Oh, you're an anarchist. I respect anarchy as a thought-through political position, although I disagree profoundly with it. A bit like how I feel about hard left positions. You will do as you wish (especially if you're an anarchist!) but I think it would be better to make the positive case for political anarchism than the negative case.

My god, you don’t even know what mitigation is. Mitigation is not decarbonisation (“reduction of emissions”), you plonker. Mitigation is reduction of the negative impacts of climate change, like sea and flood defences, etc. And as it happens, we are decarbonising a lot, it’s just there’s a lot more to do.

Globally, we spend $1.5 trillion dollars a year on fossil fuel extraction, ie on drilling, mines, wells, production platforms, equipment, labour, maintenance and the energy to operate them, but not including the fuels themselves. We’ve been spending at this level for literally 80 or more years, and most of that investment is now pointless because wells and fields run dry. By comparison, we still only spend $0.85 trillion a year on renewables today, and have only spent at this kind of level for about 5 years, and already we are at the point where that’s providing something like 20 to 25% of global useful energy, and those assets will continue to be useful for decades without depleting and without requiring large opex because there’s no fuel to extract, transport and combust. In other words, each dollar invested in building renewable capacity can displace future fuel extraction costs for decades.

We need to do both things, decarbonise and mitigate. And our efforts at decarbonising are not as fast as they should be, but are undoubtedly much better than not trying at all. We are unquestionably moving to a world of electrification of most transport and low temp heat, lots of high temp heat, and a fair number of industrial processes. Plus also a world of enormously expanding electrification too, as people in the developing world leapfrog unreliable and pricey grids and go to solar & BESS & EV two and three wheelers.

But what was it an example of?

Now I’m even more confused by the moderation! This place is weird sometimes.

What was?

See my answer up above. If a small town were to try making steel tools again in some horrendous future wasteland, they’ll be much better off salvaging a derelict car than digging for hematite. That car contains mild steel, resilient alloy steel, hard high-carbon alloy stell, copper, aluminium, and if it’s an EV, lithium and possibly nickel and cobalt.

A blacksmith with charcoal, a forge, an anvil and suitable tools could reshape quite a lot of salvaged components without even needing to melt them.

There would be literally billions of tonnes of steel, copper, aluminium, glass and other materials in abandoned buildings, vehicles, machinery etc.

You are so *obsessed* with the cars. This was about climate change as a whole, and not about just the cars! Jesus, you’re monomaniacal.

(FWIW, my son’s EV cost £9k, and all cars are priced at the price that the vendor thinks will make them the most money, irrespective of drivetrain)

Huh? Did you read my post as supportive of Trump??

I agree re fossil fuels but disagree on the ores. The ores have been concentrated into much more easily accessible and concentrated formats that are sitting on the surface, rather than buried! They’ve not disappeared or been burned. And of course, there would likely be far fewer people around who had survived, and thus the amount of material per person would be substantially greater than today.

Just to be clear, I’m not claiming that this would be a good thing, a simple recovery, or anything less than horrendous. All I’m claiming is that humanity would not be starting again completely from scratch. But I do not want this future for my kids. I want human civilisation to continue without going through a catastrophe and will do what small things I can to try to make that happen.

Oh c’mon. Why assume the worst of people like Maja Darlington, by assuming she’s making a naive statement, when there’s a perfectly defensible interpretation instead?

The tactical response to extreme weather that the UK government can pursue with more vigour is adaptation: building out flood defences, firebreaks, even using solar over cropland to reduce drought impacts, etc. But obviously that’s reasonably uncontested ground and whatever is done here doesn’t stop the problem from growing. No-one is really pushing back on doing more of this stuff. Greenpeace is an advocacy group, so it pushes hard on what is actually contested, ie the strategic response to extreme weather that the UK government can pursue with more vigour: leading on decarbonisation, both domestically through supporting deployments of renewables, heatpumps, insulation, polluter-pays rules etc, and in foreign policy by pushing on international agreements. The UK doesn’t have unlimited soft power, but it has a lot of soft power, and it has already shown that can be effective. The Johnson government was immeasurably shitty in all sorts of ways, but I must grudgingly concede that securing commitments from 65 countries to phase out coal at COP21 was a real achievement and that at least 22 of those countries delivered net reductions in coal use, in some cases pretty substantial eg Chile, Germany, Canada and Poland. Obviously, success is mixed and hard to measure. And also obviously diplomatic initiatives are not quantifiable in the sense of being able to attribute a specific percentage of that reduction to COP26 vs what would otherwise have happened, but equally obviously, it makes no sense to set the attribution to zero.

Even if DCs grow at the top end of what’s expected, they won’t account for more than 10% of national power draw in the UK in the coming years when fully rolled out. They cause significant local challenges with power draw, distribution, water abstraction, governance, etc, but they’re not the power issue people think they are. The much, much larger challenge is electrifying as much of our other energy use as possible, eg transportation, low temp heat (buildings) and whatever we can of high temp heat (EAFs etc). That requires huge growth in generation and distribution, which we absolutely can and should do.

It is a bit like that, but it’s still better than not doing it. My wife works in sustainability for large corporates, and they always prefer reducing carbon emissions directly to offsetting, but they prefer offsetting to not offsetting. Worth doing some due dil on the specific scheme you choose to use, though, as there are some that are much better than others.

We’ll be able to go beyond primitive tribes again, because humans transmit knowledge and culture between generations. Sure, lots is likely to be lost, but lots will be preserved too.

We cannot let the best be the enemy of the good. We need to push ahead as fast as we can with the imperfect replacements we have, leveraging their many advantages as much as possible, mitigating and living with their various disadvantages as much as possible, while also working on improving them and finding other solutions. This is a dial situation, not an on/off switch situation. We should be turning the dial as much as possible.