Doom and gloom that is somewhat substantiated by material reality. The world is getting warmer and nothing is done about it. Far right populism is getting more and more popular, with no end in sight. No way am I bringing kids in this environment.
I've found a lot of parallels between now and 1910s-1930.
Thru genealogy I see how families and extended families lived together to afford living expenses. MultiFamily housing was common and jobs were within walking distance. The automobile dispersed jobs and families, taking all the above away.
The needs we have now are no longer possible to fill.
"people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours."
will things still get somewhat bad, certainly yeah. but there's a very real chance we're on track to a mostly carbon free future in a ~ decade. Im pessimistic about a lot of things but there is a lot to be optimistic about here.
Putting up solar panels is great, but what is often missing from these optimistic pieces is the fact that globally, fossil fuel usage is still going up. Even in the west: coal, oil and gas plants aren't decommissioned as more solar farms go up (and economically, why would they?). And let's not get into transportation, where I don't see muany realistic plans to replace the current fleet of vehicles by electric ones.
So, all of this to say, I do not believe we'll live in a carbon-free world in a decade. At best, I can imagine something like that in 2060, and even then... My point is that we're already in a +3°C world when the "absolute limit" was set to +2°C 10 years ago. And it's not slowing down. We're currently on the worst trajectory envisioned by previous IPCC reports.
