The world’s climate goals are not sufficient. They are also unlikely to be met
economist.com
economist.com
4C of warming would probably cause a collapse in the ability to feed the populace, and render large chunks of the world uninhabitable without active cooling, or because they'll be underwater.
It's hard to imagine how civilization survives this, without those regions that do continue to have arable land putting up walls and turrets and mowing down the streams of starving migrants.
At what point do you look at preppers and think "honestly they might be on to something?"
(edit: additions below) Sources abound but https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/18/climate-...
"Indeed, the consequences of a 4C warmer world are so terrifying that most scientists would rather not contemplate them, let alone work out a survival strategy.
Rockström doesn’t like our chances. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” he says. “There will be a rich minority of people who survive with modern lifestyles, no doubt, but it will be a turbulent, conflict-ridden world.” "
"Since 2005, total global greenhouse-gas emissions have most closely tracked the RCP 8.5 scenario, "
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/rcp-85-t...
That seems more than a little cavalier given the limited range of regions we find our planet's landmass in. The future looks more and more terrifying, and despite public opinion supporting action in much the world, still the political class have little to no answer anywhere...
* Subsidize public transportation (maybe even 100%), and make it a feasible mode of transportation for as many people as possible (at least for daily commutes; bonus: many people are concentrated in cities, so start there).
* Regarding daily driving: If public transportation is a feasible alternative, punish those who still use their car for commuting.
* Massively increase taxes on all kinds of fossil fuels; no matter if used for driving or for electricity (initially ease this in regions with difficult/bad public transportation).
* Make it easier to build regenerative energies (e.g. solar and wind) plus storage systems (e.g. pumped water or battery).
* I'm personally undecided on nuclear fission, but compared to coal it could be the lesser of two evils?
* On the packaging of any product (from bottled water over electronics to toothpaste) print the amount of energy used in production and for transportation.
* Punish producers of goods that break early (e.g. define minimum durability requirements for various product groups).
Would you elect someone with this agenda? I would have a hard time, though I think these points could all be appropriate responses to the climate crisis.
Even better: Try to get elected with that ;-)
* Global population is exploding. We passed 2B as recently as 1927, now we are close to 8B. Most of this historically unprecedented tsunami of people aspires to an energy-rich lifestyle, by hook or by crook.
* Most of the global carbon emissions are produced by non-Western countries. Led by China, whose emissions are more than US + EU combined.
* How do you scale back energy intensive economies, without being rolled over by countries with no such compunctions?
Are you intentionally using per country rather than per capita numbers. This appears to be a talking point I see it so often, but it's hard to tell if people are just repeating it without thought.
Carbon tariffs let you penalise any country that doesn't play by the rules. We already do similar for other environmental and social reasons. Plus, the environmental option is often cheaper and more efficient, it's only a short term hit to entrenched interests. So really you should be worried about African nations leapfrogging you to cheap solar based manufacturing while you get locked into expensive fossil fuels to keep Republican donors rich.
So too the "global carbon emissions arms race" seems to be a wildly popular red herring. Yes, China has a brief window now where they have the highest emissions, but China is also moving the fastest at mitigating carbon emissions and is on track at moving a lot faster than the US or EU in cracking down on carbon emissions. Perhaps ironically to someone of your apparent perspective, but the higher population density of China, and predominance in massive river and coastal cities, has left China with far more incentive and immediate climate crisis concerns than most of the US and some of Europe are currently facing. The US and EU "developed world" seems more at risk of being "rolled over" by the efficiency gains China is making in "green" markets than any threat that China is just going stockpile gas in some Mad Max style race to the bottom (of the oil well). Your next car could be Chinese because they are taking Battery Electric seriously, whereas US manufacturers still have some weird idea that the market for BEV is just a toy to play with. (At least the EU manufacturers aren't rolling over and practically giving the market away.)
Tariffs. Import duties. Trading blocs that exclude anyone who isn't on board. It's already been done with copyright and other IP.
Ad 2: A lot of goods used by us are produced in China, so there are a lot of externalized emissions (hence the "kwh used for production & transportation requirement).
Ad 3: You hope the other countries realize they're committing civilizational suicide. Again: I'm open for good ideas. (And again no, "war" is still not a good idea).
So, let me summarize: You realized it's a global problem. What's your conclusion? Judging by what you write: Just do nothing and hope it's still okay-ish when we turn 80/90?
> Even better: Try to get elected with that
I don't live under a Swiss model of direct democracy, or even one of the better forms of proportional representation. We disassembled most local government powers and gave them to central. A majority of votes are pointless and wasted in safe seats. Many consider my country (the UK) one of the least representative implementations of "democracy" on the planet - with good cause. Only the top 2 - 4 issues and latest "idiot soundbite" swing elections. Scarily the Murdoch media can still apparently swing elections.
Where I live there's no point voting - there's too many retirees who've paid off mortgage, kids moved out etc who are voting solely on tax and pension levels.
Which leaves a) achieve a miracle of making it a key issue for Murdoch (or Lebedev, Desmond, Barclay Brothers etc) or b) get a world so hugely impacted that it's above health, employment and tax for most including the pensioners... Or I guess wait for the revolution? ;)
It isn't really necessary to ease this in at all if it's used to fund a dividend. Paying $5000 more for gas and electricity is no problem when you get the full $5000 back. All it does is make it cheaper to do something different than you are doing, because then you still get the $5000 but don't have to spend it all -- which is exactly the point.
You might even want to go the other direction in that case -- raise the tax in regions with bad transit, which would also increase the dividend in that region and give people there more incentive to at least buy electric vehicles etc., since they're the region with the highest carbon emissions per capita and most in need of remediation.
> On the packaging of any product (from bottled water over electronics to toothpaste) print the amount of energy used in production and for transportation.
Most people aren't going to care, and the carbon tax should take care of it anyway by making wasteful products cost more.
> Punish producers of goods that break early (e.g. define minimum durability requirements for various product groups).
Same thing there. The combination of "things cost more but you have more money (from the dividend)" causes the market to start to have a preference for durable goods, without actually harming the economy because it always nets to zero.
You really can let the market solve the whole problem just by pricing carbon appropriately. There is no need to micromanage it.
Then people stop buying fuel, and the tax income from fuels taxes dries out, and then the state no longer has the funds to pay those dividents. The state will need to stop paying dividents. Yes, emissions went down (a good thing), but also people's standard of living went down.
Since the alternatives are very close to cost competitive already, that isn't a huge hit if any, and greater economies of scale may even invert it and increase standard of living once they hit critical mass. All the tax does is cause people to have a preference for the new technology over the old one when it would have otherwise been about even.
And by the time the dividend goes to zero because nobody is buying fuel anymore, that also means that nobody is paying the tax anymore either. The only difference is that then every car is electric, which by that point cost about the same or less to own than gasoline cars traditionally did.
Haven't seen this election's manifesto yet, but in 2017 their manifesto was judged more financially credible - by the IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) - than that of the bloody Tories.
Brexit reveals there are some major failings with the system and how it can be hijacked by a focused minority group (e.g. the ERG), but it is not subject to the major US weakness to the {right|wrong} individual.
American Presidents don’t get monarchical powers. Trump has been able to deliver on almost none of his promises. But the leader a party picks is indicative of the mood of its policy makers writ large.
They threw out the baby with the bath water when getting rid of overly strong, and political union affiliations... The core premise of constraining capitalist excess, of aiming for redistribution, or "fairness" still resonates with a UK electorate. Despite 40 years of neoliberalism.
I suspect the party still hasn't quite found the right balance to get elected, and Corbyn individually is quite a huge negative for the party electorally, but their policies are interesting. Some of them feel desperately needed and long overdue. The Conservatives have brought forth the same policy for 40 consecutive years with almost nothing new or nuanced. Just more of the same - even in areas where they have failed badly. :)
Shitty leaders lose elections far more often than good leaders win them.
> American Presidents don’t get monarchical powers
It's surprisingly close and relates to Congress much as 18th century monarchy related to Parliament.
> the leader a party picks is indicative of the mood of its policy makers writ large.
True, but that again highlights the difference. A UK PM is often a markedly different MP on Parliamentary track record and voting to their administration.
> The Conservatives have brought forth the same policy for 40 consecutive years with almost nothing new or nuanced. Just more of the same - even in areas where they have failed badly.
How can you say that Tories "failed?" As you say, Labor had to become "Tories but with some social spending" in order to win any elections. When your opponent needs to adopt much of your platform to be viable, isn't that winning? Same thing happened in the U.S. after Reagan. For 25 years they had to be "Republicans with some social liberalism." I call that winning.
I did say areas where the Tories have failed. The con of austerity that has unnecessarily contracted the economy and massively escalated the debt. The destruction of public services for reasons of dogma. The decline of NHS standards under every Conservative government through deliberate under-funding and artificial imposition of expensive market solutions to non-problems - e.g. the embarrassing failure of privatised parole and prisons in the UK, or the failed NHS internal market, all of which added cost. As an aside, that's why I am heavily against re-nationalisation of industries under Labour. Even if they manage to work well during a Labour term they'll fail hard under the Tories - as a matter of dogma. The nett effect will be more cost and worse result, and long term under funding. Much better to have gone with hard regulation than nationalisation. As is, nationalisation is their weak point that worked during post-war consensus, not any more.
Winning at all costs, if you compromise your raison d'etre and forget those you once existed to help, is simply power for power's sake. It's why New Labour left, and still leaves an uncommonly bitter taste in UK politics - whether you were one time supporter or not - they were essentially bait and switch. Elections were an absence of choice when a New Labour manifesto could have been credibly put out by the Conservatives in a different cover. Vote on who has the nicer smile, nothing else much matters. The trust of politics reached a new low.
Which is not to say Labour hadn't been through a process of highly damaging self-harm captured by extremists in the years before Blair became leader. Blair was probably necessary to retain a party of any description. The Conservatives are now engaging in a similar level of extremist self-harm surrounding Brexit - when the Brexit dust settles we will see what long term damage that brings. I suspect it will be significant, perhaps as significant as Labour's troubled decades.
Both sides of the Atlantic the left seems to have been particularly slow to find an answer and reaction to neoliberalism of the right. Corbyn's Labour, though I dislike the individual, have found something that will resonate well, just as it did in 2017. There is much to like whether on the right or left. But not, I suspect, at this election. Meanwhile on the right, they ran out of ideas long ago. Tax cuts, more markets, less regulation, and um, that's it. I can't remember the last time a Conservative party had something they wanted to achieve or make better. They used to have plenty. Conservative vision is now something for one of their fringe meetings and never hits mainstream.
On that basis, it is very likely that Labour will "win" this campaign easily on policy, but lose the election on Corbyn's rating with voters. After his years of being useless in the Commons, had they put out the exact same policy under a less controversial leader a win might have been far more likely... It remains to be seen if they will spin up entirely new policy with a replacement for Corbyn.
In British elections that disparity is far from uncommon. Labour should have won in 87 and 17 on policy and campaign yet lost at the ballot box. Tories should have won on campaign and policy in 05, but lost the ballot. Then there's cyclical effects of having had enough of the current incumbent, regardless of "winning" policy. Thatcher could not have won in 92 (The year the FT backed Kinnock's Labour) even with perfect policies, somehow ideal to every voter. The change to Major was essential to that surprise win.
Neither can you rule out effect of an overwhelmingly right wing, and increasingly inaccurate and partisan media.
Edit; Sorry, that was far longer than intended. :)
There is no scenario for keeping us at 1.5 or 2C that allows the developing world to start living better lives that doesn’t involve the developed world going net negative in carbon emissions.
The developing world was given, as I understand it, to grow emissions until 2025 or 2030 and then commit to reductions and caps. Which may have been appropriate for India and China in the 80s or 90s, but hardly in the 21st century. Yet the same measure was probably about perfect for somewhere like Vietnam or Cambodia -- presuming the world never committed to honouring the obligation to subsidise the developing world past the worst and dirtiest of development. Helping a too poor to renewable India never go coal would have been the better choice - even though it would have cost the developed world actual money.
Regarding Asia: I thought of this at a more global scale. Of course it's pointless cleaning up the pool if the other people at the party using it as a trash dump (but maybe someone has to start).
If developing countries aspire to an European life style this will come with more emissions (which you said, and I agree with you). I would be the last to claim that some people should have a less decent life than others.
But the people in those country can see where this path leads, and since they're still "developing" they can try to start on a better path (if they want to). They have the advantage that these days there is greener tech available, so there is no need to go down the dirty road that led us to where we are right now in the west: We dumped a lot of shit in the pool, and still do, and we act as if we can't do anything about it while we should get ourselves together rather sooner than later.
//edit: What I mean is, I think our lifes are little bit too decent; at least with the costs we're paying for them, e.g. by destroying our planet. [Queue pun on technical debt or raking up a bill our (grand-)kids have to pay]
The cynical thing is: People with a lot of money make most of the profit from environmental destruction and can later use that money/resources to ease the effect of climate destruction on themselves and their families/heritage; poor people just try to get by, and have a harder time mitigating the effects.
I think I have a second point for my platform: Shift tax pressure from VAT to income tax and/or taxation on wealth. I should announce this one AFTER the gala with the corporate sponsors; also, this is difficult to balance for economic growth).
Hesitance towards nuclear power is part of the reason the public doesn't take climate change activism seriously.
To be clear I think you're right, but the reason I'd give is that people with financial interests in fossil fuels will spend their money on attacking you and boosting your opponent.
Nothing about the actual steps required seems that unpopular to me. Cleaner air, cheaper energy, better cars and busses? It only seems terrible if you believe the lies put out by the aforementioned fossil fuel interests.
However, remind me while you are punishing people for driving cars, how is the public transit outside major urban areas? Have you been outside urban areas?
"It's impractical for me to live in the middle of nowhere" doesn't actually refute any of their statements though.
If I were worried about spotted owls going extinct, saying "but I _like_ burning spotted owls for heat in the winter" doesn't really mean your actions are not going to have the negative consequence of spotted owls going extinct.
Compared to "hundreds of millions of people in India will die of thirst or starvation" "I like driving everywhere and living in the middle of nowhere" isn't inducing much sympathy.
Of course, you _can_ live in the middle of nowhere and have a pretty low carbon footprint. Ride a bike, eat vegetables, grow your own heating fuel, etc. Plenty of people do just that - here's one I've been following lately https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6vcadTSSQKVsdOudnbqwtg . But "I like having a cheap giant house in the middle of nowhere and driving a long ways to and from work" isn't exactly an argument.
Sad thing is that we are often pushed to live in the middle of nowhere by NIMBYs. Moderate density well-insulated homes near jobs and services that you can get to by bike, walking or transport isn't exactly a miserable life. Copenhageners seem happy enough.
Yes. I lived there for well over a decade and am still regularly visiting.
I elaborated on the meaning of the word "feasible" in the sentence "If public transportation is a feasible alternative", but removed that wall of text for better readability. Maybe should have kept it to clarify...?
> More taxes, less freedom, more punishments.
That's what we're already doing for destructive behavior if someone doesn't understand/care that what they're doing is bad. Look back at the last 30 years and tell me we actually learned that it's a bad idea to destroy our planet?
As indeed is the idea of your grand children living in a post-civilisation world
These are very different environments and public transport should be expected to be very different between them.
In cities, we should expect a high capacity system, like subways, 10-minutes buses and trams.
Gradually, as we move outside the cities densest areas, we should have a lighter but faster system, such as light transit rails, longer but still frequent bus routes.
Eventually, as we move outside suburban areas into rural areas, we should get something that barely exist right now: on-demand transit, like collective taxis, or flexible minibuses.
Doesn't matter. The planet doesn't care how difficult your commute is, and global climate policy shouldn't either. We're far past the point where we can ease in change. We need drastic worldwide change and we need it yesterday. Of course it's going to be very painful for a lot of people, but the level of climate change we're going to see on our current path is going to be an order of magnitude more so.
I know the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal is more or less verboten on HN, but if there is one thing it has exposed, it is this truth. Those who act in service to elites will deploy the most obvious lies, evince they most pathetic cowardice, and the embrace the basest nihilism instead of confronting the reality of our circumstances and those who are its authors.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/09/tipping-...
What matters is they would increasingly lock the world onto a track of rising temperatures. It matters little if the impact turns out to be serious such as melting permafrost or East Antarctic ice sheet, or less globally serious and localised such as a closedown of the North Atlantic Conveyor. How many degrees of increased warming or changed climate is far less well understood.
- Boot out the political class who are on the payroll of corporations whose short term profit margins insist on ignoring global warming. Replace them with people who are willing to actively cut profits and luxuries if it means avoiding ecological disaster, while focusing on programs that benefit the working class to maintain democratic power. Ie socialists.
- Boot out the politicians who are overly egalitarian. Enforce imperialistic extractive policies to maintain economic quality of life and create hard boundaries that can keep billions of dying refugees out. Use a philosophy of natural hierarchy of race, religion, nationality, culture, etc to maintain democratic power.
Both of these seem to be way more active and successful recently, and this will likely continue.
We can't even collectively decide to stop taking the stuff out of the ground that ought to stay there. How are these fanciful ideas more politically viable?
I'm still convinced that Musk's Boring Company is just a similar ploy to prevent investment in much needed mass transit to keep car sales up.
Also, as land becomes less farmable, other land at higher latitude and elevations might become more so. There's also the increase in vegetation associated with higher CO2 levels that might actually improve some farming.
I don't feel like we should fall into to emotional trap of throwing up our hands and predicting the apocolypse.
The effects are non-linear. What you see is that Bangladesh goes from being a habitable city one year to one which is underwater 1/4 of the time, look at the massive floods there this year. Next year might be dry, but the year after that? It is already not sustainably habitable, but the people still live there.
China (noting that most of their industrial cities are coastal) might have a bit more time, but it is going to mean rebuilding all of the infrastructure they have built--where do the resources come from for that?
And another question, before the people move, are they going to clean up all of their toxic waste? If not, it all goes into the water with the flooding, which then kills their uphill livelihood because they live next to a huge pool of poison.
Fuck, after the hurricane hit Texas, they decided to scrap environmentally sound cleanup because it was "too expensive given the scale of the loss." If the US can't clean up, why would developing countries?
Really bad example. Floods have always been a problem in Bangladesh.
Which city in Bangladesh are you talking about?
Source? I'm not sure I've heard about this...
If it takes a hundred years, it’ll be more like 99 years of buildup before the dam bursts.
Aquaculture and particularly aquatic plants and algae are such as small part of the global diet that statistically it might not even exist, and yet civilization could almost exclusive survive on it if needed. We have the know how to make such food edible. Oceans like the Baltic sea is basically in a death spiral because too much eutrophication. The nutrients is there, the farming technique is available, but the culture and economics are not. Similar to how people don't want bread made with grinned down insects, which is also a food production efficiency concept, algae is something that we could produce but won't because people will not buy the products. Even when giving away food we tend to use food that we culturally would also eat.
Right now in local context, this kind of culture crash can result in edible food having a value that is below transport costs. In lakes that suffer from overpopulation you sometimes do a push where you extract hundred of tons of fish in order to restore health to the ecosystem. As I hear, that fish usually get turned into methane and burned as bio fuel.
Food production all over the world is mostly the result of culture and tradition. With global trading we can add a bit more nuances, but even here we can find plenty of example where something which people eat in one place get thrown on the garbage heap in places which don't share the same food culture.
Human population might drop, but then house prices will drop too!
It's not all bad.
It would be a decent stronghold though for awhile I bet, but in the end desperation would lead to its discovery and pillaging.
Have you ever played the game rust? It's a survival game where the world you spawn in is pretty large. It always amazes me how similar people think in survival games. No good spot ever goes undiscovered.
If the islands were not mapped that would be your best bet.
> It would be a decent stronghold though for awhile I bet, but in the end desperation would lead to its discovery and pillaging.
So in a climate apocalypse scenario where people are starving and desperate and resources sparse, said people are going to be able to gather enough provisions and fuel to organise a weeks long trip across thousands of miles of open ocean in order to invade a settlement that is living at subsistence level. Right...
Inhumane, but...
This is somewhat disingenuous on my part as I am for using the government thumb if necessary to achieve goals that allow society to continue like a clean energy mix. However, maybe this could still be done in a light touch way like massive grants into basic research which I do think the US government has had success with in the past.
Fossil fuel could take part in this as well but from my perspective, they have never been interested in pursuing goals like efficiency and sustainability though innovation. They are driven by finding ways to create more demand for energy use and scaling up existing technology that is good enough for that purpose.
They'll have a completely new set of disingenuous talking points (unsubsidized fuel would hit the poorest hardest!) ready to confuse people and to stall that action as well.
Wasn't that literally the left's argument against carbon taxes on Oregon?
In addition, the use of untaxed externalities in arguments like this implies they aren't asking to take the government's thumb off, they are asking for the government to use more thumb, except against the companies they don't like.
It annoys me how little thought is put into making sure any of these new systems will work in a democratic system where the people negativity affected have a vote too.
Energy policy is related to social policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/20/china-appetite...
This issue goes beyond our consumption. The entire worlds growth has to be regulated at this point to ensure stability.
That means Western countries need to accept a lower standard of living or find ways to become vastly more efficient so that developing nations can catch up and we can find an equilibrium in regards to standard of living globally.
This West/rest dichotomy seems a bit outdated. Is China the West? oil-rich Middle East? Both of those have high emissions per capita - in the case of the Middle East, some of the highest in the world.
Mostly I meant developed vs undeveloped. Those are Eastern countries who are still developing. I think the dichotomy fits just fine still.
Why does this sound familiar?
Well, look, I for one at least appreciate the honesty from many climate concerned types that the goal is really authoritarian socialism. It’s much better to be honest about that than the years previous where it was all “we can just solve it with a tax” which implied but didn’t come right out and say what it really is to some people.
Is the WTO authoritarianism? Is a speed limit authoritarianism?
NO. Those are just regulations, because as systems get more complex you need more rules to manage the scale.
Look all I'm talking about doing is creating a world climate organization rater than a world trade organization and you're trying to tell me I'm suggesting authoritarianism. It's ludicrous.
I’m really worried about certain communities and cities making it through the summer down there. It will be California In the same situation again soon.
The breakdown of society? Unable to acquire basic goods? Roving gangs of marauders?
This is death by a thousand cuts. Civilisation doesn't end immediately once we hit our tipping point date - but damage to our environment becomes practically irreversible.
It gets called apocalyptic because we're heading to a future where they become inevitable, not that they exist today.
You need to get out of the car before the car crashes into a giant ball of flame. But saying that it hasn't exploded yet isn't an argument that there won't be flames.
That still doesn't make current events apocalyptic. Harbingers of the apocalypse maybe, but the apocalypse is the fireball. It's not apocalyptic until we crash.
Oh wait they don't look apocalyptic at all. The Mordor in the closet is still China and India.
Live data: https://www.windy.com/-CO-concentration-cosc?cosc,6.344,126....
The primary point of concern with a bushfire is that they kill people, destroy land and property, and are incredibly difficult to control.
Having the worst bushfires in recorded history is more to do with their scale being exacerbated by climate change, rather than they themselves having a detrimental effect on the environment.
Reducing your emissions completely is difficult. As others here have said, there are many emissions you can't practically reduce yourself, from concrete production to necessary transportation. Even where you can't reduce your personal impact though, you can reduce worldwide carbon output by an equivalent amount instead, by offsetting: directly donating to equivalent reductions elsewhere in the world that just need funding.
There's other providers too (e.g. https://offset.earth/), the only trick is to find somewhere that's cheap per-tonne offset (you should be able to do it for around $4 per tonne), with projects that are vetted & certified. Some more details & links to the kind of projects that offsetting funds here: https://www.goclimateneutral.org/our_projects.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/as-more-people-...
How so? Practically by definition you personally can make an almost incomprehensibly minuscule dent. This is not an issue that is going to be solved by personal action.
It's easy & fairly affordable for example to offset 10x your own personal emissions. For an average person in the US that would cost about $70 a month (about 20 tonnes/year * $4/tonne * 10 = $800/year). Meanwhile it's clearly impossible to 1000% reduce your personal emissions, no matter the sacrifices.
Completely agree we need large-scale action from nations & corporations too, but if you're looking for a way you can make a difference right now then offsetting is one of your most direct & effective options.
One person voting or acting makes only a small difference, but doing so as one of many eventually has an effect. Corporations and governments will move only because of the cumulative economic and democratic incentives from many many personal actions.
Our family uses around 2000kWh electricity per year. This is half of what most people in my country use. And ~16% of the avarage US usage.
Ofcourse there are a lot of reasons for the differences but the biggest reason is being consumption aware.
We don't own an AC, use LED lights everywhere, and always check the power consumption of appliances we buy.
Being aware of your consumptions really helps.
Paving your roof with solar panels will only help the producer of the panels, not your carbon footprint.
The most developed world individuals can do, as you say, is reduce their own footprint in minimal ways and VOTE!!
These individuals still can not choose zero-carbon heating/cooling (which is probably 1/3 of American's footprint, which you neglected to even mention), they can't choose how their infrastructure is produced (steel and cement, big time emissions there), they can't choose the actions of their American government, which spends a lot of carbon emissions on its internal activities as well as its foreign incursions.
So no, you really can't "boil down" to zero net emissions as an American unless you stop using heating, cooling, roads, transportation of any kind except walking/bikes, and if you completely stop supporting the US govt and its activities.
Without a tax on the resource, all you’re doing is leaving more of it for the others to abuse. The same happens with fishing, rhinos, etc etc.
Individual action is a moot point: we must solve this collectively. Everything else is a polarising distraction.
As an example I'll be moving into an A++++ isolated, triple glass, gass-less home using an efficient heat pump to convert 1x electrical energy into 5x heat energy using earth heat. Even then, we'll probably be at your consumption level (ballpark), for heating and ventilation alone. Many places on earth just won't work without heating (or AC), no matter how 'consumption aware' you are.
Curious as well to how you came to your last remark.
> Being aware of your consumptions really helps.
A lot of people live in places with summers and winters though, with ACs working through may to september and central heating through november to march.
Over 26 degrees indoors is when it starts to get unlivable and requires cooling. And without ACs it gets that hot indoors in a lot of the world and in plenty of Europe during summers, not just in tropics.
You need special attention to floor plan, facing, and to make choices that go the opposite direction of what you do if you have AC and want it to work efficiently, like having really big windows that open, several big doors, and high ceilings. These tend to make your heating less efficient, so there's that problem too.
You also need more expensive materials and different/better craftsmanship than has been commonly available to keep the house's interior finishes from deteriorating quickly when subjected to wide seasonal temperature swings. And more maintenance regardless.
About the only way I can think of would be a new global trade agreement. Something like meet your carbon targets and get free trade with all other members, don't and face 30% tariffs. If you could get say the US and EU on board pretty much all countries would be forced to follow.
That plus say a $100 carbon price might pretty much fix things for the output drops suggested in the article and not hurt the economy much.
https://spaswell.wordpress.com/2016/11/18/dr-gwynne-dyer-geo...
- - - -
important to remember that our current systems (no pun intended) are hugely wasteful. I forget the exact statistic but losses from the point of generation to your wall socket are something crazy, like 30%-50%. That's not including lunacy like refrigerators that open like cabinets rather than drawers (spilling all the cold air on the floor and filling the box with warm air. Some fridges have heaters in the door. It's true.) or pilot lights (little flames that burn 24/7 just in case you might want to cook at midnight or whatever.)
Efficiency would solve about half of the problem, in re: energy.
Wow. I had to search this to be sure you weren't kidding:
> In ‘single circuit appliances’ and appliances with a 4-star freezer compartment, temperatures are usually regulated according to refrigeration compartment temperature. When ambient temperatures fall, an issue arises because the refrigeration compartment will not need to be cooled as regularly and this means that the associated 4-star freezer compartment can then become too warm. In such cases, the refrigeration compartment is artificially heated by a light bulb or an electrical heater to force the refrigerator to cool down more frequently and thus keep the 4-star freezer compartment sufficiently cool.
https://blog.liebherr.com/appliances/my/refrigerators-heater...
The ones I was talking about are in the rim gasket thingy that seals the door when it's closed. Some refrigerators have heating elements in there to keep the gasket (or whatever you call it) from sticking to the frame when opening the door, IIRC.
We can reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions through profitable enterprise and without lowering quality of life / stopping economic growth / enforcing strict veganism or whatever else extremists propose. In fact, we can do so far ahead of the IPCC SR15 1.5C scenario requirements. How?
Firstly, don't disregard technologies without understanding their merit. Hydrocarbons are a big part of the problem, yes, but please note that natural gas is about 4x cleaner than coal and has actually been the largest contribution to lowering emissions in the energy sector (~75% natural gas reduction on a large chunk of energy consumption is far more significant than the ~95% renewable reduction on a much smaller portion of energy consumption thus far)
Our world relies on these technologies at the moment and a good climate change solution must include not only a smooth transition away from fossil fuels but also an increase in fossil fuel cleanliness.
Now, climate change is primarily driven by net emissions from 6 things:
- Energy (electricity, fuels, heat etc.)
- Transportation (cars, planes, boats etc.)
- Industry (steel, concrete, plastic etc.)
- Commercial (buildings, appliances, etc.)
- Agriculture (mostly beef, other meats, etc.)
- Carbon sequestration (deforestation, other tech)
Here's how we can solve the problem in all of these areas in a mutually beneficial, profitable way:
1. Nuclear fission is currently the cleanest, safest, and most fuel abundant energy source we have. Most people don't know this. It is also only at a very small fraction of its potential in efficiency and relies on the least common nuclear fuel of the 3 naturally occurring isotopes (U235 vs. Th232, U238)
With some relatively small investment in this space, we can both increase the world's total energy supply by several factors in order to accommodate growth in developing nations and decrease energy sector emissions by >99%, over the course of a few decades.
We can also provide enough cheap electricity to help with the other 5 areas:
2. Electric cars are physically more efficient, faster, and simpler than ICE cars. Same concept applies long term to all transport with the exception of orbital rockets (those which operate in a vacuum), and it is entirely possible that we can shift the entire transportation industry to a mix of (a) fully electric transport and (b) carbon-neutral fuels derived from sequestration techniques, all within a few decades.
3. High grade heat allows us to shift the emissions of steel manufacturing from the plant itself to the energy source. New nuclear fission technologies operating >600 degrees Celsius will allow us to shift the steel industry to net-zero emissions. Bill Gates recently also posted some notes about green concrete https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Buildings-are-good-for-peo...
Also, cross laminated timber offers a new technology that can be made stronger, cheaper, safer, and more psychologically beneficial than steel and concrete in most buildings, including skyscrapers. This and other biological materials science solutions can help shift away from steel, concrete, and plastic production.
4. Same concept from transportation applies here. Electric things are more efficient and will be cheaper long term across the board, and allow us to shift emissions to the energy sector (which is by far the easiest to reduce emissions in)
5. Agriculture is complicated, and feeding 10 billion people will be hard. But there are a lot of great options and innovations here as well. Indoor farming can be made significantly more reliable, productive, and efficient than regular farming if we have good access to electricity and water. Lab-grown meats, cultural shifts to vegetarianism/veganism, and alternative protein sources all offer options to reduce agricultural emissions by >95%.
6. There are many great companies working on sequestration technologies, and several of these not only remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere but also provide useful byproducts like clean hydrocarbon fuels. YC has recently funded such companies.
The technological shifts I proposed in sections 4 and 5 will allow us (and/or force us) to start fixing our land and replanting healthy forests.
Every single one of these solutions can realistically be widely implemented by the year 2040/2050, and if we really wanted to (although this is not realistic from a societal perspective) we could really get there by 2030. Every single one of these solutions can improve quality of life and support a growing global economy in a profitable way.
I believe we are going to reach net-zero emissions a lot faster than you might expect.
Please, don't fall for the fear mongering. (and obviously, also don't fall for denialism)
Climate change is real, but it is something we can solve, and we don't have to destroy society or adopt a political extreme across the board to do it. I've got hope for humanity, I hope you do too.
Technically, your stance or proposals are a political extreme, eh?
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FWIW, and apologies if this seems way out of left field, there is a kind of psychological algorithm called "Core Transformation Process". It operates between a guide and a single subject, in a therapeutic setting, to resolve and transform personal issues. Now I suspect, although I haven't tried it, that a variation designed to work with two subjects simultaneously (or alternating, or something) could work really well as a kind of negotiation or conflict-resolution process.
The thing is, something like that is even further out sociopolitically than your technology-saves-the-day proposals (which, again, I am all in favor of, FWIW.)
While it will definitely happen faster with government effort, the main point of my comment was that we can do all of these things in the free market.
In fact, we already are well on our way to doing all these things in the free market.
So, I wouldn't consider this a political extreme. My policy is simply to allow entrepreneurs to acquire private funding and test out their ideas. We already do that.
> ... "Core Transformation Process" ...
This is an interesting idea, I do think it is a fairly difficult issue to figure out how we can make meaningful political progress in today's world. It seems like the gears of democracy are slowing down more and more every year.
For example, electric cars require large amounts of copper, cobalt, and nickel. We don't produce enough to electrify all cars, so that means we need new mines. Mines take a long time to discover and build and have their own environmental problems. Also, recyclability of these batteries still needs a lot of work.
As for shifting steel to net-zero emissions, I agree it's possible in principle, but you need to get a lot hotter than 600C. Steel melts at ~1500C. A blast furnace needs to get to at least 1300C to separate iron from ore and temperatures can get up to ~2000C.
The engineered wood products are interesting, but they aren't well understood yet for use in large structures. One of the advantages of reinforced concrete is that the building is monolithic. There are no joints that can fail, it's one piece of reinforced concrete. The composites need joints, and every joint is a potential source of failure, which can then load other joints, potentially causing them to fail, and so on. These probably aren't insurmountable problems, but they are unsolved engineering problems and create a more complex structure.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic or contrarian. I think technological advances will be important in maintaining quality of life as we transition to more sustainable sources of energy, but they aren't going to solve all our problems.
Cobalt comes "free" as a waste product from copper/nickel mining. So long as copper/nickel get mined, there will be cobalt. There doesn't currently seem to be any threat right now of a shortage in the cobalt market (even in some hypothetical of "electrify all cars immediately" worst case). On top of that, we already have proven Lithium Ion battery formulations that don't need Cobalt (it's about a quarter of batteries on the market), and the ones in current production that use Cobalt typically list their usage of Cobalt in ppm [parts per million].
> Also, recyclability of these batteries still needs a lot of work.
Current car-sized batteries have been showing real world usage statistics at hundreds of thousands to just shy of tens of millions of cycles in their "first use" in cars, not enough have made it to secondary markets yet to have reliable statistics, but current beliefs are that secondary usages in devices such as "power walls" and grid supplementations should see tens of thousands of cycles at reduced capacities. In the tertiary stages where recycling becomes useful/necessary, we know that Lithium, the vast majority of battery compositions, is entirely recyclable (and a known entity, we've doing that much for a while). We aren't currently good at recycling Cobalt, but we haven't needed to do any such thing in bulk to date because A) again, most car batteries are still in their first lives, which are showing to be 15-20 years in some cases, B) Cobalt is often measured in ppm so a tiny percentage of battery composition, C) Cobalt is a "waste product" from other mining and economically the incentives just do not align to recycle it when it just keeps coming out of mines whether or not we need it.
Not that pessimism isn't useful, but another possibly helpful reminder we may be better off than we think we are.
Since we already triggered feedback loops (eg. thawing of permafrost) we probably need to go carbon negative for a while to stop said phenomena. This means over-provisioning our clean energy supply to power CO2 scrubbers or some similar tech.
I fear that, considering how hard is to get the world to agree to net 0 emissions, the negative emissions discussion will probably be a bloodbath.
The good news is our emissions are so high that if we do get to net zero, it will be relatively easy to go a bit into the negative from there.
We are locked already into an increase of a couple degrees celsius, because of the current carbon in the atmosphere. Even if we were to magically stop emitting any new carbon right now, the temperature would continue to coast upward for a few decades.
There is promising technology that could help us address this, but it's hard to believe that we'll be able to avoid a 4C increase at this point. Perhaps we'll be able to correct faster with technological improvements, but calling a 4c increase 'outright wrong' is not really being honest either.
https://www.unenvironment.org/resources/report/production-ga...
A computer climate model cannot predict the future. Believing so is magical thinking and clearly unscientific by definition.
I understand that observed trends tend to indicate future direction but this push, rooted in FUD, to make consensus of the scientific community equivalent to absolute fact is a reminder that all humans can have fragility in their logic and thinking in the face of fear.
If those in power who say they believe the consensus were really concerned with climate change to the existential degree they claim they would propose forcing India and China to curb emissions up to and including war if necessary. The truth is they see it as a means to their political ends. They see it as a blank check to expand the government's control over everyone's lives. If you don't believe me read the green new deal legislation proposed earlier this year. It reworks the whole of society around a certain political ideology using future predictions about climate change as justification.
I would place just as much blame for climate problems on those in the democratic party using climate change to further their ideology as I do the outright climate deniers.
Everyday people commenting on reddit and HN may be pure in their intentions but the average politician on either side just uses the topic as a leverage for their own political and monetary interest.
Since evidence based policy making became a thing. We use it for deciding when to plant crops, deciding what medical treatments should be broadly implemented, deciding what water treatment methods are acceptable...it's fairly popular.
> That concept is completely antithetical to what science is at the core (i.e. making repeatable observations to establish fact).
Either what you have established holds repeatably and you are predicting the future, or it doesn't hold repeatably and it's not, by your definition, science. You may be confusing repeatable experiments with repeatable observations, though.
> I understand that observed trends tend to indicate future direction but this push, rooted in FUD, to make consensus of the scientific community equivalent to absolute fact
At this point the observations are enough where it's an absolute fact. The only question is how much, how fast. That's what the computer modeling is trying to get a handle on.
Plus, your argument is equivalent to playing Russian roulette and claiming that the presence of a bullet somewhere in the gun is not an established fact. That's true. You don't know if it might be loaded. But do you really want to find out?
Thanks for the smug talking down to. :) However your comparison here is ridiculous. We can easily measure crop out comes, water treatment outcomes, and medical outcomes because in the past actual experiments were done that showed what worked and didn't in that situation.
The climate on the other hand is completely different. We don't have a second one to use as a control. The scale is too large to fully factor in all inputs and outputs. It is just not the same at all as the things you mention.
> Plus, your argument is equivalent to playing Russian roulette and claiming that the presence of a bullet somewhere in the gun is not an established fact.
I am not the type to choose security over giving up the personal freedoms and rights of myself and my fellow humans just in case someone's computer model turns out to be accurate.
In any case, your analogy is actually very poor. You can check and be 100% sure if a gun is loaded. You can't check what will happen to the climate in 50 years because it hasn't happened and we don't currently have the knowledge or capability to truly required to truly know what will happen with the climate.
Absolutely. There's a lot of people who don't understand how science works outside of a parochial impression from physics, and if I can't get some pleasure from dealing with it, then why bother?
> We don't have a second one to use as a control.
Like all observational sciences, basically.
> In any case, your analogy is actually very poor. You can check and be 100% sure if a gun is loaded.
All analogies can be strained out of usefulness.
> You can't check what will happen to the climate in 50 years because it hasn't happened
We already did. We're fifty years in and seeing the effects.
This is a really great analogy.
Pumping more and more GHG into the atmosphere is the stupidest experiment ever. Like poking a sleeping lion harder and harder.
And please don't tell me that doing something just in case we're right is better than doing nothing. There is a great cost to enacting the climate policies that have been proposed, both human and financial.
The very definition of science is making testable predictions.
We've had usefully predictive models for over 50 years now. The first real paper model from 1967 successfully predicted warming up to the current day.
In Einstein's case we were able to make observations and conduct experiments that bore out the hypothesis.
In the case of climate change this isn't possible. We don't have a second climate to use as a control. We don't have the capability to do experiments that accurately consider the infinite input and outputs that make up the climate as a whole. Science has its limits and they are mainly human.
Tell me what experiment we can do today that accurately includes every aspect of our climate that proves doom is certain.
If the best you can give is likelihoods or possibilities that is not a scientific fact so quit acting like it is and lets have a reasonable discussion.
There are many, many things we can do to take better care of our climate but being alarmist and using fear to get the public on board with your politics is a categorically a bad thing.
The burden of proof is on you to explain how CO2 levels not seen for 3 million years won't have a major impact on the biosphere.
> what science is at the core (i.e. making repeatable observations to establish fact)
These "facts" are predictions about what will happen in the future.
Physics tells us what will happen to physical systems, e.g. our understanding of gravity tells us what will happen to a system of masses in the future.
Chemistry tells us what will happen to chemical systems, e.g. our understanding of reactions tells us what will happen to interacting chemicals.
Medical research tells us what will happen to your body and disease when some agent is introduced to the system.
Climate science tells us what will happen to the climate, and it is based on the same concepts as the most fundamental and rigorous science: thermodynamics. If more heat enters than leaves a system, the temperature will increase. There is nothing unscientific here.
The climate isn't that simple. It's unfathomably complex. There are an infinite number of inputs and outputs. What repeatable experiment can accurately and repeatedly recreate this?
So your simplistic argument is just handwaving.
No, there are a finite number of particles in a finite space making up the Earth's climate.
> The climate isn't that simple. It's unfathomably complex.
Nothing is simple unless you simplify it.
A baseball is an unfathomably complex collection of billions of billions of particles interacting with the entire universe until you abstract it to a simple Newtonian point mass, but you'll still make all the relevant predictions to >99% accuracy.
Global warming can be accurately modeled by a very simple system:
There is the atmosphere, the ocean, the Earth itself, and the rest of the universe.
Over any finite time period there is a simple real number change in the temperature of these 4 subsystems modeled by thermodynamics, and there can be no net change in temperature due to conservation laws.
Can we predict these changes as accurately as we can predict simple Newtonian systems? No. But we can still predict them to a good degree of accuracy in the short term.