It’s a bit of a reductionist and humorous argument here but they weighed “Stopping the Industrial Revolution” against “Certain Death”, and decided that maybe the people of the future would be wiser than they were and invent a solution to the problem, similar to how they invented the steam engine to solve the issue of manual and animal labor.
Obviously that didn’t really work out, because the people of the future did in fact, invent a solution, but it was completely ignored in lieu of profit-seeking.
Somehow the problem invented was technological, spanned into the natural, but the solution pending was sociopolitical.
Homo sapiens is a rare breed.
I just watched an episode of Nova from 1977 called The Dawn of the Solar Age. They showed off fully functional hydrogen powered cars. They discussed in depth NASAs fully fleshed plan to launch solar satellites. There were interviews with some amazingly brilliant men with such high hopes for the future of humanity. Then they interviewed a politician who essentially said ‘Yeah, that’s not happening.’
The future we were robbed of looked to be so bright. Shame.
Hydrogen cars will never happen. Storing hydrogen is difficult, you also have to transport it on top. Which basically replicates the concept of gas stations with added difficulty.
EVs make much more sense, transporting power is easy and the car doesn’t care where it comes from. Beides the possibility to produce your own.
Upgrading the energy grid and adding a good mix of renewables is the way. But here we are with people crying that wind turbines are ugly and kill birds, while we burn coal and their outdoor cat is playing bird terminator.
The problem was in some ways invented to cause sociopolitical problems. Or to solve them for the bourgeoise. Whichever lens you want to take to look at it. The water wheel always did exist and was for a lot of the time cheaper than coal, but more prone to strikes because location and labor was so linked.
Greed. It will fuck us all over, even if it is not our greed.
In an 1827 paper, Joseph Fourier stated:
The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature.
The problem is the scientists didn’t warn us!
If only they had protested and lit themselves on fire and tried to tell me my Hummer H2 was bad!
Well, whatever. Time for me to drive my Hummer to church so I can get another hit of truth.
If the science was already as clear in 19th century as it is today, climate action advocacy would be much harsher. I assume that it even would have dampened the 1950s effect.
