I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue. We need to make big structural changes to the global economy to fight climate change, and those changes are going to have an outsized negative impact on today's wealthiest and most powerful people. They aren't going to let change happen without a fight.
People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.
China is also the world's leading producer of solar cells (over 70%) and the world's leading user of solar power (about 33% of global solar power).
China is also, by far, the leading producer and user of electric cars with almost half of the production and sales (more electric cars are sold in china than western europe + US combined). Half of all EV's in the world are driving around in China.
Further, chinese people use a fraction of the electricity that north americans do. Canada: 14,600 kWh/yr, USA: 12,150 kWh/yr, China: 5,300 kWh/yr.
In terms of CO2 emissions, it's the same story: USA: 17.6T/yr, Canada: 15.7T/yr, China: 6.4T/yr, on a per capita basis.
It's hard to remember what with the shiny new tier 1 coastal cities, but try not to forget that, on average, china is still quite poor with only 1/4th to 1/5th the per capita income of the richer advanced economy nations like the US, Sweden, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. China is on par with Mexico, Malaysia, Panama, Russia, or Bulgaria.
IMO, per captia measures only matters for countries that allow unrestricted internal movement.
China strictly controls how many people are allowed to migrate from the countryside to work in the cities, so it is, in some respects, multiple distinct economies with a centrally controlled standard of living.
France would react. If people start mass dying in Algeria, many of them will try to get to Europe.
Algeria being a former French colony, being close by, and already having a large population of Algerian descent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerians_in_France says there are 10 million people of Algerian origin in France. That’s over 10% of the population), France probably will be a major destination.
Before The Brexit vote, the UK prime minister David Cameron went to Europe to get a "better deal" for the UK. What he came back with didn't answer the people's problems with sudden mass migration.
What should have been proposed was a unified Europe border force. Where each member state takes its share and also send resources to help manage the southern border.
Leaving the problem to Spain, Italy and Greece is the worst approach. The 1 million migrants in 2015 really was a dry run for what will happen when Africa is too hot.
The EU needs to plan now for receiving these people, because you can't send them back.
Frontex is exactly such kind of a unified EU border force[1][2][3]. They occasionly use forced "pushbacks"[4] on migrant boats on Southern sea borders, leading to a lot of criticism and accusations of EU lawbreaking.
Guess what Algeria's first three main export products are? Crude petroleum, petroleum gas and refined petroleum. They're trying to diversify but it's too litlle, too late.
Plastics and polymers certainly aren't going away anytime soon so its not like a renewable energy world would just kill them. I don't expect plastic production to actually contract until long after we have made the grid renewable/sustainable and have extra energy for active carbon sequestering. Disposable plastic from grocery bags and simple wrappers are easy to reduce and eliminate but how many consumer devices are made of just metal or wood now and aren't 95% plastic? Plastic is still replacing tons of metal piping and ducts and on cars and everything else. When is the last time anyone has seen a wooden handled screwdriver for sale?
> I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue
Millions of people die from AIDS, malaria, and the lack of potable water and food each year. But most of those deaths happen other continents, so nothing is done about it.
The transmission of HIV could be virtually ended in the US with drugs like PrEP that have been on the market for a decade, halting a 30+ year AIDS pandemic. That didn't happen, and PrEP's price in the US rose from $1200 to $2400 for a 30-day supply in 2019, despite costing ~$40 retail in other first world countries. Now that one formulation recently became generic, it costs $1400 retail, or $600 with coupons, for a 30-day supply. As of 2020 there is a program for those without insurance, but if you're a working adult with insurance, you aren't eligible.
As long as there is money to be made, people dying will be acceptable to those in power.
>People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change.
No it wont. If anything it will just start a war and/or a(nother) refugee crisis. Plus dead people. I think hoping for disasters to catalyst change is a sadly naive worldview.
> but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue.
Or, that will just get the rest of the nations of the world to focus on preventing climate refugees from entering their nation, and perhaps use their militaries to secure remaining resources.
What will force the issue isn't people dying, but rather masses of climate refugees fleeing countries that are no longer habitable and moving toward the poles.
People dying will not change the minds that need changing.
The people who profit from the current state of affairs need to be convinced to modify their plans. Perhaps there are other ways to persuade them, but fear of something worse than not profiting from their current investment plans is the only thing I can think of at this point.
How do we know this is the result of climate change? It's meant as an honest question. Though it is largely ignored in the mainstream discussion, I've heard for years to be careful about making a distinction between weather and climate. Are you thinking this is not weather, but climate? How does one tell the difference? If there's a record winter of cold temps, would it be evidence that the climate is cooling?
There are actually scientific methods for attributing specific events to global warming or not, probabilistically. I.e. although you can never say with perfect certainty "this heatwave was caused by global warming", you can say: with global warming this heatwave has a probability 0.1 (once in ten years), but without global warming it would have a probability of 0.001 (once in a thousand years).
We seem to be having several "once in a thousand years" heatwaves per decade these days.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but simple statistics. A record winter by itself is just a freak incident. As is a record hot summer. But what are the probabilities? One record cold day broken after 80 years? Improbable but not downright implausible. Year after year after year of record highs? Just coincidence?
For the same reasons we make fun of climate-change deniers who say "look at this record cold winter; there's no global warming" means we can't use a historic heat wave to say "look globaal warming".
> For the same reasons we make fun of climate-change deniers who say "look at this record cold winter; there's no global warming" means we can't use a historic heat wave to say "look globaal warming".
We make fun of the climate change deniers in this scenario because the cold winter often is evidence of climate change. Record heat waves can also be evidence of climate change.
A heat wave (like other weather) by itself isn't evidence of global warming, but extreme weather events like this (and like extreme winter storms) are made more frequent by global warming. You should expect to see more "once in a millenium" weather events as the planet continues to warm.
People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.