With respect to climate change, there is a complete disconnect between the predictions of doom and the proposed solutions. Electric cars ain’t gonna do it. Massive disruption and reordering if the economic order and a real reduction in global well-being are the price to be paid if we’re really serious.
I just don’t see intellectual honesty among people who claim that climate change is an existential threat.
I think they are honest - they really believe that their proposals are solutions - but also that they are hopelessly innumerate, and ignorant of the time and effort involved in scaling anything up to global scale.
For myself, existential is going way too far. It will transform civilization, yes. One way or another, that's coming. Extinguish every human? No. Not unless we get weeks-long global thermonuclear war - 3700 weeks on the top 10 existential threats chart, and still number 1.
It would take an absolutely apocalyptic event (or more likely, series of events) to make the human race go extinct but it wouldn't take much more than a prolonged, widespread power failure to push civil society to collapse.
Dies the Fire is a first of a series of novels about a global power failure due to an alteration in physics by an unknown cause. Most humans starve to death, but some in the right locations resort to farming by hand, hunting and fishing. Others set up feudal kingdoms.
I just don’t see intellectual honesty among people who claim that climate change is an existential threat.