re: #81 wrenchwench

Can we tax the masses into submission? Not just the oil. We need to do more.

I am not one of the pro-doomer folk.

The pro-doomers are the ones cheering the extinction of humans. Yes, there are some people out there like that.

I guess I am still a “humanist”. Which makes me a “speciesist” in the eyes of the pro-doomers.

Having written that, I do think that our efforts now have to be in multi-generational adaptation strategies.

While we can continue to develop non-fossil-fuel methods of getting productive work done, it is clear to me that our global society have put in place several more decades of fossil fuel use.

We are not going to be able to avoid another 1C of surface temperature rise, before 2100. Unless some global cataclysm happens (like a really big super-eruption from one of the big calderas) that sets back our civilization to 19th century levels of industrialization.

With just one more degree (C) of temperature rise we will have set in motion the melting of the ice in West Antarctica and Greenland.

The melting of Greenland also may bring about the end of the AMOC. (Though I am not a near-term AMOC doomer.)

All the above will drive a race to survival over the next century and especially the one after that.

The US is now 248 years old.

My ancestors in Norway brought the Protestant reformation to Norway just over 4 centuries ago.

The printing press was invented about 580 years ago.

Looking forward that many years:
580 years - just too far to predict.
400 years - the nations of the world will be greatly reorganized.
248 years from now - the US and other nations will be attempting to not starve because of agriculture collapse.

If we hope to have a world in which democracy is still a thing, where individual rights are universal, etc., we need to prepare.

IMO the US should take our spending on the defense budget and build fewer jets and aircraft carriers and rebuild our cities to rely on energy from non-fossil resources.

Trillions of dollars need to be spent on cities that are more than 10 meters above sea level.

Continental-scale water works are needed to irrigate future desert creep in the middle of this country (TX, OK, KS, CO, and even NE.)

And we damn well accept that hundreds of millions of people will be migrating over the next 50 years and unless we want to be remembered as monsters we need to find a way to accomodate said humans.