Climate Change(d)?

[lpetrich]

400+ Actions to End Fossil Fuels Planned Around the World for Sept. 15-17
noting
Global Fight to End Fossil Fuels – September 2023
with
A map of planned events

Lots of activism over much of the world, with some "activism deserts", with China the biggest of them. Russia had one planned event, and Ukraine two.

From the article,

The protests are scheduled just before the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit, taking place on September 20 in New York, where groups including the NAACP, Sierra Club, and Sunrise Movement are supporting the March to End Fossil Fuels on September 17.

More than 10,000 people are expected to march in New York to demand that U.S. President Joe Biden end federal approvals for new fossil fuel projects like the Willow drilling project in Alaska and phase out oil and gas drilling in federal lands and waters; declare a climate emergency to unlock resources to accelerate the transition to renewable energy; and provide a just transition that creates millions of green jobs while supporting people who have worked in the fossil fuel industry.

 

[lpetrich]

Tens of thousands in NYC march against fossil fuels as AOC hails powerful message | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the crowd must become ‘too big and too radical to ignore’ as Biden came under fire for oil projects"

...
To cheers from the crowd, the progressive Democrat criticized the US continuing to approve fossil fuel projects, something which the Biden administration did earlier this year with the controversial Willow project in Alaska.

“We are all here for one reason: to end fossil fuels around the planet,” Ocasio-Cortez told a rally at the finish of the march, which ended close to the UN headquarters where world leaders will gather this week. “And the way we create urgency is to have people around the world in the streets.”

She said: “The United States continues to be approving a record number of fossil fuel leases and we must send a message, right here today,” adding that despite record profits the support for the fossil fuel industry was “starting to buckle and crack.”
Climate action requires a democratic restructuring of the economy, she said. “What we’re not gonna do is go from oil barons to solar barons.”

Organizers estimated that between 50,000 and 75,000 people attended the march in Manhattan and had anticipated it would be the biggest climate march in the US in the past five years.

The Big Climate March Returns in an Era of Soup-Throwing Protests - Bloomberg - "New York’s March to End Fossil Fuels is the first large-scale US climate protest in several years. More confrontational tactics have since come to the fore, but marches still serve an important purpose."

 

[Swammerdami]

Mankind gets a lot of its energy from fossil fuels. This post may expose my own lack of awareness, but . . .
Is there an activist plan detailing the quantities of carbon energy that will be replaced with conservation, nuclear, wind, solar, etc.?

Or -- and this may be the wisest course -- is the plan just to reduce carbon use and let market forces and creativity fill in the gap?

 

[bilby]

Mankind gets a lot of its energy from fossil fuels. This post may expose my own lack of awareness, but . . .
Is there an activist plan detailing the quantities of carbon energy that will be replaced with conservation, nuclear, wind, solar, etc.?

Or -- and this may be the wisest course -- is the plan just to reduce carbon use and let market forces and creativity fill in the gap?

If we are to apply the latter approach effectively, we need to treat all low carbon energy sources equally, and not heavily subsidise some, whilst obstructing others.

Letting the market decide will probably work, but not if the market has to decide between being handed sacks of cash to build windmills, while anyone who wants to build a nuclear power plant is required to spend vast sums on unnecessary regulations whose only raison de être is to make it difficult for such plants to get built.

The widespread practice of setting minimum wholesale prices for wind and solar power projects, so that these technologies are shielded from the low (often negative) value of the electricity they produce, has to end.

If the market is to decide, every MWh of electricity generated at a given moment should be bought at the same price, regardless of what method was used to produce it.

Source agnostic pricing, coupled with a tax on fossil fuels (ideally equivalent to the cost of removing the carbon dioxide they will produce from the atmosphere, and spent on doing just that), could work well.

Good luck getting any regulator or government to make this happen though.

 

[lpetrich]

Special UN summit, protests, week of talk turn up heat on fossil fuels and global warming | AP News

As a record-smashing and deadly hot summer draws to a close, the United Nations and the city that hosts it are focusing on climate change and the burning of coal, oil and natural gas that causes it. It features a special U.N. summit and a week of protests and talk-heavy events involving leaders from business, health, politics and the arts. Even a royal prince — William — is getting in on the action.

Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters | The New Republic - "For decades, the Atlas Network has used its reach and influence to spread conservative philosophy—and criminalize climate protest."

As in Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged"?

Earlier this year, news footage began making the rounds on social media of young activists from the German climate organization Letzte Generation (Last Generation) being assaulted as they obstructed streets in an effort to draw attention to the German government’s inaction on climate. A young woman, with her hand glued to the asphalt, was ripped off the road by her hair; a young man was run over by a truck driver; a passerby punched protesters and was cheered on. A few months later, German police raided the homes of Last Generation activists and froze their bank accounts.

It all seemed like a gross overreaction to a pretty tame form of protest. Blockading roads is not a new tactic: Suffragettes, civil rights activists, and anti-war activists have all blocked roads in past decades. Last year, Dutch and German farmers blocked roads with their tractors to protest a renewable energy policy that they said doesn’t provide enough incentives for biogas. Not a single farmer was punched in the face. What was making everyone so irate about Last Generation?

It’s a lot easier to justify ripping an activist off the road by their hair, or punching them, when a prominent politician is comparing them to violent terrorists and a major media outlet is repeating that frame.

Then discussing Frank Schäffler of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), a politician known for right-wing positions, like calling himself a "climate skeptic". He's a big objector to a national green building policy that would shift new construction away from natural gas. He uses the same arguments that US natural-gas defenders use.

FS called Last Generation terrorists and a "criminal organization", and his description was soon echoed by many others.

... German police conducted nationwide raids on Last Generation activists; police said the group was “a criminal organization that was fundraising for the purpose of committing further criminal action.”

 

[lpetrich]

But something gave FS much more reach. He

... started a think tank and joined the little-known but enormously powerful Atlas Network, a global network of more than 500 member think tanks advocating for “free market” policies.

What’s happening in Germany—public rhetoric vilifying climate activists, which the media then picks up and amplifies and, ultimately, leads to the criminalization of those activists—is a pattern we’ve seen play out in multiple countries, new research from climate news sites Drilled and DeSmog reveals. That pattern is thanks in no small part to the influence of this little-known network, which has powerful allies in the oil, gas, and extractive industries.

Atlas Network - DeSmog

The Atlas Network is a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization that describes itself as working to support a growing network of more than 500 “free market” organizations in nearly 100 countries promoting free market ideas.

Many of the member think tanks of the Atlas Network have supported climate science denial and have campaigned against legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Back to The New Republic.

That network's founder was Antony Fisher, a Briton who was born into a rich mining family.

Shocked that the British public elected the Labor Party in their first postwar election, Fisher decided he must make sure people voted the right way next time around. He was further inspired by conversations with Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who blamed socialism for all of society’s ills. Fisher considered running for office in the early 1950s, but Hayek told him to forget about getting into politics himself and to engage instead in a “war of ideas” by targeting the intellectual class.

In 1955, he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), in London UK, a right-wing capitalist think tank.

Not disclosing their corporate donors was a key to IEA’s success too. “The think tank method allowed corporations to say things that they couldn’t say themselves without appearing to be merely speaking to their own profit motives,” Walker said. These tactics allowed the IEA to amass influence in the U.K. and to help spread conservative free-market ideology in British politics throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

 

[lpetrich]

In 1970, he went on a speaking tour with an organization founded by Charles and David Koch, the infamous Koch brothers who went on to buy a lot of influence in US politics. "In those U.S. talks, Fisher encouraged American businessmen to fight back against the social movements of the 1960s." In 1974, he founded another RWCTT, the Fraser Institute in Vancouver BC, Canada, and also another one in London, the Centre for Policy Studies. In 1976, he founded the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia, in 1977, the Adam Smith Institute, also in London, in 1978, the Manhattan Institute in Manhattan, NYC, US, and in 1979, the Pacific Research Institute in Pasadena near Los Angeles, CA, US.

The IEA and its imitators helped UK PM Margaret Thatcher come to power, and AF decided that all these RWCTT's needed some assistance in cooperating, so he founded the Atlas Network. Originally with his RWCTT's, it expanded to include all the Koch brothers' ones. Its members also include the Cato Institute of Washington DC, US, the Heartland Institute, Arlington Heights near Chicago IL, US, the Heritage Foundation, also DC, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Arlington VA near DC.

Where does their money come from?

... Atlas has received millions of dollars in funding from a number of Koch-funded foundations, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which has a long history of funding climate denial since its founding. ... many of the individual member think tanks that form the Atlas Network are separately funded by foundations affiliated with extractive industries—and, in some cases, directly supported by donations from industry—as well.

Free markets, free minds? More like free markets, bought minds.

 

[lpetrich]

Alejandro Chafuen, an Argentine American businessman who took over the Atlas Network presidency in 1991 and remained in charge until 2018, once described the network’s audience in one word: elites.

Thus being commendably honest.

Atlas Network executives and member think tanks have always painted environmentalists and the regulations they seek to place on polluting industries as a cancerous growth on society.

...
Anti-environmentalism is baked into much of the rhetoric of the network. A 1991 report from Atlas member the Mackinac Institute calls early environmentalists “reactionaries” who are “anti-human.” A 1994 Pacific Research Institute report posited that “contrary to environmentalists’ apocalyptic gloom, the improvement in the environment is perhaps the single greatest public policy success story of the last generation.”

Trying to take credit for what they sneer at.

When Chafuen left his position as Atlas Network president in 2018, he went on to run one of the most prominent Atlas Network member think tanks: the U.S.-based Acton Institute, which has long pushed a Christian-flavored brand of climate denial. Acton also incubated the Tennessee-based Cornwall Alliance, an association of Evangelical think tanks with close links to another Atlas member, the Heritage Foundation. In a 12-part DVD series called Resisting the Green Dragon, released in 2010, the Cornwall Alliance described environmentalism as “spiritual deception” and warned of “dangerous environmental extremism.”

This kind of rhetoric is exactly what we see today in countries moving swiftly to criminalize environmental and climate protest.

...
Schäffler in Germany is only the most recent example. In Guatemala, Atlas think tank Fundación para el Desarrollo de Guatemala, or FUNDESA, has spent many years decrying the impact that environmentalists and Indigenous rights activists have on “investment” in the country.

...
U.K.-based Atlas member think tank Policy Exchange, meanwhile, put out a report in 2019 describing Extinction Rebellion, an organization famous for shutting down parts of London to call for aggressive climate action, as “an extremist organization seeking the breakdown of liberal democracy and the rule of law.”

...
This pattern also took place in Canada and the U.S. over the past decade, in response to First Nations and Indigenous-led protests rejecting the expansion of tar sands extraction, as well as the anti–Dakota Access Pipeline movement. A series of papers put out by Atlas member think tank the MacDonald-Laurier Institute in 2013 and 2014 paints First Nations activists as potentially violent, cautioning of the havoc these “warrior societies”could wreak on Canada. During a 2017 meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a high-level oil lobbyist described protesters at Standing Rock as “dangerous and destructive,” claiming that a large number of the activists had criminal records.

 

[lpetrich]

Atlas strategies aren’t all about criminalization: Members are also involved in crafting sophisticated P.R. campaigns to ally extractive industries with the very communities they are targeting.

...
In 2018, a report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that governments had about 12 years to implement aggressive decarbonization policies if they wanted to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. That alarm bell mobilized a global movement of young people taking to the streets—and sparked a whole new wave of anti-climate-protest campaigns from Atlas Network think tanks.

It’s not surprising that Atlas took action: Its network’s funders were shaken up by the youth movement. Internal BP marketing documents leaked to Drilled in 2020 revealed just how much the industry was caught off guard by the youth climate movement—seeing its authenticity as the biggest threat to oil and gas. An army of think tanks, many of them funded by the industry, turned to the media, social media, and any other platform they could access to mock, criticize, or fearmonger about the activists.

So they were running scared.

In Sweden, where Greta Thunberg founded Fridays for Future, a youth climate group that went on strike each Friday to demand climate action, Atlas think tank Timbro and its research arm, Ratio, began branding climate activists as “climate populists.” They compared youth climate activists to Nazis and warned that their doom and alarmism will make them likely to turn to extreme tactics.

...
The neat trick of Atlas members’ rhetorical warfare against environmentalists for so many years is that it’s not just about preaching to the choir. On the contrary, it has convinced even those who may feel urgency around the climate crisis that protesters are being too “radical,” too disruptive.

A lot of the news media has gone along with this framing, often neglecting to discuss climate science.

Media Matters’ analysis found that fewer than half of U.S. media stories on climate protest included anything about the scientific basis for climate change or the political stalemate driving the surge in protests. Meanwhile, the study found that Fox News has run four times the combined coverage of its competitors CNN (27 segments) and MSNBC (9 segments); all of the network’s 144 segments on the topic have painted climate protesters as dangerous radicals.

Social scientists who study movements and social change have largely been confused by how much questions over the “civility” of climate protesters’ tactics have dominated the discourse. “There really hasn’t been much destruction of property—the climate movement’s tactics have been very tame so far,” says Dana Fisher, who heads up the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and has been researching protest in general and climate protest in particular for years.

 

[lpetrich]

Home | Drilled
with
Investigations - The Real Free Speech Threat | Drilled

The Real Free Speech Threat

A multimedia, cross-border investigation into the global effort to criminalize environmental and climate protest.

Around the world, climate and other environmental protestors are being harassed, attacked, and arrested at an increasing rate. Laws are being passed that levy life-altering prison sentences and fines on protestors arrested near anything deemed “critical infrastructure,” which is defined so broadly it’s hard to find a public space that wouldn’t be near it anymore. Corporations are suing protestors and NGOs, comparing protest to organized crime. Governments are growing increasingly comfortable branding environmental protestors as “domestic terrorists” or instruments of “foreign influence,” and going after the nonprofit status of environmental nonprofits. And so far the media is largely participating in the rhetorical “othering” of protestors, opting in most cases to focus on the disruption that protest causes rather than the change it seeks, and to marginalize activists. In this print and audio series we’ll take an in-depth look at how climate protest has evolved in recent years, where this backlash is coming from, how it’s grown so quickly, and what it feels like to be someone who’s concerned enough about the future of humanity to join a protest, only to find themselves facing police violence and several years in jail.

News - DeSmog

American PR Firm Edelman Enabled Oil Baron Al Jaber’s Ascension to Lead COP28 Climate Conference - DeSmog - "Edelman earned millions polishing the UAE’s green image — which helped propel Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber to the top levels of climate diplomacy."

Meet the Shadowy Network Vilifying Climate Protestors - DeSmog - "The Atlas Network is behind the effort to brand climate activists as extremists and pass anti-protest legislation." -- that New Republic article

As Canada Burns, Danielle Smith Does Event with Activist Who Says Climate 'Not a Crisis' - DeSmog - "The Alberta premier is headlining an oil and gas industry conference this week with climate crisis denier Alex Epstein while thousands evacuate due to wildfires."

Two-Thirds of Conservative Endowment Fund Directors Are Linked to Fossil Fuels and Polluting Industries - DeSmog - "The UK’s ruling party and Big Oil locked in a ‘death spiral’, say campaigners."

The Atlas Network and the Building of Argentina’s Donald Trump - DeSmog - "Javier Milei, a climate change denier widely supported by Atlas Network, a web of free market think tanks, won the necessary votes to run in Argentina’s presidential election in October."

 

[lpetrich]

Fridays For Future – Map of Climate Striking and Actions

A broadly similar pattern of activism: lots in the US, Europe, Africa, and India, not nearly as much in Latin America and eastern Asia, and none in Russia and China.

 

[Swammerdami]

In 1970, he went on a speaking tour with an organization founded by Charles and David Koch, the infamous Koch brothers who went on to buy a lot of influence in US politics....

Where does their money come from?

... Atlas has received millions of dollars in funding from a number of Koch-funded foundations, the ExxonMobil Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which has a long history of funding climate denial since its founding. ... many of the individual member think tanks that form the Atlas Network are separately funded by foundations affiliated with extractive industries—and, in some cases, directly supported by donations from industry—as well.

Free markets, free minds? More like free markets, bought minds.

"Right-wing think tank" is of course an oxymoron -- These "thinkers" don't need to actually "think." They already know what tricks their pimps expect them to perform.

What's the most "respected" (if this is not also an oxymoron) right-wing bullshit tank? AEI gets a lot of attention, but is just another stable of whores in Charles Koch's Bullshit Network. Charles Koch's father founded the John Birch Society but that Society is almost rational and humane compared with the bullshit that flows like diarrhea from his son's stables.

Two years ago I happened to study a report by an AEI "Senior Fellow." It was, by far, the most academically dishonest paper or opinion I have ever seen. I reported on it at IIDB, but with all the details my report probably passed unnoticed. Briefly, the "Senior Fellow" strained to make a bullshit statistical charge against Biden's team. The charge would have been bullshit even if true, but in fact it was a lie -- or rather he fiddled the statistic until he got the bullshit claim.

If a scientist thought that the way he fiddled the statistic was valid -- and this fiddling was the ONLY "value added" in the paper -- he'd spend a paragraph or three discussing this decision. Instead the fiddle was divulged (or rather buried) in a SINGLE adjective in a single sentence in this multi-page report.

When you see "AEI" (or the name of any right-wing bullshit tank), it's safe to ignore it and/or to assume that their conclusions are total lies.

 

[bilby]

"Right-wing think tank" is of course an oxymoron -- These "thinkers" don't need to actually "think."

"Right-wing septic tank" might be a more accurate name.

 

[steve_bank]

Aggressive activism demanding immediate large scale changes is utterly impractical.

No short term changes are going to affect the built up inertia of warming oceans. I doubt there is any path back to the way thinks were.

Biden came around to saying we can't just stop using fossil fuels.

Disrupting the global economies would be worse than the current affects of climate change. We had a small taste of it with COVID.

 

[Shadowy Man]

We needed to start about forty years ago adjusting the energy economy. Ultimately it would include a variety of energy sources, including fossil fuels, but also nuclear and renewables. But now that we've waited so long, these kinds of gradual solutions that would have had non-catastrophic impacts on our economy aren't going to help as much. And its clear we don't have the political will to find solutions. The question is do we have the political will even to simply adapt to a new climate.

 

[Elixir]

"Right-wing think tank" is of course an oxymoron -- These "thinkers" don't need to actually "think."

"Right-wing septic tank" might be a more accurate name.

My best friend in 8th & 9th grade had a really great dad - used to drive us around to surf spots like he had all the time in the world. Lived in a sprawling mansion on the beach in Montecito, probably a 30-50m$ property today. Worked for Rand Corporation.

Doing what? My friend advised me that he's not allowed to know or even ask, so ... I didn't. Rand was supposedly non-partisan, but ... not.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Mankind gets a lot of its energy from fossil fuels. This post may expose my own lack of awareness, but . . .
Is there an activist plan detailing the quantities of carbon energy that will be replaced with conservation, nuclear, wind, solar, etc.?

Or -- and this may be the wisest course -- is the plan just to reduce carbon use and let market forces and creativity fill in the gap?

The problem is most of the activists are pretty much fruitcakes. It's all about wind and solar, handwaving away the storage problem. They do not have a viable approach, actually trying it would crater our economy. It's so pervasive and so destructive that I suspect Russian and/or Chinese money driving it.

Given current technology there is only one solution that works: nuclear. There isn't anything else even on the horizon. Solar/wind would make sense as drivers of low cost/high energy industrial processes that don't mind being cycled multiple times per day, but that's about it. The only such processes I see are desalinization (use the power to run oversize pumps, use gravity or compressed-air driven pumps to run the desalinator itself) and cracking water for hydrogen (which would then be reacted on-site into more useful forms--methane or ammonia.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If we are to apply the latter approach effectively, we need to treat all low carbon energy sources equally, and not heavily subsidise some, whilst obstructing others.

Letting the market decide will probably work, but not if the market has to decide between being handed sacks of cash to build windmills, while anyone who wants to build a nuclear power plant is required to spend vast sums on unnecessary regulations whose only raison de être is to make it difficult for such plants to get built.

Yup, I very much favor using the market to drive good behavior/punish bad behavior. In this case that means staying out of the issue of what power sources to use but instead taxing mining (drilling is form of mining) carbon and making the tax refundable--permanently extract carbon from the atmosphere and store it away and you are paid whatever the carbon tax is.

(And I would do pretty much the same thing with all pollutants. No "safe" levels, not thresholds to keep below, just an incentive to do good. None of the crap we see with Fukushima where they are diluting the seepage with enough other water to get it below acceptable levels. You're simply taxed on how many becquerels it's going to release over say the next 100 years with a multiplier for how it reacts biologically--much higher charges for say I-131 {goes for the thyroid} than Kr-85 {noble and thus not metabolized at all}.)

Source agnostic pricing, coupled with a tax on fossil fuels (ideally equivalent to the cost of removing the carbon dioxide they will produce from the atmosphere, and spent on doing just that), could work well.

Good luck getting any regulator or government to make this happen though.

Not coddle the existing players with money? Oh, the horrors!!! You make Hitler look like a good guy in comparison!

 

[bilby]

We needed to start about forty years ago adjusting the energy economy. Ultimately it would include a variety of energy sources, including fossil fuels, but also nuclear and renewables. But now that we've waited so long, these kinds of gradual solutions that would have had non-catastrophic impacts on our economy aren't going to help as much. And its clear we don't have the political will to find solutions. The question is do we have the political will even to simply adapt to a new climate.

Sure. But none of this actually changes anything. The solutions all remain exactly the same, despite the fact that having kicked the can for forty years has meant that they will now be less effective than they could have been.

The best time to start was forty years ago; The second best time is today.

Using the fact that these solutions are now less effective, as an excuse not to implement them, is absurd. It's never too late to start, and waiting another forty years will make these solutions even less effective than they are today.

I would rather see action now that starts a process that sees us forty years from now saying "well, at least we're finally no longer making the problem worse", than see inaction today that sees us in forty years saying "well, if only we'd started forty years ago...".

Doing nothing now because doing something a few decades ago would have been better is an excellent example of perfection as the enemy of good.

Catastrophic change in energy policies today would likely be impossible to implement, and could easily do more harm than good. But there are plenty of immediate changes to the policy and regulatory landscape that could be implemented today which would have significant long term impacts.

Long term impacts might not be as desirable as short term ones, but if they're the only option, they're a damn sight better than doing nothing at all. Or worse, doing things we know to be popular, but ineffective.

There's one solution that can actually work; We need to stop fannying around with gas, and windmills, and solar panels, (none of which can possibly lead to a zero carbon emissions world without massive energy poverty and/or disruption) and implement it.

Anyone who genuinely doesn't know which technology I am talking about can refer to my posting history on this board.

 

[Shadowy Man]

We needed to start about forty years ago adjusting the energy economy. Ultimately it would include a variety of energy sources, including fossil fuels, but also nuclear and renewables. But now that we've waited so long, these kinds of gradual solutions that would have had non-catastrophic impacts on our economy aren't going to help as much. And its clear we don't have the political will to find solutions. The question is do we have the political will even to simply adapt to a new climate.

Sure. But none of this actually changes anything. The solutions all remain exactly the same, despite the fact that having kicked the can for forty years has meant that they will now be less effective than they could have been.

The best time to start was forty years ago; The second best time is today.

Using the fact that these solutions are now less effective, as an excuse not to implement them, is absurd. It's never too late to start, and waiting another forty years will make these solutions even less effective than they are today.

I would rather see action now that starts a process that sees us forty years from now saying "well, at least we're finally no longer making the problem worse", than see inaction today that sees us in forty years saying "well, if only we'd started forty years ago...".

Doing nothing now because doing something a few decades ago would have been better is an excellent example of perfection as the enemy of good.

Catastrophic change in energy policies today would likely be impossible to implement, and could easily do more harm than good. But there are plenty of immediate changes to the policy and regulatory landscape that could be implemented today which would have significant long term impacts.

Long term impacts might not be as desirable as short term ones, but if they're the only option, they're a damn sight better than doing nothing at all. Or worse, doing things we know to be popular, but ineffective.

There's one solution that can actually work; We need to stop fannying around with gas, and windmills, and solar panels, (none of which can possibly lead to a zero carbon emissions world without massive energy poverty and/or disruption) and implement it.

Anyone who genuinely doesn't know which technology I am talking about can refer to my posting history on this board.

I guess I’m not really disagreeing with you per se. but if we couldn’t find the political Will to implement the fixes when it would have been relatively easy I don’t see us doing it now.

non-catastrophic changes now may indeed help on the long run but with less impact than they would have had we started when we should have.