I see you're getting downvoted but maybe "get rid of" isn't the best approach. Certainly taxing air travel at a chunky rate would reduce unnecessary flights.
Taxing it means : the rich will be able to continue to fly while the poor, not being able to travel anymore because of the tax, will support the burden of climate adaptation. That's not justice.
And that's the issue : climate change requires a global effort and if we want to have the masses to adapt, then we must have the elite to adapt equally.
A frequent flyer tax would help here. Everyone gets a tax-free flight, then a low tax for the next one, and it keeps increasing for more flying. ~23 minutes in this podcast describes it and explains how it'd make a huge impact: https://www.cheerfulpodcast.com/rtbc-episodes/fair-miles
The key stat is it'd be enough to reach the UK's target on carbon emissions from flying by 2050, at a cost of 0% for the first flight and 9% on the second (going up steeply from there). Of course, other countries may have different data but the principle should be the same.
The rich will support the burden of climate adaptation because the income from the tax can be used directly to help mitigate climate change.
The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people; they're taken by the richest. Take the United Kingdom as an example: 70% of all flights were taken by 15% of people [0]. It certainly isn't the poorest taking these flights.
So taxing flights will have less direct impact on the poorest than one might think.
Having said that, I think a charge on carbon is more fair than taxing flights directly.
>A carbon fee and dividend or climate income is a system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address global warming. The system imposes a carbon tax on the sale of fossil fuels, and then distributes the revenue of this tax over the entire population (equally, on a per-person basis) as a monthly income or regular payment.
I mean, if you ignore cargo, sure. If you don't ignore it nor that more fuel is being burned by an average cargo flight (due to more weight compared to a commercial flight), it'd inconvenience everyone.
Expect cargo flight are responsible for a fraction of CO2 emissions from commercial aviation[1].
If you really want to push there are solutions:
Packages just take longer over sea (10-15 days) until we switch to an air ship (2-3) based transport system which doesn't have to pay so much energy of lifting.
They literally said “Let's instead get rid of private air travel”, which I interpreted (reasonably I think) to mean private aviation (where you know the other passengers) not public airline (Delta, KLM, British Air, etc.)
Because private planes are relevant travel amounts to "cause a pandemic", and "People can go on vacation by train instead" makes sense when talking about private planes (vs "can fly commercial"?)?
I agree their conclusion was ridiculous. However, it seems equally ridiculous to conclude “even though they specifically said white, they must have meant black, and for you to read white into their argument is a willful misconstruing of their argument.”
I frankly don't think this would make sense. Imagine explaining the people of a country, that they aren't allowed to fly to e.g. Mallorca anymore. The acceptance would be somewhere between low and zero.
Maybe private air travel in one country, e.g. from Munich to Berlin could be reduced, but not international flights without any resistance
I know people making changes in their lives but it does appear hopeless right now.
I drive much less and will look at solar panels eventually an electric car. I know some who already did move in that direction.
I can plant some trees in my yard and make better choices with consumption however, what's to stop countries who still build coal power plants or coal still being mined?
I despair. Many ppl are switching to electric cars thinking they did good, and yet they charge those same cars using energy supplied by burning fossil fuel.
I'm not completely convinced solar panels or electric cars are produced cleanly. More needs to be done about that.
How do we know for sure the energy used to make these are not adding to the problem. Even worse is that old petrol cars will usually be onsold to other countries, so emissions can't be falling?
An individual can only do so much.
Most people will bury their head in the sand. Those who take action may be pissing in the wind without realizing it.
The emissions from aviation are increasing every year, the majority of flights are for holidays rather than business, and only a very small minority of people globally actually take flights.
However, I belive the parent commenter was more pointing out the unfairness of picking and choosing what to ban rather than imposing a blanket charge on carbon.
This seems to have been missed by most, even when considering that the parent is likely correct that flights have a greater, and increasingly greater, impact on climate change than bitcoin does.
"The vast majority of Bitcoin’s energy consumption happens during the mining process. Once coins have been issued, the energy required to validate transactions is minimal."
Honestly, that doesn't seem particularly well-informed. I wonder how this person thinks transactions are committed to the blockchain, and how this is separate from the mining process?
Unless they literally mean "the energy required to consult the ledger of previous transactions", which doesn't seem a useful metric.
The quote you referenced makes the distinction between committing (mining) transactions and validating. The energy used to validate transactions is indeed minimal.
The energy used for validation is a useful metric because it's how the bitcoin network can afford to stay decentralized.
The confusion comes from how the miners are compensated for their energy burning. Currently, it's mostly by the block subsidy, which is independent of the amount of transactions in a block. But in a decade or two, that will be dominated by transaction fees, and we can actually attribute the energy cost to the transaction amount.
Funny the only thing I got out of taking econ classes was the fact that everything they teach undergrads is simplified bullshit. A carbon tax would never work, if only for the fact that it's too late in the game for a carbon tax to have any meaningful impact. Also I think it's hilarious that you had time to snidely point out how firm your grasp is on economics but a tax on bitcoin eluded your wisdom. You can correct the price on carbon but not on bitcoin? LOL
Economics 101, like all Science 101 courses, is simply wrong and doesn't reflect the world except vaguely from afar. Trying to understand the economy through the lens of economy 101 is like trying to launch a rocket to the moon using only Newton's laws of motion.
Successful governments pick economic winners and losers all the time, and don't let chaotic market forces decide if they need an agriculture sector or R&D.
For a simple example of just how misleading econ 101 is, look at the effect of a minimum wage: by all accounts, it slightly increases employment, the very opposite of econ 101's prediction.
Market forces are not fully understood in complex systems but it does not mean they do not work.
Forcing employers to give more money to employees (rising wages through regulation) may cause some unexpected/unaccounted things (more consumption etc.).
Taxing something (like CO2) will definitely do not help that thing. Solving just Bitcoin problem is both hard (how do you prevent making certain computation while connected to the network, or how do you prevent buying certain digital goods) and is only part of the problem (it does not mean that fixing part of the problem is not worthwhile, but they are easier ways to solve bigger part of the CO2 problem).
They subsidize R&D because there's a public benefit to things like pure math that's difficult to internalize which leads to under supply from the market.
They subsidize agriculture because of lobbying and self-defense considerations.
In both cases, the government identified an under supply due to a market failure, and they judged that the externalized benefit was sufficiently large and so they stepped in to fix it.
In the case of crypto, the market failure is simply that carbon is too cheap. So why not address the actual market failure with a tax. If crypto miners want to keep mining after compensating society for their pollution, more power to them. It's hubris and risky to outright ban something because you just know there's no value there and all the people who ascribe value are wrong. Doing that isn't even analogous to government actions in the two examples you raised. A carbon tax is more analogous (it's sort of like an inverse-subsidiy as per your Ag example).
I like the carbon tax avenue for other reasons too. It's a broad, one shot thing that will roughly aligns incentives across all industries at once. Not perfect but a very good correction that broadly applies.
"by all accounts, it slightly increases employment"
Not by all accounts. The literature is not straight forward in this way. If it is a null effect, I don't see that as an invalidation of econ 101, either. It could just be very inelastic for small changes in the minimum wage with elasticity picking up for larger changes (which nobody doubts would happen).
I was recently thinking about why bitcoin shouldn't just be banned to help mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe which led to my recent article [0] which equated banning bitcoin to banning ice cream, which I hope helps to illustrate the absurdity of picking and choosing versus just charging for carbon more directly.
Your analysis has one major flaw: It would only make sense if ice cream had as severe a climate impact as bitcoin. I have no reason to believe that it does.
You would have to find a list of things that people enjoy but don't bring societal benefit that add up to bitcoin's climate impact. I assume that list will then either:
• contain things that should actually be banned or
• add up to way more utility for way more people than bitcoin
The idea of societal benefit is very nebulous. It sounds like your idea of it is very different to mine by the fact that you believe in an absolute answer to it.
How do you measure something like societal benefit?
I'm sure we could agree that eradicating disease is very beneficial, but would we disagree about the entire tourism and entertainment industry as a whole?
I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.
(There is one thing that I think fulfills your criteria though, flights for holidays. They contribute more, and increasingly more, carbon emissions than bitcoin does while delivery little "societal benefit" - whatever that means. However, I'm not arguing anything here because I think it's morally wrong to focus on specific activities that affect a minority of people. And yes, banning taking flights for holidays would only affect a small minority of people globally.)
> The idea of societal benefit is very nebulous. [...] How do you measure something like societal benefit?
That is indeed a very hard problem and one of the mayor challenges of any society. But that doesn't mean that any endeavor that includes this notion is to be avoided. You gave the example of eradicating disease.
> I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.
But now you are not arguing about ice cream anymore. You seem to be just generally skeptical of a strong centralized government. And you can of course argue that and there are no simple answers here. I was just pointing out that your ice cream argument doesn't hold water.
Unless it is "Any kind of government interference is bad. This is why we shouldn't ban ice cream. Therefore we also shouldn't ban bitcoin." If that is your stance, then ice cream and bitcoin are indeed equivalent for your. But that is probably not the worldview of the people asking for bitcoin to be banned. Then your post does not argue against their view, but against your version of their view.
In practice, there are behaviours which provide no net social benefit, exact tremendous costs, and yet are inherently self-perpetuating. Legal prohibitions can help in this case. It's a form of demand-dampening.
It's only your opinion that there's no social benefit. Which is a problem, because your opinion might be wrong. If you charge people appropriately for their carbon use such that it's no skin off your back if they continue consumption, then you don't risk destroying value in places where your opinion turns out wrong.
I think you're on the wrong side of caution here, if we stop activities and so help to solve climate change, then we can look later at whether those activities people thought were just empty carbon producing were actually supremely beneficial. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, as the saying goes. Bitcoin/altcoins are certainly not vital to survival.
Cut carbon, then make a case for bringing back heavy carbon producing activities that seem to be of little use.
If some things "are irreversible on timescales of centuries to millennia" then really just going carbon neutral etc. sounds like a pretty weak approach as it would create costs now and large benefits only far in the future. Maybe this really needs geoengineering (and more spending on mitigation)?
Has any means of geoengineering been demonstrated as feasable?
Given our track record, it would probably be best for us to scale back our consumption while promoting re-forestation. Nature can likely heal itself far better than our wildest geoengineering ambitions.
Clearly feasible, as demonstrated by anthropogenic climate change. Going back to a different life style is an option, but will be strongly opposed by a lot of people (and not without justification).
Planet was much hotter, much colder etc. So as a species we need to learn to cope and tackle this anyway, why not start now?
Almost everything humans do at scale interacts with the environment. The perspective of just not interacting with the environment anymore is a fantasy. We need to learn to wield the environment skillfully, instead of clumsily waving it around. We cannot just "stop" having an effect on the environment.
That depends. Is it too unnatural to go and plant millions of trees? What about culling populations of deer (as we do here in Scotland) to prevent the erosion of forestry (deer love to graze on saplings)? What about the introduction of new species to restore ecological balance? These things work when we get them right. I'm proposing that we get better at it, instead of giving up.
Nobody is proposing we "not interact with the environment anymore." That is a straw man.
The idea is to mitigate our impact on ourselves and the environment by reducing consumption. We already have widespread understanding that reduction of resource usage is the most environmentally beneficial change we can make.
I didn't mean it as an attack specifically on the parent comment, sorry if it came across that way. What I mean about the perspective "not interact with the environment anymore" is that many/most people describe the environment as something that exists above and around us. Something that is best left undisturbed and interacted with as minimally as possible by human life.
I am proposing that this perspective has run its course. It is clear that human behavior can have a very broad impact, so we should aim to learn to work with the environment for the better.
This means learning how to intervene on "natural" (whatever that means) environmental processes such that they tip in our favor (ecological engineering).
Yes, but it doesn’t mean carbon capture. The Netherlands cannot exist without geoengineering and more and more places are going to have to be building dikes and sea walls as flooding becomes a problem.
Desalination would become more and more prevalent as we are dealing with droughts and we will likely have to engineer forests to be more resilient to forest fires by creating more and more clearings and other barriers to serve as firebreaks as well as planting new forests that may be less inducive to forest fires.
Those examples are more conventionally considered "engineering" or "forest management." They are smaller-scale projects typically involving regional adaptation to adverse weather/climate.
Geoengineering is a bit different, typically on a larger scale:
> Climate engineering or commonly geoengineering, is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system.[1] The main categories of climate engineering are solar geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal.
When you’ll need to do things on a global scale such as a sea wall that would say protect the eastern coast of the US it would definitely fit into geoengineering.
By this definition a small scale carbon capture process that is borderline effective is considered climate engineering but managing 1000’s of km of dams and dikes isn’t.
I am just asking whether geoengineering has been demonstrated as a feasible solution to reverse trends of global warming and anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Geoengineering proposals typically aim to reduce the global greenhouse effect through several hypothetical means (like increasing cloud albedo.)
Dykes and dams that curtail flooding of coastal regions can be monumental undertakings but aren't typically referred to as "geoengineering." Hydropower from a dam could be a good way to reduce carbon emissions, but again wouldn't be considered geoengineering.
Mitigation spending will happen anyway, the focus rightfully should be on minimizing the need for mitigation. By all accounts mitigation costs more than carbon reduction, it is just spent later on. I suppose it all comes down to how much of the problem our generation wants to kick down the road.
As for geoengineering. If you mean adding particles to cool the atmosphere, then this is a mitigation strategy (it doesn’t reduce carbon, just compensates for it). I think we need to research this to have a plan B, but it is kind of a desperation move, and quite risky, so I wouldn’t consider it smart to have it as plan A.
Not sure I understand your mitigation point: If it is already too hot in some areas or flooding gets extreme, people living there would probably want mitigation now, not later. And if this just happens in ten years, also need to start thinking about mitigation now.
Weather should be very controlable by how much sun hits the earth. Which then causes heat, wind, water evaporation etc etc.
Large sun screen satelites (very simple ones that can fold out foil origami style) could block out a lot of sun at places according to stabilization weather models. Same for reflector sattelites, which could add more sun in specific places.
The difficulty is that we cannot send a hundred thousand sattelites out of our gravity well. We would need to setup basic mining and manufacturing on the moon for this plan to work (you can send sattelites into earth orbit at almost zero cost).
The time it would take to setup a factory on the moon should also be used to develop the necessary weather models, which should then be tested out very slowly with the first few thousands of sattelites.
Altering albedo alone still leaves us with ocean acidification problem, but I'm not up-to-date with the risks of that (other than coral reef dying out, which is absolutely tragic).
> World crisis! Quick! Give your money to or help elect these people! Save the world! Do it for the children.
Stupid. Nothing about this is quick. Climate scientists have told us for > 20 years. But sure let's post stupid bullshit on the internet and continue to do nothing.
Yes, I didn't want to spread false information because I'm no expert either. ~20 years is the time span I consciously remember reading & hearing about it but I'm sure scientists have warned us for much longer.
> This pact aims to keep the rise in global temperatures well below 2C this century and to pursue efforts to keep it under 1.5C.
It seems to me that continuing to communicate just the average temperature increase is a missed opportunity to engage with a greater portion of the population.
1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much, but once one understands that’s an average made out of much bigger positive and negative swings in temperature, one gets a much more dramatic picture.
I suspect focusing on the widening of the temperature range, rather than the average temperature change would work better with communications to the wider public
Also people need to be presented with the consequences.
I still know a lot of people who genuinely believe it means slightly warmer summers. They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water.
Also just dropping this link here as I remember watching it at the time and thinking isn't it great we're not there yet:
Yeah, I don’t mean to be disparaging but the average person doesn’t really seem to grasp this beyond: it’ll be slightly warmer. And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park.
Maybe there should be more focus on the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc.
Although to be honest if this is lost on people up until now anyway, what hope is there?
A significant number of people just don’t seem to care.
It's difficult to care about long-term problems like climate change, when you are struggling to provide for your family in the present.
That's some of it, although some others seem to emotionally reject any information about climate change, which is more concerning (especially when those people end up in positions of political power).
This year has proven that climate change isn't just a long term problem.
Manhattan was engulfed in smoke from the west coast. People were flooded out of their homes in Western Europe. And heat waves across the west coast lead to dozens of deaths.
I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media.
We can look at our response to Covid as a model for how we might respond to climate change slapping us in the face. If that is a fair comparison, I am worried.
I don’t think our responses to COVID was only disaster. Big parts of them was disorganised and inconsistent. But in the whole they were also forceful, creating not only one, but several effective vaccines in a fraction of the time it usually takes, and making them available to billions of people. Also, suddenly, there are trillions of dollars made available to keep the economy afloat and reduce personal sufferings.
If the same scale of efforts were used to fight climate change, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Right now I’m just waiting for the natural disasters being big and frequent enough so people can’t deny what they see with their own eyes. After that I expect things to happen relatively fast. Maybe some oil and coal executives that have spend billions spewing lies will be found dangling from lamppost too, when people finally understand what happened. (I in no way condone the last part, it is merely meant as a way to express that some people probably will be very angry.)
>I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media.
Tokyo Olympics, specifically the heat has been getting tons of coverage in western media. As a Tokyo resident I can't recall a summer this hot over the six years I've lived here. Floods in China have likewise received a fair bit of coverage. A few media outlets have managed to join the dots but they appear to be in a minority.
What is the thesis here, that storms are a new hitherto unknown phenomenon that are radically outside the human experience?
There has never been an era where humans didn't have to put up with horrific storms. It took Pompeii 4-6m of volcanic ash to stop humans picking up the pieces and carrying on.
I don't think a focus on "oh there'll be more storms" is going to cut it. We have to be ready for storms anyway, having more of them doesn't change the risk calculations all that much in my mind. I'd rather pay the taxes for a big well air conditioned community centre to deal with heat waves. It'll be cheaper than what gets wasted on sporting venues.
The thesis is you trade up. This isn’t about an extra thunderstorm or two, big storms are expensive and disruptive. More tropical storms become hurricanes. Category 1 hurricanes hit 2 etc, and what would have been a 5 hits harder and stays a 5 for longer.
It’s about more frequent forced evacuations, overtopped levies, and massive cleanup etc. Rising sea levels aren’t just larger high tides their also larger tsunami. Beyond that you just get more extreme events like heat waves in the Arctic, longer drought mixed with extra flooding, more hail, mudslides, bigger blizzards etc.
We’re looking at 100’s of billions in damages per year not simply adding a few AC to community centers. Though you’re also likely to have higher cooling bills.
Most of the cost from weather events isn’t born by the federal government. Looking just at extreme 1+ billion dollar weather events over the last 20 years averages close to 100 billion per year in the US. “The total cost of these 298 events exceeds $1.975 trillion.”
However, things are getting worse. “The 1980–2020 annual average is 7.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2016–2020) is 16.2 events (CPI-adjusted).“ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
Of course not all of that is based on climate change, but smaller storms also cost money for everything from snow removal to lost crops, and preparation for storms costs even more.
This bothers me less than water shortages and desertification, as well as extreme high temperatures making certain areas uninhabitable. That's what will really lead to suffering on a wide scale.
I guess major coastal cities around the world becoming part of the ocean is bad too.
It's not the increased natural "disasters" that will really mess things up. It's some places becoming entirely uninhabitable, permanently displacing many millions of people.
> And in a cold European climate, most people seem to think that’s a good thing. Warm summers are enjoyable when you’re swimming in the sea and having barbecues in the park.
This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada.
The gulf stream is already being disrupted by meltwater from the arctic.
> This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada.
That is overstating the effect of the gulf stream. Canada and Russia have continental weather - they get cold because the interior doesn't have a huge heat sink in the form of an ocean surrounding it keeping it warmer (or cooler).
The UK is small and surrounded by ocean, with prevailing winds off that ocean. It isn't going to have a continental weather system if the gulf stream is disrupted, and it isn't going to suddenly have a climate as cold as canada. It may have unpredictable effects and may not be desirable, but we wouldn't suddenly be suffering from equivalently cold weather as the same latitude in Canada or Russia.
I can confirm that: I am from EU, far inland. Warmer climate seems like a good idea to me and rising sea level does not bother me at all.
Yes, I dislike storms, floods and droughts but these are thing we know and we are prepared. And it might be even cheaper to be better prepared for storms than to bear externalized costs of CO2 ... hard to estimate that.
We need some new technology, something very cheap, efficient and disruptive, that will force oil and gas to stay in the ground economically :-|
Waitbutwhy put it well: “ 18,000 years ago, global temperatures were about 5ºC lower than the 20th century average. That was enough to put Canada, Scandinavia, and half of England and the US under a half a mile of ice”
That's not really helpful, when you think about it: Are the effects linear? How much ice would the US be under for temperatures of 1°C below 20th century average? A fifth of half a mile? No ice at all? And what does that imply for 2°C above? 0.2 miles of ice below the surface?
I prefer actual predictions of the effects, not bad analogies or useless data points.
Sure, it's unhelpful if you're trying to build a model or understand the science, but 90% of people aren't; and it's accurate –if unhelpful– analogies like this that get those people onboard.
When I was a kid, that was what I believed in too. And that is what most people would say if they heard it for the first time.
What most people do not do while saying this statement is taking the context of the change in average temperatures around the world. What should be shown are graphics like this XKCD [1], which puts in perspective the average global temperatures in past 22,000 years. (spoiler: the last time Earth's average global temperature was 4 degrees below the average global temperature during the 1970s, the Earth was covered in sheets of ice). This is where we have well and truly allowed climate change deniers to take over and spread misinformation.
> They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water.
If you put it that way it's no wonder that they think you are crazy. Storms mean heavy rainfall that means more drinking water. What is your point, exactly?
An ice age is a global temperature difference of about 5 degrees. So we are going to have at least a third of an ice age’s temperature delta in heating, if we do everything right, and two thirds if we do business as usual.
Yes and I don't think people are going to wake up till everyone faces the consequences of climate change in their personal lives, which is quite honestly just sad.
I don't think this is going to be enough. We see everyday people affected by the pandemic yet many of them still refuse to get vaccinated, keep distance or even wear a mask... They will just dismiss these consequences as "one offs"...
I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.
It might sound harsh but we're lucky that large scale pandemic like this had comparatively lower death rate, the scenario might've been completely different if it was more fatal. So, I think people will wake up if there are harsher consequences in large of chunk of population in their personal lives than covid (this is pretty horrific that we as humans with all our knowledge and technology can't prevent this without immediate danger).
I know that there are going to be some people even in that case to deny climate change, but that would be significantly smaller minority compared to what it is right now in case of covid (at least I think so).
> I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.
There were people infected with Covid, in hospital, which still denied that Covid is real. Granted, those extremes are rare, but it shows how resilient in their beliefs deniers are. I think you are quite optimistic in thinking people will wake up.
Nevertheless, we don’t need everyone to accept the reality, for us to be able to take action as a civilization.
In the late 80's I took a Botney class at Sonoma State.
The professor always talked about what 1 degree of warming will do to the oceans. He talked about it all the time. It was his worst fear.
I though he might be overreacting a bit at the time, but not now.
He was an interesting guy, and was far from politically correct.
I remember his stance on people/bikes who don't walk on designated paths. The whole, "You are ruining the indiginious fauna argument". Well his unpopular stance was the surviving plants will be stronger.
I will never forget the honest worry he had over a 1 degree change in temperature.
I agree that communicating the average seems very ineffective, and if you can carefully source better numbers to replace that measure, you would do well to post them here. People will be happy to copy those if you can show it to them.
I suspect it may not be trivial to find a measure for the widening that people intuitively understand, but it's worth trying.
I see this a lot, too. "It's just 2 degrees" – what the hell is wrong with you? If your body temperature is 2-3 degrees above normal, you feel like absolute shit.
Likewise for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations; "it's just 0.04 %" – dude, you surely start noticing the effects of "just" 0.04% alcohol in your blood. Or hey, try cyanide.
But this isn't about body temperature or alcohol concentrations, so comparisons like that are not useful.
Look, I just had a glass of cool water, perhaps between five to ten degrees celsius. And I'm about to have a coffee. What's that, fifty degrees? With 5% to 10% milk concentration. And I think I'll be just fine. You don't?! What the hell is wrong with you?
If you want to explain why a two-degree increase in average temperature on the planet is dramatic, then you need to do better than compare it to something completely different.
No, you are underestimating the fact that people already understand how average temperature works, especially folks they have ever lived in a modest home with no AC.
If someone's home is 24-26C, and they turn on their oven to cook something for dinner, it will warm up their home, depending on the size of their home and ventilation.
Overall the average temperature increase won't be that much, but they localized temperature increase is very dramatic. Your apartment might not be hot, but that small area that is 200C is having a dramatic impact on everything else in your apartment.
Bonus points for extra comprehension if they have a basement or ground floor that has a substantially lower temperature. Again, the average temperature might be high, but it doesn't mean that it's hot everywhere in the house.
Understanding this isn't rocket science, and the only reason people are ignoring it is because people in power have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of it by outright lying, obfuscating, or denying it.
A change in average temperature (either direction) does not imply extreme temperature swings. My current apartment is much warmer than my previous apartment! I'm not dying, and the extreme temperatures at the oven or the cool parts of the apartment are not any more extreme than they were before. And no, I haven't ever noticed my oven having a dramatic impact on everything else in my apartment. So, no, this kind of appeal to intuition about the average temperature in an apartment does not help explain why 2degC across the globe means more than just.. a bit warmer temperature. And most certainly comparing it to something like body temperature (which tends to be very steady compared to air temperature) does not help at all.
If my room was 2 degrees hotter right now, I would barely notice. So "2 degrees" by itself actually really does mean very little even to me - and I already know about the catastrophic effects that are going to come out of 2 degrees. I have to think about the sea level rise, increasing heat waves, more floods, more extreme weather, and so on for it to actually have an impact on even me.
You're right in a sense. I would certainly notice the change if it happened very quickly. However, I would quickly adapt and think it was just normal. (Mind you, my room is about 17 C at the moment.)
Certainly, if someone told me my room was going to be 2 degrees hotter permanently, I wouldn't think twice about it.
> However, I would quickly adapt and think it was just normal.
This definitely does not happen to me in these temperature ranges. 32 is too hot to function no matter how long I sit there. 30 is livable, but permanent discomfort. 28 is more or less ok, through I prefer lower temperatures.
You can feel how those differences affect your body.
There's nothing to "keep" under 1.5C, we are pretty much already there when error bars are considered. 2C is going to be breached regardless because even if we went carbon neutral today we have decades of locked in warming.
Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me.
I still advocate for mitigation/reduction efforts because future generations exist and they deserve the best climate we can pass on, but let's not pretend like we are on track to preserve any level of normal. 1.5C is more than a moonshot - it is behind us.
Don't quite know what you mean by "locked in warming" (nor didn't have time to look at this report yet), but the previous scenarios have massive scale future magic carbon takeback tech baked in. I assume if there was something like that ongoing on a global scale and almost no new emissions, 1.5 degrees might be theoretically possible?
Thanks, good call out. This was largely based on some charts from An Inconvenient Truth which showed temp as a latent responding variable to CO2 PPM.
Obviously a lot of research has happened since then, so I looked it up, and the lag period between CO2 and temperature rise is much shorter than I expected. It seems it is just a decade - so if we went to carbon negative today, we could see results in under 10 years [1] [2].
Kind of unclear if the baseline carbon we could achieve will result in YoY decrease in temperature, given the feedback loops and it already raising temperatures every year.
If the research you mentioned is predicated on massive carbon takeback then I am highly suspicious. The public sector doesn't have the will, and the private sector doesn't have the incentive.
> Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me.
I might be biased but popular newspaper in my country have interviews in which scientists do talk about that.
The exact way climate lag functions is still a very uncertain science. It is communicated, but it can't be communicated we because (unlike how Al Gore portrays it) the evidence around how long the lag is is still very uncertain.
I've done a lot of research into this because I am interested in climate lag.
Yes. In first approximation, if we reach a global temperature increase of X degrees, the actual temperature increase that people will actually feel on land will be double that. Oceans are warming up much more slowly because they are so deep and trap all the heat.
1 or 2 just isn't a big number. How about using the number of Joules it would take to heat the Earth's atmosphere by 1 degree (Celcius, because we're not Philistines). It'll be an approximate (as is any measurement at planetary scale, eg 1 AU) but that's fine.
I wrote about this not long ago, the problem with the climate crisis is there's no crisis point.
In a "proper" crisis or perhaps "ordinary" is a better term, there's a point where the leadership needs to drop all other agenda items and focus on the crisis. Whether that's bailing out the economy, starting a war, or calling a new election, there's a time when nothing else matters.
The climate crisis is a thousand individual, distributed, manageable events that happen all the time. Forest fires, floods, storms, they all happen and they're all dealt with locally. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. Every time. Forever.
It's the frog boiling analogy. Can we handle x amount of rain? Yes. Can we handle 1.1x? Sure. How about 1.2x floods? Sure. It will be like inflation was to our generation, grandad will tell stories about how you could buy a whole meal for a dollar. Except instead of meals, it's hurricanes.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the context of what you said in your comment that would lead us to a "let's deal with it now" moment. Telling people about the 1 or 2 degrees, sure, they need to know, but it will never bring anyone to a negotiating table.
I sincerely hope it won't be necessary, but in Kim Stanley Robinsons book Ministry for the future, there is a wet bulb heat wave that kills hundreds of thousands that serves to at least somewhat galvanize the world into action. Perhaps something like that could be a plausible thing to happen.
You'll experience the climate crisis as an ever increasing digital stream of catastrophes captured on cellphone camera until, one day, you're the one doing the filming.
Well, definitely not North America because there it seems to be a mandate that you gotta freeze inside during summer. But trust me, you (still?) can live without AC.
Bucharest here. I'm fine at 25 but if you ask my wife she'll say that it's too cold. I do realize though that different people have different definition of comfort ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'
What almost alarms me more than the thought of a climate apocalypse is that I don't think this (a UN report) is going to have any effect on the opinions of 40% of the public who see climate change as some kind of job destroying conspiracy.
Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference, perhaps we (as a species) don't deserve to continue.
It seems fairly obvious that climate change is going to be solved before the bigger existential risks we face, which are for the most part unknowable or largely ignored. There are a lot of people working on climate change now, it's well established in the public's mind, and there are many incentives in place to accelerate solutions.
there are many incentives in place to accelerate solutions
I don't believe this to be true. If you look at the incentives currently in place they're well short of what could be considered the minimum recommendations of any of the previous reports.
This is not an indicator of a world that takes climate change seriously:
It also seems companies are moving faster than politics. E.g. deprecating ICEs by 2030/35, without any policies forcing them. The mere discussion about increasing CO2 prices triggered coal power plant operators to think about phasing those put before any policy enforced coal exit.
The pessimist in me will only believe any of that, and any positive impact, once it happened. Not sooner.
2030/35 is a trojan horse because it is far too late. That's 15 years from now, and vehicles easily live for 20 years, so when people born today will be 35, there still be ICE cars around.
Thats not a measure to help, thats a fake measure to stop goverments from actually doing something effective.
I think the biggest way we could screw this up is if our governments pick winner technology stacks now, and don't keep the doors open (and ideally fund) paths to breakthrough tech. The panic over climate change (which, arguably, has merit) may lead us to making this kind of error, since we feel we have to put all our chips in now on 2020s era solutions. Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that our existing tech stacks just need to be scaled up to solve the problem. We need to keep turning the crank of innovation.
Let's optimistically assume you are correct. If you could flip a magic switch right now and stop releasing carbon and fix all the other related problems, you would still have a massive delay of many decades (40 or more years) in bringing down air temperatures. The problem then becomes how do you survive the climate interregnum? This is why governments and private industry need to be working closely together, and nations with other nations. On the one hand, this will probably be the greatest job creation sector in human history, but on the other hand, we aren't all going to make it.
The delay you mention is only the case if you do not presume humans can intervene with counterforces. Yes, we are not Gods, but I think any analysis which does not incorporate the various tech curves that are going vertical right now are falling into the "future is like the past" fallacy. I think that if we got the first set of miracles you hypothesize, we wouldn't just sit on our hands as the 40 year delay unfolds. We'll keep working the problem, and leverage would increase over time to close the gap.
No matter what we do, the delay is inevitable, but the time is variable. A lot of PR optimistically claims we won't have to wait more than 20 years, but from what I understand it's more like 40-50 in the scientific literature, and up to 100-200 years with worst case estimates. I'm not an atmospheric physicist, however.
> When you emit carbon dioxide, the climate stays altered for a long time," says Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist who is the co-director at the Climate Impact Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "And so we kind of have to deal with that baggage no matter what."
> Today's adults will be dealing with climate-driven extreme weather for decades to come. But if countries transform their economies to cut heat-trapping emissions sharply, today's kindergartners could inherit a safer world when they reach middle age.
> "It's kind of like you're driving a giant train that's very heavy. You slam on the brakes. The train keeps going for a while," Hsiang explains. "There's some amount of heating that we would continue to experience," even with dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. It will take decades for forests, oceans and other natural systems to soak up all the excess greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere.
The train analogy reveals the bad mental model. Thinking we cannot apply a counterforce to the "train" only comes from assuming it's too hard to do so. If we had infinite technological capabilities, we could remove all the excess carbon from the atmosphere relatively quickly. There's nothing, based on physics, preventing this possibility. That doesn't mean it's easy or knowable how it can be done, only that it could be done given sufficient technological means. Which we'll surely be incentivized to develop vs just sitting around and waiting for nature to take its course.
Go back and read predictions about the future from a century ago that failed to imagine simple things we take for granted today like telecomms or high speed travel. They're hilarious in grasping with bad analogies to come to strong conclusions like this. This doesn't mean the person is wrong, just that we ought to not take their beliefs as being factual, particularly if we can identify they've failed to try to incorporate technological breakouts grounded in known physics and our expected collective incentives.
But that's part of the problem - there isn't going to be a magic solution to climate change - it involves lots of changes to the way we do things, some small and some big (the way we travel, and build and consume things), most of which we already know about - but often they'll be economically damaging or a change in the way people live.
I like your attitude, and would love to hear more about why you think this. It doesn't seem obvious to me that it's something we'll actually "solve" while maintaining our current population/civilization, but maybe I just read too many doom and gloom articles?
I'm looking at this as if I am a historian from the future. From first principles, humanity has the pre-requisites in my mind to solve the problem. This doesn't mean it will be easy or obvious in predicting exactly how it is done. It's just much more likely to me that we solve it over the next several decades than not. We may take a hit along the way. Fusion energy seems relatively imminent, the economics for solar are in a positive feedback loop, and X Prizes for carbon capture are well underway. If we just get practically limitless clean energy (possible given the existence proof of stars) and figure out a way to relocate the carbon in the air at scale ("just" moving a lot of atoms) we have a lot of slack to resolve things. Again: this is just first principles analysis, not a claim it will be easy or that we won't see major consequences along the way.
The things that keep me up at night are not climate change, but runaway feedback loops that yield existential civilizational risk on the order of weeks not decades. For example, a COVID-like R0 virus that is highly fatal but spreads asymptomatically for months before killing hosts. Engineering and deploying such a virus seems plausible for a psychopathic individual over the next several decades. Basically anything where a lone actor can unleash a chain reaction to take out civilization are things we should be very concerned about, since they are total random variables. Getting various hedges in place like physical boundaries between cohesive populations (eg, a Martian colony) seem important to clear before one of these tripwires are hit.
The reason you are wrong is that stopping (or even slowing down) climate change goes directly against the way the world economic system is set up.
Basically, to stop climate change in the next decade (which is already far too late to stop catastrophic effects, which are already beginning and will only get worse) we must significantly reduce the global economy. There is simply no way to keep growing growing the economy without also growing CO2 emissions in the near future.
And of course, global economic recession is not going to be acceptable, in an economic system predicated entirely on eternal growth (where "growing too slow" is already considered unacceptable). So, climate change action will be slow, small, and entirely too little to avoid the most catastrophic scenarios.
Better to see 10 more years of economic growth before a massive collapse, instead of 20-40 years of slow economic shrinking to a more manageable, carbon neutral world, right?
No, the economic system doesn't inherently rely upon fossil fuels. It relies upon cheap and abundant energy. If we snapped our fingers and had free clean energy on tap, that would sign the death warrant of climate change, although there may be lots of collateral damage if we don't also try to rewind the clock too.
Sure, but right now, the only source of clean and abundant energy is fossil fuels. Everything else is either much more expensive up-front (hydro, nuclear) or is extremely variable (solar, wind). Nothing other than fossil fuels can travel well (electric cars are nice, but electric trucks are unlikely to be economical, and electric cargo bots are even worse).
So, the only current solution to climate change is global economic contraction - especially in the richest nations.
I don't know the extent to which that's true. If even one of the many big and worsening storms causes enough damage to breach on a single occasion then the whole city floods to whatever level it would have otherwise and your efforts are for nothing.
There was a huge flood in the Netherlands in 1953 which killed thousands and as a result a big barricade of walls was built around the whole area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works . There's been not even the slightest chance of flooding in that area since. Smart things with segmentation can also be done.
I think it is possible to hold this off for the richest cities. It'll cost a lot to build, maintain and perhaps even upgrade it, for sure. The Netherlands had the big benefit of a major natural gas find in that time that gave a huge boost to the economy, otherwise this wouldn't have been possible. Also, there were less environmental restrictions back then. All that will make it more expensive today.
On the other hand, the levee broke during Katrina in a first world country. Infrastructure needs to be improved and maintained continually and that's a huge problem and cost sink even in first world countries. Have you seen the price to build a mile of subway in NYC? The engineering marvel that will be required to save Manhattan will inevitably be the most costly thing ever built in the US.
Are these simulations public? Can I run see and run the code? Are all aspects taken into account that can affect the outcome, such as, Earth's magnetic field strength, activity of the Sun, shifting of magnetic poles?
If you have a spare supercomputer I'm sure the scientists would be happy to help you run their stuff. The IPCC report cites its sources, you can go and check who the authors are and what the models take into account.
As far as I know, the code is secret and the data that it runs on is secret, i.e., it is not science, and it is not really even attempting to appear to be science to anyone who knows what science is. Not reproducible even in theory due to secrecy means it cannot be science. It's not even wrong.
Besides being secret and likely buggy, any simulation of the climate necessarily incomplete, i.e. it omits quite a lot of phenomena. Complex systems are fundamentally non-amenable to simulation, but in this case, the results of the "simulation" are garbage squared, because they're "simulations" of some system that doesn't even exist.
This is the kind of stuff being passed off as science these days.
> 40% of the public who see climate change as some kind of job destroying conspiracy.
These people are not the ones who need to take action, so who cares?
Policy makers are the ones who need to act, and they are already well aware for most of the consequences of global warming. The issue is that a lot of big corporations (The ones which really control police makers) are not going to be advantaged by transforming the society to a more respectful one regarding nature. So things move slowly, until things are getting really bad and day to day activities are drastically affected by global warming
General public will understand the problem when first country ceases to exist (there are multiple candidates that will completely become uninhabitable in a few decades).
Blaming "big corporations" for our woes looks pretty unconstructive to me. Most big corporations got big by giving consumers what they want. Trying to reduce emissions through big corporations (AFAICT the focus will be largely on energy, transport and construction) means making their products more expensive, which always triggers responses of regressiveness / inequality, short-circuiting the whole debate.
Put in another way: regardless whether execs at the oil and flight companies are to blame, or their flying and driving customers, a solution must involve large reductions in the amount of fuel burnt (which inevitably requires making that much more expensive than it is now).
> These people are not the ones who need to take action, so who cares?
Yes they are - big corporations and governments only do things when the public goes along with them, otherwise they go bust or get voted out.
It will take people making choices, changing the way they live, travel, eat, and buy things and using the products of companies that support that to make any change.
Do you not think that "code red" fatigue is part of this? Ordinary people are bombarded with messages predicting doom at some distant point in the future for one reason or another on an almost daily basis, and yet life rolls on.
Nah, people dismissed these warnings when they were new in 50s, applied at best patches that made them feel good when problems became apparent in 90s and so on.
It's not fatigue, it's ostrich politics. "If I don't look at it, it will go away." But it's not a predator, it's essentially a force of nature. We had this kind of (then social) problems being ignored lead to huge revolutions in the past. But this time, getting the head of a few lords abd ladies will be insufficient.
I can't remember the last time Miami Beach wasn't going to be underwater '{X} years from now'. When everything is a Code Red, nothing is. Happens at work all the time too
They see it as a socialist ploy. The best solution is to propose a revenue neutral carbon tax and promise not to use it to increase total revenue. Offer to cut other taxes by a proportional amount and have that as a central part of the pitch. It'll get more political support.
Fortunately it’s a lot less than 40% unless you only count the US. The EU is a climate leader. China is not a democracy. Even in the US economical realities are already more important than the cries of rednecks.
Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January. Can the leaders of climate action actually live up to their own standards?
Without going into the religious bits and more spectacular bits of it there is an extremely interesting story going on in the last part of the book of Jonah in Nevi'im (in Christianity this is part of the old testament):
As Jonah tells the inhabitants of Nineveh about the impending doom they repent and the king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes and makes a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance.
Again, without going fully religious, this is an excellent example. When people see their "king" actually doing the thing themselves that they ask others to do, change happens. There is nothing religious about this. Here in Norway, former King Olav V was famous for, among other things, taking the tram during gas rationing in the 70ies.
Old people could still tell me back in the 80ies and 90ies that prince Olav and his siblings had actual porridge for breakfast like other kids.
Today royalty plays less of a role I guess compared to influencers and thought leaders of all kinds, but I still guess it would make a massive difference if next years Davos meeting was announced to be virtual because of climate concerns.
Or if a few tik tok/Instagram stars came out and showed their 2 generation old iPhones saying: I can get a new anytime I want but I actually do care about the environment.
> Well, the 40% are certainly not going be convinced if the "first United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate" flew on his private jet 16 times to places like Martha's Vineyard since January.
Why?
I mean, okay, getting angry about hypocrisy is fun. But why would you allow someone else's hypocrisy to sway your view of what is or is not objectively true? That is not critical thinking.
Disclaimer: I'm not defending their point of you, just reasoning through it.
My naive take is that it calls into question if the supposed catastrophe (from the 40%'s point of view) is real if the leaders aren't taking it seriously themselves. "objectively true" only works if you understand the problem without, from your point of view, suspicious people explaining it to you. In this case, the suspicious people would be the primary ones telling you that you have to pay this tax while they are mysteriously exempt.
> Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference
That won't make a difference; Liberals will blame the Floridians themselves for being conservative, and Conservatives will say it was an inevitable part of God's Plan, that saying it shouldn't have happened is a criticism of His Judgment, and that saying that it was caused by humans is claiming the type of power that only belongs to God.
> Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference
You think that would be enough? Don't underestimate how many people would be willing to shrug off mass death and destruction of others if their tribe asked them to ignore it.
So now we can get rid of fast fashion, mandate reusability for products, reintroduce basic woodworking, metalcrafting and sewing/repair work in school and with that get rid of a huge chunk of the needless shipping?
Or are we still going to go after individuals eating traditional food while thought leaders fly across the globe in private jets (no kidding) telling us we need to change our diet?
PS: I'm already a enthusiastic carbon cutter even if it historically has been because it correlated very well with cost cutting and self sufficiency.
I live in the countryside in Norway - a famously long and sparsely populated country - and I either work close enough to home to go by bike or I work far enough away that I can manage to pick up my laptop and get some work done while in public transit. And yes: I get to the train station by bike, bus or by feet, if necessary it is just 30 minutes brisk walk.
Edit: not every Norwegian can do this, but far more than today. I guess this is true for a number of other countries as well.
I'm curious what kind of town you live in. I grew up in a rural area, in which google claims its a 50 minute bike ride to the nearest grocery store, along curvy & hilly country roads with absolutely no sidewalks, let alone bike lanes, and where monstrous pickup trucks are liable to sideswipe you out of spite as much as accident.
My sister lives in a suburb in Florida: better, but the weather is unbearable for half the year. She also has three children, making carrying sufficient groceries in a bike pretty much impossible.
If people can bike, they should. But a lot of people live in these sorts of conditions that are not conducive to biking, enough that "just bike to the grocery store" is not a realistic or achievable goal.
All I hear is excuses. Excuses why someone "needs" to drive a 2 ton truck, excuses why someone "needs" to fly across the Atlantic, excuses why someone "needs" a house with more bathrooms than people, excuses why it's too cold/hot to cycle.
I'm not talking about buying a 2 ton truck or flying across the Atlantic, or owning a big house. I'm talking about people needing to get groceries.
I would prefer that infrastructure in the U.S. were more dense, that less people were not required to drive everywhere. But the reality is that, as life in many parts of the U.S. is currently set up, people cannot rely on bicycling as a safe, efficient, and effective means of transportation in their daily lives. Biking, if you live in a place that supports it, is good, but telling people to "just bike" remains a useless and naive plan for addressing climate change. Your energy will be better spent elsewhere.
If you had to make that ride to eat, you would. If you did it regularly you wouldn't think anything of it. I have a hard time believing motorists are out there hitting cyclists out of spite.
People enjoy cycling on country roads with hills and no bike lanes. Some also enjoy cycling in all weather conditions. If you haven't tried it, it is a bit much to call it impossible.
That said, I think people should be able to consume energy however they choose, even drivers of "monstrous pickup trucks". If it makes them happy or they otherwise find utility in it, it is their money to spend.
If a motorists injures someone with their vehicle, they should pay damages.
Even if I accepted the premise of climate apocalypse, which I don't, the idea of allowing technocrats control over what the public can and cannot consume seems like a more dangerous precedent. Especially when we are talking about something as essential to modern life as energy consumption.
"...If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself." George Bernard Shaw, on eugenics.
Nothing can be consumed without some form of "externality" and the negativity of someone's consumption is purely subjective. Consider the first principles of the proposal and where they lead.
You'll note that the above poster invoked "monstrous pickup trucks", a clear indicator of tribal, if not political affiliation. Ultimately it amounts to nothing more than a partisan condemnation of the 'other' and their culture. The scientism rationalizing it is nothing more than a thinly veiled window dressing over intolerance.
Of course, entertaining this flavor of intolerance and rationalizations for central planning could be considered a negative outcome. The threat of tyranny, the fallibility of man and his predilection towards corruption should be well understood by now. Just as two parallel lines will never meet, these are axiomatic truths of human nature. Whereas climate doomsaying is the latest in a long history of failed predictions of apocalypse. Nobody should be surprised that the fear is used to centralize control over energy resources, but here we are...
Close inspection indeed. You've misread the comment entirely.
I can assure you that I'm opposed to death panels and eugenics. Consumption is essential to living one's life. Under a laissez-faire system, one cannot consume more than he produces in terms of subjective market valuations.
Shaw's proposal is not libertarian, but illustrative of where the logic of subjectively determined "negative externalities" leads. Sorry that wasn't clearer for you.
As an American expat, I know what you mean, but the problem is this simply isn’t true. Americans think this way because they have never seen an alternative. What it does mean is that the cost of consumption goes way up, which is exactly what’s needed.
The problem is, you simply cannot tell people to drop their cars when there is no public transport. No matter the country.
If you want to change the behavior of people, you have to build out public transport and bike lanes first or you'll (and it ashames me to say it as a leftie, rightfully) get laughed out of the door.
Yes. Also, in my country, there are alternatives, but it is so much faster and time efficient to use car. I would gladly used any alternative that would not cost me additional time than car.
The problem is that for many people climate change adaptation boils down to that dichotomy. It'd be nice if there would be people teaching us there are other ways. Of course, we won't escape the fact we use a lot of energy and that, for the time being, most of it produces CO2.
A carbon tax that would be high enough to force changes quickly enough would also be devastating for the poorer segment of the population and hence very hard to pass in a democracy. I mixture of a carbon price and other measures can be easier to sell to the voters.
needs to be coupled with subsidies for alternatives, transport (public, electric vehicles, etc) and with the knowledge that a poor person will drive that old diesel car into the ground, so give them an incentive to switch.
If we want to be carbon neutral in twenty years, poorer people need pretty strong incentives too. I don't see that working out if the carbon tax is mostly cost neutral for them.
They'll have a choice between two similar products. One is $10 because of a $5 carbon charge, the other is $6 with a $0 carbon charge. What will they choose?
They'll choose the $6 one, and keep their carbon tax dividend in their pocket too.
They won't really be worse off.
On the other hand, the rich will be worse off because they take more flights, consume more resources, and generally cause more carbon emissions anyway from their day-to-day lives.
Eh, many poor people don't have a choice when it comes to two their biggest carbon sources: transportation and heating. They're forced to use an old ICE to get to work, because biking and public transport is not practical for them, and they live in a rented apartment that is heated with oil or gas.
Investments into public transport and bike infrastructure is relatively cheap and improves streets for everyone.
Taking a car lane and/or parking and making a dedicated bus and bike lane out of it will reduce congestion and increase the mobility of nearly everyone.
Yes, I think the point still stands. A carbon tax is an efficient measure that will reduce emissions and not harm poor demographics.
However there are other things we can do as well to reduce emissions as well as increase life quality at the same time (improve public transport and bicycle infrastructure) where poor people benefit especially.
True, but we generally waste a lot of our emissions because fossil fuel energy is so cheap. People don't realize that you can save a ton of energy by, say, reducing the thermostat set point on your hot water heater, or putting plastic film over your windows and searching for and blocking drafts when it gets cold (or hot!) A lot of energy use is just habit that can be changed with very little cost, if the incentive is in place.
Granted, that won't get us to net zero, but there are a lot of high-impact, low investment changes we can all make.
Longer term, if fossil fuel energy places rise, I expect a lot more pressure put on local governments to make public transportation more accessible, and to remove legislation that blocks the building of walkable neighborhoods and cities. I'm convinced that the vast majority of driving we do is completely unnecessary, and is just the result of myopic laws about how we can build cities and suburbs that tend not to get challenged, which lead to us just building in a really dumb way that ensures everyone needs to drive.
Unless you are a factory putting out metric tons of CO2 I don't think the tax is going to be much to sneeze at for most people. Gas going up another 50 cents a gallon doesn't actually make that big of a dent to your pocket book at the end of the day, especially in cities where rent is already like $2000 a month for a single. If you fill up your car once a week, even if the tax at the pump was a full dollar, you are throwing down like $48 extra a month, or 2.4% your rent. Seems reasonable to me.
Why not a carbon tax that's used to pull carbon out of the atmosphere? It's pretty much inevitable that we have to pull carbon out of the atmosphere at scale at some point.
Yes. Bury it, put it into use for hundreds of years. Anything that stores the carbon in the long-term. It's inevitable that we have to do this one way or another.
> taxes on usage/consumption could be progressive.
Ideally the poor part of the population should be able to use the roads in the same proportion as the wealthy part of the population. Putting taxes on road usage (which what fuel taxes actually represent) will hit the poor part of the population way harder than the wealthy (or even the middle-class) part of said population.
> You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.
That used to be one of the few remaining "pleasures of life" for a big part of the lower and lower-middle-classes from Western Europe. It was actually cheaper to fly with your lads from Luton Airport to somewhere in Eastern Europe on Friday afternoon and come back late on Sunday, all this while having lots of fun (from said lads' perspective). Taking this away from them will mean them having to hit the very expensive pubs/bars of Manchester or Oslo and not having the same amounts of fun because the money for purchasing said fun (i.e. alcohol) will just not be there. Unhappy lads may mean an unhappy populace ready to throw stones at the powers that be.
As such, the upcoming football matches from the next few months in the European big leagues will be a very good litmus test, it will be the first time in one year and a half when we'll have lots of young people together ready to scream at things (the opposing teams' players or the said powers that be). We've already had one game suspended this weekend in Montpellier (Southern France) because of fans throwing bottles at the opposing team's players.
> Ideally the poor part of the population should be able to use the roads in the same proportion as the wealthy
Yeah unless you want to give everyone the same income or have some other way of not needing money to travel anymore, that's just not going to be the case. Also today, the wealthy could do road trips much more often than the poor could. That much won't change, I think the best we can hope for is either a slight improvement or not make it worse, for example by taxing heavy use more significantly like GP proposes. I consider myself wealthy but if using 3x the average adds 5x the tax, it's not as if I have unlimited money just like the vast majority of people.
> Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY
And instead of one company or person using XXX, you will have a three small companies using X or one person having three cars in his garage that just happen to each be registered under a different person.
Exponential taxes are a hell of a lot of an incentive to avoid them and you see how far people go to just avoid linear ones. Also, managing the company tax depending on how much the consumer used so far is going to be bureaucracy hell. It's a nice idea, but I highly doubt it will be possible to implement, especially when far easier and straight-forward measures already fail to get through legislation.
I'm well aware of that. I remember reading a story about one of the cities in Asia which forbidden car traffic with driver only. Soon there were passengers for hire standing by the road.
If AWS can charge their clients by milliseconds then I'm pretty sure an airline can add a zero to a 10th ticket booked on the same passenger's name.
The number of products/services taxed progressively wouldn't have to be huge to make a difference. You don't need to progressively tax an electric toothbrush just energy consumption, but all products should be taxed based on their production externalities.
> Impose a co2 emissions tax and let the market figure it out.
Aka those who are rich will simply buy their way out of having to change, and the poor masses will have to bear the load. Neo-feudalism is not the answer to climate change - the problem starts with capitalism.
Will that help though? Capitalism and "letting the market figure it out" is how we got here. None of the systems in place work and are completely skippable by those with cash.
Individual action won’t solve this problem. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on. Reducing energy use at the individual level is good, but insufficient if the energy used comes from fossil fuels.
I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production. There has to come a global moratorium on fossil fuel production and the wells that exist need to be capped. If it comes out of the ground it will be used somewhere and the carbon will end up in the atmosphere. The more low carbon our lifestyle the cheaper fossil fuels will get and someone somewhere will always buy and use them. Regrettably politicians dare not talk about this elephant in the room.
> What if "safe for the environment" isn't just another brand that you can choose to buy if you're willing to pay the extra dollar?
But "safe for the environment" is a brand that you can choose to buy. Every environmental damage can be offset.
I'd reverse the question: what if solving global warming is something that can be achieved without outlawing anything, including SUVs, plastic garbage and wasteful lawns? Certain people perceive global warming as an opportunity to reshape society in their preferred image; (visibly) ecologically conscious, "green", friendly, local, low power, low consumption, etc. This can be seen in the discourse around technological megaengineering solutions to global warming, such as a space sunshade - usually you will find in the comments someone saying "but then we'll just keep burning fossil fuels!" Yeah, so? I thought this was about warming?
> Loss of biodiversity? Sea level change? Loss of ice sheets? You can't pay a tax somewhere and unshatter that glass.
Sea level change and ice sheets are a result of climate change and thus can be offset with carbon offsets; they're the poster child for the concept.
I don't recognize loss of biodiversity as damage.
> Oh, not even close, not if even if there were less than 1 billion humans on Earth. None of those things is sustainable in the long run.
Those things are negligible footnotes in the long run. And all of those things, including the plastic bags, can be run off solar. All it needs are the right incentives.
Individuals can and should reduce their direct CO2 footprint. Most of personal energy budget goes for transportation and heating and/or cooling the living spaces. Two solutions enable you to stop directly burning stuff: EVs and heatpumps.
Beyond that, cap-and-trade scheme has worked to reduce SO2 emissions and it will work to reduce CO2 emissions.
Am EV over a fuel burning car is huge improvement, however EV’s alone are not a sustainable solution to our transport needs. There needs to be mass transit and wider adoption of cycling/walking in more towns and cities. EV’s are still burning fuel if they’re not charged using 100% renewable energy, which clearly we are not at yet, and at the end of the day they’re _still_ an inefficient means of transporting people over any distance.
To reduce transportation emissions worldwide, there needs to be greater emphasis on alternative modes of transports to cars, electric or not.
- Long distances should be covered by train/bus.
- Medium distances by metro/bus/tram/whatever works in a given city’s geography and layout.
One issue with individual action, in the absence of a market incentive such as cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, is that reducing your use of power/fossil fuels reduces demand, thus ever so slightly reducing prices, which will give others licence to use more. It doesn't 100% cancel out your efforts, but it does reduce the effect.
One issue with EVs is that they aren't necessarily a feasible option for a lot of households due to their cost. Putting a market incentive in place would lead to a hundred different ways of reducing our CO2 emissions from driving, not limited by the ingenuity of one person or organization. More people working from home, more carpooling, distributed co-working spaces, more use of public transportation, even shifting how we design and zone our towns and cities, are a few things I can think of.
I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to take a very direct, immediate, simple action to move the USA toward having a carbon fee and dividend policy* take a look at this (or at the very least, send it to your environmentally concerned friends and family): https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/
(*a tax on carbon, where, that get returned to all citizens so as to reduce or even eliminate impact on lower income families)
This argument is the problem. If we stopped producing fossil fuels right now, there would be an economic collapse, and starvation, and probably a few wars.
In 50-75 years we will probably be looking back in horror at the missed opportunity to avoid the ongoing economic collapse, the massive famine, starvation, and plagues that will follow on COVID, and the continuous wars as refugees flood from the front lines of climate collapse to places where the impacts aren't as severe and immediate.
I went to school in the 90s and we were learning about climate change then. The argument of "we can't stop now" seemed good enough 25 years ago, but we've still not actually made any progress towards making it easier to stop. We need to do that right now.
"Individual action" is a euphemism for changing your lifestyle in the slightest, even if imposed from outside through tariffs/taxes or other regulation. What people want is their exact same lifestyle, except eveything bad has been spraypainted green. It's understandable, I want my wishes to turn things into gold.
Action against companies is an extension of action against consumption, not an alternative.
I'd say many are ready for individual action but are discouraged on a daily basis especially by
- hypocritical politicians and environmentalists traveling the world on first class/private jets
- negativity like yours and the one I originally answered
- misinformation/information overload/infighting: whatever good someone tries to do someone will pop up to explain why it is bad: nuclear, organic, frugality, you name it, someone will magically pop up to tell you how worthless exactly your contribution is.
I say: almost every effort is worthwhile as long as one doesn't actively destroy. At least spread enthusiasm and knowledge.
> which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on
I'm not sure how it is in the US or around the world, but in Germany switching to 100% renewable energy for your home takes about 10 minutes online, by changing contract or company. Sure - if everyone did it there would not be enough supply, but apparently the majority does not despite being able to.
I'll just mention though that I think there is some double dipping going on here:
"Every" Norwegian seems to be happily thinking that they are using green hydropower, while at the same time the green certificates are sold to Germany.
Not saying this to discourage you guys, what you do makes green power more viable. Edit: The problem is Norwegians are living happy lives thinking they aren't contributing from power at least and nobody is telling.
I only want to help lit a fire under the feet of Norwegians :-)
And personally I could accept a small extra fee to get certified nuclear power ;-)
Individual actions help, they aren't sufficient alone but if every citizen went vegan and didn't vacation, it would probably buy us a couple more years to transition our energy system. Every little bit helps, but I do agree industry is the low hanging and greater emitting fruit that must change first. For instance air conditioning, there are very potent greenhouse gasses in ACs, companies would do well to phase those out fully and quickly and dispose of them properly. A little government incentive there would be a massive win, much easier than telling humans not to travel.
This is true. But if large portions of the electorate start living like GP, they'll have no problem with voting for carbon taxes and other measures that'll cost money. They won't be swayed by talking heads on TV shouting "environmental Marxism!".
Since I am GP: I really hope I'd not fall for anything so stupid :-)
That said I am also a conservative and I think I know a bit about conservatives; if one want conservatives to change as fast as possible phrase it in a way that sounds reasonable to the conservative mind:
- it is economically smart on individual level
- "repairing things is the traditional thing to do" and "it feels good to be in control"
- "industry should look for ways to save resources to stay competitive and increase yield on investment for shareholders" (sorry, English is not my first language, if this reads as a parody it is not meant as)
- "take advantage of the green wave". Competitive advantage: Point out that wealthy consumers will, on average, choose the greener product if they are otherwise equal. (Maybe poor ones will too, but we are here to sell this idea, aren't we ;-)
- On a national level: we need to get independence from China
- "reach individual monetary independence faster by making smart choices"
Doing this instead of continuing to make a partisan issue about it should go a long way I think. That is, if getting the results is more important than "being right".
People are already making money this way: just yesterday I heard a close friend explaining enthusiastically (I'll translate it on the fly from my native language as well as adding my explanation of why I think this was potent):
- a US jeans company had gotten hold of "the last real loom that wasn't sent to China" (local business argument)
- "hired the old operators to teach the how to use it" (traditional argument),
- "picked it apart - about a million pieces - and restored it" (self sufficient etc argument)
- and are now selling expensive pants - but it is real jeans (the actual sales argument)
There are different ways to reach different sections of the electorate, and we should use all of them. I'm in total agreement with you that those are the talking points to use with people on the conservative side of the political spectrum.
> Doing this instead of continuing to make a partisan issue
Unfortunately, making it (doesn't matter what "it" is) a partisan issue has been shown to work, over and over and over. It's depressingly predictable at this point. People go into all sorts of mental contortions and doublethink to explain why the stance "their" side has taken is the "right" one.
People and industries who have more to lose from a greener economy have no hesitation in employing these tactics to stall or block change, and influence people.
> Unfortunately, making it (doesn't matter what "it" is) a partisan issue has been shown to work, over and over and over. It's depressingly predictable at this point. People go into all sorts of mental contortions and doublethink to explain why the stance "their" side has taken is the "right" one.
You are of course right.
But since this issue is already owned by democrats/progressives/whatever and since conservative thought leaders have painted themselves into a corner maybe I should say: we shouldn't say anything that makes it an even more partisan issue.
The more we can avoid the soreness of doing what "the other side want" and focus on "this is beneficial for me/us/"our country" - right here and now, next quarter etc the better.
> People and industries who have more to lose from a greener economy have no hesitation in employing these tactics to stall or block change, and influence people.
Of course, which is why we need to outsmart them :-)
> Individual action won’t solve this problem. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground, which means switching energy sources, which is not something individuals have much influence on.
The covid shutdown should have put this myth to bed forever.
Hundreds of millions stuck at home and no longer commuting took a massive dent out of carbon emissions and sent shock waves through the oil industry.
Individual action can save the planet; we have to be drops in the flood.
> I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production.
There's no way we can continue to works as we do and plan cities as we do and stem the oncoming catastrophe with any alacrity.
> Global CO2 emissions declined by 5.8% in 2020, or almost 2 Gt CO2 – the largest ever decline and almost five times greater than the 2009 decline that followed the global financial crisis. CO2 emissions fell further than energy demand in 2020 owing to the pandemic hitting demand for oil and coal harder than other energy sources while renewables increased. Despite the decline in 2020, global energy-related CO2 emissions remained at 31.5 Gt, which contributed to CO2 reaching its highest ever average annual concentration in the atmosphere of 412.5 parts per million in 2020 – around 50% higher than when the industrial revolution began.
In what world is hundreds of millions of people drastically changing their lifestyle because they've been instructed to stay home by their governments "individual action"? That's a collective response to a crisis mandated by government.
Yes, the individuals were coerced to take action. Note that what many intend when referring to individual action is not that the individual _chose_ to take action, but that the individual _does_ take action. When claiming that individual action won't make a difference they're claiming that changing how we live as collective individuals won't make a difference; it doesn't matter what motivated that change for their thesis to be considered.
IMHO, Governments ought to _heavily_ tax commercial office space to coerce companies to support WFH. Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
I don't think I've ever heard an argument that defines individual action in the way you do. Most "individual action" arguments tend to lean towards pushing people to make individual choices to reduce emissions, and many are not substantive – take shorter showers! bike instead of driving to the gym! Even the actions that are reasonable – "give up air travel" – only become significant in aggregate.
> IMHO, Governments ought to _heavily_ tax commercial office space to coerce companies to support WFH. Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
I think that's absolutely reasonable and something that should happen now. But "I now work from home because my company told me to because the tax on the office/parking increased to push a shift in behavior" is absolutely not an individual choice.
> I don't think I've ever heard an argument that defines individual action in the way you do. [...] Even the actions that are reasonable – "give up air travel" – only become significant in aggregate.
One person making a change has never been a reasonable solution for global climate change; advocating for individual action has always meant making changes in the aggregate behaviour of individuals.
> But "I now work from home because my company told me to because the tax on the office/parking increased to push a shift in behavior" is absolutely not an individual choice.
Correct, it is not an individual choice. It is an individual action.
> Correct, it is not an individual choice. It is an individual action.
Every world government has passed a law, rigorously enforced, that says each person can drive no more than 20 miles a week. dleslie drives 20 miles a week. Has dleslie performed an individual action to address climate change?
> Apparently I've done the opposite, because that's more than I drive in a week now. ;)
Ha! Pandemics, eh? :)
> But not to be trite, yes I would have
This feels to me like over-egging the pudding - but getting into this discussion is really more of a question of philosophy than climate science, so it's a bit of a distraction.
It seems that, beyond the semantics of what constitutes "individual action", we seem to agree with what's needed:
> advocating for individual action has always meant making changes in the aggregate behaviour of individuals.
> Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
> but getting into this discussion is really more of a question of philosophy than climate science, so it's a bit of a distraction.
Ah, but the politics of it are important to causing change to happen. If we can't get voters to buy-in to changing their behaviour then Governments are unlikely to create such policies.
The important concept for the opposition to individual action, I think, is that the opposition is rooted in two ideas:
1. Individuals shouldn't be burdened with having to change the way they live
2. The burden should be on the big evil capitalist corporations
Neither of which hold much water, I think; the data behind carbon reduction due to covid restrictions shows that changing the lives of individuals is an important and necessary part of the solution.
And those big evil corps are mostly serving consumer demand. They're not pumping carbon into the atmosphere just because they're evil, right? Moreover, some of the largest polluters are in China, and China has been a major polluter for generations; it's not a strictly capitalist concern.
> Or are we still going to go after individuals eating traditional food
I mean, yes, we should continue doing that. Our relationship with food is unhealthy and also a massive contributor to environmental decline. I'm not sure why you contrast this with other improvements we can make, many of which, individually, would be less impactful than a transition to a more sustainable diet.
Farming is a small contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and the recent attacks on red meat for example are nonsensical if you look at the math that is used to justify it.
>Farming is a small contributor to greenhouse gas emissions
This is soo wrong:
>The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter (~10 – 12 GtCO2eq / yr) of anthropogenic GHG emissions mainly from deforestation and agricultural emissions from livestock, soil and nutrient management (robust evidence; high agreement)[11.2]. Anthropogenic forest degradation and biomass burning (forest fires and agricultural burning) also represent relevant contributions.
>
>Annual GHG emissions from agricultural production in 2000 – 2010 were estimated at 5.0 – 5.8 GtCO2eq / yr while annual GHG flux from land use and land-use change activities accounted for approximately 4.3 – 5.5 GtCO2eq / yr.
>
>Leveraging the mitigation potential in the sector is extremely important in meeting emission reduction targets (robust evidence; high agreement) [11.9].
>According to the August 8 Carbon Brief in-depth article on the SRCCL, Chapter 2 provides data on livestock methane emissions, about 66% is agricultural methane" and "about 33% of global methane emissions" come from livestock.[22][23]:38
Attacking our own food supply over a supposed 25% of emissions should be lower priority than for example taxing actual emissions so that the food suppliers can adapt, and people can stop going on vacations to Bali twice a year. Doing it this way will push farmers towards e.g. regenerative agriculture which can actually be carbon negative. Waging war on certain foods will accomplish relatively little and also alienate huge parts of the people we need to cooperate with us.
>and people can stop going on vacations to Bali twice a year.
Who goes to Bali twice a year? Those aren't representative at all, and why count on people who destroy so much to save our planet? We can ignore them and simply ban such spending. There are so many things I cannot buy (e.g explosive) because we know it's too dangerous for society. Why not prevent the very few from neutralizing all the efforts of millions? A Paris-Bali flight emits more than one year of heating and cooling for a whole family!
>taxing actual emissions so that the food suppliers can adapt
Wait. The only way this could have an impact is you make meat/fish so expensive that people stop buying it. Then, what's the point of adding taxes if you just want people to stop buying it? I bet you simply want to have the freedom to continue to do whatever you want only because you expect to have the means to pay this tax. So you'd only want others to change... and you argue that we cannot expect people to change (e.g become vegetarian versus to having the resources to eat meat/fish). But I understand why you don't believe you can get people to change since you start by excluding yourself from this possibility...
Also, can you explain why I've become vegetarian after I heard facts about the impact of agriculture? Facts that are now more and more spread (see OP's story). The money I save from meat and fish goes to farmers (I've since joined a cropsharing group, which is organic, of much better quality than what can be found in markets, and provide far more support to farmers than just paying more for the same quantity). I'm not pushing farmers to be carbon negative, I'm pulling them because I accepted to change and inviting others to do the same. There's really nothing preventing anyone to be vegetarian (or almost veggie) except ignorance and misconceptions.
> The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter
1/4 of world-wide emissions. In developed nations it isn't nearly that large of a fraction. The US agriculture industry is responsible for a little less than 1/10 of our emissions.
Does that chart separate out the transportation that's involved in agriculture, though? It has transportation at nearly 30%. If the answer to my question is "yes", then the question is how much of the transportation slice is part of the agricultural process (transportation of raw materials, to processing facilities, to packaging facilities, to grocery stores, etc).
And a further question, regardless of the answer to the above question, is: how much does this change depending on the type of agriculture? For example, I would imagine the supply chain for beef would have much more transportation involved than that for beans or soy (think of all the steps that go into making animal feed alone, and that is step 0).
The point I got from the OP was that traditional culture was low-carbon from day 0, and that at least Britain's climate change minister was jetting about an AWFUL lot, and there are plenty of jet-setters pushing a vegan diet upon the world when home-kept chickens are obviously a net plus, both in terms of food waste (accounts for a significant carbon and other pollution footprint, as we pay to produce it) and in terms of proteins that don't require killing your chickens over (eggs).
Contrast that with having a cat or dog (look at amount of animals slaughtered for pet foods)
I agree that our systems need revamping in a large-scale way, particularly agriculture, as you imply.
The only way you comment makes sense to me is if you talk about male chickens and even then it is not necessary:
When keeping chickens at home like GP suggest you can keep the around and it would still be a net plus in the carbon calculations since you are just using food that would have been thrown away otherwise.
That sides, unless we are going to bring veganism into this there is no reason to do that.
Again, if you feed them from food scraps you can keep them alive as long as you fancy or until they die from old age and still be carbon negative compared to throwing the food to waste.
It is just a choice. If you are OK with keeping livestock but don't want to kill animals, keep them around.
If reducing CO2 emissions is more important, kill off male chickens as well as old ones and instead keep more of the productive ones and share some eggs (and some knowledge - if possible) with friends.
Unless you use artificial insemination to only produce hens, you’ll run into a problem. You will end up with many roosters who won’t produce eggs and you have to feed and care for them as well. Unless you have a gigantic yard or want wild roosters everywhere, you’ll end up killing a lot of them.
The hens you’ll have will produce eggs, but maybe only one a day and they’ll skip laying quite often. You can avoid that if you get modern hens who were selectively bred to lay excess eggs, but they will require more food than “table scraps” (they really need calcium supplements) and their bodies will be destroyed within two years. At that point you either kill them or let them suffer - neither us a good outcome for them.
There are plenty of scalable alternatives to raising chickens for their eggs. Plant-based options do require mono cropping, but it can feed the world and kill fewer animals.
> Unless you have a gigantic yard or want wild roosters everywhere, you’ll end up killing a lot of them.
Exactly what I tried to say above.
It is a choice: you can keep them and as long as you feed them mostly with grass and kitchen scraps you still reduce environmental impact by not consuming eggs from grain-fed chicken - even when you feed some roosters.
Choose a quiet breed though or be prepared to make some significant peace offerings towards your neighbors if you want to keep every rooster around until they die from old age ;-)
Personally I'd rather (rot13, blunt speak): pubc fbzr puvpxra arpxf. V terj hc ba n snez naq juvyr V qba'g gbyrengr navzny nohfr gurve yvirf nera'g fnperq gb zr. V jnag gurz gb yvir unccl yvirf jura va zl phfgbql naq n fjvsg, harkcrpgrq naq cnvayrff qrngu nsgrejneqf.
I'm not sure what exactly is a 'healthy' relationship with food, or when the last time any significant fraction of the human population had attained this. Maybe before agriculture, but even that is dubious.
I'm not convinced it is possible at current population levels.
Meat is unhealthy? You may want to take a deeper look at where that notion stems from. I recommend the book The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz for a history primer. Or just look at the lifespan in Hong Kong which is one of the top meat consumers in the world per capita.
I think it's suspect that the USA, the number one polluter and the unhealthiest country in the world now wants to dictate what other people should eat while consuming 10x the gasoline per capita as others. For environmental and health reasons of course.
Between us, there is indeed room for improvements, but when we are discussing this topic with our fellow Americans, we must put things into perspective. Compared to them we are perfectly fine, as their meat production and consumption is an absolute shitshow!
OK? I live not that far from an airport and I can say I have noticed a significant decrease in traffic, so much that I pointed at a passenger plane the other day to show one of my younger kids. Until COVID-19 that would have been just funny, now it was informative.
Even at the current level of population demand on resources is too great and will be massively too great if poverty is eradicated (as it should).
The long term solution for both the environment and people's quality of life (I don't think that not being able to travel, not being able to eat what one wants, having to live in a small flat in a dense city with mass transit only is a good life) is not only to have an objective to cut emission but to also have an objective to cut population.
Now, that is a very sensitive topic and so everyone prefers to ignore it.
>The long term solution for both the environment and people's quality of life is not only to have an objective to cut emission but to have an objective to cut population.
>
>Now, that is a very sensitive topic and so everyone prefers to ignore it.
No. You are ignoring that countries whose population is increasing are, per capita, not emitting much. Please compare the eqCO2 per capita in Africa vs Europe or USA. If we ask a minority to curb their pollution, we can easily fix the climate problem. But those who emit the most ask everyone to not have children... because they refuse to change their behavior. This is a sensitive topic only to the minority that is responsible for the catastrophe.
Again, I beg your to research who are polluting more that what our ecosystems can endure and tell me why we should block human beings from procreating vs asking the culprits to curb their crazy consumption/pollution and leave the rest of the world alone.
> You are ignoring that countries whose population is increasing are, per capita, not emitting much
No I'm not and this is what makes the situation worse.
When people get richer they consume more. This is not only about CO2 per se but all resources. Global population growth has been a driver for both CO2 emissions and demand on all resources, but this is also compounded by reduction in poverty.
Imagine a world where all humans consumed as much as a Western European, or even worse an American, today: This would be much, much worse than our current situation.
So unless we want to live in 1984 meets The Matrix in order to drastically limit consumption of resources then we need to get the population down so that every human can enjoy a good life in a thriving environment.
I must say I don't understand why there seems to be a taboo on this.
> asking the culprits to curb their crazy consumption/pollution and leave the rest of the world alone.
It's not "us vs them". We are all on the same boat. The poorest do not want to remain poor, and rightly so. Everyone should have the right to reach highest living standard possible.
>When people get richer they consume more. This is not only about CO2 per se but all resources.
Why would that be inevitable? I mean, you're asking to prevent people from having children! I bet it's easier to ask people to not pollute (even as they get richer) than not to have the family they want.
I, for one, I've become multimillionaire in the last decade (thank you, neoliberalism /s) while cutting my carbon footprint in more than 3. It was much easier to do that than changing my family's plans. By the way, going vegetarian makes you richer but also not flying too, not buying a bigger house and a bigger car, etc.
Being richer does not require to pollute more even if this has been the case until now, but again, we're also having more children so why would you want fewer people polluting more when we could be free to have the family we want and be responsible?
So you're becoming richer but sacrifice yourself and stash the money under your bed? Because if you're spending the money you're consuming and thereby contributing to the pressure on the environment. That does not make much sense to me as a way of life.
You also do not seem to realise how much more you're already consuming compared to the poor on this planet. If everyone was consuming as much as your family is then the environment would be in even worse shape than it is now.
If we want poverty eradicated and everyone to enjoy a high standard of living then consumption per capita has to increase globally. My belief is that everyone has the right to have a high standard of living and to enjoy greenery, nature, living space. The only way this is sustainable is if the number of people decreases to compensate.
There is a massive difference between spending my money taking my kids to the local open farm with shows, animals to pet etc or if I spend the same money hosting a party with lots of junk decorations that gets thrown away afterwards.
Same with spending my money creating a house that is well insulated and built to last vs skipping on quality and adding lots of high maintenance luxuries.
Even just keeping the money and investing it you can do something right just by vetting and prioritizing funds with a proven good profile.
> There is a massive difference between spending my money taking my kids to the local open farm with shows, animals to pet etc or if I spend the same money hosting a party with lots of junk decorations that gets thrown away afterwards.
This strikes me as a very "first world problems" view of things.
What I meant is that there is a massive difference in consumption levels (both in term of energy and resources) between you and I living our comfy Western lives and the life of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of human beings on the poorest end of the scale.
Just a drive to the supermarket for our weekly shop probably consumes more energy and resources than months of consumption for some people on this planet.
Those people have the right to be lifted out of poverty and to enjoy a high standard of living, like we have the right to enjoy those standards but this is not realistic with 8 billion people. It's simply wrong IMHO to condemn humanity to restrictions and sacrifices, so if we want everyone to be 'rich' and save the planet at the same time the only solution is to aim at cutting population significantly.
This starts by a paradigm shift, we must accept that population cannot keep growing and should in fact decrease. Then adapt to that as it has fundamental impacts on the economy and social fabric.
Start with the entirely unnessecary carniverous apex predators (aka pets) people insist on keeping. If people cant get rid of pets, then asking them to avoid replicating their own DNA is going to be a challenge.
I upvoted you, but do keep in mind that there is a lot of loneliness and some of those animals probably save us from lots of healthcare expenses. Not everything can be brought down to simple economics.
That said I have said no to dogs myself - mostly because of cost and the constant need to be looled after - and the animal we do have is a rodent that we got second hand, meaning that food cost is leftover carrot shavings etc + a bit of hay
Have you considered that for many people have pets because they don't have/can't have/don't want children? Compared to an actual human child, the footprint of a pet is quite minimal and their lifespans are short.
Well, if we need to change our diet, give up pets, give up travelling, give up individual travel in general, etc. then I think that proves the point I'm trying to make.
One of the biggest problems I've come across are older people who say or think "I've got mine, I won't be alive when the shit hits the fan, so I don't care." If you can address that aspect of the problem, then you're probably half way there to solving it.
I'd say that a reduction of systemic issues to personal responsibility is a much bigger problem than that. Global warming is a problem of externalities and can only be solved as such.
To me it looks more that people from rich countries got theirs, but people from poorer countries aren't allowed to have theirs. The people from rich countries will stop them because of climate change.
It's easy to demand that others change their behavior.
Sure, climate change will have a worse effect on poorer countries. But what's going to lead to greater suffering: climate change in the next few decades to a century or 10-15 years lower average life expectancy in India? And not only a shorter life - a worse quality of life too.
The US has a GDP of $65k per capita. India has $2.1k per capita. If we took the US GDP, add India's GDP and then divide the sum by the sum of India's and US's populations we get a GDP per capita of $14.3k. That would be a drop of almost 80% for the average American. You can imagine what they would lose in their quality of life over that.
I believe that the potential number of jobs created on behalf of climate change mitigation would increase wages and income for millions of people and minimize poverty, and figures are often cited for renewables alone showing just this. What we need is a massive form of economic conversion (redefined as decarbonization) on a planet wide scale, and this requires close cooperation between existing companies in the energy extraction sector and the governments of every nation. I believe this project could also force competing nations to work together and promote peaceful relations and encourage new growth and trade. It requires changing hearts and minds.
> But there is new hope that deep cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases could stabilise rising temperatures.
How is this possible when you have water vapor in a positive feedback loop, which is a far more potent, prevalent ghg that increases with any rise in temperature.
"Water vapor reduction" has to be part of the message at this stage, not just carbon reduction.
I don't really see how this is possible for humanity at a scale that affects global warming. Most water vapour by far is generated by nature itself. We couldn't make a dent in that.
The CO2 is what upset the balance and we are by far the biggest contributor there so it makes sense to address that.
The point is reversing the CO2 does not reverse all that proportionally much larger increase in water vapor... eg. we have no choice but to address water vapor as well as CO2 if we want to have any chance in fixing global warming.
It's both, actually. Water vapor is positive no matter what. Clouds can be both positive and negative at the same time, depending on cloud type, altitude etc.
This is one of the things that are hard to model. Get this wrong and you can swing from a mere +1 global warming (what CO2 alone would do in 100 years) to +3 or more.
Water vapour has a short residence time in the atmosphere, is self-limiting (excess water precipitates out as rain or snow), and is already at equilibrium given ambient conditions.
The one variable that could drive additional water vapour is CO2, which by warming the atmosphere further increases the ability to hold water, and the amount of water vapour present.
If you want to reduce water vapour as a greenhouse-gas component of the atmosphere, reduce CO2 levels.
Just to be clear water vapor capacity increases due to temperature, for example, relative humidity measures how much water vapor is in the air for a given temperature. Any sort of increase in temperature will increase water vapor.
Yes, CO2 raises the temperature, you get a massive increase in water vapor, which again, is a more potent ghg. Reversing that same amount of CO2 does not magically reverse all of that water vapor. This is the crux of the problem, why water vapor is now also a problem that needs to be addressed.
The article, and many like it, does a poor job of explaining the consequences we will face. 1.5°C doesn't mean much to the lay man. Explain that uncertain harvests, tied to speculation on risks, will much likely lead to an increase in the price of bread. Add to that an increase in oil will also lead to a price increase.
Heatwave in Greece ? Greece is usually hot in summer so one doesn't care. Now explain how many houses were burnt in fire, how many people died, how much it costs to rebuild houses, where that money will be taken from, etc.
Consequences... Not prediction. Interestingly, my kids have hard time understanding the word "consequence". It's a difficult concept to get.
Yes, and it's not a topic they like to talk about. I have yet to meet a person from Germany that isn't outright in favor of abolishing nuclear, the best I've gotten out of one is to agree that it might have been better to do it after shutting down coal plants.
I dearly hope the Greens will not win. Reducing consumption is an extremely tricky problem, and likely unfeasible without creating large amounts of poverty. I'd rather live in a rich, powerful nation with strong workforce and military rebuilding after each storm than being stripped my last rights and eating worms while a tiny elite still enjoying the freedoms we once had. Please do not fall for the propaganda.
Find smarter Greens and replace your current feel-good Greens with them. For all our sakes.
A strong nation the size of EU nation does not have the resources to fix it. Maybe fight it a bit and try to not make it worse but alone that will not be enough.
US or China might have these sorts of resources, but as we know politicians prefer patches and blame redirection and status quo.
EU's and Germany's emissions are negligible anyhow (9% and 2%, respectively). It's all about the U.S. and China (and maybe India) at this point, especially the latter two that have the strongest increase in emissions. There is no point in inflicting arguably some of the worst politicians in history on these relatively small European nations. They should rather be investing in building a strong workforce and military that can rebuild after storms. The fact that this is not being discussed openly is deeply suspicious.
Germany's per-capita emissions are significantly higher than other Western European nations like the UK and Spain though (9.44 vs 5.55 and 5.40)[1] and pro-nuclear France manages even lower per-capita emissions than those (5.13).
Wildfires in Greece are common since several decades, fires are usually laid or started out of negligence.
There is no sign of "uncertain harvests" in all the years people have been speculating about this as a potential consequence of global warming. Crop yields are breaking one record after another: https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-world-...
I really liked Bill Gates new Book: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster[1].
I liked that it shows what we have to do to get to 0 greenhouse gas emissions. What's the current state of technology and what's still left to do to get there.
I often find suggestions like "Meatless Monday" or "Only fly when really necessary" etc, while probably good, not really useful advice.
In Gates book he talks about that transportation and "building things" is good and we should not stop it, but instead find a way to make it emission free.
I very much agree, and as a bonus, these more optimistic solutions – solutions where we do something instead of (just) stopping doing something – seem easier for people to swallow too.
We have the means to stop the catastrophe. We don't need more solutions, just to comprehend that our behavior is destroying our ecosystems and pick the right solutions for the right behavior. We just need to act on it.
Also, no one pretended that violence can be annihilated when we collectively decided to swallow that killing one another is not a right and we outlaw it (except in some context that is defined by laws and treaties).
Ah, I see you have not read the book. No no my friend, we are not all there yet.
Some things are easy like energy production (mixed sources including nuclear) and transportation (batteries and electrofuels, though the latter is still too expensive for poorer countries so we'll need to improve those even if we technically could do it). But for example steel and concrete, things we need insane amounts of to house a few more billion people until 2100 and to build those nuclear/wind/etc facilities with, we don't really have solutions for those yet. I would recommend checking out the book.
What I also like about the book is that it speaks very practically: Gates doesn't put the onus on developing countries to reduce emissions. Instead, he shows how the developed nations need to allow people in developing nations to reach the status of developed nations while reducing their own emissions.
As usual the elephant in the room is the global population.
We can't eradicate poverty, protect the environment, and maintain the human population we currently have.
Bikeshedding is always easier than facing hard issues so people focus on marginal things, like air travel or plastic cups, rather than facing the root cause of it all.
Do we want all humans to have a good life with high living standards among a thriving natural world? If the answer is yes then we need to be lucid enough to realise that this is not doable on this planet if we are 8+ billions.
> As usual the elephant in the room is the global population.
No. Thankfully, the global population is more or less levelling off. We know the recipe by now: lift people out of abject poverty (wherein children are the only ones providing for you at old age), combat child mortality (under which people have far more children to be sure that at least some grow up), and give women control of their own bodies and education (so that they no longer have to be child-bearing machines).
We've seen this work again and again, most strikingly in Asia. We know it works. If the same process happens for Africa, the world population will certainly level off.
There's plenty of problems ahead for humanity, but it seems that we don't have to panic about the global population anymore!
I don't think that's true. We know how to produce all the energy we need with almost no GHG emissions. Do that, and put greenhouses everywhere, switch everyone to a purely plant-based diet.
In itself that's a sign that we live in a world where our consumption of resources has to be restricted. This is a lowering of quality of life.
Of course food is only one type of resources. We consume many more and if we need to have such restrictions on everything then we only survive at the expense of our quality of live.
So, we can only eat plant-based food. We cannot travel. We need to live in small flats in megacities. We can only use mass transit, etc. This ends up being 1984 meets The Matrix as I commented somewhere else.
Shouldn't the objective be that every human enjoy life while preserving the environment? Have a large garden, have pets (someone commented that they should be banned), travel to see the world? I think it's better to have fewer of us with better quality of life and able to enjoy a thriving environment.
> In itself that's a sign that we live in a world where our consumption of resources has to be restricted. This is a lowering of quality of life.
Yes. The point is that the lost quality of life some experience by going vegetarian (full disclosure: I have not managed to, I've only cut my meat consumption in half) is far smaller than the one everyone will experience if this climate change runs amok.
> So, we can only eat plant-based food. We cannot travel. We need to live in small flats in megacities. We can only use mass transit, etc. This ends up being 1984 meets The Matrix as I commented somewhere else.
I didn't say this. Yes, travel needs to be shifted to renewables. And yes, cities are probably better than rural living.
> Shouldn't the objective be that every human enjoy life while preserving the environment? Have a large garden, have pets (someone commented that they should be banned), travel to see the world? I think it's better to have fewer of us with better quality of life and able to enjoy a thriving environment.
Great secondary objective! We need to find a way to do it that doesn't make us miss our primary one: prevent catastrophic climate change. I think we can do it.
A million deaths assuming they reduce carbon emissions equally would only be 0.0125%. In reality considering that vaccines are unevenly distributed in favor of countries with high CO2 emissions, it's likely much less than that.
Most deaths are of old people who had few years to live. They were also not consuming much. And they would not have more children. The CO2 impact of these deaths is negligible if not positive (in the bad sense) because the disruption of Covid will end up emitting more CO2 than business as usual (a lot of investment could have been used to fight climate change but were diverted to fight Covid and to support the industries that are the most in troubles (which are the most polluting ones).
Covid-19 deaths have been all but invisible in the larger scheme, at least to date.
Far more signficant has been the global economic shutdown imposed by quarantine and containment efforts. That's somewhat reduced fossil fuel usage, though that effect has also been limited. It was enough to show up in BP's annual review of global energy usage though, released about a month ago in July:
Your question was what the impact of Covid on population (and hence climate) might be. As I said, it is minimal, effectively nonexistant.
To date, 4 million deaths have been reported. There's been substantial undercounting, that total might be low by as much as a factor of ten (at an extreme case), or 40 millions out of a total population of slightly under 8 billions. That's 0.5% of world human population, on the high side.
Most of the dead were elderly, and would likely have died relatively soon regardless, though I don't have figures for estimated life-years lost. A human tragedy in many cases yes. But not something that shifts the baseline on global warming threats.
It's possible that Covid might flare up again, that there will be new (a) new variant(s) with vastly greater infectivity and lethality. I suspect this is unlikely, though the pandemic is likely to be with us for a number of years more. (I'm not an expert, some have suggested another several years, I'm thinking 2--3 is likely, and perhaps as many as 5, given the spectacularly bungled response to date.) Both deaths and lockdowns as well as voluntary withdrawal from economic activity (something that's been seen even in the absence of government-ordered quarantines) ... could extend further.
Consider that that 4.5% might be repeated for another few years, possibly at a greater or lesser extent (e.g., 2.25% or 5%). It's still less than a ten-percent impact on global energy consumption, likely a short-term effect, and would have little impact on long-term energy usage patterns. So long as energy usage is growing (as it has, typically at about 2--3% annually IIRC), it will double given time (in 25--35 years at those rates, using the rule of 72).
I can't give you a hard answer, but can give you the outline parameters of what will effect the response:
- Covid net population effects are effectively nil.
- Energy impacts are measurable, but small and likely temporary.
- The overall impact of COVID-19 on global warming patterns is detectable, but insignificant in the big picture, especially against longer-term trends.
This has been my pet theory for a while. What if the actual great filter for an intelligent species is the difficulty of escaping your home planet _before_ you've consumed all of its resources? I will — naturally — have a human-centric view of this, but it does seem like a very hard thing to do, given the physical and technical challenges of getting out of the gravity well, and actually surviving for extended periods in the harshness of space. Not to mention the travel time of getting anywhere worthwhile!
It seems pretty clear to me now that we're not going to make it. We need to cut global emissions by 15% a year, every year, starting in 2020[1]. As a species, we aren't capable of the kind of global organisation and foresight it will take to achieve this. I'll suspect we'll continue hurtling headlong towards the edge of the cliff (although there's a good chance we're already over it, and currently hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote) until there's a war over the last dwindling resources, or a simultaneous worldwide failure of food production.
I've wondered a few times that if we were to go back in time to the start of human civilisation, knowing what we know now, would we be able to direct our energies more appropriately, and make it off earth in sufficient numbers to enable us to become a spacefaring species? Then I remember that science predicted all of this back in the 19th century[2]. We did nothing then, and we're doing nothing now. Alok Sharma says it's a catastrophe, but "also insisted the UK could carry on with fossil-fuel projects."[3] We're in real trouble.
This is why I think escaping from a ruined Earth is fruitless if the tendency to grow and consume everything in sight is baked into our genes. We'd just ruin Mars, too.
We can't seem to escape from our own deeply ingrained instincts, only transplant them to every inch of untouched soil we can reach. I tend to see the overwhelming evolutionary success of humans as similar to a virus that is too powerful and kills the host.
My belief is that we will have to suffer the consequences first before the death instinct is ingrained politically and socially in every person in power who contributes to the destruction of Earth. We can continue feeling fine doing what we are doing right now because not enough people have died off yet to make the drastic changes worth it. Societies will be forced to become places where optimism is extinguished in favor of pragmatism. They will only become those places because the scale of death and destruction will cross an unwritten threshold that needed to be crossed first before that change in mindset could take place.
I believe this opportunity to save the Earth that's being proposed right now will not happen because no amount of hypotheticals or climate science fiction that warns of this will be heeded, because they have to remain just that by their own nature - hypothetical, instead of actual, lived human history. That includes what I am writing right now. Our imagination is an innovative evolutionary advantage, but it has ultimately failed us. Our instincts for growth have won out against any scenario of global collapse and catastrophe and heartbreak we can think of. That is just our nature as a species, and it is a sad thing to consider, but as a result, pretty soon everyone will have to hope that they're not going to be one of the billions of people that will soon die off from climate-driven warfare or famine or any other catastrophe that's about take place. But after the dust settles, we will gain the one precious, irrevocable thing whose absence is preventing us from taking action right now - history.
At that point, if we still don't have a better way of thinking of the environmental issues figured out, then I would consider our curious experiment in biological fitness finished, once and for all.
Yeah, how do you think planning the largest genocide in history sounds to people? Do you even hear yourself? Do you want to go to 6 out of 7 people and tell them they cannot breed? What will be the punishment if they do? Or will you forcibly sterilise them?
World population will decline in any case if/when climate catastrophe happens. People will drown, drop dead from heats, die from starvation, etc. It's the Lotka-Volterra model where the predator is the environment.
Climate catastrophe is created by humans. Climate catastrophe kills humans. Conclusion: Humans kill humans. The genocide (mass scale murder) is already here (assuming climate change will be as bad as worst predictions are)
Only the strongest will survive. That is the cornerstone of Nazi ethics. That will also be the reality of everyone when food and water gets scarce. Damned if you sterilise 6B people, damned if you don't and they die from heat or fighting each other for food.
Moral theoretisising aside, population will decline before the total climate collapse. The current ethical beliefs of feminism, harsh economic conditions for young people (inequality and foreseeable end of growth), depressing reality how we will die horribly from ISIS, China or Climate Change. All of them bring about to less pairs creating children.
But humans will survive. We are worse than cockroaches. Nothing can destroy us. Mars might happen. Singularity maybe. But human race will persist in any case as long as earth persists in any livable state (-60 to +60 degrees C, somewhat fresh Air and uncontaminated water). Humans will downscale to a couple millions but will remain.
The one who seems to be hearing voices in his head is you. I never suggested such a thing as genocide or forced sterilization.
I'm simply pointing out what I believe to be the root cause of the problem, and that if you keep applying ointment to wooden legs, you aren't going to achieve much.
But then talking about overpopulation is taboo, so let's just dig our heads in the sand and wait to get properly baked.
In every discussion of environmental problems, someone says this like it’s some sort of obvious solution that everyone’s too afraid to discuss. But I want specifics from you — what would the actual policy be, and how would you implement it?
Are you talking about the genocide of billions for people? I mean, that’s far worse than the crisis we face!
Or are you talking about birth control? That would have to be radical and start right now to have much of an effect, and how on earth would you get everyone to agree with it?
Both these “solutions” seem utterly absurd on their face, and WAY harder to implement that even to most radical non-genocidal environmental policies.
I do not claim to have a solution, I'm simply pointing out where the focus of the conversation should be.
All of the "be friendly to the environment" type solutions to global warning I'm hearing about are all completely naive and simply ignoring human nature and the basic desire humans have for comfort and improvement to their lives.
Barring an amazing technological advance that'll let us control CO2 levels in our environment at planet scale, I believe it's time to be honest about the correlation between population size and global warming and to discuss what we can do about it.
>Are you talking about the genocide of billions for people?
Obviously not.
>I mean, that’s far worse than the crisis we face!
That remains to be seen. The number of people that might suffer to the point of loss of life because of climate change is something that - as another comment pointed out - no one can properly estimate.
>Or are you talking about birth control?
This is an avenue that needs to be discussed indeed. Perhaps not the way China did it, but something more along the lines of what the US did with educating people about tobacco. And also discussing the far reaching economic impact slow population decrease would have on the economy and infrastructures.
That was my point. Environmental policies are IMO completely useless in the face of what the population wants. The problem is most acute in democracies where e.g. raising taxes on gas is a surefire way for a politician to commit political suicide. But even in tyrannies like China, I doubt they'll be able to restrain the wants and needs of their people to the point where we'll solve global warming.
This is false. Only a minority of the population is responsible for the catastrophe. Take Africa, a continent with over 1.2 billion inhabitants: their carbon footprint, *all import included*, is below what our ecosystems can support. The way of live of the majority of human beings is sustainable.
Why force countries that are sustainable overall (at least in terms of C02 emissions) to not have children because the richest are destroying the climate.
You can also turn the logic around with this. Many of the globalist institutions promoting climate apocalypse have a historical background in 'population control'. Globalists do openly discuss limiting population growth. What is difficult to discuss is the link between eugenicist population control schemes and the climate scare.
I suspect that bad-faith-social-actors will attempt, as always, to undermine this report and minimize the obvious need to act in reality on Earth circa 2021.
I suspect that we must come up with social and economic mechanisms for making ALL pollution the problem of the polluter, versus an externality for everyone to absorb.
I suspect that we had better find such mechanisms NOW, vs a later that is too late.
Yes. We managed before mass production and we will manage again.
It's either the inevitable collapse of civilization or a deliberate controlled ramp down, globally. There will not be some magic technology to fix this and we clearly are not going to be able to finesse this.
It's time to start considering and planning for a global slowdown of production and a radical shift in the way we live.
If we don't do it the biosphere is going to do it for us.
>Yes. We managed before mass production and we will manage again.
Sure we did. We managed 10,000 years ago as well. But I would bet that going back to live like people did 200 years ago would cause more harm to humanity than unabated climate change in the next 100 years.
Mass production and deployment of clean technology is the only realistic way to get out if this.
It's not like there are not options available, many states are not exactly poor and past experience has shown we can scale production insanely fast if there is an important reason for it.
> "We will see even more intense and more frequent heatwaves," said Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the IPCC report's authors.
> "And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world."
According to TFA these are the consequences to expect if 1.5 degrees rise occurs. Doesn't sound like "code red" to me.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 688 ms ] threadAnd the emissions are very likely larger than those of Bitcoin.
People can go on vacation by train instead. If you demand people use slow legacy money then I can demand slow legacy travel, ok? ;)
And that's the issue : climate change requires a global effort and if we want to have the masses to adapt, then we must have the elite to adapt equally.
The key stat is it'd be enough to reach the UK's target on carbon emissions from flying by 2050, at a cost of 0% for the first flight and 9% on the second (going up steeply from there). Of course, other countries may have different data but the principle should be the same.
The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people; they're taken by the richest. Take the United Kingdom as an example: 70% of all flights were taken by 15% of people [0]. It certainly isn't the poorest taking these flights.
So taxing flights will have less direct impact on the poorest than one might think.
Having said that, I think a charge on carbon is more fair than taxing flights directly.
[0]: https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/
>A carbon fee and dividend or climate income is a system to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address global warming. The system imposes a carbon tax on the sale of fossil fuels, and then distributes the revenue of this tax over the entire population (equally, on a per-person basis) as a monthly income or regular payment.
I'm not saying we should leave it as is, but there are easier and more impactful things to focus on.
I mean, if you ignore cargo, sure. If you don't ignore it nor that more fuel is being burned by an average cargo flight (due to more weight compared to a commercial flight), it'd inconvenience everyone.
If you really want to push there are solutions: Packages just take longer over sea (10-15 days) until we switch to an air ship (2-3) based transport system which doesn't have to pay so much energy of lifting.
[1] https://theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/CO2-com...
why? ppl that travel on private jets can travel commercial, or are some people exempt from climate change damage somehow?
Maybe private air travel in one country, e.g. from Munich to Berlin could be reduced, but not international flights without any resistance
I think deep down majority knows the climate is changing, but they are not prepared to make any personal sacrifices.
I despair. Many ppl are switching to electric cars thinking they did good, and yet they charge those same cars using energy supplied by burning fossil fuel.
I'm not completely convinced solar panels or electric cars are produced cleanly. More needs to be done about that.
How do we know for sure the energy used to make these are not adding to the problem. Even worse is that old petrol cars will usually be onsold to other countries, so emissions can't be falling?
An individual can only do so much.
Most people will bury their head in the sand. Those who take action may be pissing in the wind without realizing it.
Will contribute 6-10% of yearly emission in the coming years
However, I belive the parent commenter was more pointing out the unfairness of picking and choosing what to ban rather than imposing a blanket charge on carbon.
This seems to have been missed by most, even when considering that the parent is likely correct that flights have a greater, and increasingly greater, impact on climate change than bitcoin does.
[0]: https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actuall...
Honestly, that doesn't seem particularly well-informed. I wonder how this person thinks transactions are committed to the blockchain, and how this is separate from the mining process?
Unless they literally mean "the energy required to consult the ledger of previous transactions", which doesn't seem a useful metric.
The energy used for validation is a useful metric because it's how the bitcoin network can afford to stay decentralized.
Successful governments pick economic winners and losers all the time, and don't let chaotic market forces decide if they need an agriculture sector or R&D.
For a simple example of just how misleading econ 101 is, look at the effect of a minimum wage: by all accounts, it slightly increases employment, the very opposite of econ 101's prediction.
Forcing employers to give more money to employees (rising wages through regulation) may cause some unexpected/unaccounted things (more consumption etc.).
Taxing something (like CO2) will definitely do not help that thing. Solving just Bitcoin problem is both hard (how do you prevent making certain computation while connected to the network, or how do you prevent buying certain digital goods) and is only part of the problem (it does not mean that fixing part of the problem is not worthwhile, but they are easier ways to solve bigger part of the CO2 problem).
They subsidize agriculture because of lobbying and self-defense considerations.
In both cases, the government identified an under supply due to a market failure, and they judged that the externalized benefit was sufficiently large and so they stepped in to fix it.
In the case of crypto, the market failure is simply that carbon is too cheap. So why not address the actual market failure with a tax. If crypto miners want to keep mining after compensating society for their pollution, more power to them. It's hubris and risky to outright ban something because you just know there's no value there and all the people who ascribe value are wrong. Doing that isn't even analogous to government actions in the two examples you raised. A carbon tax is more analogous (it's sort of like an inverse-subsidiy as per your Ag example).
I like the carbon tax avenue for other reasons too. It's a broad, one shot thing that will roughly aligns incentives across all industries at once. Not perfect but a very good correction that broadly applies.
Not by all accounts. The literature is not straight forward in this way. If it is a null effect, I don't see that as an invalidation of econ 101, either. It could just be very inelastic for small changes in the minimum wage with elasticity picking up for larger changes (which nobody doubts would happen).https://voxeu.org/article/lessons-climate-policy-us-sulphur-...
[0]: https://qasimk.io/2021/bitcoin-and-ice-cream/
You would have to find a list of things that people enjoy but don't bring societal benefit that add up to bitcoin's climate impact. I assume that list will then either:
• contain things that should actually be banned or
• add up to way more utility for way more people than bitcoin
How do you measure something like societal benefit?
I'm sure we could agree that eradicating disease is very beneficial, but would we disagree about the entire tourism and entertainment industry as a whole?
I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.
(There is one thing that I think fulfills your criteria though, flights for holidays. They contribute more, and increasingly more, carbon emissions than bitcoin does while delivery little "societal benefit" - whatever that means. However, I'm not arguing anything here because I think it's morally wrong to focus on specific activities that affect a minority of people. And yes, banning taking flights for holidays would only affect a small minority of people globally.)
That is indeed a very hard problem and one of the mayor challenges of any society. But that doesn't mean that any endeavor that includes this notion is to be avoided. You gave the example of eradicating disease.
> I can guarantee we have different opinions about the value of things. That's why we should be free to make our own choices. We don't need everyone in the world to help define what "societal benefit" is for them, they can do it every time they pay for something out of their own pocket.
But now you are not arguing about ice cream anymore. You seem to be just generally skeptical of a strong centralized government. And you can of course argue that and there are no simple answers here. I was just pointing out that your ice cream argument doesn't hold water.
Unless it is "Any kind of government interference is bad. This is why we shouldn't ban ice cream. Therefore we also shouldn't ban bitcoin." If that is your stance, then ice cream and bitcoin are indeed equivalent for your. But that is probably not the worldview of the people asking for bitcoin to be banned. Then your post does not argue against their view, but against your version of their view.
In practice, there are behaviours which provide no net social benefit, exact tremendous costs, and yet are inherently self-perpetuating. Legal prohibitions can help in this case. It's a form of demand-dampening.
Cut carbon, then make a case for bringing back heavy carbon producing activities that seem to be of little use.
Given our track record, it would probably be best for us to scale back our consumption while promoting re-forestation. Nature can likely heal itself far better than our wildest geoengineering ambitions.
Planet was much hotter, much colder etc. So as a species we need to learn to cope and tackle this anyway, why not start now?
No that only shows we can change the climate, not engineer it to best suit humanity.
"Stop doing what broke it in the first place" (e.g. stopping CO2 emissions) sounds like the sanest option.
Also, few of our changes to the environment have an impact as great as the greenhouse gases.
The idea is to mitigate our impact on ourselves and the environment by reducing consumption. We already have widespread understanding that reduction of resource usage is the most environmentally beneficial change we can make.
I am proposing that this perspective has run its course. It is clear that human behavior can have a very broad impact, so we should aim to learn to work with the environment for the better.
This means learning how to intervene on "natural" (whatever that means) environmental processes such that they tip in our favor (ecological engineering).
We certainly don't have a forest fire season
China and India are doing it, the Earth is greener today than 20 years ago.
Do you have a source for this? It sounds like a glimmer of hope I could do with.
_Edit:_ Just found this source from Nasa: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/144540/china-and-in...
Geoengineering is a bit different, typically on a larger scale:
> Climate engineering or commonly geoengineering, is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system.[1] The main categories of climate engineering are solar geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
By this definition a small scale carbon capture process that is borderline effective is considered climate engineering but managing 1000’s of km of dams and dikes isn’t.
Geoengineering proposals typically aim to reduce the global greenhouse effect through several hypothetical means (like increasing cloud albedo.)
http://www.geoengineering.ox.ac.uk/www.geoengineering.ox.ac....
Dykes and dams that curtail flooding of coastal regions can be monumental undertakings but aren't typically referred to as "geoengineering." Hydropower from a dam could be a good way to reduce carbon emissions, but again wouldn't be considered geoengineering.
As for geoengineering. If you mean adding particles to cool the atmosphere, then this is a mitigation strategy (it doesn’t reduce carbon, just compensates for it). I think we need to research this to have a plan B, but it is kind of a desperation move, and quite risky, so I wouldn’t consider it smart to have it as plan A.
Weather should be very controlable by how much sun hits the earth. Which then causes heat, wind, water evaporation etc etc.
Large sun screen satelites (very simple ones that can fold out foil origami style) could block out a lot of sun at places according to stabilization weather models. Same for reflector sattelites, which could add more sun in specific places.
The difficulty is that we cannot send a hundred thousand sattelites out of our gravity well. We would need to setup basic mining and manufacturing on the moon for this plan to work (you can send sattelites into earth orbit at almost zero cost). The time it would take to setup a factory on the moon should also be used to develop the necessary weather models, which should then be tested out very slowly with the first few thousands of sattelites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
Altering albedo alone still leaves us with ocean acidification problem, but I'm not up-to-date with the risks of that (other than coral reef dying out, which is absolutely tragic).
Stupid. Nothing about this is quick. Climate scientists have told us for > 20 years. But sure let's post stupid bullshit on the internet and continue to do nothing.
We can easily say 30 years, there are very good arguments to say ~50 years and to get truly technical we could say 70-100 years.
There are general-interest educational videos on global warming from the 1950s:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=T6YyvdYPrhY
It seems to me that continuing to communicate just the average temperature increase is a missed opportunity to engage with a greater portion of the population.
1.5 or 2 degrees do not seem like much, but once one understands that’s an average made out of much bigger positive and negative swings in temperature, one gets a much more dramatic picture.
I suspect focusing on the widening of the temperature range, rather than the average temperature change would work better with communications to the wider public
I still know a lot of people who genuinely believe it means slightly warmer summers. They think I'm a crazy person when I mention the never-ending storms and lack of drinking water.
Also just dropping this link here as I remember watching it at the time and thinking isn't it great we're not there yet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA
Maybe there should be more focus on the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, extreme heatwaves, etc.
Although to be honest if this is lost on people up until now anyway, what hope is there?
A significant number of people just don’t seem to care.
That's some of it, although some others seem to emotionally reject any information about climate change, which is more concerning (especially when those people end up in positions of political power).
Manhattan was engulfed in smoke from the west coast. People were flooded out of their homes in Western Europe. And heat waves across the west coast lead to dozens of deaths.
I'm probably missing things happening in Asian countries due to consuming western media.
We can look at our response to Covid as a model for how we might respond to climate change slapping us in the face. If that is a fair comparison, I am worried.
If the same scale of efforts were used to fight climate change, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Right now I’m just waiting for the natural disasters being big and frequent enough so people can’t deny what they see with their own eyes. After that I expect things to happen relatively fast. Maybe some oil and coal executives that have spend billions spewing lies will be found dangling from lamppost too, when people finally understand what happened. (I in no way condone the last part, it is merely meant as a way to express that some people probably will be very angry.)
You did, there were floods in India (https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/23/india/floods-landslides-m...) and China (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/148623/flooding-in-...).
I wonder if there exists a website that gathers reports of extreme weather events (floods, tornados/hurricanes, heat waves/firestorms) worldwide.
Tokyo Olympics, specifically the heat has been getting tons of coverage in western media. As a Tokyo resident I can't recall a summer this hot over the six years I've lived here. Floods in China have likewise received a fair bit of coverage. A few media outlets have managed to join the dots but they appear to be in a minority.
There has never been an era where humans didn't have to put up with horrific storms. It took Pompeii 4-6m of volcanic ash to stop humans picking up the pieces and carrying on.
I don't think a focus on "oh there'll be more storms" is going to cut it. We have to be ready for storms anyway, having more of them doesn't change the risk calculations all that much in my mind. I'd rather pay the taxes for a big well air conditioned community centre to deal with heat waves. It'll be cheaper than what gets wasted on sporting venues.
It’s about more frequent forced evacuations, overtopped levies, and massive cleanup etc. Rising sea levels aren’t just larger high tides their also larger tsunami. Beyond that you just get more extreme events like heat waves in the Arctic, longer drought mixed with extra flooding, more hail, mudslides, bigger blizzards etc.
We’re looking at 100’s of billions in damages per year not simply adding a few AC to community centers. Though you’re also likely to have higher cooling bills.
The US government spends 7 trillion dollars a year. That isn't an alarming number.
However, things are getting worse. “The 1980–2020 annual average is 7.1 events (CPI-adjusted); the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2016–2020) is 16.2 events (CPI-adjusted).“ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/
Of course not all of that is based on climate change, but smaller storms also cost money for everything from snow removal to lost crops, and preparation for storms costs even more.
I guess major coastal cities around the world becoming part of the ocean is bad too.
It's not the increased natural "disasters" that will really mess things up. It's some places becoming entirely uninhabitable, permanently displacing many millions of people.
This is especially frustrating in the UK, where our existing warmth relies on the gulf stream; without it, our climate would be closer to others on the same latitude, like Canada.
The gulf stream is already being disrupted by meltwater from the arctic.
That is overstating the effect of the gulf stream. Canada and Russia have continental weather - they get cold because the interior doesn't have a huge heat sink in the form of an ocean surrounding it keeping it warmer (or cooler).
The UK is small and surrounded by ocean, with prevailing winds off that ocean. It isn't going to have a continental weather system if the gulf stream is disrupted, and it isn't going to suddenly have a climate as cold as canada. It may have unpredictable effects and may not be desirable, but we wouldn't suddenly be suffering from equivalently cold weather as the same latitude in Canada or Russia.
People are bombarded with articles and viewpoints and even lies to the point that they are unable to orient themselves - and just zone out.
When the easiest thing to say is to just tell them to "stop burning stuff".
Do we call it fuel? Stop using it.
Can't stop using it? Ok, but please use as little as possible.
Yes, I dislike storms, floods and droughts but these are thing we know and we are prepared. And it might be even cheaper to be better prepared for storms than to bear externalized costs of CO2 ... hard to estimate that.
We need some new technology, something very cheap, efficient and disruptive, that will force oil and gas to stay in the ground economically :-|
I prefer actual predictions of the effects, not bad analogies or useless data points.
What most people do not do while saying this statement is taking the context of the change in average temperatures around the world. What should be shown are graphics like this XKCD [1], which puts in perspective the average global temperatures in past 22,000 years. (spoiler: the last time Earth's average global temperature was 4 degrees below the average global temperature during the 1970s, the Earth was covered in sheets of ice). This is where we have well and truly allowed climate change deniers to take over and spread misinformation.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/1732
If you put it that way it's no wonder that they think you are crazy. Storms mean heavy rainfall that means more drinking water. What is your point, exactly?
I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.
I know that there are going to be some people even in that case to deny climate change, but that would be significantly smaller minority compared to what it is right now in case of covid (at least I think so).
> I believe that our best chance is to do as much as we cand right now and to induce a sense of climate awareness into the younger generations. Bring them up believing, well, actually knowing, that the climate must be respected and protected constantly.
Yes, I completely agree on this one.
Nevertheless, we don’t need everyone to accept the reality, for us to be able to take action as a civilization.
The professor always talked about what 1 degree of warming will do to the oceans. He talked about it all the time. It was his worst fear.
I though he might be overreacting a bit at the time, but not now.
He was an interesting guy, and was far from politically correct.
I remember his stance on people/bikes who don't walk on designated paths. The whole, "You are ruining the indiginious fauna argument". Well his unpopular stance was the surviving plants will be stronger.
I will never forget the honest worry he had over a 1 degree change in temperature.
I suspect it may not be trivial to find a measure for the widening that people intuitively understand, but it's worth trying.
Likewise for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations; "it's just 0.04 %" – dude, you surely start noticing the effects of "just" 0.04% alcohol in your blood. Or hey, try cyanide.
What is wrong with people?!
Look, I just had a glass of cool water, perhaps between five to ten degrees celsius. And I'm about to have a coffee. What's that, fifty degrees? With 5% to 10% milk concentration. And I think I'll be just fine. You don't?! What the hell is wrong with you?
If you want to explain why a two-degree increase in average temperature on the planet is dramatic, then you need to do better than compare it to something completely different.
If someone's home is 24-26C, and they turn on their oven to cook something for dinner, it will warm up their home, depending on the size of their home and ventilation.
Overall the average temperature increase won't be that much, but they localized temperature increase is very dramatic. Your apartment might not be hot, but that small area that is 200C is having a dramatic impact on everything else in your apartment.
Bonus points for extra comprehension if they have a basement or ground floor that has a substantially lower temperature. Again, the average temperature might be high, but it doesn't mean that it's hot everywhere in the house.
Understanding this isn't rocket science, and the only reason people are ignoring it is because people in power have a vested interest in keeping people ignorant of it by outright lying, obfuscating, or denying it.
A change in average temperature (either direction) does not imply extreme temperature swings. My current apartment is much warmer than my previous apartment! I'm not dying, and the extreme temperatures at the oven or the cool parts of the apartment are not any more extreme than they were before. And no, I haven't ever noticed my oven having a dramatic impact on everything else in my apartment. So, no, this kind of appeal to intuition about the average temperature in an apartment does not help explain why 2degC across the globe means more than just.. a bit warmer temperature. And most certainly comparing it to something like body temperature (which tends to be very steady compared to air temperature) does not help at all.
Are you sure? I have found that difference between 28 and 30 or 30 and 32 celsius is very noticeable.
Certainly, if someone told me my room was going to be 2 degrees hotter permanently, I wouldn't think twice about it.
This definitely does not happen to me in these temperature ranges. 32 is too hot to function no matter how long I sit there. 30 is livable, but permanent discomfort. 28 is more or less ok, through I prefer lower temperatures.
You can feel how those differences affect your body.
Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me.
I still advocate for mitigation/reduction efforts because future generations exist and they deserve the best climate we can pass on, but let's not pretend like we are on track to preserve any level of normal. 1.5C is more than a moonshot - it is behind us.
Obviously a lot of research has happened since then, so I looked it up, and the lag period between CO2 and temperature rise is much shorter than I expected. It seems it is just a decade - so if we went to carbon negative today, we could see results in under 10 years [1] [2].
Kind of unclear if the baseline carbon we could achieve will result in YoY decrease in temperature, given the feedback loops and it already raising temperatures every year.
If the research you mentioned is predicated on massive carbon takeback then I am highly suspicious. The public sector doesn't have the will, and the private sector doesn't have the incentive.
[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/03...
[2]: https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/16/is-it-too-late-to-prevent-cl...
I might be biased but popular newspaper in my country have interviews in which scientists do talk about that.
What also plays a role is that before the final report it has to be seen and corrected by governmental representatives.
I've done a lot of research into this because I am interested in climate lag.
As you say, these changes are already "baked in" and the natural environment is only to get more hostile to humans from here on out.
See this tweet: https://twitter.com/JFrancisClimate/status/13877671305657917...
And on top of that, there will be much higher temperature swings.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
(but still not targeting laypersons)
Scientific facts alone are not helping most people.
Recently there was torrential rain in parts of germany. And people were warned (per official SMS) with: Expect x liters of rain per hour.
Most understood, ok, so there is heavy rain. I keep my umbrella close by.
What they did not understand is, that this meant a massive flood, with houses close to small rivers vanished and over 160 people died.
In a "proper" crisis or perhaps "ordinary" is a better term, there's a point where the leadership needs to drop all other agenda items and focus on the crisis. Whether that's bailing out the economy, starting a war, or calling a new election, there's a time when nothing else matters.
The climate crisis is a thousand individual, distributed, manageable events that happen all the time. Forest fires, floods, storms, they all happen and they're all dealt with locally. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief and moves on. Every time. Forever.
It's the frog boiling analogy. Can we handle x amount of rain? Yes. Can we handle 1.1x? Sure. How about 1.2x floods? Sure. It will be like inflation was to our generation, grandad will tell stories about how you could buy a whole meal for a dollar. Except instead of meals, it's hurricanes.
There doesn't seem to be anything in the context of what you said in your comment that would lead us to a "let's deal with it now" moment. Telling people about the 1 or 2 degrees, sure, they need to know, but it will never bring anyone to a negotiating table.
Did not seem like much to me, until I realized that 28 degrees inside the house is "comfortable" while 30 is "too hot".
What almost alarms me more than the thought of a climate apocalypse is that I don't think this (a UN report) is going to have any effect on the opinions of 40% of the public who see climate change as some kind of job destroying conspiracy.
Nothing short of Florida disappearing under the sea is going to make any difference, perhaps we (as a species) don't deserve to continue.
I don't believe this to be true. If you look at the incentives currently in place they're well short of what could be considered the minimum recommendations of any of the previous reports.
This is not an indicator of a world that takes climate change seriously:
[Saudi oil giant Aramco sees profits soar by almost 300%] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58141607
The pessimist in me will only believe any of that, and any positive impact, once it happened. Not sooner.
Thats not a measure to help, thats a fake measure to stop goverments from actually doing something effective.
> When you emit carbon dioxide, the climate stays altered for a long time," says Solomon Hsiang, a climate scientist who is the co-director at the Climate Impact Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. "And so we kind of have to deal with that baggage no matter what."
> Today's adults will be dealing with climate-driven extreme weather for decades to come. But if countries transform their economies to cut heat-trapping emissions sharply, today's kindergartners could inherit a safer world when they reach middle age.
> "It's kind of like you're driving a giant train that's very heavy. You slam on the brakes. The train keeps going for a while," Hsiang explains. "There's some amount of heating that we would continue to experience," even with dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. It will take decades for forests, oceans and other natural systems to soak up all the excess greenhouse gases that have accumulated in the atmosphere.
Go back and read predictions about the future from a century ago that failed to imagine simple things we take for granted today like telecomms or high speed travel. They're hilarious in grasping with bad analogies to come to strong conclusions like this. This doesn't mean the person is wrong, just that we ought to not take their beliefs as being factual, particularly if we can identify they've failed to try to incorporate technological breakouts grounded in known physics and our expected collective incentives.
But that's part of the problem - there isn't going to be a magic solution to climate change - it involves lots of changes to the way we do things, some small and some big (the way we travel, and build and consume things), most of which we already know about - but often they'll be economically damaging or a change in the way people live.
The things that keep me up at night are not climate change, but runaway feedback loops that yield existential civilizational risk on the order of weeks not decades. For example, a COVID-like R0 virus that is highly fatal but spreads asymptomatically for months before killing hosts. Engineering and deploying such a virus seems plausible for a psychopathic individual over the next several decades. Basically anything where a lone actor can unleash a chain reaction to take out civilization are things we should be very concerned about, since they are total random variables. Getting various hedges in place like physical boundaries between cohesive populations (eg, a Martian colony) seem important to clear before one of these tripwires are hit.
Basically, to stop climate change in the next decade (which is already far too late to stop catastrophic effects, which are already beginning and will only get worse) we must significantly reduce the global economy. There is simply no way to keep growing growing the economy without also growing CO2 emissions in the near future.
And of course, global economic recession is not going to be acceptable, in an economic system predicated entirely on eternal growth (where "growing too slow" is already considered unacceptable). So, climate change action will be slow, small, and entirely too little to avoid the most catastrophic scenarios.
Better to see 10 more years of economic growth before a massive collapse, instead of 20-40 years of slow economic shrinking to a more manageable, carbon neutral world, right?
So, the only current solution to climate change is global economic contraction - especially in the richest nations.
The same is true for New York - any city at or only slightly above sea level is a foregone conclusion. Fluid dynamics don't care about your politics.
If it helps, going by elevation maps Disney World should survive with a lot of weather hardening!
I think it is possible to hold this off for the richest cities. It'll cost a lot to build, maintain and perhaps even upgrade it, for sure. The Netherlands had the big benefit of a major natural gas find in that time that gave a huge boost to the economy, otherwise this wouldn't have been possible. Also, there were less environmental restrictions back then. All that will make it more expensive today.
Besides being secret and likely buggy, any simulation of the climate necessarily incomplete, i.e. it omits quite a lot of phenomena. Complex systems are fundamentally non-amenable to simulation, but in this case, the results of the "simulation" are garbage squared, because they're "simulations" of some system that doesn't even exist.
This is the kind of stuff being passed off as science these days.
These people are not the ones who need to take action, so who cares?
Policy makers are the ones who need to act, and they are already well aware for most of the consequences of global warming. The issue is that a lot of big corporations (The ones which really control police makers) are not going to be advantaged by transforming the society to a more respectful one regarding nature. So things move slowly, until things are getting really bad and day to day activities are drastically affected by global warming
Trump is not doing what's right for his supporter, he is doing what companies who paid him ask.
Biden is not doing what's right for his supporter, he is doing what companies who paid him ask.
That's not conspiracy theory, that's the model on which our society is built on
Mind you they're probably the types to start a civil war when private fossil fuel use, gasoline/petrol/diesel, becomes illegal.
We had an immigration wave in Germany in the mid-2010's and all it did was help a right-leaning party without much care for climate change gain power.
Put in another way: regardless whether execs at the oil and flight companies are to blame, or their flying and driving customers, a solution must involve large reductions in the amount of fuel burnt (which inevitably requires making that much more expensive than it is now).
Yes they are - big corporations and governments only do things when the public goes along with them, otherwise they go bust or get voted out.
It will take people making choices, changing the way they live, travel, eat, and buy things and using the products of companies that support that to make any change.
It's not fatigue, it's ostrich politics. "If I don't look at it, it will go away." But it's not a predator, it's essentially a force of nature. We had this kind of (then social) problems being ignored lead to huge revolutions in the past. But this time, getting the head of a few lords abd ladies will be insufficient.
Without going into the religious bits and more spectacular bits of it there is an extremely interesting story going on in the last part of the book of Jonah in Nevi'im (in Christianity this is part of the old testament):
As Jonah tells the inhabitants of Nineveh about the impending doom they repent and the king of Nineveh puts on sackcloth, sits in ashes and makes a proclamation which decrees fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, prayer, and repentance.
Again, without going fully religious, this is an excellent example. When people see their "king" actually doing the thing themselves that they ask others to do, change happens. There is nothing religious about this. Here in Norway, former King Olav V was famous for, among other things, taking the tram during gas rationing in the 70ies.
Old people could still tell me back in the 80ies and 90ies that prince Olav and his siblings had actual porridge for breakfast like other kids.
Today royalty plays less of a role I guess compared to influencers and thought leaders of all kinds, but I still guess it would make a massive difference if next years Davos meeting was announced to be virtual because of climate concerns.
Or if a few tik tok/Instagram stars came out and showed their 2 generation old iPhones saying: I can get a new anytime I want but I actually do care about the environment.
Why?
I mean, okay, getting angry about hypocrisy is fun. But why would you allow someone else's hypocrisy to sway your view of what is or is not objectively true? That is not critical thinking.
My naive take is that it calls into question if the supposed catastrophe (from the 40%'s point of view) is real if the leaders aren't taking it seriously themselves. "objectively true" only works if you understand the problem without, from your point of view, suspicious people explaining it to you. In this case, the suspicious people would be the primary ones telling you that you have to pay this tax while they are mysteriously exempt.
That won't make a difference; Liberals will blame the Floridians themselves for being conservative, and Conservatives will say it was an inevitable part of God's Plan, that saying it shouldn't have happened is a criticism of His Judgment, and that saying that it was caused by humans is claiming the type of power that only belongs to God.
You think that would be enough? Don't underestimate how many people would be willing to shrug off mass death and destruction of others if their tribe asked them to ignore it.
Or are we still going to go after individuals eating traditional food while thought leaders fly across the globe in private jets (no kidding) telling us we need to change our diet?
PS: I'm already a enthusiastic carbon cutter even if it historically has been because it correlated very well with cost cutting and self sufficiency.
Do you mind elaborating more on this? Is it just a matter of consuming less == fewer costs?
Repairing instead of throwing away.
Avoiding unnecessary consumption, choosing what I prioritize.
Edit, another: Thinking smart wrt transport, haven't used car to get to work since maybe 10 years ago.
The problem is, outside of urban areas there simply is no alternative to owning a car because public transport has never been built or torn down.
I live in the countryside in Norway - a famously long and sparsely populated country - and I either work close enough to home to go by bike or I work far enough away that I can manage to pick up my laptop and get some work done while in public transit. And yes: I get to the train station by bike, bus or by feet, if necessary it is just 30 minutes brisk walk.
Edit: not every Norwegian can do this, but far more than today. I guess this is true for a number of other countries as well.
That's what my neighbours tell me when they see me shopping on my bike.
My sister lives in a suburb in Florida: better, but the weather is unbearable for half the year. She also has three children, making carrying sufficient groceries in a bike pretty much impossible.
If people can bike, they should. But a lot of people live in these sorts of conditions that are not conducive to biking, enough that "just bike to the grocery store" is not a realistic or achievable goal.
To be honest I'm a bit fed up with hearing it.
I would prefer that infrastructure in the U.S. were more dense, that less people were not required to drive everywhere. But the reality is that, as life in many parts of the U.S. is currently set up, people cannot rely on bicycling as a safe, efficient, and effective means of transportation in their daily lives. Biking, if you live in a place that supports it, is good, but telling people to "just bike" remains a useless and naive plan for addressing climate change. Your energy will be better spent elsewhere.
People enjoy cycling on country roads with hills and no bike lanes. Some also enjoy cycling in all weather conditions. If you haven't tried it, it is a bit much to call it impossible.
That said, I think people should be able to consume energy however they choose, even drivers of "monstrous pickup trucks". If it makes them happy or they otherwise find utility in it, it is their money to spend.
Without concern for the externalities?
Even if I accepted the premise of climate apocalypse, which I don't, the idea of allowing technocrats control over what the public can and cannot consume seems like a more dangerous precedent. Especially when we are talking about something as essential to modern life as energy consumption.
"...If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself." George Bernard Shaw, on eugenics.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1074477-i-object-to-all-pun...
Nothing can be consumed without some form of "externality" and the negativity of someone's consumption is purely subjective. Consider the first principles of the proposal and where they lead.
You'll note that the above poster invoked "monstrous pickup trucks", a clear indicator of tribal, if not political affiliation. Ultimately it amounts to nothing more than a partisan condemnation of the 'other' and their culture. The scientism rationalizing it is nothing more than a thinly veiled window dressing over intolerance.
Of course, entertaining this flavor of intolerance and rationalizations for central planning could be considered a negative outcome. The threat of tyranny, the fallibility of man and his predilection towards corruption should be well understood by now. Just as two parallel lines will never meet, these are axiomatic truths of human nature. Whereas climate doomsaying is the latest in a long history of failed predictions of apocalypse. Nobody should be surprised that the fear is used to centralize control over energy resources, but here we are...
As always libertarian arguments fall apart on close inspection.
I can assure you that I'm opposed to death panels and eugenics. Consumption is essential to living one's life. Under a laissez-faire system, one cannot consume more than he produces in terms of subjective market valuations.
Shaw's proposal is not libertarian, but illustrative of where the logic of subjectively determined "negative externalities" leads. Sorry that wasn't clearer for you.
If you want to change the behavior of people, you have to build out public transport and bike lanes first or you'll (and it ashames me to say it as a leftie, rightfully) get laughed out of the door.
Most poorer people would get money in such a system.
They'll choose the $6 one, and keep their carbon tax dividend in their pocket too.
They won't really be worse off.
On the other hand, the rich will be worse off because they take more flights, consume more resources, and generally cause more carbon emissions anyway from their day-to-day lives.
Taking a car lane and/or parking and making a dedicated bus and bike lane out of it will reduce congestion and increase the mobility of nearly everyone.
However there are other things we can do as well to reduce emissions as well as increase life quality at the same time (improve public transport and bicycle infrastructure) where poor people benefit especially.
Granted, that won't get us to net zero, but there are a lot of high-impact, low investment changes we can all make.
Longer term, if fossil fuel energy places rise, I expect a lot more pressure put on local governments to make public transportation more accessible, and to remove legislation that blocks the building of walkable neighborhoods and cities. I'm convinced that the vast majority of driving we do is completely unnecessary, and is just the result of myopic laws about how we can build cities and suburbs that tend not to get challenged, which lead to us just building in a really dumb way that ensures everyone needs to drive.
In fact their lives might well get better if the rest of us are forced into using public transport.
They should receive a negative carbon tax for their good behavior, which could be delivered in a subsidy for the purchase of cleaner fuel sources.
Or in a worst case, growing it and burying it in massive heaps so the already collected CO2 is stored and new threes are allowed to grow?
Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY
This way water, electricity would still be cheap for most and would incentivise to stop overusing it.
You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.
Ideally the poor part of the population should be able to use the roads in the same proportion as the wealthy part of the population. Putting taxes on road usage (which what fuel taxes actually represent) will hit the poor part of the population way harder than the wealthy (or even the middle-class) part of said population.
> You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.
That used to be one of the few remaining "pleasures of life" for a big part of the lower and lower-middle-classes from Western Europe. It was actually cheaper to fly with your lads from Luton Airport to somewhere in Eastern Europe on Friday afternoon and come back late on Sunday, all this while having lots of fun (from said lads' perspective). Taking this away from them will mean them having to hit the very expensive pubs/bars of Manchester or Oslo and not having the same amounts of fun because the money for purchasing said fun (i.e. alcohol) will just not be there. Unhappy lads may mean an unhappy populace ready to throw stones at the powers that be.
As such, the upcoming football matches from the next few months in the European big leagues will be a very good litmus test, it will be the first time in one year and a half when we'll have lots of young people together ready to scream at things (the opposing teams' players or the said powers that be). We've already had one game suspended this weekend in Montpellier (Southern France) because of fans throwing bottles at the opposing team's players.
Yeah unless you want to give everyone the same income or have some other way of not needing money to travel anymore, that's just not going to be the case. Also today, the wealthy could do road trips much more often than the poor could. That much won't change, I think the best we can hope for is either a slight improvement or not make it worse, for example by taxing heavy use more significantly like GP proposes. I consider myself wealthy but if using 3x the average adds 5x the tax, it's not as if I have unlimited money just like the vast majority of people.
And instead of one company or person using XXX, you will have a three small companies using X or one person having three cars in his garage that just happen to each be registered under a different person.
Exponential taxes are a hell of a lot of an incentive to avoid them and you see how far people go to just avoid linear ones. Also, managing the company tax depending on how much the consumer used so far is going to be bureaucracy hell. It's a nice idea, but I highly doubt it will be possible to implement, especially when far easier and straight-forward measures already fail to get through legislation.
If AWS can charge their clients by milliseconds then I'm pretty sure an airline can add a zero to a 10th ticket booked on the same passenger's name.
The number of products/services taxed progressively wouldn't have to be huge to make a difference. You don't need to progressively tax an electric toothbrush just energy consumption, but all products should be taxed based on their production externalities.
This still maintains the incentives, but removes, on average, the financial hit.
Aka those who are rich will simply buy their way out of having to change, and the poor masses will have to bear the load. Neo-feudalism is not the answer to climate change - the problem starts with capitalism.
I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production. There has to come a global moratorium on fossil fuel production and the wells that exist need to be capped. If it comes out of the ground it will be used somewhere and the carbon will end up in the atmosphere. The more low carbon our lifestyle the cheaper fossil fuels will get and someone somewhere will always buy and use them. Regrettably politicians dare not talk about this elephant in the room.
Everyone collectively doing their part will have more of an effect than sitting on their arses and blaming fossil fuels.
Instead, we should try for environmental regulation to be as unnoticeable to the individual as possible.
The unwarranted fetishization of restricted living is a central part of the green movement's image problem.
There is plenty of room for environmentalism on the conservative side (I am a conservative):
- self sufficiency / independence both at the individual level and as nations
- economically smart
- less wasteful with resources, better for the economy
Certain people - especially on my side - making this a partisan issue is something I should really want to stop.
What if people can't live the exact same lifestyle in a way that stops, or even slows, or even slows the acceleration of environmental catastrophe?
What if "safe for the environment" isn't just another brand that you can choose to buy if you're willing to pay the extra dollar?
But "safe for the environment" is a brand that you can choose to buy. Every environmental damage can be offset.
I'd reverse the question: what if solving global warming is something that can be achieved without outlawing anything, including SUVs, plastic garbage and wasteful lawns? Certain people perceive global warming as an opportunity to reshape society in their preferred image; (visibly) ecologically conscious, "green", friendly, local, low power, low consumption, etc. This can be seen in the discourse around technological megaengineering solutions to global warming, such as a space sunshade - usually you will find in the comments someone saying "but then we'll just keep burning fossil fuels!" Yeah, so? I thought this was about warming?
Loss of biodiversity? Sea level change? Loss of ice sheets? You can't pay a tax somewhere and unshatter that glass.
> solving global warming is something that can be achieved without outlawing anything, including SUVs, plastic garbage and wasteful lawns?
Oh, not even close, not if even if there were less than 1 billion humans on Earth. None of those things is sustainable in the long run.
Sea level change and ice sheets are a result of climate change and thus can be offset with carbon offsets; they're the poster child for the concept.
I don't recognize loss of biodiversity as damage.
> Oh, not even close, not if even if there were less than 1 billion humans on Earth. None of those things is sustainable in the long run.
Those things are negligible footnotes in the long run. And all of those things, including the plastic bags, can be run off solar. All it needs are the right incentives.
Beyond that, cap-and-trade scheme has worked to reduce SO2 emissions and it will work to reduce CO2 emissions.
To reduce transportation emissions worldwide, there needs to be greater emphasis on alternative modes of transports to cars, electric or not.
- Long distances should be covered by train/bus.
- Medium distances by metro/bus/tram/whatever works in a given city’s geography and layout.
- short distances by cycling/walking.
- an EV when you need the flexibility of a car.
One issue with EVs is that they aren't necessarily a feasible option for a lot of households due to their cost. Putting a market incentive in place would lead to a hundred different ways of reducing our CO2 emissions from driving, not limited by the ingenuity of one person or organization. More people working from home, more carpooling, distributed co-working spaces, more use of public transportation, even shifting how we design and zone our towns and cities, are a few things I can think of.
I strongly recommend that anyone who wants to take a very direct, immediate, simple action to move the USA toward having a carbon fee and dividend policy* take a look at this (or at the very least, send it to your environmentally concerned friends and family): https://citizensclimatelobby.org/senate/
(*a tax on carbon, where, that get returned to all citizens so as to reduce or even eliminate impact on lower income families)
And if you need both, you need individuals to make the switch too. And for individuals to make the switch, you need to allow it.
In 50-75 years we will probably be looking back in horror at the missed opportunity to avoid the ongoing economic collapse, the massive famine, starvation, and plagues that will follow on COVID, and the continuous wars as refugees flood from the front lines of climate collapse to places where the impacts aren't as severe and immediate.
Not sure if we agree or not.
To make it clear, what I write is not about individual actions but about smart legislation and massive campaigns:
- mandate teaching practical repair work instead of todays "feel good"/"feel bad" subjects environmental studies in school
- a giant hike on import taxes on fast fashion and cheap "use once" gadgets and electronics
- gradually increase mandatory warranties until selling low quality is a losing prospect
- make "news anchors" - at least in public tv stations - use more ordinary clothing, and reuse it.
- do make ads and tv shows about cobolt mining
- do inform the public about our unhealthy dependency on China
- do make ads about the stupidity of living in wastefulness
- edit: do mock "individualism" that consists of having to go to exotic places
- edit: do tax food import! Urge other countries to do the same! Especially anyone who burns rainforest.
Action against companies is an extension of action against consumption, not an alternative.
- hypocritical politicians and environmentalists traveling the world on first class/private jets
- negativity like yours and the one I originally answered
- misinformation/information overload/infighting: whatever good someone tries to do someone will pop up to explain why it is bad: nuclear, organic, frugality, you name it, someone will magically pop up to tell you how worthless exactly your contribution is.
I say: almost every effort is worthwhile as long as one doesn't actively destroy. At least spread enthusiasm and knowledge.
I'm not sure how it is in the US or around the world, but in Germany switching to 100% renewable energy for your home takes about 10 minutes online, by changing contract or company. Sure - if everyone did it there would not be enough supply, but apparently the majority does not despite being able to.
I'll just mention though that I think there is some double dipping going on here:
"Every" Norwegian seems to be happily thinking that they are using green hydropower, while at the same time the green certificates are sold to Germany.
Not saying this to discourage you guys, what you do makes green power more viable. Edit: The problem is Norwegians are living happy lives thinking they aren't contributing from power at least and nobody is telling.
I only want to help lit a fire under the feet of Norwegians :-)
And personally I could accept a small extra fee to get certified nuclear power ;-)
Edit 2: feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Although from an individuals perspective it makes sense to change on your own terms rather than waiting for it to be forced on you.
This is true. But if large portions of the electorate start living like GP, they'll have no problem with voting for carbon taxes and other measures that'll cost money. They won't be swayed by talking heads on TV shouting "environmental Marxism!".
That said I am also a conservative and I think I know a bit about conservatives; if one want conservatives to change as fast as possible phrase it in a way that sounds reasonable to the conservative mind:
- it is economically smart on individual level
- "repairing things is the traditional thing to do" and "it feels good to be in control"
- "industry should look for ways to save resources to stay competitive and increase yield on investment for shareholders" (sorry, English is not my first language, if this reads as a parody it is not meant as)
- "take advantage of the green wave". Competitive advantage: Point out that wealthy consumers will, on average, choose the greener product if they are otherwise equal. (Maybe poor ones will too, but we are here to sell this idea, aren't we ;-)
- On a national level: we need to get independence from China
- "reach individual monetary independence faster by making smart choices"
Doing this instead of continuing to make a partisan issue about it should go a long way I think. That is, if getting the results is more important than "being right".
People are already making money this way: just yesterday I heard a close friend explaining enthusiastically (I'll translate it on the fly from my native language as well as adding my explanation of why I think this was potent):
- a US jeans company had gotten hold of "the last real loom that wasn't sent to China" (local business argument)
- "hired the old operators to teach the how to use it" (traditional argument),
- "picked it apart - about a million pieces - and restored it" (self sufficient etc argument)
- and are now selling expensive pants - but it is real jeans (the actual sales argument)
> Doing this instead of continuing to make a partisan issue
Unfortunately, making it (doesn't matter what "it" is) a partisan issue has been shown to work, over and over and over. It's depressingly predictable at this point. People go into all sorts of mental contortions and doublethink to explain why the stance "their" side has taken is the "right" one.
People and industries who have more to lose from a greener economy have no hesitation in employing these tactics to stall or block change, and influence people.
> Unfortunately, making it (doesn't matter what "it" is) a partisan issue has been shown to work, over and over and over. It's depressingly predictable at this point. People go into all sorts of mental contortions and doublethink to explain why the stance "their" side has taken is the "right" one.
You are of course right.
But since this issue is already owned by democrats/progressives/whatever and since conservative thought leaders have painted themselves into a corner maybe I should say: we shouldn't say anything that makes it an even more partisan issue.
The more we can avoid the soreness of doing what "the other side want" and focus on "this is beneficial for me/us/"our country" - right here and now, next quarter etc the better.
> People and industries who have more to lose from a greener economy have no hesitation in employing these tactics to stall or block change, and influence people.
Of course, which is why we need to outsmart them :-)
The covid shutdown should have put this myth to bed forever.
Hundreds of millions stuck at home and no longer commuting took a massive dent out of carbon emissions and sent shock waves through the oil industry.
Individual action can save the planet; we have to be drops in the flood.
> I’m not sure we need to switch lifestyles that much, but we will need to radically change energy production.
There's no way we can continue to works as we do and plan cities as we do and stem the oncoming catastrophe with any alacrity.
Note these studies took place at various different times during the lockdown, and focus on different scopes of data:
https://pcc.uw.edu/blog/research/how-did-covid-19-affect-our...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-0797-x
https://earth.stanford.edu/news/covid-lockdown-causes-record...
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2021/co2-em...
IMHO, Governments ought to _heavily_ tax commercial office space to coerce companies to support WFH. Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
> IMHO, Governments ought to _heavily_ tax commercial office space to coerce companies to support WFH. Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
I think that's absolutely reasonable and something that should happen now. But "I now work from home because my company told me to because the tax on the office/parking increased to push a shift in behavior" is absolutely not an individual choice.
One person making a change has never been a reasonable solution for global climate change; advocating for individual action has always meant making changes in the aggregate behaviour of individuals.
> But "I now work from home because my company told me to because the tax on the office/parking increased to push a shift in behavior" is absolutely not an individual choice.
Correct, it is not an individual choice. It is an individual action.
Every world government has passed a law, rigorously enforced, that says each person can drive no more than 20 miles a week. dleslie drives 20 miles a week. Has dleslie performed an individual action to address climate change?
But not to be trite, yes I would have. The Governments would be coercing individuals into taking action that would have an effect in aggregate.
Ha! Pandemics, eh? :)
> But not to be trite, yes I would have
This feels to me like over-egging the pudding - but getting into this discussion is really more of a question of philosophy than climate science, so it's a bit of a distraction.
It seems that, beyond the semantics of what constitutes "individual action", we seem to agree with what's needed:
> advocating for individual action has always meant making changes in the aggregate behaviour of individuals.
> Make it so that the opportunities to commute start to disappear.
Ah, but the politics of it are important to causing change to happen. If we can't get voters to buy-in to changing their behaviour then Governments are unlikely to create such policies.
The important concept for the opposition to individual action, I think, is that the opposition is rooted in two ideas:
1. Individuals shouldn't be burdened with having to change the way they live
2. The burden should be on the big evil capitalist corporations
Neither of which hold much water, I think; the data behind carbon reduction due to covid restrictions shows that changing the lives of individuals is an important and necessary part of the solution.
And those big evil corps are mostly serving consumer demand. They're not pumping carbon into the atmosphere just because they're evil, right? Moreover, some of the largest polluters are in China, and China has been a major polluter for generations; it's not a strictly capitalist concern.
I mean, yes, we should continue doing that. Our relationship with food is unhealthy and also a massive contributor to environmental decline. I'm not sure why you contrast this with other improvements we can make, many of which, individually, would be less impactful than a transition to a more sustainable diet.
This is soo wrong:
>The AFOLU sector is responsible for just under a quarter (~10 – 12 GtCO2eq / yr) of anthropogenic GHG emissions mainly from deforestation and agricultural emissions from livestock, soil and nutrient management (robust evidence; high agreement)[11.2]. Anthropogenic forest degradation and biomass burning (forest fires and agricultural burning) also represent relevant contributions. > >Annual GHG emissions from agricultural production in 2000 – 2010 were estimated at 5.0 – 5.8 GtCO2eq / yr while annual GHG flux from land use and land-use change activities accounted for approximately 4.3 – 5.5 GtCO2eq / yr. > >Leveraging the mitigation potential in the sector is extremely important in meeting emission reduction targets (robust evidence; high agreement) [11.9].
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
>(...) nonsensical if you look at the math that is used to justify it.
Please enlighten me!
Technical summary of "Special Report on Climate Change and Land": https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/4/2020/07/03_T...
Also, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Climate_Chan...
>According to the August 8 Carbon Brief in-depth article on the SRCCL, Chapter 2 provides data on livestock methane emissions, about 66% is agricultural methane" and "about 33% of global methane emissions" come from livestock.[22][23]:38
Who goes to Bali twice a year? Those aren't representative at all, and why count on people who destroy so much to save our planet? We can ignore them and simply ban such spending. There are so many things I cannot buy (e.g explosive) because we know it's too dangerous for society. Why not prevent the very few from neutralizing all the efforts of millions? A Paris-Bali flight emits more than one year of heating and cooling for a whole family!
>taxing actual emissions so that the food suppliers can adapt
Wait. The only way this could have an impact is you make meat/fish so expensive that people stop buying it. Then, what's the point of adding taxes if you just want people to stop buying it? I bet you simply want to have the freedom to continue to do whatever you want only because you expect to have the means to pay this tax. So you'd only want others to change... and you argue that we cannot expect people to change (e.g become vegetarian versus to having the resources to eat meat/fish). But I understand why you don't believe you can get people to change since you start by excluding yourself from this possibility...
Also, can you explain why I've become vegetarian after I heard facts about the impact of agriculture? Facts that are now more and more spread (see OP's story). The money I save from meat and fish goes to farmers (I've since joined a cropsharing group, which is organic, of much better quality than what can be found in markets, and provide far more support to farmers than just paying more for the same quantity). I'm not pushing farmers to be carbon negative, I'm pulling them because I accepted to change and inviting others to do the same. There's really nothing preventing anyone to be vegetarian (or almost veggie) except ignorance and misconceptions.
1/4 of world-wide emissions. In developed nations it isn't nearly that large of a fraction. The US agriculture industry is responsible for a little less than 1/10 of our emissions.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas...
And a further question, regardless of the answer to the above question, is: how much does this change depending on the type of agriculture? For example, I would imagine the supply chain for beef would have much more transportation involved than that for beans or soy (think of all the steps that go into making animal feed alone, and that is step 0).
I agree that our systems need revamping in a large-scale way, particularly agriculture, as you imply.
When keeping chickens at home like GP suggest you can keep the around and it would still be a net plus in the carbon calculations since you are just using food that would have been thrown away otherwise.
That sides, unless we are going to bring veganism into this there is no reason to do that.
It is just a choice. If you are OK with keeping livestock but don't want to kill animals, keep them around.
If reducing CO2 emissions is more important, kill off male chickens as well as old ones and instead keep more of the productive ones and share some eggs (and some knowledge - if possible) with friends.
The hens you’ll have will produce eggs, but maybe only one a day and they’ll skip laying quite often. You can avoid that if you get modern hens who were selectively bred to lay excess eggs, but they will require more food than “table scraps” (they really need calcium supplements) and their bodies will be destroyed within two years. At that point you either kill them or let them suffer - neither us a good outcome for them.
There are plenty of scalable alternatives to raising chickens for their eggs. Plant-based options do require mono cropping, but it can feed the world and kill fewer animals.
Exactly what I tried to say above.
It is a choice: you can keep them and as long as you feed them mostly with grass and kitchen scraps you still reduce environmental impact by not consuming eggs from grain-fed chicken - even when you feed some roosters.
Choose a quiet breed though or be prepared to make some significant peace offerings towards your neighbors if you want to keep every rooster around until they die from old age ;-)
Personally I'd rather (rot13, blunt speak): pubc fbzr puvpxra arpxf. V terj hc ba n snez naq juvyr V qba'g gbyrengr navzny nohfr gurve yvirf nera'g fnperq gb zr. V jnag gurz gb yvir unccl yvirf jura va zl phfgbql naq n fjvsg, harkcrpgrq naq cnvayrff qrngu nsgrejneqf.
I'm not convinced it is possible at current population levels.
Your American relationship with food is unhealthy. Our relationship with food here in France, and many other countries is perfectly fine.
I think it's suspect that the USA, the number one polluter and the unhealthiest country in the world now wants to dictate what other people should eat while consuming 10x the gasoline per capita as others. For environmental and health reasons of course.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/articles/52/
I say we should try to keep it at a level close to where it is now.
But we need to set the expectations here and I guess today's influencers and thought leaders won't be of much help :-/
i dont think this is true, at least booking.com has very small decrease in numbers
Even at the current level of population demand on resources is too great and will be massively too great if poverty is eradicated (as it should).
The long term solution for both the environment and people's quality of life (I don't think that not being able to travel, not being able to eat what one wants, having to live in a small flat in a dense city with mass transit only is a good life) is not only to have an objective to cut emission but to also have an objective to cut population.
Now, that is a very sensitive topic and so everyone prefers to ignore it.
No. You are ignoring that countries whose population is increasing are, per capita, not emitting much. Please compare the eqCO2 per capita in Africa vs Europe or USA. If we ask a minority to curb their pollution, we can easily fix the climate problem. But those who emit the most ask everyone to not have children... because they refuse to change their behavior. This is a sensitive topic only to the minority that is responsible for the catastrophe.
Again, I beg your to research who are polluting more that what our ecosystems can endure and tell me why we should block human beings from procreating vs asking the culprits to curb their crazy consumption/pollution and leave the rest of the world alone.
No I'm not and this is what makes the situation worse.
When people get richer they consume more. This is not only about CO2 per se but all resources. Global population growth has been a driver for both CO2 emissions and demand on all resources, but this is also compounded by reduction in poverty.
Imagine a world where all humans consumed as much as a Western European, or even worse an American, today: This would be much, much worse than our current situation.
So unless we want to live in 1984 meets The Matrix in order to drastically limit consumption of resources then we need to get the population down so that every human can enjoy a good life in a thriving environment.
I must say I don't understand why there seems to be a taboo on this.
> asking the culprits to curb their crazy consumption/pollution and leave the rest of the world alone.
It's not "us vs them". We are all on the same boat. The poorest do not want to remain poor, and rightly so. Everyone should have the right to reach highest living standard possible.
Why would that be inevitable? I mean, you're asking to prevent people from having children! I bet it's easier to ask people to not pollute (even as they get richer) than not to have the family they want.
I, for one, I've become multimillionaire in the last decade (thank you, neoliberalism /s) while cutting my carbon footprint in more than 3. It was much easier to do that than changing my family's plans. By the way, going vegetarian makes you richer but also not flying too, not buying a bigger house and a bigger car, etc.
Being richer does not require to pollute more even if this has been the case until now, but again, we're also having more children so why would you want fewer people polluting more when we could be free to have the family we want and be responsible?
You also do not seem to realise how much more you're already consuming compared to the poor on this planet. If everyone was consuming as much as your family is then the environment would be in even worse shape than it is now.
If we want poverty eradicated and everyone to enjoy a high standard of living then consumption per capita has to increase globally. My belief is that everyone has the right to have a high standard of living and to enjoy greenery, nature, living space. The only way this is sustainable is if the number of people decreases to compensate.
Same with spending my money creating a house that is well insulated and built to last vs skipping on quality and adding lots of high maintenance luxuries.
Even just keeping the money and investing it you can do something right just by vetting and prioritizing funds with a proven good profile.
This strikes me as a very "first world problems" view of things.
What I meant is that there is a massive difference in consumption levels (both in term of energy and resources) between you and I living our comfy Western lives and the life of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of human beings on the poorest end of the scale.
Just a drive to the supermarket for our weekly shop probably consumes more energy and resources than months of consumption for some people on this planet.
Those people have the right to be lifted out of poverty and to enjoy a high standard of living, like we have the right to enjoy those standards but this is not realistic with 8 billion people. It's simply wrong IMHO to condemn humanity to restrictions and sacrifices, so if we want everyone to be 'rich' and save the planet at the same time the only solution is to aim at cutting population significantly.
This starts by a paradigm shift, we must accept that population cannot keep growing and should in fact decrease. Then adapt to that as it has fundamental impacts on the economy and social fabric.
Point is you cannot condemn the person you replied without knowing them.
I can make a huge difference with small changes without making neither nyself nor my kids into laughing stock.
If my lifestyle results in 50%, 25% or even just 10% lower CO2 releases that is huge compared to what is possible for others.
Thinking about the fact that maybe I still release much more CO2 than the average Nigerian isn't productive and doesn't do anything good.
I'll keep doing the things I can:
- keep my hobbies smart (I repair stuff, create software and grow fruit and vegetables at home and together with friends on a patch on a nearby farm)
- cook food from scratch
- teach my kids not to waste
- teach my kids the joy of simple things like hiking and tenting
- when time permits: shooting at the local shooting range
- when it existed: volunteer at the local refugee center
- and other inexpensive, interesting activities that aren't crazy wasteful.
That said I have said no to dogs myself - mostly because of cost and the constant need to be looled after - and the animal we do have is a rodent that we got second hand, meaning that food cost is leftover carrot shavings etc + a bit of hay
There's a desire to turn this into some kind of mass moral failing. We're all sinners with our cheeseburgers, or something like that.
This doesn't change the outcome. Mostly it's just an annoying distraction from the massive industrial endeavors that might actually make a dent.
Making more stuff locally would also be a fine idea.
It's easy to demand that others change their behavior.
The US has a GDP of $65k per capita. India has $2.1k per capita. If we took the US GDP, add India's GDP and then divide the sum by the sum of India's and US's populations we get a GDP per capita of $14.3k. That would be a drop of almost 80% for the average American. You can imagine what they would lose in their quality of life over that.
How is this possible when you have water vapor in a positive feedback loop, which is a far more potent, prevalent ghg that increases with any rise in temperature.
"Water vapor reduction" has to be part of the message at this stage, not just carbon reduction.
The CO2 is what upset the balance and we are by far the biggest contributor there so it makes sense to address that.
Edit: this is a genuine question. The last time I read about it the result was inconclusive whether it caused or hindered warming.
This is one of the things that are hard to model. Get this wrong and you can swing from a mere +1 global warming (what CO2 alone would do in 100 years) to +3 or more.
The one variable that could drive additional water vapour is CO2, which by warming the atmosphere further increases the ability to hold water, and the amount of water vapour present.
If you want to reduce water vapour as a greenhouse-gas component of the atmosphere, reduce CO2 levels.
https://skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm
Just to be clear water vapor capacity increases due to temperature, for example, relative humidity measures how much water vapor is in the air for a given temperature. Any sort of increase in temperature will increase water vapor.
Yes, CO2 raises the temperature, you get a massive increase in water vapor, which again, is a more potent ghg. Reversing that same amount of CO2 does not magically reverse all of that water vapor. This is the crux of the problem, why water vapor is now also a problem that needs to be addressed.
Heatwave in Greece ? Greece is usually hot in summer so one doesn't care. Now explain how many houses were burnt in fire, how many people died, how much it costs to rebuild houses, where that money will be taken from, etc.
Consequences... Not prediction. Interestingly, my kids have hard time understanding the word "consequence". It's a difficult concept to get.
We have known 40 years what will happen and now for our leaders those consequences seem to come as a surprise.
I hope the Germans will vote for the Green party in the September's federal elections and other countries will follow the example.
A strong nation the size of EU nation does not have the resources to fix it. Maybe fight it a bit and try to not make it worse but alone that will not be enough.
US or China might have these sorts of resources, but as we know politicians prefer patches and blame redirection and status quo.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
Yeah I don't know which one you've been listening to but this definitely doesn't only go for people voting green.
There is no sign of "uncertain harvests" in all the years people have been speculating about this as a potential consequence of global warming. Crop yields are breaking one record after another: https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/record-high-world-...
I often find suggestions like "Meatless Monday" or "Only fly when really necessary" etc, while probably good, not really useful advice. In Gates book he talks about that transportation and "building things" is good and we should not stop it, but instead find a way to make it emission free.
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-new-climate-book-is-fin...
Also, no one pretended that violence can be annihilated when we collectively decided to swallow that killing one another is not a right and we outlaw it (except in some context that is defined by laws and treaties).
Ah, I see you have not read the book. No no my friend, we are not all there yet.
Some things are easy like energy production (mixed sources including nuclear) and transportation (batteries and electrofuels, though the latter is still too expensive for poorer countries so we'll need to improve those even if we technically could do it). But for example steel and concrete, things we need insane amounts of to house a few more billion people until 2100 and to build those nuclear/wind/etc facilities with, we don't really have solutions for those yet. I would recommend checking out the book.
We can't eradicate poverty, protect the environment, and maintain the human population we currently have.
Bikeshedding is always easier than facing hard issues so people focus on marginal things, like air travel or plastic cups, rather than facing the root cause of it all.
Do we want all humans to have a good life with high living standards among a thriving natural world? If the answer is yes then we need to be lucid enough to realise that this is not doable on this planet if we are 8+ billions.
No. Thankfully, the global population is more or less levelling off. We know the recipe by now: lift people out of abject poverty (wherein children are the only ones providing for you at old age), combat child mortality (under which people have far more children to be sure that at least some grow up), and give women control of their own bodies and education (so that they no longer have to be child-bearing machines).
We've seen this work again and again, most strikingly in Asia. We know it works. If the same process happens for Africa, the world population will certainly level off.
There's plenty of problems ahead for humanity, but it seems that we don't have to panic about the global population anymore!
The demand on resources is simply too great.
Global population is a key problem for humanity.
In itself that's a sign that we live in a world where our consumption of resources has to be restricted. This is a lowering of quality of life.
Of course food is only one type of resources. We consume many more and if we need to have such restrictions on everything then we only survive at the expense of our quality of live.
So, we can only eat plant-based food. We cannot travel. We need to live in small flats in megacities. We can only use mass transit, etc. This ends up being 1984 meets The Matrix as I commented somewhere else.
Shouldn't the objective be that every human enjoy life while preserving the environment? Have a large garden, have pets (someone commented that they should be banned), travel to see the world? I think it's better to have fewer of us with better quality of life and able to enjoy a thriving environment.
Yes. The point is that the lost quality of life some experience by going vegetarian (full disclosure: I have not managed to, I've only cut my meat consumption in half) is far smaller than the one everyone will experience if this climate change runs amok.
> So, we can only eat plant-based food. We cannot travel. We need to live in small flats in megacities. We can only use mass transit, etc. This ends up being 1984 meets The Matrix as I commented somewhere else.
I didn't say this. Yes, travel needs to be shifted to renewables. And yes, cities are probably better than rural living.
> Shouldn't the objective be that every human enjoy life while preserving the environment? Have a large garden, have pets (someone commented that they should be banned), travel to see the world? I think it's better to have fewer of us with better quality of life and able to enjoy a thriving environment.
Great secondary objective! We need to find a way to do it that doesn't make us miss our primary one: prevent catastrophic climate change. I think we can do it.
But has any model taken into consideration about covid deaths?
Death don't have a great effect as the general carbon production (oil, coal, gas) are still rising.
0.05% of the world population has died from covid. Numbers may be wildly wrong but would have little overall effect.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Far more signficant has been the global economic shutdown imposed by quarantine and containment efforts. That's somewhat reduced fossil fuel usage, though that effect has also been limited. It was enough to show up in BP's annual review of global energy usage though, released about a month ago in July:
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...
Submitted at the time though there was no discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27798644
Your question was what the impact of Covid on population (and hence climate) might be. As I said, it is minimal, effectively nonexistant.
To date, 4 million deaths have been reported. There's been substantial undercounting, that total might be low by as much as a factor of ten (at an extreme case), or 40 millions out of a total population of slightly under 8 billions. That's 0.5% of world human population, on the high side.
Most of the dead were elderly, and would likely have died relatively soon regardless, though I don't have figures for estimated life-years lost. A human tragedy in many cases yes. But not something that shifts the baseline on global warming threats.
It's possible that Covid might flare up again, that there will be new (a) new variant(s) with vastly greater infectivity and lethality. I suspect this is unlikely, though the pandemic is likely to be with us for a number of years more. (I'm not an expert, some have suggested another several years, I'm thinking 2--3 is likely, and perhaps as many as 5, given the spectacularly bungled response to date.) Both deaths and lockdowns as well as voluntary withdrawal from economic activity (something that's been seen even in the absence of government-ordered quarantines) ... could extend further.
BP's estimate is that global energy consumption fell by 4.5% in 2020 over what was expected absent Covid. That's the impact so far. https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...
Consider that that 4.5% might be repeated for another few years, possibly at a greater or lesser extent (e.g., 2.25% or 5%). It's still less than a ten-percent impact on global energy consumption, likely a short-term effect, and would have little impact on long-term energy usage patterns. So long as energy usage is growing (as it has, typically at about 2--3% annually IIRC), it will double given time (in 25--35 years at those rates, using the rule of 72).
I can't give you a hard answer, but can give you the outline parameters of what will effect the response:
- Covid net population effects are effectively nil.
- Energy impacts are measurable, but small and likely temporary.
- The overall impact of COVID-19 on global warming patterns is detectable, but insignificant in the big picture, especially against longer-term trends.
I now realize that this is not a topic I should've started.
And my second point was that I agree with you that the energy reduction is only temporary
So to does quietly researching at times ;-)
... though if you're getting stuck, asking for clues, cues, or pointers is fair game.
Every decision maker should read that list.
It seems pretty clear to me now that we're not going to make it. We need to cut global emissions by 15% a year, every year, starting in 2020[1]. As a species, we aren't capable of the kind of global organisation and foresight it will take to achieve this. I'll suspect we'll continue hurtling headlong towards the edge of the cliff (although there's a good chance we're already over it, and currently hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote) until there's a war over the last dwindling resources, or a simultaneous worldwide failure of food production.
I've wondered a few times that if we were to go back in time to the start of human civilisation, knowing what we know now, would we be able to direct our energies more appropriately, and make it off earth in sufficient numbers to enable us to become a spacefaring species? Then I remember that science predicted all of this back in the 19th century[2]. We did nothing then, and we're doing nothing now. Alok Sharma says it's a catastrophe, but "also insisted the UK could carry on with fossil-fuel projects."[3] We're in real trouble.
[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263... [2] https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/were-on-...
We can't seem to escape from our own deeply ingrained instincts, only transplant them to every inch of untouched soil we can reach. I tend to see the overwhelming evolutionary success of humans as similar to a virus that is too powerful and kills the host.
My belief is that we will have to suffer the consequences first before the death instinct is ingrained politically and socially in every person in power who contributes to the destruction of Earth. We can continue feeling fine doing what we are doing right now because not enough people have died off yet to make the drastic changes worth it. Societies will be forced to become places where optimism is extinguished in favor of pragmatism. They will only become those places because the scale of death and destruction will cross an unwritten threshold that needed to be crossed first before that change in mindset could take place.
I believe this opportunity to save the Earth that's being proposed right now will not happen because no amount of hypotheticals or climate science fiction that warns of this will be heeded, because they have to remain just that by their own nature - hypothetical, instead of actual, lived human history. That includes what I am writing right now. Our imagination is an innovative evolutionary advantage, but it has ultimately failed us. Our instincts for growth have won out against any scenario of global collapse and catastrophe and heartbreak we can think of. That is just our nature as a species, and it is a sad thing to consider, but as a result, pretty soon everyone will have to hope that they're not going to be one of the billions of people that will soon die off from climate-driven warfare or famine or any other catastrophe that's about take place. But after the dust settles, we will gain the one precious, irrevocable thing whose absence is preventing us from taking action right now - history.
At that point, if we still don't have a better way of thinking of the environmental issues figured out, then I would consider our curious experiment in biological fitness finished, once and for all.
But climate change is just a symptom, and absolutely not the disease.
No one seems to want to discuss or even mention the actual root cause of climate change, namely: there are simply too many people on the planet.
Go back to less than 1B human on planet earth, and climate change will stop being a problem in a heartbeat.
But the implications of such a drastic population decrease are simply impossible for any politician to even consider, much less discuss openly.
Not to mention the swath of folks for whom "be fruitful and multiply" is still a basic moral tenet.
Climate catastrophe is created by humans. Climate catastrophe kills humans. Conclusion: Humans kill humans. The genocide (mass scale murder) is already here (assuming climate change will be as bad as worst predictions are)
Only the strongest will survive. That is the cornerstone of Nazi ethics. That will also be the reality of everyone when food and water gets scarce. Damned if you sterilise 6B people, damned if you don't and they die from heat or fighting each other for food.
Moral theoretisising aside, population will decline before the total climate collapse. The current ethical beliefs of feminism, harsh economic conditions for young people (inequality and foreseeable end of growth), depressing reality how we will die horribly from ISIS, China or Climate Change. All of them bring about to less pairs creating children.
But humans will survive. We are worse than cockroaches. Nothing can destroy us. Mars might happen. Singularity maybe. But human race will persist in any case as long as earth persists in any livable state (-60 to +60 degrees C, somewhat fresh Air and uncontaminated water). Humans will downscale to a couple millions but will remain.
The one who seems to be hearing voices in his head is you. I never suggested such a thing as genocide or forced sterilization.
I'm simply pointing out what I believe to be the root cause of the problem, and that if you keep applying ointment to wooden legs, you aren't going to achieve much.
But then talking about overpopulation is taboo, so let's just dig our heads in the sand and wait to get properly baked.
How do you know it's 1 billion and not 1 million or 10 billion? Hint: you don't know.
This is non-actionable opinion and therefore actively harmful as it further propagates no-action on climate change or solving problems whatsoever.
The population is peaking anyway, growth rates are dramatically slowing, so this is not at all a relevant point.
I certainly don't.
That wasn't the point. The point was that this is the conversation that matters, not how much cows fart.
But the downvotes of my comment are its perfect vindication: it's not something that anyone is willing to have honest conversations about.
Are you talking about the genocide of billions for people? I mean, that’s far worse than the crisis we face!
Or are you talking about birth control? That would have to be radical and start right now to have much of an effect, and how on earth would you get everyone to agree with it?
Both these “solutions” seem utterly absurd on their face, and WAY harder to implement that even to most radical non-genocidal environmental policies.
I do not claim to have a solution, I'm simply pointing out where the focus of the conversation should be.
All of the "be friendly to the environment" type solutions to global warning I'm hearing about are all completely naive and simply ignoring human nature and the basic desire humans have for comfort and improvement to their lives.
Barring an amazing technological advance that'll let us control CO2 levels in our environment at planet scale, I believe it's time to be honest about the correlation between population size and global warming and to discuss what we can do about it.
>Are you talking about the genocide of billions for people?
Obviously not.
>I mean, that’s far worse than the crisis we face!
That remains to be seen. The number of people that might suffer to the point of loss of life because of climate change is something that - as another comment pointed out - no one can properly estimate.
>Or are you talking about birth control?
This is an avenue that needs to be discussed indeed. Perhaps not the way China did it, but something more along the lines of what the US did with educating people about tobacco. And also discussing the far reaching economic impact slow population decrease would have on the economy and infrastructures.
>most radical non-genocidal environmental policies.
That was my point. Environmental policies are IMO completely useless in the face of what the population wants. The problem is most acute in democracies where e.g. raising taxes on gas is a surefire way for a politician to commit political suicide. But even in tyrannies like China, I doubt they'll be able to restrain the wants and needs of their people to the point where we'll solve global warming.
This is false. Only a minority of the population is responsible for the catastrophe. Take Africa, a continent with over 1.2 billion inhabitants: their carbon footprint, *all import included*, is below what our ecosystems can support. The way of live of the majority of human beings is sustainable.
Why force countries that are sustainable overall (at least in terms of C02 emissions) to not have children because the richest are destroying the climate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
By which time it'll be way too late, so I'm not sure how that helps.
I suspect that bad-faith-social-actors will attempt, as always, to undermine this report and minimize the obvious need to act in reality on Earth circa 2021.
I suspect that we must come up with social and economic mechanisms for making ALL pollution the problem of the polluter, versus an externality for everyone to absorb.
I suspect that we had better find such mechanisms NOW, vs a later that is too late.
What do we ramp down? Electronics? Clothes? Food? Transport?
It's either the inevitable collapse of civilization or a deliberate controlled ramp down, globally. There will not be some magic technology to fix this and we clearly are not going to be able to finesse this.
It's time to start considering and planning for a global slowdown of production and a radical shift in the way we live.
If we don't do it the biosphere is going to do it for us.
Sure we did. We managed 10,000 years ago as well. But I would bet that going back to live like people did 200 years ago would cause more harm to humanity than unabated climate change in the next 100 years.
It's not like there are not options available, many states are not exactly poor and past experience has shown we can scale production insanely fast if there is an important reason for it.
I'm talking about a global change. And if we don't do it the biosphere will do it for us.
- Don't eat meat
- Don't use plastic
- Don't use cars
- Grow your own food
- Love the earth
And yes Babylon is literally burning.
> "And we will also see an increase in heavy rainfall events on a global scale, and also increases in some types of droughts in some regions of the world."
According to TFA these are the consequences to expect if 1.5 degrees rise occurs. Doesn't sound like "code red" to me.