Reduction of Carbon Emissions is and always will be the best strategy to slow down global warming. These moon shot initiatives are necessary but should not be taken too seriously given their low probability of success.
Yeah, but the alternative is lower profits for entrenched corporate powers, so ...
In all seriousness, though, I'm glad someone is considering all options, because the political reality of this planet is that the common-sense approach may very well be off the table, meaning a moonshot is all we'll have left.
Can’t we just pay these people enough to go away?
“These people” is most of the population. Look at how little people have done to reduce their own meat reduction, transportation usage, etc.
People claim they care about global warming but air travel is back in full force and US citizens are throwing shit fits about petrol prices being a little closer to other western countries.
There is no corporate evil cabal keeping CO2 emissions high. It’s what the population actually wants through revealed preferences despite their expressed preferences.
Corporations want your money so they make things you want. They don't just pump CO2 into the atmosphere for fun.
Nobody pumps CO2 into the atmosphere "for fun," besides a very small group of men with illegally modified trucks. But corporations do pump CO2 into the atmosphere (taken as a general metaphor for pollution) because it's an efficient method of externalization.
Why do you remove all agency and responsibility from consumers and place it on corporations? Does it have anything to do with which one you're a part of?
I think it would behoove you to read this thread more charitably.
Edit: that being said, I don't need an advertisement to tell me that I want the majority of things in my life.
Google and Facebook are huge thanks to massive corporate advertising budgets. Lots of products would never survive based on need and consumer demand only. They need advertising to sell the product.
And those are just the first obvious examples that come to mind.
Any negative consequences, if any, will automatically put more burden on the poorer countries that don’t have the resources to fix things when they go wrong. All options should not be considered imho.
did I fall asleep in class when they mentioned that it was the American pollution that was particularly bad for the world?
if blame-pointing is the primary concern here, doesn't China produce something like double the amount of CO2 emissions compared to the US?
Certainly not per capita. And China and other developing countries have been emitting large amounts of co2 for only a very short period relatively speaking. We have gained the benefits of industrialisation but other poorer nations are beating the costs. This is why American and European pollution is different and must be addressed as a priority.
And per-capita emissions today are still vastly higher in North America and (most of) Western Europe than the rest of the world.
I'll invite you to consider the difficulty in getting people to agree in a question so trivial as to whether to wear masks i public in 2020.
Most individuals in China consume way less than most individuals in the US and emit less carbon. That they live under the same totalitarian govt is unlikely to make them sympathetic to the view that their personal sacrifice should be higher as we fight a global challenge.
I doubt they are willingly making sacrifices. They are just forced to do that...the poor people consume less because they cannot grab more.
The voters blame the politicians. The politicians blame the voters for voting wrong. The communists blame capitalism. Capitalism blames capitalism. The consumers blame the producers for producing the wrong thing. The producers blame the consumers for wanting the wrong thing. The east blames the west. The west blames the east. Cats blame dogs. Dogs blame cats.
In a sense yeah. They are all right, they are all right because we are all to blame. Each and every one of us bear this guilt. We all could have done differently. And if we keep sitting in a circle pointing fingers at each other, if we don't all own up to this responsibility, who is to blame won't matter, because there will hardly be anyone left to point fingers in a few hundred years.
We either fix this together or we all lose alone (although comforted by the thought that surely someone else was more at fault).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report...
Hmm, live the life of someone from the Congo, or do literally anything else. Not a tough decision.
I think that in practice a lot of countries would choose active genocide over deindustrialization. And it wouldn't even be close. Passive genocide, like that caused by Global Warming... There might be a lot of noise, but absolutely no significant action. So providing choices other than "deindustrialize" and "passive genocide" is critical if you don't want the decision to be "passive genocide".
In other words: your perception of your quality of life would have to have unreasonable roots (such as a large, disproportionately wasteful car and needing to consume large amounts of relatively low quality chicken and pork) in order for you to actually experience a decline, rather than just change.
Otherwise, what motive do most Americans have to reduce consumption? Even people who believe climate change is real and are worried about it likely barely move the needle. That's before we even consider people who don't believe or don't care.
Now, I think we can reasonably meaningfully reduce the amount of pollution we produce per "unit of consumption" such that consumption levels could remain relatively unchanged, but still allow us to save the world. Whether or not we can get there, with powerful short-term-thinking, status-quo-loving lobbying groups hindering progress every step of the way, is another matter.
There are lots of things, primarily in the domain of corporate regulation and incentives, that we can do to reduce per-capita pollution. Plugging externalizations, in turn, has a virtuous effect on demand (since businesses will push some of the costs onto consumers, and consumers will respond by maximizing purchase value over longer timeframes).
There is some innovation happening in technologies to extract carbon from air but they're extremely inefficient and mostly exist as greenwashing of plastics while effectively wasting energy that in turn ultimately results in pollution.
People don't work like that. Frankly, it is hopelessly naive of the human condition and akin to saying "why don't we all stop wasting money on locks and just all of us agree to stop stealing?" Or "why do we need money? Can't we just all do our part and only take what we need?" Or "why can't we agree to end wars?"
People tend to (mostly) calculate what is best for them. Most people would just say "the only thing I can control is what I do, not what everyone else does. The best outcome for me is to live like I want to live, regardless of what everyone else does." Some people have more awareness of what is good for all than others, but very few will make huge individual sacrifices for the sake of making a hard-to-detect positive impact on the common good.
See "prisoners' dilemma", "tragedy of the commons", "invisible hand", and so on.
A government, on the other hand -- especially one as big as the US government -- is generally the only way to address this sort of thing. I'm not saying this is a great plan, but I suspect things like this are worth looking into.
Climate change is unfortunately still -- even with all the obvious weather changes that are already happening -- too abstract to get a lot of people to even admit it's a problem, let alone agree on what should be done.
All the obvious weather changes that are doing what, exactly? The way that global agricultural output has increased over time[0]? The way that England is a degree or two warmer on average in the past five hundred years[1] (somewhere between the difference in going from London to Paris and London to Bordeaux, quelle horreur)?
The change is there, sure, but in what way is the problem pressing enough that dealing with it is clearly better than the cost of dealing with it? Because remember, every bit of time and resource we spend on climate change could be alternatively spent in other uses that might also benefit humanity.
[0]: https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply
[1]: https://i0.wp.com/judithcurry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11...
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_South_Asian_floods
If you attribute random weather events to global warming, then random weather events to "disprove" it also count.
Your links don't say "climate change isn't a problem," they just have a tiny bit of data out of context, that very few people here have the ability to fully understand as to how they may or may not relate to climate change. Do you really think the fact that agricultural output has increased over time says much about climate change, vs. technology and population and such? Or that a 2 degree temperature change in England is a) not a problem, just because a 2 degree temperature change seems minor, or b) is really going to give non-scientists a good perspective on something like this? Unless you understand all the things involved, you really need to let the scientists do an analysis on the data, rather than your seat-of-the-pants approach. If you don't want to trust the scientists, great, but just showing a tiny bit of data and extrapolating a conclusion based on intuition probably doesn't cut it.
The below is just pasted from Wikipedia, but it's a great starting point. You can follow the citations if you go to the article. Sure, it's a politicized issue so you'll always find a few on the other side. But the vast majority of scientists agree with this:
Due to climate change, deserts are expanding, while heat waves and wildfires are becoming more common. Increased warming in the Arctic has contributed to melting permafrost, glacial retreat and sea ice loss. Higher temperatures are also causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. Rapid environmental change in mountains, coral reefs, and the Arctic is forcing many species to relocate or become extinct. Climate change threatens people with food and water scarcity, increased flooding, extreme heat, more disease, and economic loss. Human migration and conflict can also be a result. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls climate change the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. Even if efforts to minimise future warming are successful, some effects will continue for centuries. These include sea level rise, and warmer, more acidic oceans.
> Hammond was right, of course, on his primary counts, as well: the temperature topped 40 degrees at London’s Heathrow airport and over 1,500 people died across Europe as a result of the heat wave.
There was 'literally' one day of temperatures over 40, in a couple of places. I didn't see any data on deaths, but it wasn't 'thousands'.
Before anyone jumps, I believe in climate change :) I just think this hyperbole isn't helpful.
> To date, 3,271 excess deaths have been recorded during heat-periods in 2022 in England and Wales. This is an average of 82 excess deaths per day, and 6.2% higher than the five-year average. The heat-period with the largest number of excess deaths was H2 (10 to 25 July) with 2,227 excess deaths (10.4% above average), an average of 139 excess deaths per day.
And my point was that it is striking to talk about how climate change is no big deal in England in this context.
Heat waves, wildfires, melting permafrost and sea ice, stronger storms -- OK, that's fine, I'm not disputing that these things are happening. But what is the human toll of these things compared against the literal billions of lives uplifted from terrible poverty in the global fossil fuel-based capitalist(ish) economy? That is the question I keep asking and to which I never seem to get a clear answer.
The time, effort, and resources we spend on de-carbonizing the global economy (or whatever other mitigation efforts are being studied and suggested) are time, effort, and resources that have alternative uses that could also benefit humanity. I wish to examine those alternative uses and the marginal cost at each level of mitigation. What I keep getting instead are categorical assertions that we are all doomed (literally, as in civilizational collapse) if we don't repent our ways and not much more than vague handwaving that renewable energy will be cheaper, more abundant, and easier to use.
I want an answer to the question: how do we bring the roughly half of the world living on a few bucks a day to first-world living standards? As a commenter put it so eloquently elsewhere, how do we ensure that Bangladeshis and Pakistanis can live like Texans? Because relieving human suffering is my goal.
But actual people on the ground, especially if that ground is in places that aren't as developed, do in fact want higher standards of living. I do not see myself as having the moral authority to tell them that they cannot have it because of environmental reasons. I'd rather leave it up to them to decide whether they want to "drill, baby, drill" now and live with the possibility of facing the music later, or keep living in huts.
Are you prepared to hear that it is simply not possible? We have finite resources. If everyone was living like in developed countries, we would consume the entirety of the resources we are currently capable of extracting from the Earth in a year, in only a few months. And even if we expanded our extraction capabilities, there is only one Earth, of which only finite amount of material will be useful and put to good use for our comfort.
Given that, there is only two possibilities: reduce resource consumption, or expand the amount of available resources.
* Reduce: you can either reduce each individual usage, or reduce the number of individuals. Now you see why everyone is advocating for reduced individual usage, because culling the population is seen as 'not relieving human suffering'.
* Increase: it requires going away from Earth and expanding into at least adjacent bodies with the capability of transforming them into useful stuff. To plan for that, you need to prove first that such solution would be possible before we are all extinct from the ecological collapse of our life support systems.
So now you are back to square one: if 'increasing' the available resources is not available right now, and might not even be available in the future, and reducing the population is frowned upon, then you are forced to find a way to reduce resource consumption.
Which might well mean that for everyone to live like Texans, that means Texans will have to change their lives and live like everyone else.
Once our ecosystem has collapsed, a possibility we see approaching close and closer, then *no one* will live, nevermind with the latest F150 or whathaveyou that Texans might enjoy. If your goal is truly to reduce human suffering, you must also entertain the possibility that we must limit ourselves. Someone living hedonistically, trying to enjoy earthly pleasures as much as possible and dying at age 35 to cardiac and respiratory failure, has not succeeded in enjoying their lives the most.
Another question might be: does everyone want to live like Texans in the first place? Are you planning to burn our Earth on faulty ideological or cultural assumptions? Because believe me, when I see how Americans live, I definitely do not wish to join them. You might be culturally conditioned to believe your way is the best, but don't take extreme opinions such as 'climate change is preferable to modifying the status quo' based on such myopic views.
Everyone's entitled to their preferences, but more people migrate to the US than any other country in the world, so it's evident that a lot people do wish to join them. And 7-8 of the top 10 recipients of global cross-border migration is to first-world countries, the inhabitants of which consume orders of magnitude more energy (even if that's less than Texans do) than those of the origin countries; so clearly many people other than myself vote with their feet to and go where more energy and resources are consumed per capita than less. Will you call all of those people myopic for pursuing a richer life, as well?
> Are you prepared to hear that it is simply not possible? We have finite resources.
Absolutely! I'm not wishing for sunshine and rainbows to appear magically and raise everyone's living standards. I simply choose to step out of the way of the people who are doing so by any means, including burning fossil fuels. And though it is axiomatically true that we live in a physical universe and therefore our resources are finite, I hope you're equally prepared to hear that in terms of the primary materials that go into producing the things that people consume, we've really just only scratched the surface of the Earth. It's pretty big. We're quite a long ways from where we need to mine other planets for resources.
> Once our ecosystem has collapsed, a possibility we see approaching close and closer
Eh. This gets repeated over and over with little evidence. Flooding in flood plains? Bring in the big earthmoving equipment, run the concrete plans, all powered by fossil fuels, and build dams. Cities with temperate climates experiencing more heat waves? Insulate homes and put in air conditioning. We'll adapt, or at least I will.
Definitely. People living in the US are not the most happy on Earth. Life is not the easiest there. Granted, there is a very successful propaganda at work convincing people that they will have a better chance to succeed. But more and more, this ideal is being questioned.
> Bring in the big earthmoving equipment, run the concrete plans, all powered by fossil fuels, and build dams.
To continue speaking in your language, run the cost analysis. Find how much more costly it will be to entertain grandiose project just to continue living the same way as before.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a believer of an idealistic natural world where humans should not life, far from it. But as the current pinnacle of life, the greatest achievement on Earth, I consider that it is our duty to sustain ourselves for as long as possible -- and that means for now understanding as much as possible of the biological systems on Earth before changing anything. We should reduce ecological collapses as much as possible, until we have learned everything we can from the species we are disappearing every days. We must be aware of our impact, in the fullest of sense and decide with total knowledge how to proceed.
> We'll adapt, or at least I will.
You are describing the exact inverse of 'adapting'. You want to modify the environment as much as necessary, at any cost, for it to fit our current cultural zeitgeist. Our biology trumps any current cultural fact. We should not try to preserve a single society or human colony, we should try to preserve as much life and (DNA) diversity as possible, as this is our best chance to learn and understand more, and find better ways to live, to further reduce our suffering.
> Eh. This gets repeated over and over with little evidence.
This is already happening, these last years have already shown a prelude of what is to come.
Rains will be rarer and more intense, leading to periods of drought and floods, as well as reduced retention in our current biomes. I don't know what you watched these last two years but it has already been happening in several regions, I don't know what more evidence you want of what is to come.
It will only become more and more difficult to grow food and keep livestock as the water system become more violent and unstable. Trying to stabilize an increasingly unstable system will prove extremely costly, you will be battling forces that are currently outside our capabilities. You might be optimistic and consider that we will always find solutions to it, but this is unreasonable. No one has shown so far that we will be capable of containing those issues.
Water might be the most problematic issue in the medium term, but wildfires, ocean acidification, tropical storms, ecological collapses have also started to happen, more frequently and more intensely. It will lead to a harder life for everyone. We will be lucky in the US and EU and will live better life for a time, but we will also experience greatly increased migrations, that will completely destroy our current social support systems. Given the latest rise in populism (on the left and right), it is clear to me that in that situation people will vote for any tyrant that will promise to do anything to protect their way of life. That will mean building critical infrastructure to attempt to contain the effects in the best case, but more likely just more self-serving, corrupt assholes and brutal power enforcement, genocide of the millions of people moving. It's only human nature.
Frankly what you describe will only accelerate our downfall. Our best chance of surviving is through knowledge, and your way will make so much of the complexity of life around us disappear, just to fit some myopic conception of how we should live.
"Why won't this code compile!!?? Computers are stupid!"
The prisoners' dilemma arises from the prison. The tragedy of the commons arises from the replacement of mutual social structures with competitve market incentives. These are not neutral facts of life, they're describing emergent properties of the systems they exist in. Those systems are arbitrary and we can change them.
There's actually a number of "one percenters" (i.e. multi-billionaires) who lobby for raising their own taxes. Few of them understandably want to simply give away their wealth but they're okay with paying a fairer (read: significantly larger) share as long as others in their class have to do so as well. They're trying to lower the ceiling, to literally change the system so the emergent properties of it change for the better.
What you're describing is an extremely individualistic approach favored by Austrian economics. It's not apolitical objective truth. It relies on intentional design choices of the economic system that can be changed. Much like feudal lords before the French revolution, however, those currently benefiting from it are largely disinterested in changing it and too powerful to overrule. We can hope "the government" addresses this, but as long as we accept narratives about individual responsibility and "everyone doing their part" I see no hope for legislators seriously reining in the actual polluters, especially in a country where the second anyone proposes it a skilled orator will insist that this will single-handedly destroy America as we know it.
Of course convincing an economist that the system could be changed in a way that doesn't incentivize the destruction of our habitat would be as outlandish as convincing an aristocrat in 1322 that the system could be changed so the king is continuously elected by the common folk instead of being destined by his bloodline and divine right:
It is hopelessly naive of the human condition to imagine that an ordinary mortal like you or I could assume the power of God to pick a new lordship like we are picking out pigs to slaughter. Even if it wasn't blasphemy, surely it is only right and best for us if our lord is born into his destiny and raised from a young age by experts in his future affairs do be a good lord for us and make his choices we are too ignorant to judge fairly.
Complete BS virtue signaling - everyone of those supposed 'multi-billionaires who lobby for raising their own taxes', can already voluntarily pay as much extra taxes as they want - how many are?
Why is it that these people will only do what they believe is morally correct, but only if the law forces them do it? The answer is, because they don't really believe what they say they believe in - they are virtue signaling.
Just like all the celebrities flying around in their private jets, giving speeches about global warming, and collecting their global warming awareness achievement awards.
I call BS.
You know why they don't voluntarily pay higher taxes, and yet advocate for it? because they know if the tax rates/laws change, they will just pay their lawyers extra money to figure out how not to pay it - they want someone else to do it instead.
Same reason Bezos preaches on GW, and yet drives around in a yacht that burns more fossil fuels than thousands or of typical Americans will use in a year.
It's all virtue signaling, and nothing else.
She's basically advocating for policies that would make it impossible (or extremely difficult) to become and remain as wealthy as she is, let alone a billionaire. And she's directly going against her own financial interests with this because no amount of creative accounting would shield her from all of it if it became actual policy.
For the record, I remembered her being a billionaire heiress but it seems I was off by a digit or two. So I apologize for incorrectly referring to one-percenters when I meant mostly her and other millionaires (afaik) who support her project called Taxmenow. She also criticized philanthropy.
I gave this as an example of people asking for a systemic solution that goes against their own self interest but solves a systemic problem that is bad for society as a whole. "Why don't they just give away their money" is an individualistic "solution" that does nothing to fix the systemic problem except going against their self interest.
Of course this assumes you agree with them that them being able to have so much money is a systemic problem worth addressing, i.e. that the system needs to be changed. "The law forcing them" is literally the system being changed. Because, as I said, the system incentivizes harsh competition and maximizing personal financial gain, so without changing the system there is no incentive for any individual to give up their excessive wealth if nobody else will.
If you are desperate to find hypocrisy, you'll have more success looking at "philanthropists" who argue against having to pay higher taxes but instead "give away" their money to their own charities (which just happen to shuffle that money back into their own companies).
EDIT: I see now that you were thinking of the exact billionaire philanthropists I mention as an example for actual hypocrisy, so I guess we agree on the hypocrisy, you just weren't aware of the group of people I was referencing.
You do realize that elective monarchy and republics were relatively common and very well known at the time right?
We can and do so - in small societies, like inner family and close friends - where trust exists.
So in thery maybe this trust can grow to eventually connect all humanity, but I really would not count on it.
So wouldn't it be nice, if we are all nice to each other? Yes but we ain't. Not with these existing tensions.
Know what the poor world thinks?
"The west got rich by polluting and now we are supposed to stay poor, because polluting is not allowed anymore? Not fair."
And I think they have a point.
When you are starving, you cannot afford to care if the gasoline and coal you are using is causing more long term problems. You are happy, that you have the coal in the first place, if you are cold or need power.
So yes, idealism likely will not solve anything. But it can help make the transition to a sustainable economy.
And I rather would distribute low tech solar cookers and high tech solar panels on scale, than mess with the atmosphere.
They may have a point, that won't change the reality of the situation: letting them do exactly what the developed countries did, will kill them. That's not fair, that's life.
> So yes, idealism likely will not solve anything. But it can help make the transition to a sustainable economy.
No, idealism by definition will produce idealistic solutions that won't amount to anything. You are advocating for controlling a system by considering that with enough ingenuity, trust or whatever, we can do it. No, controlling a complex system is done by understanding its baseline or attractors and tweaking its inputs carefully to bring it and maintaining it there.
It means indeed that injecting aerosols in the atmosphere to control the climate is a foolish errand, and the practical approach is energy sobriety. But don't go advocating this position by talking of ideals and fairness, you won't convince anyone.
Idealism is trying to do this, targeting the human motivation attractors.
Doing (subjectivly) good things gives a good feeling.
And if it would not work, there would not be so many vegans for example.
Intrinsic motivation is a strong attractor, you can reach with idealism. But we agree, that in this case on a global scale - it will never be enough. But each person convinced that things must be done, is (ideally) one more person working on the problem.
Climate change is inherently large scale. There's nothing that will change that.
We can change the equation only by large scale "contracts" and the like. That generally means governments. For instance, we can vote for representatives that make laws that limit emissions from factories and vehicles, and make treaties with other countries. Those things are not subject to tragedy of the commons.
I am not advocating for "messing with the atmosphere" in this sense, but I'm also not rejecting it outright. We are already messing with the atmosphere on a large scale, due to billions of individual decisions driven each one of those individuals' self-interest. If you are going to mess with it, I'd rather it done based on a controlled methodology based on science.
The issue with this sort of thinking - most plans that assume a good outcome, really - is the real question here is how many people will inhabit the world. The default strategy that math (and human instinct) drives towards is just enough people that on average they start starving.
And if people are going to keep going until they starve _anyway_, what is the problem with some living well?
> It will put very strong pressure during the transition...
As opposed to exponential growth? With the number of people we've got wandering around, we're one slightly-worse-than-COVID disaster away from 100s of millions to billions of people starving to death. An outcome like Japan's is significantly better than what is likely to happen in Africa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Population_g...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds-popu...
Starvation poverty is not the result of overpopulation. Quite the contrary: people in extreme conditions are more likely to have more children because high child mortality means any individual child is less likely to surive so if you want a heir (and an income provider since child labor likely also exists), you'll need more of them.
Studies have shown again and again that raising the standard of living (and access to medical care and family planning) reduces population growth. Studies have also shown that extreme wealth disparity directly leads to social instability (read: crime). Not simply poverty but poverty next to oppulence.
If you want a stable society with a stable population size, you need low wealth inequality. If you want to eliminate extreme poverty, you need to eliminate extreme wealth. Changing tax law so billionaires can't exist won't fix poverty but it will seal a constant drain on societal wealth and make it easier to fund public works programmes to empower people to leave poverty and welfare programmes to support those who can't.
Of course that's a much less edgy answer than just letting poor people starve because they're just too dumb to make good choices like not being poor or not being born in a country coerced to optimize their economy for the cheap export of unrefined resources and low-value cash crops wealthier nations can refine and use to create luxury goods to sell back to them at a massive premium.
That is rather off the mark on a couple of levels. Say there is a billionaire and a society of homeless indigents. We set the billionaire's house on fire and wreck all his stuff. This has no impact whatsoever on the people in extreme poverty.
That silly example has played out in practice in a couple of ways (communism being the most showy). There is a compelling picture that allowing extremely wealthy individuals to flourish is good for the communities they are in. Once people start adopting policies to curtail or confiscate resources from people who create wealth it is easy to lose control and end up in a bad spot.
Alternatively, you could just set his pool house on fire, and then ask if he would like to ~voluntarily change his tune or find out what happens next.
Kinda like this, with appropriate modifications:
The plan there is literally to identify the person in the best position to help and then start hindering/antagonising them. You've even managed to envision a scenario worse than just stealing stuff, which is already pretty bad as plans go. Can you come up with a worse path to prosperity if you try?
If I had used the word "should" instead of "could", I may agree with you (or at at least agree with you more).
> That approach is the fast path to poverty. It is more likely to lock in generations of families starving to death than any approach except total war.
There are heuristic predictions of reality ("is", "is more likely", when referencing the future or counterfactual reality), and then there is reality itself (which is unknown, but cloaked and thus not realizable as such). And then there is also a culture unnecessarily stuck in a state where they rarely make a distinction between the two - now that, to my mind, is a real catastrophic lack of strategic/etc thinking.
> The plan there is literally to identify the person in the best position to help and then start hindering/antagonising them.
You're "not wrong", but technically, it should be only a very small part of a well thought out (and thus much more complex) plan.
Not to mention: hindering and antagonism goes both ways.
> You've even managed to envision a scenario worse than just stealing stuff, which is already pretty bad as plans go.
Why is this worse than stealing stuff? Stealing stuff has relatively minor causal effects - it's become normal, "baked into the system", it has been skilfully accommodated as a "cost of doing business". Accommodating random, chaotic, and anomalous events that cannot easily be predicted in advance has much more potential for broad causal influence, at least as I see things (at least: it is plausible). As an example, consider how successful the immensely powerful US military does when fighting vastly under-powered "enemies".
Additionally: explaining on TV why people are stealing stuff is easy - explaining that someone's pool house got burned down and a "Your move." note was left at the scene of the crime is....not so easy. Or desirable, I suspect (the silly masses often have a tendency to get caught up in trends - best for everyone to keep their attention focused on Facebook, TikTok, the political outrage du jour, The Facts, etc).
> Can you come up with a worse path to prosperity if you try?
Easily. And I can also come up with hundreds of better variations - the advantage of this approach though is that it is simple (to understand, and execute), and it (as a singular discrete action) does not require coordination of large numbers of people (subsequent steps would though, of course).
All this is getting a bit beyond the level of colloquial reality we've become "accustomed" to though, so no need to take it very seriously - probably best to just file it under "far right conspiracy theorist" or something like that (choose your preferred meme) for peace of mind, as we do. It's not like the very system we live in deserves the same level of thorough analysis that we devote to the computer systems we work in at our days jobs.
The natural way to remove carbon is weathering rocks over millions of years, and it's not hard to accelerate that process so it only takes decades: https://vesta.earth
Why wouldn't that be the best strategy? Just like contraception is the best strategy for teenagers, I think natural methods of geoengineering are the best strategy for climate change. (I'm not saying aerosols are natural, that one is a horrible idea)
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Not all nations are born alike. There are plenty of examples of wealthy nations in Europe and Asia with fractional carbon emissions footprint.
Before anyway throws the "they export their pollution" argument at me, you need to look at the stats on global GHG per capita.
Basically the US, Canada, Australia, and the Gulf Countries are disproportionately wasteful per capita.
This is largely due to how much people buy non-essential goods in those countries and how much energy is generated from Coal/Gas. Both of these can be changed without falling into medieval lifestyles.
To assume that nothing can be done about it is learned helplessness which absolutely plays into the interest of the hydrocarbon industry lobby.
edit: Gulf not Golf!
Given the truly impressive number of golf courses in the area (for a desert), this isn't the worst descriptor, but I do wonder if you mean the Gulf Countries, referring to the countries with a shoreline on the southern half of the Persian Gulf? I remember being a kid in the early 90s wondering why they were starting a war over a game...
Gee I wonder why those countries would be producing so many emissions per capita. I mean it's not like they're supplying the entire world with food and energy, oh wait, they are.
I think it's more useful to look at carbon emissions per unit GDP, and the change therein. Stuff has to be produced somewhere, and it doesn't matter to the Earth where. What we want is for it to be produced as carbon-efficiently as possible. By this standard the U.S. still has a way to go to catch up with Europe, but it is catching up, rapidly (and our Canadian friends are weirdly awful, I guess because of tar sands and growing food in greenhouses).
Introducing an exotic species for pest control can work, but sometimes it just makes everything much, much worse.
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2018/05/top-10-inv...
1) Hey, let's introduce rabbits for hunting!
2) Shit, they're eating all the grass that we want our sheep to eat
3) Let's introduce ferrets, stoats, and weasels, to eat all the rabbits!
4) Shit, they're just eating all the endemic birds
5) Uh....
We're still wrestling with Step #6 - our native beech forests (not Northern Hemisphere beech, as their Latin name makes clear - Nothofagus "false beech") will have a mass seeding event (a "mast") every few years. And when that happens, rodent populations explode, and then so too do the stoat and weasel populations.
But when the mustelids run out of rats and mice, then they move onto the birds. So, we have to poison, like crazy, as well as trap, to try to protect the birds most vulnerable to them.
Luckily, that didn't get much traction.
Perhaps she’ll die.
The closer attention you pay, the more this place seems like a simulation, of some kind.
Remember that "paying close attention" should not mean focusing on the interesting coincidences. A million things happen to you every day; most of it is noise unless you assign meaning to it. This sheer quantity of events means that coincidences are pretty much guaranteed to happen on a regular basis — paying close attention just means you notice more of them.
Or maybe: both are true (to some degree) simultaneously!
> Remember that "paying close attention" should not mean focusing on the interesting coincidences.
Exactly - this, and also all the other things.
> This sheer quantity of events means that coincidences are pretty much guaranteed to happen on a regular basis — paying close attention just means you notice more of them.
I am suspicious of the word "just" in this sentence, it makes an otherwise fine sentence seem necessarily incorrect. What did you mean by it?
If we’re living in a simulation, it would be strange indeed that they’ve made it appear to be completely deterministic but with an extra sprinkling of coincidence pixie dust as experienced by Darwinistic entities which experience a self-bootstrapped illusion of free will.
So it may seem...but can you know for certain that it doesn't reflect underlying cognition, at least to some degree?
For example, let's reconsider your statement:
"Remember that "paying close attention" should not mean focusing on the interesting coincidences. A million things happen to you every day; most of it is noise unless you assign meaning to it. This sheer quantity of events means that coincidences are pretty much guaranteed to happen on a regular basis — paying close attention just means you notice more of them."
We now know that "paying close attention means you notice more of them [only coincidences, which has also been ruled out]" is not necessarily a comprehensive set of the consequences/benefits of paying very close attention - so then: what might some other plausible benefits be, for various degrees of the exercise of "paying close attention"?
(And as an aside: have you ever noticed how programmers and scientists, and their fans, regularly extol the superiority of the virtues of strict logic and epistemology, but when they are asked to practice it they often claim that it is ~stupid/dumb/meaningless/a waste of time?)
> If we’re living in a simulation, it would be strange indeed that they’ve made it appear to be completely deterministic but with an extra sprinkling of coincidence pixie dust as experienced by Darwinistic entities which experience a self-bootstrapped illusion of free will.
This makes several assumptions - for example, if we are in a simulation, you seem to be assuming a particular kind of simulation (one that people or an entity of some kind made) - what about the Plato's Allegory of the Cave style of simulation, that has substantial scientific support?
For example: "they’ve made it appear to be completely deterministic" is your experience, but not mine - materialists (not making an accusation, just saying "in general") tend to only "see" the physical realm of reality, but others also see the metaphysical realm (although ~everyone complains about the metaphysical realm, despite thinking it doesn't exist).
The best I can tell is that your argument is that it's not possible for me to provide an absolute assessment of my own opinion. And that my choice of sentence construction could have some deeper meaning. If that's what you're saying, it is—in my opinion—nothing more than empty sophistry.
How about reading my star signs next.
That said, I'd rather just take my chances with the warming than engage in some mad-scientist cooling plans...
Tangential, but I really enjoyed this podcast with a climate modeler:
At a certain point humanity's chances with the warming are zero. Just depends on how many dominoes start to fall and how fast. We could conceivably wipe out just about all life on the planet. If our only hope is to buy ourselves a few more years by geoengineering I'm all for it, but I do wish we'd start with things that didn't involve poisoning our atmosphere or risking upsetting our already screwed up weather system. It seems like we've done basically nothing so far so jumping straight to the most extreme potential solutions (none of which have a ton of evidence supporting their effectiveness) feels premature.
I guess if I were in the fossil fuel industry and wanted to continue making money hand over fist by destroying the planet these kinds of options must seem pretty tempting though. They certainly wouldn't lose any sleep poisoning the sky if it means they can continue doing business as usual.
The hyperbole in your claim is laughable and completely unhelpful for anyone who's on the fence about climate change and climate change measures. Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark.
What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism that has always been innate to humanity (see centuries of apocalyptic predictions under any number of pretexts you can conceive) and has nothing to do with real science, real risks and real, possible solutions. Today, for many, this fetishism happens to have latched onto climate change, and steals some of its apparent legitimacy from the fact that the underlying problem is a real one, though not a genuine doom scenario.
The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past, and it will survive along with life, without problems despite even our worst human-caused warming. Even with our predicted warming trends, humanity will be a long ways from being in danger of extinction as the climate changes to a warmer one because of our economic activities. As we've already done many times in our past, we will simply adapt.
"we will simply adapt."
Tough luck to the other folks, right? They should have been born in a different country. They deal with the consequences of your pollution, as their political system crumbles and nobody lets them migrate.
Secondly, your emotional comment completely disregards the basic point of what I was saying, that humans in general will adapt and are actually very good at it in general.
Furthermore, even more fundamentally, my points about doom fetishism and apocalyptic exaggeration: Climate change is a problem for the vastly complex human society spread all across the globe and sustaining 8 billion people, but it is not on par with a true cataclysm for life on earth in the way something like a large asteroid impact or a "snowball earth" ice age would be. It is something that the earth, life on earth and much of human society in general will find ways to deal with. This isn't to sweep suffering under the rug, but it's worth mentioning for a dose of realistic optimism.
We simply can't predict at this point what human innovations in the next 150 years of the UN/IPCC predictions of worst case climate warming will possibly improve things or let humanity adapt in ways that mitigate the worst effects of those evidence-based predictions (as opposed to sheer hyperbole pushed forward by people obsessed with emotional arguments over death and destruction.)
I have no interest in trying to convince anyone who is "on the fence" about climate change. It's real. Anyone who doesn't see that by now can't be convinced by facts, or overwhelming scientific consensus, they sure as hell aren't going to be convinced by me.
> Even the worst evidence-based predictions of the UN and the IPCC come nowhere near the extinction of all life or anything remotely in the same ballpark. What you're saying seems to be part of a doom and gloom fetishism
Some scientists like Frank Fenner, Henry Gee, and Stephen Hawking have already predicted that humans will go extinct in large part due to climate change, but climate research hasn't given much consideration to the worst effects of climate change and it's hard to blame them.
The IPCC has looked at tens of thousands of species of land animals and determined that as many as 14% "will likely face very high risk of extinction" and things are looking much worse for things living in our oceans (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/without-action...) but predicting the effects of climate change on animal populations is hard enough, predicting the effects of the collapse of human society is much much more difficult and also really depressing to think about. Still, scientists are saying that it's time to explore how bad climate change will be on humanity, what the collapse of civilization might look like (https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/15/8161/htm), and that human extinction is one of those outcomes we need to be thinking about. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2108146119)
You call it doom and gloom fetishism, but it's smart to take a hard look at the potential outcomes of climate change so we know what's at stake and can prepare as best as we can for what's coming. Even the DoD acknowledges that climate change is an "existential threat" (https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/25...).
> The Earth has warmed drastically at many times in its past,
And in the past those periods of warming, which are nothing like what we face now, still resulted in mass extinction events that killed off 80%-90% of all life on the planet. Adaptation takes time, and that's something we might not have enough of.
You (and I) are likely fairly wealthy relative to the rest of the world and will be dead within 60 years at the outside.
What we’d rather do doesn’t matter at all. Any decision from here on out is to mitigate the coming climate hell of 100-200 years from now.
Every year for the rest of our lives will be worse climate-wise. Some people are rich enough to avoid it bothering them too much. The rest of us will just have to deal with it.
The anti-human ideology of environmentalism needs to end or mankind probably will.
The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans.
Citation needed, please.
Now consider that in the context of global warming.
[1] No, not really.
Widespead use of lead had horrific affects on child development - and it's even credited for being one of the factors that lead to the downfall of the Roman empire.
And if we hadn't stopped using pfas as quickly as we did we would have had an even bigger fertility crisis on our hands than we currently do. We would have strode right into a Children of Men scenario.
I don't understand how you can blow these examples off as a "lack of scientific thinking". The irresponsible use of chemicals (or, more charitably, unintended side effects) seriously damaged society, and collective action was taken to mitigate further damage. How is that not an example of what you were asking for?
> How is that not an example of what you were asking for?
I didn't ask for examples. I asked for proof to back up the above claim. A few random examples aren't proof, I don't care how heavy and toxic lead is. It has nothing to do with our current environmental issues, it's completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I'm not sure these are examples, or counterexamples, though...
No evidence to support such a bold and frankly uninformed claim. If we could have fixed this we would have - but right now we have so many complex systems which we only think we have some semblance of control.
"The massive carbon reductions being called for won't happen once people realize the massive toll in human suffering they would cause. A pre-industrial Earth couldn't support anywhere near 8 billion humans." << -- More troll lunacy.
The Haber-Bosch process requires nitrogen pulled from petrochemicals (there are no other large sources of nitrogen we can use at scale) to feed a large portion of the worlds population. We literally *CANNOT* go back to guano - people would starve to death.
Edit: I made a grave error in the above. I misremembered nitrogen as the scarce material in the reaction, when in fact it's hydrogen. We get hydrogen from hydrocarbons that we then use for synthesizing fertilizer.
I'm going to leave the above error so future humans can laugh at my idiocy.
Seems like we could cut out most fossil-fuel consumption without making any sacrifice on this front.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Economic_and_env...
We already have an equivalent alternative for internal combustion engines for passenger cars, plus some other types of vehicles in some situations. No, not every situation and every vehicle, but if we could replace all passenger cars with EVs overnight, that would make a huge dent in emissions. Yes, we'd still have all sorts of construction equipment, 18-wheelers, etc. running off gasoline. But that's ok, for now. Of course we can't even replace passenger cars; most legal efforts to phase out ICEs in passenger cars have timelines that we should have already hit, but are still years, and in some places decades, away -- if they exist at all.
On electricity generation, new renewable plants are coming online at a decent pace, but we could be so much farther along by now if it wasn't for special interest groups and lobbyists clinging to the status quo. At the very least, we should have our daylight-hour needs 100% met by renewable sources by now, but we're nowhere near there. It's pathetic.
Cars and electricity generation are but a fraction. We need heating, shipping, goods production, agriculture all to become climate neutral or we'll simply continue on this path of ever increasing catastrophe.
What is your argument for electrifying cars being ok for now?
Counterpoint: Nuclear disasters like Chernobyl.
Some things just need to fix themselves over a long timescale. If we screw up badly enough, humanity won't be around to see the eventual recovery.
Joking aside this is a really fascinating, it’s just a shame we have to experiment in it with an N of 1
This isn’t sufficient on its own. Reduction of emissions, carbon recapture and carbon sequestration are all needed.
A strategy that has consistently failed across multiple countries for the last 30 years is not a good strategy.
Even the US has been going down in absolute numbers since 2005, and per capita for longer.
It would be okay if this trend would be true across the world, but the issue is china primary and India secondly are growing in emissions exponentially, and their increase is more than the decrease in developed nations.
A solution to global CO2 emissions has to be effective globally or it has failed. The only thing it has accomplished is a slight slowing of the global increase. That is complete, abject failure.
And how do you calculate the probability of success here? And the probability of success of reducing carbon emissions?
and like a volcanic eruption, the dust goes away in a few years.
stop the hysteria.