O/T:- ⚠️Impressed with the leadership [The UK Party Politics Thread]

[Jampie]

Will doing anything about it make a difference?

Yes

Will it make things worse?

No

What are the trade offs and would it be worth it?

The tradeoffs are we have to stop using fossil fuels. Most people will end up better off because natural energy sources are cheaper, electric cars are cheaper to run etc etc.

Some corporations will make less profit.

Yes it's worth it.

How many people does it save, you could drive millions into greater poverty and death by taking climate action, why does your kids inheriting the Earth matter more than theirs does?

Millions are being lifted from poverty every year, moving off fossil fuels will ensure this continues indefinitely. Or until we run out of people in poverty.

So your question is a false dichotomy.


Failing to do so risks catastrophic climate change that could lead to the entire human race returning to poverty. The survivors anyhow.

When we talk about the environment we're talking about the entire planet, it's relationship with the sun, the solar system and the whole damned show. You're making a grand doomsday prediction about an extremely complex system when we can't even predict the weather accurately beyond 5 days.

He isn't making a prediction, scientists have.

Climate is literally weather over time, and while predicting whether it will rain in Nottingham next Thursday is very difficult because that's one datapoint and could easily vary, predicting that the average temperature globally is going up by another degree in the next couple of decades is quite achievable and has been done. It's a matter of modelling the energy in vs. energy out of the system. In the last 50 years scientists have gotten quite good with these models.