MJ Alexander-Scott

Yes, our climate targets will fail because plans to meet them are mostly empty words. They are slightly slowing down the developments though, so still better than nothing. Of course we should keep on trying, and of course activists will keep on insisting the impossible is possible and then complain that no one is listening to them. The reason all this climate talk goes nowhere is that most climate activists misidentify the source of the problem. It's not a technological problem -- we have known how to avoid climate change since we've learned of it. The problem is that we have no system to convert this knowledge into collective action. The only global system that we have to aggregate information and coordinate actions to use resources are free market economies. And for those to work, we'd have had to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Which we did not. So for several decades now we have witnessed meetings and demonstrations and countless opinion pieces that amounted to very little. It is not hard to predict what is going to happen from here on because the default mode of humans is simply to keep on doing what they've been doing. This is why Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Dioxide Removal (eg BECCS) will become increasingly widespread -- because they'll allow nations too keep on doing what they're doing. I see in my mentions that some people insist I must be dumb for not understanding that CCS and CDR are costly, ineffective, and unlikely to scale. Well, yes, I am so dumb that I said this in a video two years ago. I am not saying it's a good solution. I'm simply saying it's how it will go because it's the closest we can manage to a market for carbon. And fossil fuel companies know this full well. And since that is very unlikely to keep global warming below 3 degrees, we'll end up doing stratospheric aerosol injections. Again, a stupid thing to do. I'm not saying we should do it. I am merely saying this is what I think will happen. Why? Because it's cheap and we know how to do it and the more we think about it, the more appealing it will look. If you want to know what I think we should do, well, I've said this before. Expand solar, wind and most importantly nuclear, CCS on fossil fuel plants, upgrade the electric grids, and stop wasting money on nonsense, like for example those COP meetings... xitter.cf/erikengheim/status/173…