Today my old friend Ezra Klein writes a column about climate change with this headline:
It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn
When you put it that way, it does seem odd, doesn't it? Except that it's not. In fact, this kind of thing has happened so frequently throughout human history that it would be odd if it didn't happen. Consider a few examples.
The early settlers of Easter Island deforested their entire island over the course of just a few centuries. Today, successive leaders of Brazil are in the process of doing the same thing to the Amazon rainforest in a few decades.
Midwestern farmers in the 1920s used farming techniques that eroded the soil, leading to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today those same farmers are draining the Ogallala Aquifer.
Ancient hunters hunted big game to extinction in North America. In the 19th century we hunted the plains bison nearly to extinction. Today we hunt whales to extinction.
I could go on in this vein forever. Humans have a long habit of doing whatever suits them best in the present, regardless of what damage it will do in the future. And none of this is from ignorance. In nearly every case we knew exactly what we were doing.
So it's perfectly natural that we would let the world burn as long as it meant a few more years of air conditioning and two-car garages. In fact, it's something of a miracle that climate change has gotten as much attention as it has.
So what's to be done? First off, here are the Four Commandments of Climate Change:
- If you aren't talking about the whole world, you're just jerking off.
- If you assume human nature will change, ...
- If you think current technology can solve the problem, ...
- If you think facts and analysis will win the fight, ...
This leads us to four requirements for action:
- Any solution worth wasting ink on has to be global.
- Human nature will not change. Don't try to guilt people into giving up their comforts.
- Current technology (primarily electrification) should be rolled out in emergency fashion, but it can solve only about half the problem. The other half we don't really know how to solve yet.
- Nobody cares about facts. The facts have been clear for a long time.
Got it? Now let's hear your plan!
POSTSCRIPT: What's my plan? In a nutshell, we should spend huge boatloads of money in a desperate attempt to invent new technology. The longer version is here.
"Today those same farmers are draining the Ogallala Aquifer."
I virtually never hear this talked about, but as I understand it is a massive problem on a timescale of 2-4 decades. Is anyone doing anything effective to mitigate it?
If the GQP wins Minnesota governorship, he likely siphons water from Lake Superior, regardless Canada's disapproval, vis pipeline to South Dak.
I disagree with #1, and I know it's been the central theme of your writing on climate, Kevin, and it's a little frustrating. I would say we need to keep the international perspective in mind, and we need to push a suite of solutions that will give global coverage. But solutions can and will vary a lot from location to location.
I feel like your formulation is a call for "silver bullets."
Definitely agree on #2-4 tho -- with the caveat on #3 that we *do* have solutions for the rest of emissions, but we don't know which will be the most feasible / optimal / scalable / etc.
Kevin Drum doesn't know WTF he's talking about, but when did laughable ignorance ever keep a "progressive" from puking out another virtue-signaling lecture? LOL
Hush now. Adults are talking.
No, he's right about the global nature of the problem. You can make some small incremental progress on the national level, or maybe among a few nations, but China and India each have over a billion people and if they don't sign on, it literally isn't going to stop global warming and we will have catastrophic impacts even if you zeroed out US emissions (which isn't going to happen anyway).
I think a lot of people are so busy debating this as a US political issue that they don't even realize the scope of the problem. We actually had to do something about this back in the 1980's and 1990's. We're literally already screwed. We still have to scale back carbon emissions, but at this point, we're looking at technological mitigation or nothing.
BS. There's nothing in the trolls post that says that. You have a point. The troll is just trolling. Don't feed trolls.
Look at the graph in the middle of this page:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions
You can see that zeroing out the US contribution won't help if we can't get China and India to make progress as well.
And China is still building coal burning power plants at an incredible rate. They added 40GW of coal burning power plants in 2019 alone.
Ah yes, the communist shouts "troll." LOL
Good ole jakejjj, our eternal troll, who models his life on that of a drunk teenager speeding down a mountain road on an icy night all the time saying "why would anything go wrong?"
Does he actually even have the capacity to model his life, rather than merely parroting like a half-trained chimp?
Howdy "progressive" Anglo racist! Thanks for trying to change my inferior first language, because USA English is superior. You know, speaking of "white supremacy." Look in the mirror, racist! LOL
The Latinx
We already have a solution, nuclear energy. Given where the planet is, the tradeoffs are worth the risks. If we standardized on a few designs and regulated them strictly, there's no better solution in the near term (next ~20 years).
tbh, decarbonizing the electric sector is the easy part, and new nuclear simply isn't cost competitive right now (in addition to its other long-standing issues).
I think what Kevin is concerned about are the so-called "hard to decarbonize sectors" such as cement, steel, industrial emissions, aviation, shipping, etc. Nuclear isn't much help with those.
You pick the low hanging fruit first. Decarbonizing electricity generation, space heating, and ground transportation reduces CO2 emissions a lot. Airplanes are probably the most difficult problem; jet engines will run quite happily on hydrogen, but it would take radical redesign of the airplanes to allow them to carry the required volume of liquid hydrogen. Ships can run on hydrogen fed fuel cells, and can be converted by pulling the existing diesel engines and fuel tanks and putting fuel cells and very large Dewar flasks in their place; substantial hull redesign is not needed. Cement production looks like a practical application for carbon capture and storage. Steel production can mostly use hydrogen in place of coke to reduce iron oxide to metallic iron.
In other words, what's needed is LOTS of clean electricity, some of which can be diverted to the production of electrolytic hydrogen.
Yep, I generally agree with that sketch and with the need for loads of clean electricity. I just think there are lots of uncertainties around exactly which are the best paths for these sectors. What policies are best for scaling and deploying that tech on enormous scale and very rapid timeline, and actually hitting the targets we need? For me, those are the questions that make it a "hard" problem.
I strongly disagree with this. Nuclear power is too expensive, it consumes vast amounts of concrete which produces lots of CO2. Nuclear fuel is expensive to mine and process which also produces lots of CO2. Some nuclear may be helpful in the short term.
Conservation is much cheaper and more effective than building nuclear power. Spend the same money on insulating homes and offices, switching to LED lights would be a better investment than building nukes.
Conservation is asking people to change human nature. All of our best efforts at reducing pollution and reducing energy usage have been driven by advances in science and enforced laws, not changing consumer behavior.
Right. Also, there's a symbolic reason to do lots of nuclear, which is that it makes clear that the left isn't just in this to attain its own policy gains. It says that we are going to hold our noses and shove a power choice that a lot of members in our coalition hate down their throats because we are serious about carbon emissions.
The resistance on the left to various forms of zero-carbon energy, coupled with the "all we really have to do is conserve" mantra, really helps cement the image among many people that this isn't really a serious problem. Because it sure looks like at least some folks on the left are only willing to solve it on their own terms.
OK then, *force* people to use LEDs, or better, specify the performance of permitted technology so that it can be exceeded.
Would you look at that! We're already doing it!
I disagree with that. Conservation isn't asking to change human nature, it's protecting something valuable from harm.
If we, as a nation, decided to channel some of our wasted dollars that are propping up already wealthy stakeholders into upgrading the nation's nations buildings that wouldn't be changing behavior. It would be taking wasteful assets and turning them into efficient assets.
Let people who really like incandescent lighting have it, but upgrade everything else feasible to LED. Insulate every home in the country, puts contractors to work and reduces the need for heating and cooling. Replace every combustion fired space heating system with a heat pump hybrid system (or heat pump alone where climate permits). This isn't hard stuff and it allows people to be more comfortable while using fewer resources.
All it takes is dollars, we know how to do all of these things and it won't take 7 years to get it "shovel ready".
Compared with automobile, not that much CO2
The scale of the problem means that we're not looking at either/or, we're looking at "e) all of the above". Conservation is a good idea, wind power is a good idea, solar power is a good idea, geothermal power is a good idea, nuclear power is a good idea. We need to do ALL of them, soon.
Nuclear isn't a total solution, but any real progress will require lots of no-carbon power, and nuclear is the only real 24x7 choice available today.
IOW, nuclear is necessary, but not sufficient.
But there's more research/design required in nuclear as well. We need safer, standard reactor types, via models that can't melt down even during a power failure as happened in Fukushima.
It is more likely that conservation behavior can be successfully encouraged, than that the public’s apprehension about nuclear power can be overcome. You can complain that the fears are disproportionate, but it is those fears, and the consequent hearings and lawsuits, that delay licensing of new nukes. Lead times are now far too long for nuclear to make a contribution in the near term.
Uh, no. Just no. To the extent that there's any fear at all (and I see very little of it in the general public), it's due to left-wing nutters who are doing everything they can to portray nuclear power in as poor a light as possible. These are the guys who deliberately delay plant construction with spurious lawsuits and then claim that these plants are always more costly than initially projected.
These are contemptible people and I despise them. Also, they're not serious about dealing with AGW, as any fool can plainly see.
I haven't read the original, "Limits to Growth" (see: https://bityl.co/7r9s), nor have I completed Gaya Herrington's, "Update to Limits of Growth" (see: https://bityl.co/7r9f), but I understand that we have only a decade or two left before societies collapse. Climate change inaction is apparently just the expected human nature that is part of the reason why we are inevitably headed towards societal collapse.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"If you aren't talking about the whole world, you're just jerking off."
I don't think this is a must, at least not initially, since the potential solutions for one nation will not work for another, so it's a fool's errand to try to cover the entire world in one swoop. Really all you need is a plan with actual teeth for non-compliance that includes just the top five CO2 emitters: China, the USA, India, Russia, and Japan. Manage that and that already takes care of a bit over 50% of the world wide emissions.
Until these five (if you can get at least the top three that would already be huge) don't actually do something serious it will be hard to get a majority of the other nations to follow through, since they'll correctly point out that just five nations are destroying things as much as all the other nations of the world combined.
If the planet where a body, and the emissions where bleeding wounds, first you take care of the big bullet holes around your vital organs before you start working on the smaller cuts and bruises on your limbs.
I think the whole world approach is good, but as you say, it needs to be tailored to each nation. For example, I was reading about how NGOs were giving African residents small solar systems, a panel, a battery, some LED lights and a small cook stove. This eliminated the need for them to cut down trees for firewood, improved their health because they weren't breathing smoky air.
We could work with sunshine rich areas such as equatorial Africa to build large solar installations and use that power to produce hydrogen. Combine that with carbon from the air to produce a carbon based fuel that could be sold to other countries for jet fuel and diesel fuel. This provides income for those countries and a safe fuel for others.
Closer to home, Mexico could do the same. It is crazy that Mexico, which is drenched in sunshine, pumps old from the Gulf to obtain hard currency.
So, Kevin. Are you the proud owner of an EV or at least a hybrid yet? Have you started replacing your likely gas-fired heat and hot water with electric?
thing is, it doesn't really matter. this isn't a problem that will ever be solved by individual action. national and international governments have to take charge, create effective policies and enforcement for government agencies, private companies and individuals.
Necessary vs sufficient. And walking the walk.
Of course not. Kev's a "progressive," and as such he wants to tell OTHER people how to live. LOL
Wow. I don't swing by KD's comment section so much any more, but this is certainly an irritating and counter-productive addition. Nothing better to do but snark?
It's just a troll. It posts to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
Thanks, racist!
Cordially,
The Latinx
I don't know what Kevin owns, but I have two EVs (a 2019 Tesla and a 2016 eGolf), a 16.32 kw solar system that powers the whole house and the cars, and 40 kwh of ESS which gets the house through the night for most of the year.
Sort of like Kevin's post about understanding special relativity, you may think you understand solar power intellectually but until you see the basically unlimited power which hits the roof of your own house everyday --- well, I thought I understood it before but really get it now.
Battery storage, or some other form, is everything. Unlike burning stuff for energy, you can easily overbuild solar panel generation and essentially "turn it off" if its overproducing -- I have seen my own system do it.
Personally, pumped hydro, where you run pumps during the day and let the water run generators at night has sort of an elegant appeal to it, but the reality is there is not only no waiting required but solar and ESS coupled with electric transport is available now, and its cheaper than the alternative in CA and will in a few years be cheaper than fossil fuels everywhere else too.
It (my system) is not something to brag about because there is no sacrifice. But in a way, the fact that there is no sacrifice gives me hope - we already know people will not, as a group, readily sacrifice for others.
Don't know about Kevin, but I own an electric car. And I just got a heat pump hot water heater and changed all my lights to LEDs. Also, I am not fat like Al Gore. So rick, you should read carefully and believe whatever I write on climate change.
Very good. All you need now for complete authority is a non/gas home heating system 🙂
Which I hope to have as part of an upcoming renovation. Panels. No more gas and a level 2 charger.
I think we don't know with 100% clarity what the full solution-scape will look like that gets us to zero emissions, so the #1 requirement for me is this:
The government (or govts of the world) need to take an aggressive, yet iterative, approach to the problem. That means aggressive policy, with ambitious goals and a suite of programs, but then also re-assessing yearly to focus on what is working, what needs more resources, what should be scrapped.
Unfortunately, the GOP, SCOTUS, and right-wing infotainment infrastructure make this difficult.
Destroying the dictatorship of capital and ending the accumulation of surpluses will free mankind from labor indenture to create these surpluses and save the environment from the extraction necessary to produce them. This can only be accomplished by destroying the bourgeoisie as a class. Since destruction is assumed to be natural, annihilating the bourgeoisie to allow for the rest of humankind and all the other inhabitants of the earth a right to live should become the focus of those concerned with saving the biosphere.
Developing new technology follows the model which has created the catastrophe of anthropogenic global warming and will only succeed in perpetuating the creation of surpluses. Surpluses that only accrue to the bourgeoisie without saving the planet or breaking labor from its capitalist authority.
Burn, bougie, burn.
Thanks, communist! Your plan has done wonders for Cuba, Venezuela, and best of all, the Khmer Rouge. Make sure to put your statement into the Democratic Party platform. LOL
Universal adoption of the living standards of median wage Cubans is the solution to ending global warming. Any technological solution to global warming will require the burning of fossil fuels for energy, extraction of other natural resources, and enrichment of the ruling class through accumulation of surpluses. This model now aknowledged to be burning the world will not save it.
jakejjj is good at denial. Otherwise he would recognize the one leader who most resembles Venezuala's Hugo Chavez was his own Donald Trump. They were both arrogant ignorant populist authoritarians. People who are bilingual have comment on how similar Trukmp's speeches are to Chavez'.
Chavez at least served his country.
You and your patron saint Bernie LOVED Chavez. LOL
Venezuela ain't communist dip shit.
Sounds like a Nazi dream come true. Destroy the non-Aryans, save the planet
Don't know about Kevin, but I own an electric car. And I just got a heat pump hot water heater and changed all my lights to LEDs. Also, I am not fat like Al Gore. So rick, you should read carefully and believe whatever I write on climate change.
Opps, double post.
Yes, capitalism is bad for the environment, except the old socialist Soviet Union and Chinese People's Republic were far worse than most any somewhat capitalist system. The important thing is not capitalism vs socialism, but democracy vs authoritarianism. All the worst environmental bad actors (Trump, Bolsonaro, Mao, Stalin) were/are authoritarians.
The problem is not that we have air conditioning. That's just blame shifting. The problem is that we don't stop companies from providing air conditioning in climate destroying ways.
Serious question: what would be a non-climate destroying way to provide air conditioning?
Use solar power and to drive a heat pump to cool a well insulated home. You could time it to provide maximum cooling in the afternoon when the sun is shining. A well insulated building won't heat quickly during later hours.
You could go one better and require that heat pumps be based on eco-cute technology. Instead of CFCs for the refrigerant they use CO2 compressed to the triple point. This is popular in other parts of the world, but getting a slow start here.
I'm on record as saying we won't be getting those super-batteries people keep talking about any time soon, because our nanotech simply isn't that good yet. OTOH, if we do get those super-batteries, our material science will also probably be good enough to deliver solid-state cooling elements at least as efficient as anything mechanical now on the market.
I'm optimistic on the account of stuff like that doesn't depend on breaking the laws of physics 🙂
Reduce human population to a sustainable 1 or 2 billion. Don’t have kids. Why should I sacrifice today so that human population can be 20 billion some time in the distant future? Not interested.
Want fewer people? What's keeping you from doing your part? LOL
You’re an idiot. LOL.
It's a troll. It leaves its droppings to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
He wants fewer people. Suicide is his duty, but like every "progressive," he prefers murder. LOL
We have at most 20 or 30 years to deal with climate change (it's possible the pessimists are right that it's already too late, but I hope not). Given the world's current age profile, if there were no further pregnancies after today, the world population wouldn't drop to less than 5 billion in the next 30 years, unless we're prepared to adopt a policy of slaughter on an enormous scale.
Who do you trust to decide who lives and who dies?
Why should anyone trust Kevin Drum, a stupid, arrogant, inflation-denialist "progressive" who substitutes his baseless bullshit for any research? LOL
https://www.axios.com/ceos-warn-inflation-alarm-sound-da5e2dcf-af16-4ca4-a1de-bdd03fbbe775.html
Why should any rational personal pay any attention to jakejjj?
It's just a troll. It trolls to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
Why would any "progressive" admit the truth? LOL
Abortion should be free everywhere.
Birth control should be free and promoted by the government with access provided at every corner drugstore to anyone over 15 years of age
Foreign aide should be dependent on how the receiving government promoted and protects female reproductive rights.
This is, of course, not enough...but it is the sine qua non of any effective approach to this...absolutely pressing and possible extinction event.
Best Wishes, Traveller
Pretending that we have time to plan and implement solutions fits nicely with the human component of your hierarchy. Wishing the some quantum leap in technology occurs fits in as well.
I don't want to raise the specter of violence here, but reality doesn't care about what I want. I fear that everything needed (raw materials, water, food, etc) to survive will quickly become scarce. And violence will be all that a majority of the species will have at their disposal.
Sorry for the downer...
Reading between the lines I think you have stated the heart of the problem. We have the technology to reverse global warming starting tomorrow. Get rid of single use plastics, all packaging should be compostable, stop using natural gas except in extreme conditions, require good insulation for all buildings, retrofit older homes, etc. We could even build machines that remove CO2 from the air (including the CO2 needed to build them). We can implement better farming techniques that store CO2 in the soil. We could ban insecticides and herbicides that damage the environment. The problem is not technology.
As you point out, it comes down to willpower. We can't even get a third of the population to wear a simple cloth mask to protect themselves and their loved ones. Our psychology (in the aggregate) is to socialize and enjoy life and provide for loved ones.
There are some signs of hope. In Jared Diamond's book he wrote that on some small islands the people developed a culture that lived sustainably in their limited space. This is maybe impossible on a world wide basis, but we do have examples of success.
The other point is that we do know how to "sell" things to people in order to gain their cooperation. Read Robert Cialdini's books about Persuasion. The thumbnail is that he (and others) have studied how people decide to cooperate (or not). If the elected officials wanted to combat AGW they probably could.
So we have the technology and we probably know how to manage our popular opinion to make this happen, but like you, I'm skeptical that this will happen.
The real sell will come when we, the First World, try to convince the Other Worlds to slow their development, if not halt it. That usually goes over real well.
Can you imagine... after centuries of mouldering, your country's economy is blossoming: new resources are harvested, luxuries are becoming plentiful, conveniences are wide-spread, money and free time are finally taking hold in a new Middle Class - all at the expense of the effluent of cheap energy, disposable packaging, reclaimed landscape. And then the US and Friends and the World Bank ask you to slow your roll.
Lol.
This is nonsense. We can't even build safe nuclear in volume today; this is still partly a research project. Reversing global warming will first require getting to net zero carbon emissions as a prerequisite, and *none* of the things you mention will contribute significantly to that goal. Getting rid of single use plastics? Driving 10 miles to work and back probably emits 20 lbs of CO2; wasting a 1 oz plastic bag isn't in the same ballpark.
And FWIW, replacing coal burning plants with natural gas burning plants is responsible for nearly 100% of the progress the US has made in fighting GW, since natural gas provides about 2X the power as coal per ton of CO2 emissions.
This is correct. Currently, we are on schedule for global resource wars by 2050. Conservation, solar, wind and nuclear won't stop that--it's baked in the atmospheric cake. The only possible way to avert catastrophe is global carbon capture and/or geoengineering.
We'd have to go to a "war footing" in regards to changing the course of the economies of the world...and that's what I'm pointing out.
There's an "airleak" in the biosphere - and no rescue ship on the way. Or even thought of.
I don't think we have the tech for massive carbon capture today.
Changing the world's power source from fossil fuels to a combination of nuclear, solar and wind will take many decades. We better start planning our geoengineering now, because people are greatly underestimating the effort involved in changing all power generation world-wide.
The problem is the same thing that's been at the heart of every problem at every point in history,
nothing good can happen while social conservatives have any place in public life. The history of civilization is cleaning up around the edges of the mess they leave.
Amen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA
Non-human population booms and crashes are common in nature as well. Nature is not in a state of benevolent equilibrium - it's a jungle out there. All instinctive behavior is for the ultimate purpose of reproduction because this is what allows species to exist. There are apparently no natural mechanisms which limit reproduction. Some individual human societies seem to be limited in population, but then other societies arise which are not. So it is natural to consume the environment in pursuit of reproduction.
Population control is difficult. The one thing that seems to make a difference is to educate women and give them more control over their own bodies. It is documented that more education leads to smaller families.
Own bodies???? They do control it and in ways you don't like.
Conservatives universally think human nature is thoughtlessness and self-indulgence.
Dude give it up. Indo European tribes respected nature. It's middle eastern philosophy that hates it.
And by thinking it they encourage it to happen. Plenty of non western societies don't suffer the tragedy of the commons.
My plan? Geoengineering.
Deploy all the satellites we know how to over the poles to reflect light before it reaches earth, simulating ice caps.
Dump iron into the water to stimulate the plankton that eat CO2.
Coat every human structure with the type of reflective material that reflects light in a wavelength the atmosphere cannot absorb as it will reach space.
Pour funds into carbon capture.
Nuclear Fusion. Nothing else matters.
Nope. Nada. Simply not true. Any feasible commercial fusion process will produce tons of fiercely radioactive waste every bit as deadly as the fission kind. _And_ it's a more -- much more -- complex technology.
Fusion's show-stopper has never changed. There is no feasible way to contain the reaction. All the king's horses and all the king's research grants have not changed that. The containment issue is huge, and those plasma schemes don't work, period.
You don't know WTF you're talking about, but when did that ever stop a lazy, stupid "progressive?" LOL
World population more than doubled from 1960. What did you think would happen? Don’t have kids.
For a special note, Bisen was a little misleading in that before the Columbian Exchange, Bisen was not that numerous. A end result of the massive disease driven die off.
Here's my plan:
1 -- Build more nuclear. We need standardized plants that are designed in a more failsafe manner so that they don't trigger melt-downs if power to the reactor fails, as happened in Fukushima.
2 -- Use power from #1 to make more industries carbon neutral, or to power carbon capture technologies.
3 -- start research on injecting cooling aerosols into the atmosphere. The changes required for #1 and #2 are immense -- you're talking about changing how the entire planet generates power, at a minimum. This isn't going to happen in 20 years, it'll be more like 50-70 before new tech and safer nuclear is rolled out in significant amounts. In the mean time, we need a stopgap mechanism, and I can't think of anything else that can be deployed in less than a decade and will have a real effect.
4 -- This is really 1A -- if you're going to roll out nuclear over a large area, you're going to need some international agreements to ensure that these reactors are being run safely.
I agree for the most part. Nuclear can be made much safer if there are a few standard designs replicated throughout the world. If there are design flaws detected down the line, all of the plants can be retrofitted in the same way. This will reduce costs and speed up the time for plants to be on line.
Yeppers. Where intermittent energy sources won't do the trick, modular Gen IV reactors are the way to go. For now, at least.
Half a century ago, our rivers were often lifeless sewers filled with human and industrial waste. We solved that problem by making it a crime to dump such materials in waterways. Climate change is a collective action problem, and we solve such problems through laws. Technology alone won't do it. I'm building a house in a rich, hyper-liberal neighborhood. Everyone is concerned about global warming, but most of the houses are build to the legal minimum in terms of energy efficiency. There's plenty of technology available to improve efficiency and residents can afford it, but they don't use it. They follow the law, and no more.
Also, our focus should be on the supply side, not so much on demand. Norway is very concerned about Global Warming is doing great things on the demand side, such as incentivizing EVs. But they spend every minute of every day sucking oil and natural gas out of the North Sea as fast as they possibly can. To decrease greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere, fossil fuel have to stay in the ground. Energy efficiency is not in itself a solution - see Jevons Paradox. The solution I favor is:
Pass a law that says, by a certain date:
1. Shut down all coal mines and close all oil and gas wells.
2. Stop importing fossil fuels.
3. Stop importing CO2. That is, if a country has not decarbonized, subject its imports to punitive tariffs or forbid them altogether.
The certain prospect of future fossil fuel restrictions will drive present day investment in non-carbon alternatives. If big advanced economies like the US and EU implement this, it will work.