We industrialized the world, lifted billions out of poverty, and increased living standards. Why do people ignore the human progress's we've made. Folks really need to have some perspective.
I recently read almost exactly this talking point earlier today, about Exxon’s lies.
Almost word for word.
1) that’s weird.
2) we make trade off choices all of the time, it’s what society does. However, when one side argues that the trade offs don’t exist, or lie about them, that’s deeply immoral, especially when it is such a pervasive, existential threat.
“If you work this job I have for you in my mine, I know for a fact you’ll get mesothelioma, I won’t tell you, and in fact fight tooth and nail to convince you and everyone else that it’s perfectly safe. But now that you have mesothelioma, why don’t you think about the salary we paid you? How it supported your whole life? Maybe have a bit of perspective, huh?”
Had we acted on climate change in the 1980s, I doubt that would have made much difference on living standards in the end. And insofar as it would, it would have been worth it. Maybe we could have avoided the worst externalities of petrochem and consumerism-centered lifestyle.
People have figured out carbon capture; people haven't figured out economical carbon capture at scale yet (except for reforestation, which only partially helps), and it feels like we're a long way off. If you want to incentivize the creation of CCS while still penalizing the externality (cost to society of a carbon intensive economy), you'd probably want to ratchet up something like a carbon tax, and then give a rebate for performing something like carbon capture. That might create the economies of scale needed.
