jawagord wrote:Taxing carbon and giving the money back in rebates or building solar parks isn't protecting our cities from the natural disasters that will happen at some point and history has shown us they always do happen.
This elevates the whole conversation to a new level and we have an Adaptation thread and Degrowth thread for such discussions.
Your comment begs the questions of not only What will happen? But When? And Why? And most importantly What do we Do now Ollie?
What we do know is that the climate is changing in percetable ways caused by human activity, specifically release of green house gasses. We are effecting our habitat in other manners as well such as resource depletion (oil, water, etc.) and more factors. It’s a clear case of the Tradgedy of the Commons tuning its course.
What to do? First educating the public to the dangers and then proposing rational measures that fit the problem. I find very little positive in the GND, and much negative, it has made finding a solution much more difficult because it politicized the agenda. That’s gonna make education difficult
We need solutions that reach across the range of problems we are facing, it just climate change.
Ideas for the USA, elsewhere will have different solutions. In no particular order:
Set a max population, cease all immigration until we fall below that population.
Seek to reduce our energy use. We sent many billions aboard annually to buy oil. Stop, keep that money home to pay down the self.
Rationalize our transportation infrastructure to meet our current needs. No more expansion simply to grow undeveloped areas. Make mass transit less expensive or FEEE. It’s an underutilized public investment.
Don’t invest in fighting Mother Nature. Let New Orleans go. Ditto Miami. Stop all development of barrier islands. And quit spending untold billions trying to move people into and out of NYC. SLR will eventually make it untenable. Use our money to build sustainable elsewhere, not pouring it down an inundated subway line.
Cease trying to be the World’s Breadbasket. Not stop all export but why are we depleting our soils to feed places like Saudi Arabia, which has no hope of feeding itself. Obviously this would have to be stepped down over time. But we need to lower the stress on our souls, go towards sustainable agriculture, even if it costs more.
Build out nuclear energy. Figure out how to use the old nukes, make another try at meeting our treaty commitments with Russia. Build out wind and solar where it makes sense. Solar canopies over parking lots, doubles the usage out of a piece of otherwise worthless land. Parking lots scale with population.
Stop trying to export Democracy. Scale back the military. Mind our own business.
ALL new housing needs to be vastly more energy efficient.
Vastly improve our communications infrastructure so we cane make better use of video conferencing vs. flying to meetings.
And maybe even a carbon tax. And much more
To do any of these things we need a national awareness of the need to do them, the advantages of long term planning, understanding of the consequences. It’s not just about climate change, it’s about a whole array of interlocking problems. And many of the solutions are overlapping.