Time is running out on the Climate Clock
theverge.com
theverge.com
Fossil carbon extraction needs to be halted. Worldwide. Close the coal mines, shut down the oil rigs.
Everything else is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It's very, very simple: at the beginning of the Paleozoic era, atmospheric carbon was 20x higher than today, a level that the current biosphere cannot survive in. Gradually, over the next few hundred million years, that carbon was sequestered into the ground. We are now digging it back up and burning it, thus returning it to the atmosphere, within a span of decades. You can talk about LED lightbulbs and carbon credits till the cows come home, but the only thing that can halt this is preventing people from burning carbon that came from the ground - and the only way to stop that is to ban its extraction.
"But what will we do for energy?" Lots of things. We have options. Personally I'm a fan of the magic green rocks that give energy forever.
"But how will we power things that need high energy density / make plastics / lubricate my e-bike chain etc" - Oil. We can make it from anything carbon based. It's not even hard. We just have to stop digging it up and burning it.
Edit: responding to comment below about CFCs - Equating CFCs with all fossil fuels is an error of few orders of magnitude in scale.
Edit: Those complaining I can't use reply button, it's because of throttling.
If you agree with the premise and logic, but simply dislike the conclusion, I really don't know what to tell you.
There is nothing specific to provide you with because you haven’t presented any specific points in the first place. You want to shutdown energy production from fossil fuels. That would be extremely immoral if you think about the consequences.
Edit: Responding to the comment below, you're told lies: https://www.humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-relate...
Edit: Responding to dTal below - You can't just shut down fossil fuels without killing millions, not to mention complete loss of freedom, our country and everything it stands for. We both have same goals to get rid of fossil fuels, but I disagree with "plenty of alternatives exist". The only alternative we have is nuclear power. That's not looking good. The same environmentalists that want to solve climate change are also against nuclear power, and against any solution to climate change. They want you to not have kids – that's the quiet part. They're also hypocrites. There is no objectivity to how much decarbonization is acceptable, the end goal is to eliminate you. It's a cult.
[edit: I'd like to respond to your response, but you didn't post it as a separate comment. I'm not polluting this one. Use the reply button like everyone else.]
I'll assume the figures in that article are true, but it's missing the point: people aren't talking about current deaths, but about future deaths. Climate change has the potential to globally upset weather patterns in such a way that compensating will be hard, and/or climate change will make entire areas unviable for habitation resulting in large migrations (which, historically, have been very disruptive). All of this is substantially different than "number of hurricane deaths of 1920 vs. 2021".
Furthermore, there are also examples where intervention did prevent famine, for example rationing during the second world war in some countries, and I'm sure there are more examples. But there are no dramatic "The famine of 1897 that didn't happen because of effective government measures" Wikipedia pages. You can "prove" anything by linking to some example where things spectacularly failed, but that doesn't really "prove" anything, certainly not for the generic case of all "government interventions".
And look, shutting off all fossil fuels from one day to the next would of course be sheer lunacy. But no one is really argueing for that, and what they are argueing for is replacing oil and other fossil fuels, ASAP.
If $thing you do affects only you: do whatever you want! Go nuts! If $thing you do affects a substantial number of other people: maybe we need to ensure this doesn't result in you imposing your $thing on the rest of us? These sort of things aren't simple: your freedom to play music at 4am interrupts my freedom to sleep at night.
If we do what you are suggesting, half the world population will starve to death.
Given enough energy, and raw feedstock matter, we can make anything we need. Nuclear power gets us all the energy we need. Matter can simply be recycled in closed loops. The nitrogen for fertilizer we currently get from fossil fuels currently ends up in our sewage, and from there to places it shouldn't be like the ocean, causing huge problems like algae blooms. Recycle that, and you've solved another problem!
It's all about closing the loops.
We really do not need much concrete or steel. What we need is bioplastics, biocomposites, wood, fused sand and a lot of farming practice changes. Some breakthrough in water desalination or cleanup. A lot of people will have to move.
There's no way around it now.
I'm not saying that you're advocating doing nothing, nor am I supporting totalitarian/fascism. Just that at some point there will be decisions forced upon people; to choose who will live.
Maybe that's part of the general apathy? Do people subconsciously think that they'll be saved and those "others" will be sacrificed?
The rich don't care. They expect to be buffered by their ill-gotten gains.
They may be right.
The only problem is trucks, diesel trains, tractors and some ships. Ships could just go the old slow way. Diesel trains have electric replacements, trucks and tractors are hard though mostly due to sheer numbers. Then we have airplanes, big ones have no replacement but we can live without them. The pharmaceuticals we can make from biomaterials, no serious mining. Industrial heat might be a problem for a hot moment but there are some possibilities.
Water however is the key issue we will face and cannot really go around.
I'd be happy to be wrong about this!
If you would prefer, an alternative is that the (US) Gov't could 1. take over the oil companies 2. Raise the price of oil 3. Force the "Free market" that everyone's so proud of to start dealing with Oil as if there is actual scarcity for it.
If they did that tomorrow, I suspect they could stop a number of the worst polluters (businesses), and make everyone actually start working for the goal of "zero emissions".
People would hate this, and people would complain about the gov't overstepping, but the oil companies aren't going to start doing this out of the goodness of their hearts as long as they're making money hand-over-fist like they are.
(I feel confident in saying that nothing major has changed about the sun in the last 2000 years because that's not the time scale these things happen on).
The sun has been the same brightness for human history. It doesn't make it more difficult than the problem we had 50 years ago.
Please do not hide your tactics and by all means keep up the batshitcrazy loudness of your plans. The more you yell and scream and introduce more radical planning -- the more the average person will grow tired of them and end up shutting you all out.
Ideologies aside we agree on nuclear energy.
You know that, when productivity goes down, people that can barely survive already will die. Right?
If you really want to make changes it seems to me that the best place to put effort would be pro nuclear rather than cutting industry to the ground. Serious investment in thorium seems a good place to start.
A woman sits in her house pretending to have a cup of tea. She's dying of radiation poisoning but goes through the motions of her pre apocalypse life rather than face what is happening. Bugs swarm through the dirty water in the tea mug, but she's denied reality so deeply that she doesn't see them.
It feels like industrial societies, especially governments and corporate leadership, are doing the same thing. Denying reality because the alternative is too big, too mind numbingly terrifying to accept.
I was walking my dog this morning, and had a flash of an imagined future. The grass was replaced by soil that was brown and cracked. Lush trees and foliage gone, only withered stumps remain. Houses were gone, just a few burnt beams left. No wildlife at all.
Maybe we should use all that AI power to generate a satellite and street view showing the potential future. Though I can't delude myself into thinking it would change anyone's mind.
To save you all the trouble: OK Doomer.
Governments should give their militaries a standing order: when society collapses, hunt down the billionaires hiding in their bunkers, ships, castles, wherever they may be hiding. Make it known that the richest 0.01% of the world has no chance to escape the doom of humanity.
Maybe that would make them try to prevent it happening. The 0.01% are the ones with power, and all they do with it is hoard it and seek more.
But yeah maybe it wouldn’t even be enough to make it “visible” with AR glasses etc. to make the necessary global shifts…
Let’s quit the doomerism none the less though, this planet should still have just enough smart apes to make this work without taking everyone and everything else down with us..
How could we hack our ape minds to make this work? Maybe social dynamics could work? High status / high success in life = low carbon emissions? How to get there?
New game rule set? Taxes etc? Chicken / egg issue though.
Most 'production' is not productive, it is a waste of our precious limited resources in a time when we know we are rapidly running out.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/22/g20-countries-...
Clearly we are not even trying to compete. We keep on falling behind with our behind mindsets.
And yes, I’m an 80s fan as well but those times are nothing but the age old past by now. Nothing will bring them back, continued denial will just rob us of our future.
Let us take it as read that if you have children, you are morally obliged to work to ensure that the planet is habitable for them and future generations. But if you choose not to have children, do you have any moral obligation to ensure the planet can continue to support life after you have died?
I could foresee a future when more-or-less everyone agrees that something drastic would have to be done to save the planet, but an electorally-significant block simply say "don't care, dead soon, so long and thanks for all the fish".
I'm sorry they haven't been able to wrap the kernel in something more palatable to you. If you want the "movement" to be different then be a part of it.
I'll say the quiet part out loud: you're worried about the authoritarian left - or, as the libertarian left calls them, tankies.
Green washing and ESG aren't an authleft project. They were invented by corporate interests looking to avoid brand damage, so at best we could say it's a right-libertarian project.
Insamuch as people apply social justice frameworks to environmental causes, it is to say that global warming is going to kill underprivileged people first and faster than wealthy people. Depopulation (aka "overpopulation") was the authright framing of environmentalism: we have too many mouths to feed and we need to stop making more, and conveniently for us it just so happens to be some other people's fault. These viewpoints are irreconcilable; in fact, I would argue the social justice environmental view is specifically a response to the authright trying to rehabituate themselves as environmental crusaders rather than industrial murderers.
I object to calling JustStopOil loonies for the same reason why I don't call BuzzFeed loonies for pioneering clickbait. Smearing black paint on art is their tactic, not their goal.
As far as I can tell there isn't really a libertarian (left or right) answer to global warming. Greenwashing and ESG won't actually fix the problem, because the problem is a public choice problem. Western standards of living are built on infrastructure that only loves oil and rejects all else. Everyone else wants western standards of living and is copying the same infrastructure to get it.
This is naive I think. The same crowd goes to Davos every year. It’s far deeper and insidious than “we don’t want to pay for lawyer/lawsuits”.
The real quiet part is this: they want their genetic lineage to have better resources than others. Usually, group dynamics (tribe) provides a better overall outcome for their kids. The fracturing of unity has led to a bunch of elite clans to seize Gov power through proxy of social justice, climate change, etc.
One might argue further that the political compass is not topologically flat, and that at the extremes right-authoritarianism and right-libertarianism are the same ideology. After all, what's the difference between today's brutally authoritarian regimes and a large corporation that owns monopolies on everything? It's all abusable power.
I also object to discussing this in terms of "genetic lineage". Humans are mesaoptimizers, none of our intelligence gives a shit about what evolution gives a shit about. Social justice was something that the economic elites were able to appropriate, Rebel Sell style, because nothing about capitalism forbids irony. However, there is nothing left-wing at Davos. They have no intent on actually bringing social justice about when it contradicts the moral foundations of their ownership. So their support boils down to "black lesbian dollars are still green" and rainbow logos, and not "let's stop destroying the world and impoverishing people for profit".
This is an excellent reason why we should focus on putting our own house in order, in spite of all those people who say "there's no point doing anything while China is burning coal".
So anyone who wanted a democratic coalition to deal with climate change had to look to the left of the political spectrum for support and dispel the notion that it would make the poor poorer.
> Last year was even a record-high year for energy-related CO2 emissions.
> Energy infrastructure and structural change is not something that you do in a couple of months. It’s something that needs years,”
So we only have six years. CO2 production is rising. Key players are not on board. And even if everyone would be aligned politically, we will never manage to make technical changes on time!
It is like cars emission car regulation in EU. New cars are very energy efficient and have low emission. But too expensive so nobody buys them. Average vehicle age is 15 years (in Czechia) and it really stinks!
Perhaps we need better and more realistic plan, that would actually work!