I’m not trying to be a doomer here but the dominos have already started to fall and we are well and truly fucked. Even if the entire world’s economy was repurposed to carbon capture and stopping this we would still be fucked.
Indeed, and even if we somehow magically managed to stop that issue (which basically requires magic at this point), it wouldn’t stop countless others. Such as topsoil disappearing. Or the biosphere being destroyed fast. And climate change consequences are thus far only a very minor part of what’s killing the biosphere, too - ecosystems destruction, overfishing, or the use of pesticides everywhere, to name a few, are doing that on a planetary scale.
There can be no management of the consequences of climate change without massive degrowth of the global economy, right now. Almost the entire cars and air flight industries should be shut down immediately, among many others; large scale deployment of new agricultural approaches (for example massive decentralized permaculture approaches requiring a large amount of workforce) should be attempted; large scale development of public transport as well; a massive push to produce and consume only locally, too. All of this should’ve been done decades ago. We should still attempt it, but recognize that all this will accomplish at this point is attempt to soften the blow and avoid human extinction.
Of course none of this will happen; if we don’t die with a long whimper of darkness and suffering (including fascists governments appearing in many countries worldwide and genocides at the borders of various developed countries), we’ll probably manage to off ourselves instead through nuclear apocalypse. On that subject, an interesting talk is geopolitics in a hotter world by Gwynne Dyer (that’s a transcript, here if you want the video itself). He does a good job, for example, explaining the issue with the Indus Waters treaty and how the quickly melting glacier that feed the Indus are going to cause incredible tensions in that nuclear-armed region of the world. And that’s only there - similar likely points of tension exist all over the world due to decreasing resources.
Personally, I cope with psychedelics. That and the vague hope that after centuries of suffering in a wasteland earth a small amount of still surviving humans might manage to eventually get back up in a sustainable way and remember the lesson. That’s likely hopelessly optimistic though, given we’re still pumping CO2e gases into the atmosphere like mad year after year and we’re already gone over the threshold for many self reinforcing feedback effects.
I like to believe that, as unbelievably horrible as climate change and everything will get, it’ll end up forcing the world to adopt communism. I don’t think the systems of control that the capitalist class relies on will be enough to keep tens or hundreds of millions of imminently dying proles from open revolt. The imperial core countries that rely on imperialism to prop up their own economies seem like they’ll collapse pretty hard, and even the US military won’t be able to keep entire continents directly subjugated.
I dunno, I think the only countries that could remain stable will be the ones with the ability to coordinate large-scale central planning and manage catastrophic disasters (e.g., China).
Maybe communists should get into prepping.
I’d like to believe that too but I suspect when climate refugees start moving in the tens of millions, dwarfing any so-called “refugee crisis” we’ve seen in the past, things will sadly probably move in the other direction.
We should still care because the stuff that we need to do to try and avoid extinction/tragedy in the megadeaths range - such as the suggestions above - cannot and will not happen in the current capitalist system. And moreover, doing these things would wreck the current planetary economy, hence it would require massive wealth redistribution at the same time to avoid large swathes of misery and poverty.
Carbon capture could stop the worst of this if we go zero in the next decade. We’d still be in for a shitty 150 years or so.
Current international proposals to mitigate climate change now need to include BeCCS and carbon capture in general to pretend 2C or less is still achievable, but don’t let that convince you it’s a realistic proposal in any way. BeCCS at scale is largely non demonstrated, and most likely a pipe dream; a cop out to keep going and avoid doing what we actually should be doing: stopping emissions immediately, negative growth and consuming less, not differently.
Here is a short piece, for example, that explains why the largest carbon capture facility in the world does in fact shit-all for the climate: it does sequester CO2 but the only way it managed to do that efficiently enough is not by pulling it off of the air, of course, but instead off of natural gas being extracted to, you guess it, be burned as a fossil fuel. More generally, actually deploying true BeCCS plants at scale seems impossible - the scale of the infrastructure required boggles the mind, not to mention the energy required (which is itself currently mostly not clean and climate-damaging). And this all supposes tens of thousands of those plants would actually be built, without a profit motive, in a capitalist framework.
Finally, as I said in another comment, even assuming BeCCS could be deployed and that it would work (which again, is extremely unlikely), that does fuck-all for the ongoing biosphere destruction (species are disappearing right now much faster than during the worse mass extinction the Earth has ever seen, and mostly thus far not because of climate change) - making the idea that we’d only be in for 150 “shitty years” sadly optimistic.
I don’t think 2c is achievable. We’re gonna need everything to stop 4c.
As for the rest I agree. We’re fucked. But there’s “geologically scale ruined the biosphere but still somewhat functioning as a civ” fucked and “unlivable planet, no seasons, no crops, weather shuts down trade by making ports unviable, everyone dies” fucked
