you truly believe that civlization will collapse by 2030, then money will be of no use to you in 2030. However, if you're skeptical, you could come away with some decent winnings.
- If this is a real concern, e.g. water levels rising, destruction of housing, etc. you'd think "fat cat" insurance companies and banks would be hedging their bets. i.e. mortgage/insurance on the coastal cities (i.e. most of them) would be getting very expensive.
- The massive growth of global green house emissions in the future will not come from already modernised nations (e.g. US, EU, ANZ, etc) it will come from the 3B people in China, India, and Africa that raise themselves out of poverty by industrialising -- more electricity, more cars, more meat. Are you going to try and impose "green" requirements on these places? It seems hypocritical for the first-world nations to impose green solutions onto the 3rd world, when they're already in very comfortable positions.
- It might look like rolling out "green tech" is the answer, but what happens when you stifle the growth of the poorest parts of the world (e.g. Africa, India, Asia) by removing access to cheap and reliable fuel source (i.e. petrol/diesel), that already has a widely deployed supply chain? Are we sure that global warming is worse than 3B people living worse off for another 30 years?
> you'd think insurance companies and banks would be hedging their bets
At least here in Australia, most insurance companies include a clause that excludes sea level rises in insurance coverage [1]
> Are you going to try and impose "green" requirements on these places?
Definitely true it's hard to enforce green policy from outside, but the very very least a country can do is lead by example. The alternative is that everybody sits on their hands because nobody else is doing a thing.
It's like humanity is sitting in a rowboat that's heading for the top of a waterfall, and nobody in the boat tries to row to safety because nobody else is rowing.
I was 15 in 1980 and I'm therefore old enough to remember the existential dread of nuclear destruction that was present during the Cold War - I'm in the UK, which would have been one of the hardest hit countries in any conflict.
What do I remember about that time? That most people completely ignored it - we escaped the effects of a global nuclear war through luck and sensible judgement by a large number of people on both sides who generally chose not to do something.
Unfortunately, choosing to do something is much harder (exhibit A: the UK's Brexit debacle) - so I'm genuinely worried about the potential for us to actually decide on what to do even if we all agree that something should be done.
It's worse even than that. We have to choose to stop doing things we are already doing, on a massive scale, from which we derive enormous benefits. That's really tough, it's like getting a junkie off the hard stuff in the middle of a really bad bender. Except the benefits we get from abusing oil and coal and plastics aren't illusory, they provide livelihoods to huge swathes of the world's population.
This is where Thunberg's analysis comes short. The benefits from abusing resources don't just go to a tiny few. They go to all of us. We travel around in fossil fueled vehicles, the food and goods we consume travel and are farmed the same way, we fly on holiday in fossil fueled jets, we use cheap electricity from non-renewable sources. Rapidly switching away from these will carry enormous costs, just look at the energy market in Germany that's essentially being bailed out by French Nuclear power, and really wasn't even possible decades ago.
If it really was just a small minority getting all the benefits, fixing this would be politically easy. We do need to act yes, it's a real problem with dire consequences, but it's not a simple issue.
Mods: Please change the title to the article’s original title. Nowhere in the article is there a claim that civilization will end by 2030, so the current title is both wrong and click-baity.
Let's not be overly generous here with the term economy. The actual term is money. All of society is built on the foundation of money. A dream of money. A purpose of money. Money, money, money.
And yes, people are extremely afraid to let go of this. People are afraid to find out what life would be like without money. People would rather give their "money" to the government and pretend that human life is meant to be lived through such a sociopathic system.
If life on Earth in its current state was a program, then it surely would be one nasty virus. That's all it is. A spell, a program, call it to want you want -- but it is not the way of a human.
People say suffering in life is essential. The only suffering in life is because of circumstance. And the circumstance is created by money. But this is not what you want to hear, is it?
- I wonder if you can place bets against this happening. If you truly believe that civlization will collapse by 2030, then money will be of no use to you in 2030. However, if you're skeptical, you could come away with some decent winnings.
- If this is a real concern, e.g. water levels rising, destruction of housing, etc. you'd think "fat cat" insurance companies and banks would be hedging their bets. i.e. mortgage/insurance on the coastal cities (i.e. most of them) would be getting very expensive.
- The massive growth of global green house emissions in the future will not come from already modernised nations (e.g. US, EU, ANZ, etc) it will come from the 3B people in China, India, and Africa that raise themselves out of poverty by industrialising -- more electricity, more cars, more meat. Are you going to try and impose "green" requirements on these places? It seems hypocritical for the first-world nations to impose green solutions onto the 3rd world, when they're already in very comfortable positions.
- It might look like rolling out "green tech" is the answer, but what happens when you stifle the growth of the poorest parts of the world (e.g. Africa, India, Asia) by removing access to cheap and reliable fuel source (i.e. petrol/diesel), that already has a widely deployed supply chain? Are we sure that global warming is worse than 3B people living worse off for another 30 years?