With luck capitalism will squeak in but libertarianism will be blamed for climate change collapse the same way that communism was blamed for famines, war crimes etc
It’s not clear what happened to the 753.5 billion defense budget but 1/5 in there’s lots of info missing in between the Wikipedia info dumps (info dumps being Stephenson’s Achilles heel) if you choose to wiki dump so much info people will ask why are you being selective
Maverick libertarian 🙄 uses geo-engineering to fight climate change. Even Stephenson's stresses that it does not address the root cause and regards it to be a temporary measure to reduce the rate at which the environment heats up.
There's a difference between slowly and purposefully burying carbon and playing with sunlight reflection and altering the environment. The first option is slower, more manageable, observable, and controlled, but it will be more expensive. That's Kim Stanley Robinson
The second option is less expensive in the near run, but it is little understood, will result in worldwide losers, and will need humans to sustain an earth's yearly atmospheric injection, hence when the injections stop you get termination shock
Technically you cannot really get to KSR vision without geoengineering but as things stand it’s not a stretch to seen geo-engineering as a new gate-keeping narrative without ever going into serious carbon sequestration or repurposing of the economy
Grumble, grumble
The book edges close to Poe’s law with T. R. Schmidt's sulfur gun and his Texas drawl saying there’s no such a thing as sea level 😬 but every semi-parody of extreme views can be mistaken by for a sincere expression of the views being parodied
We are generally most concerned with lagging metrics. They're items like revenue, sales, and profit. The problem is that we can't always act immediately on them. Everything we did to get there has already happened by the time we review it so if we don't like it, it's too late.
Same here; leading metrics must be prioritized in order to drive lagging metrics. If we want to lose weight, we should focus on eating less and eating healthier foods, as well as exercising more and keeping to a fitness program.
If geoengineering has one advantage, it is that it fits neatly into our most tired cultural narrative... It's the one that tells us that some of us (the ones who matter) will be spared at the last possible moment.