Comment by jfengel
5 days ago
Solving climate change isn't a technical problem, but a human one. We know the steps we have to take, and have for many years. The hard part is getting people to actually do them.
No human has any idea how to accomplish that. If a machine could, we would all have much to learn from it.
I disagree with this assessment. We don’t know the steps we have to take. We know a set of steps we could take but they’re societally unpalatable. Technology can potentially offer alternative steps or introduce societal changes that make the first set of steps more palatable.
I feel I should clarify as clearly this is an unpopular opinion: I’m not saying climate change can be solved by technology alone, but I do believe that enabling the societal changes needed to deal with climate change requires using every tool we have at our disposal and that includes technology. I don’t really see why this is controversial and would love to hear that perspective.
My perspective is that no technology can do much while the social problem is so intractable.
If somehow we could get past the social problem, technology will happen. Probably quickly, once we had some agreement that it was a thing worth doing. But until then the technology is largely moot.