Comment by everdrive

>But don't worry, USA is solving the problem by Biden banning cheap electric cars and Trump ending electric subsidies entirely, forcing coal plants to restart

People really think if they just buy the right products we'll solve this problem. People are really fundamentally unable to solve global warming issues. There are a few fundamental problems:

- Broad, collective action is not possible in just any direction. People can broadly get behind causes that are related to some fundamental human motivation, but generally cannot be guided towards nuanced political topics except via general tribalism and coalitions. (eg: you can go to the moon, but there's only broad support for this in the sense that it has consequences for national pride. You didn't have a whole nation helping the the logistics; you just had broad coalitional support.)

- People think that merely buying the right product will help, but major impacts to climate would require a serious modification in quality of life and material wealth. This will never have broad support. People will always scrape out the most comfort and most material wealth that is possible, and will only allow themselves to be constrained by hard limits. Technology can help here to a degree, but once technology helps, people just advance to the next hard limit. For instance the use of insecticides, industrial fertilizer, and large-scale factory farming just allowed for more population boom. Rather than arriving at a place where where had near infinite abundance, we just ate up the gains with expanded population and luxury products. (sort of how computers don't get faster; once the computer is made faster, the software does more and the actual UI responsiveness just stays in the same place.)

- People would need to intentionally decrease population and find healthy limits with the environment. No living thing does this. If you watch population curves in predators and prey, they occur because the hard limits force starvation and population decline. (ie, if the wolves eat too many deer, then the wolf pups starve, the wolf population declines, and then the deer can rebound.) In other words, nature is not "wise and balanced" but instead the balance is a mere fact of competition and death. The moment we produce an abundance, we use up that abundance. This may not be true in the case of some individuals, but broadly this is true for any population.

- No political body, even an authoritarian regime could force these things. People would revolt. Authoritarians themselves often get into power by promising abundance they can never actually deliver on. No authoritarian has gained power by promising to reduce abundance and material wealth.