China? Let’s see, you sit down with them at the table and work out a solution, it’s worked for trade with them, it worked for reducing ICBMs for a while, and China is actually interested in not having to deal with a populace displaced, impoverished and angry due to climate change.
Russia, less easy, but by no means impossible.
The Eurozone is working to reduce Co2 emissions to mitigate climate change, and to improve energy independence, and as part of their strategy to counter Russia. It’s not like policies can’t ultimately have multiple goals, and work towards several outcomes at the same time…
Nobody here has said that humanity cannot adapt, what we’ve said is that adaptation is likely to mean an involuntary reduction in population, issues with disease, food supplies, civil unrest, and so forth in the short term. Long term is pretty uncertain. We’re probably going to take a big swathe of the biosphere down in this time too. We could probably do something about it, but where’s the money in that?
But again - this is about what WE can do to deal with this issue. We can’t force China or Russia to do anything. We CAN demand action from our government. It is a moral imperative that we do so in fact. Arguing about Russia and China is a clear distraction tactic by people who don’t want to take action on climate change. It’s the rallying cry of cowards, essentially.
Ah, the outmoded “realist” school of international relations that’s been used to excuse Putin’s war and to call for appeasing him (and which also dismisses any attempt at international co-operation, environmenal or otherwise) makes its appearance. Where else can you find Greenwald and Mearsheimer cozying up to each-other under the approving gaze of Kissinger?
Funny how these same “realists” ignore (or in the case of right-leaning ones extol) the all-too-real ability of trans-national corporations – esp. fossil fuel ones – to do the “impossible” and co-operate and co-ordinate policy across multiple national borders.
I think both need to be done, change things at home, and push for change elsewhere, treaties of mutual reduction should placate the whining capitalists on both sides.
I agree, but we can’t force other countries to DO anything. The more we try and force them, the more likely we are to cause conflict. But by changing our own system as much as possible to be green and environmentally friendly, we look like we’re leading by example. the old model of imposing on others has not worked. It has not made the world safer or better.
to circle back to the actual article, we got Miami with the same problem as Java: well, Miami is going to be fine, because it is rich. Indonesia, maybe not so much. They might not be able to rebuild. Someone else might have to help. They might even have to move.
When the posited solution to “islands and their residents soon to disappear beneath the waves” is “well lets have another meeting in a few years, and, uh, slap some solar panels up there”, it’s gross. The broke cities on this list need to adapt or they need to move, but I’m not hearing any discussion of, like, the USA rebuilding the marshall islands.
The idea that “we’re all going to get together and solve carbon, because we’re all equally at risk” is a fantasy that gets to avoid the responsibility of real hard problems of how nations will adapt and how they will make global decisions about who will move and who will pay for it. Luckily for theorists it looks like we are just going to collapse into world war so we can blame the other guys for the devastation.
It’s not going to be fine if the solutions of the glorious engineers follow the demands of the MBAs who control the city to “just pile another inch of dirt” on the berm. Java might actually come up with a more sound and creative and longer-term engineering solution when preserving corporate profits isn’t seen as a mandatory component of their own existential crisis
I’m definitely not for the Teddy Roosevelt style of diplomacy, and I think, possibly mistakenly, that China wouldn’t be opposed to it as much as people assume. I mean, have we actually asked?
There’s your straw-man argument again. No-one here is claiming international co-operation on dealing with carbon emissions will be easy or that every country is operating in good faith. We’re saying that it’s not impossible, and further arguing that not every decision in that regard has to be the zero-sum game so beloved of the neoliberal default consensus that got the planet into this mess.
It always ends in gleeful nihilism for you lot, doesn’t it? Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude…
Is it? Not if we don’t change our policies it won’t.
And offering help to other places isn’t off the table either.
Probably not, but as I said above, offering help is not the same as imposing it. Much of our foreign policy was built on “imposing help” since the mid-19th century. It’s not been effective for creating positive change.
I mean, WE’RE currently not operating in good faith.
You want a vision of the U.S. in thirty years, imagine a lung cancer survivor, on oxygen, continuing to smoke cigarettes. That’s the trajectory we’re on.
An appropriate metaphor, given that the tobacco industry provided the original template for bad-faith tactics, empty talking points, and fallacious arguments later taken up by the fossil fuel industry (some of which are still being used by a poster even in this very topic).
That’s what made me think of it. I recognized that voice- the one that tries to get me to start smoking again even though I know damn well it’s no good for me. A bad habit.
“Oh just keep smoking bunbain, you’re not dying yet, and by that time, they’ll have the technology to fix you up like new!”
When you understand that China is a sovereign country that has every bit as much reason as the rest of us to protect their own economy and citizens, you’ll recognize that they have been increasing their alternative energy industry substantially (more than the U.S., in fact). They will protect their own. We don’t have to ‘force’ them to do that.
Helping Ukraine win the war against them, which would destabilize Putin’s hold on the country and enable a new government to rise up, is probably the best path forward right now.
absolutely. and it has the compelling advantage of not having to pay for oil.
gas is expensive, especially now. it makes us clearly beholden to places like saudia arabia and europe to russia. that oil money breeds corruption wherever it goes.
renewables improve our resilience, make america able to be more independent, and will be far cheaper in the long run
