https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1794231057815867807
Slow website? Make it 10x faster with a few tweaks. Spending too much on services in your business? The first audit can easily cut down costs 10x.
What about global warming? If we are unintentionally warming the earth, we can easily get 10x the results with intentional manipulation -- in the direction we choose. In practice, it appears that the leverage is million-fold. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere (where it stays for years and doesn't cause acid rain) cools the planet over 1 million times as effectively as CO2 heats it.
Now personally, I suspect that a warmer, wetter planet will be better for humanity, not worse -- but in any case, there are many geo-engineering solutions to climate change. It's much, much cheaper to use million-fold leverage than wreck the industrial economy.
The problem is that environmentalists consider geo-engineering to minimize human impact automatically good (hence the ban on sulfur in fuels) and geo-engineering to improve human flourishing automatically bad. So when the International Maritime Organization banned sulfur in tanker fuel in 2020, this was considered good, even though it was geo-engineering that noticeably increased global temperature. By contrast, targeted SO2 release into the stratosphere, or iron seeding, or any of the dozen measures that have dramatic leverage over climate are considered automatically bad.