An intelligent friend found this argument about the climate crisis plausible

[orthoclad]

4. The key phrase in the quote is

Last edited Sat Apr 1, 2023, 01:43 AM - Edit history (1)

"without hurting economic upliftment"

That's the tell, the little facial tic that exposes the true motive behind that article. It's a fairly meaningless phrase. What is meant by "hurting economic uplift"? Whose economic uplift?

I see it as yet another attempt by the fossil wealthy to extract the maximum wealth they can before things crash down. Ask the 3000 dead in Puerto Rico, the 2000 dead in New Orleans, the people of Paradise, California and all the other burnt areas of the now-arid West what they think of economic uplift. The poor people of India skating perilously close to unsurvivable heat and humidity, or the poor of Bangladesh waiting for the ocean to close over their world.

Is this the economic uplift that the article speaks of?
Congressional Budget Office: Trends in the Distribution of Family Wealth, 1989 to 2019
?itok=fh64bNke
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58533

I can just as easily say that economic uplift consists of making the rich pay taxes and compensation for the consequences of their greed.

Holding global heating to between 2C and 3C will spell unspeakable pain and disaster for millions of people, maybe billions. Thousands of scientists worked for decades to reach this conclusion, including Exxon's own scientists. And now they are telling us that we are out of time to waste. Any delay in acting will require enormously more effort.

It's time to take a collective deep breath and begin a Manhattan Project, a Moon Shot, of global heating prevention - because Nature doesn't negotiate. We can achieve full employment and eliminate poverty in the US in the process. Is that "economic uplift"?

edit: I'd like to superimpose the rise in GHG generation over the same time span of the upper ten percent curve above, or better yet, the upper 1%. I'm gathering the data to create that, then I have to find someone on Mastodon to post it so I can link to it. After all, the closest I come to punching nazis is to boycott the bird cage. I expect a good fit just from looking at the curves. Might be a strong correlation coefficient. Is there a way to just draw a line on an image on DU?