Pirate's Cove

Once again, I’ll point out that Warmists, and even some Skeptics, used to give me guff back in the early 2000’s when I noted that this whole thing wasn’t about science, but authoritarian politics. More and more Warmists are opening up with their real agenda

The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech

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Our society has come to believe that technology is the solution. Electricity from renewable sources, energy-efficient buildings, electric vehicles and hydrogen fuels are among the many innovations that we hope will play a decisive role in reducing emissions. Most of the mainstream climate-change models now assume some degree of “negative emissions” in the future, relying on large-scale carbon capture technology, despite the fact that it is far from ready to be implemented. And if all else fails, the story goes, we can geoengineer the Earth.

But the problem with this narrative is that it focuses on the symptoms, not the causes of environmental decay. Even if the technologies on which we pin our hopes for the future deliver as expected and do not lead to much collateral damage – both of which are huge assumptions – they will not have fixed our mindsets. This is a crisis of culture and politics, not of science and technology. To believe that we can innovate and engineer ourselves out of this mess is to miss the key lesson of the Anthropocene – that dealing with planetary-scale processes calls for humility, not arrogance.

What does this look like in practice? Changing the collective mindset of a civilisation calls for a shift in values. It means educating our children about humility and connectedness, rather than vanity and individuality. It means changing our relationship with consumption, breaking the spell of advertising, manufactured needs and status. It means political organising, generating demand for a politics that sees beyond the nation state, and beyond the lifespan of the currently living generations – Wales has already started, with its Wellbeing of Future Generations Act.

You will be forced to change by your Betters, who will still be able to go on with their lives with little change.

To solve climate change, the innovations we need are financial

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But there was something else in the EIA report that caught my attention and perhaps deserves a bit more of all of our attention — how much investment in clean energy is needed. Take a look at this graph. The amount of money that was spent on clean energy in the last four years will need to be quadrupled in 2030 and again in 2050.

That’s no small feat. Especially when the investment world has been timid at best on clean energy over the last decade, although thankfully that’s starting to change.

This is going to mean a lot of taxation.