The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.
Since a few years, the tables have turned and solar seems to be marching towards absolute dominance.
So there isn’t much to do in terms of political climate action, since the incentives are now mostly economical.
I agree though, the extend to how people are happy to just roll over and accept that the world will go down with them is surprising.
this has not been true since 1951
2) Agents in the current system have incentives to prioritize short term benefits over longer term benefits. And a lot of climate related things are short term cost/investment for "profitable" long term benefits ; the current system sucks big time in this configuration.
3) The people having the least negative impact from climate change are the countries emitting the most greenhouse gas. The countries the more negatively impacted by climate change are countries contributing the least to climate change. There is a big misalignment of interest there making a purely "free market" "economical" solution difficult.
4) There are a lot of case in the real world were there is a strong economical incentive to switch to something different and were the different agents just don't... Because people don't want to change, because there can be some particular interest in the system, because of political motive... Human is not a rational animal, and his rationality is not only dictated by money
5) We need to do more than just switching from fossil to "green electricity"
> The thing that always stood between the world and climate action was the fact that fossil fuels were the best energy source.
> Since a few years, the tables have turned and solar seems to be marching towards absolute dominance.
> So there isn’t much to do in terms of political climate action, since the incentives are now mostly economical.
If we could put climate change on hold for 50 years we would probably be in pretty good shape, because in 50 years we will probably have enough renewable energy that we can just decide to stop burning (most) oil.
But in the real world, in 2024 we haven't actually reduced emissions at all yet, and the possibility of cutting down emissions in 50 years isn't enough.
It's true that in that sense we aren't that far from a scenario that "isn't so terrible" but that seems more like an ironic fact than something that should be comforting.
Because of the way climate change works, the future possibility of reducing emissions simply isn't enough if we aren't actually currently reducing emissions when we would really need to be at approximately zero right now to fix the problem.