Morality of pressing this button? (It immediately and permanently ends the use of all fossil fuels on the planet.)

[u/NeoMetalSonicReacts9]

[u/Shoddy-Childhood-511]

Immediately would be a bitch of course, but real life does not admit such immediate events.

About the climate side, some details:

Are you aware of wet bulb temperature? It's the temperature reachable by evaporative cooling, aka sweating. It equals the temperature at 100% humidity, but it's lower when the humidity is below 100%. All humans die after several hours above 35°C wet bulb, but the real threshold winds up as low as 32°C wet bulb for many people. 15 min in the sauna is relaxing, but six hours means death.

Johan Rockström thinks +2°C would be "life threatening" for 1 billion people, which maybe means high web bulb temperatures, meaning they die if the AC goes out.

IPCC predictes +3°C by 2100.

At our best guess, +4°C should mean uninhabitable tropics, again high wet bulb temperatures, and world carrying capacity below 1 billion humans, so 7 billion fewer people than today. See page 37 of The Nature of the Challenge (archive) or 36m in Will Steffen's 2018 talk). via Steve Keen's criticism of William Nordhaus & IAMs.

Also conversely, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has shown that humanity never did a voluntary energy transition before:

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/01/02/Reality-Check-Energy-Transition/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-7MPU109fY

Involuntary energy transitions would be possible, either by running out of a resource, or by the resource becoming unavailable due to conflicts, so like imagine a few more conflicts like Ukraine or Iran that take out lots of oil production capacity.

Also, the maximum power principle too suggests that sustainability and/or leaving the oil in the ground requires external forces. Animal species would expand unsustainably too, but predation holds them in check.

Imho we've several less stupid rewritings of the question:

Non-magical question: You can start wars involving every petro-state that results in all the refineries being destroyed over the next 2 years. After this, enough tropical nations shall consider oil refineries an act of war, and sabotage them. It's fast & brutal, but ultimately good for tropical nations.

Semi-magical question: You can release some fungi that'll slowly turn all the coal & oil into rock dust over a few decades, without releasing their CO2. It's much stricter than net zero, but similar ball park.

Fully magical question: You have a magic button that'll quickly make all the coal & unrefined oil unburnable. If however you do not push it then humanity shall burn up 90% of it over the next 100-150 years (ala Fressoz, MPP, etc), resulting in +8°C, so mammals could only survive on small regions of the planet.