Comment by Voultapher
12 hours ago
It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't. For many years I strongly believed in our cleverness, after all I was clever and in the narrow domain I worked in - tech - cleverness was enough to overcome most issues. So why not human climate change?
In Tom Murphy's words:
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
> It would be great if we could engineer our way out of this situation, but we can't.
I think it would be much more honest to say we don't know so we shouldn't bet everything on one approach.
Humans care about survival and will impact the world. It is exactly what all other animals do, and there is a dynamic equilibrium: too many predators => reduced prey => less predators. I don't think it's fair to think we humans are special. Or should we blame the algae for one of the previous mass extinctions?
I do think it is reasonable to take more care about the environment (co2, pollution, etc.) than we do because we need it in order to live well (not because I just want a nice Earth). I think most people agree with that, and are slowly adapting. Will see if fast enough.
Our viewpoints don't seem that far apart and thanks for the nuanced take. Personally I believe we know that technology can't fix this by definition because the problem is of social, cultural and economic nature. Our lifestyles are woefully incompatible with a 100k year horizon, even a 100 year horizon in many areas. Our perception of wealth depends on never ending growth, our welfare systems depend on never ending growth, our economies depend on never ending growth. It seems implausible to the point of impossibility that our economies can grow forever [1]. Technology is good at reaching goals e.g. going to the moon is unlikely without science and technology. But in this case the problem is the goal itself. Technology won't motivate us to let go of our conveniences.
[1] https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pd...