We are failing to correctly address climate change because many people have been seduced into thinking it is a subplot of some bigger problem, and that all we need to do is address that bigger problem. Even if this were true, the time frame is wrong. We need to get on top of climate change over the next 30 years and the supposed bigger problems can not be sanely addressed in that time.
One claim is that it is all a symptom of excess population. Indeed there is an evil subset of the environmental movement that is perfectly relaxed about the prospect of billions of people starving to death. This would, for example, be a likely effect of stopping the production of artificial fertiliser.
In fact we are rapidly developing the technology to produce a lot of food using much less land. This will enable a significant population increase. However the arrival of prosperity and contraception brings a rapid decline, and often reversal, in population increase. Encouraging prosperity is the reverse of the plan that the degrowthers have for addressing the rise of the population.
The second claim is that we need to live "sustainably" with renewable energy and recycling everything. This body of opinion doesn't actually want to kill people, though the effect of their policies would likely be the same. Since nuclear energy uses less artificial ingredients than an equivalent energy source of wind or solar, it is obvious that renewability is not the prime objective of the anti-nuclear greens. Indeed the proponents can be heard, at times, to say that the real problem they are trying to solve is the high consumption society. Making the food for 8+ billion people consumes a lot of resources. So the extremists in this camp have a high overlap with the extremists in the overpopulation camp.
In my next post I'll detail the approach we should be taking to address the climate emergency.
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