# Climate Change & Energy - Brett hall post - [](https://www.bretthall.org/blog/optimism-and-prophesy)[https://www.bretthall.org/blog/optimism-and-prophesy](https://www.bretthall.org/blog/optimism-and-prophesy) - Or we will try _non-scientific_  things that simply make us feel good without actually achieving anything - Taxation is sometimes seen as a means by which we can punish so-called “evil” industries like coal and oil companies. But this is short sighted. Of course these industries create big problems. But _all_  industries create problems. The size of the problem you create scales with the size of the problem you solve. In the case of the fossil fuel industry the big problem created is air pollution - but the problem solved is that of cheap energy and bringing electricity to those who otherwise would not be able to afford it - My take: - We must go fast, why? - Consider a thought experiment. - Imagine fossil fuels. Some could say we must slow things down, reduce co2 output. In general reduce tech because of the new problems it brings. Eg the Internet brought new problems, it must be reduced. The same for social media. However, this has two huge errors. 1. It does not provide the _upside_ of these things. Consider the upside of the Internet or social media (or potential upside of connecting more people in the case of social media). 2. It falsely assumes that there is some _perfect_ state that if we could simply return to, things would be great indefinitely. This is false. Whether it is an asteroid, global warming (naturally caused), a solar flare, a volcano eruption, etc, there will always be problems. Our best chance is to embrace _speed_ in trying to solve them. We need a society that innovates, is creative, etc. we need to be able to respond to these issues when they arise, and a fast optimistic society with the correct incentives is more likely to do so. 3. Counter arguments? 1. What about experimenting with virus’s that could wipe out mankind? In other words global warming is nice in that it is slow. A super virus could spread in weeks. 2. Same goes for WO mass destruction. 3. In general these are tails events (taleb talks all about this) - [](https://www.bretthall.org/our-most-important-problems.html)[https://www.bretthall.org/our-most-important-problems.html](https://www.bretthall.org/our-most-important-problems.html) - [](https://bretthall.substack.com/p/energy#details)[https://bretthall.substack.com/p/energy#details](https://bretthall.substack.com/p/energy#details) --- Date: 20220620 Links to: #todo Tags: #review References: * []()