Nor is weather climate. One is short-term events and the other is long-term trends. But weather rides on climate's back -- and it is increasingly obvious that weather can beat us up in the here and now while climate creeps steadily worse.
We can keep on whistling past that graveyard for a good long while, but the road leads right to the cemetery gates. Technology got us into this fix and the only real way out is with more -- and better -- technology.
It doesn't matter if the people who'd put us back in mud huts want to do so because they long for an imagined halcyon past of folk singing and sustainable living, or because they pine to "RETVRN" to a fantasy wonderland of happy peasants and benign, sword-bearing nobles (who will of course be them*): it's idiotic and unrealistic. We can have fresh vegetables all winter and clean air, global connectivity and clean water, but we're going need to do the hard work of engineering our way to them -- and you can't do that from a feudal culture with most people stuck living like farm animals. (It took rediscovered science, stolen gold, readily-accessible coal and steam engines last time, and it was centuries in the doing.)
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* Yeah, good luck with that. Even a cursory reading of history reveals that when the going gets tough, pencil-neck geeks are shoved to the back by the biggest, meanest action-oriented types, sorted for viciousness first, cleverness second and geekery not at all.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
5 comments:
The core issue with radical societal change not grokked by a lot of utopians is that they really need the supermajority of people to buy into their system for it to actually work.
Too many of them think that they can just seize power, and then force everyone to join in. Inevitably, their Utopia gets corrupted, twisted, suborned, and turned into the Land of Ideological Make Believe that inevitably fails.
But pretending is more fun than persuasion.
It takes far longer to invent something from scratch than it does to recreate something that has already been done, and for which you still have the basic and foundational documentation.
The idea that we’d fall back to Medieval levels of technology and essentially stay there for an extended period of time is ludicrous on its face. People who believe that could happen (or wish for it to happen) should not be taken seriously.
So much easier to pine for a world that never really existed than to fix the one that does.
Climate change solution, Nuclear, the Power to Save the World!
Nuclear is certainly a possibility. Spent fuel and vulnerability to military/terrorist action remain problems.
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