To Save the Planet, Should We Be Moving Slower?
newyorker.com
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I do not believe democratic governments would ever be willing to take the needed steps to slow growth sufficiently to save the planet- they'd be voted out of office and replaced by someone else. Autocratic governments will never care enough to do anything to help anyone but themselves.
One begins to see why all the billionaires are trying to figure out how to escape the planet.
Dysfunctional bicameral faux democratic governments such as the system that holds sway in the US at present will struggle - but they don't properly represent the will of the people at large.
Every survey I've seen on health care or gun regulation for example shows the will of the public at odds with the actions of the government.
THe founders were not fans of party politics .. and yet that became the emergenant behaviour, pandering to self interest and the highest bidders for attention and not to broad opinion.
Would you also fix the endless human desire for more? If you can, then you’ve got a shot. Otherwise, you don’t.
We could call it the New Soviet Man or something like that
That's why communist countries are known for their carbon neutral economies, and being excellent stewards of the environment, right?
Source: product of 2 former commie countries. The after effects probably take 50+ years to undo
A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state. No stable, large scale "society without state" exists in the modern world.
Have distinct silos for military, civil service, law (trials, not police or writing), etc. with harsh penalties for stepping out of line good rewards for duty are things that I rate highly in a government system.
The case can be made that the US took a turn for the worse when the Supreme Court was allowed to go outside its remit of "do the least required" and wrote policy by making Citizens United legalise directly bribing officials.
That was at least a two guard rail jumping systemic failure (IMHO).
1. "legalise directly bribing officials" is a gross misrepresentation of Citizens United v. FEC. As per the wikipedia article, the ruling "prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations"[1]. In other words, it means the government can't prevent corporations from donating to groups that run political ads. "Bribing" has a specific meaning, which involves quid quo pro, and "corporations being able to spend money on political ads" is nowhere near that.
2. at the risk of starting another flame war, the "turn for the worse" happened decades before with roe v. wade, when they ruled that abortion was under the "right to privacy". Regardless of whether you think women should be allowed the right to abortion, justifying it under the 14th amendment is much more egregious than the supreme court ruling that the government can't restrict the speech of groups of people (ie. corporations).
Also, I carefully wrote a turn for the worse as there has been many twists and turns on the path between past and present.
I admire your gumption in insisting upon the turn for the worse as if there has been only one and that Roe V. Wade was that moment.
Popular opinion by the numbers within the USofA appears to disagree with your assessment.
>Popular opinion by the numbers within the USofA appears to disagree with your assessment.
The full quote from you was:
>The case can be made that the US took a turn for the worse when the Supreme Court was allowed to go outside its remit of "do the least required" and wrote policy
You seem to be claiming that the supreme court "took a turn for the worse" when it engaged in judicial activism (ie. "Supreme Court was allowed [...] to [write] policy"). Given that, I fail to see how "popular opinion" is a relevant factor in this, unless you think that judicial activism is only bad when it doesn't align with "popular opinion"?
Market dynamics of supply and demand bridge this gap with the same vigor they bring to any other kind of "investment."
Politicians need monetary support, they figure out what kinds of positions are likely to secure that support, they adopt those positions, and the support appears. Do they meet with corporate executives in the graveyard at midnight and sign a contract with blood squeezed from the homeless? No, but it's a bit weird to point to the absence of silly midnight rituals as exonerating evidence when it's pretty clear that the exchange happens without the need for any such nonsense.
Call it what you will. Playing with definitions does not fix the problem.
counterpoint: https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1355186871354200066
That was my introduction 40 years ago to iterative dynamics and voting systems - FPthePost converges to a non representative duopoly.
I believe that to be an unintended outcome unforeseen by the US founders.
Being climate change denialist is just utterly dumb at this point.
For starters, they can stop investing on creative ideas that accelerate its environmental collapse.
After their greed being the reason why we are here.. but good news for them, there is nowhere else to go, they will rot with us here.
In regards to ecological problems we're on a tight schedule to fend off the worst consequences and that won't be possible if we keep eating up all new gains. Especially because there's hard limits on how fast you can add new infrastructure globally, which itself is rarely green.
Otherwise why don’t you calm down and entertain the thought that maybe the future won’t suck, and might even be normal or good, just like the present is right now.
Why are you working on technology if you don’t think the future will be great?
Anytime someone that had kids mentions anything about reducing other people's carbon output they should just be ignored. You just created a potentially forever chain of carbon usage that will be exponential. Meanwhile here I am with my "constant" carbon usage to your O(2^n) in perpetuity.
People talk about the AI singularity but the whole world is a singularity all the time. To model the entire world and predict how everything is going to play out on a social and economic level is obviously impossible. To make impoverishing top-down prescriptions based on that seems criminal. To utilize this storyline as a political mechanism is cruel.
Sure.
But that's a trite non sequitur entirely orthoganal to the simplicity of the thermodynamics underpinning the cause of climate change.
Ever increasing levels of trapped energy that will increase at an even faster rate once methane and water vapor get seriously involved in the mix unless action is taken to either block the sun or reduce the insulating effects of atmospheric gases.
If humanity does end up accidentally terraforming the planet to get to hot in a positive feedback loop, I believe we will be within a line-of-sight to terraforming it back in the other direction.
Technology has solved all our physical problems so far. Maybe we will seed clouds in the upper atmosphere to reflect a lot of energy back into space. Maybe we will find something useful to do with captured carbon (which doesn’t just release it). It is insane to suggest capitalism won’t solve this problem by the time it actually needs solving, and therefore needs to be shut down (it’s the thing that actually works).
If that's your suggested strategy then I would suggest that we can do better by not going there in the first instance.
* Thanks to the arrow of time, the issue of unbreaking a glass, methane release and other factors it very realistically could take more time and energy to get out of the hole we seem intent upon driving into.
> Technology is for solving problems.
It's not 'magic' though and I have little time for green washing or praying to the technology fairy.
The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism, which will have serious consequences that are easier to predict than climate change: we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.
But un-restricted capitalism is literally the stereotypical paper clip AI. It will seek out maximal profit at every cost. As per the very Adam Smith, it only works well in small, welll-regulated markets. Let the government do its job, and capitalism its own.
The article is about degrowth.
The paperclip thought experiment is a stupid thought experiment. An AI that had the executive functioning to improve its entire substrate (e.g. rewrite the entire TSMC Nvidia chip and software supply chain) would require the same higher order agency that would stop it from destroying the world to turn it into paperclips. It only seems plausible if you spend all your time disembodied from reality browsing lesswrong.
That time is now, and it has failed.
But it is crystal clear that we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at the (imo small) price of personal luxury — even if some new technical advantage can solve the problem, we should stop at least speeding towards the cliff, and try to break as much as possible.
You are forgetting just how much bigger the planet is then us.
We diverge on this point and I talked about it in other comments.
> we should decrease our current CO2 usage as much as we can, even at a small price of personal luxury
It’s luxury because we live in the first world. In the 3rd world where most people live (and most people are poor), these policies have catastrophic consequences, such as the Sri Lankan organic farming affair.
Is this how rational people react, or is some spiritual response talking from fear?
How can be the depletion of biodiversity, the increase of temperatures and the disappearance of ecosystems that we need to survive "good"?
As a community we do no have a crystal ball to predict the future, but we have science and technology and the predictions from there are clear: it is not good for us, and it is not good for the current species.
The far future, the very far one -- sure -- the are good chances that new ecosystems will appear adapted to the new environments, but those will not be "nice" for our current expectations.
A doing-nothing-and-hoping-for-the-best strategy is a guarantee for massive wars, hunger and suffering, as happen many times in the past (but never in a scale of 7.000.000 population)
Is loss of biodiversity bad? Maybe. Will we have resurrected most extinct species using jurassic park DNA within the next 500 years? I dunno but if that happened, it would make the current loss of biodiversity into more of a blip than an apocalyptic thing.
The science and technology enterprise is economically motivated. It is pretty good at creating value out of fewer and fewer resources. It is not good at making godlike insights into the far future about the late stage interactions between itself and the physical world. Any definite predictions provided to you are more likely driven by short-term incentives of some political figures.
There is nothing indicating massive wars are coming due to climate change, most of the world is lifting out of poverty not slipping back into it. If the world does heat by 5-10 degrees, we should be focused on making sure indians and africans have enough economic resources to afford air conditioning like we do in rich countries.
We can’t predict the future down to a point, but we can make good, large-scale predictions with good accuracy — global average temperatures will increase and by every prediction, that will have catastrophic results. Period. That’s not some doomer news, that is reality. We can’t predict how individual countries will react, but that is not the question.
So unless you believe in some Secret Government that controls everything, it is just a completely naive take that has no basis in reality. We can’t even coordinate a single country’s various, independent incentives even in very authoritative governments — and you believe that every study made is financed with the same incentives? If not, you can surely list reputable studies that call out the fake research, right?
Dude neither of us have ever read a scientific study about climate change. We are both going on bullshit we read online and related to experiences we had in corporate land. Maybe I read more right-leaning stuff so I have a more counter opinion. Don’t pretend any of us are fact checking the magical climate science, we aren’t.
The one thing I actually have firsthand experience with is computational complexity. And after thinking about it for a while, it seems plausible to me that we cannot know the scientific prescriptions we see in negative climate coverage with nearly the definitiveness that they claim.
And it also seems plausible that a lot of people gradually managed to form a doom and gloom committee to find doom and gloom in a noisy world where there aren’t that many definitive answers.
If that's the case then I expect you're well across the Dzhanibekov effect and the fact that the long term arc trajectory of (say) a spinning wingnut can be extremely predictable as its CoG follows the usual equations of motion while its short term tumblings are utterly unpredictable and chaotic.
The key point being that the corase climate model is pretty damn simple in terms of basic thermodynamics.
Heat from below (core), light from above (sun), energy absorbtion in the sea and land, energy transform to heat, heat radiation outwards, some heat entrapment by insulation.
Increased insulation ==> greater heat entrapment, etc.
To be sure the fine details of interplay within and between climatic cells are challenging .. but the long term arc of more and more energy being trapped leading to more heat, more storm energy etc is straighfrward enough that it was first done as a back of an envelope calculation more than a century ago.
If you're demanding an exact time table on what and where will reach what tempreture when .. then you'll be sorely disapointed.
Otherwise its a simple case of we're in the direct path of a massive fully laden train that is ever so slowly derailing.
If climate science is correct, the one hole I still see is that it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology, which I think might have some solutions especially when the problem actually threatens an economic player like a 1trillion dollar company. It is basically a choice to believe something good like this can/will happen, so you could call this out as semi religious.
Thank you for engaging with me in the end.
Looking at some of your responses to my comments:
> The problem is that you are recommending we turn off capitalism
I made no direct recomendation although I suggested various approaches - I'm not sure where on the globe is practicing fully informed free market capitalism but I'd certainly want to regulate it in the same manner as we regulate engines of power to avoid them becoming unbalanced and walking across the floor just as first generation unregulated steam engines did.
From a complex dynamics PoV Adam Smith was a first order basic bitch (as I believe the young people of the day might say).
> we will doom the world’s poor people to lives of certain poverty with no hope of upward mobility.
Mighty white of you to say so, maybe you might want to ask some of the worlds poor what they want.
The people I know that have nothing (I grew up in very outback Australia) want their land back, they want the "developed advanced nations" to stop dumping waste and shit on the land they've cared for the past 40+ thousand years, and other such novel ideas. eg: [1] [2] [3]
Not one has mentioned wanting yourself or others to speak on their behalf.
Of course there are many people across the planet, I wouldn't assume to speak on their behalf - although I did gain some perspective travelling through roughly 2/3rds of the worlds countries in many of the more undeveloped areas.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UKu3bCbFck
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaoSi6RFqsc
It's a bit of a bone of contention that so many of these massive copper and lithium deposits are on indigenous lands.
Perhaps the question you best dwell on is whether endless growth and increasing consumption is really all that certain groups of people seem to think it is.
> If climate science is correct ...
It's 2023, the time for "if" was 40 years ago - are you questioning "If GPS science is correct", "If Magnetotellurics is correct", "If the James Webb telescope actually works", "If the Finite Element Method is real", etc.
> ... it doesn’t take into account future improvement in technology
Nor should it, but of course climate models can be tweaked with "what if scenarios" - what if the suns input could be reduced (outward reflecting bubbles in space twixt earth and sun), what if X million tonnes per annumn of C02 can be captured and sequested 'somehow', what if we build out thousands of acres of solar PV and mass produce green ammonia to offset the climate effects of the Haber–Bosch process, etc.
'Climate science' contains multitudes after all: https://phys.org/news/2023-07-family-trees-relationships-cli...
Still, it's good that you seem to want to learn more.
Nobody has ever realistically thought that real world problems are easy.
The earth must radiate all the energy it gets from the sun (else we break physics).
A third of the sun's radiation is reflected directly.
The rest have to be radiated. Calculation show that the temperature needed to radiate the excess energy is 155K. Also, plank's law make that this radiation is mostly infrared.
The atmosphere (GHG concentration especially) makes that the point of emission of the energy is not the earth surface, but high up in the troposphere. The temperature this point need to reach is 155K. To reach that, the point below has to reach 156K, the one below 157... (it's not really discrete values, and it's not really temperature but energy, but I'm both simplifying and explaining in a language I never used for physics or math before).
So, rising the number of Co2 molecules at that altitude (and especially higher) will move the point of emission up. But that new point of emission isn't at 155K yet! So for a while, the earth will absorb more energy than what it's emitting, until the new point of emissions reach 155K.
Its high school physics tbh.
Can we not just seed clouds to reflect lots of energy back into space though? Maybe that is a stupid idea, but I could come up with 10 ideas like that and maybe someone could come up with an idea like that, but which actually works.
We have to issues:
we don't know how the feedback loops work: we are jumping into the unknown, we have no data to predict the risks: the only thing we know is that between the last ice age (1km ice sheet over Canada, Sweden) and the climate we had for 10000 years, until 1850, the difference in global temperature was 3,5K (2% increase).
The second issue: the transition lasted 10000 to 20000 years. We are on a real, really fast track and making the same transition in 100/200 years.
Now my opinion : we aren't doomed as a specie. In fact, I'm pretty sure mammals can thrive in jurassic era temperatures. But I do expect a lot of death because the transition is way, way to fast. We are unprepared. And a lot of species will disappear. Also Zooplankton is dying because marine CO2 concentration is too high and the ocean is too acid for zooplankton to form shells from CaCO, which is an issue caused by CO2 but unrelated to tropospheric warming.
Climate engineering is way harder than that (we want to avoid acid rain, reducing direct sunlight will reduce photosynthesis, so as long as we have famine, we want to avoid it too. Augmenting the albedo on the surface is an OK option in hot countries).
But we should not have people that travel with private jets at all, neither should we transport locally easily produced goods across the world due to salary arbitrage, should build small, walkable cities, communities. There are plenty appliances/tools we could easily share and thus not opt for cheaper, low lifetime ones — e.g. how often do you use you drill? Or power washer? Wouldn’t renting/lending it between a few houses be more environmentally responsible? Also, multi-generational houses are not a bad thing if the relation between people is not bad — the elderly get to experience the joy of their grandchildren, parents get “free babysitters”, later on the parents can care for the elderly. It’s how humanity has been since forever, and I believe it would have positive effects on everyone, not just ecology. Also, there should be barely any need for single use plastic packaging besides medicinal use — create standard container dimensions for various kinds of products and create dispensers in supermarkets that take in your previous container, and give you your product in a new one. If you break it/don’t bring it back, you have to buy that again. Yoghurts, drinks, huge swathes of supermarkets could be replaced that way.
The problem is the huge inequality — my Western ass is in huge luxury, when my African counterpart is hungry with barely any potable water. Wouldn’t they also deserve equal treatment? But if everyone were to live in Western lifestyle we would be even worse off. We should strive to cut back a bit on the Western side, and bring up the rest of the world in a sustainable way. We have the tech for that, mostly.
You could argue that I should turn off the lights, and on that point you might have some ground. But more generally there are many things in my life that I save time on by basically throwing a little money in the trash, and I am very fortunate to have this opportunity. This is on a spectrum and we should obviously not cause obscene long term damage so I can save 2 seconds per day, but we are not at that point yet.
And regarding inequality, it is also on a spectrum, and at some point it is definitely too much, but I don’t think we have necessarily crossed that line. 99% of the people in my city have enough food to eat. And the right amount of inequality is certainly not 0, the only way to achieve that is by killing all life on earth. Some inequality is a natural consequence of the different branches of possibility that people explore with their lives. To the extent that we have anything in our society it’s because we are able to share ideas and cooperate. A society will necessarily always have the have’s and the have-not’s.
Personally, I think nuclear could be fantastic, humans just cannot be trusted to manage it. Fukushima was a case of negligence, it wasn't caused by the Tsunami. The operators did not implement the recommended safety improvements because they didn't respect Murphy's law.
So when a case is made like this, "just spam nuclear reactors", you're glossing over the details that we've fucked up a lot of nuclear reactors?
The cleanup operation hasn't only costed hundreds of billions of dollars, it's severely damaged, and will continue to damage Japans' reputation and desire for exported foods and seafood.
I'm not trying to attack you or your views, but if nuclear was easier and cheaper, it would've already proliferated in the same way that solar has. Can you imagine how much solar will exist in 30 years compared to nuclear? it will be absolutely everywhere.
And while solar is great, you still need base-load and for most places in most cases solar + storage can’t do that.
With that said, cooling reactors need a bit of rethinking with this warmup, rivers may no longer be fine to use.
The costs from climate change far exceeds the cleanup and damage costs from all nuclear accidents combined.
Even if we spammed nuclear reactors I still don't think a proportional increase in nuclear accidents would come anywhere near the damages from climate change.
The advantage of nuclear energy is that it will only pollute a large area in a disaster. While fossil fuels spread their pollution constantly over the entire planet by design, no disaster required.
Doesn't honestly seem too bad scenario. And being cynic, isn't population reduction the most effective way to combat climate change anyway?
That massive carbon footprint exists because although the Haber-Bosch process represents a huge technological advancement, it’s always been an energy-hungry one. The reaction, which runs at temperatures around 500 °C and at pressures up to about 20 MPa, sucks up about 1% of the world’s total energy production.
Here in my state we're looking hard at mass production (global scale numbers) of 'green' ammonia.
https://fortescue.com/what-we-do/green-energy-research/green...
High-grade phosphate rock (for Phosphorus (P)) is the declining resource, or perhaps more accurately isn't matched by our ever increasing demand for it in fertilizers as our human population grows. For now at least we're coasting along on increased beneficiation of lower grade ore through washing, flotation and calcining.
It's a fair point - I'm personally in the "let's see fewer humans overall camp", I'm not advocating genocide, just in favour of birth rates continuing to decline until we're back between (say) 4 to 6 billion.
Unlimited growth in a petri dish has obvious issues, even if the dish is the surface of a relatively large sphere.
Govts/corporations are full of ppl. People are programmed not just for Consumption but Conspicuous Consumption.
Social status is directly tied to what Luxuries you can afford. No one wants to work for a simple boss, but for the dude who lives on a super yatch.
The most ambitious ppl know this and take full advantage of it to trap ppl who work for them in golden cages. The greatest anxiety of a beauracrat/corporate exec is exiting the cage.
Luxuries are a gigantic WASTE. And the largest companies in the world sell Luxury cause the most ambitious of the elite use luxury to signal status and trap/control everyone.
Technical minded ppl spend most of their day trying to reduce waste. So they are the group that can come up with ways that can interfere with these cycles everyone feels they are trapped in.
This is a pet peeve of mine, but seeing “ppl” drives me crazy. Particularly when the rest of the comment is typed normally, and then the next word is “people”!