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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

Yes unfortunately the sweetspot time for incremental change was 25 years ago and we elected Bush twice . Although honestly I think a lot of the climate proposals you see from the late 90s/early 2000s had some significant issues that would've in some ways made emissions worse than the status quo via unintended consequences (e.g. climate proposals from that period called for MASSIVE investments/subsidies for biofuels for cars)

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michaelflutist's avatar

The sweet spot time was the 1980s. Had Carter been re-elected, he could have continued to concentrate on conservation and solar energy. But the Supreme Court's selection of G.W. Bush may have been the death knell for any sort of effective relatively mild climate transition policy.

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Henrik's avatar

Ooh yeah even more massive biofuels would have been a disaster.

Honestly, hybridization out of a “peak oil”/efficiency argument would have been the way to go, and battery tech would have been much better for electrification by present day

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

Yes bumping the fuel standards up to what would require essentially all vehicles to be at least hybrid would've been the way, but boy back in say 2002 with oil so low, I don't see how you could've ever gotten the political winds to blown those sails.

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