I hesitate to say it, but you're probably right. I'm a problem solver, I do a lot of root cause analysis. But as a whole, humanity isn't really driven by logic, it's driven by the survival instinct. So the health of the planet will always fall second to the health of one's children. Which is arguably as it should be.

TBH, I believe we entered the endgame with Bush v. Gore in 2000. All of this (whatever it is, hoopla, chaos) around climate change denial is a natural outcome of people's fear. We know deep down that we can't stop the devastation, so we play shell games to distract and deny. I see that as owning the libs, but that's my impression, through my filter.

So, if we're in the endgame, we should probably be thinking about outside-the-box solutions. If this is the Kobayashi Maru, then there simply isn't a logical way out of this, given our current understanding. Maybe deniers are correct to grok that and internalize the fact that no amount of personal sacrifice can save the climate now.

The kicker though is that we could have stopped it if we started half a century ago. But we chose Reagan over Carter for reasons similar to those outlined above. I feel tremendous resentment around all of that, but that doesn't help us now. Blaming deniers today doesn't solve the problem, so again, it's probably a waste of time.

So, what do we do? What will the solution be, if there is one? Well, based on everything I just said, the closest thing we have to a solution outside the box of human understanding is AI.

It's self-evident now that AI can solve really hard optimization problems like the ones needed for over-unity fusion. That's why I am certain that we'll have fusion power plants before the singularity arrives around 2040 (see Kurzweil for where that prediction comes from).

Also, compared to something like stable diffusion, self-replicating robots are a much more tractable problem. We could have them today for a trifling of money, perhaps $10-100 million for a small team. I think probably that self-replicating drones made of basic materials like wood and salt will re-seed forests.

What I'm saying is that stopping climate change is just under the order of magnitude effort required to terraform a planet. Maybe 1% of that. Granola solutions aren't enough. We need something on the scale of at least industrial agriculture. And as we're all basically just surviving due to wealth inequality, solutions need to be self-funding and self-scaling. AI FTW.

The reason I hesitate to say all of this is that it gives us a false sense of security. "The AI will solve it" will be our mantra for at least the first half of this century. Until the downsides become impossible to ignore. We might go too far and create a prison planet like in Highlander II and The Matrix movies. Then we're grappling with threats even larger than climate change.

In the face of anxiety around those looming threats, I've chosen to turn towards faith-based approaches like meditation and manifestation in my own life. I try to crystalize and evangelize my thoughts in the hopes that all of us working together can figure this stuff out. That can feel defeatist sometimes, so I'm also trying to solve prerequisite problems like how to fund UBI.

For example, looks at SpaceX. Why would they go to all the trouble of building retro rockets running on methane? Because that's what you use to land on Mars and run on the fuel available there. They're breaking down seemingly intractable problems into a series of small steps that can be overcome. That's what we need to do for climate change.

After writing this out, I still believe that this begins with all of us picking ourselves up by our bootstraps on a personal level. But I'm open to the idea that a change in lifestyle isn't enough. We should look beyond that, not just at somehow coming up with the $40,000 to go sustainable, but how to accomplish that without money, through a fundamental change in economies and culture, maybe with something like UBI. A sustainable economy could actually be more attractive than the ones we have now, if it meant a reduction in unfulfilling labor and more passive income for everyone. Then there would be an incentive for change, and it would happen automagically.

When we look at the players currently benefiting and profiting from the status quo, it's easy to see why they prevent such unity and sew division through divisive politics. If there's a root cause in all of this, that's the one I see. It's all connected.

The other comments are great too, but I'll have to pass on responding in the interest of time.