This article, like Turnbull, is incorrectly equating cost with price. Emissions are a cost. Price + emissions = cost. Renewables have been beating coal on cost for quite a while, only now they can start to win on price.
but to dig a bit deeper, who pays each cost and who benefits from the value?
who directly benefits from the value of energy:
- australian energy consumers
- australian energy producers
who pays the costs for energy prices:
- australian energy consumers
who pays the costs for australian emissions *:
- people living in australia -- 0.3% of emissions
- people living in world excluding australia -- 99.7% of emissions
Clearly we cant account for these shared global costs sensibly unless enough countries reach some kind of global agreement. The current australian federal government is taking a regrettable approach of self-interest and is waiting for the larger/more powerful countries to lead the way. Australia has plenty of coal to sell in the mean time.
Australia has a horrendous wildfire problem. The frequency and severity of wildfires has drastically increased over recent years. A small increase in global temperatures could render vast areas of the country effectively uninhabitable due to the risk of fire.
I think that most Australians are willing to act; that will is being subverted by a powerful coal lobby. They see the hellish scenes every summer. They see the immense financial, environmental and human cost. They see the weight of scientific evidence.
Thanks - I wasn't aware of that. Are there any books / articles that go into this in more detail and might be accessible to someone with a decent math + comp sci education but no knowledge of game theory?
But I keep defaulting to a painfully pessimistic imagination that is the costs are collectively going to be so moot so much sooner than any expectation, due to unforseen extreme results.
Am I going through a depression or something manic, maybe, because I don't believe we're not all suppressing contemplation of the outlier worse consequences of climate instability and as a result are walking blindfold in a kind of negotiated but half acceptable death march into a slower extinction and because of this unseen compromise on the range of forecasts that are shorn of the scariest conclusions we're investing in hope and eliminating healthy appreciation of the dangers, and ultimately accommodating skepticism too much for that accommodation to be without inevitable negative effects ?
edit: final words arranged for grammatical clarity, no overt meaning altered by edit.
There's also this - Roy Scranton's "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene":
https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-ho...
> The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.
i am not sure if you will find any of this helpful but i hope that you can find some peace with time
I'm possibly finally reaching the simple steps of normal reaction to events that so shocked me I blanked a considerable amount of my life memory and only recently was reunited with by a further trauma. But I have reacted to your comment by latching on to the health side of the equation as patently a relatively simple thing to incrementally improve that is likely to be a positive feedback catalyst. My mind is silently expressing a elongated and expressive Yep to that. But what you say about philosophy and understanding emotions is particularly apt, as it is a pain point that my memory loss is associated with the devaluation of emotions in my life at important times.
I'm unable to add to the thoughts of resources wars, except for mention of the emergency powers in place in the UK for 13 years now which are so draconian the only parallel is Soviet control over the population. Statewatch is a good place to source for the much ignored data and law. In my mind the powers have been long anticipating social breakdown and were ready over a decade ago. I can only wonder at the imagination of the technology advances in recent years without a accompanying chillier political climate and stagnating peacetime. I actually take solace from thinking that it is not a given, the seemingly inseparable advance of tech and the diminished capacity for liberties. I'm inclined to bet long and hard on the positive side of technology.
Thanks again for your thoughts. I've actually taken them to heart.
Game theory has important effects on economics and marketing, as well as the obvious politics.
First country footing the massive startup bill will have an economy slowdown compared to other that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity.
Besides countries won't really change until it's in their economic interest. Taking from your example until the cost of fighting bush fires (and other climate change related stuff) is greater than the cost of implementing a national plan on the whole economy, things won't change. That's why the hop production crisis is a better predictor on government action than bushfires or heat strokes deaths.
not in the modern R&D driven economy. As an example, Silicon Valley is regularly footing the massive startup bill :)
>that can be dirty a decade or more while the tech and the solution become commodity.
and so lacking their own technology they would be naturally buying it from the "first countries" while the first countries will be reinvesting those money into development of even better tech thus ever increasing their lead.
Although I see it as a positive. The money spent to "buy" technology is essentially wasted money.
Is money spent to buy software also "wasted money"? How are you going to pay the engineers developing this technology?
I can live on a decent wage. I don't need to make millions of dollars a year.
Screw "creatives" and screw this madness of royalties and license fees. Of what you're doing is of value to someone, they will pay you upfront.
And because this is Hacker News, have a play with the simulation hosted at Fourmilab: http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Forest
However, if there's nothing left ot burn and the whole ecosystem is destroyed, that's a problem
Not that straightforward. Effects of emissions is global, yes, but there are also local effects due to pollution, certain chemical byproducts, etc... meaning the local cost is higher than the average worldwide cost.
Another grave consequence of bith global climate change and localized pollution is the loss of biodiversity and the chance to study and learn from other organisms and their unique genomes and adaptations.
1 http://www.thoracic.org/about/newsroom/press-releases/journa... 2 https://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v7/n1/full/tp2016280a.html
E.G: when you give prices for a nuclear plant in France, you include only assembly price and running costs. While for wind turbines you include assembly, disassembly, running costs and wiring (which must be underground by law). This makes it hard to make fair comparisons.
Now we can put the existing bombs in maintenance mode, or disassemble them into more modern ones, as we don't need that many. It's the right time to shift the energy source, because now it's all about energy again.
This is the only subject where terrorism actually helped. You can't nuke a bunch of suicide bombers or extremists hidden in a mountain. Hence you can't justify making Armageddon devices as easily as before.
I'm not against nuclear in general, but accounting should be apples-to-apples.