I think Biden will rejoin the Paris Agreement and maybe put back some Obama-era regulations? Otherwise, no I don’t think anything will happen in the US. Maybe Harvard will put a toe in the geo-engineering waters…
Otherwise I think it’s like the “gun-violence in america” thread, a thing for us to document from afar… but then again, that’s kind of true of every Political thread. We’re just shooting the shit here, not saving the world.
Probably the best AO irony is when we all nerd out over our favorite make-believe health care systems, while at the same exact time our own employers throw money at congress shouting the exact opposite message.
I want Medicare Advantage for all. Obviously it would benefit my employer (and me) tremendously. I also donate to our PAC out of my paycheck every week because my interests aline with my employer and I want them to be funded. Full disclosure from my point of view.
As far as I can tell, the Paris Agreement just means making an volunteer promise to reduce emissions by some amount, and then vaguely wagging your finger at countries that fail, and really every country is failing.
Is there a better solution? For example, should we just “bomb the shit” out of polluters?
Sweden just turned down Harvard’s latest attempt at a solar engineering experiment. So another year wasted. This has been pushed back about a decade now.
(Solar Engineering is a quick fix to global warming. You intentionally dump a bunch crap in the sky to block out the sun. It’s cheap, fast, temporary, and sort of natural.)
I’m disgusted. This is a vital tool that we are throwing away because of politics. On one side, you have conservatives who are just in complete fucking denial. And on the other side you’ve got environmentalists who are too idealistic. They argue that it doesn’t address ocean acidification, that it’s playing God, that it’s a moral hazard, yada yada yada… But honestly it’s a good idea, that we should look into no matter what. It would be a good idea, even if we did magically reduce emissions tomorrow, which we won’t.
And frankly there’s a decent chance, 20 years from now, that some less cautious entity like China or Elon Musk will do some geoengineering unilaterally, without knowing the consequences that these experiments would uncover.
Well, they’ll hit the Arctic Ocean and they’ll stop creeping northward.
Wonder if this is happening in Russia and Canada and Alaska. Not sure if there are reindeer herders in those areas that are running short of space like these folks in Norway are.
