While this is better than doing nothing, I don't think it's enough. We're passed the phase where we should do stuff on 30-year timelines. It's just not going to cut it.
Yes, I know that they can't just shut down the oil industry overnight - but governmenst need to set incentives more aggressively to move away from oil and coal energy, non-electric transportation and using animals in food production. At the same time, they need to stop subsidizing these (the EU is spending a quarter of their budget for direct livestock farm subsidies).
Such a course might seem expensive and disruptive, but the alternative (business-as-usual) will be significantly more expensive and disruptive.
>Jørgensen claims his government’s existing actions have already brought Denmark a long way. “We need to reduce by 20 megatons between now and 2030, and we’ve already reduced by five. We have 10 years to do it, and in one and a half years, we’ve done a fourth of that,” he said.
On the right track, though experience suggests that there’s always a lot of low hanging fruit that is ripe for picking. It’s rare that the last quarter of improvement comes anywhere near as quickly as the first quarter.
This drives me crazy. While closing down the oil industry should be a goal, all solutions that the public would accept
(and aren't worse than climate change itself) will be technical solutions, not sacrifice. The lockdown gave us a good glimpse at how effective sacrifice it. It's not enough.
Not everything is a technical solution foremost: new laws prohibiting the import and sale of certain polluting equipment and/or incentivising people to buy lower-carbon equivalent are primarily political/economic/social solutions. If they are well-designed (which isnt easy, I give you that) reasonable people can accept them.
Not only is sacrifice an insufficient toll but it’s an unfair one. Who’s getting sacrificed for whom. Are we just going to tell thousands at a danish scale and millions at a global scale tough luck but at least you’ll have a shot at eeking out a subsistence level livelihood for your family. The smallest minority on earth is the individual and a civilisation that exists on the basis of overt human sacrifice isn’t one I and many others will abide by. This sounds a bit melodramatic but I’ve seen the toll it’s taken on family members this year who’ve lost a year of turnover in their small business. If the powers that be continue to throw these people under the bus they will have a fight on their hands and then we won’t even fix climate change probably the other way around.
I understand what you are saying, but you can make the same argument for why littering should be allowed. Banning littering is also sacrifice. Very likely technical solutions alone won't cut it.
My issue with sacrifices is that they often punish the wrong people. For example, let's say there is a carbon tax on flights (very likely to happen soonish). People who travel for work and for other necessities should not incur the same penalty as tourists who travel purely for pleasure.
There seems to be a random distribution of what's acceptable and what not. Driving an SUV? Sinner. Owning a dog? Acceptable, despite higher CO2 emissions. Getting a daily newspaper on paper? Perfectly acceptable. Eating takeout? Irresponsible waste of resources, despite a family of 4 eating at a (European) McDonalds needing less paper than needed for a newspaper.
The tourists traveling purely for pleasure are also helping the people who work in the tourist, service and entertainment industries at those destinations. For some smaller countries, that's a considerable part of their economy.
This dismisses the successes eg Fridays for Future had. Making high-CO2 lifestyle choices (frequent international flights, SUVs, fast fashion, ...) socially less acceptable and “uncool” is absolutely part of the solution
You probably mean frequent national flights for small Europeans countries? People are just flying less internationally because of COVID, not because of Friday for Futures thinking that's not cool.
Are these actually successes? I don't know how you can become carbon neutral by avoiding flights, SUVs and fast fashion. You can reduce CO2 emissions a bit, but won't come even close to 0. I think they are distractions.
Yes, because that new SUV will probably remain on the market for another 20 years. The 1999 Opel Corsa has at most 5 years of useful life left. So "new SUV" vs "old car" is a false dichotomy, and the real comparison should be between "20 years of fuel-guzzling SUV" or "20 years of fuel-efficient minicar" (mildly exaggerating, but you get the point).
So destroy anything that could be useful and reliable (which in turn decreases emissions as well because less things are being produced) and buy new shiny cars? Have you ever looked at how reliable modern cars are (especially with downsized engines which don’t do much about fuel economy but do a lot in reliability, not in a good way? you can’t expect most of them to last 20 years on the first engine and gearbox. While over 300k miles on the odometer was totally doable with 20 year old cars which are often rust free(not like 70s cars) and similarly efficient as modern cars, I don’t see why buying a new, more unreliable with almost the same fuel efficiency car would be better for emissions than keeping an old car running.
Maybe not, but that's probably not a fair comparison. Given same age, length and width, an SUV will be a bit heavier and have more air resistance than a vehicle with less height, so the energy use (and emissions) will be maybe 20% higher than a comparable station wagon.
Assuming that we are not talking about an hybrid/electronic SUV, right? I think the SUV theme is more a class struggle, trying to fit all SUV drivers into a stereotype (conservative/ suburb/family) than really a CO2 emission Per se.
It's also a thing for Europeans to criticize Americans about because most average people in Europe can't afford to have an SUV, whether due to money, lack of parking, roads not made for SUVs, etc.
so true. I'm one that, even if I wanted (and I don't), it would be hard to park and drive through our narrow streets.. add to that the risk to get the car trashed just because It's a SUV.
There are enough SUVs on European roads to prove it's possible. There are also countries like Switzerland or Luxemburg that have higher average incomes than the US, and still prefer Porsches or Mercedes to SUVs. Looking at the countries with slightly lower GDP per capita like Spain or France, you can restrict statistics to just the upper classes, and any group income-matched to the US population will have just as many garages but still far fewer SUVs.
If you look at your individual emissions then an SUV, frequent flights and fast fashion will dominate everything else. The only reason flying isn't a huge percentage of global emissions is because few people fly. Even in the US less than half the population fly in any one year.
It's true, but why would you put your focus on reducing your individual emission by (rough estimate) 30%, instead of demanding solutions that can get your emissions down by 100%? There's this urge to self-sacrifice and then look down on other people who don't, and it's really counter-productive in every way.
"Because technology alone won't solve the problem."
Technology is more likely to solve the problem than reducing emissions by a certain percentage, which is guaranteed to be insufficient. Transatlantic flights are certainly a hard problem, but why should it be impossible? Either using hydrogen, synthetic fuels and/or by offsetting emissions with carbon capturing.
If all that comes along then great, take advantage of it. But right now there are no hydrogen planes rolling off the production line in Seattle. Carbon capture has been hyped for a long time now but we aren't seeing anything substantial happening.
Which leaves us in the situation that if you get on a plane to cross the Atlantic today you will add another ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Carrying on as we are right now is like spending next years pay rise before you have got the promotion, it will bankrupt us.
Technology eventually solved every problem by making the solutions cheap enough to be acceptable.
Back when every river in Europe was full of human shit, the air was full of smog and pretty much the entire continent was devoid of timber people were saying the exact same sort of "technology will never solve this, we need to make sacrifices" crap.
I could go on but "making sacrifices" does not work at scale because when you apply that one approach to more than one problem you wind up sacrificing so many things that the standard of living is driven back by hundreds of years.
Technology eventually solved every problem by making the solutions cheap enough to be acceptable.
Technology created this problem, applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it. All this wishful thinking crap won't get us anywhere.
You don't need to drive your standard of living back hundreds of years although if we don't get a handle on climate change that will happen.
Yeah, there's something liberating about knowing we have to get to carbon zero or even carbon negative.
It quickly & significantly narrows the solution space. No amount of carpooling or bicycling will ever be enough by themselves to get us to carbon zero. (Speaking as an avid cyclist)
It's literally nothing. It's too little and too late, and nobody can guarantee that it isn't reversed before '50. The oil companies can still search for and extract oil right up til the deadline. So if there's enough money to be made lobbying will remove this deal. Jørgensen loves to big himself up with a lot of hot air and very little impact.
With this comment I request a link or other reply, explaining how climate change or global warming is due to man, and how to judge the validity of models predicting that. I’m a reasonably intelligent programmer who is OK with maths and stats, and am trying to curiously learn but of course am sceptical of grand claims. Many thanks to anyone trying to enlighten me wrt the truth
Thank you for replying. It’s a 650 page document, and I must say I admire you for having read through the quite wordy prose therein.
I can’t commit to reading it all through to understand how to model whether human action warms earth, and how to understand the accuracy of any such model.
The document appears to be aimed primarily at rulers of states, and to be in a big part about how rulers could create “global equality” and the like. In which of these chapters can I read to learn how to model whether mans industry is warming the earth up or not?
1: Framing and Context
2: Mitigation Pathways Compatible with 1.5°C in the Context of Sustainable Development
3: Impacts of 1.5oC Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems
4: Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response
5: Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication and Reducing Inequalities
Chaos theory. Everything we do can potentially alter the universe in very big ways. So, every human action is potentially affecting the climate. Having said that, nobody can predict what actions will lead to what kind of effects. It's simply not possible to predict that. Whoever is saying that is making it up.
There are pollution concerns when we do things at scale. There have been lots of toxins added to the environment ONLY because of large scale use by humans. This is real.
The main idea behind global warming is the CO2 being a greenhouse gas and hence trapping more heat, leading to more vaporization of ocean and releasing water vapor, which is also another greenhouse gas. This has been repeated forever but it is mostly theoretical. It shouldn't be very difficult to experimentally show how much CO2 traps how much of suns radiation and how it changes as CO2 concentration rises and falls... but this has not been done and is not presented, which leads me to believe that this claim is bogus.
If you forget "climate change" and "global warming" and look at what countries say and do from economic lens, things become much more clearer.
It was the late 90s and it seemed that the oil was running out so something had to be done. There were two sides. One was going to develop new technologies which would make existing technologies like solar and wind more efficient. Another was to attack war-torn parts of the world which have oil reserves and take their oil. You know which idea they went with.
The Cleantech idea was taken to China for manufacturing but China just copied the technology and made it better. Now, it is the biggest producer of wind and solar equipment.
Meanwhile, the U.S. came up with fracking, a new technology that made it possible to get oil that was not considered before. While expensive, it opened up the possibility for the U.S. to become energy independent. So, the Middle East, Europe and China got very concerned because the market prices would drop at best, and U.S. could outcompete them altogether at the worst.
So, the Climate Change narrative is mostly run from outside the U.S. at this time, mostly to get the U.S. to stop fracking.
Denmark is running out of their oil reserves by 2047. If you look at Denmark's economy, it may seem very diversified. Well, it is not. They do a lot of things but everything is indirectly subsidized by their oil money. Norway is in a similar situation. Without oil, they're are worse off than Italy and Spain economically, not to mention the shitty weather. So, they'll do everything to try to avoid that.
The TCR needs some explanation, but can be estimated from the Stefan-Boltzmann law; the temperature differential to produce a radiative output of 3.7 W/sq m is 3.7 / (4 * sigma * T0^3) which at a T0 of 287 K is 0.69 K. Clearly the Earth is not a perfect black-body so this lower bounds the TCR.
This also allows us to lower bound the anthrogenic climate contribution due to GHG radiative forcing 1850-2020 at 0.48 K.
Thank you! This is pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Had to read the post through a few times. The comment section had people asking the same questions I had and more, and with insightful discussion.
I think most of the readers here are aware of that. Plus there's a ton of other applications, like plastics, other chemicals etc.
But this article is not about that - this is about one country deciding to get out of oil production. I guess they have discussed this at lenght and decided that, all factors considered, it makes more sense for them to stop oil production, decarbonize their economy as far as possible, and import the oil that they will still need.
Yes, pretty much every educated person realizes that.
When people say "stop using oil", it really means stop using it for fuel because that is the vast majority of usage, and if we eliminate that then what's left is not a significant problem. The worldwide demand could probably be satisfied by a handful of drilling rigs instead of the thousands we have now.
CO2 is not a significant problem compared to quite literally millions upon millions tons of persistent, bio-accumulating chemicals that are dumped into the rivers and oceans by large polluters.
That is to say: actual poison.
They love setting people on quixotic quest against fairly harmless CO2 while they continue dumping actual toxic poison into ecosystem.
This is criminally stupid bullshit of the highest order. Climate change is real, it is an existential threat to human civilization, and it is to a very large degree caused by CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Those are scientifically established facts.
> quite literally millions upon millions tons of persistent, bio-accumulating chemicals that are dumped into the rivers and oceans by large polluters.
This is also a serious problem. But it is A) not in fact as big of a threat, and B) would in fact also be significantly reduced if we stopped burning oil as fuel, because the oil extraction industry is one of the worst (quite likely the worst) source of "persistent, bio-accumulating chemicals that are dumped into the rivers and oceans".
> They love setting people on quixotic quest against fairly harmless CO2 while they continue dumping actual toxic poison into ecosystem.
You are doing exactly the thing you are criticizing.
I agree CO2 has become a red herring. But I believe a lot of intelligent people supported its use for a long time not out of malice, but because it was a single metric that, while not a very good proxy for the various pollutants that are emitted by large polluters, was probably the best single proxy available.
You are underestimating how much man made CO2 is in the atmosphere. Preindustrial CO2 levels were at around 280ppm. Nowadays we are at 415ppm and no sign of any slowdown. 30% of the CO2 in the atmosphere came from burning fossil fuels. We are just a few decades away from doubling CO2 levels compared to preindustrial times.
On the order of millions of years the earth is a self correcting system that always tries to release as much energy as it absorbs. If you disrupt it in mere centuries you're going to see mass extinctions. Humans can adapt but often that just means they migrate to more hospitable locations. It means more refugees than we already have. The negative effects on agriculture will make it harder to feed 8 billion people so eventually civil wars will break out.
We are already seeing mass extinctions though, and biodiversity is generally greater in warmer regions. Unless these extinctions are entirely due to the 0.9 degrees of warming we've seen, there are other factors at play, many of which might yield more bang for our buck if we focused on them instead of net CO2e.
I think of measuring environmental health via CO2 like measuring economic health via GDP - it's probably the best single indicator if we have to use a single indicator, but it ignores a lot of nuance without which a better system can't really be designed.
"Modern medicine relies on petroleum, particularly to transport patients, staff, and supplies"
That part is largely 'solved' problem and the rollout of those solutions over the next 30 years will probably be significant. As far as plastics and pharmaceuticals are concerned the paper puts it at "an estimated 0.2% of petroleum used in the United States was for medical plastics"
As for plastics in general the current number seems to be in the 6-10% range globally depending on who you ask. With a combination of reducing, recycling and misc. technology improvements I'm sure we can get that down further in the next 20-30 years. And much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.
So on the whole I think winding down the petroleum industry as we know it today over the next 30 years to a fraction of what it is today (no one is seriously suggesting 100% shutdown) is absolutely doable, from a technology point of view. The reasons why it won't happen are political.
> and much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.
More importantly, it will hopefully come from onshore wells which are easier to access and manage than the crazy underwater shenanigans necessary of deep offshore extraction.
Not to mention that there have been research into making bioplastics[0]. Though they currently aren't as good as petroleum plastics, a push for more research and using blends can significantly reduce that dependence even more. Every step forward is still movement forward. Yes, we should be moving faster, but moving forward is better than not moving at all (or moving backwards). At the end of the day we won't be able to stop all CO2 production, but we should be able to achieve sustainable levels.
People often forget that the problem isn't producing CO2, the problem is producing too much CO2. If we have sequestration techniques (natural or man made) you can produce as much CO2 as you want as long as you have sustainable levels (which currently we need negative net production).
For the amount of petroleum products used in pharmaceuticals, they can easily be replaced by synthesis from bio-derived precursors. There's nothing special about hydrocarbons from oil.
Chances are wherever you are most of of what you have in your direct sightline contains petroleum in a way or another. Try living without products containing petroleum and you're basically back in 1800s.
Once we run out of it we're truly fucked because we have yet to find viable alternative for most of its use cases.
I consume ~30kg per week of petroleum for my (quite fuel efficient) car, or 1500kg petroleum annually.
I consume maybe somewhere on the order of 2kg per week (100kg/yr) in the form of plastic packaging, toothpaste, rubber, asphalt, etc. And most of this consumption results in solid waste or other inert storage, as opposed to the generation of CO2.
Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses will not mean "you're basically back in 1800s" - those sorts of uses are not as relevant to climate change. You'll still be able to buy tires and toothpaste (though the economics of something like asphalt, which is almost a waste product unless you're doing cracking, might result in alternative materials trials for road surfacing treatments, particularly in urban areas. Interlock pavers are particularly suitable for low-strength situations where asphalt is currently used due to artificially low prices)
> Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses
I never talked about energy and heating, quite the contrary. All I'm saying is that almost everything we use or consume are petroleum derived, that petroleum is not an infinite resource and that for most of these things we don't have anything viable to replace them with yet.
We have the technology to synthesize petroleum and it is economical enough to do now for clothes, paint, consumer plastics, and clothing. These things cost more when made with synthetics, but not substantially so.
The economics of synthetics are cost prohibitive for use in transportation and road construction. But luckily, electric vehicles will continue to reduce the need for petroleum for transportation purposes and asphalt is the most recyclable petroleum product out there. You can literally recycle it on-site.
You can use renewable energy to produce any form of hydrocarbon chemical you want via Power-to-X processes.
You can synthesize hydrogen from water. You can synthesize methane, methanol or ammonia with hydrogen and CO2 and go on from there to build everything that is built from oil today.
This isn't exactly efficient, and doing this at scale is a huge challenge. But in the end we'll have to find alternatives for all oil products, because making them from oil will inevitably lead to carbon emissions (both in the refinery and at the end of life of products when they decompose in a landfill or get burned).
Climate minister? Please! Their oil reserves have been projected to run out in 2047 [1]. So, they decide that they're going to close the oil industry by 2050, obviously because of their "deep concern for the environment".
I understand that people care for the environment, but I hope people do understand the economics and politics behind these things, right?
Part of the same plan is that Denmark needs to be CO2 neutral in 2020 - but not without using fossil fuels. This just means Denmark will be capturing CO2 using storage and planting trees. This is not my claim, it is right there in the proposal from the Danish govt.
So Denmark WILL consume oil in 2050 - but now it has to come from abroad.
So Denmark gets poorer as a result - and have to consume oil that other countries have produced anyway - but at least it feels and sounds good now!
Please stop. Seriously, this kind of mentality can only be detrimental to the effort to curb climate change. Every single discussion on the topic inadvertently ends up in the same few debates about numbers.
Denmark has taken a decision against its own economic interest, same as Norway before it (and maybe others). This is a decision worthy of a lot of respect.
Why is it worthy of respect to go against your own interest?
By making energy energy more expensive all you have done is taking a step further towards ex keeping 1 billion people in energy poverty because you are making it more expensive for them.
Denmark have invested heavily in wind over the last 40 years, as a replacement yet it only covers 8% of it's energy needs.
We don't need to curb climate change, we just need to control the consequences of it which we have done historially using fossil fuels.
The idea that the climate before the industrial revolution was some perfect equilibrium and that our emissions are a grave danger to the world is simply not historically true.
What is true is that what used to be a dangerous storm today can be a setting for a romantic dinner because humans have been able to invent ways to control the consequences of climate leading to much fewer people dead from it.
>Why is it worthy of respect to go against your own interest?
Isn't this like a basic human principle? That we are taught as children? That sacrificing one's own interests for the commonwealth is typically considered virtuous? So your question is total nonsense unless you were brought up in a forest by a bear somewhere and actually genuinely don't understand.
People take decisions that are in line with their ideology against their economic interest all the time. Pretty much any "poorer than national average" US state that isn't in favor of national healthcare is doing thins. I'd wager more than half of all separatist movements are not for the economic benefit of whoever wants out. And then there's obviously tons of "economically bad but we like it so we do mental gymnastics to pretend it's not" public policy.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing but "doing something against their economic interest" is a really low bar
I'm perplexed. This is a clear an example of false equivalence as you can hope to spot in the wild.
On the one hand, you have US states that don't want free healthcare because they are uneducated and think it's "communist". There is no sacrifice, no bravery, no nothing. It's just a lack of understanding.
On the other hand, you have Denmark which has put the health of the planet ahead of their economic wellbeing. This is something that very few countries have done.
As a dane, I'm slightly offended by all the posts dismissing this as something that doesn't really matter.
We were the first country to legalize porn, and homosexual civil unions, and although we're not the biggest country, I think it made an impact.
Maybe the actual savings in terms of CO2 isn't the largest, and maybe the closing could've been more aggressive - but I still think it sends an important message to other countries who are larger producers of oil.
If people just banned slaves for moral reasons, they'd have come back eventually for economic ones.
Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. This wasn't because people suddenly realised the slaves weren't having fun, or suddenly after millennia of religion someone decided to take the 'be nice to people' dogma seriously. Neither of those things take centuries to figure out.
The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. Slavery is a great example of liberating people to do things being much more impressive than bans. Banning slavery was a big step that sped the whole process up by a few decades, but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create.
> let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive.
Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.
No, the modern day slave trade is flourishing. Sex trafficking all over the world is one example. There are open slave markets in Libya now just as there were for centuries or longer.
> By 2017, 60% of the Libyan population were malnourished. Since then, 1.3 million people are waiting for emergency humanitarian aid, out of a total population of 6.4 million [0]
I'll cheerfully point out I don't think that Libya is economically competitive, and the slave trade is a big symptom of that.
Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away.
Them banning slavery will impress me less than a policy of general liberalisation to get some economic success happening. Economies don't grow big by banning stuff; banning stuff happens after the economy is strong enough to handle the damage bans do.
Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away.
That argument requires substantiation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arguably some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, yet slavery (or slave-like working conditions) are prevalent throughout society.
I can substantiate it with Libya - it had one of the highest GDP per capita in the world for a bit (same wiki page). But they couldn't sustain that because they have the sort of economy where slavery makes sense. The Saudis and Qatarians will be the same when the oil runs out.
An economy with slaves does not, fundamentally, make sense. It isn't going to be the least bit competitive with a modern capitalist economy with wages without wealth literally bubbling up from the ground in the form of oil. Everyone in such an economy will be less wealthy than their peers in a free market.
1) The capitalist formula for this is basically: Can i extract more value from this individual through "free" productivity minus wages, or from "slave" productivity minus enforcement cost.
Your arguments don't convincingly prove the former.
2) Even if I were to accept your reasoning (which to be very clear I don't), I still don't understand what argument you're making.
Because it naturally leads to:
a) Capitalism solved slavery by it being unprofitable, so the regulation/ban was unnecessary.
which leads to:
b) If it was profitable, the ban would hamper economic growth.
I'm much more interested in the second part. What would your stance be if we assume it would be profitable?
Capitalism doesn't concern itself with morality, but humans do. Should we do nothing about it because all political intervention is bad?
No, capitalism and freedom in general must operate within the confines of morality. But I think it is also true that slaves (at least as a source of agricultural labor) were becoming economically unviable regardless, due to advances in technology. Mechanized harvesting and other agricultural mechanization was just less expensive than using (and housing, and feeding) people to do the same work.
> No, capitalism and freedom in general must operate within the confines of morality.
Just to make sure, I assume this is your opinion of agreement with me? Which I appreciate, even if you weren't GP. It's just that the phrasing makes it sound like a disagreement in reasoning, which if that is the case I would like you to expand on.
But as to your second point, labor hasn't (yet) disappeared due to industrial revolutions, only shifted. What has changed is simply the scale one unit of labor could perform. Slaves would very much still be valuable in the 1800s. If nothing else proven by the fact that still to this day farming jobs are very often imported low-income jobs. I can't reconcile that fact with your reasoning.
It is not flourishing, it is underground and/or illegal in almost every country in the world. Your example of Libya shows just how badly governance has to break down in order for slavery to regain even a shadow of its former importance. The number of people enslaved has gone from substantial portions of humanity to a fringe activity, mostly on the margins of society.
The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me.
To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here?
Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.
> but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create.
Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.
So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.
> but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.
A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically no slaves left because nobody would want one. Cost money to maintain with very little payoff versus alternatives.
Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
> A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically none left because nobody would want one.
[citation needed]
> Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
I'm having trouble taking this comparison seriously. There has always been employees aside of slavery, usually at different positions.
Look at Apple's production history in China, or Amazon warehouse workers or Google/Amazon turk work. If there was no regulation, and with unscrupulous C-levels, those positions would probably be slaves, from a "capitalist perspective".
The economic disadvantage of slavery is the same one as that of communism -- people don't work as hard or as smart when they don't receive the fruits of their labor.
So now someone has a factory. They could, in theory, buy slaves and try to get them to work in the factory. But you would run away or, if you stayed, have no desire to work hard because you're not getting paid.
Or, the factory could "buy" slaves and offer them a buy-out mechanism. The factory pays $500, but after you make 1000 widgets, you get your freedom. The factory earns $800 from 1000 widgets, so that's a profitable deal for them. The former slave gets out of slavery as soon as they make 1000 widgets, so they have the incentive to make widgets. Try to get someone to make widgets as a slave without any reward and they only make 500 widgets, and then the factory would have to pay $500 to get $400. So the factory that ultimately frees the slaves out-competes the one that doesn't, and the slaves get freed.
True, 250+ years after slavery was abolished in the U.S., slaves are no longer an effective (or legal) asset.
Companies like Apple, Google, etc., did not exist in the 1800s. Stock ownership did not become common until the 1900s, even amongst the wealthy, so there was no alternative for this hypothetical slave owner. Moreover, unlike the North, the South did not have easy access to shipping or to the raw materials for heavy industry. (For example: Pittsburgh didn't become the Steel City because it was a nice place to live; it became the center of the U.S. steel industry because of its proximity to the raw materials and the methods of transportation available at the time.)
Obvious to the free market. The slave owners were already heading towards bankruptcy when the Civil war began. Nonenforcement of the escaped slaves act could well be seen as a refusal of other participants in the economy to subsidise slave owners' unprofitable business models.
This is completely wrong. In the 1800 US census, it recorded 893,602 slaves. By the time of the 1860 census (the last before the Civil War), that had risen to 3.9 million slaves (the 1850 census showed 3.2 million, so it was obviously still rising).
So now you're saying that "slavery started to fade away" as soon as it was abolished but it had nothing to do with the actual abolition? Just co-incidence?
And, yes, it halved as a % of the population because the urban population was growing faster than the slave population was growing. That doesn't mean it was shrinking.
Banning slavery had a big effect. But the ban wouldn't hold if slavery made economic sense. It isn't as though the the people were suddenly imbued with a moral spirit - we've had human history for literal millennia. Slavery being bad for slaves is not a complicated concept, people knew about that forever.
Making slavery unprofitable is more impressive than actually banning it. Both are good, but enabling freedom is still a substantially more powerful change than the simply banning of slavery. Much like how banning heroin doesn't actually cause heroin to die out if there is a demand for it; we may yet see heroin legalised in my lifetime much like marijuana. It is entirely possible. Slavery ain't coming back, it benefits pretty much nobody. There isn't a billion dollar industry in slaves waiting to be discovered.
> Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.
The problem with heroin (not from personal experience) is that you only realize that it was a mistake after you're already addicted, and then it's incredibly hard to stop. But seeing how much damage the "war on drugs" and the cartels producing them are doing, maybe a number of addicts (and deaths) more would be acceptable in the grand scheme of things...
Not in the US...The Industrial Revolution actually made slavery worse. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 dramatically increased the demand for slaves.
The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom.
No, in the U.S. at least the Industrial Revolution meant lower-paying jobs in a factory within less individual opportunity for economic success. The Industrial Revolution killed the demand for skilled artisans and tradesmen. The 1800s were known as the age of the "Robber Barons" for this reason.
It's still illegal in many[0]. And there are good arguments it should be illegal in more[1]. Picking "we made porn cummies more widely available" .... not the best example of your country being responsible for human progress. Great way to pacify your population though.
>And there are good arguments it should be illegal in more[1].
While it's certainly worth debating and discussing, the liberal paradigm in law proscribes that we should only make laws in certain circumstances under specific notions of harm, and the mere risk of harm is not usually sufficient. In addition, it is neither clear that legislation is the route to take, and several feminist critics of porn have tempered their claims and goals.
Before even discussing this matter, never mind mentioning legislation, you should be clear on how you define porn and the extent to which the research on porn is consonant with that definition. It's too easy to think that all porn fits in one bucket while today we have everything from hentai to fanfiction to online roleplay to audio recordings to OnlyFans. How much of your literature discusses these forms, and to what extent do the results converge?
Porn is surprisingly similar to alcohol, even in terms of its effects, but private sexual autonomy is arguably more important (morally) than the autonomy to consume alcohol.
Ana J. Bridges in a review of the scientific literature on the relationship between porn and sexual assault in the Handbook of Sexual Assault and Sexual Assault Prevention concluded that a ban is not warranted[0], but media literacy and other measures have been somewhat promising.
Oh please; OP was boasting of legalizing porn as some great achievement of his people. It's not a great achievement of his people, nor an inexorable sign of progress. It is at best something marginal, like making slot machines legal so swine like Sheldon Adelson can buy off US politicians instead of scurrying around in criminal back alleys avoiding police where gambling syndicates belong.
You're lecturing me on the "liberal paradigm in law" which was somehow invented in the 1960s rather back in the 1700s when the rest of the liberal paradigm was invented by, you know, the philosophers who invented classical liberalism.
And great reddit tier red herring about "defining porn." How about "all the filth that the Danes made legal, as OP was boasting about." Is that a clear enough definition for you, or do you want to parse dirty pictures and debate the merits of DH Lawrence books?
>You're lecturing me on the "liberal paradigm in law" which was somehow invented in the 1960s rather back in the 1700s when the rest of the liberal paradigm was invented by, you know, the philosophers who invented classical liberalism.
The liberal paradigm in law has only relatively recently gained support despite being "invented" long ago - whether we're talking about debate over obscenity laws, gay sex, alcohol, or, indeed, gambling. This is especially true in non-US countries which are not founded on explicitly liberal principles. The 60s saw the L. A. Hart and Patrick Lord Devlin debate on the limits of morality's place in law.
>And great reddit tier red herring about "defining porn."
Not a red herring at all. I frankly do not trust legislators to possess an accurate or up-to-date understanding of what the relvant literature shows, with what confidence, or explanatory power. I also do not trust the blunt force of the law to limit its scope. The Danes probably made erotic fanfiction legal too. Imagine you're a fanfiction writer, and your craft is illegalized and you're thrown in prison despite the fact that your government could not produce any evidence that your craft causes the harm attributed to other porn. That would be an injustice, and just like the prohibition of alcohol on similar grounds, I can't support it unless we're clear ahead of time what this means for freedom of expression.
No, I can't imagine I'm a fanfiction writer because it's a pathetic and awful hobby, and I honest to god don't care about their alleged right to make grubby Mr Spock porn, thus condemning (by your tortuous logic) generations to be subjected to disgusting, degrading and addictive pornography. Imagine being a dope fiend .... yep; still not imagining it. Imagine being a <insert another degenerate and completely non sympathetic category of person> -no thank you!
Community decency laws used to work just fine, and I do not see their eradication as an improvement in the over all state of the human race. Just like anti-gambling laws; and gambling is at least not pumped into every household.
Every society has a right to chose the levels of degeneracy allowed: necrophilia, prostitution, drug use and bestiality are all victimless crimes as well which should be allowed via your imbecile version of "liberal paradigms." Looking forward to your spirited defence of philip morris brand heroin-addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts for family viewing on early evening television.
Denmark doesn't get to claim "muh cummies" as a great cultural achievement. Not any more than their whorehouses or gambling parlours. Personally I don't think their posturing on environmental virtues will amount to much of a positive nature either.
>No, I can't imagine I'm a fanfiction writer because it's a pathetic and awful hobby
>Community decency laws used to work just fine, and I do not see their eradication as an improvement in the over all state of the human race
I don't care for a discussion in which we have different standpoints on the principle by which laws should be created, and being a 'degenerate' is sufficient to feel the force of the law. Community decency laws do not work fine for me, nor for many creative people. Be thankful your hobbies aren't judged pathetic and awful. Maybe someone does judge them as such, which would be a good thing(?).
>necrophilia, prostitution, drug use and bestiality are all victimless crimes
Perhaps prostitution and certainly bestiality are crimes with victims.
>Looking forward to your spirited defence of heroin-addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts for family viewing on early evening television.
If you don't want to watch Philip Morris brand heroin addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts, you can turn your TV off. Your argument seems to be "well someone might have hobbies" -I'm sure that's someone's hobby. Defend it; or begin to think of why maybe your allegedly "liberal" views are not such a good idea.
Meanwhile, the Danes have done nothing obviously good by legalizing filth. Mind you, at the rate we're going my proposed entertainment will be on Danish TV soon. And they'll brag it was broadcast using green energy.
> Looking forward to your spirited defence of philip morris brand heroin-addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts for family viewing on early evening television.
Yikes dude, just yikes. I can't believe that horrible bigots like you still think they have the right to get between a man and his cadavers.
Worth noting that in Denmark the prohibition against pornography was repealed by a conservative government. The concern was that due process could not be applied fairly since the definition of obscenity was so subjective.
There was a number of cases where works of literature or art were charged with obscenity, and it became an embarrassment to police and the judicial system since the criteria was so arbitrary.
So it wasn't so much a question of pro or against porn, it it a question of justice.
The discussion mostly concerned "obscene" literature since photographic porn was not widespread. But the repeal of the law combined with technological advances made Denmark into a powerhouse of pornography magazines and movies - probably not what the conservative government had expected.
It seems that supernormal stimulus + profit motive = bad outcomes for society. From the snack-food industry breeding a nation of diabetic hamplanets, to the Infinitely Novel Pornotron that real women just can't compete with, to the teeny-boppers who are so addicted to social media that they'll publicly shit-talk their own parents[0] for internet up-cummies...
I think we're inevitably gonna have to amend our idea of "freedom" to account for things that blatantly exploit human psychology. It's like the Greek philosophers said. Being truly free is synonymous with living temperately; someone who is ruled by his primal urges to coom and consoom is just a slave to himself.
Just as one case example, snack foods have been ubiquitously available worldwide for a long time and there are countries that have somehow managed to retain a relatively healthy lifestyle without resorting to yet more government regulations.
I think banning is a fairly unimaginative legislative knee-jerk response. For example what if we genetically engineered snack foods to be more like pistachios. The amount of effort required to open up a single pistachio often results in the expenditure of an equal number of calories to the actual energy content of the food itself. Thus it acts as a natural net negative caloric food.
Also I'm not sure how much we should be taking from the ancient Greeks considering that pederasty was commonly practiced there.
Every little bit counts. There will always be people who say “it’s not enough” and it may be true. But, the key is to start acting in good faith. Things like this often have a snowball effect and lead up to other changes for good.
Proud to be living in such a society here in DK that cares to make education free/affordable, healthcare free, and invests in social good. Yes, it’s not perfect, but has a lot more to be proud of than to complain.
Now, one thing I wonder is why Denmark doesn’t pounce on the opportunity to set an example and build out electric charging infrastructure backed by its grid of renewable energy. That could boost the economy and save the world at the same time.
Unfortunately, like "better safe than sorry", this just isn't true beyond feel-good virtue signalling. When you're dealing with nature and the environment it all comes down to assimilative capacity; under it and we're fine, over and we're screwed. No matter how many Denmarks make dramatic changes it means nothing without movement by the biggest emitters like China and the US.
We don't exactly know where the catastrophic threshold for climate change is. So it's entirely possible that this little move might make the difference between 2C warming, 4C warming.
US points to China for why they shouldn't do anything. China doesn't care or points to historical overall emission where they are behind US/the west due to them starting earlier.
If everyone only points to each other and a "bigger real problem" you can hand wave everything away.
I am not denying the overall urgency of the problem or the need to work together in a global scale to save the world. But, such massive efforts don't start themselves or gain momentum so easily. It all has to start somewhere and get people to think about it and rally for the bigger cause. This one act alone or Denmark alone might not make a dent in the current need, but it sure can trigger a lot of tiny little efforts that lead up to something big that will eventually make that dent.
Heck, the US might see what it did to Denmark and start its own version to compete and make "green" money. Being dismissive of good faith effort doesn't take us anywhere.
I think they are trying to do that right now, but the infrastructure is so damn expensive - Norway can finance their electric car revolution with their oil money, but Denmark does not have the same kind of money
As a Dane, I am slightly offended by the dishonesty of our politicians, especially concerning our energy policy, which makes no sense.
Yes, this is a big deal, but only because of the publicity value of the decision, as the environmental impact will be negligible. But this is the root of the problem: Denmark's energy policy is almost solely about publicity!
Since the end of the 1970s, our neighbours in Sweden have consistently followed an energy policy, that deliver cheap[0] and stable energy from hydro- and nuclear power, while emitting much less CO2 than us. Check at any time of day, and I can assure you that the emmissions from our electricity consumption will be higher than in Sweden[1].
While Denmark has almost phased out coal power, we've replaced it with "biofuel"; imported wood from Brazil, Estonia and the US. This is especially neat, as a technicality in the IPCC emmissions ratings views wood as a sustainable fuel, as the forest can be replanted and the emmissions will be stored in the wood until this is cut down and burned anew.
Our strategy was described as "accounting fraud" by IPCC scientist William Moomaw and "climate fraud" by Daniel Kammen, professor at Berkeley and a former IPCC lead author and Obama advisor. Denmark's seemingly incredible track record has even fooled our population: 78% of Danes believe that our primary source of renewable energy was windpower, when this was actually just 22% of all renewable electricity generation (biomass being 68%), which accounts for 35% of total electricity consumption [2].
This is problematic to say the least: Not only are our energy prices among the highest in the world - how does 40 cents pr. kWh sound? - we aren't making any real difference. The Danish strategy has always been sold as "a job creator" and "an export adventure", but isn't that just the same type of corporate greed, now in sheeps clothing?
Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, was the primary recepient of billions of dollars in state aid, tax excemptions, etc., but every downturn resulted in layoffs, which always struck Denmark first.'
As CO2-levels have risen to a record level, we Danes keep on burning wood, straw and trash, while calling ourselves a "green leader", while our strategy has also left us wholly dependent on electricity imports from Germany, Norway and Sweden.
The inability to act sensibly is depressing and I hate how the entire issue of climate is being politized in such a way, that a civil discussion is close impossible, while lobbyists are having a field day.
So please spare me the praise of Denmark's policies. If nothing else, our deceptions are making things worse.
Ha! When I read the headline, I immediately had two thoughts: first one "yeah they'll just import it from elsewhere" and then "well maybe I shouldn't be such a knee-jerk pessimist".
Turns out I was probably not pessimistic enough (i.e. my first though was generic skepticism about "climate promises" by someone with no history of "climate fraud", but if what you say is true, my "skepticism" is actually more like "business as usual").
A good thing though is that at least for electricity a lot of Danish coal was replaced by Swedish nuclear and Norwegian hydro, but also some German coal. Do despite being dishonest it is actually also greener in practice.
Also worth pointing out is that one of the key reasons for keeping all those "green" biomass power stations running is that they supply heating for most urban areas via "communal heating". This heat is tax-free since the heat is a "waste product", keeping the single biggest energy use sector at an artificially low price (energy use for heating is bigger than transport and consumer electricity).
It would be political suicide to start taxing the energy for heating, leading to all kinds of weirdness such as:
- Denmark _paying_ to export electricity when the power stations need to run to produce heat (because if the power plants used the electricity to provide heating, the heat would not be a waste product)!
- Big data centers cannot sell waste heat for heating, because they would need to run heat engines to raise the temperature to usable levels, again rendering the heat "not a waste product".
(TBH, The last one is so clearly stupid that a workaround in the rules is in the books)
The Danish legislation is setup in such a way, that all electricity consumers pay a tariff to cover the guaranteed electricity prices to owners of wind farms.
Still, Denmark often sold electricity for pennies on the dollar – or literally for free – to Norway, who in turn used the energy to pump more water into their hydroelectric dams. This energy was then sold back to us, at (higher) market rates, whenever the wind died down and Denmarks needed to import electricity, due to its inability to produce enough electricity to cover its own demand.
Often, when Scandinavia is getting a lot of wind, you can even see electricity prices going below zero. In some of those cases, you can sometimes see a group of wind turbines, where some are spinning at great speeds and other are completely still. This is in order for the producers not wanting to pay to get rid of their electricity.
While it is a shame that the storage problem isn't solved yet (except in the case of our shrewd Norwegian neighbours), I don't really fancy waiting for that to happen, when other options are (or rather should be) on the table.
Without question burning wood and similar biomass is better than burning coal. It has the issue of particulate pollution, but modern filtering technology on that is pretty good. It also has the risk of demand outpacing the rate at which new biomass can grow, but I don't know if we're anywhere close to that.
Not if you import your wood and biomass out of South America or Asia from "officially well maintained" forests. Cut the trees in your country and suddenly you can see how well maintained are the forest delivering enough wood to run combined heat/power plants.
You need a staggering amount of wood and if you want to produce them in a really sustainable way, you simply cannot. You would be able to produce such amount of wood nicely in a sustainable way, you would sell it for furniture or construction wood for way more money.
The only heat from wood I know are really well (not only on the paper) managed are the ones directly working with a network of sawmill to reuse the waste and usually, they are small.
Better how? Scientists and professors with decades of experience in this exact field, disagree[0].
Burning wood even discharges more CO2 in the atmosphere, than coal[1] and we haven't even started to talk about where all those trees must be grown to keep up with the demand of an energy policy based on solar/wind + biofuel backup, like we are planning in Denmark.
It is not a terribly good idea and it is infuriating how little science and facts matter to a political discusssion that one would think was based around those elements.
It's painfullly ironic that this situation was forced on Denmark by the anti-nuclear grass roots movement of the seventies. The tree-huggers destroyed the climate with their concern for the environment.
> Not only are our energy prices among the highest in the world - how does 40 cents pr. kWh sound?
That sounds like a great way to reduce carbon footprint. All renewable power is used, so every extra (marginal) kWh used comes 100% from CO² producing generation. A price high enough to affect consumer's usage will reduce the carbon footprint.
>> Not only are our energy prices among the highest in the world - how does 40 cents pr. kWh sound?
> That sounds like a great way to reduce carbon footprint. All renewable power is used, so every extra (marginal) kWh used comes 100% from CO² producing generation. A price high enough to affect consumer's usage will reduce the carbon footprint.
I disagree; itis a rather backwards view and a misunderstanding of how cheap and plentiful energy has made the human experience less harsh and more meaningful for billions of people.
In Denmark it means that many Danish homes are being heated with wood stoves, wood pellet boilers, natural gas or even old oil furnaces. Neither of these have any meaningful filtering and emit CO2, whereas cheaper electricity would make heat pumps and other electric heating much more meaningful.
Remember: Cheap energy is not the problem, unless the low price point is due to political legislating, not requiring the producer to pay the entire "bill", e.g. by not compensating for emitting CO2.
Vestas and other wind turbine producers have done some clever lobbying by getting legislators to buy their "cheap" power, while leaving the issue of baseline stability to somebody else.
Sending a message may have some impact, but what he says doesn't matter in practice. This industry is dead in 30 years due to economic reasons. Offshore petroleum drilling is too expensive.
Denkmark obviously messed up when legalizing porn: for about a decade, distributing child pornography was legal in Denmark and there was at least one company which produced such films where actual children (younger than teen-age minors) were abused [1]. Holland has a similar history.
> We will lose the battle against climate change. We simply do not have 30 years to become free from fossil fuels
My understanding is that despite +2C being an important limit we should not cross, that every bit of warming we stop above that provides increasing benefit because every bit above +2C is increasingly harmful (i.e. the increase from +3C to +4C is much worse than the increase from +2C to +3C).
This is not what I am saying. I am saying we don't have 30 years. Waiting 30 years is like saying that lifeboats will be delivered next week, while the Titanic is already sinking.
I do appreciate every step in the right direction. I really do. But this is not even an attempt to make a step. The climate minister will be in retirement in 2050 and take no political responsibility.
As a Dane, I've always felt that we should accept, maybe even appreciate, that our lot in the world is to be the Shire, while other countries get to be Gondor and Rohan. As LOTR so beautifully showed, if we have the courage to orient ourselves toward the world, and lead by example, we can inspire others, punch way above our weight, and sometimes maybe even make a difference by our own actions too.
> The Lindholm Island project, which is intended to house 100 or so rejected asylum seekers who have been convicted of crimes and served their sentences but cannot be deported for various reasons, is explicitly designed to create a less welcoming atmosphere than the facility that currently holds those with a similar “tolerated stay” status.
Emphasis:
> 100 or so rejected asylum seekers who have been convicted of crimes and served their sentences but cannot be deported for various reasons
Going to European States because they have social welfare systems and then committing crimes knowing the punishments are most likely not as severe as in their home countries is unacceptable and should lead to them being automatically thrown out of the country. Unfortunately their home countries in most cases don't want to accept them back or the migrants have "lost" their passports/documentation before coming to the EU thus there's no country to deport convicted criminals back to.
For the record, I as a Western/Central European have nothing against immigrants, as long as they come here to work/study/lead law-abiding lives like it's been done for decades. However coming here for no other reason than to be an eternal drag on the social benefit system and then on top of that committing crimes?
IMHO that minority (from TFA ~100 out of thousands for Denmark) of immigrants is not and should not be welcome in any country.
Dunno, sounds like something a Shiriff would do. But seriously, yes, that's despicable, that and the "jewellery law" and others like it. When I say it takes courage to orient ourselves toward the world, I didn't just mean it as a pat on our own backs, I meant it as a struggle of opposing worldviews that I've seen playing out my whole life; between those who see the outside world mostly as a danger to be held at bay, and those who see both opportunity and responsibility to care for those less fortunate than us.
It is intended for convicted criminals without a residence permit but who cannot be deported, for example because they risk torture or capital punishment if they are deported to their country of origin.
Not trying to justify the use of an island for this purpose, but they would be imprisoned anyway since they are disbarred from residing in the country.
It is not intended for regular refugees or asylum seekers.
I think its important to point out that noone actually bid on those contracts and that is more likely to be the reason why it was shutdown rather than it being an environmental thing, it sounds great in the foreign press tho :)
It absolutely matters, and this is the type of leadership we need. I do think it could potentially be even more aggressive a timeline, but it is a starting point.
As an American I actually think it is extremely helpful for small countries to set examples. Smaller countries can serve as experiments that we can look to and use as driving forces for larger bodies to adopt, like the US or EU. Similar to how in the US we've seen states make things legal before the federal (e.g. same sex marriage, marijuana reform, etc), it is much cheaper and easier to do the experiment on a smaller scale first than convince a wide background of politically diverse forces to unite. I think the small groups doing things first is extremely helpful. So for that I say thank you, because your example will help my country take steps forward.
For everyone commenting that denmark is "too small to matter" - please keep in mind that denmark basically kickstarted the modern wind energy industry. Cheap wind energy is one of the major pillars of hope for the energy transition.
I didn't know that Denmark was the "biggest oil producer in the EU" I would have guessed Norway.
Also changes the perspective on the progressive social welfare programs for which Denmark is often lauded to know that they are financed by fossil fuels and climate destruction.
Denmark has been positioning itself as a frontrunner fighting climate change, but its oil production had presented a dilemma. Now this dilemma is being solved. Good for them.
Occupied (Norwegian: Okkupert) is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that depicts a fictional near future in which, due to catastrophic environmental events, Norway's Prime Minister has stopped the country's oil and gas production.
Russia, with support from the European Union, occupies Norway to restore its oil and gas production, in response to a Europe-wide energy crisis.
This is what real climate leadership looks like; actually having the courage to assert that you're going to halt on big emissions sources.
Meanwhile in Canada you have the government claiming it's a climate leader because it'll plant trees and ban plastic straws meanwhile expanding development of oil sands. It's completely disingenuous.
Software engineers with any experience in profiling should know how to make big gains on a problem quickly. Find the biggest problems and cut those down to size. Fiddling at the edges isn't gonna get us there.
While I don't disagree with the Canadian government's messaging being disingenous, 7% of the entire Canadian GDP came from just resource extraction in Alberta (not to mention the ancillary industries surrounding oil and gas). Recently, that made it the largest industry in the country, even ahead of banking and financial services. [0]
Compare that to Denmark which employs about 2000 people in resource extraction [1]
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[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadYes, I know that they can't just shut down the oil industry overnight - but governmenst need to set incentives more aggressively to move away from oil and coal energy, non-electric transportation and using animals in food production. At the same time, they need to stop subsidizing these (the EU is spending a quarter of their budget for direct livestock farm subsidies).
Such a course might seem expensive and disruptive, but the alternative (business-as-usual) will be significantly more expensive and disruptive.
On the right track, though experience suggests that there’s always a lot of low hanging fruit that is ripe for picking. It’s rare that the last quarter of improvement comes anywhere near as quickly as the first quarter.
This drives me crazy. While closing down the oil industry should be a goal, all solutions that the public would accept (and aren't worse than climate change itself) will be technical solutions, not sacrifice. The lockdown gave us a good glimpse at how effective sacrifice it. It's not enough.
Your point about sacrifice probably stands
My issue with sacrifices is that they often punish the wrong people. For example, let's say there is a carbon tax on flights (very likely to happen soonish). People who travel for work and for other necessities should not incur the same penalty as tourists who travel purely for pleasure.
All these fake greenies flying to India to find themselves are still going to burn in hell though.
You probably mean frequent national flights for small Europeans countries? People are just flying less internationally because of COVID, not because of Friday for Futures thinking that's not cool.
Or to put in another way, is a new SUV worse than an Opel Corsa 1999 regarding CO2 emission?
Applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it.
then look down on other people who don't
That's in your mind, not mine.
Technology is more likely to solve the problem than reducing emissions by a certain percentage, which is guaranteed to be insufficient. Transatlantic flights are certainly a hard problem, but why should it be impossible? Either using hydrogen, synthetic fuels and/or by offsetting emissions with carbon capturing.
Which leaves us in the situation that if you get on a plane to cross the Atlantic today you will add another ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.
Carrying on as we are right now is like spending next years pay rise before you have got the promotion, it will bankrupt us.
Back when every river in Europe was full of human shit, the air was full of smog and pretty much the entire continent was devoid of timber people were saying the exact same sort of "technology will never solve this, we need to make sacrifices" crap.
I could go on but "making sacrifices" does not work at scale because when you apply that one approach to more than one problem you wind up sacrificing so many things that the standard of living is driven back by hundreds of years.
Technology created this problem, applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it. All this wishful thinking crap won't get us anywhere.
You don't need to drive your standard of living back hundreds of years although if we don't get a handle on climate change that will happen.
It quickly & significantly narrows the solution space. No amount of carpooling or bicycling will ever be enough by themselves to get us to carbon zero. (Speaking as an avid cyclist)
I can’t commit to reading it all through to understand how to model whether human action warms earth, and how to understand the accuracy of any such model.
The document appears to be aimed primarily at rulers of states, and to be in a big part about how rulers could create “global equality” and the like. In which of these chapters can I read to learn how to model whether mans industry is warming the earth up or not?
1: Framing and Context
2: Mitigation Pathways Compatible with 1.5°C in the Context of Sustainable Development
3: Impacts of 1.5oC Global Warming on Natural and Human Systems
4: Strengthening and Implementing the Global Response
5: Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication and Reducing Inequalities
There are pollution concerns when we do things at scale. There have been lots of toxins added to the environment ONLY because of large scale use by humans. This is real.
The main idea behind global warming is the CO2 being a greenhouse gas and hence trapping more heat, leading to more vaporization of ocean and releasing water vapor, which is also another greenhouse gas. This has been repeated forever but it is mostly theoretical. It shouldn't be very difficult to experimentally show how much CO2 traps how much of suns radiation and how it changes as CO2 concentration rises and falls... but this has not been done and is not presented, which leads me to believe that this claim is bogus.
If you forget "climate change" and "global warming" and look at what countries say and do from economic lens, things become much more clearer.
It was the late 90s and it seemed that the oil was running out so something had to be done. There were two sides. One was going to develop new technologies which would make existing technologies like solar and wind more efficient. Another was to attack war-torn parts of the world which have oil reserves and take their oil. You know which idea they went with.
The Cleantech idea was taken to China for manufacturing but China just copied the technology and made it better. Now, it is the biggest producer of wind and solar equipment.
Meanwhile, the U.S. came up with fracking, a new technology that made it possible to get oil that was not considered before. While expensive, it opened up the possibility for the U.S. to become energy independent. So, the Middle East, Europe and China got very concerned because the market prices would drop at best, and U.S. could outcompete them altogether at the worst.
So, the Climate Change narrative is mostly run from outside the U.S. at this time, mostly to get the U.S. to stop fracking.
Denmark is running out of their oil reserves by 2047. If you look at Denmark's economy, it may seem very diversified. Well, it is not. They do a lot of things but everything is indirectly subsidized by their oil money. Norway is in a similar situation. Without oil, they're are worse off than Italy and Spain economically, not to mention the shitty weather. So, they'll do everything to try to avoid that.
The TCR needs some explanation, but can be estimated from the Stefan-Boltzmann law; the temperature differential to produce a radiative output of 3.7 W/sq m is 3.7 / (4 * sigma * T0^3) which at a T0 of 287 K is 0.69 K. Clearly the Earth is not a perfect black-body so this lower bounds the TCR.
This also allows us to lower bound the anthrogenic climate contribution due to GHG radiative forcing 1850-2020 at 0.48 K.
Anyone who thinks we can simply stop using oil is simply ignorant.
That is not to say that we shouldn't use renewable energy for fuel but the narrative of we should stop everything 100% is highly irritating.
Happy to hear is anyone has different opinions :)
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3154246/
But this article is not about that - this is about one country deciding to get out of oil production. I guess they have discussed this at lenght and decided that, all factors considered, it makes more sense for them to stop oil production, decarbonize their economy as far as possible, and import the oil that they will still need.
When people say "stop using oil", it really means stop using it for fuel because that is the vast majority of usage, and if we eliminate that then what's left is not a significant problem. The worldwide demand could probably be satisfied by a handful of drilling rigs instead of the thousands we have now.
That is to say: actual poison.
They love setting people on quixotic quest against fairly harmless CO2 while they continue dumping actual toxic poison into ecosystem.
This is criminally stupid bullshit of the highest order. Climate change is real, it is an existential threat to human civilization, and it is to a very large degree caused by CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Those are scientifically established facts.
> quite literally millions upon millions tons of persistent, bio-accumulating chemicals that are dumped into the rivers and oceans by large polluters.
This is also a serious problem. But it is A) not in fact as big of a threat, and B) would in fact also be significantly reduced if we stopped burning oil as fuel, because the oil extraction industry is one of the worst (quite likely the worst) source of "persistent, bio-accumulating chemicals that are dumped into the rivers and oceans".
> They love setting people on quixotic quest against fairly harmless CO2 while they continue dumping actual toxic poison into ecosystem.
You are doing exactly the thing you are criticizing.
On the order of millions of years the earth is a self correcting system that always tries to release as much energy as it absorbs. If you disrupt it in mere centuries you're going to see mass extinctions. Humans can adapt but often that just means they migrate to more hospitable locations. It means more refugees than we already have. The negative effects on agriculture will make it harder to feed 8 billion people so eventually civil wars will break out.
I think of measuring environmental health via CO2 like measuring economic health via GDP - it's probably the best single indicator if we have to use a single indicator, but it ignores a lot of nuance without which a better system can't really be designed.
"Modern medicine relies on petroleum, particularly to transport patients, staff, and supplies"
That part is largely 'solved' problem and the rollout of those solutions over the next 30 years will probably be significant. As far as plastics and pharmaceuticals are concerned the paper puts it at "an estimated 0.2% of petroleum used in the United States was for medical plastics"
As for plastics in general the current number seems to be in the 6-10% range globally depending on who you ask. With a combination of reducing, recycling and misc. technology improvements I'm sure we can get that down further in the next 20-30 years. And much of that oil can probably come from sources other than pumping it out of the ground.
So on the whole I think winding down the petroleum industry as we know it today over the next 30 years to a fraction of what it is today (no one is seriously suggesting 100% shutdown) is absolutely doable, from a technology point of view. The reasons why it won't happen are political.
More importantly, it will hopefully come from onshore wells which are easier to access and manage than the crazy underwater shenanigans necessary of deep offshore extraction.
People often forget that the problem isn't producing CO2, the problem is producing too much CO2. If we have sequestration techniques (natural or man made) you can produce as much CO2 as you want as long as you have sustainable levels (which currently we need negative net production).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic
Chances are wherever you are most of of what you have in your direct sightline contains petroleum in a way or another. Try living without products containing petroleum and you're basically back in 1800s.
Once we run out of it we're truly fucked because we have yet to find viable alternative for most of its use cases.
I consume maybe somewhere on the order of 2kg per week (100kg/yr) in the form of plastic packaging, toothpaste, rubber, asphalt, etc. And most of this consumption results in solid waste or other inert storage, as opposed to the generation of CO2.
Eliminating fossil fuels for energy and heating uses will not mean "you're basically back in 1800s" - those sorts of uses are not as relevant to climate change. You'll still be able to buy tires and toothpaste (though the economics of something like asphalt, which is almost a waste product unless you're doing cracking, might result in alternative materials trials for road surfacing treatments, particularly in urban areas. Interlock pavers are particularly suitable for low-strength situations where asphalt is currently used due to artificially low prices)
I never talked about energy and heating, quite the contrary. All I'm saying is that almost everything we use or consume are petroleum derived, that petroleum is not an infinite resource and that for most of these things we don't have anything viable to replace them with yet.
The economics of synthetics are cost prohibitive for use in transportation and road construction. But luckily, electric vehicles will continue to reduce the need for petroleum for transportation purposes and asphalt is the most recyclable petroleum product out there. You can literally recycle it on-site.
You can synthesize hydrogen from water. You can synthesize methane, methanol or ammonia with hydrogen and CO2 and go on from there to build everything that is built from oil today.
This isn't exactly efficient, and doing this at scale is a huge challenge. But in the end we'll have to find alternatives for all oil products, because making them from oil will inevitably lead to carbon emissions (both in the refinery and at the end of life of products when they decompose in a landfill or get burned).
I understand that people care for the environment, but I hope people do understand the economics and politics behind these things, right?
[1] https://ing.dk/artikel/teknologisk-spredehagl-skal-klemme-si...
Part of the same plan is that Denmark needs to be CO2 neutral in 2020 - but not without using fossil fuels. This just means Denmark will be capturing CO2 using storage and planting trees. This is not my claim, it is right there in the proposal from the Danish govt.
So Denmark WILL consume oil in 2050 - but now it has to come from abroad.
So Denmark gets poorer as a result - and have to consume oil that other countries have produced anyway - but at least it feels and sounds good now!
To really make a dent in greenhouse gases you need US, China, India, etc. to come to the table.
Denmark has taken a decision against its own economic interest, same as Norway before it (and maybe others). This is a decision worthy of a lot of respect.
It's all just empty quixotic platitudes until then.
By making energy energy more expensive all you have done is taking a step further towards ex keeping 1 billion people in energy poverty because you are making it more expensive for them.
Denmark have invested heavily in wind over the last 40 years, as a replacement yet it only covers 8% of it's energy needs.
We don't need to curb climate change, we just need to control the consequences of it which we have done historially using fossil fuels.
The idea that the climate before the industrial revolution was some perfect equilibrium and that our emissions are a grave danger to the world is simply not historically true.
What is true is that what used to be a dangerous storm today can be a setting for a romantic dinner because humans have been able to invent ways to control the consequences of climate leading to much fewer people dead from it.
Isn't this like a basic human principle? That we are taught as children? That sacrificing one's own interests for the commonwealth is typically considered virtuous? So your question is total nonsense unless you were brought up in a forest by a bear somewhere and actually genuinely don't understand.
I'm not saying this is a bad thing but "doing something against their economic interest" is a really low bar
On the one hand, you have US states that don't want free healthcare because they are uneducated and think it's "communist". There is no sacrifice, no bravery, no nothing. It's just a lack of understanding.
On the other hand, you have Denmark which has put the health of the planet ahead of their economic wellbeing. This is something that very few countries have done.
You are comparing apples and oranges here.
We were the first country to legalize porn, and homosexual civil unions, and although we're not the biggest country, I think it made an impact.
Maybe the actual savings in terms of CO2 isn't the largest, and maybe the closing could've been more aggressive - but I still think it sends an important message to other countries who are larger producers of oil.
If Denmark manages to thrive after banning fossil fuels, then that will be the time to be impressed.
let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive.
much more impressive than banning slavery.
Slavery started to fade away through the 1800s. This wasn't because people suddenly realised the slaves weren't having fun, or suddenly after millennia of religion someone decided to take the 'be nice to people' dogma seriously. Neither of those things take centuries to figure out.
The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom. Slavery is a great example of liberating people to do things being much more impressive than bans. Banning slavery was a big step that sped the whole process up by a few decades, but the writing was on the wall once it became obvious just how much wealth a motivated free person could create.
> let people do heroin for example. would be very impressive.
Yeah, it would. Countries should have some faith in their people to figure out what a mistake looks like without the police arresting people. I'd applaud any government that can get to that level of enlightenment.
No, the modern day slave trade is flourishing. Sex trafficking all over the world is one example. There are open slave markets in Libya now just as there were for centuries or longer.
I'll cheerfully point out I don't think that Libya is economically competitive, and the slave trade is a big symptom of that.
Banning slavery won't make them wealthy - they'll still probably be starving. Make them wealthy and the slave markets probably go away.
Them banning slavery will impress me less than a policy of general liberalisation to get some economic success happening. Economies don't grow big by banning stuff; banning stuff happens after the economy is strong enough to handle the damage bans do.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya#Economy
That argument requires substantiation. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arguably some of the wealthiest nations on the planet, yet slavery (or slave-like working conditions) are prevalent throughout society.
An economy with slaves does not, fundamentally, make sense. It isn't going to be the least bit competitive with a modern capitalist economy with wages without wealth literally bubbling up from the ground in the form of oil. Everyone in such an economy will be less wealthy than their peers in a free market.
1) The capitalist formula for this is basically: Can i extract more value from this individual through "free" productivity minus wages, or from "slave" productivity minus enforcement cost.
Your arguments don't convincingly prove the former.
2) Even if I were to accept your reasoning (which to be very clear I don't), I still don't understand what argument you're making.
Because it naturally leads to:
a) Capitalism solved slavery by it being unprofitable, so the regulation/ban was unnecessary.
which leads to:
b) If it was profitable, the ban would hamper economic growth.
I'm much more interested in the second part. What would your stance be if we assume it would be profitable?
Capitalism doesn't concern itself with morality, but humans do. Should we do nothing about it because all political intervention is bad?
Just to make sure, I assume this is your opinion of agreement with me? Which I appreciate, even if you weren't GP. It's just that the phrasing makes it sound like a disagreement in reasoning, which if that is the case I would like you to expand on.
But as to your second point, labor hasn't (yet) disappeared due to industrial revolutions, only shifted. What has changed is simply the scale one unit of labor could perform. Slaves would very much still be valuable in the 1800s. If nothing else proven by the fact that still to this day farming jobs are very often imported low-income jobs. I can't reconcile that fact with your reasoning.
The destruction of chattel slavery as a prevailing institution (after it being normalized for thousands of years) should be counted as one of the greatest human triumphs. That you think the historic slavery in the Americas, Africa (especially in the Congo), China, etc.. is somewhere in the same ballpark as what goes on today is astonishing to me.
To say slavery is "flourishing" is not only incorrect, it is cynical aned likely demotivating to those people who actually work to reduce debt bondage, sex trafficking, child labor and other forms of "modern" slavery. What is your motivation here?
Pointing out that the battle against slavery isn't completely won yet is reasonable, saying "wage slavery" exists is also true, but pretending there was no transition away from slavery starting in the 1800s is just wrong.
Obvious to whom? Definitely not the slave owners. A motivated free person might create more wealth for themselves, but it's the society as a whole that potentially benefits from that (for sake of argument), not the previous slave owners.
So why would it sort it self out? It didn't, and hasn't. This change could only have come politically, which is why that was the case.
A rational slave owner would sell all their slaves and buy stock in a company that didn't employ any - that it is going to make vastly more money. Slaves aren't an effective asset in this century. After a generation or two there'd be basically no slaves left because nobody would want one. Cost money to maintain with very little payoff versus alternatives.
Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
[citation needed]
> Look at Apple, AWS, Google, etc, etc vs some slave-run plantation in wherever-they-have-slave-plantations. Which one would people rather invest in, just from a greedy capitalist perspective? All the money is in owning productive capital and businesses made up of motivated employees.
I'm having trouble taking this comparison seriously. There has always been employees aside of slavery, usually at different positions.
Look at Apple's production history in China, or Amazon warehouse workers or Google/Amazon turk work. If there was no regulation, and with unscrupulous C-levels, those positions would probably be slaves, from a "capitalist perspective".
So now someone has a factory. They could, in theory, buy slaves and try to get them to work in the factory. But you would run away or, if you stayed, have no desire to work hard because you're not getting paid.
Or, the factory could "buy" slaves and offer them a buy-out mechanism. The factory pays $500, but after you make 1000 widgets, you get your freedom. The factory earns $800 from 1000 widgets, so that's a profitable deal for them. The former slave gets out of slavery as soon as they make 1000 widgets, so they have the incentive to make widgets. Try to get someone to make widgets as a slave without any reward and they only make 500 widgets, and then the factory would have to pay $500 to get $400. So the factory that ultimately frees the slaves out-competes the one that doesn't, and the slaves get freed.
True, 250+ years after slavery was abolished in the U.S., slaves are no longer an effective (or legal) asset.
Companies like Apple, Google, etc., did not exist in the 1800s. Stock ownership did not become common until the 1900s, even amongst the wealthy, so there was no alternative for this hypothetical slave owner. Moreover, unlike the North, the South did not have easy access to shipping or to the raw materials for heavy industry. (For example: Pittsburgh didn't become the Steel City because it was a nice place to live; it became the center of the U.S. steel industry because of its proximity to the raw materials and the methods of transportation available at the time.)
Obvious to the free market. The slave owners were already heading towards bankruptcy when the Civil war began. Nonenforcement of the escaped slaves act could well be seen as a refusal of other participants in the economy to subsidise slave owners' unprofitable business models.
This is completely wrong. In the 1800 US census, it recorded 893,602 slaves. By the time of the 1860 census (the last before the Civil War), that had risen to 3.9 million slaves (the 1850 census showed 3.2 million, so it was obviously still rising).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_census
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
And, yes, it halved as a % of the population because the urban population was growing faster than the slave population was growing. That doesn't mean it was shrinking.
Making slavery unprofitable is more impressive than actually banning it. Both are good, but enabling freedom is still a substantially more powerful change than the simply banning of slavery. Much like how banning heroin doesn't actually cause heroin to die out if there is a demand for it; we may yet see heroin legalised in my lifetime much like marijuana. It is entirely possible. Slavery ain't coming back, it benefits pretty much nobody. There isn't a billion dollar industry in slaves waiting to be discovered.
The problem with heroin (not from personal experience) is that you only realize that it was a mistake after you're already addicted, and then it's incredibly hard to stop. But seeing how much damage the "war on drugs" and the cartels producing them are doing, maybe a number of addicts (and deaths) more would be acceptable in the grand scheme of things...
Not in the US...The Industrial Revolution actually made slavery worse. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 dramatically increased the demand for slaves.
The change was the industrial revolution that let relatively ordinary people create enormous amounts of wealth if left with their freedom.
No, in the U.S. at least the Industrial Revolution meant lower-paying jobs in a factory within less individual opportunity for economic success. The Industrial Revolution killed the demand for skilled artisans and tradesmen. The 1800s were known as the age of the "Robber Barons" for this reason.
Both Canada and Australia have had legal injecting rooms for many, many years.
When was porn illegal in other countries?
Canada has restrictive laws regarding some porn which is legal in other countries, they've arrested people over it.
[0] example: https://www.worldnomads.com/travel-safety/southeast-asia/sin...
[1] https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/
While it's certainly worth debating and discussing, the liberal paradigm in law proscribes that we should only make laws in certain circumstances under specific notions of harm, and the mere risk of harm is not usually sufficient. In addition, it is neither clear that legislation is the route to take, and several feminist critics of porn have tempered their claims and goals.
Before even discussing this matter, never mind mentioning legislation, you should be clear on how you define porn and the extent to which the research on porn is consonant with that definition. It's too easy to think that all porn fits in one bucket while today we have everything from hentai to fanfiction to online roleplay to audio recordings to OnlyFans. How much of your literature discusses these forms, and to what extent do the results converge?
Porn is surprisingly similar to alcohol, even in terms of its effects, but private sexual autonomy is arguably more important (morally) than the autonomy to consume alcohol.
Ana J. Bridges in a review of the scientific literature on the relationship between porn and sexual assault in the Handbook of Sexual Assault and Sexual Assault Prevention concluded that a ban is not warranted[0], but media literacy and other measures have been somewhat promising.
[0] http://xyonline.net/sites/xyonline.net/files/2020-07/Bridges...
You're lecturing me on the "liberal paradigm in law" which was somehow invented in the 1960s rather back in the 1700s when the rest of the liberal paradigm was invented by, you know, the philosophers who invented classical liberalism.
And great reddit tier red herring about "defining porn." How about "all the filth that the Danes made legal, as OP was boasting about." Is that a clear enough definition for you, or do you want to parse dirty pictures and debate the merits of DH Lawrence books?
The liberal paradigm in law has only relatively recently gained support despite being "invented" long ago - whether we're talking about debate over obscenity laws, gay sex, alcohol, or, indeed, gambling. This is especially true in non-US countries which are not founded on explicitly liberal principles. The 60s saw the L. A. Hart and Patrick Lord Devlin debate on the limits of morality's place in law.
>And great reddit tier red herring about "defining porn."
Not a red herring at all. I frankly do not trust legislators to possess an accurate or up-to-date understanding of what the relvant literature shows, with what confidence, or explanatory power. I also do not trust the blunt force of the law to limit its scope. The Danes probably made erotic fanfiction legal too. Imagine you're a fanfiction writer, and your craft is illegalized and you're thrown in prison despite the fact that your government could not produce any evidence that your craft causes the harm attributed to other porn. That would be an injustice, and just like the prohibition of alcohol on similar grounds, I can't support it unless we're clear ahead of time what this means for freedom of expression.
No, I can't imagine I'm a fanfiction writer because it's a pathetic and awful hobby, and I honest to god don't care about their alleged right to make grubby Mr Spock porn, thus condemning (by your tortuous logic) generations to be subjected to disgusting, degrading and addictive pornography. Imagine being a dope fiend .... yep; still not imagining it. Imagine being a <insert another degenerate and completely non sympathetic category of person> -no thank you!
Community decency laws used to work just fine, and I do not see their eradication as an improvement in the over all state of the human race. Just like anti-gambling laws; and gambling is at least not pumped into every household.
Every society has a right to chose the levels of degeneracy allowed: necrophilia, prostitution, drug use and bestiality are all victimless crimes as well which should be allowed via your imbecile version of "liberal paradigms." Looking forward to your spirited defence of philip morris brand heroin-addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts for family viewing on early evening television.
Denmark doesn't get to claim "muh cummies" as a great cultural achievement. Not any more than their whorehouses or gambling parlours. Personally I don't think their posturing on environmental virtues will amount to much of a positive nature either.
>Community decency laws used to work just fine, and I do not see their eradication as an improvement in the over all state of the human race
I don't care for a discussion in which we have different standpoints on the principle by which laws should be created, and being a 'degenerate' is sufficient to feel the force of the law. Community decency laws do not work fine for me, nor for many creative people. Be thankful your hobbies aren't judged pathetic and awful. Maybe someone does judge them as such, which would be a good thing(?).
>necrophilia, prostitution, drug use and bestiality are all victimless crimes
Perhaps prostitution and certainly bestiality are crimes with victims.
>Looking forward to your spirited defence of heroin-addicted prostitutes being voluntarily violated and eaten alive by wild beasts for family viewing on early evening television.
Am I being trolled?
Meanwhile, the Danes have done nothing obviously good by legalizing filth. Mind you, at the rate we're going my proposed entertainment will be on Danish TV soon. And they'll brag it was broadcast using green energy.
Yikes dude, just yikes. I can't believe that horrible bigots like you still think they have the right to get between a man and his cadavers.
https://bigthink.com/think-tank/is-necrophilia-wrong
There was a number of cases where works of literature or art were charged with obscenity, and it became an embarrassment to police and the judicial system since the criteria was so arbitrary.
So it wasn't so much a question of pro or against porn, it it a question of justice.
The discussion mostly concerned "obscene" literature since photographic porn was not widespread. But the repeal of the law combined with technological advances made Denmark into a powerhouse of pornography magazines and movies - probably not what the conservative government had expected.
I think we're inevitably gonna have to amend our idea of "freedom" to account for things that blatantly exploit human psychology. It's like the Greek philosophers said. Being truly free is synonymous with living temperately; someone who is ruled by his primal urges to coom and consoom is just a slave to himself.
[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/504615-michigan-candid...
I think banning is a fairly unimaginative legislative knee-jerk response. For example what if we genetically engineered snack foods to be more like pistachios. The amount of effort required to open up a single pistachio often results in the expenditure of an equal number of calories to the actual energy content of the food itself. Thus it acts as a natural net negative caloric food.
Also I'm not sure how much we should be taking from the ancient Greeks considering that pederasty was commonly practiced there.
Proud to be living in such a society here in DK that cares to make education free/affordable, healthcare free, and invests in social good. Yes, it’s not perfect, but has a lot more to be proud of than to complain.
Now, one thing I wonder is why Denmark doesn’t pounce on the opportunity to set an example and build out electric charging infrastructure backed by its grid of renewable energy. That could boost the economy and save the world at the same time.
Unfortunately, like "better safe than sorry", this just isn't true beyond feel-good virtue signalling. When you're dealing with nature and the environment it all comes down to assimilative capacity; under it and we're fine, over and we're screwed. No matter how many Denmarks make dramatic changes it means nothing without movement by the biggest emitters like China and the US.
If everyone only points to each other and a "bigger real problem" you can hand wave everything away.
Meanwhile in the US...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/11/few-countrie...
Oh, only two insignificant countries are meeting their treaty obligations.
Heck, the US might see what it did to Denmark and start its own version to compete and make "green" money. Being dismissive of good faith effort doesn't take us anywhere.
How do you propose magically fixing everything at once without making any steps along the way?
Yes, this is a big deal, but only because of the publicity value of the decision, as the environmental impact will be negligible. But this is the root of the problem: Denmark's energy policy is almost solely about publicity!
Since the end of the 1970s, our neighbours in Sweden have consistently followed an energy policy, that deliver cheap[0] and stable energy from hydro- and nuclear power, while emitting much less CO2 than us. Check at any time of day, and I can assure you that the emmissions from our electricity consumption will be higher than in Sweden[1].
While Denmark has almost phased out coal power, we've replaced it with "biofuel"; imported wood from Brazil, Estonia and the US. This is especially neat, as a technicality in the IPCC emmissions ratings views wood as a sustainable fuel, as the forest can be replanted and the emmissions will be stored in the wood until this is cut down and burned anew.
Our strategy was described as "accounting fraud" by IPCC scientist William Moomaw and "climate fraud" by Daniel Kammen, professor at Berkeley and a former IPCC lead author and Obama advisor. Denmark's seemingly incredible track record has even fooled our population: 78% of Danes believe that our primary source of renewable energy was windpower, when this was actually just 22% of all renewable electricity generation (biomass being 68%), which accounts for 35% of total electricity consumption [2].
This is problematic to say the least: Not only are our energy prices among the highest in the world - how does 40 cents pr. kWh sound? - we aren't making any real difference. The Danish strategy has always been sold as "a job creator" and "an export adventure", but isn't that just the same type of corporate greed, now in sheeps clothing?
Danish wind turbine manufacturer, Vestas, was the primary recepient of billions of dollars in state aid, tax excemptions, etc., but every downturn resulted in layoffs, which always struck Denmark first.'
As CO2-levels have risen to a record level, we Danes keep on burning wood, straw and trash, while calling ourselves a "green leader", while our strategy has also left us wholly dependent on electricity imports from Germany, Norway and Sweden.
The inability to act sensibly is depressing and I hate how the entire issue of climate is being politized in such a way, that a civil discussion is close impossible, while lobbyists are having a field day.
So please spare me the praise of Denmark's policies. If nothing else, our deceptions are making things worse.
[0] Electricity prices in Copenhagen are ~ 50% higher in Denmark, than in Sweden. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/map [2] https://nyheder.tv2.dk/samfund/2019-09-06-danmarks-klimaregn... (Google Translate should be able to translate most of the article pretty accurately)
Turns out I was probably not pessimistic enough (i.e. my first though was generic skepticism about "climate promises" by someone with no history of "climate fraud", but if what you say is true, my "skepticism" is actually more like "business as usual").
It would be political suicide to start taxing the energy for heating, leading to all kinds of weirdness such as:
- Denmark _paying_ to export electricity when the power stations need to run to produce heat (because if the power plants used the electricity to provide heating, the heat would not be a waste product)!
- Big data centers cannot sell waste heat for heating, because they would need to run heat engines to raise the temperature to usable levels, again rendering the heat "not a waste product".
(TBH, The last one is so clearly stupid that a workaround in the rules is in the books)
Still, Denmark often sold electricity for pennies on the dollar – or literally for free – to Norway, who in turn used the energy to pump more water into their hydroelectric dams. This energy was then sold back to us, at (higher) market rates, whenever the wind died down and Denmarks needed to import electricity, due to its inability to produce enough electricity to cover its own demand.
Often, when Scandinavia is getting a lot of wind, you can even see electricity prices going below zero. In some of those cases, you can sometimes see a group of wind turbines, where some are spinning at great speeds and other are completely still. This is in order for the producers not wanting to pay to get rid of their electricity.
While it is a shame that the storage problem isn't solved yet (except in the case of our shrewd Norwegian neighbours), I don't really fancy waiting for that to happen, when other options are (or rather should be) on the table.
You need a staggering amount of wood and if you want to produce them in a really sustainable way, you simply cannot. You would be able to produce such amount of wood nicely in a sustainable way, you would sell it for furniture or construction wood for way more money.
The only heat from wood I know are really well (not only on the paper) managed are the ones directly working with a network of sawmill to reuse the waste and usually, they are small.
Burning wood even discharges more CO2 in the atmosphere, than coal[1] and we haven't even started to talk about where all those trees must be grown to keep up with the demand of an energy policy based on solar/wind + biofuel backup, like we are planning in Denmark.
It is not a terribly good idea and it is infuriating how little science and facts matter to a political discusssion that one would think was based around those elements.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/opinion/pruitt-forests-bu... [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaa512/...
That sounds like a great way to reduce carbon footprint. All renewable power is used, so every extra (marginal) kWh used comes 100% from CO² producing generation. A price high enough to affect consumer's usage will reduce the carbon footprint.
> That sounds like a great way to reduce carbon footprint. All renewable power is used, so every extra (marginal) kWh used comes 100% from CO² producing generation. A price high enough to affect consumer's usage will reduce the carbon footprint.
I disagree; itis a rather backwards view and a misunderstanding of how cheap and plentiful energy has made the human experience less harsh and more meaningful for billions of people.
In Denmark it means that many Danish homes are being heated with wood stoves, wood pellet boilers, natural gas or even old oil furnaces. Neither of these have any meaningful filtering and emit CO2, whereas cheaper electricity would make heat pumps and other electric heating much more meaningful.
Remember: Cheap energy is not the problem, unless the low price point is due to political legislating, not requiring the producer to pay the entire "bill", e.g. by not compensating for emitting CO2.
Vestas and other wind turbine producers have done some clever lobbying by getting legislators to buy their "cheap" power, while leaving the issue of baseline stability to somebody else.
Each country ought to do what works for them atm.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Climax_Corporation#Child...
- He will be 75 years old and he won't be accountable for that decision
- We will lose the battle against climate change. We simply do not have 30 years to become free from fossil fuels
My understanding is that despite +2C being an important limit we should not cross, that every bit of warming we stop above that provides increasing benefit because every bit above +2C is increasingly harmful (i.e. the increase from +3C to +4C is much worse than the increase from +2C to +3C).
So are you saying we should do what every other country is doing to end their reliance and production of fossil fuels - namely nothing ?
Currently, Denmark are the world leader, and we should acknowledge that as a HUGE win.
I do appreciate every step in the right direction. I really do. But this is not even an attempt to make a step. The climate minister will be in retirement in 2050 and take no political responsibility.
https://time.com/5504331/denmark-migrants-lindholm-island/
> The Lindholm Island project, which is intended to house 100 or so rejected asylum seekers who have been convicted of crimes and served their sentences but cannot be deported for various reasons, is explicitly designed to create a less welcoming atmosphere than the facility that currently holds those with a similar “tolerated stay” status.
Emphasis:
> 100 or so rejected asylum seekers who have been convicted of crimes and served their sentences but cannot be deported for various reasons
Going to European States because they have social welfare systems and then committing crimes knowing the punishments are most likely not as severe as in their home countries is unacceptable and should lead to them being automatically thrown out of the country. Unfortunately their home countries in most cases don't want to accept them back or the migrants have "lost" their passports/documentation before coming to the EU thus there's no country to deport convicted criminals back to.
For the record, I as a Western/Central European have nothing against immigrants, as long as they come here to work/study/lead law-abiding lives like it's been done for decades. However coming here for no other reason than to be an eternal drag on the social benefit system and then on top of that committing crimes?
IMHO that minority (from TFA ~100 out of thousands for Denmark) of immigrants is not and should not be welcome in any country.
Not trying to justify the use of an island for this purpose, but they would be imprisoned anyway since they are disbarred from residing in the country.
It is not intended for regular refugees or asylum seekers.
https://www.businessinsider.com/denmark-is-unbelievably-mass...
A government can always undo the actions of a previous government.
Also changes the perspective on the progressive social welfare programs for which Denmark is often lauded to know that they are financed by fossil fuels and climate destruction.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-top-oil-producing-na...
Occupied (Norwegian: Okkupert) is a Norwegian political thriller TV series that depicts a fictional near future in which, due to catastrophic environmental events, Norway's Prime Minister has stopped the country's oil and gas production.
Russia, with support from the European Union, occupies Norway to restore its oil and gas production, in response to a Europe-wide energy crisis.
I'm not sure how does that work. What is the point of any government if it can not change laws to accommodate whatever situation might arise.
Meanwhile in Canada you have the government claiming it's a climate leader because it'll plant trees and ban plastic straws meanwhile expanding development of oil sands. It's completely disingenuous.
Software engineers with any experience in profiling should know how to make big gains on a problem quickly. Find the biggest problems and cut those down to size. Fiddling at the edges isn't gonna get us there.
Compare that to Denmark which employs about 2000 people in resource extraction [1]
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/oil-and-gas-gdp-growt... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Denmark#:~:text=Denm...