I'm not scared of the system being broken, I'm scared about climate change not being fixed - which I thought we had a deadline to meet?
Well. A few things.
1.
When it comes to "fixing" climate change you are basically up against one of the largest industries in the world. The will do anything to protect their profits and in a system where money buys you influence there is just no way anyone can compete with the fossil fuel industry.
Unless the system changes there is nothing you can do.
2.
There is no deadline with climate change. We are already way past the point of no return. We are already seeing the early effects of climate change and even if we stopped 100% of our greenhouse emissions today we would still slide into a massive, unprecedented crisis over the course of the next 100 years.
You have to look at the problem in a different way:
A different climate isn't the problem, the actual problem we face is the speed at which the climate changes.
This means that fertile zones will shift, our agricultural and fresh water infrastructure will become less and less effective, because it's no longer at the right locations, leading to shrinking food and fresh water supplies around the globe. Some countries will be able to adapt quick enough, other won't.
In addition to that rising sea levels will force billions of people to relocate. So in addition to food and fresh water shortages we will also face the BY FAR largest refugee waves the world has ever seen, and unlike every other migration movements before, this one won't be regional but global.
Europe is currently under massive stress because of a couple of million of refugees. Imagine the situation where there is a couple hundred million refugees and food and fresh water supplies are critically low.
More extreme weather like hurricanes, droughts, floods etc. will literally be the least of our problems.
This scenario is going to happen no matter what, we can't avoid that anymore. All we can do is lessen the impact, because it matters a lot if these changes happen and people need to relocate over the course of 50 years or 20 years or 10 years or 100 years.
According to the latest IPCC models, keeping global warming below 2°C would likely displace less than a billion people until 2150. (which sounds like a lot of time, but its actually isn't, even spread out over 100 years this would still pretty much means that the entire planet is facing an unprecedented refugee crisis for an entire century.)
But we are right now far away from even just that goal. In order to reach that 2°C goal we not only need to bring down our net greenhouse emission to zero, but we would need to actively filter CO2 and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere again.
Which is extremely expensive, but thats what we need to do, and thats what we will eventually start doing, because the alternative would be even more expensive - massively more expensive.
So basically what we are doing now, by continuing to emit greenhouse gases as ever, is taking out very stupid loans from future generations.
Right now fossil fuel companies are spending millions(lobbying), to protect their billions in short to mid term (private) profits, but down the line we(society) will have to spend trillions to clean that mess up again.
If we factored the clean up cost into fossil fuels, they wouldn't be economically viable anymore. But even the proposed carbon taxes don't even come close to factoring in the actual clean up costs future generations will be looking at.
3.
I am European, so I look at the US from a different perspective. I don't know if you are from the US but the way you perceive the US status quo as something set in stone is typical for people who view the system from within.
People start to perceive it as second nature and stop questioning it. Not only the political system, but also the economic system. People view capitalism as something eternal, even though it's a phenomenon that occurred not too long ago and is very unlikely to still be around by the end of the current century. Yet people act like we need to protect the capitalistic structures from intrusive policies to combat climate change.
To think that you have to play within the rules of a given system, when the system is obviously not able to solve the problems it is presented with, is weirdly naive.
There won't be a solution to climate change without a complete redesign of the current political and economic system in the US. No way.
Its not only policies that have to change. It's also about changing lifestyles and ideologies.
