[GGG]

Originally Posted by Itse

The dumb thing about the incoming global climate crisis is that despite what many are saying, massively cutting down on emissions would not even be hard. No new technology is needed.

There's really only seven major things that need to get done.

- Shut down all coal mines. Build nuclear energy and renewables to replace them. All the necessary technology exists for this. Sure it's expensive, but way cheaper than dealing with climate change. Easily doable within a decade.

- End subsidies for meat and dairy production and fossil fuels. Transfer those same subsidies to low carbon footprint food production and renewable energy. Doable with a few years.

- Build tons of public transport and make it cheap and high quality. It makes for good cities anyway, and basically pays itself back when you don't have to spend the same money on new roads for new cars.

- Make fossil fuel cars things you can only buy with a special permit, explaining why you need it. Doable within a decade.

- Put in place consumer protection laws that require all household appliances to last at least 10 years, all clothes at least 2 years and all electronics at least 4 years. These are all technically trivial requirements to meet. Costs no public money. Would make most people happier, because most people don't like shopping for new things anyway.

- Make it illegal for companies to destroy unsold, unused products. No public costs. Some products would become more expensive, some would become way cheaper because there would be a lot of really cheap discounts as companies dump unsold products.

- Plant a lot of new trees. As far as fighting climate change goes, this is an extremely cheap method. If you JUST DO THIS, BUT A LOT, you could make a MASSIVE difference.

Notice that none of these are consumer level decisions. None of these require any new technology. Some would actually be obviously beneficial to consumers, and on a personal few people would need to make massive adjustments. All of this is doable within a decade.

A lot of people would have to change their diet for budget reasons, but spoken as someone who has cut down his meat use to maybe 1-2 a week, it's trivial, and this is speaking as a single parent who also has to feed a teenage athlete who is a fairly picky eater. It was about a two year process of slowly cutting down on meat, getting used to new products and coming up with some new go-to recipes, but it was never really a major chore. There already exists a ton of good high-protein choices that are perfectly fine for everyday cooking. It's just a, question of availability and price, both of which would be fixed with a change in where agricultural subsidies are sent.

Your ideas don’t hit 2030 targets and the developing world was impoverished for longer.

You also caused a massive recession with the banning of internal combustion engine cars without a substitute. The workers in cities revolted and overthrew the governments who promised to bring back cars.

Geo-Engineering needs to start now. Also the tree idea. Canada’s 2% of global emmissions means we could plant 2% of the 1.5 trillion trees required which is only 30 billion trees. So with tree planting coating between .3 - $1 Canada can completely offset its emissions for 1-3 billion per year for 10 years. It’s by far the cheapest solution.