bubobubosibericus:

bubobubosibericus:

kontextmaschine:

Liiiiike, I was around for early ‘90s environmentalism and the general takeaway was that acid rain would melt our buildings and the hole in the ozone layer would burn us alive and factory ship fishing would kill all the whales and dolphins unless we capped global human population at 3b MAX and undid the Green and maybe Industrial revolutions

So what I’m saying is, in retrospect “ah, fuck it, give it time and it’ll sort itself out through technological improvements on the margins” was not at all an unreasonable response to “environmentalists got really het up about this in ‘88″

Uuh. You do realise that the entire reason for that was a quick government response in both cases? Several species of whales have already gone extinct and many others are still thetering on the brink of total annihilation.

Climate change is a slow process that needs a quick response now, or we’ll be joining the whales. I don’t know if you realize it, but we’re on schedule for ending up halfway between the second worst greenhouse scenario and the worst one, and the longer we wait, the harder it becomes to fix, because unlike acid rain, CO² doesn’t leave the atmosphere on a hundreds- or even thousands of years timescale.

@kontextmaschine and what annoys me about this, is that you could have known that what you are saying is bullshit, had you bothered to actually read the article. Which in turn (the irony) is exactly what the article complains about. I paraphrase: “A prediction that did not come true, however, was that politicians would listen to the scientists, and take action.”

You’re being churlish. The “government response” wasn’t that quick and was mostly the “technological improvements on the margins” I mentioned. CFCs were phased out on a slow and pragmatic schedule that continues to this day. Smokestack scrubbers were installed on plants as they were upgraded/relicensed, as the technology became economically feasible, over a course of decades. Tuna was branded “dolphin-safe” for voluntary consumer appeal once it didn’t appreciably increase prices. Whaling was cranked back largely through unilateral US influence yes, but was balanced against/exploited w/r/t concerns like the US-Japan balance of trade in automobiles.

The things the US did in the name of global warming - voluntary options to purchase renewable energy (or carbon offsets! remember carbon offsets?); marginal improvements to auto emissions and power plants, dirty/brown coal->”clean” coal->natural gas, all sensitive to industrial expenses and competitiveness - are perfectly in line.

Now maybe in this case it’s not enough, but point stands, a big part of the answer to “we heard about this in ’88, how have we done so little” is “we have done basically as much as successfully resolved the equally apocalyptic-looking environmental issues of ’87”