Forget 'Climate Change' -- Now It's 'Climate Restoration'

In the end, somehow we knew it would come to this. The Left, in the form of the think thank RAND, has gone full Luddite:

Since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, society has organized efforts to limit the magnitude of climate change around the concept of stabilization — that is, accepting some climate change but holding it within acceptable bounds. This report offers an initial exploration of the concept of climate restoration — that is, approaches that seek to return atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to preindustrial levels within one to two generations. Using a simple integrated assessment model, the analysis examines climate restoration through the lens of risk management under conditions of deep uncertainty, exploring the technology, economic, and policy conditions under which it might be possible to achieve various climate restoration goals and the conditions under which society might be better off with (rather than without) a climate restoration goal. This report also explores near-term actions that might help manage the risks of climate restoration.

Take a moment and try to grasp how utterly demented this is. So great is the cultural-Marxist hatred for modernity — Marx himself was a child of the Industrial Revolution and developed his crackpot scheme based on mid-19th-century conditions — that, like the Luddite, they wish to return to some halcyon period before… well, you draw the line wherever you like.

Key Findings

• Restoring atmospheric concentrations to preindustrial levels could prove possible at acceptable cost in two scenarios: (1) a best-case carbon capture scenario in which direct air capture technology achieves its most optimistic cost and performance assumptions and (2) a low-cost capture and abatement scenario in which reducing greenhouse gas emissions also proves relatively inexpensive.
• Setting a climate restoration goal could catalyze the deployment of negative emissions technologies that remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. But such a goal could also reduce the likelihood of successfully decarbonizing the global economy. Pursuing a climate restoration goal would avoid such a moral hazard under conditions in which successful negative emissions technology is at least half as likely as successful decarbonization.
• If climate restoration proves possible and catalytic, it would reduce the risks of extreme climate change and make meeting other climate goals more likely.
• In the longer term, the pursuit of climate restoration has some favorable policy persistence characteristics. If the technology proves viable, a growing climate restoration industry might promote policies favorable to its continuation and growth.