The human body is already close to thermal limits in many regions
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/05/ip-on-carbon-tax....
From the end:
"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."
He then makes that appeal to both sides:
"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."
Hence Chomsky's argument that the Republican party is the most dangerous organisation in human history: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-choms...
So I agree we need carbon tax, but I find it frustrating to pretend this is a issue both sides are at fault for.
Cochrane thinks (not sure I agree with him) that the onus right now is more on the traditional left than the right.
"...climate policy advocates have gone far beyond a technocratic idea of simply, well, reducing carbon. 'And nuclear energy' is usually noticeably absent. Carbon capture technologies, equally good at reducing carbon are usually noticeably absent. Other agendas like 'climate justice' creep in -- worthy or not, anything else that creeps in means less carbon reduction per dollar. A carbon tax reduces carbon any way that reduces carbon, which is really good at, well, reducing carbon, and not getting distracted with other agendas. That is a strong reason why carbon taxes, and especially such taxes in return for less regulation are resisted on the left."
Whether you agree re: who is at fault, given that most people on HN are prob on the "do something about climate change" end of the spectrum, if you are personally skeptical of a carbon tax vs something like the green new deal or Jay Inslee's climate change plan, I'd encourage you to look into it more.
Cochrane's blog post and and also this would be good places to start:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/17/this-is-n...
First, people on the left who are resisting carbon taxes are mostly because they believe cap and trade is a better solution, which many economists agree with.
Second, what has some notion of "climate justice" got to do with anything? I don't see any evidence politicians on the left are somehow getting distracted by "value-signaling".
Third, where does the idea come from that a carbon tax must be matched with less regulation elsewhere? That's a pure right-wing dream to try to match the two together, there is no connection.
What this essentially sounds like is a Republican talking point that it's all Democrats' fault because Democrats aren't succeeding, despite Republicans refusing to help and therefore making it impossible to succeed. The doublespeak and hypocrisy makes your head spin...
This is the first thing that comes up when you google 'green new deal':
"A Green New Deal is a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change. It would mobilize vast public resources to help us transition from an economy built on exploitation and fossil fuels to one driven by dignified work and clean energy."
https://www.sierraclub.org/trade/what-green-new-deal
And here's AOC's chief of staff on the green new deal: "“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” "
Second is Jay Inslee, the democratic running for president who has made fighting climate change the centerpiece of his campaign.
https://www.jayinslee.com/climate-mission
Look at his four points. Point three is "fighting for environmental justice & economic inclusion". Two of the other points are subsidies, one for clean energy, the other for a jobs program. The last one -- getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuel industries -- is a good idea. Control f'ing for the word tax (as in carbon tax) gives no results. Neither does cap, nor trade.
Only I assumed that the "dirty" lobby killed that.
We're now at the point where if we want to keep a similar quality of life without destroying the planet something like the Green New Deal is going to be needed. Not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a political one - such as change drastically improve the situation for a lot of people and will greatly decrease the risk of amoral fanatics winning again in the biggest economy in the world.
Note that measures to actually address climate change are unpopular even among Democrats. Sure, they like it when it’s articulated as a jobs program (“green new deal”) but they still oppose things like carbon taxes, which experts have offered forth as the solution. State level measures along those lines got strong push back in very blue and very environmentally conscious Oregon and Washington
I'm sorry but there is no doubt that "both sides are at fault".
"Trudeau has never really stood in the way of Canada’s oil industry, despite years of platitudes about addressing climate change."
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trudeau-Declares-...
ETA: In an ideal world I'd prefer NDP or Green, but as long as we're limited by first past the post, the best way to support climate change mitigation is by avoiding Conservatives via the Liberals.
First, that starts off with a false premise. You don't know that the government is going to regulate carbon.
Second, ignoring the "climate change is a myth" crowd, there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await. That attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way is not worth the unknown outcome of attempting to save the current state of climate.
This isn't even a "not my problem" situation. I've heard this from folks leaving in a coastal region that already suffers some amount of regular nuisance flooding. It's not as if rising tides will skip over them.
Failing to understand that viewpoint is going to result in two sides yelling past each other. One side thinks we must do everything in our power to preserve nature's status-quo, the other is firmly of the mind that it is an impossibility and to try would be wasted effort with much risk and unclear gain.
Your first task is convincing them of the horrors that await for them.
I am not sure what i think about this argument yet, but it seems like it may be reasonable.
His proposal to replace other regulations with a small and uniform carbon tax, is bound to make both proponents and opponents of carbon tax unhappy (which may be a sign that it is a reasonable proposal:)
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-comm...
Climate change isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem.
“Advanced” economies rely on otherwise-unnecessary consumption of resources, irrespective of environmental damage, because there's no effective social penalty for harming the environment.
Clean energy won't help: demand always increases at least as fast as supply.
Even if we stopped all unnecessary consumption, and kept only the minimum necessary for life, we would not make significant impact on climate change, because with the current number of people CO2 will still accumulate, and would become problem some time later.
If energy is clean, it simply will not cause global warming, independently of demand, but we do not even need to make it clean, we simply need to use the CO2 (e.g. by creating forests in deserts) or to use some other technology to gain fine grained control over the climate.
Climate change is inevitable but the amount of change can still be affected. Preventing carbon emissions now will absolutely be cheaper that paying for mitigations in the future.
The amount of warming is very important. An increase from 1.5C to 2.0C will kill an additional 100 million people from air pollution alone.
Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".
It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
If a family member or close friend dies - you hang out with friends, you go to therapy. You certainly don't buy some weapons and decide to finish off the rest of your friends for good measure!
A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.
What's the goal here? 800ppm? 1200? Literally just whack the thermostat up 10c and have every city in the world suddenly be in the wrong place?
> attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way
It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.
Shifting consumption to more efficient "happiness/usefulness per damage" stuff wouldn't ruin anything.
It's difficult for me to understand why people would think that carbon pricing pushing people towards different foods or smaller cars or cycling or whatever would "destroy the economy". I think they have a different definition of the word 'destroy'. Consuming a bit less is not destruction. Your hometown being underwater is a destroyed economy.
Why would we not be able to build permanent structures?
> It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.
Well I'm not here try to tell you they will, and why. I'm telling you why you run into intelligent people who aren't gung-ho about reforming our economy in regards to climate change. That if you're trying to have a conversation with to get the desired result, politics, how you need to approach the "other" side.
Of those that I've talked to about this, the belief is that the necessary changes to pricing would result in an economic downturn, as bad as if not worse than the "Great Recession," which is still in recent memory for just about every adult. That's the milder hesitancy, some believe the necessary economic changes simply aren't possible, that to do so wouldn't even help make things better. That we're past the point of no return, so might as well just roll with it and adapt as needed.
Your problem is not telling them "bad things are going to happen if we don't deal with emissions" but rather "things are going to be so bad that your fear of economic decline is the lesser of two evils." Secondary is convincing them that necessary pricing can be put into place without destroying the economy.
That's literally the opposite of damaging the economy. If we actually took climate change seriously as a challenge to civilization itself, we'd have a boom economy like it hasn't been seen in at least 50 years.
> It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
I thought it was very clear:
> If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
> What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
They're arguing against something like fining the person whose farm caught on fire.
Arguing for pricing in externalities is more akin to arguing for the fine, trying to make people change their ways so such fires are less common, while giving no thought to the people affected directly (unnecessary extra costs on top of recovering from the fire), or who couldn't avoid it (lightning strike causing fire / infrastructure not in place to avoid the cost and it getting passed to the consumer instead of dealt with).
It represents fixing the economic incentives.
If a beef burger is 10x more environmentally damaging than a vegetable one, it should cost approximately ten times more.
As I've posted below - this is child-level logic. It's time for us to sort our shit out. There really is no option.
We need stable homes, nutrition, and a bit of entertainment. We don't need no-holds-barred competition to literally use as much of everything as we possibly can; and we _certainly_ don't need that to be apportioned essentially randomly - the more damaging activities should cost more.
If it bothers you to be confronted by that - if your first thoughts are "economic damage" and the fact your life might slightly change - I'm sorry for you. Because you really are fucked, you're coming down with all of us.
I believe climate change is coming but trying to convince someone they should change because they are a Bad Person if they don’t change their ways, or that some unspecified type of fuckedness is looming, is not very successful.
Or it won't and we die in a fire.
So it goes.
I don't aim to convince anyone; just stating how it is. I think most are beyond saving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental...
This makes no sense at all. Climate change is not a binary effect, it's compounding.
In this way carbon tax would increas marginal costs of using carbon-intensive products, but does not increase overall taxation.
Like the comment one higher up mentioned, one way to get around that and do effectively the same thing would be to split the revenue among citizens. This is what a bunch of economists have called for doing: https://www.econstatement.org/
Most likely effect of carbon tax is that it will kill more people than it will save.
I see how some taxes (such as gasoline tax for building roads) can have outsized advantages that are bigger than the tax distribution overhead. But carbon tax does NOT have advantages like that. At least not yet, considering that too much of the Earth land is too cold.
Good idea. How do we make it happen?
There is a high correlation between solar generation and air-con demand, although it's not perfect, as e.g. heat can persist into the evening, so you could have a grid connection to allow the air con to continue working in the evenings, and to absorb any excess power but in the event of grid failure, the air-con power should just follow the solar generation directly. I don't know if such a system exists commercially at the moment.
Even in the event of wide scale power outages, it would not lead to wide scale deaths as most people would have air conditioning that still worked. Air conditioning failures would be a very serious issue, though, requiring evacuation to another building.
An easier alternative for these rare cases is probably just to have a backup diesel generator.
In terms of emergency power outage in hot day situations, you don't need to cool the whole building, or cool it to a comfortable temperature, it just needs to be below a "wetbulb" of 35°C in a single room people can shelter in until power is restored.
Do you have some sort of citation for that?
Because a dehumidifier is pretty much an air conditioner that doesn't make the room cooler from a mechanical perspective, so the premise that there's a wide gap in efficiency, or that the unit which blows it's heat indoors is the more effective one, seems unlikely to me.
Others recommend dehumidifiers as a compromise which uses less power, you can find this in multiple discussions in relevant forums
First of all, most of the water is in gaseous form, i.e., vapor, not droplets. But even if it were in the form of droplets, the droplets would have to be small enough to remain in the air, and consequently just like the water vapor, they'd be in thermal equilibrium with all the other molecules of air with the result that removing them would not lower air temperature.
We need fundamental cultural and policy change. The question is how to achieve it. Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. Think about any significant societal change in the last century or so. Women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, gay rights. None of these were initiated by the parliament. They all started as a popular rebellion and direct action.
So what are we to do.
- Change your lifestyle. Less flying, driving, meat.
- Divest fossil
- Get out of the techno bubble and get your hands dirty with direct action and civil disobedience. e.g. [1]
It doesn't seem possible to do both things without failing at both with terrible consequences.
Eating beefburgers, flying Australia <-> Europe for holidays, driving a Hummer, using plastic for everything, and so on and so forth, just isn't necessary. My street has twice the number of cars it did when I was younger.
The idea that "terrible consequences" will come about from people taking the piss a bit less is really very silly. It makes me think of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch but inverted (when I were young, we had all the things...)
If we stop now and find a way to get the carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough we might even have a chance to go back to the old normal, but we have to act fast. Please help to push for it!
Meat is significantly less efficient to produce than a balanced vegetarian diet.
Particularly organic vegetarian diets need a lot of land.
The only way that meat could win on either metric is if livestock are able to subsist on a diet far less varied than humans; essentially if they are better able to convert lower quality feedstock into higher quality meat.
Our baseline should be what is required for a healthy body and brain. We can go up from there.
Going down from the current level is farcical. We're in a crisis.
I like me an avocado as much as the next person, but if they need a 500% tax (invented, I don't actually know) to incorporate externalities, they need it. End of.
Like, seriously. It doesn't matter what we "want" at this point. Carbon needs pricing or we are totally fucked.
Here is a land use graphic from Our World In Data that also includes information on what fraction of consumed calories and proteins are provided by the uses.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/10/Land-use-graphic-...
This graphic is used in the article https://ourworldindata.org/yields-and-land-use-in-agricultur...
My concern is that we don't have enough land for this, and the fear/threat of overpopulation is already upon us. And has been for decades.
Consider that all of the land currently used for livestock were converted. You then _also_ have all of the land used for feedstock for the livestock.
And then there's the fact that most diets globally are predominantly vegetable based anyway - meat is a rare addition.
You can't convert it, or it's already converted. Usually for corn.
No, because livestock need food too and are horribly inefficient at turning food/water into meat.
The animals we eat are mostly fed by what is cultivated on the arable land, exactly because of the modern habits of everybody eating meat every day. Most of the animals never see the pastures. The demand is too big and getting much bigger.
So we feed the animals, and most of the energy stored in their food is converted to the maintenance of the life of the animal, not the meat you get when you kill it.
Compare that with feeding the humans directly (with mostly vegetarian diet): most of the animal food you grow, transport and feed to the animals never end up becoming meat.
See for example:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/1...
Example from ten percent law [0]:
> Sun releases 1000 J of energy, then plants take only 100 J of energy from sunlight; thereafter, a deer would take 10 J from the plant. A wolf eating the deer would only take 1 J. A human eating the wolf would take 0.1J, etc.
We can go directly from plants to people instead of using land, energy and resources to grow plants to feed animals for human consumption with 10% efficiency.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
That entirely depends on the land, no?
Sheep and goats can thrive on land you can’t actually use for any other sort of farming. We have lots of that land here in Wales.
True. Unfortunately the majority of meat does not come from grass fed animals.
The most sustainable way to farm would be to open pastured cattle, pigs, and sheep which would drop manure in a fallow field and add tons of organic nutrients to the soil - as happens in nature. That pasture would then be used to grow crops the next year, as the animals are rotated to another area. When an area is only used for growing vegetables, there is a net depletion of natural nutrients that have to be supplemented with external input.
The worst part of agriculture is farming ONLY beef or ONLY dairy or ONLY vegetables on acreage. I'm going to risk being contrarian to the HN crowd - but farming can't be automated in a sustainable way. The ecosystem is far too multivariate and interrelated. Sure, you can make a smarter tractor, but that land will be barren in 40 more years. Automation only works at scale, but nature does not divide into neat discrete categories without some sort of tradeoff in biodiversity or long-term resilience
It only takes a few passes with a plow to turn it into desert, so pretty much the only way of getting calories from land in Montana is by grazing cattle or bison.
Kind of irrelevant though, ranch land in Montana only support a few cattle per square mile.
I don't know enough about Montana, but I'm mostly worried about what monoculture farms are doing to the fertility of the Midwest.
By eating vegetarian you cut one or maybe several factors of ~ 0.1 out of the equation. I'm not vegetarian but have reduced my meat consumption by a lot while not having the feeling that I miss anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level#Biomass_transfer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_efficiency#Ten_perc...
Edit: I was not talking about missing vitamins when I said "missing". I was talking about missing something as in suffering from practising self-denial.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/vegetarian-and-vegan-d...
I believe cutting back on meat would still be a significant improvement over the current situation.
Its complicated, but not eating meat would account for somewhere between 3-8% reduced greenhouse gas emissions. And as more of the world's population becomes "first world" demand is going to go up unless we start reducing cultural dependence on meat throughout our diets.
Anyway it is a worthy goal but people shouldn't think they are doing their part of they are successful. I believe the numbers are that if all cows disappeared tomorrow, that'd take care of something like 5% of our worldwide carbon-equivalent emissions.
the solution is to buy higher quality clothes, but less often.
Why not?
We need big carrots and big sticks in order to achieve things like less flying - that means government regulation, huge material incentives for not flying/driving/etc.
Also, yeah, maybe it's too late now. If only one could reload from a savegame and learn from experience next time around.
Amazingly now a lot of the "Western world" would prefer those other human beings die rather than suffer a downgrade of their comfortable lives...
Of course, it would have been better to phase in the taxes decades ago since some solutions (mass transit, for example) can take a decade or more to build.
Greed and lazyness are so innate that you could probably trace them back to lobsters.
Lobsters are a slave to their instincts, humans are not.
They are but just occasionally and briefly.
Superficial customs have changed. Not how underlying perceptions of interests are governed.
Sure we can still understand thinkers of old in a limited capacity, but that's not due to us thinking like them or even experiencing the world like them as our experience is coloured by the concepts we use. We can understand them because of the continuity of society, the constant translation of the old into the new.
Capitalism can only exist now because of how much those underlying assumptions have changed.
As for Shakespeare, his plays still speak to fundamental, understandable human drama.
When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
I don’t think it’s merely cultural continuation. We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Perhaps I missed something?
I dispute the very concept of "human nature", it implies a platonic "human", a base which we can only uncover the details of. While in reality there doesn't appear to be such a thing.
> I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.
It kind of does, changes in the "public consciousness" are more often subversive than radical, a lot of concepts Shakespeare popularised or came up with are still in common use, however it's not because he's unlayering the onion of "the human" concept, but because these concepts are useful and haven't been subverted or forgotten.
> When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
They of course still have practical value, when I say "in a limited capacity" I mean it in a more "glass-half full" way, a lot of context for these works has been lost forever and how a person reading a text understands a word relies more on his entire lifetime of experience than it does on the authors intent, good authors can generally bridge the gap easily, dead authors can't. So information is lost.
> We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Unless you've brushed up on your ancient Chinese that's not really true, the cultural continuity here is the translator.
Don't go by the dictionary definition of machiavellian. He really wasn't saying things that are hard to believe. He was really just pointing out the sorts of manifestations of human nature that surround us if we don't blind ourselves and refuse to see it.
And if it is let's continue and end it all because it's just plain sad. What a way to go !
Let them carry on. Perhaps our exction will be exactly what saves the planet! Our archeological records will serve only as a warning for whatever "intelligent" life evolves in the future ;-)
It seems like a flippant attitude, but it seems to be the way many people are treating climate change (probably because the worst effects won't hit for decades, when many of the people responsible (i.e. voters) will be dead.)
We're leaving an unsustainable mess for our children, I'd like to see some action in their lawsuit:
https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
Since they are the ones that will be paying the full price of climate change.
At the same time, you're right -- the 2 missing pieces are believing the threat is real, and thinking that you can get by if lots of other people change their behavior instead. Which they won't any more than you will, but that leads us back to human nature again.
The same is with cutting back on comfort of living. If I cut my comfort, but my neighbor don't and payoff is equal for us both, why should I suffer more than him? This is our basic species morality which we found even in apes [0].
[0] https://www.theemotionmachine.com/what-great-apes-teach-us-a...
Seriously? You mean Bill Gates works because otherwise he'd starve to death?
More seriously, I challenge you to hold a poll among your friends - given $x per month where x is enough to survive, would they stop working?
Everyone I speak to about this says that he/she personally would not, but the "other people" certainly will.
Not working means that you reclaim 50%+ of your awake time, and not any 50%, the 50% during which you spend most of your energy. I'm already living on ~70% of the min wage of my country, and I don't feel like I'm restraining myself at all so it wouldn't be such a big deal.
One might argue that this is all work.
2. You and your friends are probably not like the average person.
3. You were probably raised with the idea that it's very important, both financially and socially, to have a job. It might be a lot harder to raise your kids with these values if they grow up in a world where working or not working has no financial impact.
A farmer might still plant, but decide to plant flowers instead of food. Or maybe they would plant exotic fruits instead of staple foods.
A programmer might still program, but they might decide to play with algorithm problems instead of developing medical software.
So let's put self-regulation aside, you will never see it happen on a policy level because it won't be popular.
Same for emissions trading schemes, they're actually great things, but they aren't popular with the masses.
Anyway, let's drop The War on Terror and The war on Drugs and begin the War on Climate Change?
I'm not entirely saying I agree with people just flying around for the sake of it, but let's be honest, putting an end to most transport doesn't exactly seem like progress, let's also think of it this way, the problem is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, not traveling.
"companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons."
If you're a Doctor, truck driver, pilot, builder, fisherman etc, then how do you work remotely? The majority of the workforce can't just work remotely because knowledge workers can. Besides, data-centers also have a large environmental cost, remote work creates it's own mess.
I'm also a knowledge worker, but I just choose to live in the city close to my office and ride to work so I have a very small / no carboon footprint from transport.
I've also worked remote full-time, it wasn't for me, I think it has it's own set of issues.
We got used to it but it doesn't mean it's the way to go. We're acting like spoiled kids discovering that no, you can't have it all, all the time, for free.
- We have built our society around the assumption of mobility so it could be difficult to just switch overnight.
- Remote work doesn't work for many people and/or many situations.
- Opportunities are not evenly distributed across the country.
- Tolerance of alternative lifestyles is not evenly distributed.
- Access to hobbies, cultural institutions, etc. is not evenly distributed.
Driving cars is just an example, the other ones being flying less, procreating less, eating less meat.
> or they'll eventually be forced to
I think we overestimate most people's desire to do anything for the benefit of others. My fear is that a lot of the worst offenders of that are people who are quite likely operating on the basis they'll be dead before we feel the absolute effects.
As much as it's the only real solution, I don't think we can rely on regression to drive action. That's why the sugar for the pill of renewables will be eventual cheaper prices. We need to make the alternatives more appealing (or, at least some decent narrative to make them seem more appealing).
What if, for example, infinite disposable plastic bottles are actually the easiest solution, and the sustainable solutions are actually a bit more work (e.g. water fountains and bottles you carry around).
Yes, sure, perhaps we can fix landfill. Devil's advocate though - it is definitely not the case that every aspect of our current ecological nightmare has a win-win solution.
We _need_ to start pricing in externalities, whether people moan about it or not. Seriously - this is putting the seat belt on in a car level stuff. Deal with it.
Is the morning after a night out a regression? Not the hangover; the every-day life. No - it's absurd to paint it that way - the high life was the abnormality.
> We _need_ to start pricing in externalities
I might've been arguing the OP at crossed purposes, as my point seems compatible with yours, just framed differently at the point of delivery. We can't rely on the population to just decide "I'm going to do the right thing today". We make it a non-choice as you say. That can either be "it's cheaper/easier/better" or "you'll be locked up if not". It's quite a compelling narrative either way.
Just expecting large swathes of quite evidently moronic people (without delving too far into politics, if you agree the current political climate is as the result of ignorance, that's a sh*t-tonne of ignorant people out there - on the order of billions of people worldwide) to decide to look out for the interests of us as a collective is frankly wrong.
I agree with you - but I think we need to move past the "do it for the planet/species" argument as there's a lot of people who don't care and will be ridiculous in their stubbornness. The scale of it just doesn't work when trying to convince people. But show them how their heating bills will be cheaper and that they'll get a 6-month suspended if they throw a bottle in the sea, and things might change sooner.
I do bad things all the time because I have little agency.
I'm planning to make some major changes to move towards that, but still, if every store around me uses plastic in food etc I can't skip it.
We need to price in externalities. It's that simple. We need to cut this bullshit about the 'short-term economy' or phasing things out over 40 years or whatever; this isn't an emotional argument.
If we don't account for the cost of pollution we are going to kill ourselves.
Hmm, no it's not on the same level. Perhaps you can deal with it because you can afford to spend more on goods, but people in poverty will rightly moan.
Moaning does not change the outcome.
Again, we either reduce consumption, stop emitting (and likely have to capture) CO2, etc, or we kill ourselves.
It does not matter how much the child wails, if it is time to leave the arcade, one must go.
> can afford to spend more on goods
We must all use less. This is not a matter of bits of coloured paper; externalities must be priced in to force the market in the correct direction.
To take an example: if plastic bottles were banned worldwide tomorrow, or suddenly cost 10 USD per, this would have approximately zero effect on those in poverty other than shuffling some jobs around a bit.
> If plastic bottles were banned worldwide tomorrow
What happened to pricing in externalities?
It doesn't make a difference. We are not playing some identity politics game about who gets more or less.
I'm tired, sorry. But really. Just do it.
They will be poorer if you don't.
Pricing in the externalities doesn't mean we selectively jack the prices up on the "bad stuff" like plastic bottles (where you get to define what's bad). It means that the price of nearly everything goes up because the cost of raw materials, shipping, etc goes up since everyone on the supply chain has to pay for the pollution they're generating now.
These people often have kids, and they do a lot for them. They need to understand that it is all in vain if they don't do anything.
And yet, lots of those same people with kids are the reason we're in the current political climate. Deliberate choices designed to cause outweighted impact on the younger generations.
I don't want to veer too much off course here, but look at the demographics around the Brexit vote. Those are large swathes of parents across the country who've made a decision that they wont live to see the ramifications of, with those younger generations almost entirely voting in the opposite direction.
Personally, I believe it's because the issues at play are far too large to comprehend. We need to change the message, and it needs to be localised and individualised as much as possible. However, that's expensive, and the people with the money are the ones less likely to want to help get that message out there...
Disagree. Leave/remain is just as 50/50 among my generation (young people) in my area. Anecdotal to be sure.
[0] https://fullfact.org/europe/how-did-young-people-vote-brexit...
True, which is why we need a legislation framework to combat this problem. We need to do this together, as one human race (also helping certain other races who have it tough such as other mammals). Which won't happen when a country as important as the USA elects someone who "does not believe in climate change".
As per my other comments here - we need to do that 100%, but I don't believe that's a compelling way to get individuals to change their own behaviour.
"I don't have to do my bit as other people are much worse than me. Why aren't the other 6,999,999,999 other people doing their bit too?"
so you want to deceive people at scale to get them to do what you want? not sure I can get behind that.
Without want to slander my own profession, but: "marketing".
If your municipality doesn't respond to your transportation needs, your employer doesn't allow you to do remote-work, your professor insists on face-to-face meetings, how can changing your habits can reduce your carbon footprint?
We need to be more flexible in our ways and we shouldn't drive the society and the system this hard for so-called human and organization efficiency.
We'll have to. It can either come from us, from policy, or from the laws of nature. Our choice.
The kind of "solutions" that involve not changing any of the behaviours that are causing the problems are the ones that are not really solution.
But the reality is that there many, many things to do that are more effective before even starting to look at aviation.
I don't understand the point of calling for "civil disobedience" (which is usually an euphemism for blocking roads and airports, and alienating public opinion in the process). What does it achieve? If you want to use your individual power do it constructively by changing your everyday routine and behaviour.
It is not as hard as: just stop driving with your car to work! Hmmkay?!
The issue is that it focuses on something that is not a priority and it is so largely on ideologically grounds.
Your second sentence is actually highlighting a real aspect of the issue: Many people prefer to do something easy rather than something effective.
Yes, that's the usual 'argument' except that this does not even seem to be true (return flight from London to New York seems to emit about 1t per passenger when a typical Brit otherwise contributes 7+t, so that's 1/14th of personal annual emissions per flight).
In any case, not everyone flies over the Atlantic every year, so that overall and in the grand scheme of things aviation should not be held as a priority.
Focusing on aviation is a distraction.
While I do think it's mentioned more than it should be, it can't be denied that it's a major factor.
We have been systematically strip mining the planet for decades. We need to take a step back and calm down.
If you're banging through your credit card, you knock it all out. You start from the bottom up, not the top down. You look at what you absolutely need and slowly add things back in.
We've hit the credit limit on our ecosystem.
The most actionable item (that is of course MUCH harder than not eating meat) is doing something to to convince the nations with most children per woman [2] to have less. But this is not easy - joining organizations that would educate women and doing volunteering or even dangerous work is insanely hard. Not buying meat, recycling and not riding your car seems hard for western people and so you FEEL like you are doing something, but you are not.
I will not have children but do 50 transatlantic flights this year, eat all the meat, hell, I'll even teach myself to drive a car just to show off how useless these individual actions are. You can't convince the world, stop CHANGING the world and change yourself, seek data and find the most actionable item. Jeez!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_c... [2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...
Why can't we live more sustainably and work on reducing global human population?
I think you are just signalling a different kind of virtue. You are scientific, sceptical and ever so smart. But you are not saving the world either.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-canadian-start-up-is-removing...
- get locally sourced food
- get less things; waste less; buy less
Packaging and cargo are the two big problems, one for the plastic pollution, the other for the co2 emission. It's not meat consumption.
Cutting personal driving/travel is also good but more for environmental well being - eg less noise. It will not make any big changes in the longer run.
Downsizing and less stuff will.
According to a 5 year Oxford University study, the single best thing we can do at an individual level to decbarbonise is to say no to dairy and meat.
So public policy can both incentivise everyone, not only activists to make the right choices. And it can save a lot of lives.
If a suitably large group of people refuse to vote for politicians that don't support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies, it will lead to better outcomes.
Combined with the efforts to switch the grid to renewables (net-zero electric grid by 2040 and net-zero altogether by 2050) this should greatly reduce emissions coming from eating.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/6/20/1869105...
In fact, New York has aggressively limited the expansion of natural gas pipelines and recently both ConEd and National Grid, two major gas providers, said in response they will stop expanding their network. IMO New York's energy agencies are using this to see if they can fully eliminate fossil fuels from new development and start a phase out.
https://enerknol.com/national-grid-stops-accepting-new-gas-s...
https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Programs/Clean-Energ...
I think a lot of common sense has been lost in the design of homes. In the south of Europe homes are often comfortable with minimal or no air-conditioning because they have designs suitable for the climate. However, this means having small windows which aren't directly exposed to sunlight, tiled or marble floors etc.
This claim is incompatible the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time."
That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.
But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.
You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.
Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.
A carbon divided, which is to say redistributing the income of the carbon tax equally and directly to the people should at least in principle be uncontroversial because it is both socially equitable (richer people live more carbon intensive lives and thus contribute more), and it sets the right consumption incentive without taking money out of people's personal pockets (which should please conservatives).
Consumers pay some carbon taxes directly (e.g. while buying gasoline), but does this account for indirect carbon taxes (e.g. the natural gas used in making fertilizer to grow the food that the cow ate to make this burger?).
At the end of the day, a lot of our purchases are really paying for the energy used in its production at some level.
In practice, it's @#%#ed up, as usual. They didn't implement a carbon tariff, so foreign fertilizer would have been a lot cheaper than domestic fertilizer. But instead of putting a carbon tariff on foreign fertilizer, they gave domestic fertilizer a 90% exemption.
If not, go troll somewhere else.
I'm reminded of how the German word for "tax" is "Steuer", i.e. steering/control, which encourages smarter thinking about tax policy because it acknowledges precisely this effect on incentives.
The simple solution is to build more nuclear. When energy generation doesn’t require burning things, this solves itself. A carbon neutral grid means we can use as much air conditioning as we want. I was in Rome and France last week and “less AC” would have meant vulnerable people potentially dying in the heat.
Perhaps at this point in time we could just make things work by cutting back our lifestyles: but 20 or 30 years later the grown population would again need more food and more natural resources. And hungry people don't care about changing the world but about getting food for today, sustainable or not.
What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?
Because: there is no overpopulation, and if there was it is not caused by too many babies but by people living longer.
When it comes to CO2 by agriculture: we are eating way too much (meat).
In my opinion you're putting the bar way too high if you require anybody on this forum to only reply to a discussion when he/she not only can point out a failure in the arguments but has the correct solution as well.
Finally, you are putting some rather dubious solution in my mouth with your comment "What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?". Of course I didn't have that solution in mind.
It is true that this is nothing we can change, but the source of the problem shouldn't be ignored.
Of course we can eat as much meat as we want. It just doesn't scale to 7 billion people.
So yes, there is overpopulation, we just cannot do anything about it. But don't dismiss the fact.
I don't agree that overpopulation is the root cause, and I'm not a fan of talking about it much either. However, assume for the sake of argument that it is:
Reducing Earth population in the long run doesn't have to involve harming anyone.
For example, we could use changes to politics, technology and culture to provide better skills, education, even healthcare and assisting the old to live longer, and assist with more fulfilling lifestyle aspirations, and generally empower as many people as we can to lead happier lives.
Much of the scientific study we have suggests that will both reduce world population and improve quality of life across the board, because of how humans make choices about reproduction.
Nobody needs to be killed, nobody needs to have medicine withdrawn, nobody needs to be sterilised or even discouraged from having children. No odious racism or elitism or eugenics is required.
It's enough, to just improve lives, and it looks very much as though humans may naturally reduce their population replacement rate in the long run.
So that leaves only the climate problem in the shorter run, for which "temporary solutions" could be good enough.
--
² i belive it was this event http://longnow.org/seminars/02019/jan/14/prospects-humanity/
A bigger deal than population increase is that energy use is going to rise massively with just the population we have, as people move out of energy poverty.
We need to make the energy zero-carbon.
Which "anti-war movement" or "parliament" are you talking about otherwise?
Will your movements have the same traction in India or China?
- I don't have any (direct) influence on the Chinese government. I am gonna do my part and hope that like-minded people in China will do theirs.
- A fair share of Chinese emissions are actually our emissions anyway. Haven't we outsourced our industry to China? What's the US - China trade "imbalance"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage#Contemporary
20 years ago, Germany raised taxes on fuel, but that didn’t make anyone drive less. I’m guessing the same would happen with a tax on CO2. So I‘m favoring emissions allowances: Politics dictates a threshold of how much CO2 is permitted and gives out allowances, then the price develops on the market.
But it feels like, for those „rebellions“, capitalism is the root of all evil.
The system already exists, isn't it? The so called "cap and trade" https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en
But the cap is too high and the prices are too low. Would you accept it's ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
But also, wouldn't a lower cap lead to the "drastic life style changes for people" anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)?
Yes, but not for all industries.
> Would you accept it‘s ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
If people rebel for realistic solutions I‘m all for it!
> wouldn‘t a lower cap lead to the „drastic life style changes for people“ anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)
Yeah, probably! Surely not to the same extent like the carbon tax demanded by climate activists. But the idea is to incentivize companies to find more climate-friendly solutions. Certainly some companies would lose their competitive ability if they depend on high emissions, though.
People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
I think the current little pupil rebellion is something very worth supporting. But their demands are naive.
Your proposition would be a more efficient mechanism.
Currently there is a discussion about giving people a fixed amount of money for the additional costs this tax would cause.
What a waste of time...
And yes, this all requires drastic lifestyle changes. That's the point. No lifestyle change, no climate effect. Simple as that.
That is a huge part of the criticism against a tax for households that are just responsible for 1/5th of emissions and I wouldn't include them in the emission trade at all. Because even today people don't waste significant energy for basic needs like heating, so any instrument can only be that effective.
And corporations are currently the only ones paying for every tonne of CO² they emit. And you want to change that to be extended to everyone... You might argue that they should pay more, but...
Of course people in many political parties are rubbing their hands that you actually want to increase tax burdens. Money solves problems, right?
So Marxists try to make it come true, by doing destructive things like the rebellion.
It turned out the taxes are not high enough. If people really were depended on cars, but were hurt by the high taxes, car makers would sell smaller cars. They don't. Extremely big cars, totally unneeded by almost anyone, are still the most popular models. Why? Cause the costs of having and using one are not as high as you make it sound.
> People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Yeah, sure. Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above. It couldn't be that they tend to have a bit more foresight than you.
> Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years for significant parts of the population. The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages. A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none).
No, no, and no. Cars are getting more and more efficient, and there are many affordable efficient cars today. It‘s just that people in rich countries like to display their wealth by getting a big car. But there are still people that live in the countryside, who have no other means of transportation, that‘d get hit pretty hard by even higher taxes on fuel. It‘s how they get to work, how they get their groceries, how they get to their friends‘ place.
It‘s easy to renounce something if you‘re not dependent on it.
> A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none)
What part of the population exactly are you referring to? Low-income households? Tax evaders?
Which people don't buy most of the time. By your explanation many people seem to be either rich or the price of cars (over lifetime) is still too low. I don't see the majority of people being rich, so that only leaves the other option.
> But there are still people that live in the countryside, who have no other means of transportation, that‘d get hit pretty hard by even higher taxes on fuel. It‘s how they get to work, how they get their groceries, how they get to their friends‘ place.
People in the country-side are the first to state that higher rent is the price of living in a city -- to turn that around: Higher transportation costs are the price of living in the country-side.
> Low-income households? Tax evaders?
The first. You don't pay taxes below a certain income, low wages still hit you. Tax evaders are usually not hit by either.
Now you‘re just imagining things. In 2018, 36.5% of the newly registered cars in Germany were small or compact[0]. Also have a look at this statistic [1].
> higher rent is the price of living in a city [...] Higher transportation costs are the price of living in the country-side.
Exactly. Now think about this: They live in the countryside BECAUSE they cannot afford to live in the city, which ends up being cheaper even if you have to pay for a car, especially with the current housing market situation in cities.
[0] https://www.kba.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2019/Fahrzeu...
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/165065/umfrag...
To quote your first source:
> Mehr als die Hälfte aller Neuzulassungen entfielen auf die Segmente Kompaktklasse (22,0 %), SUVs (18,3 %), Kleinwagen (14,5 %) und Mittelklasse (10,9 %). Die SUVs verzeichneten mit +20,8 Prozent den deutlichsten Zuwachs in der Jahresbilanz, gefolgt von den Wohnmobilen (+15,5 %) und der Oberklasse (+12,4 %).
SUVs were the second biggest segment and had the highest increase. The third highest increase was for luxury cars. 36,5% for small or compact also means over 60% weren't small or compact. Your source seems to support my conclusions pretty well.
> Exactly. Now think about this: They live in the countryside BECAUSE they cannot afford to live in the city, which ends up being cheaper even if you have to pay for a car, especially with the current housing market situation in cities.
Most poor people live in cities. People in the country side usually live there because they want big houses and "live in the green", not because they cannot afford rent. On the contrary, poor people usually have to live in the city despite the high rent, cause that's where low-wage jobs exist.
Not quite. You said „which people don‘t buy most of the time“ (referring to efficient cars), which could not be more wrong judging by both of my sources. But sure, people by SUVs, which I never denied. In fact, I also think that‘s a bad thing.
> Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above.
It was no judgement. I was also on that train a while ago.
> The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages.
Partially agreed. There is no reference as to what constitutes too high taxes honestly, but the point stands. Having low wages doesn't really allow for tax increases either.
> Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years
Not true at all. Income taxes maybe, but not overall tax contribution. What I mean is the quota of all taxes combined (Steuerquote). We are setting record after record here. We can be proud of ourselves...
In the end, voting is the only thing that matters. Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual without government setting policy so that doing the right thing is also doing the most profitable thing.
But despite you being wrong in your core point in my opinion, you're absolutely right about the method. (change your lifestyle, divest fossil, direct action, civil disobedience)
The reason that voting is useless is because voters don't care about the environment. Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters.[1]. Fix that, and then voting might make a difference. And you do that by making it clearly visible that it's important to you, and by convincing others that it's important to them.
1: https://news.gallup.com/poll/244367/top-issues-voters-health....
It was clear from the rest of your comment that you aren't one of those, but I fear they would find support in your comment. Confirmation bias would lead them to emphasize the "voting doesn't matter" part and ignore your call to action.
[edit]: Rereading your comment, you're much more clear than I originally thought about all change being grass roots. Did you edit? If not it really emphasizes this point. I read "voting doesn't matter", hitting one of my hot buttons leading me to misread your comment. We're obviously in fairly close agreement, yet my response was to spout off an angry denunciation...
No
But before that being vocal, determined, and incessant is what matters [1]. At first, nobody knows about you, then, nobody believes you. The climate change discourse is still not past that second stage.
[1]: https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
I think you wanted to write:
Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters _in the United States_...
In many countries it is a lot higher on the list of priorities.
For example, in the UK it is on the 4th place for voters [1].
In Denmark it is the highest priority in latest polls [2] (sorry danish only)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/21/environm...
[2] https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/ny-maaling-den-groenne-dagso...
USA is spreading conservative and fossil-fuel interests propaganda all over the world, it's very harmful, but it's not some inherent "voters don't care about X". It's simply that people paid a lot of money for voters not to care about X, and much less money to make them care about X.
Voting matters when (1) laws ensure all people have roughly equal influence when voting, (2) laws ensure voting translates into action instead of an empty gesture to appease the population, and (3) the rule of law is respected and consistently enforced.
When one or more of these is compromised, then the actions of the government are illegitimate, and there is a continuum of actions people can take beyond voting.
Writing letters -> peaceful street protests -> nonviolent civil disobedience like blocking roads -> sabotage -> violent street protests -> armed insurrection -> civil war.
So no, voting is not the only thing that matters.
Voting in most of the world is just a spectacle. If someone was elected that would in fact challenge the status quo (private property and police dominion for instance) they would be instantly murdered or imprisoned in a coup d'État.
At least that's how the story goes for revolutions in Europe/US and much of our modern colonies. As Emma Goldman once said, « if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal ».
> Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual
This is for sure. The problems are deep and structural and no individual action (however radical) can bring change. The issue is the people profiting from human exploitation and nature's destruction (the wealthy ruling classes) will never stop until it's too late. We have to stop them. Under some circumstances, voting can be a part of this process. But most times social change comes from the people, not a piece of paper.
Some Harvard Business people suggested that we could curb this issue by a three pronged approach:
1. Open primaries to prevent minority duopolies in the general
2. Gerrymander with an open source algorithm or a "shortest split line" method
3. Implement single transferrable vote, ie ranked choice, instead of first past the post (plurality voting), which spoils votes and results in sub-par representation.
Well, that's the main attribute of representative "democracy". This system we live in was setup in 1789 by the bourgeoisie to prevent emergence of a democracy. Many Lumières philosophers were frightened by actual democracy (the rule of the people). Voltaire famously said: « The people should be guided, not taught ».
These Harvard people you mention are not wrong. They're just so deep into the status quo they can't even imagine what a real democracy would look like. Building a democracy has nothing to do with technical details. Sure, some Condorcet-style voting system would favor smaller candidates. But to me, as an anarchist, building a democracy has more to do with:
1. Direct action instead of power delegation: the belief in elections prevents people from exerting change in their environment
2. End the tyranny of the majority: there is no universal truth to life and minorities should have their place in a democracy (which is not the case in our capitalist systems)
3. Decentralize institutions: centralization is always the tool of tyrants, whether republican (French-style jacobinism) or pretend-socialist (USSR-style democratic centralism)
We need to put our countries on a 'war footing'. We have so many people who could be working to fix these problems stuck in offices doing stuff that there isn't really a need for (i.e. most all software development) because that's what the 'market' rewards. We need to completely overhaul what we think of as value and how we reward it. I don't see how that's possible under the current capitalist system and I don't see the majority of people supporting alternative systems.
Imagine if we deployed the people power and innovation that currently gets wasted in competition between rival social media applications and redirected it to doing something about climate change. It's not possible for individuals to make that change however because at the end of the day they need to pay their landlord (who I regard as largely parasitic leeches on productivity) and buy food at the shops; and the roles that would allow them to contribute to this don't exist in the number, or at the wages, required.
The cost of moving to zero emissions here in the UK was estimated as being £1 trillion so it was kind of kicked down the road to maybe slightly after 2050. Which is just mad. Sure China and India might be bigger emitters but someone has to make the first move. The innovations can then be shared for free with those countries, we can spend money to help them transition. This is our long term survival, we need to be less squeamish about taking what we need from "private property" (read tax havens, the stock market, etc). But clearly these changes aren't achievable at the speed and scale needed solely through voting. Democracies tend to limit themselves to a small range of acceptable views around a midpoint and take a long time to change even if there is a moral imperative, like the previous changes you mention; so I don't see how they can react at the speed necessary to fix this.
In addition addressing climate change without addressing social justice won't work. As the article mentions the people most affected by this are going to overwhelmingly be poor and in less-developed countries. They're going to need to come somewhere when their regions become uninhabitable and while it's possible our response is to erect barriers (see Europe, US, etc) or build prison camps from a moral standpoint it can't be.
I've gone through that stage too. Then I came out and decided I'm gonna do what I can, however little the impact might be. I am not hopeful or optimistic. I don't expect to succeed or fail. I am just gonna work on it.
Got a source? My share of that is 16 grand (1T/63M). Let's just bloody do it. My god. That's a biscuit, it really is.
So > £1 trillion by 2050, not sure if that includes assumptions about cost reductions in renewables by then though so I'd assume compressing the timescale increases the estimate.
Either way it needs doing and it would seem that 2050 is going to be too late.
'Cos if we don't do it we're dead. Infinite opportunity cost.
I've posted about this before, but thinking in terms of pictures of the queen's face here is really rather daft.
Recirculation, and doing it over a number of years, change the figure into something tractable of course.
But that just makes it an economics question - does the UK have £1Tn available, and over how long. I'm thinking probably no today, and yes between now and 2050 if they aren't stupid with the economy.
It just feels like people are suffering from a massive streetlight syndrome where they feel like the only valuable thing they can contribute with their skills (which includes the ability to control unprecedented computing power) is more inconsequential mobile apps.
It reaches an even more ridiculous point when you consider that Silicon Valley is considered "hubristic" by a lot of pundits. What?! No! Silicon Valley's ambitions are underwhelming at best. We should expect a lot more from it.
That's because the carbon-taxers are manipulative and playing on your emotions. You need to feel that it's an absolute dire situation that needs rectifying immediately. They believe the only way they'll get their way is shouting above everyone else.
Truth is, some of us are starting to feel 'I'll lite the world on fire myself before I capitulate to your infantile tactics.' You need to adjust your strategy to offer incentives to actual people that have actual problems, not blame and shout.
1. Tragedy of the commons
When a country/company wants to make money by damaging the environment in the process, the money come to the country/company now, but the damage is spread world-wide. If the pollution would stay only in that country/city, it would be different. So, the choice is natural, especially considering government 4-year terms.
2. We always put ourselves first, rest of the city/country much further, and rest of the world... doesn't matter. What people want, by human nature, is to satisfy their own needs & comfort.
Examples:
* Why wait for a bus or use an electric bike when one can just drive a 2 tonnes car to move oneself? It's comfortable and cheap.
* USA-specific, but spreading to other countries as well: people huge SUV-style cars to transport 1-2 persons, when a small one could do the job as well.
* Norway refuses to drill for billions of barrels of oil in Arctic, leaving ‘whole industry surprised and disappointed’. Government made the right choice, but a few (prosperous already) affected by making less money complain: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/norway-oil-drillin...
* France introduces a diesel tax, to reduce pollution, which affects everybody's health. But, wait, some need to pay a little more? Let's protest! Tax was cancelled: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/11/french-protes...
* The Bełchatów Coal mine & Power station in Poland. Hundreds of people employed there, they are happy with it. Should the plant be closed to stop pollution? What about our jobs? No way! And no, getting only 20% of salary for free (basic income) and having to learn stuff to maybe find a new job in renewables is not acceptable. So, the coal plant goes on, but it's easier to point to China for doing the same (with more plants, of course).
3. Delayed effects of current actions
The environment effects of what a one person/community/country does, bad or good, are hard to see in the short term. Only the downsides are clearly visible in the present. So, taking the correct action is quite hard.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to overcome these. Would be glad to be proved wrong!
FYI, my personal environment footprint is much smaller than the average in EU/USA, but we are too few to make an impact and others won't listen/change.
Here's a solution at the international level: https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/
At the national level I believe the problem is slightly easier (though still extremely difficult). We generally have effective national institutions, so we "just" have to convince the populace that the pain is worth the gain. It's easier to stomach a little bit of pain for the common good as long as people believe that everybody else is also doing their part.
What leaves me hopeless is that any lifestyle restrictions Americans might make are being vastly outpaced by population growth in countries that are doing much less (personally and nationally) than the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
2. Deforestation is destroying the environment: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warmin...
3. 24 billion tons of fertile soil disappears every year: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/land-deg...
4. Large animals are dying out: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/66/10/807/223613...
5. At the other end of the scale, insects are disappearing: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071...
6. This is because we're in the middle of the 6th major mass extinction event the Earth has experienced, and this is our doing: https://truthout.org/articles/sixth-mass-extinction-ushers-i...
7. And we're polluting the planet so badly, plastics are showing up inside our bodies: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/news-...
To be honest I hear a lot of people talking about actionable efforts all the time, but if they're so actionable, why aren't they happening? Isn't that the definition of the term?
So I'd say it's lifestyle change, direct action and voting.
Fixes that really work will have to be at the source - the energy generation stage, making existing lifestyles zero carbon. Bear in mind that billions more people have yet to achieve the comfortable high-energy-use lifestyles that we enjoy.
There is only one way to get what you want: build what is effectively a world government and coerce everyone to reduce their consumption. That includes people in countries such as India, China, and Indonesia. They'll need to be told by rich westerners that they can't do the things that we did to get rich. Good luck with that.
A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem. That means more cost-effective green technologies, geoengineering, and adaptive technologies (such as air conditioning, building underground, heat sinks, etc). Those would allow us to keep growing economically, maintain people's quality of life, and it doesn't fail if China or India continue on their current path.
That article says we need to build a global organization that can coerce everyone reduce their carbon emissions. I don't see how my statement was incorrect.
Energy efficiency improvements and water conservation efforts have been spectacularly effective in many first world areas.
Electrified rail.
Low CO2 concrete. Real, already used.
The list is almost literally endless.
But anyway, all of these are simply cost based choices. A carbon tax would literally overnight shift the consumer choices. And the cost effectiveness depends on the market, and that is usually the best we can get.
Just to take one counter-example, the UK has reduced CO2 consumption by 38% since 1990.
> A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem
Technological approaches are part of the solution, but it's far too risky to gamble the future of our civilisation on technical breakthroughs that may or may not occur. We're up against some tough physical limits and we certainly have no guarantee that we'll get any miracle breakthroughs in the next few decades.
Besides, with our current technology level we almost certainly have the ability to solve the problem now; we just lack the political will. How would a slight improvement in technology change that?
The UK is a country, not a civilization. They don’t have to solve the same coordination problem that the entire world has.
You say "No civilization has ever voluntarily reduced resource consumption", but civilisation as a whole has not needed to before. This is the first time I can think of that we have faced a global existential threat - or at least one we can do something about.
consumption or production? also, isn't CO2 increase offset by increase in forests (that consume CO2)? so reducing CO2 should lead to reduction in forests, right?
I suppose it's possible that we get wise enough to deserve continue on as a species, but at this point I doubt it. I don't see anything in humanity that would lead me to believe it's capable of making the cohesive decisions to remedy the situation. Something else will come along in a few million years and maybe they'll do a better job of it.
If voting doesn't matter why would giving women the vote matter?
In the US, if you could just get more registered voters in Texas to actually vote it would completely flip the balance of power between the Dems and Republicans. The issue, supposedly, is that Texas has a "disproportionate number of young, poor, and uneducated citizens." This means that the (actually quite popular) idea that voting doesn't matter mostly benefits the party that has adopted ignorance as most of its platform.
I used to be a bit baffled how people could say "fake news" at obvious facts and data and science. Then I read something Fulton Sheen said: never think too much about what someone says, but why they say it. He made this point about atheists, saying that they only choose not to believe in God so they can continue living an evil life. The same can be said of people who deny climate change and the seriousness of the matter, or any clear and demonstrable truth really.
Scared people are only going to run in panic and will do the first thing that is presented "because something must be done".
I also see that you have fallen into the trap of thinking that there is anything you _can_ do personally.
The question is still valid though: are we thinking things through and what are our leader's intentions in case something like that happens and are they thinking about how to prevent it in the first place ?
Ten years ago we talked about how the India/Pakistan nuclear arsenal could end up in the hands of Al-Qaeda. What were the plans and which one was put in motion (if any) ?
"consider a narrow river valley below a high dam, such that if the dam burst, the resulting flood of water would drown people for a considerable distance downstream. When attitude pollsters ask people downstream of the dam how concerned they are about the dam's bursting, it's not surprising that fear of a dam burst is lowest far downstream, and increases among residents increasingly close to the dam. Surprisingly, though, after you get just a few miles below the dam, where fear of the dam's breaking is found to be highest, concern then falls off to zero as you approach closer to the dam! That is, the people living immediately under the dam, the ones most certain to be drowned in a dam burst, profess unconcern. That's because of psychological denial: the only way of preserving one's sanity while looking up every day at the dam is to deny the possiblity that it could burst. " - page 436
It's a fun story but it doesn't prove causality. Maybe their faith in the dam is why they moved there.
I mean I think if I was living right next to a dam or a chemical plant or whatever I would be more worried about an accident.
Although I suppose in real data you could get selection bias - those people who are terrified by nuclear power are unlikely to continue living next to a plant for long, leaving behind only those who are not bothered by it.
It’s not directly relevant in a relatable way to most of us. If you can afford air conditioning, these conditions are survivable. Building empathy with faraway victims facing chronic problems is hard.
But I only have shallow knowledge of the major supply chains, maybe someone with a deeper understanding can chime in.
The problem for many areas is it’s not a dry heat. I like many other people as you point out have lived in 35c and above areas just fine, but the humidity was very low - it wasn’t really that bad if you could avoid direct sun exposure and didn’t physically exert yourself much.
Once that humidity creeps up then it’s a problem.
The first sentence explains that the authors studied the “potential for a catastrophic cyclone-heatwave combo”. The rest of the article elaborates.
I didn't mean to be so flippant. But honestly, this article deals with an incredibly unlikely combination of events in a very small area of the world, and is then labelled with "the human body is close to its thermal limits because of climate change". This kind of sensationalist crap is not helping anyone.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0525-6
> We show that ‘TC–heat’ events are already possible along densely populated coastlines globally but, to date, only an estimated 1,000 people have been impacted. However, this number could rise markedly with over two million at risk under a storyline of the observed TCs recurring in a world 2 °C warmer than pre-industrial times. Using analogues as focusing events we show, for example, that if the catastrophic 1991 Bangladesh cyclone occurred with 2 °C global warming, there would be >70% chance of subsequent dangerous heat. This research highlights a gap in adaptation planning and a need to prepare for an emerging TC–heat compound hazard.
They also cite some past work you might find informative, e.g. https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/joc.2...
I kinda stand by my statement though. 1000 people who might have been affected. "Millions" more globally (so a tenth of a percent of the population then?). Lots of uncertainty in the previous paper. But a headline that implies that this is happening to "the human body" and we're all at risk. I'm not blaming the scientists, or questioning the science, but the reporting of it is (still, even after reading more into it) sensationalist crap.
Where is the alarmism?
It's been hot and humid in a lot of places for a long time, but it's only just now beginning to be hot and humid enough to be passively deadly.
Every person feels like, often rightly so, that they have enough fiscal and social stress that immediately impacts their lives.
For an (U.S) example, Presidential elections: the results of which undoubtedly impact the entire nations population in, potentially, massive ways in every sphere (social, economic ect.). You cannot really escape it either, it permeates news cycles at all levels nationally and globally.
Since 2000 it turnouts have been bounced between 50-60%. Given that, how many people are really going to be concerning themselves with something like climate change? Tax policy rattles more people than climate change ever will, they may even recognize it themselves, and yet people just don't care (or have more immediate concerns).
If you want someone to care, they have to be moved enough by being directly impacted. In climate change's case, it will be too late to do anything. But that's just how people (including myself) work.
I get the desire for a single unified initiative that drags us out of this mess, even against our wills. But no entity capable of doing that exists. And the bigger ethical question is indeed whether it should exist to begin with. If we can't solve these relatively simple problems of ensuring our survival and provide a reasonably fulfilling existence for our fellow humans, why does our species deserve to exist?
> But no entity capable of doing that exists.
I agree, this is a pipe dream. The reality is that there is absolutely no hope. Hence, my choice of not having kids.
Religious dictatorships didn't lead to peace or even actual embrace of the principles, communist dictatorships didn't help the working class, and green dictatorships won't help the environment.
If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?
Related:
If it's not enough because so many other people can't be arsed, my quality of life does not go up if I add sleepless nights and ulcers to my experience.
" Some things that help:
Walk more, especially as a form of transportation.
Use more daylighting and passive solar. This can be as simple as opening the window instead of cranking the AC.
Eat less meat. "
Interestingly I live in an area that's in between a middle/ upper middle class neighborhood and a much more rundown area. Of course the sidewalks only extend down the the poorer area. On top of that the road is adjacent to interstate entrances/ exits, adding more danger. Unless I want to pay for an uber, I'm generally confined to the apartment and immediate surrounding areas. There are ways to get to other parts of down, but they'd have me walking down streets notorious for crime. And don't get me started on the heat. A mile walk has me drowning in sweat.
I don't live completely in the middle of nowhere, but it is a pretty small city, and its obvious that not driving affects my quality of life significantly. Of course at this point, learning to drive and getting a car will cost about as much as to move to a walkable city, so I suppose I may do that.
Opening the window: To make it hotter and more humid in my house?
Eat less meat: I dont mind using turkey instead of beef anymore but good luck convincing most others.
https://apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0 > June 30, 1989
Articles in a similar vain are trotted out constantly, they just change the timespan and a few details. See recent example from FT:
https://biggerpicture.ft.com/global-risks/video/global-sea-l...
It's clear from the article's text that the statement was not that the predicted problems would occur by 2000, since "UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990" would give an absurdly short timeline.
It says "The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown."
Conveniently, that was 30 years ago. I went to https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ . In 1989 the temperature anomaly was about +0.25°C. It's currently +0.82°C. A change of 0.57°C is just over 1°F. As predicted by the most conservative estimate.
I have been unable to find the report. The only people who talk about that newspaper article appear to be climate change denialists, who don't link to the actual report, and misread the article to believe that there's a prediction of a 3 foot sea rise by 2000.
The late 1980s is when the majority of scientists - and associated people like Isaac Asimov, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfB7Hzb7G2Q - were convinced of the evidence of global warming and its potential problems.
That built upon earlier work. Eg, "In 1982, Exxon's environmental affairs office circulated an internal report to Exxon's management which said that the consequences of climate change could be catastrophic, and that a significant reduction in fossil fuel consumption would be necessary to curtail future climate change. It also said that "there is concern among some scientific groups that once the effects are measurable, they might not be reversible." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...
There's no way you can claim that this is vindication of that prediction.
Without knowing the original article context, it's really hard to know what the exact prediction is. It seems clear from looking around that most people who reference the article are global-denialists as I haven't found anyone verify that the newspaper reporter was accurate in the report.
So, I looked for the report. I believe it's "The State of the World Environment 1989 - UNEP/GC.15/7/Add.2" dated April 1989 at https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/28295/... . The prediction on p23./paragraph 68 is:
> Even then, estimates of temperature increase vary widely—from 0.7°C to 9.6°C. Recent studies agree, however, that doubling the carbon dioxide concentration from the pre-industrial level of 270 ppmv will probably increase global mean temperature by 1.5°C to 4.5°C (47, 48, 49)—but most likely by 2°C.
+0.82°C is larger than 0.7°C, so well within that predicted range - certainly on the low-end, but not enough to be rejected as "shit" given how the report explicitly states the uncertainty.
The 1 degree could have been 0.82°C rounded (up) to the nearest degree, or 1.476°F rounded (down) to the nearest degree.
I don't see an estimate of when, but figure 5 shows an estimate of 3°C rise by 2050, of which about 0.8°C come from CFC - CFCs weren't yet banned at that time. Which means Brown's prediction in the news article likely included a CFC component that didn't happen.
Thanks for the link to the original paper, I've never seen it myself either
The shit is now starting to hit the fan.
The predictions are that there's going to be a lot more shit hitting the fan, and these predictions are constantly being checked and re-checked.
The news reports first that the shit bombardment is coming, and now it's here.
And you complain about those news reports, and not those actually shitting on the planet?
You know the metaphor "bikeshedding", yes? The idea that there can be a lot of vigorous arguments over the materials, paint color, etc. to use for a bike shed?
The flip side of that metaphor, which I'll coin "atomicpowerplanting", is that few want to dig into the details to make a good decision. Going back to the original bikeshed email:
> an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far.
So, starting 40 years ago people started talking about the problems in graphite atomic piles, and made vague mentions of the Wigner effect, but the atomic power plant is important for national security and so it is built and put into operation.
This goes on for years. People point out some of the problems, and its knowledge is suppressed.
More years pass. And then the Windscale fire happens.
Perhaps the warnings are really important, but so complex that it's easy to atomicpowerplant?
I'm trying to point out that "shit bombardment" might be appropriate, if everything is going to shit.
Do you think there is substantial global warming caused by humans?
Do you think it's serious enough that we need to take drastic measures to reduce CO2 emissions?
Do you think the evidence was strong enough in the 1980s that they were right to be concerned about the future?
Do you think their claims - bearing in mind the range of the predictions as in the 1989 document I found - been shown to be substantially correct?
You haven't committed either which way, only to say that you've been bombarded by shit by the news. The 1989 article you pointed to, however, doesn't seem like shit. Why do you think it is?
Red Scare (first and second), Communist takeover, "better dead than red".
Ehrlich's The Population Bomb predicting world-wide famine by the 1980s, followed by the Zero Population Growth movement.
The destruction of the ozone hole.
For the more Biblical prophecy oriented, "The Late, Great Planet Earth", predicting the end of the earth by the 1980s or 1990s, sold 28M copies.
I could probably come up with more with a bit of research.
Perhaps if we'd never worried so much about the ozone hole, it'd be a lot bigger now. (it's still there by the way, just smaller)
Some of these were/are real concerns. Certainly the threat of nuclear war was a real concern, as were CFCs leading to the ozone hole, and the threat of mass starvation. These changes were based on the realistic fear that millions or more might die.
(Continued illegal use of CFCs is not helping, btw.)
Some were/are not. Biblical predictions of the end of the world come up every few decades, and have for over 1000 years.
But aren't they all examples of being told by mass media that we're going "to die at any moment"? I can empathize that hearing about these for many decades can cause people to become inured.
Unless there was something else to stop the emission of CFCs, it would be huge by now, no question!
If anyone wants to know about the current state of the ozone hole, here's the newest report:
https://ozone.unep.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/SAP-2018-...
I like the plots on ES.24 that show the effect the regulations have on global warming (the older replacement coolants were powerful greenhouse gases). See that curve? It's going down. If the regulations are followed (and we have good precedent that they will be) we've been spared several centi-degree in warming by 2100.
This is the only really positive news I've heard so far in the context.
Climate Change being real or not is not the point here. The point is that we have yet another generation of people believing that we're all screwed before we get old. Maybe that's it: it's actually easier for young people to believe that they don't have to make long-term decisions because they won't live that long.
- Nuclear war. This was the biggy. I remember at 25 I honestly didn't expect to live to 40. We regularly asked each other what we will do when (not if) the alarm goes off and we have 15 minutes to do something before being simultaneously cooked and blown apart in the shockwave.
- AIDS. When the AIDS epidemic broke, there were TV adverts with tombstones on them basically saying "stop having sex, it'll kill you". There were scientific articles explaining how the spread of AIDS was unstoppable and would destroy Western Civilisation within a decade.
- The Hole in The Ozone Layer. This was going to fry us all and we'd be living in underground bunkers by 2020.
- Y2K. Mass Media made a lot of this, painting pictures of planes falling out of the sky and distribution networks failing. It was very, very, anticlimactic (thankfully, and I played my part in that).
- Peak Oil. There was a fairly popular sentiment in the 00's that the oil was going to dry up before we were ready for it to. It turned out that fracking could alleviate that concern, and then they found a ton of new oil fields. But again, you can find media articles explaining how Western Civilisation was going to be destroyed by Peak Oil, and preppers getting themselves ready to survive it.
- Acid Rain. Less catastrophic, but still up there. I remember articles explaining how the delicate ecosystem of the English countryside was being destroyed by acid rain, and it would never recover, leading to the collapse of Western Civilisation.
There's probably more. The common thread is always "if this continues at its current pace (and it will because we have no way of stopping it), X will happen and that will destroy Western Civilisation". Sound familiar?
- worst pesticides (DDT)
- sulfate aerosols from coal
- CFCs
- chloride based plastics
- asbestos and dust
- leaded gasoline
- heavy metals
- nuclear non-proliferation
We have also made strides in monitoring our environment.
So it might look like lots of doomsday predictions, but the reason why these didn't pan out was that humans actually put the work in to prevent that from happening.
You've got to remember, the Hole in the Ozone Layer was just as threatening at the time as Climate Change. It was literally going to fry us all within a decade because of extreme UV. We'd be living in underground bunkers by now. And then we stopped using CFC's and it stopped growing, and we're all good now, thanks. Except the next disaster that was going to kill us all came along...
We're probably already past the event horizon on that issue. At this point, there's probably no way to make it happen that doesn't involved laws.
There's no way any of us can change the situation individually. We're past the event horizon; nuclear war/catastrophic climate change is a certainty, and we're all going to die. Some brave individuals are protesting against it, and some people are preparing for it. But for most of us, it's a done deal.
I have a theory that it actually allows people to stop worrying about the future, and therefore we don't have to make long-term decisions. It's actually comforting in a "what's the point of saving money, we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust/climate heatwave anyway. Might as well spend it down the pub now..." way.
So you get us in the middle who just ignore it all because after hearing both extremes for so long you again get desensitized to it all.
I liked what Arnold Schwarzenegger said "I don't give a if we agree about climate change.". We should just work to reduce our emmisions anyway and make everything cleaner.
I do know people tend to be more receptive to slow change. You take their SUV's away in 5 years, there will be issues. You start slowly phasing them out, it will probably work better. Also efficeint cars seem to expensive. You can buy a used car that will last 5 years for $3000 that gets crappy gas milage, or a new hybrid car for $20,000. one can argue about saving movey on gas, but you will never save $10k worth of money and for people with little money that is what they need to get by.
A full-out nuclear exchange might last anywhere from 1-3 hours and kill every human on Earth. Thousands of nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert is literally on the verge of wiping ourselves out. It almost happened, at least twice.
We're lucky to be here. But survivorship bias is a psychological distortion; it has zero predictive power. You can say the same thing at the individual level. "I've been hearing my whole life that I'm gonna die. Still here." And that's true up until the day you actually die.
An all-out nuclear exchange would kill a lot of people and send humanity back to the early industrial or pre-industrial era, but it's not an extinction risk.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests
The vast majority of those were underground, and they were not all at the same time.
One of the predicted problems was mass starvation. One of the mitigations was the Green Revolution. Quoting Borlaug's Nobel Prize speech (he has been credited with saving the lives of 1 billion people):
> It is true that the tide of the battle against hunger has changed for the better during the past three years. But tides have a way of flowing and then ebbing again. We may be at high tide now, but ebb tide could soon set in if we become complacent and relax our efforts. For we are dealing with two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction. ...
> There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind
In context of your comment, the predictions of mass starvation didn't happen. Was that because the predictions were wrong? Yes and no. The predictions were right, but people listened to the predictions and worked to mitigate them ... fully aware that they were only mitigations. Thus, those prediction did not happen ... yet.
It was for the people of the future - you and I included - to work to find the real solution. If we don't worry, the work of people like Borlaug to give us more breathing room to work on a more complete solution seems pointless.
The fact that I don't lose sleep over worrying about doomsday scenarios doesn't mean I'm doing nothing about it, a point I've repeatedly addressed in this same thread.
If you have an emergency and dial 911, the person who answers remains calm, cool and collected. If they send police or ambulance to your location due to your emergency, those folks also remain calm, cool and collected.
I'm not in denial here. I just think that not only is it not helpful to run screaming across the stage of life in a panic while flailing my arms like Kermit the frog, it's actively counterproductive.
I wish very much I could get more traction for certain things. Perhaps someday I will.
But I am quite confident that histrionics will play little to no part in any success I manage to achieve.
"If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?"
If I understand you correctly, your response to your own question is that you do indeed do something (eg, lack of car), but you don't worry, or more specifically, you don't worry to the point of losing sleep about it.
Is that a correct interpretation of what you wrote?
If so, I think we are working on different meanings of 'worry', which the OP used. I was thinking more along the lines of "to annoy, bother, vex", not "to cause mental distress or trouble" (using the definitions from https://www.etymonline.com/word/worry ).
That is, more along the lines of "concerned", and "alarmed", and not along the lines of the excessive worry that could be part of a generalized anxiety disorder causing a lack of sleep.
I believe it is possible to be both "worried" and "calm, cool and collected." For example, quoting from an interview with a paramedic at https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/01/03/6760393... :
> When people are acutely sick or injured, pain medication is important," Dahlke says. "But it's not the first thing we're going to worry about. We're going to worry about life threats. You're not necessarily going to die from pain, and we're going to do what satisfies the need in the moment to get you into the ambulance and to the hospital and to a higher level of care."
I assumed that OP meant that sort of worry - the kind which implies paying close attention to a real problem and trying to resolve it - and not some 'histrionic' concern.
No, I didn't.
I'm well aware there can be other reasons people aren't particularly/obviously invested in the topic. My reply wasn't intended to explain all such cases.
I didn't feel any need to pedantically enumerate all such points of view, some of which can be quite ugly. For example, if you believe global warming is human created and that this article is correct about billions of lives being at risk, you may cynically feel it is a problem that will resolve itself once that mass die off occurs.
People can be trying to solve it in earnest without signaling to anyone that they believe we are heading towards a doomsday scenario and that their life's work is intended to "save" us from it. In fact, those trying in earnest to find real solutions probably want to activaly eschew that framing. It won't help their work get taken seriously to identify themselves to the world as having some kind of saviour complex.
Renewable energy is a growing industry. How do you know who in that industry is just looking to make a buck and who is on a mission to save the world from global warming?
You can't actually rely on what they say to know what is in their heart of hearts. The person looking to get rich may claim to be trying to save the world because it's a good marketing ploy and improves their bottom line.
I gave up my car more than a decade ago, in part because I'm an environmental studies major. I'm also quite poor and have been for a long time. My lack of a car is consistently viewed through the lens of poverty. No one ever sees my lifestyle choice as an environmental choice.
I mostly don't harp on it. I also don't see well and have other reasons why I'm content to make my life work without a car in a country that actively makes life without a car difficult.
I don't see an upside to trying to position myself in the minds of most people as a fanatic devoting my life to leading by example. In fact, I see a lot of downside to such positioning.
I'm actively involved locally with two non profits. I'm generally the poorest person in the room. Making the rich people around me feel morally judged for things like having a car would close doors in my face, not open them.
Anyway, you and I seem to inherently frame things in a manner that isn't compatible. I feel I am pointlessly beating a dead horse here. It's not a good feeling and it's not a thing I care to continue with.
You replied: "We've been hearing since WW2 ... If we are right this time, why worry about it? If we are wrong this time -- as we have been for the past 70 years -- why worry about it?"
This "we" is a general "we", not a personal comment as it's unlikely that you are that old.
If your answer doesn't reflect something about 'the minds of most people' then who is the "we" who you are saying "are right"?
This is very important. Thank you for that.
If we are right, why worry about it? Because there are things you can do to help, but only if you acknowledge the problem.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/248027/americans-concerned-ever...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/26/climate-...
The response in USA is that people ask Trump to build a wall. In Europe, people vote for populistic right wing parties who promise to stop migrations.
They don't want to fix the root cause, which is that south is becoming inhabitable by climate change.
Notice that the worst scenarios, like the 4 degree warming, discussed in the article, happen lose to the end of the century. Most of us are dead then.
Not to mention that fearmongering is the basis of politics and so we're constantly being bombarded with "studies" showing a million different things to be fearful of, very often contradicting each other or at the very least not including the full story.
Are we saying people should go out on the streets in a mass hysteria? That's worse than climate change itself.
Are we saying we need to have in depth nuanced discussion about it. Sure, please do.
It's also just one of countless doomsday scenarios out there.
His thesis:
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"
An example from the rest of the talk:
"Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realize you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1/8th; then a 1/16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realize there’s a problem?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
This article seems to imply that everyone will die from exposure once a certain temperature and saturation is reached, but doesn't seem to take measures into consideration. Even without A/C there are plenty of options available, e.g. evaporative cooling, living underground, heat pumps (that move heat or cold underground depending on season) and just building with possible heatwaves in mind.
I AM worried about these things, we've just had a heatwave that knocked my girlfriend out for two days. Tomorrow morning a guy will come over to make measurements to install awnings and screens to keep the sunlight (and heat) out. I am long-term thinking about installing solar panels on the roof, which can be used to offset the power consumption of another possible upgrade, the installation of a solid rooftop AC unit instead of the portable one we've used that just can't keep up.
And that's just my house, there's loads of actions that can be undertaken by individuals, local municipalities and governments - think about growing taller trees in residential areas, managing the water table to combat drought, providing aid and cool shelter to the homeless and economically disadvantaged, or even opening up public pools and fountains, and making (cooled) public spaces more accessible to spend a day at during hot weather.
I bet, they were in a similar situation, people saying that we should stop. That it changes things. And... they didn't stop until the bitter end.
I think we will be like the easter island. We won't stop.
See for example: https://gizmodo.com/new-evidence-contradicts-theory-that-eas...
This article suggests they got all their stone from a single quarry, and so must have collaborated around that quarry.
....this doesn't seem to contradict the central claim of a society destroying its resource base. Am I missing something? It's also not incompatible to have collaboration around a central resource and conflict elsewhere. Though I mainly think it's a sideline to the tree story.
http://islandheritage.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/...
I don't think it does challenge the idea that the deforestation led to the collapse, but maybe it was not the only cause.
Certainly plausible. To know beyond that point we'd need a subject matter expert and possible original investigation.
In other words it's possible Diamond's tree narrative is correct but not his war narrative. I think that doesn't undermine it so much for the purposes of discussing the possibility that we may use all of a certain resource. But it is indeed a caveat worth noting.
Early reports of visits to the island noted how friendly the islanders were. Then just a couple of years later they were aggressive towards visiting ships. I wonder why? On the first visit some islanders were killed "by accident" (shot one! oops!).
The "stupid natives cut down their trees" story is mostly propaganda to cover the real tragedy caused by external forces destroying the island life.
I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint by consuming as little as possible, but just I myself alone is not enough. This requires a whole refactoring of how our cities should be built, how our civilization should work and I just don't see that happening any time soon.
Sure. Start talking to your friends, family and colleagues. Join groups of like-minded people.
I wonder if in human history there has been such a long running dire topic to endlessly discuss without any solution in sight ?
Maybe the Cold War ?
Wars in Africa can be traced to shrinking rivers and lakes. Tensions between north and south Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda,
When you see pictures of people starving, they never hold AK-47 in their hand.
In another viewpoint on climate change, do remember that the Earth rotate around the Sun in elliptical manner, it's not perfect circle - there will be surely a time when a new Ice Age will happen - we're just at a period when Earth is getting closer to the Sun on it's rotational axis
The earth's orbit around the sun is an ellipse. But it's an ellipse that takes one year to traverse. The closest thing that gets us in terms of an "ice age" is winter. And, in fact, "winter" is what happens when you're closer to the sun, due to a change in the angle of incidence of sunlight (in the northern hemisphere).
Are you referring to something else?
Historically this is a recipe for raising cheap armies, and finding something to do with them.
> The wetbulb temperature includes the cooling effect of water evaporating from the thermometer, and so is normally much lower than the normal (“drybulb”) temperature reported in weather forecasts.
With 100% humidity, the air temp and the wetbulb temp are the same. At lower humidity levels, they diverge.
Name a catastrophe that can compare with this scale — even the effects of that city-killer asteroid hitting Brussels would be easier to deal with.
So this is the real reason for the US Border Wall, right?
That would be an ironic acknowledgement that global climate change is a serious risk.
It's the old orders of power and the conglomeration of corporate entities that actually create the shooting script for various events including the creation of a border wall.
The identity politics or the thin veneer of hollywoodesque narratives above most especially foreign policy is just exactly that, fantasy, while it's the military-industrial complex that in reality drafts the plans together with PR companies.
Look for example at military historian Gwynne Dyers's talk here from 2010 both foreshadowing the refugee crisis, Syrian War and the border wall all from climate extrapolation without the identity-smokescreen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc_4Z1oiXhY
The whole border issue is extremely muddy though as it's not classically right-wing to protect the working classes from wage dumping by not letting millions of people in but has become a left-wing issue because class consciousness and economic policy has mostly been replaced with superficial identity based issues because they are allowed by the status quo. This is because they don't interfere with the increase in inequality and fall in real-wages happening in plane sight while pop-leftwingers are busy screaming about identity based issues (not that those aren't important).
From a resource perspective one could argue that the ever more transnationally oriented elite couldn't give two f's about protecting the sovereignty of yesterdays empires and nation states - but i think the US is still seen as a very valuable asset because a somewhat stable country with a large middle class is still important in a global system of resource extraction and exploitation - and also as a buffer around the US military which in essence is just a mercenary army created to protect US corporate assets and interests.
All in all, the border will be created no matter who is president because the plan has been laid out in military circles for decades , because climate change has never actually been tabu in the corporate intelligentsia as we also see in the Exxon papers from 50 years ago. It's all part of a plan to squeeze as much value out of the global capitalist ponzi scheme and protect US assets just up until everything turns into chaos. Exxon has known this together with most other elite wealth management entities - that is why the next step is border walls with machine guns and watchtowers, then a short balkanisation with feudal rule and mercenary armies protecting the elite before everything collapses and the private jets are pointed towards a new Antarctica or new Zealand bunkers.
If this sounds conspiratorial look no further than to Jeff Bezos statement this week that his space travel efforts are very much because he knows we are headed for total collapse of earth ecosystems. Thiel, Bezos, Musk, the Rothhcild family, Saudi Aramco or whoever are all very much aware of the coming collapse and fragmentation - this is why they all invest heavily in "let's get of earth or into the ground" tech.
I don't have any insight into "military circles", but I do recall an action film (maybe from the 80s) that featured (among other stuff) a militarized wall and prison complex along the US-Mexico border. Some action/horror films (especially zombie ones) are loaded with ~prophetic social commentary.
Edit: And damn! Gwynne Dyer's talk looks amazing. And there's a transcript at https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
Can we have a runaway greenhouse effect and reach a hothouse state like millions of years ago, or even worse due to the amount released all at once?
What do the models say in the worst case?
Will humanity barely survive at the poles, in that case?
If the permafrost melts it'll release a lot of methane and CO2, in part captured and in part from material beginning to rot a few thousand years too late.
Humanity might survive at the south pole, but we'll more likely go extinct in a worst case. Unless it's a venus scenario, life itself will go on.
At the absolute worst we'll reach a moist hothouse scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Eart...
The more likely worst case is climate similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
This (I think) could cause an overshoot, then a reduction of the total greenhouse effect
If you want to live in a colder climate -- just move North: Canada (almost empty), Northern United States (Alaska is almost empty), Northern Europe, Russia (almost empty).
I moved to Florida, because I like warmer temperatures. A lot of other people are moving to warmer South too (from colder North).
I will vote against laws that may bring temperature down.