Mustang
Gold Member
For one thing, everyone has to change the way they view the problem. We should understand that new sources of renewable energy can help to create new industries and not just worry about putting oil companies out of business. Hell, they've got enough money now that they could divest and get in on the ground floor of new energy businesses.
Refining the whole nuclear power industry and making those power plants smaller and safer would help. That means that liberals have got to stop having such a knee jerk reaction to nuclear power.
Secondly, countries, industry, and even average citizens have to get serious about reducing pollution and waste. That includes developing ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and preventing it from getting up there in the first place. That means scrubbers on power plants and pumping liquid CO2 back into the ground.
Additionally, the whole concept of using something and then throwing it out just to buy a new one should be abandoned. Products should be built to last instead of being built to toss away.
City planning should be improved to reduce the need for driving.
Public transportation should be improved.
The amount of packaging for products should be reduced.
Recycling should be made mandatory for all products where the energy cost for recycling is less than the energy cost is for making something new. But even recycled products can and should be reused in different ways. Some industries already do a pretty good job at that when you consider that pretty much all of plant and animal products and byproducts are used in one thing or another. If it can be done so successfully with organic matter, it can also be done with inorganic products and by products.
New forests should be planted. Gardens should be encouraged.
Energy efficient products should be introduced.
There are hundreds of things that could and should be done. All it really takes is some relatively easy creative thinking that's taken seriously instead of summarily dismissed. For example, a few decades ago, the US used to tow old ships out to the deeper parts of the ocean to sink them. At some point, marine biologists were able to convince gov'ts to sink ships in relatively shallow water nearer to land in order to create an artificial environment for sea life which helped improve the fishing industry. It was a damn good idea, but nobody had ever thought of it that way before.
But it's absolutely essential that people and gov'ts must cooperate. If people and gov'ts spent their time and energy working at the problem instead of arguing about everything from A to Z about it, we actually could make progress.
As far as the economy goes, a little hit on GDP in the short term is the equivalent of pacing yourself in a race. It's preferable to run a little slower so you can run longer instead of running fast and then running out of steam and not being able to go the distance. So, even if economic growth is not what it might otherwise be, that's better shoving the world economy in the hole like a man who revs his engine at a high RPM until he ruins it and it won't run anymore at all.
Think of it like crop rotation. Farmers used to grow the same crop year after year until the soil couldn't grow much of anything anymore because the nutrients were depleted. It was only after farmers learned to rotate crops or let some fields lie fallow for a year or two that farmers were able to maximize their yields in the years that they planted. People and gov'ts have got to start to think longer term instead of just racing from quarter to quarter as if the most important thing in the world were quarterly profit and loss statements.
He never came back 
