The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.
In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that reliably do more for less and increase the amount of energy people can consume.
I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat.
To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further.
We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.
What you're asking for is a permanent reduction in standards of living. While that might be the right thing to do, it's going to be difficult to convince average people to vote for that. Many of them are barely getting by as it is and don't think they are able to sacrifice more.
We really are screwed off our only hope is blind faith that tech can save us. Technology can help, but we can't abandon the option of decisions that can already be made today.
What energy
What "tech"?
Tech isn't magic. We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.
> We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.
You're absolutely right, that's why tech is the only non-magical solution.
Anyone thinking they can change the behavior of 8 billion people is engaging in magical thinking.
Nuclear is at least a viable shirt term solution. Combine that with reducing our total energy demand and we're at least buying ourselves more time to figure things out, that's a much better sort term path for sure.
Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.
The various comments here blaming "people" are a mix of victim blaming and cover-up for the well organized forces that have held the democratic will back for decades and despite (or because of?) this, the agents of this tragedy are very popular around these parts.
They really haven't, no. Corporations don't want to take responsibility for their actions, governments don't want to, and big surprise: individuals don't want to either.
Polling shows that US voters favor climate bills – yet assume fellow Americans don’t
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/01/us-vot...
UK:
> The UK has some of the highest levels of concern regarding the climate emergency in the world with 81 per cent of people ‘believing’ in the climate emergency, with over three-quarters (77 per cent) saying we must do ‘everything necessary, urgently as a response’.
https://www.ippr.org/blog/as-some-politicians-seek-to-divide...
They've all had their whole lives to make climate conscious lifestyle decisions, they could all stop eating meat tomorrow, but they ain't done squat. Not as individuals nor as a group. The few who have are weirdos who live at the margins.
This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for creating it and therefore fixing it. They cannot accept the logical conclusion of the necessity of state action, as it contradicts their core beliefs.
The whole situation is as deterministic as two celestal bodies moving according to Newtonian physics. Technological progress was inevitable, and so was the resulting population bomb in the last century, and so is the nearing Collapse of the civilization in the coming decades, due to ecological overshoot. Read the Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.
What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits.
Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction.
Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.
Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument.
But instead you can reframe the argument.
Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing?
Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself?
Etc.
> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.
We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice.
For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.
This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence.
Convincing people to change is really hard!
It’s hard when you’re trying to trick them. But show someone a genuinely better product and you don’t need to convince them of anything.
If they didn't buy those trucks I don't think they would work any less. They would just spend the money on something else.
Cars, apart from their direct purpose, also serve as status symbol. This might justify the investment.
Why would someone argue with you about what they like? You’re assuming that they are dumb and that you are smart. That’s a bad way to approach persuading people.
That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases.
I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.
I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true.
Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time.
We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there.
Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.
Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineering experiment.
Wildly disruptive.
Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high.
Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".
The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.
- did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree?
- what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much?
This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.
Plastic production is an insanely small part of oil and gas usage, 4%. Anyone bringing up plastic as a reason to not stop using oil isn't being intellectually honest. We could literally decimate the oil industry and still produce way more oil than the plastic industry needs. It's just not a concern.
Recycling can absorb much of that, but medical plastics cannot be made through recycling today.
Considering the price of medical devices in the US, there is certainly room for a few extra cents.
In the US, this cost will get absorbed. But if you are in subsaharan Africa, 6x more expensive IV tubes and syringes is extremely consequential.
That's definitely not a complete solution (if one exists), but that could be implemented over night if we wanted to do it.
And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.
It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2 without paying $1k" are not the way to improve things. The biggest fight in the world today is not for "the climate", but for the freedom to live in a non-autocratic country. We would have to win the second to have the slightest shot at cooperating well enough to have a shot at mitigating the first for those of us in places that will be hit the worst.
Do you think a communist-by-name party of China (or Russian mafia-state) gives a damn about the climate and how it affects people in places like subsaharan Africa, Bangladesh etc? Not in the slightest, but they'll gladly use every bit of it to promote panic and industry killing policies in places like the US, EU while pretending to "be green". If we win the fight not to be ruled by corrupt dictators we can have a shot of improving the lives of people who will suffer due to climate change.
Even if that was true in the short term (and reducing global supply by shutting down oil wells makes ir unlikely) the relative incentive for alternatives created here would lead to global improvements over the medium and longer term.
(That said, the time to apply solutions with medium-to-longer term payoff was 50 years ago.)
The problem is that it requires the US to be on board with it. Each one alone couldn't, but the EU and US together would have the economic force required to solve this problem, if they acted with decisiveness.
The EU on the other hand has virtually no ability to produce oil and gas and is dependent on outside suppliers. So of course they have a lot of incentive to move off of it and that’s much easier if everyone else does too.
American hegemony is at stake if oil demand is dramatically reduced quickly. Where as the EU stands to gain influence. So again, why would the USA weaken herself to the benefit of the EU?
Perhaps it would make economic sense to squeeze the market to the last drop? This is also why peak oil is an important concept. The price will certainly increase over the long term and this is a tempting opportunity.
However, this is also how empires fall. There will be technological change, and it will decrease our dependency on oil, not increase it. The economic impetus for this change is clear. Companies resisting change will be irrelevant in the future and the same is true for whole countries. Economies which isn't dominated by oil will be the first to change and master the next economic era. Countries like Russia are not likely to keep up with the technological change, they are much too invested in the old system.
So the answer is that given a long enough outlook, economies gain from this transformation. The US specifically also should have every incentive to keep trade with China under control, given that geopolitical situation. Aligning with the EU would be a strategical move against China, while keeping the European trade partners close. It's a move that would make both economic and political sense.
That's separate from the moral reasons. We know what carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads to. Over geological time scales it is abundantly clear. We may not want that for our children, but that's unfortunately too late to change now. Economic and political reasons are what remains.
We're still far better off decarbonising because (rest of the world CO2 + China CO2) > China CO2.