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+--- Thread: Sometimes, do nothing might be the best option. (/showthread.php?tid=4087)
Sometimes, do nothing might be the best option. - Dartz - 06-05-2017
When I realised nothing would truly be achieved to stop it, I stopped caring. You might try on an individual level, but ultimately, it'll all damp-squib out. The world doesn't really want to do anythin - just offer platitudes and hollow promises and accords.
Maybe that's the best option.
Don't mean just keep burning the shit out of coal and oil until the planet cooks. It'll all run out, eventually. Alternative sources of energy are a Good Thing in an of themselves, without worrying about Carbon, simply because oil prices are so volatile. It's far better to make a commercial argument, than an environmental one - especially to those with their eyes on short term profits to keep shareholders happy. Really, it seems like the best way to succeed is to assume disaster will be allowed to happen by those who can stop it, and figure out how to deal with the aftermath.
What's a hotter world going to be like? Maybe we'd be better off focusing our energies on dealing with that, rather than trying to stop the train we've just accelerated. Everyone agrees stopping it's a good idea, but nobody really wants to pull on the brakes until it's long past the time the train can ever be stopped. That's human nature. Are we past that tippin point.... probably not, but close enough to it that we might as well be. Meanwhile, alternative energies are still coming on stream, so we're already slowing the train down just as a natural byproduct of this, so we're not barrelling headon into thing and coming to a crashing halt.
The world's going to be warmer. It has been in the past. Right, lets figure out how to deal with that. Let's fight the next war and win that, rather than the one we've always lost.
If that sounds pessimistic. It's not. There'll be a lot of challenges caused by a warming world. But potentially, new opportunities aswell for those who know where to look for them.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
- Labster - 06-06-2017
Quote:Don't mean just keep burning the shit out of coal and oil until the planet cooks. It'll all run out, eventually.Ugh well we have hundreds of years worth of coal reserves. There's really a lot of it. We basically have the ability to make the planet mostly uninhabitable if we keep burning that stuff. There's also more esoteric concerns like "don't use all of the easy fuels, because what if we need to bootstrap a civilization again?" or "what if we need coal-powered giant robots to fight magical monsters?"
It's not really clear where the tipping points are, which is part of the problem of modeling. It's a planet-sized nonlinear system after all. Some things are obviously thermodynamically irreversible, like phase changes -- in this case things like ice melt, methane clathrate evaporation, permafrost thawing causing gas release, etc. But we are are already committed to a warmer world. At least 1°C rise will happen by 2100, if we stopped burning all fossil fuels today. So yes, we need to deal with the fallout. And lots of people already have been doing this, starting with the engineers and insurance industry.
But at the same time it's probably worth it to prevent the world from turning into a Dark Sun campaign. (Although I have to say things are looking more and more Shadowrun every day.) Preventing consequences gets much harder if you keep causing more of them; both sides of the problem have to be dealt with.
Your post sounds like you're in the bargaining stage of grief, which I believe comes before the "Brooklyn rage" from sea level rise.
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