I'd love to see more engineering efforts going towards improving our standard of living regardless of what the climate does. By all means, worry about whether the planet is getting warmer or cooler or a bit of both dependent on the place...but let's find a way to live regardless of CO2-induced warming, sunspot rarity or some other, unforeseen dramatic change.
A lot of the political and societal measures are aimed at making energy more expensive, reducing consumption and promoting a rather righteous view of how people should live. Why not spend the same effort to promote technologies that allow people to live however they want in a way that is sustainable regardless of the environment?
I don't think the aim of politics is to make people's live more miserable. Energy is being made more expensive to account for the externalities . The markets can then figure out how to make us live well with the proper energy costs.
What kind of tech promotion do you imagine, other than more efficient energy production and consumption?
I do genuinely believe that a lot of the reporting and comment on climate-related issues is a form of frenzy by the people involved - not rationally thought-out but a tendency on one side to claim that nothing's wrong and everything's fine (for optimists) and on the other to claim that everyone's going to die and terrible things will happen (for pessimists). The debate is too polarised to be useful, or even interesting, any more. Mixed-in with that, there are politicians, corporations and pressure groups seeking to distort the issue so as to create more power or profit.
I'd love to see more promotion given to sustainable agriculture that's tolerant of temperature drops or rises, city-structures that re-use the heat that they give off for something productive, research into how to build and live effectively in regions subject to hurricanes or earthquakes that don't come down to rebuild-everything-every-30-years, flood defences that are something more than 'build-a-wall', etc. I'm not saying that these things don't exist, but we spend so much time talking about how to change societies (unfeasibly, in my opinion) so as to mitigate climate change and not very much on what to do to mitigate that change into sustainable habitats.
"The debate is too polarised to be useful, or even interesting, any more"
Except that is probably part of the strategy - FUD. If you give up, the people in control are free do act as they please.
How do you propose to give incentives for development of those things you suggest? Don't you think more expensive energy would make people build more efficient things, recycle better, create cleaner energy?
It is part of the strategy - and one I have no heart to fight. There is simply no point in listening when the signal-to-noise ratio is too low and your chances of effecting the outcome are minimal.
Yes, expensive energy may do that - but is it the best way to do it? I would have thought that anyone who manages to do those things would probably make money from it regardless of whether the government takes a cut or not.
A lot of the political and societal measures are aimed at making energy more expensive, reducing consumption and promoting a rather righteous view of how people should live. Why not spend the same effort to promote technologies that allow people to live however they want in a way that is sustainable regardless of the environment?