Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Who should pay to fix the climate emergency?" video.

  1. Any libertarian that understands the non aggression principle has to agree that fossil fuel companies owe the planet a massive debt. They have caused damage - they need to pay for it. In fact, they have already caused enough damage to put them out of business. And a fair carbon tax that would pay for further damage would make fossil fuels unviable commercially going forward. But I have found it hard to find libertarians who will put their money where there mouth is on this....
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  2.  @guenthermichaels5303  We tried. The recent referendum on imposing stricter governance enforcement on Swiss companies operating overseas narrowly failed to pass, thanks to backwards right wing rural cantons :(
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  3.  @guenthermichaels5303  I will when the dealer has lied for decades on an industrial scale about the dangers of using their product, when they have corrupted politics to ensure that no action is taken on climate and when they constantly undermine international action to switch to cleaner fuels. Also, there is a clue in your own wording of the problem. What do we do with people who deal dangerous substances like hard drugs? Last time I looked, we put them in prison.
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  4.  @guenthermichaels5303  Most people have no choice but to use fossil fuels, in their electricity, for their transport etc This is largely down to public policy that has subsidised and privileged fossil fuels even after the world agreed that climate change would be catastrophic if we didn't stop using them, way back in the early 1990s. It really boggles my mind that people would apologise for such a destructive greedy corrupt and dishonest industry.
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  5.  @guenthermichaels5303  I live in Switzerland, the country in Europe that has warmed most already - 2C above preindustrial temperatures. Switzerland has warmed at a rate of around 0.4C per decade since 2000. I am not overwhelmed by this issue. I do know plenty about it. Not everything, but who could. I read the science, directly in the academic papers and have been doing so for about 4 years now. I read the studies about direct impacts of GHGs. I read the studies about the feedback mechanisms like ice melt, permafrost melt, water evaporation, wild fires, marine methane hydrate release, etc I read the studies about the acceleration of warming that is currently ongoing. I read the studies about the huge costs to economies globally expected over the next 80 years, and thereafter. I read the studies that model where we will be in the coming decades based on various emissions trajectories from RCP2.5 up to RCP8.5. I read the reviews of the accuracy of past projections that demonstrate them to have been remarkably accurate. I read the studies that show how fast we have to reduce emissions if we want to limit warming to anything like 1.5C, and how far away we are from that kind of action. I am not short of knowledge on the science. And then I read the endless accounts of how the fossil fuel industry itself made similar projections about warming in the 1970s and 1980s, and rather than plan a future that would avoid predictable global catastrophe, they hired the same misinformation machines that delayed action on tobacco and lead and got to work ensuring that any action to reduce emissions was delayed indefinitely. They spent billions creating propaganda and misinformation, a fake narrative that the science was in doubt, they funded politicians to do the same, they interfered in every single international effort to reverse the growth in emissions since Kyoto. And now we are probably too late to limit warming to even 2C, let alone 1.5C. And the consequences on warming beyond 2C are so vast and widespread, it's very hard to actually take them in. The projections for damage to the economy (which to some extent illustrate the damage in terms of human suffering) are between $127 trillion and $792 trillion by the end of this century depending on how much we miss the Paris 1.5C target by. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15453-z So, while I am not overwhelmed by the issue, I think that there is plenty to be overwhelmed by. I suspect that you have not really looked hard enough at how bad the damage will be, and how hard it will be to stop and that might be causing your somewhat cool assessment of the situation. Climate scientists have been fairly terrified about the situation for at least a decade, and they should really know.
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  6.  @guenthermichaels5303  Emissions related to telecoms is something I have also studied. I have created the sustainability plan for the ISP I work for. We have a program of auditing our power and equipment, as well as purchasing power from renewable sources to minimise our impact. We offset all unavoidable emissions. We have an EV company car program to boot. We also model the emissions related to customer traffic off our network and allow the customers to pay to offset the impacts of their usage, both the transmission of traffic and the servers and storage that are serving users with data. However, that is a soluble problem in the medium term. The main source of emissions is from electricity generation and reducing the emissions associated with that is a very tractable problem.
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