Feeling the Heat

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released it's most recent reports.. Cue calls for action from people the world over who are concerned about the impacts on Earth's climate, and, in theory, its capacity to support human life. It's pretty much a given that there's no chance of humanity managing to avoid at least 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Even 2 degrees is looking pretty dicey at this point. And there's nothing surprising about this. I recall learning about the Greenhouse Effect in the 1980s. (Popular Mechanics noted the Greenhouse Effect, and the fact that burning coal contributed to it, in 1912.) As Bill Maher pointed out, our generation has pretty much done nothing to address the problem. People have had other priorities.

And this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Because as Bill Maher also pointed out, the younger generation has much bigger idols than climate activists. The people they want to emulate, and the lives they want to lead are at odds with working to preserve the temperature status quo, just as it was when I was a young person. Hectoring messages from climate hawks are not going to change this. Finding a way to align incentives might. And this, to my way of thinking, is really the only way that humanity doesn't find itself attempting to bail its way out of the boat that it managed to drill a hole in the bottom of. The message of "pay for climate stabilization now, or pay to remediate the effects later" may be spot on, but it doesn't make the costs any more palatable, or reduce the feelings of poverty that make people so reluctant to pay anything.

Unless climate activism finds a way to make paying for a transition away from cheap, but damaging, fossil fuels seem like a clear benefit, rather than a burdensome tax, their message will continue to fall on deaf ears.