You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.
Wanting to kill people now, to hopefully save the environment in the future.
How this is not a parody is beyond me.
this is drastically wrong and dangerous rhetoric
Also “If You Can Keep Your Head When Everybody Round You Is Losing His, Then It Is Very Probable That You Don’t Understand the Situation”
Dropbox wasn't built in a weekend, but it was built.
I recommend the book Seeing Like A State.
I didn't mean to say that it's easy, just that it's simple. Simple things can still be hard to accomplish.
People have been screaming "everyone will die!!!" via religious based prophecies for... all of human history. The Cult Of Climate Change is no different: a little bit of truth and a lot of faith in Revelations and the unavoidable apocalypse.
Prophecies like "all the icecaps will be gone by 2020" and "billions will die from starvation" (hint: those forecasts failed)
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...
This is no different than the people who follow the pastor that's wrong about the date of Jesus' second coming. every year he looks at the numbers and says "next year, on x date". That date comes. and goes. and the faithful see the failed prophecy and he goes "oh look... I was wrong... it's really next year on y date". The faithful see this each year and their faith grows stronger as each failed prophecy means the next one MUST be true.
What do we think will happen? More failed prophecies. The Church of Climate Doom faithful becomes more convinced that theirs is the One True Faith as each prediction continues to prove them right.
But it's a political problem in the end, anyway, not a science one.
There is SOME truth. but not all of it.
Just like there is truth in religions - be nice to your neighbors. Do unto others. Truth. surrounded by bullshit (religion, dogma, etc).
There is truth and "actual science"... but there's also half truths, lies, bad prophecies, etc.
"you can cherry pick" likewise, you can cherry pick some facts about carbon... and then ignore stuff like the destruction required to make batteries, the inability to recycle a MASSIVE fuckton of "green" (wind mill blades, batteries, solar panels, etc - all ending up in land fills).
"models" yeah... except that models are limited, have increasing error rates and you end up with the spaghetti modeling with the simple stuff like weather for next week - much less the weather for next year.
Speaking of cherry picking... you'll cherry pick one or two models from a decade ago and ignore the 100+ others that are wrong.
"political not science" it's both. and religious. It's faith in models that have been cherry picked while ignoring inconvenient truths about "green" solutions that are based on bad models that can't be proven and that don't cover all the possibilities.
the problem with your response is your apparent faith in science and, like a Catholic who will downplay problems with priests, you'll ignore the parts you are uncomfortable with.
climate change is real (little c, little c). Has been happening for... all of history.
Climate Change is not (big C, big C). It is a religion.
One is based on facts and science. the other is based on faith.
It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.](https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob....) This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land. [As the number of storms are estimated to decrease, the threat vector is slightly increasing storm intensity.](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurrica....) Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.
[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.
Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.
For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.
This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.
I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.
I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead
A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.
A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.
There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.
Your example describes a fantasy.
The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km.
If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries do not buy 200g of wagyu at a time. They typically only go once or a few times per month and they stock up.
The population of people who live rural is very small. People who live rural are also quite poor.
The carbon emissions, environmental impact, and fuel consumption of this population of people is so unbelievably small, it's irrelevant.
But, you are targeting this small population of poor people. No wonder you get so much pushback, or "extremism". I guess poor people defending their way of life is extreme.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...
The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.
People live in communities, cities, towns. You can build a human scale town in Oregon just as well as you can in the UK.
But also not entirely unrealistic or uncommon, and I live in an european city with good public transport. If I want to buy something special like a good cut of beef, go to an asian market, I’ll be doing a 30km roundtrip by car.
From what I’ve seen a roundtrip to Walmart in the US for weekly groceries can be in the same ballpark - even in the city, since the larger stores are always on the outskirts.
You can keep raising strawmen, but the extremism is going from a suggestion of reduced car traffic and reduced meat consumption, to accusations of not caring about lives and mass murder.
>But also not entirely unrealistic
Well which is it? Hyperbole or not, the intent behind it is the same, which seems to focus the climate change problem on some of the weakest sources of fuel consumption who also happen to be some of the poorest, most vulnerable people.
I think it's a kind of subconscious projection, that the example you've brought to the fore is those poor people driving to buy their groceries, not the industrial behemoths doing the real dirty work.
That is a strawman you introduced into the conversation. Most cities in the west are planned around cars. I’ve been to a few of the largest cities in the US and don’t think those 6-lane highways were clogged with “the poorest most vulnerable people”. You see the same patterns in south america.
This is really about the average car-centric culture, consumption patterns, the system of centralized food distribution through massive supermarket chains. It’s about urban planning, incentives, regulations and public policies, not lords vs servants. Note that I didn’t suggest individuals should stop driving to fight climate change, these changes can only start happening at a much higher level.
The EPA says emissions from transportation are responsible for 29% of all pollution [1]. This is a bigger slice than industrial pollution, and 58% of it coming from light vehicles, 28% from trucks (including the ones that supply these supermarkets, and not accounting for the diesel used to bring our bananas, garlic and olive oil by sea from across the world).
[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...
Maybe we can announce a ban on pork, beef, plastics, TVs, consumption, etc but it should not be done overnight for the same reasons.
The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"
Wishful thinking is that expensive sacrifices for the far future will be politically feasible while at the same time people need to already mitigate the effects of climate change. There need to be way better policy and technological packages than now.
AFAIK worst case predictions for climate change death aren't above a billion life years.
I survived, and traveled to many, many countries without it. ( car, buses )
Now, I live between two continents. Take plane at least once a year or every other one.
I would still be in favor of plane restriction.
It will happen anyway: but by prices purely and the most affluent of us will be the less impacted.
That what I had in mind. It seems more and more costly to extract it.
Then It might just be not cost effective at all to go dig deeper or use more complex process to get it.
How does that works with current recent trends? Globally we consumed more oil in 2023 than 2022 for instance.
If demand plumet somehow … can we still support a extraction industry ? Recently ( pre 2019 ) shale gaz was worth it because of high prices… then it switched again to lower price and extracting it made little sense ( till next time )
During the transition there could be cost spikes at demand levels that are awkward to fill without expensive resources, though.
So we assume that we replace all explosion engine by EV. Correct?
1. What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?
2. What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?
See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?
Please stop with this zero-order thinking and spend a few seconds thinking of first-order and second-order effects when what you suggest can impact billions of lives.
E.g, Mao and his moronic campaign against birds
Pandemic happened -> Europe went to lockdown -> Restaurants, hotels closed, weddings cancelled -> a drop of flower sales -> Kenyan flower growers suddenly find themselves out of work and out of income (plane-loads of flowers get flown everyday from Africa, M. East and S. America to Europe)
Yeah it was probably okay sailing for rich countries that can conjure up debt and give their citizens some relief, but how about for the poorer countries? India had a lockdown and day-wagers had to walk thousands of kilometers home, and the PM's response seemed to be "Not my problem!"
Then
> But yes I do agree about butterfly effects, like in this scenario: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-cov... or https://archive.is/0inYa
> Is the cure really worse than the disease? The health impacts of lockdowns during COVID-19
https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653
Rich countries suffered too.
https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/california-test-scores-sho...
Ok, then you can have a car. Everyone else still can't.
>What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?
Company provided shuttle buses.
See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?
See how silly that sounds? These are just two things I thought of quickly. You will end up with ten thousand rules and caveats if we think a bit more. Why wasn't this included in the original comment? If you propose rules, make them at least 50% complete!
> Company provided shuttle buses.
TIL buses are equal to trains and cycles. Also shuttles will pollute more if they are sparsely occupied which is common.
You should read about Mao's idiocy. We shouldn't repeat similar idiocy in 2023.
The rest of your comment is also wrong, and I'm sure you know why if you stop to think about it for 30 seconds.
You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.
This is such a common concern troll talking point but it ignores the fact that many people have disabilities which prevent them from driving (e.g. blindness or epilepsy) or prevent them from having the kind of income needed to own a car, especially if it needs customization for them to use it. Those people are all better off with reduced car infrastructure: access services don’t get stuck in traffic, transit helps everyone, and all kinds of mobility devices benefit from safe car-free spaces.
Not very useful during winter. There're places with lots of snow (meters) and temp dropping down to -30F and below. Simply can't bike when snow falls heavily. People live in such places. And their almost exclusive options (except air) are:
- cars (unreliable: engine fail or no fuel/battery with hundreds km from the nearest town means death too often when it's -30F)
- and railway (very reliable and cheap).
Remember, nobody is saying that 100% of trips should be on bicycle. We’re saying that we should break the previous century’s default assumption of using a multi-ton vehicle per person for every trip, especially in urban areas where cars make everything worse for everyone including the drivers.
Boom, all problems suddenly solved?
You might want to run the numbers on that one some more.
The irony of this comment.