"Climate change is a wicked problem… [and] there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat."
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Activists from the United StatesNon-fiction authors from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesEnvironmentalists from the United StatesJournalists from Missouri
Original Language: English
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"Something Wicked This Way Comes", republished in Resilience, December 7, 2023
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Heinberg
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Richard Heinberg
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