Climate Change: Why aren't more people concerned about it?

You're worried about the end of the world, when most Americans are worried about the end of the month.

Find a way to make everything cost less - instead of doing the opposite - and you'll never have to worry about public support ever again.

I think you didn't read about the idea that you can find credits that support mitigation in a meaningful and certifiable way.

That is the point of the Google link... that you spend money to mitigate the carbon you don't reduce.

In that way, it is just an investment, the dollars you spend now to mitigate the carbon you emit is less than the money you will spend in the future to mitigate the same amount of carbon

Death in Jurassic Park: global warming and ocean anoxia

New research links greenhouse gas-related global warming to severe environmental degradation and a mass-extinction during the Lower Jurassic Period, around 183 million years ago.

The take-home message from all of this? By whatever means an initial atmospheric carbon spike is generated (be it gigantic volcanic episodes or humans burning fossil fuels), the knock-on effects can be substantial, leading to a portfolio of severe environmental stresses that manifest themselves in the fossil record as mass-extinctions. Will Mankind's footprint, already involving severe carbon pollution and overfishing, be likewise visible in Anthropocene strata some 180 million years from now? Let us hope not, but if so, we will not be worthy of the sapiens sapiens part of our species' Latin name. The events recorded in these Toarcian rocks once again warn us starkly of our peril.

Cement is the source of about 8% of the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions,

If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third largest emitter in the world - behind China and the US. It contributes more CO2 than aviation fuel (2.5%) and is not far behind the global agriculture business (12%).

The latest climate talks ended here Saturday, a day late, with agreement largely reached on a rule book to implement the nonbinding Paris Agreement. The bigger story is how the United Nations climate process is losing its battle with reality.

“Will civilization descend into another dark age?” Al Gore bellowed. “I’m getting worked up early.” Yet compared with the euphoria three years ago in Paris, defeat hung in the air as delegates faced the realization that whatever they agreed in the hall had little relevance to developments in the world.

Negotiators sought to slow the rise of greenhouse emissions—around 2% a year world-wide for the past two decades. For the three years straddling the 2015 Paris conference, carbon-dioxide emissions were more or less flat. Then they resumed their upward trend—up 1.6% in 2017 and a projected 2.7% this year. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released on the eve of the conference, all scenarios limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit assume steep reductions in coal consumption—to zero by 2050.

That’s not going to happen. According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a German think tank close to Chancellor Angela Merkel, what it calls the renaissance of coal continues, using up the available carbon budget within a decade.

Speaker after speaker at conference side-events spoke of expanded coal use. Turkey has plans for 80 new power stations to double its coal capacity and reduce dependence on imports. Chinese provinces are lobbying for more coal and Beijing is investing in coal infrastructure abroad. So are Japan, South Korea and Australia. During his September visit to Indonesia, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in oversaw a deal to build two new coal plants there. Before the conference, in Polish coal country, Warsaw had declared it would continue burning coal—a matter of national security when the principal alternative is Russian natural gas.

Explaining why the efforts thus far hadn’t bent the curve of rising emissions, the Potsdam Institute’s chief economist, Ottmar Edenhofer, said the fundamental reality was an oversupply of fossil fuels, making it harder for renewables to be cost-competitive with coal. An underappreciated factor, he suggested, is monetary policy. Zero interest rates act as an artificial stimulus to renewable energy, which is much more capital-intensive than gas and coal. To students of Austrian economics, it’s a classic malinvestment: When interest rates are suppressed below the natural rate, too much of the wrong sort of investment leads to a boom, then a bust.

As interest rates rise, renewable energy can’t compete without carbon pricing — economists’ magic bullet to solve global warming. Therein lies the biggest cause of despair at Katowice. Thanks to French President Emmanuel Macron’s carbon-tax folly, politicians of all stripes are likely to treat carbon pricing like the plague.