If fossil fuels keep burning at present rates, we are headed for apocalyptic civilisational collapse. Perhaps even more strangely, there is no longer much serious disagreement about this claim.
Things will change the exact second that existing petro-wealth figures out how to make more off of green power in the next quarter than by continuing to destroy the earth. I wonder if, ironically, that day will be highly delayed because they missed the opportunity to buy in at the bottom.
Everyone could see that greentech would be a trillion dollar industry. If nothing else, nobody after 1950 ever pictured oil derricks in their sci-fi worlds. So you’d expect the firms that already knew energy-- the oil companies and utilities-- to take a speculative punt on every new tech just as they’d buy into new oil-fields.
But I guess a dollar reinvested in the goo industry in 1980 was the sure thing-- worth more than the chance to own a chunk of the new economy in 2040. Will ExxonMobil or Shell be willing to pivot into solar/hydrogen/battery/etc tech at today’s prices, or will they just use their political leverage to maximize the extraction and damage thry can do with their assets until they become complete write-offs?
Feels like people are on the collective verge of having had enough of giant corps dictating our future and our survival.
Collective behaviours dictated by evolutionary shaped biological core drivers can’t be changed without changing the underlying human animals. Maybe the survivors who pass though a population bottleneck will sustainably inherit different properties due to the founder effect, but that remains to be seen.
Meanwhile the overconsumption of the ensemble and that of the underlying individuals will continue, until it can’t. The carrying capacity plunges, after a delay due to inertia the resulting excess deaths bring back the population to the new carrying capacity level, way lower than the current level. There is nobody to blame, even those who do know yet continue, uncaring, since their numbers are too low to measurably change the outcome either way. They still be bastards, though.
I think it might keep going slowly until sudden change
Yes, exponential processes running into planetary limitations do tend to end that way. First gradually, then suddenly. They rarely tell a happy story though.
