The chasm between politicians and science is staggering. For a truly terrifying example, there's the 2018 IPCC report. It's under 600 pages. The summary for policymakers is 25 pages, with the following 5 chapters each with an executive summary of about 2 pages. So let's say a 35 page read for politicians.
For 170K a year, plus an expense account, plus a nice pension, we should expect each of the representatives of the United States Congress to slog through those 35 pages, right?
Greta Thunberg, providing the United States Congress with a roughly 3 paragraph TLDR of the IPCC report, and even this is news to probably most of them.
I interpret climate inaction not as science ineptitude, but as defecting in a prisoners dilemma sense.
The high capita emitters (AU/US/CA/NZ) are refusing to slow down economic growth (each country has to slow down to different degrees, depending on their existing energy mix), and are relying on other nations to make progress.
Rich countries will adapt. Poor country may not have the resources to do this, and thus climate inaction is an inequality issue, not just a scientific issue.
Politicians respond to votes and slowing economic growth is not popular.
Either rich countries will willingly sacrifice growth to help the poor of the world (not going to happen), or we encourage international cooperation. This is what's happening (Paris, Kyoto), albeit with defectors who need to be punished.
NOte that most of the work this guy is talking about was done decades ago.
As in, 8 iterations of Moore's Law before the present day.
If there were problems in those models, you could show them today with just a few EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You would not need a supercomputer.
Political party elected for money reasons that ignores science is a symptom of the problem, it is not the problem itself. Outdated laws and electoral two-party system is the problem.
Why no “top researcher” ever urges to look at the root of the problem? Why researchers of political science do not sound the alarm to change outdated laws that were written 100 years ago when they couldn’t imagine shameless lobbying, mega corporations, manipulated social networks, and climate emergency that clearly requires different political system to manage it.
The other issue I see is that, traditionally, it wasn't a matter of the end of civilization if governments took 3, 4 year terms to do something about an issue. For example outlawing smoking in public places.
This issue is so dire and serious but it doesn't fit in the headspace of these politicians and the voters that like them, it doesn't fit their traditional model of urgency.
My tl;dr version; it's too late to wait any longer. We can't wait till these politicians retire for action.
In Australia, in recent times that's the Liberal Party and the Australian Labour Party.
While there have been influential minor parties, and even independent persons who hold the balance of power on occasion, the executive leadership is always from one of two major parties. Those parties may change over time, fwiw.
Although the Liberal Party is a coalition with the Nationals who have a great deal of influence over the Liberal party and its policies when the Liberal party is unable to form a majority government on its own.
That isn't really what that Wikipedia page is saying - although the interpretation is ambiguous.
"In contrast, in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia and in other parliamentary systems and elsewhere, the term two-party system is sometimes used to indicate an arrangement in which two major parties dominate elections but in which there are viable third parties which do win seats in the legislature, and in which the two major parties exert proportionately greater influence than their percentage of votes would suggest."
The important weasel word there is "sometimes" and in those cases it would be incorrect. To form Government one has to have a majority. To gain this majority, the current Government is formed by a "coalition" - which is a combination of parties - Nationals and Liberals. The opposing majority party is Labor. So here you have 3 parties. Not to mention that the structure of the Australian elections is such that we have one of the most democratic systems using compulsory, preferential voting - meaning that everybody has to vote, and all votes convey some power in decision making. The only case where this isn't try is in a recent edge case caused by rule changes allowing you to number above the line (and not to completion).
It is about as close as you could get to a fair democratic system that is not systemically bound to be a two party system, and in practice, has not resulted in a two party system, but one of a coalition, a majority opposition and a decent growing minor party. (With many others in the senate).
> Nationals and Liberals. The opposing majority party is Labor. So here you have 3 parties
The Nationals are really only a separate party from the Liberals in name only.
They don't (by and large) ever compete with the Liberals for seats, and where policies differ - it's because the Nationals have a view that's more representative of their regional constituent's views.
Yes, but the more important distinction is the election structure which is not systematically designed to result in a two party system. "System" being the important word here, not "outcome".
Political party elected for money reasons that ignores science is a symptom of the problem, it is not the problem itself. Outdated laws and electoral two-party system is the problem.
I disagree. Powerful people and institutions actively protect their interest. Laws and precedents are protected when there are interests that benefit from them.
IE, anti-democratic institutions survive because people protect them. They are the symptom and money driving the system is the cause.
I don't know why you're getting down-voted. This is basically the answer. In general, politicians tend to be very smart people - you have to be smart to convince people to vote for you (or even in dictatorships be your enforcers). However, the economic incentives are by and large not aligned and therefore decisions poor in the long term get taken.
Just questioning the overly simplistic world view.
A carbon tax/cap and trade is in everyone's interest. The "cost" would be passed on to consumers, just like if the price of oil went up, or any other cost really. As such, they're actually regressive policies as seen purely from an income perspective (people with money can better afford the increase in price). Neither policy would be a "threat" to "status quo power".
Spending five minutes familiarising yourself with the politics of such schemes in Australia would cure you of your own simplistic thinking on this topic.
The countries with high per-capita emissions (AU/NZ/US/CA) have built cities and societies on cars, meat, flying, and polluting sources of electricity.
Reducing those to sustainable levels is not popular: it will cost jobs, industries, tax, quality of life.
The rich countries pollute to their advantage, and will try to preserve this.
In a democracy politicians listen to voters, not to "the science".
So those researchers perhaps should focus on convincing voters? Having actual scientists being the public face of global warming would be a welcome change from having spokesmen being TV people or high-school dropouts.
Maybe it's people need to listen to the science first?
Australia deserves everything it has gone through after purposely voting in PMs to 'scrap the carbon tax' and recently the guy bringing coal into parliament saying there is nothing to fear.
In some ways it kind of makes it worse that we knew a bit about who he was come election time.
Truth be told, Scomo was barely a figure anyone would have recognized until he was suddenly PM. He was there in the shadows but few would have picked him to be our next PM.
The re-election however I get the feeling that was a bit down to people starting to feel the pressure from a slowing economy. With that many were voting to ensure a system they knew even if not ideal. Better the devil you know than to try their hand on an nearly unknown candidate.
I don't really know, there is so much noise in the political space nowadays that it is difficult to get much signal out of it.
he won because people were afraid of what Shorten and his cronies were saying they would do, in my mind it's a bit of a 'stuck in between a rock and a hard place'
Australian here, its not that we don't care about the climate (same for our politicians), its that we realise that we contribute to under 1% of the problem. However to reduce that 1% we would effectively have to kill off industries in which around half our workforce is employed. Thats a big re-skilling project.
But then you look at China who is the main problem (also 1 billion people to our 26 million), and they are doing nothing.
Do you understand the notion of per-capita emissions? Australia has higher per capita emissions than China, and thus must act accordingly.
NSW has a hosepipe ban. Is my household exempt from this, simply because there's only 2 of us, and 2 is such a small number in comparison to NSW's population? No, everyone must do their part. Australia is not.
I didn't in fact think of that being a factor, although being that we are where China mines their fuel I would say the economic cost would be terrible either way
48 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadFor 170K a year, plus an expense account, plus a nice pension, we should expect each of the representatives of the United States Congress to slog through those 35 pages, right?
If you want the terrifying truth, watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZsHtpk0XII&t=217s
Greta Thunberg, providing the United States Congress with a roughly 3 paragraph TLDR of the IPCC report, and even this is news to probably most of them.
CP Snow's essay The Two Cultures is all too true.
The high capita emitters (AU/US/CA/NZ) are refusing to slow down economic growth (each country has to slow down to different degrees, depending on their existing energy mix), and are relying on other nations to make progress.
Rich countries will adapt. Poor country may not have the resources to do this, and thus climate inaction is an inequality issue, not just a scientific issue.
Politicians respond to votes and slowing economic growth is not popular.
Either rich countries will willingly sacrifice growth to help the poor of the world (not going to happen), or we encourage international cooperation. This is what's happening (Paris, Kyoto), albeit with defectors who need to be punished.
I interpret politicians not doing the reading as politicians not doing the reading.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair
"It is easy to get men to claim something, when their salary depends on them making the claim."
As supporting evidence: Statistics.
As in, 8 iterations of Moore's Law before the present day.
If there were problems in those models, you could show them today with just a few EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services. You would not need a supercomputer.
Why no “top researcher” ever urges to look at the root of the problem? Why researchers of political science do not sound the alarm to change outdated laws that were written 100 years ago when they couldn’t imagine shameless lobbying, mega corporations, manipulated social networks, and climate emergency that clearly requires different political system to manage it.
This issue is so dire and serious but it doesn't fit in the headspace of these politicians and the voters that like them, it doesn't fit their traditional model of urgency.
My tl;dr version; it's too late to wait any longer. We can't wait till these politicians retire for action.
In Australia, in recent times that's the Liberal Party and the Australian Labour Party.
While there have been influential minor parties, and even independent persons who hold the balance of power on occasion, the executive leadership is always from one of two major parties. Those parties may change over time, fwiw.
"In contrast, in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia and in other parliamentary systems and elsewhere, the term two-party system is sometimes used to indicate an arrangement in which two major parties dominate elections but in which there are viable third parties which do win seats in the legislature, and in which the two major parties exert proportionately greater influence than their percentage of votes would suggest."
The important weasel word there is "sometimes" and in those cases it would be incorrect. To form Government one has to have a majority. To gain this majority, the current Government is formed by a "coalition" - which is a combination of parties - Nationals and Liberals. The opposing majority party is Labor. So here you have 3 parties. Not to mention that the structure of the Australian elections is such that we have one of the most democratic systems using compulsory, preferential voting - meaning that everybody has to vote, and all votes convey some power in decision making. The only case where this isn't try is in a recent edge case caused by rule changes allowing you to number above the line (and not to completion).
It is about as close as you could get to a fair democratic system that is not systemically bound to be a two party system, and in practice, has not resulted in a two party system, but one of a coalition, a majority opposition and a decent growing minor party. (With many others in the senate).
The Nationals are really only a separate party from the Liberals in name only. They don't (by and large) ever compete with the Liberals for seats, and where policies differ - it's because the Nationals have a view that's more representative of their regional constituent's views.
We haven't had a government made up by a single party since we ditched FPP and brought in proportional representation
I disagree. Powerful people and institutions actively protect their interest. Laws and precedents are protected when there are interests that benefit from them.
IE, anti-democratic institutions survive because people protect them. They are the symptom and money driving the system is the cause.
Reactionary politicians are well aware of what the science thinks - they're just prioritizing their class interests.
The economic transformation necessary to properly fight climate is a threat to their status quo power, and so they resist it.
"The science" is very much beside the point here.
You see it all the time on this forum. You can make narrow economic critique but broad, generalised critique of capitalism is off-limits.
It seems HN has stopped the usual astro-turfing these posts attract and it's been replaced by down votes and flagging.
Normally a comment or two is enough to kill the thread.
How?
> transformation necessary to properly fight climate is a threat to their status quo power
Is it? How would a carbon tax/cap and trade threat their "status quo power"?
A carbon tax/cap and trade is in everyone's interest. The "cost" would be passed on to consumers, just like if the price of oil went up, or any other cost really. As such, they're actually regressive policies as seen purely from an income perspective (people with money can better afford the increase in price). Neither policy would be a "threat" to "status quo power".
Reducing those to sustainable levels is not popular: it will cost jobs, industries, tax, quality of life.
The rich countries pollute to their advantage, and will try to preserve this.
Get ready to live in a world of a LOT of stupid in it, and keep your wits about you.
It's all a simulation nothing is real NOTHING MATTERS.
Applying the label "science" doesn't remove any of the uncertainty associated with many so-called "scientific conclusions."
In this regard, psychology is not all that different from climate change.
Politically acceptable is not the same as true. Consensus is currently politically unacceptable due to costs to industry.
Australia deserves everything it has gone through after purposely voting in PMs to 'scrap the carbon tax' and recently the guy bringing coal into parliament saying there is nothing to fear.
Truth be told, Scomo was barely a figure anyone would have recognized until he was suddenly PM. He was there in the shadows but few would have picked him to be our next PM.
The re-election however I get the feeling that was a bit down to people starting to feel the pressure from a slowing economy. With that many were voting to ensure a system they knew even if not ideal. Better the devil you know than to try their hand on an nearly unknown candidate.
I don't really know, there is so much noise in the political space nowadays that it is difficult to get much signal out of it.
But then you look at China who is the main problem (also 1 billion people to our 26 million), and they are doing nothing.
Do you understand the notion of per-capita emissions? Australia has higher per capita emissions than China, and thus must act accordingly.
NSW has a hosepipe ban. Is my household exempt from this, simply because there's only 2 of us, and 2 is such a small number in comparison to NSW's population? No, everyone must do their part. Australia is not.
I assume you mean mining here. It contributes a lot financially, but according to ABS numbers employs 1.9% of the Australian workforce.
http://lmip.gov.au/default.aspx?LMIP/GainInsights/IndustryIn...
People overestimate this considerably (obviously!!)