We have, as always, good and bad carbon news from the latest Conference of the Parties, COP28. There is getting to be more good news, and the bad news is now getting serious pushback. We have been at this for more than 50 years now against furious and massively funded opposition, and now it’s all happening.
As I have often said, the funny thing about tipping points is that nothing seems to happen until you reach one, and then everything seems to happen at once.
Good News Thursday: The Fifty-Year Rule in Politics
Major social change requires changing minds, and at the same time it requires that its opponents die off in the normal manner. This tends to shift opinion by about 1% annually, in favorable cases, so that from a standing start we can get to a voting majority in favor of the new policy in about 50 years.
Global Warming was predicted in the 19th century, and verified in both measurements and insurance claims in the early 1970s. The Fossil Fool industry hired the tobacco denialists to mount a furious campaign of lies, gaslighting, and political lobbying. They got a majority of the population back then to buy their disinformation, and convinced Ronald Reagan to take down Jimmy Carter’s solar water heaters from the White House roof.
Well, their fifty years are up.