It seems my pessimism on global warming was close to the mark. According to this

https://www.mail.com/int/scitech/new...-stage-hero1-9

While everyone is talking about CO2 reductions, they're digging up more fossil fuels and spending more on fossil fuel burning projects that clean energy ones.

@enorbet: Yes, so many libraries have been forever lost ... and, for what? The political reasons for their destruction are also "gone with the desert winds."

Me too, but I try the best on my part: reduce consumption to the max (my car logs under 2000km/yr now, mostly for food purchase).
To hell with the economy.
By the way on LTT forums, they just blocked a similar thread about Climate Change.

LTT??

Ulez

Big cities should follow this.

I hate abbreviations this week, because I don't know the ones you guys are using.

ULEZ = Ultra Low Emission Zone

What one man does for or to the global climate is insignificant. What a BILLION men do is VERY significant. What a 50 thousand men make those who regulate INDUSTRY do can be enough to override what a billion men could do. What billions of people AND regulation can do is save the world! Or destroy it, apparently.

I vote for the save.

Paris 2015 was aspirational. Politicians can do aspirational. Cop26 in Scotland is real. They can't do real.

It's difficult to see what can be done. There's money and jobs in mining and exporting fossil fuels, money, electricity and jobs in burning them. There's a massive requirement for fossil fuel in transport, where goods are made in the Far East and sold to the West.

In democracies, the first rule of politics is: "You've got to get elected before you can do (or make) anything." How many leaders are going to commit political suicide? Because the opposition will sweep to power with a promise to reverse their good intentions.

Not untrue, which is why you have to focus on industry and innovation. Several industries started moving to carbon neutral and non-fossil technology around 20 years ago, and accelerated recently. They do not like their bottom line being at the mercy of the fossil fuel market, and renewable energy is cheaper and (despite propaganda to the contrary) more reliable.

One factor that has gone the OTHER way is mass transport of goods internationally. Building long-reach supply chains has been a growing factor that has proven vulnerable to disruption and remarkably "dirty". If you had not noticed, both companies and governments figured this out and are workign on initiatives to shorten supply chains and localize production wherever possible. SOME are addressing initiatives to make transport more "clean", but that really needs more focus.

The point is that we CAN fix this, just not with politicians alone. Politicians need to SUPPORT this and that is where getting all of the people possible supporting it AND INFORMING THE POLITICIANS OF THAT SUPPORT is critical.

Political engines are driven by money, power, and population. (Some ethics or great causes.) For each politician you need to leverage you population to make it clear that if their priority is money or power they risk it by not supporting the priority of the population. It is very clear how this works in a true Democracy, but less clear that it DOES work (although not as neatly) everywhere else as well. If the will of the people can be suppressed, it is important to convince the politicians that it is to their advantage to take the lead on this and make it "their project" as if it was their idea in the first place. (FYI: this is also how you manage conservative bosses in employment situations.)

You can, if you care to watch, see these dynamics in politics and industry playing our on the world stage. The question is not does and will it work, but will it work FAST enough to save the world as we know it. That is not yet clear.

First rule of corporations is to make money for the stockholders. No incentive exists to make it otherwise.

Governmental regulation of corporations has proven necessary. Too late!

Politicians nowadays don't care, they just want campaign contributions.

Their inaction and the subterfuges of energy corportions to make themselves look "green" would be laughable were it not a life-threatening situation we are now facing.

My grandkids are screwed.

The market solves all problems eventually. The trouble is, it takes a long time to do it and we don't have that time.

Yes, companies are belatedly realising that far-flung supply chains make them vulnerable. Covid went a long way to proving that. We had a well-worked-out plan for a global pandemic that included ordering PPE in advance from various other countries and importing it when it was needed; of course when the pandemic struck, the governments of those countries commandeered all their PPE for their own use (as we would surely have done in their position!). I suspect that many nations will now make sure that they produce the most critical products themselves, and that will indirectly save on fuel.

Also energy companies will increasingly try to disinvest from coal and oil and move to greener energy sources, because wealth that can suddenly be made useless by government decree isn't real wealth. But, as TorC has pointed out, the immediate purpose of a company is to make money and it takes time for changes such as these to become sufficiently threatening to the bottom line to make it worthwhile to spend money on changing the business model.

Of interest in this debate is David Attenborough ‘s 2021 documentary “Breaking Boundaries - the science of our planet” which lays out different boundaries vis a vis global warming, pollution, deforestation, etc. We have overshot but then fixed one, the Ozone. Of the 9 it mentions, you get the scoresheet. You also get news on the tipping points. It’s in association with some Swedish Scientist whose area of expertise this stuff is. Compulsory viewing for all who have read this far

The bitter irony is that global warming through CO2 emissions was discovered in the 1970's. If the warning had been generally believed at that time, we would have needed only small adjustments to our course to avoid the present crisis. But of course people were only going to believe it when it produced effects too drastic to be explained away by anything else. And now, when it is doing precisely that, it is probably too late to stop the train.

Yep - they looked after the Ozone Layer in the 1980s. And they are not going to solve any problems now at COP26 either. My (very unreliable) prediction is that it's going to end in argument and acrimony. But then you and I have a more reliable prediction at Revelation 11:18.