> Governments need to tax CO2 emissions on the business side and pour the money into carbon capture technology in the private space through investment and perhaps some sort of bounty program
Unfortunately, getting this proposed, passed without mutilation, and enforced is also a collective action problem.
Though I agree with your implied point that decentralized solutions should be the baseline, especially as they don't preclude coordinated action if that somehow becomes possible. To do otherwise is to pointlessly leave a powerful, relatively easy-to-deploy policy tool on the table for essentially religious reasons.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty powerful contingent of superstitious economic illiterates in our politics that see market-based solutions as automatically suspect, in the same way that there are powerful scientific illiterates that see nuclear as "unclean" (which is basically "unholy" laundered by modernity).
> I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse
What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit (again, any proposal that doesn't emphasize nuclear is unserious; the Green New Deal explicitly rejects it)
In the US, I expect solar and wind plus storage is cheaper than nuclear. It doesn’t really matter though, if you put high enough taxes on carbon the market will sort it out. The government shouldn’t be picking individual technologies, because they are likely to fuck it up.
I used to think as you do about nuclear, but I've become convinced that old nuclear technology is too expensive to compete with renewables OR fossil fuels, and new nuclear technology cannot scale up enough to matter before 2050 (when the worst effects of climate change will either have been averted or made inevitable).
I still absolutely believe it is worth investing in nuclear just in case I'm wrong, and it would be nice to explore the universe later using e.g. cold fusion if our civilization survives this crisis, but I do not think we should rely on or expect nuclear power to make any significant contribution to addressing the climate crisis on the very tight timeline necessary.
> What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit
The left != the party (by which I assume you mean the Democrats)
A sizeable fraction of the population understands that climate change is an enormous problem and when polled has said solving it should be a priority (no numbers or poll link offhand, sorry). They are also routinely told that they are terrible people if they don't support the party that at least acknowledges climate change in their rhetoric over the one that for all I can tell is 100% committed to turning the planet into one big oil spill.
Don't confuse the actions of the politicians with what the populace actually cares about. Something like 70% wants universal government-run healthcare (yeah, even the people who watch Fox news[1]) but even with Democratic majorities in congress the politicians can't seem to scrounge the two craps to even pretend like they want to make it happen.
Unfortunately, getting this proposed, passed without mutilation, and enforced is also a collective action problem.
Though I agree with your implied point that decentralized solutions should be the baseline, especially as they don't preclude coordinated action if that somehow becomes possible. To do otherwise is to pointlessly leave a powerful, relatively easy-to-deploy policy tool on the table for essentially religious reasons.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty powerful contingent of superstitious economic illiterates in our politics that see market-based solutions as automatically suspect, in the same way that there are powerful scientific illiterates that see nuclear as "unclean" (which is basically "unholy" laundered by modernity).
> I'm past hoping for people to do the right things en masse
What scares me is that there doesn't even seem to be a constituency for bold action on climate. I used to at least be comforted by the political left carrying the torch, but the most recent iteration of the party has a "climate policy" that just dresses up the same old unrelated economic wishlist in climate rhetoric like a skinsuit (again, any proposal that doesn't emphasize nuclear is unserious; the Green New Deal explicitly rejects it)