In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
We don’t have time for that.
The way I see it, we have 3 main paths
We cut everything we’re doing, go local and human powered, and adapt to conditions as they change.
Super-intelligence and/or full automation (whichever comes first, we soon get both). It makes capitalism pointless, it lets us expand into space scaling geometrically, and it tells us exactly how we can change things here to maximize habitability
We keep doing what we’re doing until the “just in time” supply chains we use to minimize costs collapse. Either the US military’s plans for this are good and we minimize loss of life, or we starve. Industries collapse immediately, and maybe we lose the ability to produce higher technology - at the very least it won’t be nearly as common. Hopefully we can still work on AI and robotics or there’s no real way out of it
Path 1 is probably not happening. Path 2 and 3 are just a race between the next revolution in technology and the climate. It’s looking pretty close right now - so doing anything to tip the scales, however slightly, is a great idea
It would take 5, maybe 10 years at most to build a Lofstrom loop making it possible to send out unmanned mining craft en masse, and then have the craft process minerals in zero g and then dump the calcium into the ocean. Furnish the magnesium into rebar and run a current theough it when it’s stuck in the deep sea. We could even build nice seasteading islands at the same time with that approach – create more living space while undoing the damage we’ve done to the oceans. Win-win.
Governments are running experiments on SSPSes now, in no small psrt because of climate change.
We absolutely can and should take the space approach now while we still have time.
Speaking of time, we can and should launch a solar shade up there to immediately stop the warming to give us the time we need to decarbonize, and clean up the oceans and forests. A solar shade will cool the Earth without the baggage and environmental problems associated with dumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere as the U.S. and EU are considering.
Of all the options, the solar shade might be the most mandatory, and would be very doable cheaply with a Lofstrom loop.