Climate change is well understood but what to do and how hard it is is not.

#4098

Climate change is creating the conditions where we are all learning a lot about physics, about energy and flows. But the result is most discussions about climate change are still trying to get the physics, right, mostly around energy, but the discussion of what to do is focusing increasingly on the spending of money on technologies and the distribution of their products. What we are not getting is a better discussion of what to do. Conclusions can be drawn. Most importantly there seems to be no plans on how to actually step-by-step cut the use of fossil fuels And the production of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Look around you and see if you can see any object whose is existence did not depend upon heat for manufacturing and transportation. The plant in the corner of the living room survives because the air is warm, heated by gas or coal, and if you think it’s just heated by electricity, what is the source of that electricity?

Kevin

iven such facts, what would you cut? Who would have the authority to do it? Does it scale to the hundred million plus barrels of oil we, the world, use each day?

If we are realistic, and most people I think quietly are, we face a pretty unusual situation. always in the past, the collapse of empires did not mean the collapse of human prospects. It was understood that after the collapse a recognizable degree of normality would emerge from the chaos. No longer can we honestly have that assumption, mostly because the CO2 in the atmosphere that is heating the world remains in place or is amplified. and the ability to produce sequestering technologies will also be a victim of collapse as the cost of energy rises and workers do not show up.

The novelist and poets need to give us language to understand this. Because of the rapid pace of events, I think the poets have a better chance because they can more rapidly adapt to new understanding, whereas the novelist is trapped in a project that takes months or years. Think of T.S. Eliot’s This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. Even bad poetry is highly evocative and reveals the compassionate soul of the writer. Try it. See how good a bad poem is.