Climate-Related Death of Coral Around World Alarms Scientists
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Imagine the startup, who don't have customers yet and just gives up (because what's point, they will not come). The more traction they have, the more snowballish it become.
How regular people can help?
1) Try to use renewable materials around you (bags, not plastic bags, use the fabric)
2) Sort the garbage (don't know about US), but in Europe this is real thing (organic, general, electronics, etc)
3) Try to limit the car or any fossil fuel usage in your household.
3.1) Don't have 1 car per each family member
4) Don't buy and throw away clothes too often, if you do, return to second hand
5) Use energy saver functions at it's max
6) Stop searching for someone to blame and "Just DO IT!" (c) Shia
How IT people can help?
1) Write less energy consumption programs and servers, they eat too much now
2) Move toward real innovations in "green" tech, not the pseudo ones to collect money and bail
Samsung once done the big screen phone, how the iPhone users called them? "Shovel" phones / users. Then came this "innovative" Apple iPhone with the same big screen and it suddenly became "mainstream". Don't be afraid to be first in something good, especially if this is a future of your planet.
Don't expect that someone will make this problems "go away" or people fly away from here. Humans managed to make orbit a trash can too, so we don't go anywhere in far future.
While you do this the capitalists will be trying to move all the 3rd world people to the 1st world lifestyle. Just to balance things out.
Currently this always looks like, hey, X doing Y times more than I do, why I should care? This will not change anything.
Blaming China now is quite not fair, because other countries already caused this global warming, not China, they now just want to grow like the others.
This mindset of modern humans lead to lost of humanity itself. Most of the people don't care about others, they are selfish. Until every bit of climate change hit them personally (like your house underwater, boom!) then they will start to think about that and demand changes.
So "Plan B" will be waiting when this thing will blow into the face of those, but as always this will be too late.
The largest impact will be by China, India and Africa, so we'll quickly need to popularize green energy such as solar and perhaps the kinds of nuclear technology which can't be used for weapons (nuclear waste might be preferable over damages caused by pollution and climate change).
We need to be decisive and strong, which might involve bold and expensive media events and populism.
The ones who are able to think in the long term need to stop fighting themselves for superficial issues, political correctness and minor details. We need to strengthen our arguments instead and keep in mind that we are following the same ultimate goal.
Do I want to give up my car? No. What if I did want to; how would that change my outlook? I'd want cities and a job that accommodates those desires. What if everyone wanted to? Those cities would be built and politics might make cars more restricted.
There are hybrid, full electric cars out there, so if something hard to be changed, we can try to replace it with more optimal.
Going back Dark Age again will not help a lot and people will not agree to this.
Those are both ways you can affect climate change.
Asking if someone supports politicians that claim to be eco-conscious while raising campaign money, who are almost universally left-leaning, is far from "neutral". There are places on the Internet to espouse political support for either side. This, however, is not one of them.
Environmentally friendly legislation can be a bit more diverse but that doesn't really exist now, emissions is all people discuss.
Historically, the Republican Party gave us the National Park System and the Clean Air Act, and Soviet officials thought green air around factories was a sign of progress.
Someone proposed the rhetorical question of "what politicians do you support" as one of the "ways you can affect climate change". The poster is not saying "You should vote (in a particular way)", nor even generalizing what positions the respective parties take, just that voting affects climate policy, which affects climate. The poster literally only said "the way you vote affects the way climate is handled", and -you- are inferring a bias, and a political motivation, and crying foul.
By that logic, we can't talk about voting being a means to -any- end. "How can we prevent the TPP" "Vote out those in favor of it" "NO NO NO, POLITICAL COMMENTARY, GTFO!"
Talk of tearing the whole system down or whatever is totally acceptable, even if (or maybe precisely because) it's probably also unrealistic. However once a subject comes up where one group is basically wrong, it becomes a lot more difficult to talk about in a forum like this because some folks actually do have to justify their voting habits in the context of e.g. climate change, instead of all of us just kind of posting at each other "those politicians eh?" all day and getting very little actually done.
When it comes to a lot of tech issues, pretty much everyone in Washington is fucking awful and we can find consensus on that (with a few notable exceptions that show up in every thread to concern troll everyone else - not going to name names). However there is only one party in the US right now that is broadly sticking its fingers in its ears and screaming that climate change isn't happening.
Contrast this with a lot of tech issues, where you can throw up your hands and claim the whole system is fucked, and that both sides have their faults in roughly equal proportion. You're not forced to think about the consequences of supporting one party or the other as much.
True, and they are probably at least a small net flow into the atmosphere. But:
"There are hundreds of millions of cows (and other livestock) that did not exist before."
... that part doesn't matter: agriculture is by nature carbon-neutral (except if you count mechanization aspects like fertilizers + fuel).
But you're missing the fact that some of the CO2 captured by the grass is farted by the cows as methane, CH4.
About 1% of the CO2 is released as CH4.
CH4 is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas. It's one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Luckily methane has a half life of 7 years in the atmosphere, so anything we do to reduce methane emissions is likely to be helpful.
Especially as China and other countries continue eating more meat at higher and higher rates.
Additionally, something has to ship all that food to the cows.
> Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years. -“Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2006
[1] From this excellent documentary: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/
This estimate says that livestock contribute 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gasses: http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/
As far as opportunities to curb your own carbon footprint, use one of the calculators available on the web. For many people, jet airplane travel dominates the 'discretionary' portion of GHG pollution.
If cows add 1 unit per year and the source of that unit is ultimately CO2, then the cows aren't actually making things worse than they are now.
https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/n2o.ht...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas:
"For example, the direct radiative effect of a mass of methane is about 72 times stronger than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame[20] but it is present in much smaller concentrations so that its total direct radiative effect is smaller, in part due to its shorter atmospheric lifetime. On the other hand, in addition to its direct radiative impact, methane has a large, indirect radiative effect because it contributes to ozone formation. Shindell et al. (2005)[21] argue that the contribution to climate change from methane is at least double previous estimates as a result of this effect.[22]"
"Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 ± 3 years. The 2007 IPCC report lists the GWP as 72 over a time scale of 20 years, 25 over 100 years and 7.6 over 500 years.[20] A 2014 analysis, however, states that although methane's initial impact is about 100 times greater than that of CO2, because of the shorter atmospheric lifetime, after six or seven decades, the impact of the two gases is about equal, and from then on methane's relative role continues to decline.[37] The decrease in GWP at longer times is because methane is degraded to water and CO2 through chemical reactions in the atmosphere."
Immediately following this last paragraph they show a table which says that carbon dioxide has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) of 1 over all time periods, while that of methane is 72 over 20 years, 25 over 100 years, and 7.6 over 500 years.
> If we where starting from zero then sure they would both have a large impact but they are both in sufficient quantities that lot's of them are breaking down making the future contribution have a negotiable net effect.
Maybe it's too early in the morning for me, but I don't understand the point you're trying to make here, and I am apparently not the only one. Care to clarify?
This proportion is also likely to go up significantly in the next 30 years. If you want to get a more visceral sense of that, try changing the "Diet" settings in this climate change mitigation model http://tool.globalcalculator.org/ . For more of an eye opener, change the "examples pathways" to IEA 6DS (current trends) and then just manipulate the "Type of meat" parameter. Simply by replacing 64% of expected ruminant consumption (beef, lamb etc.) with other meats (chicken, pork, etc.), we can decrease total worldwide emissions by 43%.
I've known climate-change deniers. They hold on to their political-economic religion as it literally destroys their world. And they're not the worst. The worst are the enablers, who often call themselves "moderates".
It's virtually impossible to move forward without fully acknowledging this fact.
This is happening right now, it's not a future thing. We're dealing with it whether we want to or not.
Sadly, your natural gas heater is currently more carbon friendly than electric heat. In an interconnected grid, what you are using is probably offset by a mix of coal and gas generation, and to get to you it's suffering transmission loss. Solar hot water is a big win, though, especially if you are electric there. Same with insulation. Eat less meat. Repair vs replace.
Good luck to all of us.
edit: full disclosure, I replied to you without reading the article. I just read it. Holy shit. I wish there was someone that could comfort me that between ocean acidification, conveyor current shutdown, Greenland/Ross shelf based melting, threats to krill lifecycle, precipitation changes, and changes in farmland suitability (among others) ... we are looking at mass human die-offs over most people heres' lifetimes. When you look at the level of interconnection across the world, specialization, fragility of our complex systems... it's hard for me to not come up with a back of envelope figure ~6 billion deaths from starvation & conflict. Based on our resource extraction rate, it could easily make this the peak of human civilization.
There was a bit on the news about the massive bleaching event up north, a few mentions on tv. Once in the paper.
My current minister for the environment Greg Hunt, or as he is know amongst his admirers: " Fucking Festering Cunt Hunt", and his jolly band of Liberals (don't be confused, in Australia "Liberal" means far-right fucking nutjob) could care less about the environment and have, on national TV, dismissed climate change as "absolute crap".
We elected this government, and there is a significant chance that we will vote for them again before the end of the year. Fuck me dead if I know why.
I apologize for the cussing, but I believe its appropriate.
(edit: added more fucks)
If you want to help scale clean energy technology and get a healthy dose of optimism in the process, we're hiring: http://genability.com/careers/vp_of_engineering.html
At what point does this become so scary that something happens to increase the taxes on fossil fuels so that consumption will go down?
Falling renewable prices are not enough, and use-based taxes are the single best way to let individuals make their own decisions about what/how much to use.
Carbon credits are a good market-based solution too, but it seems likely that people and industries will try to game the system.
It seems like a revolution is necessary to stop them from acting against humanity's long term existence for their short term financial gain.
Reminds me a bit of banning plastic bags in California to help the ocean. That's lovely, but given Asia dumps something like 150 times the amount plastics into the ocean, so is basically meaningless.
They were banned because they don't decompose, so they end up all over the place. Not just in the ocean, but on the beach, in creeks, lakes, anywhere near a highway, etc. As an example local to Silicon Valley, Stevens Creek used to be completely clogged with plastic bags. It's gotten a lot better now.
Of course any wasteland or street is still littered with fast food plastic, plastic bottles and the excessive packaging found in most supermarkets.
We have slightly effective recycling schemes for a tiny proportion of what we use, and massive amounts of recycling end up shipped to the developing world to be dumped. Manufacturers of TVs, appliances, IoT toys and any thing else using plastics aren't required to own their debris at end of lifespan.
So, as is typical with modern politics, we've had a token gesture that affects the public but utterly avoids the real issue.
The oceans are doomed unless we grow up and own our debris as a species.
"Paper or Plastic?
How many plastic bags does the US use in one year? 10 bags per grocery store trip x 2 trips per week x 52 weeks per year = 1000 bags per person per year. 300 x 10^6 people in the U.S. = 300 x 10^11 bags in the US per year.
Is this a lot? Compared to what? A roll of bags weighs a few ounces so there are about 200 bags/lb Your 10^3 bags weigh about 5 pounds.
The 500 gallons of gasoline you burned last year weighs 4000 pounds (2 tons).
Your 10^3 bags are irrelevant. (Just don’t litter)."
...Or use a re-usable bag ;)
I want to read "How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint Of Everything" by Mike Berners-Lee. It addresses similar disconnections on how we think about our impact on the climate, and the steps we take to try and do something. For example, people who bike everywhere, but eat foods shipped from all over the world over local produce.
I agree that focus are many times misdirected and ineffective, but that's no reason not to try.
China signed a climate deal with the US to limit emissions for the first time in 2014. In 2015 they and earlier this year they signed a global deal on climate also.
Leading and being by example can lead to change.
China dumps a lot of CO2, and it's growing. http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/sci...
One could say this about both sides of this issue. Clean tech has utilized an enormous amount of lobbying and been given substantial subsidies as a result - despite the lack of appreciable results.
Solar would continue to grow if it were economically viable on its own. It's getting closer and I hope it gets there. But when I said "appreciable results" I meant the introduction of economically viable alternatives, absent subsidies.
The scary thing is that these reefs are so incredibly diverse & their creation took millions of years. Millions of years to create and they can be globally destroyed in just 200 or so years.
It's also scary is to consider what else may be balanced just as precariously.
Slight increases make it impossible for some creatures to create shells. Those creatures are key parts of the food chain, which means that fisheries (already under sever pressure from over-fishing) risk total collapse.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140502-ocean...
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidificati...
But not all species are going to be vulnerable to this. Some grow thicker shells. http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/ocean-acidification--a-r...
> Under very high experimental CO2 conditions, the shells of clams, oysters, and some snails and urchins partially dissolved. But other species seemed as if they would not be harmed, and crustaceans, such as lobsters, crabs, and prawns, appeared to increase their shell-building (see interactive).
The entire discussion around coral reefs has been going on since I was young and can remember(at least 20-odd years). It was always emotional (think of the children level guilt-tripping, almost), and was always "assumed" and dictated. There was never any convincing, discussing; it was just the way it is and we as young children were to accept it.
And despite all of that, we as a society have spoken the other way around and gone ahead and potentially ruined the delicate environment required for these creatures. It's who a majority of us are. Perhaps not who we should be, or who we'd like to be, but this is largely of our doing and our inability to convince those in power and the rest of society to protect the things we value.
If Japan is losing population to climate change, if the US is losing population to climate change, if the EU is losing population to climate change, THEN we will see change.
Deaths in Indonesia, middle East, Africa, South + Central America won't be enough to inspire change. The people who have the power won't act until they feel directly threatened.
Do you think any of that evidence is terrifying to skeptics? If not, think about why not.
Hilarious considering the truth.
You're jumping to conclusions on the actual solution to the problem.
I suggest unpacking this problem a bit more. Given the time scales, and potential delay between addition of CO2 into the atmosphere and consequence, I imagine that we should also be thinking "How do we adjust to our new climate?". "Taxes, now" is short sighted.
The US has done a lot to help out climate change and the environment. We have all kinds of EPA standards on our vehicles (that are actually followed), which have been in place for at least a decade or more. I can go to most major cities and not feel like I'm choking from the rancid air.
These taxes only end up strangling our economy because we follow the rules and other countries go un-checked because there is virtually no penalty.
"Carbon credits are a good market-based solution too, but it seems likely that people and industries will try to game the system."
Carbon credits are a joke. Huge companies pay for them and then just continue polluting. I thought the goal was to fix our environment, not make carbon credit companies wealthy. Money shouldn't give you a free pass to pollute.
Are we also going to tax electric vehicles because the batteries cause damage to the environment (and we don't have a good way to dispose of them yet)? How about the electricity used to charge the vehicle itself? Will that be taxed as well unless it's solar/wind/hydro?
Do you have citations for this?
I don't see any reason to say the batteries damage the environment.
The damage to the environment may not be egregious, but it is clear enough that it is there.
I know this process can be quite slow, but on a long enough time frame it's conceivable there may be no net loss and possibly even a gain global reef acreage?
But coral is built to respond gradually over decades. It's never going to be able to migrate in time at this rate.
Coral reef ecosystems take centuries to establish themselves and mature. They can't simply grow legs and walk a couple miles north every year.
What "really bad things" would you or your children suffer, should all the corals suddenly become sentient and beam into outer space? Just curious.
"Well don't worry, we'll just get food from somewhere else" is not a real answer. At some point, life on a dead planet just isn't worth it anymore.
We are looking at the devastation of an entire habitat. Many species that rely on that habitat may cease to exist. As a consequence, many species that eat animals from that habitat may disappear too.
Worst-case, we're faced with the disappearance of an entire food chain. And since many large ocean species travel the entire world, the consequences will not remain local.
1. Temperatures drop.
2. Temperature variability increases. (Seasons are more meaningful away from the equator.)
The second issue, of temperature variability, is a main problem that prevents reefs from migrating away from the equator in response to global warming. The corals can't tolerate a wide range of temperatures.
The other problem, as you say, is the time frame. Reefs are built up over thousands of years, and we are warming and acidifying the oceans over mere decades.
(And ocean acidification isn't helped at all by moving away from the equator.)
It's estimated that wasted food contributes 13-17% to aggregate global warming.
Who will write an app to help people waste less food and monetize by reduce costs and savings for users and businesses?
grass, goat, pig, sheep, cow, person, dog, cat
Currently we catch wild fish to eat. That will cease some day (we'll run out) & we will grow most of our fish in farms.
So.... these are probably the last 100 years of wildlife. Unless people make drastic changes.
We have already sterilised much of the earths surface.
We need to stop writing apps to monetize what is already provided to consumers as free services and focus on the big issues of today.
We should use technology to solve the biggest problems. Our talent to code and design systems should be used in ways that move society further towards sustainability.
Climate change could ruin everything we have ever built. Everything we ever do in our lives including our families could fade forever if we don't act swiftly.
The people who want to solve life threatening problems will do so and the people who want to make "trivial" apps to make lots of money will do so.
Asking us to just do the former is pointless.
Also what about people who aren't entrepreneurs and work at industries like finance, law, and first country problems? Shouldn't they be held under the same scrutiny? What's so special about tech entrepreneurs that they'll should be more responsible? Knowing how to code Ruby and deploy in Docker is not the same skill set needed to come up with climate change solutions.
I had not considered that every time a person complains about duplication of apps, or developers that make trivial apps for money (instead of 'changing the world'), the same standard should be applied to the tens of millions of service and industrial jobs that are mostly clones of each other and could be considered trivial by the same standard.
For example: we really need to do something about all of these people working at Costco, trying to make their car and rent payments. It's ridiculous, the duplication of labor going on, where people aren't doing anything original.
That would be considered a cruel, borderline malevolent statement. And following through on it would result in a hundred million people being unemployed. Somehow the standard changes when a person is mostly seeking to earn a living off of an app however.
I'm referring to innovators in computer science who say they innovate when they simply recreate. It's a waste of efforts
Duplication of work is a cardinal sin of technology and automation. Millions of jobs have already been destroyed by software, and the rate of obsoletion is only growing. A few thousand LoC and a couple racks of hardware can destroy tens of thousands of jobs. That's why software companies are highly valued. Aggregated across the entire industry and we've replaced millions of jobs already... Hopefully we'll see that number hit tens of millions within a couple decades.
Apps... most apps are frivolous, bordering toys. They add value like a hot dog vendor adds value to a baseball game. Why would app creators be treated any differently?
We also want more engineers and other specialists in government - but decades of bureaucratic creep and managerialism on the one hand and neoliberal-driven cost cutting and privatisation on the other have made government, like academia, very unattractive to young smart people.
So it's not a question of people already in finance, law or tech startups switching over to fighting climate change - as you said, they aren't in the same skill set. We need to train the next generation to fight climate change across a number of fronts - climate study, geoengineering, energy, transport, flood defense, food production and so on. And right now all the incentives are pushing that generation in entirely the wrong direction.
We want to solve this problem using the waterfall method, but let's just do it with scrum / MVP / agile / GTD.
Ship those panels now. Get the Army and national reserve to install them. Anyone that has been unemployed too long, can start installing panels.
Innovation could come around offshore panel farms, v2g, battery improvements.
Or is it that there aren't enough Musks? If so, sure, but there are plenty of really smart, really hardworking engineers helping implement his vision.
Oh my God Oh my God We are all going to die alarmed
I have bad feeling about this alarmed
Or Hm how odd alarmed
> There is an (apocryphal, for sure) anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian army headquarters in the middle of the First World War: the Germans sent the message "Here, on our part of the front, the situation is serious, but not catastrophic," to which the Austrians replied "Here, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious."
His point is that this is the situation we find ourselves in today: ecologically and socially, the world is falling apart. We can see the catastrophe coming but we don't take it seriously.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and...
Also, it bears noting that these facts have been well understood for some time now. Its simply being ignored because it is inconvenient. Its a great pity that catastrophe is needed to force the masses to force the powers that be to affect change, all the while those powers were very much aware of the coming crisis. How could they not be ?
There is a lot of complaining that nothing is being done. There should be some basic steps aside from accepting your problem to begin with, and that is to study some solutions:
#1. Propose and study solutions to match your conclusions of climate change - I don't find too much here compared with the amount of continuing studies on the climate.
And very important to get intellect to act -
#2. Who's going to pay for it, and on whose back falls the labor to implement #1?
Financial illiteracy is the big problem nobody talks about when discussing STEM deficiencies. You may need to build a skyscraper, but if you have 2 guys, 100 bucks and 1 day, you are going to be living in a lean-to, or a makeshift tent at the end of the day, no matter how much you complain or dream. I try and do my best to live minimally, because I prefer it, it makes me feel more peaceful and less distracted, and gives me plenty of time to read and think. I don't preach that all should live my way. On a more cheerful note, I found a Tweet today about Sweet Meteor of Death, but it was in reaction to people's political apathy or neuroses over the coming U.S. elections. An apocolyptic meteor for POTUS 2016! You should buy the tee shirt and smile!
Its asymptotic to your point, but practically - assuming we don't destroy ourselves this century - we will spend a lot of resources when we are a trans-universal space-faring race to preserve the Earth in the same way we spend time preserving historical art and architecture.
(I live in the southern hemisphere, so for selfish reasons I'd prefer this apocalypse to take place in the northern hemisphere).
http://www.theonion.com/article/nations-experts-give-up-682
and
http://www.theonion.com/article/experts-say-best-option-now-...
You might be alarmed by a very specific change like this one, and you might want to do everything possible to stop it. That's completely understandable and I wish you success in your advocacy. But the way I see it, change is perhaps the only constant feature of our world, and change absolutely is going to mean death of a bunch of coral sometimes. Go far enough with the rhetoric and it sounds like an argument that the climate shouldn't change, which is futile.
I hope the mainstream environmentalism will someday "grow up" to a point where people understand that change is inevitable, and that as long as we exist we actively participate in the change. Then rather than setting arbitrary "natural" criteria and bemoaning corruption like depressed Platonists, and rather than starting witch hunts after people, we can focus on how that change should be planned for and what actually can or should be done to manage it.
But don't expect to be treated with respect.
You're making a pitiful excuse to dismiss trends that threaten trillions of dollars of inherited infrastructure investment that is at risk of being made useless, and that threaten the comfort and safety of billions of people.
Again I don't agree that the threat indicated by these trends is as grave as you claim. I agree there is strong evidence of a grave threat to this coral ecosystem, and Australian coastal tourism.
On the other hand have you really taken enough time to consider the consequences if your faction is wrong? Have you acknowledged that there could be bad consequences in that case too?
Typically I hear "we would be taking better care of the environment anyway so win-win" but nobody ever adds "by granting loads of new power to governments and big institutions, which may or may not be corrupted just as big and powerful institutions have been corrupted throughout history" and that is a significant detail!
Out of curiosity, I'm interested to know which of the following descriptions you consider more accurate:
a) The climate/environment situation is exactly as bad as the mainstream warnings indicate. The only hope at this point is if we can start a large long-term centrally planned project to administer the solution as decided by the most prominent or respected thinkers.
a) The climate/environment situation is not as dire as mainstream warnings indicate. At least some of the activism is motivated by fear, when people notice this or that smaller problem, get very scared by warnings of much bigger problems to come, and make the not-completely-rational choice to give up freedom for the promise of safety.
I think we could all agree that non-renewable energy sources will run out at some point. Hence the name :). Or, to be more precise, the extraction of non-renewables will cost more than their utility.
So, at some point we have to transition: first to a mix, and eventually to renewables only.
I would venture that we could also agree that those who make their money from non-renewables have an interest in delaying this transition as long as possible. That's what I would do. So, there will need to be some sort of agreement to transition, and incentives to do so.
This doesn't necessarily need to be a "large long-term centrally planned project to administer the solution as decided by the most prominent or respected thinkers" - you can use economic incentives to leverage the market to do so. Well, you can in one country at a time fairly easily, but globally - it's tricky.
If (as it seems) use of non-renewables is also a cumulative pollutant and could cause large costs to society globally, then the smart thing to do would be to accelerate this process. This doesn't mean giving up "freedom for the promise of safety" - it means, again, using economic incentives, but balanced against the costs. This already happens, all the time. We aren't giving up freedoms. In my opinion, anyway. We don't need to give governments loads of new power. We need to agree this is what we want and instruct our governments to do it. They already tax, rebate, and subsidize many things (e.g corn crops).
The difficulty is the tragedy of the commons - and that's what all the arguments are about. Lots of countries, lots of different incentives, different histories, etc.
I agree that the necessary transition from scarce hydrocarbons to something else, whenever that happens, is not likely to be totally pain-free. One of the traditional problems with markets is the turbulence that happens around these big paradigm shifts. America is in the middle of one right now as we transition to an information-based economy.
I don't agree that the existing players in the hydrocarbon market have the ability to delay the change in the way that you're implying. In other words, resource availability is not a stepwise function that can just go from "available" to "not available" overnight. Rare things gradually get more expensive, investment is gradually shifted into alternatives, and this is basically guaranteed to happen with oil as long as there is not a perfect monopoly or perfect collusion.
Also I'm skeptical that the economic policies you're suggesting won't lead to giving up freedoms. In practice freedoms do get taken away very often when institutions obtain the power to do so (e.g. the regulatory blockade on nuclear power, the ratcheting emissions rules for automobiles that will make a legal gasoline-powered car physically impossible in the near future, the outright ban on fracking in NY). I think this has a good chance of happening even if the initial plan is just to influence the market. A possible scenario: Some bad idea is encouraged for whatever reason by policy makers, and the economic policy isn't able to overcome the fact that it is a bad idea, so the decision makers cling to the sunk cost and pile on more regulations, until they start taking away freedoms.
For the record I'm not a big fan of the current agricultural policies we have in general, even though I do think imposing a tariff or offering an incentive is infinitely preferable to a ban.
That is why it is necessary to put the burden of proof on the industry. That's why I see regulation as being a necessary evil. That is why a ban on fracking in NY is fine (in my opinion) - in the big picture, it shouldn't matter. If fracking is OK, time will tell and the ban will be removed. The gas can only be removed once, so who cares when? The companies are big enough to focus elsewhere in the meantime.
In the US, the Citizens United vs FEC case ensured that much money can be spent on influencing the government. Much more money has been spent by the fossil fuel lobby than the renewables lobby - they have more money to spend. I don't doubt for a second that they are slowing down the shift to renewables as much as they can. It's happening right now, and it is real. This is normal, and expected, and according to the rules. I don't expect them to act outside their own significant interests. However, I think that it is not in the best long-term interests of humanity and I am willing to tolerate some ineptitude and over-regulation to shift the balance.
And by the way, I'm very used to "not being treated with respect" from the opposition on this topic. Usually they aren't so eager to keep mentioning it, though. What's the deal?
Yet drilling an oil well is currently illegal on a lot of private land in the US.
> Where we have a problem is when you start spreading that oil, or stuff derived from it, in my air and water.
Air and water pollution are regulated separately by another group. I don't have any problem with this kind of regulation unless it gets out of hand (classifying CO2 as pollution for example).
1. Soil subsidence. 2. The well casing can break, causing migration of oil, gas, and other pollutants to neighboring wells. 3. You over-pumping your well, drawing oil from under neighboring lands. 4. Releases of gas and natural gas liquids into the air.
So now if instead of having to comply with intense drilling regulation about drilling, owing to the rights of other citizens, you are told not to drill at all, this makes our country an authoritarian tyranny?
Can you try offering an argument that passes the giggle test?
Again, try to explain why this turns our country into an authoritarian hellhole, and try to do it in a fashion that passes the giggle test.
Just because a plot of land is in the name of someone doesn't give them the right to harm others.
It takes willful blindness to "not agree" at this point.