Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
So I&#x27;m honestly not as concerned about this as I once was.<p>Don&#x27;t get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we&#x27;re in a mass extinction event already and people aren&#x27;t going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity.<p>One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I&#x27;ll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of this.<p>Think there&#x27;s too many people? You can easily show that the world could easily produce enough to feed a population 10 times what we have now in the very near future, thanks largely to automation.<p>Think we&#x27;re dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. Even if we don&#x27;t, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by &quot;solve&quot; I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).<p>Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.<p>Worried about how we&#x27;ll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it&#x27;ll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.<p>And all you need for this kind of optimism is the kind of technology we&#x27;re widely expected to have this century.<p>So it&#x27;s kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you&#x27;re not going to change people&#x27;s appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.<p>The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that&#x27;ll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn&#x27;t become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.<p>Fundamentally this also seems like a &quot;betting with the Mayans&quot; type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we&#x27;re screwed. If so, you&#x27;ll be right but who cares? We&#x27;re still screwed. You&#x27;re probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there&#x27;s a pretty decent chance they will.