In the Year 2050

When John Kennedy set the goal of going to the moon, he said ‘by the end of the decade’ and, by golly, they pulled it off. And that required the development of technology that did not exist in 1962.
Joe Biden has said he will get us to carbon neutrality by 2050, which requires the development of no new technology at all. 30 years. By 2050, I will be 96 years old and Joe Biden about 13 years older than that. So, it’s a bullshit statement on his part. He’s not actually doing anything to reach this goal and if 2050 comes along and we’re not any closer to carbon neutrality than we are today, nobody’s going to blame Biden. Biden, and his promise, will be part of a history long forgotten.
We could, if we were serious, reach carbon neutrality in a couple of years. We need enough solar panels and wind turbines to power our entire electrical grid, including trains, and charging stations for electric cars and buses. Some people say it will have to include nuclear power. Personally, I suspect most people who post comments like that are shilling for the nuclear industry, but if that’s what’s needed, that’s what’s needed. It’s still technology that already exists. It’s not as if we have to invent the space suit, or figure out how to escape from the atmosphere. It includes the planting of billions, maybe trillions of trees, but that could be done in a couple of years. There are billions of unemployed people in the world, and planting a tree does not take a long time. It includes more urban gardens, more rooftop gardens, and more small, organic farms, but it’s still all stuff we can do.
It also means we need to stop fracking, and using pesticides and herbicides, but to stop doing something is not nearly as difficult as to figure out something that’s never been done before.
30 years. If Biden does nothing, and some kid who is in kindergarten now invents a carbon-extractor device that will pull all of the air pollution out of the sky just like a big vacuum cleaner 25 years from now, his pledge will be fulfilled.
But, it’s equally likely that we’ll all just be completely fucked by then and Joe Biden won’t care. Because he’ll be dead.