With evidence mounting on the failure to limit global warming to 1.5C, do you think global carbon emissions will be low enough by 2050 to at least avoid the most catastrophic climate change doomsday scenarios forecast by the turn of the century?
I am somewhat hopeful most developed countries will get there but I wonder if developing countries will have the ability and inclination to buy into it as well.
If capitalism is still the dominant economic system and wealth inequality is even higher then it is now, then there is no chance at all of meeting climate goals, there never was.
Actual government intervention is starting to show up, and technology has worked in our favour. Maybe we’ll do it. The biggest question is geopolitics, I think.
Of course, we might have hit a tipping point already, so net zero by 2050 will still lead to a very different Earth.
Fucked.
We’ve already experienced the hottest three weeks in recorded history. It does not get better from here.
Like today, but worse. We’ll have five-sigma events occurring once a week, but we’ll still insist on calling them “five-sigma” instead of “new normal”, and the denialists will still be denying that it’s any different than it’s ever been, and utopianists will still be screeching about how the technology that will save us is just “a few years” away, and lots of people will die of prosiac, totally preventable things like famines and droughts while the super-rich will have retreated to the bunkers they started building back in 2012 exactly for this scenario.
At this moment? I’d say we should make peace with the fact that there aren’t too many generations of humans ahead of us.
At one point or the other, we will have to accept the fact that saving humanity is not within our power - but wreaking vengeance on the elites that caused it is.
