Parent as I read it isn't suggesting that having your cake and eating it too is possible, instead they're attempting to establish a dual-scale demarcation of viewpoints with one scale being "Prohibition or allowance of fossil fuels" and the other scale being "Fixes or does not fix climate change".
This is useful because polling has discovered many US Republicans will actually vote for climate solutions _if_ they employ new technologies that would result in new industries.
I suspect that unfortunately there is a mismatch between hypothetical polling and reality given the current outright hostility to solar and wind in spite of them contribuiting jobs and income in their regions. Farmers are renting land for turbines using fallow fields for solar panels and are facing bizzare objections when there are fewer externalities than the existing options.
The people voting against environmental reforms are doing it because they don't want to reduce their quality of life.
And since nothing comes close to the cost to energy density ratio of fossil fuels, there is no solution other than reducing energy usage and reducing quality of life. And so without convincing people they should reduce their quality of life for the benefit of future generations, nothing is going to happen.
>The ones who think it would reduce their quality of life are just being ignorant. They don't understand the possibilities.
I'm not willing to give people that benefit of the doubt. Deep down, people are loss averse, and will tell themselves whatever about the second coming or make up conspiracies to do it. The real cause is people don't want to give up single family homes with garages and SUVs on quarter+ acre lots. People don't want to give up annual vacations to tropical destinations.
> The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed.
It's not evenly distributed because the costs aren't felt evenly. Fossil fuels are portable, they start on demand in a variety of weather or time of day, and they have all the infrastructure already setup to use them. They're good at what they do. But until the environmental costs aren't incorporated into the financial costs of fossil fuels, I don't see what would motivate people to move away from them.
I think we'll still have the luxuries we have today. Fossil fuel burning will not completely end, but we'll get to our vacation destinations another way. Electric airplanes are coming, for example. Not soon, but eventually.
Single family homes with quarter+ acre lots are great places for solar installations, btw.
It’s very, very, very unlikely that we’ll find a magic bullet solution at this stage. Removing co2 from the atmosphere requires some external energy source, for one thing.
