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I Study Climate Change. The Data Is Telling Us Something New.
(www.nytimes.com)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
They wouldn't be able to take the same oath we did but that isn't saying they could never get to where we're at more or less.
The enlightenment spawn the industrial revolution but it didn't necessarily have to. Scientific inquiry could have eventually lead us to somewhere near where we're at now without fossil fuels. The path would look wildly different and there's a fairly high likelihood mass slavery could play a role in that but it's still possible.
Kind of a tangent here but the book children of time goes into some depth on how the author thinks a race of super intelligent spiders could overcome many of the same hurdles we had to in wildly different ways to become a space-aring civilization. It's science fiction and obviously not an in depth study into how feasible it all would be but it did get me thinking that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
I disagree. To unlock workable solar and wind powered electricity, you need something to carry you energetically through the 'tech tree.' I simply don't think you can get to that level of technology without some fossil fuel use.
Solar maybe not but i could see an intelligent species figuring out that if they wrapped some copper wire around something under a waterfall that stuff happened.
Hell maybe they'd skip most of what we've done and just stick uranium into cars.
I really don't have enough scientific knowledge to offer in depth arguments as to the how of it but I think it's reasonable to assume that at least some. If not most. Of the discoveries we take for granted in modern times could have happened without oil. It would be a very different world for sure. Though.