Global warming is really an easy problem to solve. All we need is money to throw at the problem.
To stop the atmospheric temperature from rising, we need to stop the atmospheric CO2 level from rising by removing as much CO2 as we emit each year. We even have the technology to remove CO2 from the air: carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
Strange as it may sound, the Paris Climate Accord is an agreement between the world leaders to ruin the planet to the maximum. The world’s leaders are arguing over how much that maximum is. Should we allow the temperature to rise 1.5 or 2 degrees above the preindustrial temperature—or even more? We want to keep it a little below what will kill us all, right?
No nation has the desire to spend the huge amount of money on CDR that would be required to restore the normal temperature of the planet. We have accepted our fate of forever having to live on a much hotter planet with all the symptoms of global warming much worse than they are today.
The answer to why nations have no interest in saving the planet lies in a speech by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. According to Tyson, nations only commit to investing huge sums of money on things the public clearly understands as beneficial to everyone since the source of funds is the taxes paid by the electorate.
He cites examples from history to prove his point. He says that the public is only motivated by two things: “not wanting to die and the promise of economic returns.” It is really hard to get money for “research with unknown returns on investments in fields not yet fully understood by the public,” Tyson laments.
Tyson says that the motivation for humanity’s history of grand investments in massive projects (such as the moon landing or the American interstate highway system) amounts to “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to die poor,” which he says can move us “to invest in practically anything.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson may just have discovered the creed of nations: “Save lives and grow the economy.”
This discovery explains why the leaders of the world’s biggest polluter, China, and the fourth biggest polluter, Russia, had no time to even come and pay lip service at the twenty-sixth annual Conference of Parties (COP 26) in Glasgow.
If world leaders have done nothing for twenty-six years, it is not likely they will all have an epiphany in the twenty-seventh year.
Twenty-six years should be enough time for us to finally realize that we have been knocking at the wrong door.
If Neil deGrasse Tyson is correct, the world’s leaders will not be able to spend serious money on saving the planet because global warming is “a field not yet fully understood by the public.” No one is afraid of dying or losing their job because of global warming. So why would the public be willing to spend money on global warming?
When global warming starts killing people and the economy, matching the scale of the coronavirus crisis, only then might the United States and other nations be willing to spend trillions of dollars on it. Because then it would be consistent with the creed of nations: “Save lives and grow the economy.”
In this case, it is “Save lives and save the economy.”
We should face the truth that the world’s leaders cannot save the planet—not because there is something uniquely wrong with the leaders of our time but because spending huge sums of money on global warming goes against their creed.
This means that we have to find a way of saving the planet without serious financial help from the nations of the world. How it can be done is a topic for another day.