A New Push to Make Ecocide an International Crime
npr.org
npr.org
Sounds good, until you consider that people will want to use this as a wedge to declare driving cars, eating meat, heating your homes etc to be crimes against humanity. Having billions of people around has a substantial likelihood of wide spread, long term damage to the environment. We should collectively work to mitigate this, while preserving our quality or life and rights to happiness etc. This declaration doesn't help that, it just provides silly cover for a political agenda.
FWIW, I think the most useful political-economic thing to do would be to attempt to measure and account for "ecosystem services" both on the degradation/cost and improvement/benefit sides of the balance sheet.
Something close would be Exxon lying about climate change, or VW cheating emissions tests to produce high-pollution cars at scale without punishment, etc. Not individual drivers. I think that's pretty clear in the definition.
Edit: I'm an eco-fanatic and this seems productive to me.
Depends on the timeframe you choose to measure the social and economic benefits and costs.
> Cars have such enormous benefits...
Contrast with alcohol-fueled trains.
Surely one cannot disagree that designing neighborhoods and quality of life around personal car usage is the number one culprit for pollution.
Where is the flaw?
It’s more than cars and energy, its water, sewer, transit, land use, ecological impact, all the things that don’t scale well.
Yes decentralized power can mitigate a lot of that but planning communities to be low energy is a more scalable solution.
And at the end of the day, nothing will mitigate the 2nd law of thermodynamics in our current toolchest. So either we reduce total consumption, or we (spanning multiple generations of humans) pay the price.
> "Wanton" means with reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated;
Which seems to give a free pass to developed countries to just keep doing what they're doing as long as it's not outside the norms of what developed countries think is acceptable.
I'm not sure that it should: I mean banning driving isn't workable, but at this point burning fossil fuels for transportation is an economic choice. Giving up on fossil fuels doesn't mean giving up on cars, it means embarking on a slow and expensive transition to better cars.
So no, driving cars, eating meat or heating homes are not suddenly going to be considered ecocide.
But not taking care of your laws to try to minimize waste products of driving cars or heating homes might be.
Also, eating meat does not equate to relying on factory farming.
Sure, nobody is going to come out and ban driving/meat/heating.
But, do you REALLY need that pickup truck which has a V8 and gets 13MPG? Isn't that wanton disregard for the environment?
Do you REALLY need to eat red meat 7 days a week? Shouldn't you substitute with 1 day a week of chicken and another vegeterian, you'll be healthier too!
Do you REALLY need your house heated to 72F in the winter and 70F cooled in the summer? At least we should enforce to make the thermostats networked so we can control peak demand!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
To be very clear, I don't draw any parallels to what's happening here to be a holocaust-level thing. I do think it's A) a very slippery slope of giving control over what I fundamentally believe should be personal decisions over to a controlling central authority and B) I really like that poem.
The fact is, my definition of wanton may differ from yours, especially across cities and states and nations and continents and that's OK. You make your choices, I'll make mine.
My grandparents lived through German occupation of Poland. You would not want to live in a world where invaders can and do liberally stop you for whatever reason or no reason at all and shoot just for fun.
Poland lost about 3M ethnic Poles out of something like 24M population, just to German and Soviet occupation, most of them murdered in cold blood, not due to war action.
At least if you were Pole you could keep your head down and maybe live through the war.
Holocaust was 1000 times worse than that.
It was targeted, merciless action to wipe out an entire nation. 100% of it. You would be hunted like an animal. Worse than that, if anybody tried to help you they and their families would also be punished by death.
Please believe me that I have a dear amount of respect for what happened to people in the holocaust, for personal reasons.
International smuggling of endangered species as one of the main sources of income for organized crime.
Creating a chain of wildfires for profit to hit the economy, so people is turned against their government.
Having imbecile presidents that think that destroying decades of scientific work or taking bath masses in the middle of a pandemic, is really funny.
Chasing massively in Malta all European migratory birds that Europe is trying to protect with lots of effort (but is failing because somebody needs to fix his tiny complex p*s bragging about how much protected eagles, goose and birds can kill in a day).
THIS is the type of cases that ecocide cover and THIS is why is so important to have something like that ASAP.
I think you missed the point. It's all about crimes against 'Nature'.
Shame might be a pragmatic technology to bring individual people in line, but it can not steer planet scale collectives of people any more than it can steer our cars. In fact shame-politics stupefies people by asking them to relinquish their own rationality with the fear of painful non-conformity. It makes children out of adults. If there is a religious action to be taken, it is creating a reciprocal faith in rationality and virtuosity of the mature individuals, who can also trust that others will do the same.
Individualism isn't a viable route to collectivism because holding out for everybody to become rational actors is just as much magical thinking as thinking that laws will fix misaligned emergent incentives.
Saving ecosystems? At this point, I think only a that kind of fanaticism will be effective long-term. The combination of technology and industry is simply too deadly; it needs to be deeply socially unacceptable to cause harm to ecosystems and 'the environment'.
We have the knowledge: political science, propaganda (Nazism was an incredible achievement of myth-building), epidemiology (memes as 'idea viruses')... And the right time is during periods of instability and uncertainty - in this case, environmental rather than political!
As the article does explain, one of the governments who have ratified the Rome Statute of the ICC has to formally propose it, and then two-thirds of those governments have to vote in favour of that proposal. Close to zero chance you would get two-thirds votes for this.
Few governments are going to support turning the International Criminal Court into an international environmental regulator. Its existing expertise is in investigating crimes against humans (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity); it has little expertise in environmental issues.
I guess we may as well let the world burn at the hands of corporations, rather than bother to even say something about it. I'm really surprised at the defeatest attitude on HN about climate issues. This isn't the end. Time is still going, the clock is ticking.
I see defeatest as accepting that we have to reduce our quality of life, or otherwise compromise in order to live sustainably. Many are, and more should be, aggressively pursuing technologies that let people do what they like while providing economically viable ways to make sure we don't cause long term harm.
You seem to assume there is a supranational entity that can force nation-states to comply with rules, but there isn’t.
A set of rules that no organization can enforce is worthless. I would like if we can all come together and cooperate on climate change, but it isn’t likely.
Here is a comprehensive list of global problems that humans have cooperated on a global scale to solve:
I think that food scarcity could be on your list. If we were globally connected 100+ years ago, we might have collectively worried that there was no way to feed our growing population, advocated rules about reproduction, about what we could eat, about how many calories we burned... turns out we really did collaborate globally so that most of us are fed well enough for population to keep growing, and for global quality of life to increasr. And the solution was technological, not dogmatic.
Telling nations and individuals globally that they have to make sacrifices for climate change, and that only the selected few will be able to tell them what they can do, is completely untenable as you say. Working together to come up with more efficient ways to live is not.
In the book, the UN agency formed to enforce the Paris agreement has no teeth. It takes some high-profile climate disasters to get some countries to pay attention, and some eco-terrorism to get corporations/one-percenters to pay attention. Only after that does the agency get any real power to set standards and hold anyone to them.
It’s a broadly optimistic novel despite all that. I’m less sanguine about the outcome in the real world, but I fully expect some of the same tragedies (massive heat waves that kill maybe millions) and terrorism (drone swarms bringing down airliners/private jets) to occur.
Climate change is a wicked problem - we can't just legislate it away. We need to solve many many problems like reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, allowing/helping nature to rebound from centuries of industrialisation, and probably numerous other things, on a global scale without losing out to unscrupulous international competitors (both national and business). All without giving up too much of our present lifestyle (because people will resist such efforts).
[edit]: Wicked problems, for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Murder has been illegal for a long time but murder hasn't gone away. We need ecocide to go away, and fast. A more effective approach is needed.
There are exactly two ways to address climate change:
* wait for a natural feedback loop to kick in, i.e. wait for people to start dying. Necessity is the mother of invention, etc.
* artificially stimulate the feedback loop early through legislation, taxes, and real penalties.
One way or the other, the goal is to disincentivize unsustainable behavior such that the people who would be willing to resort said behavior no longer find it worth the risk/expected cost vs the estimated payoff. Yeah, people still murder, but they are a small exception. The goal is to get to that point for ecological damage too.
Personally though, I think it should already be considered a Crime Against Humanity.
Just making things illegal is painfully easy to work around for the wealthy and well connected, this should be obvious by now.
What you're describing is in the realm of a natural feedback loop. And yeah, it would be great if that were good enough. But what happens when it's not? The ONLY reason Tesla is where it is today is due to massive govt subsidies in its early years. So it's only a natural feedback in so much as it's an attempt at artificial stimulated natural feedback.
Then in your 2nd post you gave Tesla as an example of what a solution might look like; making sustainable options more attractive to consumers than alternatives.
Now it sounds like you've pivoted to, "it's complicated and we would have to think really hard about it", contrasting this with an overt strawman, as though any reasonable solution would consist of "sit back and say 'we did the best we could'".
Literally no one is saying that. Obviously it's a complex issue. Which to me means that the solution will involve pulling out all the stops. Sure it would be great if sustainable options were naturally able to become economically viable without intervention. But there is currently a lot of energy going into preventing this from happening to protect established income streams. And the clock is ticking. So i believe we will need to artificially disincentivize things, which seems to me like a vital piece of the "complex system" solution you're alluding to. So I don't understand why you're so resistant to it. So far it's worked great for curbing society's insatiable thirst for murder.
None of this is a pivot; systems science is my primary topic of interest but if I started talking about attractors or distributed-parameter systems then I'm just spewing jargon and that doesn't help anybody. We need market interventions, funding interventions, sociological, maybe even cultural interventions (if anybody's figured out how to shape culture yet). My point is that systems science provides an approach to dealing with these exact kinds of problems.
My point (which, I don't know if I'm not being clear enough or you're just missing it) is that as a society we tend to over-rely on just legislating away issues. The problem is that these techniques aren't going to cut it in this instance. They might help a bit, but it's not going to remove the need for fossil fuels, which are one of the biggest problems. It might make the occasional chemical plant executive think twice about dumping waste into the water. Those aren't the kind of incremental results that will avoid disaster. And you can't rely on the compounding of incremental results either, as would typically be the next step in the reductionist pipeline of ineffective approaches. Even if we stave off anthropogenic co2, we still have every other climate problem we've created to deal with.
If you think that making murder illegal has done the job of reducing the murder rate then there's really no getting through to you. Murder's been illegal for hundreds or thousands of years depending on the country, and it turns out that other things have done the work that making murder illegal could not. If perhaps we could have investigated and put funds towards those things earlier, the murder rate would have dropped sooner.
It's a similar argument to the "defund the police" people - maybe stop trying to stamp out crime exclusively through punishing it, and instead divert some of those funds elsewhere to prevention through different services like mental health and community intervention.