Comment by Loquebantur
16 hours ago
There is no dichotomy between preparing for the inevitable and preventing the preventable.
Painting the actions of people on the other side of the planet as "out of anybody's control" is hubris though. Humanity very well is capable of organizing on that scale and has done so regularly for a long time already.
The actual problem is the disconnect between the interests of those in charge of such organization and the well-being of the public.
Villages all over the world since ancient times would have houses with some form of a summer kitchen. During hot days the temps in the house are already uncomfortable and cooking there would make things worse, so they built basic kitchen facilities away from the main house to keep heat and smoke and smells out (that also reduced some fire risks).
Many western countries now summer-kitchen most of their uncomfortable output to corrupt poorer countries where the leadership doesn’t mind taking cash for poisoning their citizens. The naïveté is then claiming that those poorer countries are then the main polluters. Recyclables in the US and a lot of Europe are shipped off to southeast asia thus 80% of plastics in the ocean are found there. A train of plastic to be burned was even shipped to Bulgaria (a EU member) by the mafia a few years ago.
In the mean time “carbon credit” companies have their offices in Hong Kong and are guilting Disney and Adidas and Apple and any Western public brands into paying for “carbon laundering”. Forests that would have been planted anyway for lumber collect carbon credits as extra income right before selling said lumber for consumption. It takes real faith to keep believing any of the activity actually removes carbon legitimately, but the money movement in that movement is very real.
While anyone can target the source of the warming with any resource they want to dedicate, and should be free to do so. Governments need to focus on mitigating the risks to human life and that involves real fire prevention (trimming, controlled burns - maybe smart tech the smoke so it gets captured instead of irritating the noses of non-summer-kitchen citizens), clean energy generation, and installing damn air conditioning units into old European capitals so Europeans don’t end up dying in droves from preventable basic climate change consequences.