Pirate's Cove

You won’t feel a thing. It won’t affect you at all. Everything will be awesome and perfect!

This is what 2030 could look like if we win the war on climate change

By 2030, your CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced. Meat on your dinner table will be a rare sight. Water and the air you breathe will be cleaner and nature will be in recovery. The money in your wallet will be spent on being with family and friends, not on buying goods. Saving the climate involves huge change, but it could make us much happier at the same time.

See? No change

Right now, we are losing the fight against climate change – but what would winning look like? What is life like in a green world?

Here’s one version of a “CO-topia”:

You walk out of your front door in the morning into a green and liveable city, where concrete has dwindled and green facades and parks are spreading. If you choose to call a car, an algorithm will calculate the smartest route for the vehicle and pick up a few other people on the way.

Since the city council’s ban on private cars in the city, lots of new mobility services have arrived. It is cheaper for you not to own your own car, which, in turn, reduces congestion so you arrive at your destination more easily and quickly and don’t have to spend time looking for somewhere to park. You can also choose to travel by bike, scooter or public transit.

(many more things which are supposed to be awesome, skip to the end)

If we consider what the future could be, picking up the mantle against climate change may not seem so bad after all.

Yeah, everything is great. Your life is controlled by the Government, you don’t have that much money to buy things because the cost of living is sky high and government takes a lot more of it, you can’t really go anywhere, your home is tiny, and nothing has changed with the climate, since the changes are mostly natural.

But, now that you’ve given all your choice, freedom, and liberty up to government, you don’t know how to get it back.

Read: Say, What Does The World Look Like In 2030 After Winning The War On Hotcoldwetdry? »

But there is something that can save us all

Technology will not save us from climate change, but imagining new forms of society will

Citizen action on climate change has reached a new intensity: school children by the thousands regularly skip school to protest and Extinction Rebellion’s civil disobedience recently caused widespread disruption in cities around the world. Challenge and disruption is important in prompting change. But it’s also key that we consider—and show—how a zero carbon future could work in practice. This is where the field of social innovation – the development of new ideas that meet social needs—is coming of age.

When climate change was last so prominent, at the time of Kyoto, 1997, and again in the mid-2000s, most of the emphasis was on targets and treaties on the one hand, and big R&D budgets for clean tech on the other. Now there is a much better understanding that if these aren’t combined with social innovation from the bottom up, they’re unlikely to stick.

One reason for this is that cutting carbon use depends on changing social norms and behavior as much as technology—whether local food sourcing or reducing fast fashion. Another reason is the urgent need to show the skeptics that they won’t necessarily be harmed by things like higher petrol prices or shrinking traditional industries like coal mining. A low carbon economy can mean many more jobs, for example in refurbishment or recycling e-waste.

But this requires a very different approach to innovation, in which investment in new technology is matched by investment in new ways of organizing society. And investment in technology alone has dominated the last century.

See? It’s very easy! All we need to do is put government in charge of organizing our society and forcing us to behavior in a specific manner.

These tools are now becoming more mainstream, alongside the more traditional support for science and technology. They include, for example, experiments to find out what works best in persuading people to insulate their lofts, to go vegetarian or switch from a car commute to cycling. They include new kinds of social organization—from new neighborhoods designed for low carbon (like London’s BEDZed) to action by whole communities to cut their emissions.

President Obama and California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, both set up social innovation offices, and countries as varied as Malaysia and Canada have had national strategies for social innovation. Carlos Moedas, the EU’s commission of research, commented late in 2018 that the EU would put more money into social innovation “not because it’s trendy, but because we believe that the future of innovation is about social innovation.”

So, it’s pretty much Modern Socialists who are pushing for “social change”, which is forced compliance to rulings of people who rarely practice what they preach.

The key message of social innovation is that the scale of change needed in the next few years simply can’t be achieved just by top-down government policy or by grassroots action. This will become ever more apparent as the world grapples with implementing the Paris agreements, and hopefully goes further than their modest targets. Social innovation has a central role to play in mobilizing society as a partner in this work.

For the next decade, this is where energy now needs to be directed. Change must be accelerated, not just in the organization of our physical systems, but also in the way in which we live and relate to each other.

Anyone getting the idea that this isn’t about science, but about forcing people to live a certain lifestyle and be completely dependent, and under the thumb of, government?

Read: We Can’t Depend On Technology To Save Us From ‘Climate Change’ (scam) Or Something »