\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLiiiiike, I was around for early \u201890s 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
\nSo what I\u2019m saying is, in retrospect \u201cah, fuck it, give it time and it\u2019ll sort itself out through technological improvements on the margins\u201d was not at all an unreasonable response to \u201cenvironmentalists got really het up about this in \u201888\u2033
\nUuh. 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.
\nClimate change is a slow process that needs a quick response now, or we\u2019ll be joining the whales. I don\u2019t know if you realize it, but we\u2019re 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, CO\u00b2 doesn\u2019t leave the atmosphere on a hundreds- or even thousands of years timescale.
\n@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: \u201cA prediction that did not come true, however, was that politicians would listen to the scientists, and take action.\u201d
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You\u2019re being churlish. The \u201cgovernment response\u201d wasn\u2019t that quick and was mostly the \u201ctechnological improvements on the margins\u201d 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 \u201cdolphin-safe\u201d for voluntary consumer appeal once it didn\u2019t 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->\u201dclean\u201d coal->natural gas, all sensitive to industrial expenses and competitiveness - are perfectly in line.
Now maybe in this case it\u2019s not enough, but point stands, a big part of the answer to \u201cwe heard about this in \u201988, how have we done so little\u201d is \u201cwe have done basically as much as successfully resolved the equally apocalyptic-looking environmental issues of \u201987\u201d
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