97% environmentalist
scottaaronson.com
scottaaronson.com
"Whenever I hear this style of argument, I’m reminded of Marcia Clark’s closing argument in the OJ Simpson trial: 'We have proved that OJ Simpson is a murderer. The defense has proved that Mark Fuhrman is a racist.'
"Likewise, in this case: 'We have proved that climate change is a grave threat to the survival of human civilization. You have proved that rich, do-gooder liberals can come off as annoying hypocrites.'
"Unfortunately, the human mind is wired in such a way that, just as 'Mark Fuhrman is a racist' actually worked to get OJ acquitted for murder, so 'Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio are smug elitists, flying around in their private jets' is considered by millions to be a strong argument for climate inaction."
It's interesting because Warren Buffet is often cited by leftists because Buffet supports raising income taxes. See the Buffet secretary story from 2011 where he complained that his secretary pays a higher income tax rate than he does. Interestingly, Buffet did not call for a raising of the capital gains tax -- the form of income from which Buffet derives his wealth. The relevance of this example is that these marquee people that try and influence public policy ALWAYS act rationally towards their own best interests. Al Gore promotes AGW and becomes a billionaire. Buffet suggests raising income taxes to potentially deflect calls to raise capital gains taxes.
This "settled science" bullshit is exactly that. No science is "settled," yet there are those that want to fundamentally alter civilization based on politically-influenced mathematical models. Interestingly, even the IPCC admits that "we redistribute world's wealth by climate policy." Looking at the AGW issue objectively, given all of the scandal, the misrepresentations, the outright lies (i.e. the polar ice cap will be completely gone by 2016,) and the Chicken Little aspects, a person with no political opinions at all would be suspicious. The idea of human-caused global warming has been trumpeted with a zeal equal to that of the Eugenics movement -- and we all know how that turned out.
As an example, Charles Davenport had a PhD in biology from Harvard and later was a Harvard professor. He also was the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At the time, one could say his scientific credentials were beyond reproach. One of his statements (among others) was, "I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits." This highly respected scientist helped and supported the Nazis, their scientific programs were based on much of Davenport's work. Yet, in 1911, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences because of his eugenics work. Eugenics inspired Margaret Sanger to found Planned Parenthood, not to save society from unwanted pregnancies, but to prevent immigrant "inferiors" from breeding. A member of the National Academy of Sciences who laid the groundwork for the extermination of millions of people. All based on "settled science."
So pardon me if I'm a bit skeptical when a billionaire politician like Al Gore tries to sell the world a bill of goods. We could argue that divestiture or the elimination of fossil fuels might be "good," but then again similar arguments for "goodness" were made in the justification eugenics. I'm certainly not comparing oil to genocide; I'm elucidating the potential rabbit hole down which we may go when we confuse the scientific with the political.
Warren Buffet argues for high estate taxes. Bershire Hawthaway makes a lot of money buying family-owned businesses worth ~$100M, who are forced to sell due to the estate tax bill.
This has never been true of Al Gore. You're confused about a lot of things but this is the oddest, as it's the easiest to verify.
Um, why do you say that? Every statement I've seen from him very clearly says taxes on capital gains need to increase (at least for those earning large capital gains).
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/opinion/buffett-a-minimum-...
Here is the core of your argument - you strongly agree with something based on sober reflection on empirical data. One day, a charlatan joins your side and becomes a prominent activist for your cause. Will you re-evaluate your judgement of the facts based on your dislike of this man?
Nobody is claiming that climate change is a threat just because Al Gore says so, so the sincerity of his belief is irrelevant. Politicians are not the ones "selling the world" on climate change; they're the ones being persuaded (to varying degrees) by scientific evidence of a man-made threat, and they're in a position of power to do something about it.
As for what happens when politicians don't pay attention to climate change, just look at Florida: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/09... Their senator and governor don't believe global warming exists, and they're already having to deal with rising sea levels. It's the politicians who don't take action that are harming their constituents, not those who do.
Personally I am in the camp that global warming is almost certainly real. What I haven't seen is an estimate of what percentage is due to human activity. Do you have a citation for what that might be? It strikes me that appropriate action differs depending on humanity's contribution, e.g. < 40%, do nothing to alter consumption, it won't appreciably alter the result, > 100 % (Hey, without human intervention we might actually experience cooling) throttle it down as best as practical.
For more detail see Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren, which describes:
- The physics of the greenhouse effect
- The contributions to global warming from CO2, methane, black soot, etc
- The geological record that shows how the planet responded, when things like this happened before
the money politics is pretty clearly stacked on one side. your argument about eugenics, though distasteful, is actually illustrative of what happens when you latch onto bad science to find excuses to maintain the status quo.
So when people make the very important decision to take climate change seriously or not based on the shallow level of reasoning that you've used in your post, it scares the hell out of me. For your first point: you could just as easily argue that someone doesn't believe that poverty exists because they haven't sold all of their belongings and given the money to the poor. Some problems need very large political changes, and so it's perfectly rational (though perhaps hypocritical) to not worry about personal behaviour when changing it would be just window dressing.
Your second argument boils down to "scientists have been wrong in the past". The fact that you're willing to take humanity's largest gamble on scientists being maybe wrong this time is irrational. The downside risk is literally the collapse of human civilization, with violent or desperate deaths for most of us, and the upside is that we'd managed to not be duped into making investments into energy infrastructure and enriching a couple of charlatans? Why would anyone take that bet?
Granted, we can't be held hostage to every doomsayer that comes along, but the alarms that are being raised by scientists and researchers now is unprecedented. Something large appears to be happening, and no one knows what will happen, but everything but the best case scenario is very, very bad. If your post presents the best evidence you have, then you have practically no grounds for being as certain as you are that everything's going to be fine.
That's incorrect. He could easily and profoundly believe that using a private jet increases his efficiency in promoting climate awareness.
Regarding Al Gore types, I don’t think it’s fair to use them as an argument agains the science or need for action. But it is majestically fair to use their actions to argue against the inefficient "blacklist" approach, where they presume to tell me which goods have a negative net utility, rather than giving me a price and letting me decide whether I still want the incandescent light bulbs. If you don’t like legislation that would mandate a smaller home size or max flights per year (knowing you can pay for the externality), then don’t propose legislation that would mandate what kind of artificial light you can have!
So your attack on Al Gore is even more obscure than the usual ones. It could easily be turned around and argued that it's unfair to allow the rich to have the privilege of incandescent bulbs, while the poor have to suffer with the harsh but efficient LEDs.
Having said that, as someone who thinks the free market is a powerful tool, I'd generally go for carbon taxes as that lets the market do it's thing, rather than more targetted bans, subsidies or taxes. But presumably the ban was effected with the intent of getting out from one local maximum caused by network effects and high up-front investments in the new tech (people will wrongly choose the cheap in the short term tech rather than the cheap in the long term), so it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do in my eyes.
This is sort of a pedantic point: selling your shares in Shell substitutes, not reinforces, pumping more oil out of the ground. In that sense, divestment achieves its goal of keeping oil in the ground, for sure. But sometimes, if your company can pump more oil from the ground, and Saudi doesn't also pump more oil, you've made money and your stock rises. Sometimes, if you pump more oil from the ground, everyone's stock falls. It's complicated.
What's most persuasive? If you had listened to the divestment folks back in 2012, when many of these movements took off, you would be on a great big pile of cash right now.
So it actually makes a lot more sense to pitch big academic endowments: "You'll make a ton of money if you divest from energy stocks." There's just no way you could have known that would work in 2013, especially in the midst of an oil boom.
My recommendation: Make as much money as possible, and lobby for cap-and-trade pollution credits. Then you can buy all the credits you want, and simply not use them. It is a far more direct and economically predictable way to achieve environmental change.
I very much agree with this solution. I'd also consider the funding of genetic research into bacteria that could convert oil in situ into something stable in the ground so it could never be pumped into the future, pumping said bacteria into wells using the same equipment used for hydraulic fracturing.
We as a species have a terrible track record as stewards of our planet. We can, and should, do better.
Taxes, by contrast, require some amount of tweaking the tax every time you think the resource is being overconsumed. Even if there's political consensus to do something now, there's a very real danger of undershooting, the resource being still overconsumed in the future, but the political will to raise the tax again no longer being present (example: imaging trying to raise consumer gas taxes in the US today).
Both regulations have the same basic goals -- raise the price of the thing to reduce usage, maybe collect some revenue in the process. Which regulation makes more sense depends a bit on the political reality (and future reality), and the relative diffculty of administering a tax vs a cap. It depends on context.
Sounds like the IPv4 allocation system. I agree it's politically palatable, but if a nation is going to distribute a good, it's more sensible to allocate an even chunk to every resident/citizen, and have them get paid for its usage.
And if you want to hand billions in tax credits to current carbon polluters so they don't fight the tax, you can do that with a carbon tax too. I'd actually recommend doing this for ordinary people, so that you don't hurt people with current high-carbon lifestyles too much, but still offer an incentive to save carbon/money, possibly a phase in would be required as is generally proposed for cap and trade.
I'm also wondering how a carbon cap and trade system could be effective and yet not result in a raise in gas prices in the US? That's surely the whole point?
In fairness, this can be a lot more difficult politically than raising or lowering a tax. Compare:
"Oh jeez, if we don't issue enough taxi medallions, we can just issue more later, or remove the requirement altoghether." (And have people who bought them scream bloody murder.)
On the other hand, if instead of agitating for divestment, the students/workers/activists were to ask for proxy votes, then we could put up a real fight at shareholder meetings. Sure, we might not have enough power to elect board members in the early stages, but nothing builds a movement more than meeting up with like-minded people and confronting the enemy face to face. It would provide a forum for activists to make connections with one another, grow the movement, and get excited about the possibility of fighting climate change by being an engaged citizen.
It's heart-breaking to me to see so much support given to this divestment movement -- I've never seen any of the major figures involved give a justification for why we should be divesting rather than fighting the corporations head on. Especially since proxy fights have a history of driving movement growth in the US. Divestment is a retreat. If climate change is really as much of a threat as most of us know it to be, then retreating should not be an option.
And there is a point to make that many fossil fuel assets will be stranded, and made worthless, if we do manage to limit emissions enough to stay below an increase of 2-3 degrees Celsius. The Bank of England and the IMF are both talking about this being another subprime issue. The divestment of pension funds, major charities and other similar organizations gives a better, more accurate sense of jeopardy – 'by all means, invest in these stocks, but bear in mind that you are taking a gamble, and don't be surprised if your investment goes belly up' and it also means that if such a retrenchment takes place the burden will fall on speculative private capital rather than important and structural social institutions.
I would like to read more discussion about the issue, though.
1) The debate around climate change is the worst piece of rhetorical garbage that has ever been foisted on mankind in the last couple of decades. Look at the terms in this essay, which is admittedly a more balanced judgment. We have environmentalists and anti-environmentalists. Who that breathes does not like breathing? Are there folks who wish to poison themselves? Please, spare me the "rich folks are out to destroy the planet on the backs of the poor" argument. Everybody is an environmentalist, at least when it comes to being a living human. Political groups which have no logical opponents do not add productively to the public discourse.
2) The more energy and freedom poor people have, the better we all are. Poor workers with cars can drive to find jobs. Poor people without water can use energy to extract water from deep in the ground, the air, or the ocean. Poor people with cheap energy can rebuild houses, move, go to school, live a better life. More freedom and cheaper power to as many poor people as possible.
3) Intelligent carbon-based creatures that exist in dry areas of the habitable zone of solar systems will evolve into their intelligence based on the backs of millions of years of built up hydrocarbons. These creatures will release this energy by burning -- this is as natural as a fish swimming in the ocean. Is such a release part of The Great Filter? Or is such a release part of the inevitable journey from the swamp to the sky? I don't think we have enough evidence to say one way or another. I am concerned by those who feel otherwise.
I think worst-case scenarios around climate change emphasize the need to productively develop all of mankind as quickly as possible. That probably means hundreds of new nuclear reactors being built. Worldwide. I see no effort anywhere for that to happen. Instead I see various proposals that always end up with expensive energy for poor people. This is only going to make the problem worse. We are going to take away the tools that poor people and nations need to grow capabilities to deal with things when they change. And while we're doing it, we're going to rob them and their children of a better future. It's a solution that's worse than the problem.
I really have to disagree with you. After reading about the decline in nuclear power across the world, the inability to get traction on Thorium-based LFTRs, and so forth, nuclear is not the answer. I mean, it could be if we as a species didn't suck so terribly at managing it as an energy source. We are not that species yet (note we still keep a coal-fired generation plant operating near Congress in DC due to politics).
If you'd like to debate this in depth, check my profile; my email is there. The Earth Policy Institute (holla Lester Brown) has shown how quickly China is bringing online solar and wind generation resources that already outpace their nuclear generation capacity. Bloomberg reported Friday that the US is on track to add an additional 35 percent of solar capacity this year alone.
Nuclear plants, coal plants, all of these central generation facilities all require massive capital outlays, they require corporations to manage them, staff to run. Solar and wind require none of these (except utility-scale, there be a bit more work required there).
It's simple, so very simple! We should be build solar and wind flat out as fast as possible, selling it to those who can afford it and giving it away to those who can't.
Solar Electric Light Fund http://self.org/
"SELF's mission is to design and implement solar energy solutions to assist the 1.5 billion people living in energy poverty with their economic, educational, health care and agricultural development."
Wind vs Nuclear in China: http://www.earth-policy.org/data_highlights/2014/highlights4...
Bloomberg Article I mention: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-26/solar-as-f...
Deutsche Bank Predicts Grid Parity Of Solar Across All Fifty States in 2016: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/29/solar-grid-parity-us-sta...
I know many environmentalists, including career activists. The worst they could be accused of is not making nuclear power their number one priority. But, abstractly at least, they all support increased nuclear power in principle.
I know many people against nuclear power. They, however, don't have many political or scientific beliefs, and their intelligences lie elsewhere than scientific or conceptual thinking. None would identify as green or environmentalist.
The biggest problems with nuclear power seems to be (a) the inertia of leftover regulations and bad vibes from the 60s-80s and (b) nuclear power is really, really expensive and requires a great deal of capital outlay and time to build and even to recover the energy costs of building it. People are also more sensitive to the worst case failure modes of a nuclear plant (which has happened like once in history) than they are to the failure modes of coal power (which are when they function like they're designed to).
http://www.sierraclub.org/nuclear-free
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/nuclear...
Sierra Club and Greenpeace are two of the largest and well-funded environmental groups.
For solar and wind to run civilization without fossil backup, you need a lot of extra infrastructure. A couple years ago, one study looked at what it would take to run a certain section of the U.S. electric grid on 99% wind/solar. They had a computer try 10,000 combinations and picked the cheapest, which was to overproduce energy by a factor of three, and add a little storage. That's not just overcapacity, it's actually producing that much extra energy to make sure you always have enough to meet demand.
On the nuclear side, molten salt reactors and factory-produced modular reactors have the potential to reduce costs quite a bit, if we can get the regulators up to speed.
MSRs, even module, require at least a decade of approval through the NRC. You won't see a new reactor online, modular or not, for at least 15-20 years, by which point solar, wind, and utility scale battery storage will have slaughtered nuclear.
How do you compete against a tech that can be deployed in weeks or months? And that has no licensing time? Nor requires $1-2 billion just to start.
The US consumes about 19.05M barrels of oil per day. Each barrel of oil is about 1.6 MWh of power.
So this is 31017210 MWh (3.1 x 10^10 kWh) of power just in oil every day..
The solar constant is 1.36kW/m^2 on average. Solar panels convert solar energy into power with roughly a 14% efficiency or about 190W/m^2 or about 2.2kWh/m^2 in 12hrs.
Taking 3.1 x 10^10 kWh/(2.2kWh/m^2) I get 13 x 10^9 m^2. Converting this to miles gives us about 5240sq miles of solar panels just to get the same amount of energy we consume in oil.
Hopefully I did everything right above.
"Tank-to-wheel efficiency of conventional Otto cycle car is only 16% as illustrated fellow. Here, Otto cycle engine loss is 72%, standby /idle loss is 10% and drive line loss is 2%. Accessories loss, such as air conditioning unit consumes 2% but for comparison purposes, it was assumed 0%."
That's right. You're losing almost 90% of your available energy to heat. In all practicalities, you use less than 1% of energy available in a barrel of oil to move a car forward.
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pu4i-aok/cooldata2/hybridcar/hyb...
"That’s right, an electric car is over four times as efficient at turning energy into motion."
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-whee...
Please see /u/Brackenshire's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9676675) regarding land required.
There are at least four startups attempting molten salt reactors. In the U.S. they all struggle with the NRC, which has inflexible regulations mandating things that only apply to solid-fueled reactors. We'll need new regulations before those companies can even operate test reactors.
Bill Gates' company Terrapower, which is attempting a fast reactor, has given up on the NRC and is seeking other countries that will let them work.
The U.S. spent thirty years on the Integral Fast Reactor, and according to the lead scientists on the project, they were a year or two from completion and commercial readiness when the Clinton administration shut them down.
Most of these projects, and others with more conventional technology, want to build small modular reactors that could be licensed once and churned out in factories. The NRC isn't set up for this either.
China is indeed rolling out a lot of renewables, but they're also building a fair number of new nuclear plants and have major research programs on several GenIV designs, including fast reactors and molten salt. This is what we should be doing: pulling out the stops and working on every non-carbon energy source we can, because time is short and technology isn't completely predictable.
Solar and wind certainly do well when backed up by natural gas, but running civilization on them is another matter. To overcome their variability you have to add overproduction, storage, long-distance transmission, and smart grid, all of which gets expensive.
As far as the story about solar and wind being ready? This is a very easy thing to test: if it's ready, it's ready. You'll be selling them like hotcakes. If it's not ready, it's not -- folks can certainly continue investing, and I wish them the best of luck. But let's go do something right now that we know that works. We could have started with a lot of this next generation nuclear technology a decade or more ago -- and had the support of a big chunk of the people and the commercial energy sector. How far along would we have been now?
We have consistently been more enamored with keeping the troops riled up and having a good political fight than we have with accepting already existing solutions to the problem which aren't as contentious.
I wish solar the best. Wind also. But if we do not understand how we got here, we have little hope of making good strategic decisions and sticking with them.
We should certainly deploy as much wind and solar as we can right now. Using fossil as backup is better than using it as primary. But so far it doesn't look like renewables alone are the fastest way to get off fossil fuels entirely. Adding nuclear baseload would make things a lot easier.
[1] https://orionmagazine.org/article/forget-shorter-showers/
Gas / oil / coal / food are not free. In fact the poorer you are, the more expensive they are relative to total lifestyle.
The financial markets are pretty messed up. The newspaper interest rate is 0.025% or whatever, but it doesn't matter. The real world interest rate for poor people is 29.99% credit cards and loansharks and rent-to-own scams. If that were fixed, so poor people could buy house insulation and solar panels at bank level interest rates instead of loan shark level interest rates or no operating financial markets at all...
"So it seems systematic changes are necessary."
We don't have the political organization at this time to do anything other than mess things up worse than they are currently. The same folks who can't provide a modern medical system, a sensible K12 or higher ed system, can't do foreign policy without killing millions of innocent civilians, can't run an economy to the benefit of more than 1% of the citizens, if, given more power over environmental issues, are just going to find a way to make the rich richer, the poor poorer, and kill a bunch of proles all while telling us its for "our" own good. One has to be pragmatic, screwing up is the only thing they've done for a couple generations. Given that historical record, its very hard to support .gov intervention beyond the "put a green ribbon imported from a Chinese factory on my car to raise awareness" level of action.
Yeah, turns out there's a heck of a risk premium involved with making unsecured non-recourse loans to people who don't make all that much money. This sucks, of course, but what in God's name do you expect to happen instead? Banks willingly losing billions a year on bad loans? We do have charities in this country, but banks aren't them.
> If that were fixed, so poor people could buy house insulation and solar panels at bank level interest rates instead of loan shark level interest rates...
Poor people buying home insulation? I thought we called it the Weatherization Assistance Program. (Part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.) If that didn't work out, why not, and what exactly do you think will work out? (And anyway, do poor people generally own a house, or rent?)
There are a surprising amount of substitutions people can (and, as measured, do) make to their habits when the prices go up. Overnight they may consolidate trips, drive the more efficient car they already own, or just not make a marginal trip at all. Over 5 years they may consider buying a more efficient car, or living closer to work, or any of a large number of possible solutions that you only think about when the price is affecting you directly.
People do change their habits in response to price signals. The trick is actually raising the prices (eg via taxes on environmentally bad things). After that you don't really need to do much convincing.
But, global warming? I would have expected better of educated people such as these.
> Just over 97% of published climate researchers say humans are causing most global warming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_...
We should weight evidence, not amount of people behind it.
These endless arguments over the semantics of what scientists think is completely inane. We need educated people to actually understand how the environment works and stop treating it like some abstract concept that only exists inside some scientist's head.
If you release millions of tons of stuff into the environment then it will have an effect that could be bad.
You're quite right, it could have a bad effect, but we've yet to prove that climate changes are an effect of those gases we've released.
One, quite important, detail, on climate change, is that a few several centuries ago, the earth was actually warmer by a few degrees that it is today. This would indicate that climate changes is not strictly due to the gases we're putting out, and that there are more complex variables in the system than what's being considered.
As I said we lack a baseline of what the world would look like without human activity. Either way I think your point is mute from a policy point of view. The environment is inextricably linked to humanity for the forseeable future. It may be interesting to speculate on if a change is "natural" but we cannot possibly seperate the human enviornment from the natural environment.
What we lack is agency in how the environment is changed. It may get warmer or colder, but we don't have a choice. Reducing green house gas emissions is a way of trying to control the atmosphere for the benefit of humans.
Scott dealt with him correctly. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2316#comment-639452
Well, the origin post is also about someone not specialized in this area speaking about the issue. I don't think "no being a scientist" disqualifies anything you say: what we should care about are merely the facts that the person exposes.
I actually went through the first link you posted. The first paragraph is no more than a Argumentum Ad Hominem, while the rest is a lot of claims, with many interlinked articles, but no strong raw data to back most of it up.
> Scott dealt with him correctly. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2316#comment-639452
He basically disregarded the information provided because the video was on youtube. He made no reference to the data provided in various talks by Mockton. He the procuded to another falacy: Argumentum ad populum. "Since most people think it's right, it must be right".
---
Here's one of several interesting talks on the subject, if you're interested on the data:
Monckton: The earth is cooling
Counter-argument: The last decade 2000-2009 was the hottest on record.
Yet, during the last five years it has decreased noticeably, but we haven't drastically reduced emissions. Even if we altered emissions radically, the latency it would have on the global temperature is by far more than a few years.