Interesting response but I find your other posts on the matter even more insightful.
She's just a kid saying solve the damn problem like the adults we claim to be. It's up to us to find a way to make that happen through legislation, executive actions, international treaties, etc. Greta wasn't hired to solve the world's problems but the people who were refuse to act so there's not much left to do but call them out.
So climate change is a bogus partisan myth that has somehow conned 97% of the world's scientists for decades but can simply be ignored because the cult of inertia says so? What a mature perspective you bring to the table.
The one and only solution you'll accept is more nuclear power yet you feel entitled to tell the rest of us we're not mature enough to discuss it like adults. Sounds like you're part of the problem to me.
No, my measuring stick for when environmental groups really believe fossil fuels are destroying the planet is when they accept the lesser evil of nuclear power. Don’t straw man me, please
And don’t straw man what I say about climate change. I’ve read the actual IPCC reports. I believe CO2 is increasing because of fossil fuel use, and I understand that each increase in solar radiation retention creates a new equilibrium temperature for the earth, everything else remaining equal. And I know what predictions carry low, medium and high confidence assessments. I also follow both global temperature and sea level predictions and compare them with actual temperatures (raw and adjusted) and tide gauges.
My challenge to you is to read the actual IPCC reports. Not the summaries, not the news reports on what could happen, and not the speeches of politicians. Read the summation of the actual science. What have the actual predictions been, not the outlier possibilities? And how have actual results matched those predictions? Is it fewer hurricanes but stronger hurricanes?How much stronger? More rain or less rain where you live? How much more or less?
Then do some actual math. Figure out how many solar panels or windmills we will need to provide all electrical needs, not just at capacity, but every single minute of every hour, day, month and year. Add batteries or other storage methods if you like, but no fair just waving your wand and saying, “there’s lots of ideas, so one of them will work.”
The reason politicians make promises and don’t follow through is that promises are easy and only have to have a loose relationship with truth. But if a politician tears down a system that, whatever its flaws, keeps the vast majority of us from freezing to death and has provided us with a steady though uneven increase in our standard of living, and leaves us with something that doesn’t work, or is so expensive that half of us can’t afford it, it is curtains for that politician, and it won’t help to whine about what the electorate said to do. That’s why the politicians don’t do it.
The path to a zero carbon future involves excruciating sacrifices. That’s why Germany is building coal fired plants to replace the nuclear plants it shuttered, Japan has dropped its plans to close all nuclear plants, California is setting up diesel generators as its Plan B, the Netherlands are burning wood to generate electricity (pretending it doesn’t produce CO2), while also raising their dikes by two meters, and utilities are going bankrupt in the UK.
The current plan seems to be to make all energy needs run through the electrical grid and generate all electricity with windmills and solar panels. My prediction is that we will accomplish that shortly before first contact with Vulcan and the creation of the United Federation of Planets. Some of my kids think it will happen, but they’re the ones who flunked math.
I’ll accept a solution other than nuclear power when someone actually shows how it works. And no fair pointing out that Iceland did it with geothermal or Norway with hydro. Those are geological oddities that can’t be scaled.
