It's unlikely that they'll die from climate change. But it is much more likely that they'll die from wars caused by climate change. It is pretty much certain that their lives will be much worse because of climate change.
serious war is always "around the corner". Remember that the fall of Rome was predicted by doom mongers for hundreds of years before it transpired to be true. Should today transpire to be similar (e.g. window of hundreds of years) than you're more likely to be wrong about this than right.
For example your narrative is failing to account for the horror of mutually assured destruction which is a strong psychological factor in wars between major powers.
sure that's standard fare, and a far cry from the doom drums of a world war III blitzkrieg that appears to be a general doomer theme on this subject. I mean Russia annexed Crimea six years ago and we're all still alive and Putin has a lifespan so its not even an unstoppable trend.
We are under a new cold War and people don't seem to realize this.
Russia has had troops around Ukraine for the last 7 years. The Donetsk and Lugansk "republics" exist since 2014. Russia is waiting for Ukraine's move since then.
As long as USA has bases in Japan and has military presence in Taiwan... China won't make a move. It's easier to wait for USA to leave though.
We'll see continuous provocation between the blocks (most recently, Afghanistan Taliban Regime, Belorussian usage of immigrants against the EU, etc). But a serious war around the corner sounds a bit too far from reality.
I hope so. Putin was the first to push the limits. He got away with Ukraine without any serious response from the West. Now he is encouraged, and the only question remains is whether or not NATO is really ready to got to war over the Baltics. NATOs de-facto defeat in Afghanistan definitely didn't help in projecting strength, nor is the constant in-fighting within the EU.
China is doing the same now with Taiwan. Try calling Taiwan a country as a movie star -> forced apology. Bodies like the IOC already falted. No guarantee that sometime someone tries, or feels forced to try for whatever reason, to push it. If the West doesn't react to that, well, then all the others will push the limits as well.
After the pro-EU Ukrainians ignited the Euromaidan movement (to remove a Kremlin aligned president) a civil war started in Ukraine. At that point Putin supported one side of the war and got Crimea for almost nothing. There's also the closely related Donbas war which never stopped. So he got the first place at it.
USA has lost its image of "being the police of the world" and the countries that depend on that image are suffering. Their future looks quite grim. Besides that, Taiwan isn't recognized by the UN since 1971 and by the IOC since 1981. The west didn't react back then either.
Regarding Taiwan, I honestly never understood why everyone caved to China already back then. Ok, today it is all about money. Back then, I don't know. Maybe there was hope to unite China under a pro-West government? Because even the DDR and North Korea are / were recognized.
My opinion . I don’t think current administration would do anything in response to an invasion of Taiwan. Our allies certainly know we are weak.
This is the perfect time for China. Before the next election and a possibly hardline guy is elected.
Cuban mistake crisis happened because Kennedy was perceived as weak willed. The generals behind him were not and pushed him hard toward stronger response. Was close to an American revolt.
Wouldn't be too surprised if China and Russia coordinated their territorial ambitions. Sino-Russian relations can get strained at times but overall are good. It seems they have a common adversary in the US lead western world. I doubt there's much appetite amongst the public in the west for World War III, even if it were to be non-nuclear. It's hard to get good information but from what I know of China's naval capabilities, their limited scope might be the biggest impediment to taking over Taiwan rather than worry about geopolitical reactions to it.
This was the case with China/Taiwan and I am not sure why this isn't being reported on, but in his talks with Xi Jinping, President Biden said that the US supports a One China model and won't interfere with Taiwan. I am not actually sure what might come of that but it sound like permission to invade. I am also seeing chip manufacturers in the US quickly ramp up but that could be a coincidence. I really don't know what to make of it. It was my understanding that Taiwan made chips that the US could not make?
> Serious war is around the corner. Not hypothetical wars.
Serious war may look different from the past of nation-state wars. We're living through the emergence of network states. Given how the Internet enables non-tangible property (I.e., domain names that one can use to build businesses, associations, non-profits; bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto-projects) through communications protocols and cryptographic mathematics, its no longer necessary to wage physical war to gain an advantage. Thus we see a massive rise in persistent threat actors, which could be world war three already happening, but we don't recognize it yet because we're used to observing nation-state wars, not network state wars. Perhaps the modern age of nation state dominance ran from the Peace of Westphalia to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the design of the World-Wide-Web by Berners-Lee.
There will be actual kinetic warfare between Westphalian nation states ALSO.
Just because there's 'new' war, doesn't mean the old dirty war will go away.
Especially because crypto can't replace aquifers or reduce flooding and other things lost in global change.
So, you're not wrong, but also omitting a significant actual current threat.
wars caused by climate change, or wars caused by actions taken (in good faith) against climate change?
I believe there is a risk that the current activistic climate movement will do similar harm to the society in general as the last decades aggressive movement to liberalism in the "west part" of the world. The liberalistic movement is like running with a rubber band - it will force the societies to become repressive. I hope I'm wrong, but the climate change movement will similar cause (negative) unplanned effects..
I just don't see that happening, especially given the extremely slow rate at which climate is changing. Personally, I haven't really perceived the change in my lifetime (30+ years). Of course, I'm not saying it's not happening, just my perception of it. Care to share some articles that support this scenario?
> I just don't see that happening, especially given the extremely slow rate at which climate is changing. Personally, I haven't really perceived the change in my lifetime (30+ years).
Where do you live?
I'm originally from Brazil, I live now in Sweden.
In Brazil during my lifetime I lived through a massive deforestation of the Amazon. I saw landscapes change from lush jungles into arid and depleted soils. I went to places in the Pantanal area as a kid that were completely transformed 20 years later, rivers drying up and a different kind of flora was taking over parts of what used to be wetlands.
In Sweden I have less than a decade around so my own experience is pretty limited. Here I can only get a glimpse of the changes through the eyes of my local friends, my girlfriend parents and other older people I talk to have noticed how much shorter and warmer winters have got. How hot summers are happening more frequently. The winter season used to last almost a month longer and snow wasn't a possibility but a given. Now they live through winters where less than 5 days of snowy days are a reality. Planning your skiing season varies a lot between years where when I talk to older people they just used to consider it a given that there would be a skiing season in most parts of the country (maybe except for the south in Skåne).
The warming is much more prominent closer to the poles.
The climate is not changing slowly in my experience, given the size of the system it's changing pretty fucking fast.
Well, I remember two-lane streets being single lane during winter because one lane was used to pile up snow. The ski resorts I learned skiing as a kid removed their lifts 20 years ago for a lack of snow, some even more than 20 years ago. The town with the single lane streets in winter? Last year my parents removed snow from their drive way 4 times during winter, and it was a snowy one there.
Another example, 8 years ago when we built our house, we did the roof between Christmas and New Year's Eve. We worked in t-shirts because otherwise it wasn't bearable at close to 20 ° C in plain sun. In dead winter, normal temperatures would have been more like -10° C. And somewhere around 20 cm of snow.
I remember 6 hundred-year floods from top of my head in the last 20 years. Climate change is here, it is happening. And at least where I live you see it everyday.
The trend for “one in a decade/century” weather events to happen more often than would be indicated by simple statistics is pretty worrying and it isn’t helped that statistics being what they are, people looking to deny evidence can push back with arguments about the distribution of a random sample not being related to its overall average over time.
> But it is much more likely that they'll die from wars caused by climate change.
For kids in rich countries, it is much more likely that they'll kill in wars caused by climate change (or vote / pay for soldiers to do the killing for them).
Sadly, climate refugees will be an easy target for modern armies, and when voters see millions of starving people trying to cross their borders, they will listen to the politicians who call this an invasion that needs a forceful response.
Some places are already seeing these harsh political forces playing out, for example the UK, where the government is trying to make it illegal to rescue asylum seekers in boats[0] at a time when dozens can die on a single failed crossing.[1]
Australia’s been brutal with respect to anyone trying to arrive without a visa via boats. The charters, cruises and mega-yachts have no issue but the refugees and asylum seekers have a lot of effort out into preventing them getting close enough to Australian shores that we have any legal obligations to help them get the rest of the way.
I wonder how similar the UK are being in terms or Pr argument and international law…
Like mine would be worse than my parents’ because of acidic rain and disappearance of the ozon layer? I’m sorry, I don’t want your negativity near my children.
Adults solved this for me as a kid, there was no need to tell me that I'd have trouble going outside if there were no clouds, in my future. They could have saved me the hardship.
Apart from those were well understood problems with relatively simple solutions unlike climate change which at current pace will change the face of the planet in the next 50 years.
We are in 2021. Unless tabloids claim, scientific models have error intervals, so you should be aware that what Al-Gore claimed still can happen.
And failing in a single prediction does not invalidate magically all the other models. Ecological problems are complex and chaotic problems by nature. Much more complex that building an app. Being wrong is totally normal, and even necessary to understand and improve the model.
So this would be like discarding an entire program of millions of lines because, gasp, one bug was found. Bugs are expected and even welcomed. They are tests that allow us to improve much faster
If the problem is what was said by <"politician"> from <"random color"> that you dislike, you are attacking the problem in all the wrong ways.
With this type of fear mongering, more people will die from the fight against climate change than climate change itself. For example, fertilizer is made from fossil fuels, so attempts to raise the price of fossil fuels or prevent companies from obtaining these fuels results in starvation. Similarly raising the price of things like home heating oil or gasoline will devastate poor nations. Madagascar had a famine because it wasn't able to afford fertilizer due to the twin effects of loss of revenue from covid lockdowns and an increase in fertilizer prices.
Trying to move away from fossil fuels is an extremely delicate operation that requires nuance and patience. It also requires having something to replace fossil fuels that is as cheap otherwise poor nations wont be able to afford it. This means purely relying on market solutions to increase prices and let replacements bubble from the market is a recipe for disaster in the developing world.
One minor but important detail: fertilizers are made with hydrogen that is currently coming from natural gas. But it could be exchanged to some other source, or the superfluous carbon could be stored in solid form etc.
But those options don't exist at the moment due to their cost, so it's pretty foolish to raise the price of something now because in theory, a replacement might become cost effective in the future. A rich nation can take a hit like that but a poor nation can't -- they will just have a famine.
In other words, have that replacement in place and available before you start messing with the price of fossil fuels.
I really want to push against this neoliberal "carbon credit" mentality where we think market solutions will somehow provide replacements as needed. If you want to shut down a coal plant, fine first build the nuclear plant, and then switch over to the coal plant. If you want solar and are convinced batteries will work, then fine, build the batteries first and then switch over. Don't just rely on "the market" to allow you to shut something down and assume replacements will just appear.
Sure, there are effects like you describe. But also, the new alternatives can't compete if the old polluting alternatives don't have to pay anything for their pollution.
Nature is not a person that has emotions and will be fine with any amount of carbon -- 200 million years ago there were no icecaps and it was a flourishing time for life, with 2000 ppm carbon in the air as well as huge amounts of other greenhouse gases and it led to an explosion of life.
We are talking about adopting policies that promote human flourishing, and I guarantee you that rising fertilizer prices and fuel prices will kill many more people than rising sea levels. It's just that the people who die of rising fertilizer prices live in Africa and India, not NYC, LA, or Miami.
"200 million years ago there were no icecaps and it was a flourishing time for life, with 2000 ppm carbon in the air as well as huge amounts of other greenhouse gases and it led to an explosion of life"
Yes, but the life was adapted to it. Humans are now causing a mass extinction event, and the warming didn't really started yet. The main threat is to human habitat, not life on Earth. We don't really know how dependent on the biosphere we really are, and perhaps we shouldn't try to find out.
"I guarantee you that rising fertilizer prices and fuel prices will kill many more people than rising sea levels"
I think here's your misconception (and also the reason why this needs to be talked about more) - the rising sea levels are (at least in this century) the least of our worries.
Possible heat and drought conditions are a much bigger problem, both directly (certain populated places on Earth might become unlivable) and indirectly (the agricultural output of major crops is expected to decrease). As someone else stated, yes, global warming won't kill you, a war or a famine will.
In any case, even if we didn't have a big problem with global warming, the fossil fuels would run out this century anyway, so if your society is dependent on them for survival (e.g. for making fertilizer), you better try to make the transition to something else (more sustainable) as soon as possible. However, it should be noted, vast majority of the world is not dependent on fossil fuels for survival, but for convenience, and we could easily make most of the transition away from them without any loss of human life. (And in fact thanks to cheap renewables we won't actually have to give up convenience either.)
Absolutely. The recent epidemic and how the vaccines were distributed have shown that the wealthy countries generally don't care about the rest of the world. Humanity is very fragmented and can't act as a whole on important global issues, that's what the epidemic revealed.
Ironically, this discriminatory policy is also a reason for the supply shortages - underdeveloped countries are the suppliers for the whole developed world.
> The recent epidemic and how the vaccines were distributed have shown that the wealthy countries generally don't care about the rest of the world.
Yeah, apart of saving countless human lives in all countries spending tons of their money and talent to bring us in a time record with the only real solution to this global emergency with a, not one vaccine, a handful of vaccines that in fact work... what they did to help the humanity in this emergency? uh?
The underdeveloped world is intentionally oppressed by the developed world - in order to maintain their way of living. The resulting economic imbalance and class hierarchy are crucial to the developed worlds survival.
So I’m quite surprised that you think that the climate change will only affect the “under”-developed? Maybe the direct temperature change might, but the ripple effects will be global.
This is utter marxist bullshit in its finest form. The "under"-developed world has been given trillions in aid and almost every statistic shows that they are doing better than ever before [1]. This is due to capitalism and billions of aid every year [2] that is paid from the taxes from OUR WORK. And again with covid we see the developed world spending massive amounts of money and recources to help the rest of the world get the vaccines.
You know what the world was like when the developed world acutally intentinoally supressed the under developed world? Slavery and the slaugther of millions, colonizers forcing people to work on their land and not get the benefits of their People getting their hands cut off if they didn't work enough in the slavers mines.
This spiteful pseudo interlectual left wing bullshit is helping no one. Sure we COULD do better but we are FAR from enslaving lesser developed countries. And it's not like there aren't humanitarian catastrophies SOLELY due to the utter incompetence of these countries and THEIR elected leaders and i'm sick of the double standard we have. Are people from under developed countries to stupid for democracy? To incompetent to elect good leaders? To deficient in their intellect to see an unfair deal when it's offered to them? That's the soft bigotry of low expectations in it's purest form and i'm sick and tired of it.
> You know what the world was like when the developed world acutally intentinoally supressed the under developed world? Slavery and the slaugther of millions, colonizers forcing people to work on their land and not get the benefits of their People getting their hands cut off if they didn't work enough in the slavers mines.
You really ought to look at what France is currently doing in Africa. If you want to disagree with the parent that Africans or those in the developing world are intentionally oppressed, just because millions are no longer slaughtered is no mitigation of their point.
You don't need to defeat them in open war, as if France would mount an all out war to "save" their colonies from a peaceful revolution. Worked for India but that was impossible too I guess? But thats not what those poor oppressed people want. They get really annoyed when France doesn't help them with their problems [1] but that's just France opressing them by NOT sending enough military. Either way it's always Frances fault
Not just Mali. Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Benin and Niger.
I would encourage you to read more about Divide and Conquer, the territories mentioned above, French activities there, and resist the temptation to use a single article to generalize what millions of people want.
I think you are hopelessly naive about military affairs, revolt does not work like you think it does and comparing India vs post war Britian and the Boston Tea Party to a much more nuanced contemporary corporatist form of colonialism is ignorant.
>He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
>He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.
So did the british in india, yet somehow india isn't a british colony anymore. What an impossible thing to have happened, almost as if peaceful revolution is not the same as all out total war against a superior power. But then again, the americans won against the well trained and superiorly armed nuclear super power afghanistan too and now it's just another american colony forever. Oh wait...
I'm proposing you read the article I linked to, and notice that the actual link and title of the article itself literally has the word "dissuasion" in it.
>In his book La paix nucléaire (1975), French Navy Admiral Marc de Joybert explained deterrence:
>Sir, I have no quarrel with you, but I warn you in advance and with all possible clarity that if you invade me, I shall answer at the only credible level for my scale, which is the nuclear level. Whatever your defenses, you shan't prevent at least some of my missiles from reaching your home and causing the devastation that you are familiar with. So, renounce your endeavour and let us remain good friends.
Your work is enabled by the innumerable underdeveloped countrymen that slave away producing everything for you. This is quite obvious if you think hard enough, just actively ignored by most.
> Are people from under developed countries to stupid for democracy? To incompetent to elect good leaders?
Please read more (1)(2) and learn to have some empathy for the developing people that you indirectly exploit everyday, before making such strong accusations.
Glad im not american. But I guess we should just stop "exploiting" them. Let's just stop all trade and aid for under developed countries and let them catch up a century or two, maybe then they are civilised enough to join us on fair terms. I mean they are where they are just because of us, it's all oir fault. Look at China, whenever I'm buying something I'm oppressing them I suppose. Oh, wait before they became an export nation that governs themselves terribly they were starving end masse because they followed their idiot leader Mao? No that can't be true it must have been the white man oppressing them that killed all those birds.
The developing world is supported by the American hegemony’s control over the global market. And like the other commenter showed, Europe has its own share of colonial control. Wherever you’re from, your lifestyle is still enabled by developing countries.
> maybe then they are civilised enough to join us on fair terms
Honestly, your talking points are from 1900s colonial racism. Not sure what you’re doing in 2021. Please educate yourself ASAP.
maybe then they are civilised enough to join us on fair terms
I should have marked that as sarcasm I suppose. But it doesn't really matter because the original point stands, if we are suppressing them so badly how come basically every metric for human development had gone up for 20 years straight. How are billions in aid suppressing them? What about the plethora of human rights interventions, international education programs etc. What a sneaky way of supressing people by education and access to clean water. But that idea clashes with leftist dogma therefore it musnt be true.
> What a sneaky way of supressing people by education and access to clean water.
Upliftment is not providing bare essentials to the enslaved. We’ve already seen this happen with British colonies, where they aimed to “tame the savages”, but just enough to make sure they stay enslaved.
This is what is happening now by the developed elites, as well.
Ironically, despite this whole thread focusing on developing countries - we see the same even within developed countries. Whatever labor/tasks/services cannot be outsourced/imported, need to be performed by the “lowest classes” of the developed nation too. They are mistreated, exploited, and prevented from real upliftment. In fact, even moreso to your point, they have “access” to the best education and resources in that developed country - and yet are “lower class”?
Think about that for a while, and why it happens in the modern world.
> Upliftment is not providing bare essentials to the enslaved. We’ve already seen this happen with British colonies, where they aimed to “tame the savages”, but just enough to make sure they stay enslaved.
Yup thats why africa only gets food, water and shelter and no one there gets internet, access to loans, secondary education or else the slaves would revolt i suppose?
What an insane idea, helping them with development aid and causing measurable increases in human developement is somehow opression. What could we possibly have done that's not somehow opression then? Leaving them alone? Opression. Helping them? Opression. Perhaps we should have nuked afrika, the middle east and most of asia when we had the chance, can't opress dead people.
I think you should revisit the history of US (and Western more generally, but the US is the ringleader) NGO and development activity in Africa. I think a case can be made that it has done more harm than good, and I say this knowing full well all the hospitals and schools founded and staffed by various Christian organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries as well as the activities of the high powered organizations such as the Ford foundation trying to spread liberal values and western-authored constitutions and legal systems throughout Africa, starting in the post-war period until the present.
IMO we should pull the NGOs out and let African nations find their own path forward. The reason why I think this is to look a little more closely at what aid means and how it works.
There are two types of aid:
1. Direct resources. This is the old model of sending in missionaries to start a hospital or university. This can be helpful in some sense but also the aid workers bring their own values with them and evangelize those values, which is something that may not be suitable for Africa. They end up being local power centers on the ground and start managing and administering African governments instead of letting Africans do that. That was one approach used by the Ford foundation to control african governments and guide them into adopting inappopriate governmental structures.
2. Financial aid. Sending dollars to Africa results in those dollars in Swiss bank accounts of local warlords together with an increase in imports which can displace local production.
Trade with Africa is great, but the moment you start giving them aid, that aid comes with strings and we start pressuring Africa to adopt western european standards and structures, which end up creating fragile governments, they stoke ethnic conflict, and they may well impede letting Africa take its own development path and forming its governments according to its own values.
While I disagree with your conclusion due to the measurable increases in human development through our aid, i am somewhat sympathetic to your argument on a philosophical level. That being said, most of the HN Crowd would still cry over the opression from our trade with africa in that scenario because its always the evil capitalist west thats at fault and any disagreement on that point and you are considered a goat fucker (see comments above)
So yes, there has been some measurable human development. But Africa continues to fall farther behind the rest of the world -- e.g. the difference in global development between the rest of the world and Africa in 1960 was much lower than the difference today. We see divergence, not convergence.
That's a very low bar in exchange for Africa continuing to fall farther behind the rest of the world - e.g. during the same period child mortality in the EU fell be a factor of three and in the entire world it declined by a factor of 2.5
Actually this is true, I live in Brazil and European countries really try to dictate what we can and cannot do with our Amazon, nobody should interfere in our internal affairs, that region is the most underdeveloped region of Brazil because nobody has courage to face European lobbies.
Also, is clear that the anti-petro propaganda will slow down the growth of poor/developing countries.
Yes, they said is to conserve it, but everybody knows that very poor people is not thinking about environment, but thinking how they can survive the next day, they will cut centenary trees to sell wood, they will extract precious metals using poisonous substancies, etc.
Apart from the fact that they should care about their forests or what's left there(if any), they developed theirselves using their resources and lobby to Brazil not use his own resources because it will "hurt the entire world".
I'm not saying that is just because of poor people, but big part is, another way they destroy it is due to fire, when they clean the terrain to plant next year, and the fire go out of control.
"They must find it hard to afford the tools to do so"
With the centenary woods in Amazon and the abundance of gold is not very hard to make money there.
There are the criminals as well, people who go to Amazon just to make money..and those should be hunt, but, since there are very big extensions of land is really hard to get those. Amazon is really huge, it's a Europe.
And since we don't extract the resources and use it to preserve the forest, there is no money to preserve it all. Wealthy countries love to complain but don't give the money necessary to preserve it ($50b/year is the needed).
A solution would be give the right of exploration to companies extract the resources in certain areas of land, get the taxes and invest in protection and require these companies to monitor a part of Amazon in exchange for the right of exploration.
But since no one can touch there, is really a no mans land.
Man, the money they sent is not possible to preserve 1% of Amazon, they sent some millions expecting we would preserve a forest with the size of Europe.
If the world pays $100 per hectare it would be $50 billion/year sent to Brazil. This would make some difference, not the pennies sent here eventually.
You guys really don't know the reality of Amazon, nor the politicians there, and many here as well.
I dislike these sweeping and 1-dimensional viewpoints, both because they're bait for extremist thinking and because they're high-bias statements despite reflecting the ghost of a truth.
The reality is that there's not a clean picture to be painted, and like a Rorschach test different narratives (i.e., abstractions) can fit the identical ground truth.
The underdeveloped world has been significantly harmed by the developed world in a number of concrete ways. Colonialism, historically, obviously, with some still dodgy things going on in geopolitical interference that could be considered "neocolonialism".
But the underdeveloped world has also been benefited by the developed world. Trade, aid and openness with the developed world undeniably lifts them up. South Korea is a miracle. You can enter the developed club despite having a long history of brutal actual oppression. If we built a wall around some poor country 500 years ago and made a rule that zero contact was allowed - no colonialism, no nothing - would they be better off now or worse? The answer in most cases is they'd be worse off. They'd have a life expectancy of 40 and die often from violence. So this is reason to think that this oppression viewpoint is correct in a gross sense but false in a net sense and is ignoring some real, tangible benefits that the developed world gives to the underdeveloped.
I realise that you are trying to present this as 'balanced' 'two sided' debate, but I really hate this sort of apologist approach. You create a false dichotomy between a star trek prime directive no contact world and then say in a net sense it was of benefit. Using the likes of Singapore or South Korea as a counter example is also typical.
Take a look here at life expectancy and when exactly it started to rise above 40.
I'm not trying to present a 'two sides' story in the sense that it's exactly 50/50, since I think the viewpoint I was countering is quite a bit more false than it is true, which is why I flatly asserted that developed countries provided a net benefit to underdeveloped countries. My opinion here doesn't stop me from admitting that there's facts that underlie the narrative that are true, even if I believe the subsequent conclusions to be false.
An underdeveloped country can be suffering from the consequences of colonialism, while still benefiting significantly on net from technology, trade, and so forth, with the ratio between the former and the latter expected to decline over time. This can all be true simultaneously.
> You create a false dichotomy between a star trek prime directive no contact world and then say in a net sense it was of benefit.
That's not an example of a false dichotomy. It's a hypothetical, or a thought experiment.
> Using the likes of Singapore or South Korea as a counter example is also typical.
Typical != incorrect.
> Take a look here at life expectancy and when exactly it started to rise above 40.
Having the boot of colonialism being lifted is one of many reasons for this graph.
> Take a look at the correlation between post colonialism and death from violence.
Which is confounded by poverty/education/etc, the main drivers of death from violence.
Then I would encourage you to think of all the infinite options in between hundreds of years of colonialism being a 'net benefit' and the 'prime directive, no contact'/South Korea/Singapore extremes as a thought experiment.
> Having the boot of colonialism being lifted is one of many reasons for this graph.
I never said that colonialism was a net benefit. I said that developed countries have been a net benefit for underdeveloped countries. That's an important difference, and it's a claim that my thought experiment supports.
On South Korea; it was valid to bring that up, not only because it shows the positive benefits that the developed world brings to underdeveloped countries, but because it's the counterexample that exposes the incorrectness of the claim that the underdeveloped world is intentionally oppressed in order to maintain our way of living. We in the rich world have benefited from South Korea's, and China's, rise. They make us richer, as we them. This is basic comparative advantage. It's absurd to think that we benefit from Africa's poverty. To put it bluntly, Africa of all places is where we obtain the least benefit. We make more money from Europe and Asia. If they could raise up to $15,000 GDP/annum, we in the rich world would be more rich as a result.
They could maybe argue that underdeveloped countries have been oppressed intentionally for the benefit of the military industrial complex, but that's very distinct to arguing that that happened in order to maintain our lifestyle. As it stands, their statement is factually incorrect, and South Korea shows why.
I believe the truth of that statement may have been different 100-200 years ago, where colonialism was done to pillage resources. No longer so in the modern globalized world.
Your argument here is again premised on the benefits of colonialism & post colonialism outweighing the costs of colonialism, but exceptions like South Korea and e.g. Singapore do not prove the rule. It's completely unrealistic to compare these success stories, and the idea of 'no contact'. The reality is far grimmer. The comparison is to be made between what could have happened, and what did. The 'net' benefit then becomes very clear.
South Korea & Co are no longer intentionally oppressed. There are many other countries besides them that continue to be.
It's absurd to argue that because the developed countries could benefit more from Africa than they already do, that Africa is not oppressed. South America also.
> They could maybe argue that underdeveloped countries have been oppressed intentionally for the benefit of the military industrial complex, but that's very distinct to arguing that that happened in order to maintain our lifestyle
Every industrial complex besides that too. Raw materials are vitally important. Every act of Foreign Policy is done in order to maintain a lifestyle, to protect national interests. I don't know how you can argue that it is not.
> I believe the truth of that statement may have been different 100-200 years ago, where colonialism was done to pillage resources. No longer so in the modern globalized world.
I think you should really look at what resources are being exracted from Africa and South America, by whom and for what level of profit.
"The comparison is to be made between what could have happened, and what did."
Disagree. If the question we are asking is whether developed countries have provided a net benefit, the hypothetical has to be with them never having interacted with the country in question at all.
"South Korea & Co are no longer intentionally oppressed."
This is the No True Scotsman fallacy.
"Every act of Foreign Policy is done in order to maintain a lifestyle, to protect national interests. I don't know how you can argue that it is not."
I already provided my argument. In the modern world we are richer when they are richer due to comparative advantage. Afghanistan made us much poorer, not richer, besides one or two special interests. More countries like SK means more wealth for us.
The hypothetical does not have any such restriction on it, your star-trek hypothetical is as valid as mine, even if it is less realistic.
You are the one generalizing South Korea to say that intentional oppression does not occur, there is a 'net benefit'. Intentional oppression does not have to be universal to be true, it is selective and opportunistic in nature. The short years of benefit in South Korea do not undo the horrors elsewhere.
The argument that you stand to benefit even more does not invalidate any facts of their intentional oppression, past or present. Don't be absurd.
Minor addition: I don't believe you can say it's a 'No True Scotsman' situation unless you also consider South Korea to be 'underdeveloped' currently.
> But the underdeveloped world has also been benefited by the developed world.
Nobody is arguing that there aren’t potential benefits to the oppressed side. Slaves in the colonial days were also kept alive, housed, and fed.
But, since you’re talking about the knowledge and industrial revolutions, do consider that the former is a mutual exchange of ideas which has benefited all (not purely from the developed to the developing) and for the latter, it’s mostly the developing manufacturing for the developed, to this day!
Asia and Africa both had very advanced medical tools, machine, and philosophical and societal structures, which the West adopted innumerable ideas from. The developing countries have had civilisations that benefited their populace, and have had others that resulted in violence and death (just like the West).
I think the main problem with your viewpoint, like the other commenter said, is the false dichotomy you present between colonial oppression and no-contact outcomes.
Moreover, your understanding of world history reeks of “white saviour” principle. Hope you educate yourself one day!
> I'm talking about net benefit, not gross benefits.
What is the net benefit? How are you measuring the relative +/- to the colonised? You can imagine that the colonised would disagree with your colonising assessment.
> you should go and read about comparative advantage.
How is the ability to provide poverty wage manufacturing to the developed countries, a comparative advantage for the colonised people? I’m dumbfounded. You can feel happy that they’re being paid something more than enslavement, but they don’t feel the same way. They are forced to participate in a global extractive economy designed to ensure they are never richer than the developed countries.
> I didn't say otherwise.
But, you keep claiming that the oppression has led to a net benefit, and I fail to see any measured examples in your replies that prove this upliftment that the West has so generously provided as a “benefit”.
> hypothetical is categorically and definitionally different.
What is your hypothetical, exactly? “Imagine the (guaranteed) horrific future for the colonies, had they not been colonised and uplifted by the West”? That’s your opinion, not a hypothesis.
There's a very subtle insidiousness in saying that the efforts of the developed world "helped" others into becoming the same as them. Yes, South Korea is a miracle to many Westerners as an advanced capitalist nation, probably it's doing capitalism even ruthlessly better than what the US is doing. But if you've lived inside this nation for some time you will notice that people aren't happy, with overheated competitions for education and jobs, exploitation of factory and service workers, widespread alienation, depression, and suicide. It's one of the unhappiest advanced capitalist nations in the world, and you should wonder why works like Parasite and Squid Game are being created here.
Colonialism covers a wide array of things, but it also includes robbing the people of its narrative. And that is precisely what happened to the two Koreas. Our country was occupied by fascist Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century, Korean culture and political participation were severely oppressed, and economic exploitation of the people (to fuel their war economy) was rampant. In this oppressive atmosphere an strange thing happened: Marxists (the far left) and the nationalists (the liberals), finding their common enemy, were able to resolve their differences and cooperate with each other to fight for independence. And after Japan's loss and subsequent independence, most of these two were willing to reconcile their positions through democratic means, and people were generally excited for a new independent democratic nation to be established. Instead, the Soviet influence from the North deliberately gave support to Kim Il-sung and its constituents to push Soviet-style dictator communism in the North, while the US from the South gave overwhelming political and military support for Syngman Ryee and his followers (who was "voted" to become president via manipulated elections) to create an equivalent capitalist dictatorship. After that the rest is history, communist dictatorship hellhole in the North, capitalist dictatorship hellhole in the South. It's only been about 30 years since our country was regarded as a liberal democracy, but even then I question if the country is really a democracy now when the whole system blocks ordinary people from actually participating and having a stake in political issues.
So our history is a fable of crushed potential narratives, the inevitability of both Western authoritarian communism and Western authoritarian capitalism imposed on us with guns and bombs. Maybe without foreign intervention, our place could have been an experimental testbed for a new kind of Asian democratic socialism? Maybe we would have succeeded in creating a more enriching egalitarian nation, or maybe we would have failed, who knows? But regardless of what the outcome would have hypothetically been, this was all robbed of its possibility by Western superpower interests. And being robbed from the people of their self-organization is a dehumanizing experience that I'm sure many colonized countries will empathize with.
I don’t think that’s correct either. The undeveloped world is improving well and it’s way better now than 50 years ago with projections for continued improved standard of living.
Climate change is making this harder, but most of the undeveloped world today is going to be much better off in 100 years in terms of disease, war, and opportunity.
So making catastrophic statements like this are as credible as saying that vaping is going to kill kids.
He has become pretty radicalised lately - less so in his videos/podcasts, but his Twitter feed has become ... unpleasant and often more reminiscent of a right-wing pundit than the more stoic/therapeutical approach he had before his hospitalisation.
It's either that, or he allowed someone to take over his social media channels and does not check on content.
Isn't this just appeal to authority in different clothes? I mean most conversations going on between people are people talking about things they are not trained in and they don't cite reliable sources.
Whenever people posted something I disagreed with, or specifically doubted, I would respond by asking them to cite sources.
I was consistently downvoted for doing so, as if I was trolling; so I stopped. HN is a place for interesting discussion, not correct discourse, apparently.
So, we either need to establish this as a place where IMHO is always implicit, or where it's reasonable to ask for source to anything claimed to be factual. Right now, the rule is "Citation needed for things I find inconvenient, free pass for anything I care not to question".
I think the issue is both the commanding tone most of the time that the commenter who submitted the claim somehow must do the work of finding a citation and posting it as proof. But what _is_ a citation after all? Just someone else saying the same thing. The problem is, then we can't have original ideas as those would be first thoughts. Also, just because a citation can be provided doesn't make it true or false.
So it comes off as if commanding to provide a citation is purely used for shutting off the commenter. Just the tone 'citation needed' contains the implicit assumption that the citation is _needed_. No it's not. Whoever asks it is simply using higher authority as a weapon, because often, it's impossible to provide citation. And even if it is possible, it requires significant time-cost. This is a forum, not a dissertation. Let's discuss the merits of the idea instead.
I suppose it depends what it is. If a very specific fact is mentioned, they ought to have a source in mind already, or how else would they know. For example, if specific figures or statistics are mentions, it should require no work to find those because where else would they come from - you shouldn't be stating such things from memory if you can't recall their source.
> Just someone else saying the same thing.
Not really. "proofs" aside (e.g crypto or math), someone else can have positions or credentials that qualify them to comment on something, making them a legitimate authority.
> we can't have original ideas
An idea or concept isn't the same things as a stated fact though
> just because a citation can be provided doesn't make it true or false
Not sure what this means. I think it affects perceived probability, but this feels like a philosophical point.
> comes off as if commanding to provide a citation is purely used for shutting off the commenter
I feel this is often the case, but I think the inconsistency is the issue.
> the implicit assumption that the citation is _needed_. No it's not.
Depends what this means, which again can go off into the philosophical. Keeping to the guidelines isn't needed in some sense; nor is obeying the law or staying alive. If we stick to what as a community is desirable, I think it some cases citations should be required, or at least posts should be downvoted as unhelpful/misinformation if they spread assertions of fact that they don't care to support.
> often, it's impossible to provide citation
again, I wonder what kind of thing you are suggesting here: anything purported as "factual" should have a reason to believe it is true, or be explicitly labelled otherwise (anecdotal, for example, or "IMHO" are both "non-factual").
Note the original ancestor comment I've reacted to:
> Jordan Peterson talks about many topics he's not trained in without citing reliable sources.
We should all have the right to talk about topics without acquiring official training. That's my main argument. You responded to facts which is a subset of this.
Re facts and misinformation, that's a hard problem and you are probably right that being required to cite sources would slow misinformation. I think the issue is that most online conversations are casual and this burden would absolutely kill them.
Given this trade-off, I suspect no online community requires it - definitely not this place. Then some random Joe comes along and says 'citation needed'. Which is trying to enforce a made-up rule. He may think it is desirable or that it should be required but it is not required and communities have mods for a reason. Maybe I'll add a comment from now on that 'citation needed' itself needs a citation.
I think the proper way to go about it would be something like: "I'm surprised about {FACT}, do you have a source I could check?". Without the assumption that the original commenter is required to do it.
- Even though I think we are arguing on different planes, thanks for your thoughtful response.
The two books Peterson has published are topics he should be an expert in. I disagree that public speaking should have the same rigor as publishing papers. 99% of all public speaking is people just saying their opinion. And that is fine as well.
If everything that was ever said in a public speaking position is 100% proven fact humanity would stagnate really quickly. It's just not possible.
He is and, no, being a psychologist does not make able to tell people what to think. For example clinical psychologist are specifically trained not to pass down their own personal opinions about politics and social issues to their patients.
Also being a psychologist does not make you a philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist, political analyst and so on.
You can't just put "mentally process" in front of a subject and then claim that a psychologist is the person to be a reliable expert in them. Is he a reliable expert in how to "mentally process quantum mechanics"? How about how to "mentally process epidemiology"?
Sure. But a trained psychologist is capable of commenting on hysteria about pretty much everything, including global warming. And that the kids marching in their little organised-by-adult-pied-piper protests suffer from a form of induced mass hysteria is obvious to anyone who read the medical definition of mass psychogenic illness.
What about all the trained professional climatologists pleading for the last few decades for the governments of the world to change their policies? Is that mass hysteria as well?
So if one's standpoint is ignored and "noble" enough, it is acceptable to talk children into anxiety disorders so that these noble ideas will be acted upon? I find this morally questionable, but that's just me.
You brought the children into the argument. Until then it was Jordan Peterson vs climate science. Leave the children outside the debate for now. You're trying to use them as an example in much the same way that many people will bring up "think of the children". Jordan Peterson needs to argue the points raised by the climatologists.
That is one vile post. Do you have any evidence that kids marching are doing so because of "organised-by-adult-pied-piper protests" have you read the latest IPCC report? If your life expectancy is anything longer than twenty years, do expect to see the other end of your misguided certainties. If not, there is still a good chance you yet will.
You can shut down the conversation about global warming with the same method - kids are not trained or experienced enough to ask for huge politics changes fixing climate change. Back to school, get a job first and all the standard phrases. I don't think it helps with the discussion either way.
A guy who sells rules for life while is own life is in shambles and a life that few people would want... why should I listen to what he thinks about anything?
I’m not sure Id say his life is in shambles, but I don’t think, logically, your post makes sense.
Philosophy doesn’t have to be based on individual actions and results to be helpful.
Would you say Socrates shouldn’t be listened to because his life ended in shambles? Peterson isn’t anywhere near Socrates, but I find it interesting that you would discount his information because of his personal life.
I am put in mind of a really great passage on Wikipedia. There is no requirement that people lead a conventional life before passing out some good ideas.
> ... There he passed his philosophy of Cynicism to Crates, who taught it to Zeno of Citium, who fashioned it into the school of Stoicism, one of the most enduring schools of Greek philosophy...
He's wrong about climate change but this is such a shallow piece of rhetoric. He's a "guy" who is a respected research psychologist with lots of clinical experience. Out of anyone, this makes him more likely to have interesting things to talk about when it comes to self-help. At least far more than gurus. The fact that he suffers from chronic depression, which is largely a BIO-psycho-social (emphasis on bio) problem, is irrelevant and is a total low blow.
I could counter your argument and say that him pulling himself out of his recent depression is evidence that his ideas work. If a dermatologist gets an acne breakout and then fixes it, we don't blame them for the breakout, we commend them on addressing a difficult problem. Either way, this counter-argument of mine, and your original argument, are both silly. If his depression was more biologically grounded, he deserves neither credit nor blame. If his depression was due to social situations like cheating on his wife and feeling immense guilt, then yes, we can blame him for creating a depression based on his own stupidity. But neither of us knows the situation and so it's an irrelevant thing to bring up at best.
You can't separate out that from the depression, though. He was prescribed benzos, a highly addictive drug, because of his depression, and possibly relapsed because of that depression in addition to a chemical dependency that developed over the course of treatment. If you haven't suffered, you really can't empathize with how easily that can happen.
I want to challenge an implicit assumption there - that someone can control their own life to the point where it is all quiet, comfortable and easy.
That isn't in tune with reality. Maybe a lot of people are lucky enough to experience a life where nothing goes wrong - I doubt it - but there are a lot of disasters in the world where a life can just fall apart. And if you love anything, you're going to lose it and that will really hurt. The options are basically suffering or a monk-like abstinence from emotion and attachment.
Someone having a chaotic, even shambolic, life doesn't disqualify them from giving life advice. That is just normal. The best and worst of us have objectively horrible existences filled with disasters. Most people don't talk about the sheer number of things that go wrong because it makes for distressing chit-chat.
Peterson does good work in being open about some of that stuff. That is part of why he is popular.
Just because it's not possible to control everything and guarantee a happy life free of pain, doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't control some things to make life a bit better than it otherwise would be.
Jordan Peterson says many things in an authoritative manner. I don't really agree with him on many of them. Interesting video from Youtuber Tom Nicholas regarding Peterson's take on Orwell, "Western culture", religion and various other subjects:
> We need a new message for climate change. One that drives action through optimism that things can be better. Or, based on the signs that things are getting better, we might rebrand this optimism as realism. This would be much more effective at driving real change, and would save a lot of mental strife in the process.
Exactly. The main question is: What are you going to do about it?
Doing nothing and screaming about doomsday to others is not a solution.
Many people are doing what they can at an individual level, but that's vastly less important than the required collective action.
Gasoline cars don't have "range anxiety" because there are gas stations everywhere. Nothing you do changes that. Gas is also comparatively cheap because the climate costs are externalized; again, you cannot do anything about that on your own.
There are many other such externalized costs, from meat to cheap consumer products. You can reduce these on your own, but it's vastly less effective than systematic reductions.
There have been tons of proposals to counteract these effects, but they are fought by powerful forces to convince you that climate change doesn't even exist. The doomsday screaming is the natural result of people trying to make the point that it's a real and important thing.
It doesn't really matter what people propose when the default action is to do nothing at all. If you're interested in some of the proposals, I can list them, or you can read up on what has been suggested at the COP conferences. But my top priority is for people to stop lying so that at least one of those proposals has a chance of being accepted.
Instead of fear, spread care and kindness. I ask my kids if we should love our planet earth and save energy and do such positive steps - they say yes and take the correct steps. I think this is more positive and sustainable - make them love the planet and they will do what they can/need to do to preserve it.
The way I see it is that Climate Change will prevent the Global South from reaching the Quality of life of first world. We may mostly solve problems with basic issues and poverty but may not reach the potential as envisioned in StarTrek universe. But Climate change may not be the only reason to blame.
Those kids from the 80s and 90s who were taught about greenhouse gasses, global warming, animal and plant extinction due to our actions (I'm one of said children).
We were taught/asked to love our planet and the inhabitants (human and others) like family.
It did diddly to change anything. Now that generation are the ones in power at MegaPollutingCorp, but nothing is changing.
This is just yet another inactivism propaganda piece.
Prefacing this with the fact that I'm still thinking about all of this, so I'm trying not to be absolutist. But I was thinking that as well. There is a few ways in which the older generations have not left room for the upcoming generations to flourish in general, including when it comes to governance of companies and governments. That said, it's probably a fallacy to think that there is any precedent for the world we live in now. People live longer, stay active longer, and we're all so steeped in "What's mine is mine" individualism that the idea of making way for the younger generation may as well be egocide.
I find it strange to anthropomorphize a "generation".
Old people want to be engaged and do something meaningful and influential as long as they can. I imagine the majority of them would agree in principle that younger people should have more of a role. Just that someone other than them should be the person to step aside and make way.
Do you honestly think that when you are the same age, you will be willing to end your role as a productive member of society for the sake of the "younger generation"? Even if you don't have enough to retire and maintain your current lifestyle? What will you do with your remaining time after that?
Oh I imagine I would be the same, I empathize and understand. I don't really know what the solution is. Do we just adjust our expectations for "success"? Should people stop expecting to be where their parents were at 30 and start expecting it to happen at 40 or 50 instead?
There is also a difference between continuing to participate, and shutting the door behind you so no-one else can participate. That's what we are getting in property markets in various places right now and it's not necessarily malicious. Young people can't afford homes even with well paying jobs, because the property game was rigged to build wealth for those who got in early and now the bar of entry is too high.
I think sport is a good example, a natural ageing out process means there's constantly room for up and coming talents, and importantly people can see that there is room and so they know they can invest the effort to aim to take that spot.
In various ways right now, it feels like there's no room, and there may never be room. Why invest the effort? Why save money for a house if prices are always just continuing to climb? Why work hard when the wages are too low to progress because the c-suite hoovered up all the cash?
I feel like we who were raised with this consciousness in the 80s and 90s we're in the minority. And there was suddenly a turning point in the 2000s when I felt like everybody was paying attention to these things that my parents had been talking about all along. I remember arguing with my teacher about it as an 11 year old. We're probably not the ones went on to become geologists working for big oil. But it also seems we did diddly to change anything.
I can see your point, but it seems to me that today's youth might be different. Arguably, climate activism and the general frustration of nothing changing is a much bigger thing than before. I do agree that spreading doom and gloom is problematic/often ineffective (and dangerous because of hopelessness, self fulfilling prophecies and all that). However, it can also instill a very justified sense of urgency that motivates one to action.
But yeah... It's a hard and sad topic, and I'm generally naive and don't know shit. Maybe it could be helpful to focus more on creativity & solution-oriented futures that don't deny the shittiness of climate change, but still seem livable enough (e.g. solarpunk or something like that).
To be fair to the kids, Germany is still a capitalist country, and if food prices go up, people (including kids) at the bottom of the social pyramid will go hungry.
Obviously, that's a political choice. States can have free school meals as a easy target for budget cuts, or as a cornerstone of their responsibility towards child welfare. That'll still be true even if we hit 2 degrees of global warming.
The point is, given the way politics works at the moment, it would absolutely not be surprising if children were dying of starvation in Europe in a future of catastrophic global warming. In the UK, the number of children admitted to hospital with malnutrition in 2020 was almost 2,500. Obviously, the UK is an extreme case, but you can imagine in a state of extreme crisis, food supply shocks, and displacement (wildfires, etc) this could become endemic in europe in general.
If children go hungry in Germany, that's a failure in the system. It happens, but rarely. Everybody in Germany has enough food and shelter if the system is working as it is intended.
The system costs money, and when state resources are tight because they're trying to handle catastrophic global warming, it's easy to imagine that money going elsewhere.
Just look at all the 'belt-tightening' that occurred after the financial crisis.Then imagine what's going to happen to the international economy when the fundamentals are continuously being smashed by extreme weather, mass displacement, crop failure, political instability, and war.
The people who are predicting human extinction are not
reasonable or rational.
How did this group of deranged individuals manage to capture the public attention and make so many people miserable?
I am very much in favour of preserving our wildlife and wilderness and have been for years, this modern lunacy has damaged the cause of environmental preservation.
We already see rising temperatures in Europe that have consequences for the yield of crops and the availability of drinking water. We see a decline of insect populations which will no longer be available for pollination. We know that forests are suffering because of the summer heat that we have in Europe.
It isn't too bad for us humans right now. But we see clear warning signs that things will probably get worse. Most of us in the western world have underestimated COVID-19 when it first hit China. COVID-19 has changed our world in ways hardly any of us had imagined. The same will probably happen with climate change.
The crops that make up the vast majority of human calories consumed are not insect pollinated. They're wind pollinated. Wheat, rice, rye, barley, corn (maize), these are not going away.
Area dedicated to crops has steadily declined in Europe and the US since the 1950s, while feeding larger populations. This is only possible if crop yields have increased, substantially.
Climate change is only one of myriad problems mine and my children's generation need to address. Cleaning up microplastics could make decarbonization look like child's play. Phosphate and nitrate cycles also need to be addressed if we are to stabilize this planet. We are essentially awash in our own waste and global population is only beginning to flatten off. Not to mention a shrinking or flattening population brings along its own issues to solve. Probably some of the problems we will be working on in 30 years will be directly caused by near sighted solutions to climate change my generation is implementing today.
Growing up, I was fed lies about a future of a unified world, universally prosperous under American hegemony. It was a dogmatic fiction, and I am still bitter about it. It's better to be real with our kids. That does not mean telling them they will die but they need to be aware of the risks and the scale of the work ahead.
Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible. We can basically either change patterns/behavior drastically or settle other planets fast. Either option entails hardship that the postwar generation simply never had to face.
So the future will be quite different than what my generation experienced thus far. In some ways it will be worse and in some better. Being honest about that is crucial.
* Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible *
Yet our whole economic systems are predicated on infinite growth. If a country's population were to decline it would and does cause structural problems in their society.
You have a political figure making it a political issue, and at the same time not doing it well, basically lying to get his correct point across. Manipulating the scale and using theatrics because he assumes his base is too dumb to understand it any other way.
How are our economic systems predicated on infinite growth? I see this “fact” parroted a lot, but always with very little detail. Japan didn’t grow economically for decades, and, as far as I can tell, continues to exist without collapsing.
The basic measure of a countries "success" is GDP. You never hear any language (and yes the language is import here) about a country reaching GDP stasis, our current economic theory is it can always improve and grow. We even assume that the best interest rate target is not 0% preventing inflation but somewhere close to our nominal rate of GDP increase relative to our actual GDP potential. We assume that even "backwards" nations like Papua New Guinea should aspire to increase their GDP to "grow" into being a developed nation. "Developing" nations alone is the type of language that shows we won't take you seriously until you have grown your GDP to be per capita like that of the good and mighty nations.
Just by the fact alone that we assume the human population is growing, and that everyone should have at least the standard of living of their predecessors, we assume economic growth will occur. Of course this cannot happen forever I recommend reading this tidbit (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...).
What decades are you referring to with Japan? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2... . Japan's GDP slowed down for sure but it has certainly been growing. I think you are confusing the value of Japan's stock market which was overvalued drastically at one time.
I agree that if the population grows, than GDP should also grow to account for that person. But nothing about our economic system says that the population must grow. Regarding Japan, GDP per capita was basically flat from the late 80s to the early 2010s: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CN?end=2020...
Also, people don’t suggest that Papua New Guinea grow the economy for the sake of growth or the sake of the broader economic system. People think Papua New Guinea should grow because the quality of life of the population would be improved. This is not a convincing argument that our economic system is predicated on continuous growth.
I'm curious what you mean about Gore lying? I was quite young at that time so I didnt have informed opinion on the matter then, but these days I feel if anything he was maybe not pessimistic enough in his predictions. Everything in that clip has basically been corroborated by NASA and NOAA measurements now. I think they may have failed to highlight the risk of feedback loops and the importance of limiting methane emission...
>Growing up, I was fed lies about a future of a unified world, universally prosperous under American hegemony.
Interesting, I'm Canadian and we certainly didn't learn this. We certainly have learnt about embracing the multiple cultures around us. How we dont need to melting pot the cultures and we can peacefully coexist. We don't need to 'unify', the more we embrace each other's differences the better.
>It was a dogmatic fiction, and I am still bitter about it. It's better to be real with our kids. That does not mean telling them they will die but they need to be aware of the risks and the scale of the work ahead.
There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, -MIB
It's virtually impossible for human extinction. It becomes 15 degrees c warmer and we have full collapse of everything alive on earth. The new thing you can make lots of money do is building domes and robotics. Your new home will be completely self-contained ecosystem. Robots deliver all your needs, you never quite really leave your house. Doesnt sound good, but if for some reason outside was just completely uninhabitable.
>Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible. We can basically either change patterns/behavior drastically or settle other planets fast. Either option entails hardship that the postwar generation simply never had to face.
Infinite growth is impossible, but the limit is so far beyond where we are now. I guarantee real gdp will be ridiculously higher 30 years from now. We certainly have a pollution problem, but interestingly cleaning that pollution will be gdp growth.
Everyone seems to think I am making a statement about GDP or economic systems when I say infinite growth but I am just speaking in broad strokes about human activity. Capitalism may be the only viable model for a world with serious scarcity, as I expect ours is to become in the mid to near term. GDP is a made up number. When adjusted for externalities, there's a possibility that GDP per capita in the OECD has been negative for multiple decades.
>Everyone seems to think I am making a statement about GDP or economic systems when I say infinite growth but I am just speaking in broad strokes about human activity.
The saying you said is specifically about economic and GDP. Fair enough though if you didn't mean it.
>apitalism may be the only viable model for a world with serious scarcity, as I expect ours is to become in the mid to near term.
This is a pretty depthy subject. The failure of communism in 1989 has left many people, most of which who haven't lived under communism, to be quite upset. Many of these folks are now proposing some mixed system. This will ultimately fail as well. Capitalism is just the system in which works the best even despite its many drawbacks.
I think fundamentally when the gold standard was dropped. What everyone is yearning for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit It's a right-wing economic system but I bet with a ton of work we could make it work. The left wing often call this UBI.
>When adjusted for externalities, there's a possibility that GDP per capita in the OECD has been negative for multiple decades.
Debt adjust it as well and I bet it's in some serious trouble in many countries. Such is the debt cycle. Which is what social credit is designed around. Debt = money. It inherently is going to be managed in social credit.
> Interesting, I'm Canadian and we certainly didn't learn this. We certainly have learnt about embracing the multiple cultures around us. How we dont need to melting pot the cultures and we can peacefully coexist. We don't need to 'unify', the more we embrace each other's differences the better.
I wonder how much of that is simply for short term political gains. "Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.
I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?
>I wonder how much of that is simply for short term political gains.
I think it has happened long enough ~150 years to prove it's not short term. Every single major immigration event in north america has benefitted us greatly.
New orleans and french culture is still there from 1700s immigration
1850 famines brought tons of irish to the east coast producing places like notre dame. Germans went to midwest producing the auto industry and general huge success of detroit.
filipino and jewish immigrants practically built the west coast in the 1930-1950s.
That's kind of the thing. In the short term the new immigrants are often living in poverty and are hated, but long term immigration is super beneficial.
In fact the arab spring was intentionally done to drive arabic immigrants to the developed world. We need them for the 2030 worker shortage.
>"Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.
Oh yes, north america has very bad identity politics since Obama. It has gone beyond pandering and leading into civil war for the usa. It's far worse in Canada because we actually removed our freedom of speech in place of 'hate speech'. So every politician now is a racist etc. Every single conservative leader has been called a racist or worse.
Though there's also a more hidden agenda of mitigating our 2030 worker shortage issue. Canada is essentially bringing in a province worth of people every year in an attempt to mitigate. This has to be done from countries that were affected by WW1 but not WW2.
>I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?
~10% of Canada's GDP is going toward building expensive housing. One of the highest in the world. Housing prices are skyrocketing because mortgages are being issued in illegitimate basis, but also because we're adding a province worth of people every year. That's a ton of housing being built.
I must say I do feel that way and it is a common "joke" within my circle (mid-twenties) that we will be lucky if we survive until our retirement. So I would not say 10 years timeframe, but more 40-50 years up to 100 years (so our potential children lifetime).
It will take a lot to change my mind on that, I believe we are truly f*ked and I don't believe humanity will get out of this one. It requires such drastic change in lifestyle that most are simply not ready to do unless facing imminent (in your face type) catastrophe. Most likely scenario in my mind is global disruption of food supply chain, wars for water access, lots of migrations and lots of death/suffering.
Planet is going to be fine, we don't need to "save it". Us? Not so much.
I’ve read comments from people arguing why having children now is immoral because the world is ending. Beyond absurd. At least those people are removing themselves from the gene pool.
If I remember correctly, and forgive me for missing some details, the last one states that we are most likely to experience warming until 2045/2050, no matter what we do.
They then proceed to give some different scenarios based on their models of what we do in those years from now to 2050. The models explain what changes we will likely experience, if the temperature rises post 2050 from a range of 2 to 6/7 degrees. The ideal scenario is a 1-2 degrees, which is still bad and can lead to a lot of global destabilization. But not as bad as all the other scenarios. The worse and worst case scenario is cause for concern, and if we don't do our best, we are in for a hell of a ride.
So no matter what we do, we will experience more and more harsh effects, that is most likely the reality now. It is not delusional, and it says so in the ippc reports you are referring too. I am referring to the latest one from 2021, made for policy makers.
I don't think we will all just have no future, we can still do a lot to mitigate the risks post 2050. It is neither productive to say it is hopeless, but neither that the risks aren't very very real. But if we don't take it seriously now, things are gonna be capital B bad. It's like one of the execs of an oil company said when asked about the implications of using oil, and I'm paraphrasing; "It's not my concern, the future generations will just invent tech and solve it". How arrogant and careless can you be....
It's not just humans vs "planet". The big rock called Earth, yeah we probably aren't going to bother it much. But the destruction of biodiversity, all forms of life on earth, is an enormous ongoing tragedy that we absolutely have a responsibility to reverse with all our efforts.
This is a political problem, not a technological one.
We can pretty much see how a zero carbon energy future can be realized, if there is just the political will to allow it to happen.
Solar is already close to beating fossil fuels in pure cost terms, without subsidies. And we are a long, long way from maxing out the potential of harnessing solar energy.
And then there's nuclear to see us through until storage is good enough to supply all our needs from solar. Again it's political stupidity failing to see that the risks of nuclear power are minuscule compared to the threat of carbon.
Tesla is probably the most popular car manufacturer in the world. And the other major automobile manufacturers are pushing hard in developing new electric vehicles. Building out fast recharging stations is not a complicated technical problem. Except for reducing the charging time, but I'm confident that will improve as well. So again, migrating to electric vehicles is a political and cultural problem, not a technical one.
I really so no reason at all why lifestyle needs to degrade at all to get off of fossil fuels. We have a road map to solve every single one of the technology problems. We just need the dumb politicians (and voters) to get out of the way.
> Solar is already close to beating fossil fuels in pure cost terms, without subsidies.
Looking at the marginal cost to produce renewable energy today in a world doped with fossil fuel is meaningless. It's only cheap because we have ample cheap fossil fuel energy supply at our disposition to support production and logistics. Try to completely build, ship and install your solar panel and your wind turbines only using renewable energy and I bet you would see the cost increase by at least an order of magnitude.
But why are fossil fuels currently so cheap? They have a bunch of situational advantages over renewables that will either go away (such as subsidies and plentiful easy-to-access reserves) or evened out over time as infrastructure and adoption of renewables catches up
Most people (even self declared environmentalists) still take commercial airplanes.
If even environmentalists can’t stop flying - literally the most important thing you can do as a individual to help the globe - we have no hope for others to take necessary reductions in quality of life.
It’s clear we either need to accept climate change, or engineer some other solution.
I would argue the opposite. The rate of change due to biological impact on Earth has been slowly speeding up ever since life developed.
Changes that used to take hundreds of millions of years now happen in decades. And there is no sign of slow down.
I am not arguing negatively or positively about the future, simply that the efficiency of innovation and scaling new changes are increasing, so the rate of change continues to increase.
This is the Holocene.
I think geo-engineering the planet is inevitable, completely aside from that as a climate issue. We already have many planet wide systems, and the number and scale of them are growing.
Climate and environmental concern were dismissed and attacked for decades.
Reading the article it seems that the author is opining on Climate Communication, but that is not his main subject.
They pick a headline from climate activists “famines in Europe in 20 years” as an example of hyperbole, but “Half of the Great Barrier Reef Is Dead” is a headline.
Sure, extreme claims will hurt credibility when they don’t pan out. But does this really matter when solid climate science has already been “debunked” and dismissed by a range of Murdochian talking heads and cranks?
A necessary amount of emotional energy is needed for momentum to shift in stories. Even more energy is needed when someone is manipulating climate change coordination. Large scale communication for a movement is simple and designed for ease of repetition and emotional resonance.
This is what it looks like when you have enough pressure in the pot to counteract suppression.
> Climate and environmental concern were dismissed and attacked for decades.
Part of the reason is that the "green" movement has a long history of promoting de-industrialization and generally opposing human flourishing, using "nature" as a type of proxy for this anti-human, anti-development sentiment. Some examples:
* rigid opposition to nuclear power, which continues until the present. We could have moved completely off fossil fuels for electricity production if it were not for the green movement.
* the "environmental" regulations pushed through by the green movement were written with the aim of making development more expensive, resulting in the high price of housing as developers are sued into oblivion in disputations over environmental impact reports.
* the green movement is responsible for our disastrous forest management practices, resulting in thousands of deaths and massive ecological destruction by making it prohibitively expensive to harvest timber from federal lands. See, e.g. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article25495772...
* prominent leaders in the green movement have gone on record wishing for mass culling of humanity in order to "save the planet". The most notorious example would be Prince Phillip, fantasizing that he would be reincarnated as a virus to wipe out millions of people in order to help the environment. See, e.g. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/308...
* Absurd crusades such as trying to ban plastic straws, plastic grocery bags, or promoting wasteful recycling programs that are not backed by any rational basis and cause more harm than good.
* Opposition to modern agricultural practices such as use of fertilizer, GMO crops, etc, that allow billions of people to eat in the name of a kind of unscientific primitive romanticism.
* The methods of various "pro environment" groups involving tactics such as domestic terrorism (including murder) to blocking highways as privileged activists lie down in public spaces and sob to "save the planet" turn off a lot of people and cause them to discount what environmentalists have to say.
> Sure, extreme claims will hurt credibility when they don’t pan out.
This has already happened. There really doesn't seem to be much in the way of quality control when it comes to wild claims being made, which leads people to discount all the claims.
Basically because once you get past recycling scrap metals you start consuming many more resources than you save, which forces municipal governments to subsidize the recycling operations, which becomes so expensive it threatens local budgets. Then the cities start paying China or Africa to take their trash to "recycle" and they end up shipping it overseas, consuming even more real resources when in reality much of that is just thrown away and disposed of in less safe ways than if it were to be put in local landfills in jurisdictions with stricter environmental rules. This is all to make people feel good about saving the planet.
Interestingly, this was already known in the 1990s, and the NYTimes science writer, John Tierney, wrote an article about how recycling is actually harmful for many of the items recycled, and that this has taken on a type of upper middle class religious ritual (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...). No science article ever published by the times received so many death threats and angry letters as that article.
Is there motive behind this comment other than to smear "the green movement" with a wall of text inherently hard to argue against in its massive entirety?
"The green movement" is in fact a vast multitude of movements, people and ideas, of which several would probably shoot each other on sight if given the chance. The reason it was opposed is certainly not that it is exceedingly bloodthirsty, inhumane or counter-productive.
Like, not so long ago mining companies deemed it appropriate to mount a machine gun on a rail and slowly roll through their workers camp as a response to a worker's strike and the US government god damn firebombed an apartment block to silence two dozens lefties. But somehow, a handful assassinations by individual radicals are responsible for "rightful opposition" of this supposed single green movement? We don't discount Computer Science even though von Neuman was a fanatic intent on nuclear eradication of Japanese civilians, yet we should discount this green movement because a B-promi said idiotioc things in a lifestyle magazine?
"The green movement" might not have the right idea to solve humanities problem and one may reasonably be opposed to some or even most of "their" ideas and plans, sure. But to say that this oppositions rightfully stems from the greens all being mean and dumb is facetious and bad faith.
> Is there motive behind this comment other than to smear "the green movement" with a wall of text inherently hard to argue against in its massive entirety?
This is a strange way of saying "Yes, you make a lot of good points I can't argue against, and you should feel bad for doing that." followed by a no true scottsman fallacy.
Yes, the green movement is not perfectly homogeneous and of course they are not all the radical bomb throwing types, but they protect and defend those radical groups and don't police their own movement to try to deradicalize it or to make it more scientific.
You don't see is greens condemning other greens for being too radical or insufficiently scientific. The condemnation only goes in one direction -- not being radical enough and not supporting unscientific agendas (anti-nuclear, anti-logging, pro-recycling, plastic straw bans, etc).
Hey, I got it! "Don't worry, be happy"! That should do it!
Unfortunately there are scant few reasons to be happy after reading the article. We're moving too slow and we're not hitting any targets. Meanwhile much of the world is heading for climate catastrophe. What are the doomsday scenarios we should leave aside then?
I am a huge fan of a zero-footprint future through eliminating pollution, reusing already mined non-renewables, switching to renewable resources and energy and protecting and preserving bio diversity and wild habitats.
But when I hear about the incoming climate catastrophe, I wanna just crawl in a corner and die.
"Head in the sand" happy-clappy, willful ignorance won't help either. This underestimates and patronizes subsequent generations. Greta Thunberg is just one example of transcending hopelessness and not falling into learned helplessness. It is a climate change emergency and existential threat that must be deal with honestly without sensationalizing or minimizing because world leaders and the billionaires are killing the species long-term with apathy, greed, and delay.
What's needed is action now. Specifically, not "Mission Accomplished" ostensible, piece-meal virtue-signaling planting a tree, divestment, or changing fuels. Large-scale, oceanic bio-CSS is one of the primary technologies that must be deployed at a minimum rate of several trillion USD per year.
Only drastic carbon negative civilization will work for the foreseeable future, and CCS is the only way to get there because carbon, lifestyle, and economic austerity sure won't work.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] threadChina is becoming hyper aggressive towards Taiwan.
Serious war is around the corner. Not hypothetical wars.
For example your narrative is failing to account for the horror of mutually assured destruction which is a strong psychological factor in wars between major powers.
Maybe a couple of islands and a bit of India. Then a break for a few years. Repeat now and then.
Russia has had troops around Ukraine for the last 7 years. The Donetsk and Lugansk "republics" exist since 2014. Russia is waiting for Ukraine's move since then.
As long as USA has bases in Japan and has military presence in Taiwan... China won't make a move. It's easier to wait for USA to leave though.
We'll see continuous provocation between the blocks (most recently, Afghanistan Taliban Regime, Belorussian usage of immigrants against the EU, etc). But a serious war around the corner sounds a bit too far from reality.
China is doing the same now with Taiwan. Try calling Taiwan a country as a movie star -> forced apology. Bodies like the IOC already falted. No guarantee that sometime someone tries, or feels forced to try for whatever reason, to push it. If the West doesn't react to that, well, then all the others will push the limits as well.
USA has lost its image of "being the police of the world" and the countries that depend on that image are suffering. Their future looks quite grim. Besides that, Taiwan isn't recognized by the UN since 1971 and by the IOC since 1981. The west didn't react back then either.
Cuban mistake crisis happened because Kennedy was perceived as weak willed. The generals behind him were not and pushed him hard toward stronger response. Was close to an American revolt.
Serious war may look different from the past of nation-state wars. We're living through the emergence of network states. Given how the Internet enables non-tangible property (I.e., domain names that one can use to build businesses, associations, non-profits; bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto-projects) through communications protocols and cryptographic mathematics, its no longer necessary to wage physical war to gain an advantage. Thus we see a massive rise in persistent threat actors, which could be world war three already happening, but we don't recognize it yet because we're used to observing nation-state wars, not network state wars. Perhaps the modern age of nation state dominance ran from the Peace of Westphalia to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the design of the World-Wide-Web by Berners-Lee.
So, you're not wrong, but also omitting a significant actual current threat.
Not worth dwelling on.
I believe there is a risk that the current activistic climate movement will do similar harm to the society in general as the last decades aggressive movement to liberalism in the "west part" of the world. The liberalistic movement is like running with a rubber band - it will force the societies to become repressive. I hope I'm wrong, but the climate change movement will similar cause (negative) unplanned effects..
Where do you live?
I'm originally from Brazil, I live now in Sweden.
In Brazil during my lifetime I lived through a massive deforestation of the Amazon. I saw landscapes change from lush jungles into arid and depleted soils. I went to places in the Pantanal area as a kid that were completely transformed 20 years later, rivers drying up and a different kind of flora was taking over parts of what used to be wetlands.
In Sweden I have less than a decade around so my own experience is pretty limited. Here I can only get a glimpse of the changes through the eyes of my local friends, my girlfriend parents and other older people I talk to have noticed how much shorter and warmer winters have got. How hot summers are happening more frequently. The winter season used to last almost a month longer and snow wasn't a possibility but a given. Now they live through winters where less than 5 days of snowy days are a reality. Planning your skiing season varies a lot between years where when I talk to older people they just used to consider it a given that there would be a skiing season in most parts of the country (maybe except for the south in Skåne).
The warming is much more prominent closer to the poles.
The climate is not changing slowly in my experience, given the size of the system it's changing pretty fucking fast.
Another example, 8 years ago when we built our house, we did the roof between Christmas and New Year's Eve. We worked in t-shirts because otherwise it wasn't bearable at close to 20 ° C in plain sun. In dead winter, normal temperatures would have been more like -10° C. And somewhere around 20 cm of snow.
I remember 6 hundred-year floods from top of my head in the last 20 years. Climate change is here, it is happening. And at least where I live you see it everyday.
For kids in rich countries, it is much more likely that they'll kill in wars caused by climate change (or vote / pay for soldiers to do the killing for them).
Sadly, climate refugees will be an easy target for modern armies, and when voters see millions of starving people trying to cross their borders, they will listen to the politicians who call this an invasion that needs a forceful response.
Some places are already seeing these harsh political forces playing out, for example the UK, where the government is trying to make it illegal to rescue asylum seekers in boats[0] at a time when dozens can die on a single failed crossing.[1]
[0] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/priti-patel-ma...
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/migrant-crossings-several-people-...
I wonder how similar the UK are being in terms or Pr argument and international law…
Some blame the fall of Rome on climate change, but if it hasn't been rotten at its core it would have withstood the challenge easily.
Adults solved this for me as a kid, there was no need to tell me that I'd have trouble going outside if there were no clouds, in my future. They could have saved me the hardship.
And failing in a single prediction does not invalidate magically all the other models. Ecological problems are complex and chaotic problems by nature. Much more complex that building an app. Being wrong is totally normal, and even necessary to understand and improve the model.
So this would be like discarding an entire program of millions of lines because, gasp, one bug was found. Bugs are expected and even welcomed. They are tests that allow us to improve much faster
If the problem is what was said by <"politician"> from <"random color"> that you dislike, you are attacking the problem in all the wrong ways.
Trying to move away from fossil fuels is an extremely delicate operation that requires nuance and patience. It also requires having something to replace fossil fuels that is as cheap otherwise poor nations wont be able to afford it. This means purely relying on market solutions to increase prices and let replacements bubble from the market is a recipe for disaster in the developing world.
In other words, have that replacement in place and available before you start messing with the price of fossil fuels.
I really want to push against this neoliberal "carbon credit" mentality where we think market solutions will somehow provide replacements as needed. If you want to shut down a coal plant, fine first build the nuclear plant, and then switch over to the coal plant. If you want solar and are convinced batteries will work, then fine, build the batteries first and then switch over. Don't just rely on "the market" to allow you to shut something down and assume replacements will just appear.
Unless the new ones are subsidized a lot.
The problem is nature around us is losing this patience. Good luck convincing it!
But I agree just market solutions (carbon pricing) won't cut it, although for the opposite reason - they are acting too slowly.
We are talking about adopting policies that promote human flourishing, and I guarantee you that rising fertilizer prices and fuel prices will kill many more people than rising sea levels. It's just that the people who die of rising fertilizer prices live in Africa and India, not NYC, LA, or Miami.
Obviously, it was a metaphor.
"200 million years ago there were no icecaps and it was a flourishing time for life, with 2000 ppm carbon in the air as well as huge amounts of other greenhouse gases and it led to an explosion of life"
Yes, but the life was adapted to it. Humans are now causing a mass extinction event, and the warming didn't really started yet. The main threat is to human habitat, not life on Earth. We don't really know how dependent on the biosphere we really are, and perhaps we shouldn't try to find out.
"I guarantee you that rising fertilizer prices and fuel prices will kill many more people than rising sea levels"
I think here's your misconception (and also the reason why this needs to be talked about more) - the rising sea levels are (at least in this century) the least of our worries.
Possible heat and drought conditions are a much bigger problem, both directly (certain populated places on Earth might become unlivable) and indirectly (the agricultural output of major crops is expected to decrease). As someone else stated, yes, global warming won't kill you, a war or a famine will.
In any case, even if we didn't have a big problem with global warming, the fossil fuels would run out this century anyway, so if your society is dependent on them for survival (e.g. for making fertilizer), you better try to make the transition to something else (more sustainable) as soon as possible. However, it should be noted, vast majority of the world is not dependent on fossil fuels for survival, but for convenience, and we could easily make most of the transition away from them without any loss of human life. (And in fact thanks to cheap renewables we won't actually have to give up convenience either.)
We dont have to move away from fossil fuels over night if we could reduce consumption. Minimalism is the key
Yeah, apart of saving countless human lives in all countries spending tons of their money and talent to bring us in a time record with the only real solution to this global emergency with a, not one vaccine, a handful of vaccines that in fact work... what they did to help the humanity in this emergency? uh?
Everything?
So I’m quite surprised that you think that the climate change will only affect the “under”-developed? Maybe the direct temperature change might, but the ripple effects will be global.
You know what the world was like when the developed world acutally intentinoally supressed the under developed world? Slavery and the slaugther of millions, colonizers forcing people to work on their land and not get the benefits of their People getting their hands cut off if they didn't work enough in the slavers mines.
This spiteful pseudo interlectual left wing bullshit is helping no one. Sure we COULD do better but we are FAR from enslaving lesser developed countries. And it's not like there aren't humanitarian catastrophies SOLELY due to the utter incompetence of these countries and THEIR elected leaders and i'm sick of the double standard we have. Are people from under developed countries to stupid for democracy? To incompetent to elect good leaders? To deficient in their intellect to see an unfair deal when it's offered to them? That's the soft bigotry of low expectations in it's purest form and i'm sick and tired of it.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_development_aid_countr...
[1] Just an example source https://www.vox.com/2014/11/24/7272929/global-poverty-health...
You really ought to look at what France is currently doing in Africa. If you want to disagree with the parent that Africans or those in the developing world are intentionally oppressed, just because millions are no longer slaughtered is no mitigation of their point.
It's an old strategy, Divide et impera - there's a lot to learn from the thousands of years of history of it.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20210926-mali-accuses-fra...
I would encourage you to read more about Divide and Conquer, the territories mentioned above, French activities there, and resist the temptation to use a single article to generalize what millions of people want.
I think you are hopelessly naive about military affairs, revolt does not work like you think it does and comparing India vs post war Britian and the Boston Tea Party to a much more nuanced contemporary corporatist form of colonialism is ignorant.
But even then, Popehat's Law Of Goats would still apply:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%...
>Popehat's Law of Goats
>He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
>He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_de_dissuasion
And you couldn't figure that out for yourself because...?
I'm proposing you read the article I linked to, and notice that the actual link and title of the article itself literally has the word "dissuasion" in it.
>In his book La paix nucléaire (1975), French Navy Admiral Marc de Joybert explained deterrence:
>Sir, I have no quarrel with you, but I warn you in advance and with all possible clarity that if you invade me, I shall answer at the only credible level for my scale, which is the nuclear level. Whatever your defenses, you shan't prevent at least some of my missiles from reaching your home and causing the devastation that you are familiar with. So, renounce your endeavour and let us remain good friends.
To dtx1:
See Popehat's Law of Goats.
Your work is enabled by the innumerable underdeveloped countrymen that slave away producing everything for you. This is quite obvious if you think hard enough, just actively ignored by most.
> Are people from under developed countries to stupid for democracy? To incompetent to elect good leaders?
Please read more (1)(2) and learn to have some empathy for the developing people that you indirectly exploit everyday, before making such strong accusations.
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic (2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
The developing world is supported by the American hegemony’s control over the global market. And like the other commenter showed, Europe has its own share of colonial control. Wherever you’re from, your lifestyle is still enabled by developing countries.
> maybe then they are civilised enough to join us on fair terms
Honestly, your talking points are from 1900s colonial racism. Not sure what you’re doing in 2021. Please educate yourself ASAP.
I should have marked that as sarcasm I suppose. But it doesn't really matter because the original point stands, if we are suppressing them so badly how come basically every metric for human development had gone up for 20 years straight. How are billions in aid suppressing them? What about the plethora of human rights interventions, international education programs etc. What a sneaky way of supressing people by education and access to clean water. But that idea clashes with leftist dogma therefore it musnt be true.
Upliftment is not providing bare essentials to the enslaved. We’ve already seen this happen with British colonies, where they aimed to “tame the savages”, but just enough to make sure they stay enslaved.
This is what is happening now by the developed elites, as well.
Ironically, despite this whole thread focusing on developing countries - we see the same even within developed countries. Whatever labor/tasks/services cannot be outsourced/imported, need to be performed by the “lowest classes” of the developed nation too. They are mistreated, exploited, and prevented from real upliftment. In fact, even moreso to your point, they have “access” to the best education and resources in that developed country - and yet are “lower class”?
Think about that for a while, and why it happens in the modern world.
Yup thats why africa only gets food, water and shelter and no one there gets internet, access to loans, secondary education or else the slaves would revolt i suppose?
What an insane idea, helping them with development aid and causing measurable increases in human developement is somehow opression. What could we possibly have done that's not somehow opression then? Leaving them alone? Opression. Helping them? Opression. Perhaps we should have nuked afrika, the middle east and most of asia when we had the chance, can't opress dead people.
IMO we should pull the NGOs out and let African nations find their own path forward. The reason why I think this is to look a little more closely at what aid means and how it works.
There are two types of aid:
1. Direct resources. This is the old model of sending in missionaries to start a hospital or university. This can be helpful in some sense but also the aid workers bring their own values with them and evangelize those values, which is something that may not be suitable for Africa. They end up being local power centers on the ground and start managing and administering African governments instead of letting Africans do that. That was one approach used by the Ford foundation to control african governments and guide them into adopting inappopriate governmental structures.
2. Financial aid. Sending dollars to Africa results in those dollars in Swiss bank accounts of local warlords together with an increase in imports which can displace local production.
Trade with Africa is great, but the moment you start giving them aid, that aid comes with strings and we start pressuring Africa to adopt western european standards and structures, which end up creating fragile governments, they stoke ethnic conflict, and they may well impede letting Africa take its own development path and forming its governments according to its own values.
From 1960 to 2020, real GDP per capita in subsaharan Africa has grown by 0.6% per annum.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDSSF
Whereas real global GDP per capita has increased by 1.7%, or three times the rate of growth as subsaharan Africa.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDWLD
So yes, there has been some measurable human development. But Africa continues to fall farther behind the rest of the world -- e.g. the difference in global development between the rest of the world and Africa in 1960 was much lower than the difference today. We see divergence, not convergence.
I can't see that as a success story.
I'd call that a sucess story.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT?locations=Z...
Can you establish what "everything" is? A vast amount of stuff is produced in China - are they underdeveloped?
Also, is clear that the anti-petro propaganda will slow down the growth of poor/developing countries.
> they developed theirselves using their resources
Are there no other people in Brazil, except very poor woodcutters, who might have some other claim to these resources?
"They must find it hard to afford the tools to do so"
With the centenary woods in Amazon and the abundance of gold is not very hard to make money there.
There are the criminals as well, people who go to Amazon just to make money..and those should be hunt, but, since there are very big extensions of land is really hard to get those. Amazon is really huge, it's a Europe.
And since we don't extract the resources and use it to preserve the forest, there is no money to preserve it all. Wealthy countries love to complain but don't give the money necessary to preserve it ($50b/year is the needed).
A solution would be give the right of exploration to companies extract the resources in certain areas of land, get the taxes and invest in protection and require these companies to monitor a part of Amazon in exchange for the right of exploration. But since no one can touch there, is really a no mans land.
Ok. Will you please return the money paid for conservation then?
If the world pays $100 per hectare it would be $50 billion/year sent to Brazil. This would make some difference, not the pennies sent here eventually.
You guys really don't know the reality of Amazon, nor the politicians there, and many here as well.
The reality is that there's not a clean picture to be painted, and like a Rorschach test different narratives (i.e., abstractions) can fit the identical ground truth.
The underdeveloped world has been significantly harmed by the developed world in a number of concrete ways. Colonialism, historically, obviously, with some still dodgy things going on in geopolitical interference that could be considered "neocolonialism".
But the underdeveloped world has also been benefited by the developed world. Trade, aid and openness with the developed world undeniably lifts them up. South Korea is a miracle. You can enter the developed club despite having a long history of brutal actual oppression. If we built a wall around some poor country 500 years ago and made a rule that zero contact was allowed - no colonialism, no nothing - would they be better off now or worse? The answer in most cases is they'd be worse off. They'd have a life expectancy of 40 and die often from violence. So this is reason to think that this oppression viewpoint is correct in a gross sense but false in a net sense and is ignoring some real, tangible benefits that the developed world gives to the underdeveloped.
Take a look here at life expectancy and when exactly it started to rise above 40.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/life-expect...
Take a look at the correlation between post colonialism and death from violence, in one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
This isn't a case of 'what have the Romans ever done for us', and few will accept that it's not oppression in a net sense.
An underdeveloped country can be suffering from the consequences of colonialism, while still benefiting significantly on net from technology, trade, and so forth, with the ratio between the former and the latter expected to decline over time. This can all be true simultaneously.
> You create a false dichotomy between a star trek prime directive no contact world and then say in a net sense it was of benefit.
That's not an example of a false dichotomy. It's a hypothetical, or a thought experiment.
> Using the likes of Singapore or South Korea as a counter example is also typical.
Typical != incorrect.
> Take a look here at life expectancy and when exactly it started to rise above 40.
Having the boot of colonialism being lifted is one of many reasons for this graph.
> Take a look at the correlation between post colonialism and death from violence.
Which is confounded by poverty/education/etc, the main drivers of death from violence.
> Having the boot of colonialism being lifted is one of many reasons for this graph.
Here we agree, it's a shame it was ever inserted.
On South Korea; it was valid to bring that up, not only because it shows the positive benefits that the developed world brings to underdeveloped countries, but because it's the counterexample that exposes the incorrectness of the claim that the underdeveloped world is intentionally oppressed in order to maintain our way of living. We in the rich world have benefited from South Korea's, and China's, rise. They make us richer, as we them. This is basic comparative advantage. It's absurd to think that we benefit from Africa's poverty. To put it bluntly, Africa of all places is where we obtain the least benefit. We make more money from Europe and Asia. If they could raise up to $15,000 GDP/annum, we in the rich world would be more rich as a result.
They could maybe argue that underdeveloped countries have been oppressed intentionally for the benefit of the military industrial complex, but that's very distinct to arguing that that happened in order to maintain our lifestyle. As it stands, their statement is factually incorrect, and South Korea shows why.
I believe the truth of that statement may have been different 100-200 years ago, where colonialism was done to pillage resources. No longer so in the modern globalized world.
South Korea & Co are no longer intentionally oppressed. There are many other countries besides them that continue to be.
It's absurd to argue that because the developed countries could benefit more from Africa than they already do, that Africa is not oppressed. South America also.
> They could maybe argue that underdeveloped countries have been oppressed intentionally for the benefit of the military industrial complex, but that's very distinct to arguing that that happened in order to maintain our lifestyle
Every industrial complex besides that too. Raw materials are vitally important. Every act of Foreign Policy is done in order to maintain a lifestyle, to protect national interests. I don't know how you can argue that it is not.
> I believe the truth of that statement may have been different 100-200 years ago, where colonialism was done to pillage resources. No longer so in the modern globalized world.
I think you should really look at what resources are being exracted from Africa and South America, by whom and for what level of profit.
You are the one generalizing South Korea to say that intentional oppression does not occur, there is a 'net benefit'. Intentional oppression does not have to be universal to be true, it is selective and opportunistic in nature. The short years of benefit in South Korea do not undo the horrors elsewhere.
The argument that you stand to benefit even more does not invalidate any facts of their intentional oppression, past or present. Don't be absurd.
Minor addition: I don't believe you can say it's a 'No True Scotsman' situation unless you also consider South Korea to be 'underdeveloped' currently.
Nobody is arguing that there aren’t potential benefits to the oppressed side. Slaves in the colonial days were also kept alive, housed, and fed.
But, since you’re talking about the knowledge and industrial revolutions, do consider that the former is a mutual exchange of ideas which has benefited all (not purely from the developed to the developing) and for the latter, it’s mostly the developing manufacturing for the developed, to this day!
Asia and Africa both had very advanced medical tools, machine, and philosophical and societal structures, which the West adopted innumerable ideas from. The developing countries have had civilisations that benefited their populace, and have had others that resulted in violence and death (just like the West).
I think the main problem with your viewpoint, like the other commenter said, is the false dichotomy you present between colonial oppression and no-contact outcomes.
Moreover, your understanding of world history reeks of “white saviour” principle. Hope you educate yourself one day!
What is the net benefit? How are you measuring the relative +/- to the colonised? You can imagine that the colonised would disagree with your colonising assessment.
> you should go and read about comparative advantage.
How is the ability to provide poverty wage manufacturing to the developed countries, a comparative advantage for the colonised people? I’m dumbfounded. You can feel happy that they’re being paid something more than enslavement, but they don’t feel the same way. They are forced to participate in a global extractive economy designed to ensure they are never richer than the developed countries.
> I didn't say otherwise.
But, you keep claiming that the oppression has led to a net benefit, and I fail to see any measured examples in your replies that prove this upliftment that the West has so generously provided as a “benefit”.
> hypothetical is categorically and definitionally different.
What is your hypothetical, exactly? “Imagine the (guaranteed) horrific future for the colonies, had they not been colonised and uplifted by the West”? That’s your opinion, not a hypothesis.
Colonialism covers a wide array of things, but it also includes robbing the people of its narrative. And that is precisely what happened to the two Koreas. Our country was occupied by fascist Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century, Korean culture and political participation were severely oppressed, and economic exploitation of the people (to fuel their war economy) was rampant. In this oppressive atmosphere an strange thing happened: Marxists (the far left) and the nationalists (the liberals), finding their common enemy, were able to resolve their differences and cooperate with each other to fight for independence. And after Japan's loss and subsequent independence, most of these two were willing to reconcile their positions through democratic means, and people were generally excited for a new independent democratic nation to be established. Instead, the Soviet influence from the North deliberately gave support to Kim Il-sung and its constituents to push Soviet-style dictator communism in the North, while the US from the South gave overwhelming political and military support for Syngman Ryee and his followers (who was "voted" to become president via manipulated elections) to create an equivalent capitalist dictatorship. After that the rest is history, communist dictatorship hellhole in the North, capitalist dictatorship hellhole in the South. It's only been about 30 years since our country was regarded as a liberal democracy, but even then I question if the country is really a democracy now when the whole system blocks ordinary people from actually participating and having a stake in political issues.
So our history is a fable of crushed potential narratives, the inevitability of both Western authoritarian communism and Western authoritarian capitalism imposed on us with guns and bombs. Maybe without foreign intervention, our place could have been an experimental testbed for a new kind of Asian democratic socialism? Maybe we would have succeeded in creating a more enriching egalitarian nation, or maybe we would have failed, who knows? But regardless of what the outcome would have hypothetically been, this was all robbed of its possibility by Western superpower interests. And being robbed from the people of their self-organization is a dehumanizing experience that I'm sure many colonized countries will empathize with.
Those with more wealth and/or the bigger army get the food, water or land.
The other ones suffer or die.
Climate change is making this harder, but most of the undeveloped world today is going to be much better off in 100 years in terms of disease, war, and opportunity.
So making catastrophic statements like this are as credible as saying that vaping is going to kill kids.
It's either that, or he allowed someone to take over his social media channels and does not check on content.
(Topic starts at 9:30)
[1] citation needed
I was consistently downvoted for doing so, as if I was trolling; so I stopped. HN is a place for interesting discussion, not correct discourse, apparently.
So, we either need to establish this as a place where IMHO is always implicit, or where it's reasonable to ask for source to anything claimed to be factual. Right now, the rule is "Citation needed for things I find inconvenient, free pass for anything I care not to question".
So it comes off as if commanding to provide a citation is purely used for shutting off the commenter. Just the tone 'citation needed' contains the implicit assumption that the citation is _needed_. No it's not. Whoever asks it is simply using higher authority as a weapon, because often, it's impossible to provide citation. And even if it is possible, it requires significant time-cost. This is a forum, not a dissertation. Let's discuss the merits of the idea instead.
> Just someone else saying the same thing.
Not really. "proofs" aside (e.g crypto or math), someone else can have positions or credentials that qualify them to comment on something, making them a legitimate authority.
> we can't have original ideas
An idea or concept isn't the same things as a stated fact though
> just because a citation can be provided doesn't make it true or false
Not sure what this means. I think it affects perceived probability, but this feels like a philosophical point.
> comes off as if commanding to provide a citation is purely used for shutting off the commenter
I feel this is often the case, but I think the inconsistency is the issue.
> the implicit assumption that the citation is _needed_. No it's not.
Depends what this means, which again can go off into the philosophical. Keeping to the guidelines isn't needed in some sense; nor is obeying the law or staying alive. If we stick to what as a community is desirable, I think it some cases citations should be required, or at least posts should be downvoted as unhelpful/misinformation if they spread assertions of fact that they don't care to support.
> often, it's impossible to provide citation
again, I wonder what kind of thing you are suggesting here: anything purported as "factual" should have a reason to believe it is true, or be explicitly labelled otherwise (anecdotal, for example, or "IMHO" are both "non-factual").
> Jordan Peterson talks about many topics he's not trained in without citing reliable sources.
We should all have the right to talk about topics without acquiring official training. That's my main argument. You responded to facts which is a subset of this.
Re facts and misinformation, that's a hard problem and you are probably right that being required to cite sources would slow misinformation. I think the issue is that most online conversations are casual and this burden would absolutely kill them.
Given this trade-off, I suspect no online community requires it - definitely not this place. Then some random Joe comes along and says 'citation needed'. Which is trying to enforce a made-up rule. He may think it is desirable or that it should be required but it is not required and communities have mods for a reason. Maybe I'll add a comment from now on that 'citation needed' itself needs a citation.
I think the proper way to go about it would be something like: "I'm surprised about {FACT}, do you have a source I could check?". Without the assumption that the original commenter is required to do it.
- Even though I think we are arguing on different planes, thanks for your thoughtful response.
Even more so when people try to sound authoritative or portray themselves as role models for others.
If everything that was ever said in a public speaking position is 100% proven fact humanity would stagnate really quickly. It's just not possible.
Seems he’d be a reliable expert on things like how to mentally process global warming?!?
Also being a psychologist does not make you a philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist, political analyst and so on.
You are making a good example of a political statement dressed as a scientific truth.
Similarly to ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology, masquerading one's own ideas behind scientific-sounding words is how a scientist loses credibility.
Why do you believe that, other than calling him a "drug addict" for getting addicted to a prescribed anti-depression drug?
Philosophy doesn’t have to be based on individual actions and results to be helpful.
Would you say Socrates shouldn’t be listened to because his life ended in shambles? Peterson isn’t anywhere near Socrates, but I find it interesting that you would discount his information because of his personal life.
> ... There he passed his philosophy of Cynicism to Crates, who taught it to Zeno of Citium, who fashioned it into the school of Stoicism, one of the most enduring schools of Greek philosophy...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes
You know Peterson is a licensed clinical psychologist right? It’s literally his job to give mental health advice for money.
Or are you just against mental health workers getting paid?
I could counter your argument and say that him pulling himself out of his recent depression is evidence that his ideas work. If a dermatologist gets an acne breakout and then fixes it, we don't blame them for the breakout, we commend them on addressing a difficult problem. Either way, this counter-argument of mine, and your original argument, are both silly. If his depression was more biologically grounded, he deserves neither credit nor blame. If his depression was due to social situations like cheating on his wife and feeling immense guilt, then yes, we can blame him for creating a depression based on his own stupidity. But neither of us knows the situation and so it's an irrelevant thing to bring up at best.
That isn't in tune with reality. Maybe a lot of people are lucky enough to experience a life where nothing goes wrong - I doubt it - but there are a lot of disasters in the world where a life can just fall apart. And if you love anything, you're going to lose it and that will really hurt. The options are basically suffering or a monk-like abstinence from emotion and attachment.
Someone having a chaotic, even shambolic, life doesn't disqualify them from giving life advice. That is just normal. The best and worst of us have objectively horrible existences filled with disasters. Most people don't talk about the sheer number of things that go wrong because it makes for distressing chit-chat.
Peterson does good work in being open about some of that stuff. That is part of why he is popular.
https://youtu.be/BQWjyo1m0Yg "Jordan Peterson doesn't understand George Orwell"
Exactly. The main question is: What are you going to do about it?
Doing nothing and screaming about doomsday to others is not a solution.
Gasoline cars don't have "range anxiety" because there are gas stations everywhere. Nothing you do changes that. Gas is also comparatively cheap because the climate costs are externalized; again, you cannot do anything about that on your own.
There are many other such externalized costs, from meat to cheap consumer products. You can reduce these on your own, but it's vastly less effective than systematic reductions.
There have been tons of proposals to counteract these effects, but they are fought by powerful forces to convince you that climate change doesn't even exist. The doomsday screaming is the natural result of people trying to make the point that it's a real and important thing.
It doesn't really matter what people propose when the default action is to do nothing at all. If you're interested in some of the proposals, I can list them, or you can read up on what has been suggested at the COP conferences. But my top priority is for people to stop lying so that at least one of those proposals has a chance of being accepted.
Those kids from the 80s and 90s who were taught about greenhouse gasses, global warming, animal and plant extinction due to our actions (I'm one of said children).
We were taught/asked to love our planet and the inhabitants (human and others) like family.
It did diddly to change anything. Now that generation are the ones in power at MegaPollutingCorp, but nothing is changing.
This is just yet another inactivism propaganda piece.
Please look at the CEO, President, and Board of Directors of MegaPollutingCorp. Are they kids of the 80s and 90s?
Old people want to be engaged and do something meaningful and influential as long as they can. I imagine the majority of them would agree in principle that younger people should have more of a role. Just that someone other than them should be the person to step aside and make way.
Do you honestly think that when you are the same age, you will be willing to end your role as a productive member of society for the sake of the "younger generation"? Even if you don't have enough to retire and maintain your current lifestyle? What will you do with your remaining time after that?
There is also a difference between continuing to participate, and shutting the door behind you so no-one else can participate. That's what we are getting in property markets in various places right now and it's not necessarily malicious. Young people can't afford homes even with well paying jobs, because the property game was rigged to build wealth for those who got in early and now the bar of entry is too high.
I think sport is a good example, a natural ageing out process means there's constantly room for up and coming talents, and importantly people can see that there is room and so they know they can invest the effort to aim to take that spot.
In various ways right now, it feels like there's no room, and there may never be room. Why invest the effort? Why save money for a house if prices are always just continuing to climb? Why work hard when the wages are too low to progress because the c-suite hoovered up all the cash?
But yeah... It's a hard and sad topic, and I'm generally naive and don't know shit. Maybe it could be helpful to focus more on creativity & solution-oriented futures that don't deny the shittiness of climate change, but still seem livable enough (e.g. solarpunk or something like that).
This generation helped push renewables to the spot they're in today.
Obviously, that's a political choice. States can have free school meals as a easy target for budget cuts, or as a cornerstone of their responsibility towards child welfare. That'll still be true even if we hit 2 degrees of global warming.
The point is, given the way politics works at the moment, it would absolutely not be surprising if children were dying of starvation in Europe in a future of catastrophic global warming. In the UK, the number of children admitted to hospital with malnutrition in 2020 was almost 2,500. Obviously, the UK is an extreme case, but you can imagine in a state of extreme crisis, food supply shocks, and displacement (wildfires, etc) this could become endemic in europe in general.
Just look at all the 'belt-tightening' that occurred after the financial crisis.Then imagine what's going to happen to the international economy when the fundamentals are continuously being smashed by extreme weather, mass displacement, crop failure, political instability, and war.
We already see rising temperatures in Europe that have consequences for the yield of crops and the availability of drinking water. We see a decline of insect populations which will no longer be available for pollination. We know that forests are suffering because of the summer heat that we have in Europe.
It isn't too bad for us humans right now. But we see clear warning signs that things will probably get worse. Most of us in the western world have underestimated COVID-19 when it first hit China. COVID-19 has changed our world in ways hardly any of us had imagined. The same will probably happen with climate change.
Citation needed?
> forests are suffering [..] in Europe
Forests have been booming in Europe: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/07/forest-europe-environ...
> decline of insect populations
Worrying, but unsure at this point what the trend is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
For example, I read for years how the monarch butterfly was on the verge of extinction. Now:
https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/11/17/california-sees...
Area dedicated to crops has steadily declined in Europe and the US since the 1950s, while feeding larger populations. This is only possible if crop yields have increased, substantially.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
Growing up, I was fed lies about a future of a unified world, universally prosperous under American hegemony. It was a dogmatic fiction, and I am still bitter about it. It's better to be real with our kids. That does not mean telling them they will die but they need to be aware of the risks and the scale of the work ahead.
Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible. We can basically either change patterns/behavior drastically or settle other planets fast. Either option entails hardship that the postwar generation simply never had to face.
So the future will be quite different than what my generation experienced thus far. In some ways it will be worse and in some better. Being honest about that is crucial.
Yet our whole economic systems are predicated on infinite growth. If a country's population were to decline it would and does cause structural problems in their society.
I wonder on climate change just how many people this clip alienated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tkDK2mZlOo
You have a political figure making it a political issue, and at the same time not doing it well, basically lying to get his correct point across. Manipulating the scale and using theatrics because he assumes his base is too dumb to understand it any other way.
Just by the fact alone that we assume the human population is growing, and that everyone should have at least the standard of living of their predecessors, we assume economic growth will occur. Of course this cannot happen forever I recommend reading this tidbit (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...).
What decades are you referring to with Japan? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2... . Japan's GDP slowed down for sure but it has certainly been growing. I think you are confusing the value of Japan's stock market which was overvalued drastically at one time.
Also, people don’t suggest that Papua New Guinea grow the economy for the sake of growth or the sake of the broader economic system. People think Papua New Guinea should grow because the quality of life of the population would be improved. This is not a convincing argument that our economic system is predicated on continuous growth.
Way worse than that, but I expect you know.
>Growing up, I was fed lies about a future of a unified world, universally prosperous under American hegemony.
Interesting, I'm Canadian and we certainly didn't learn this. We certainly have learnt about embracing the multiple cultures around us. How we dont need to melting pot the cultures and we can peacefully coexist. We don't need to 'unify', the more we embrace each other's differences the better.
>It was a dogmatic fiction, and I am still bitter about it. It's better to be real with our kids. That does not mean telling them they will die but they need to be aware of the risks and the scale of the work ahead.
There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, -MIB
It's virtually impossible for human extinction. It becomes 15 degrees c warmer and we have full collapse of everything alive on earth. The new thing you can make lots of money do is building domes and robotics. Your new home will be completely self-contained ecosystem. Robots deliver all your needs, you never quite really leave your house. Doesnt sound good, but if for some reason outside was just completely uninhabitable.
>Infinite growth on a finite Earth is not possible. We can basically either change patterns/behavior drastically or settle other planets fast. Either option entails hardship that the postwar generation simply never had to face.
Infinite growth is impossible, but the limit is so far beyond where we are now. I guarantee real gdp will be ridiculously higher 30 years from now. We certainly have a pollution problem, but interestingly cleaning that pollution will be gdp growth.
The saying you said is specifically about economic and GDP. Fair enough though if you didn't mean it.
>apitalism may be the only viable model for a world with serious scarcity, as I expect ours is to become in the mid to near term.
This is a pretty depthy subject. The failure of communism in 1989 has left many people, most of which who haven't lived under communism, to be quite upset. Many of these folks are now proposing some mixed system. This will ultimately fail as well. Capitalism is just the system in which works the best even despite its many drawbacks.
I think fundamentally when the gold standard was dropped. What everyone is yearning for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit It's a right-wing economic system but I bet with a ton of work we could make it work. The left wing often call this UBI.
>When adjusted for externalities, there's a possibility that GDP per capita in the OECD has been negative for multiple decades.
Debt adjust it as well and I bet it's in some serious trouble in many countries. Such is the debt cycle. Which is what social credit is designed around. Debt = money. It inherently is going to be managed in social credit.
I wonder how much of that is simply for short term political gains. "Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.
I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?
I think it has happened long enough ~150 years to prove it's not short term. Every single major immigration event in north america has benefitted us greatly.
New orleans and french culture is still there from 1700s immigration
1850 famines brought tons of irish to the east coast producing places like notre dame. Germans went to midwest producing the auto industry and general huge success of detroit.
filipino and jewish immigrants practically built the west coast in the 1930-1950s.
That's kind of the thing. In the short term the new immigrants are often living in poverty and are hated, but long term immigration is super beneficial.
In fact the arab spring was intentionally done to drive arabic immigrants to the developed world. We need them for the 2030 worker shortage.
>"Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.
Oh yes, north america has very bad identity politics since Obama. It has gone beyond pandering and leading into civil war for the usa. It's far worse in Canada because we actually removed our freedom of speech in place of 'hate speech'. So every politician now is a racist etc. Every single conservative leader has been called a racist or worse.
Though there's also a more hidden agenda of mitigating our 2030 worker shortage issue. Canada is essentially bringing in a province worth of people every year in an attempt to mitigate. This has to be done from countries that were affected by WW1 but not WW2.
>I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?
~10% of Canada's GDP is going toward building expensive housing. One of the highest in the world. Housing prices are skyrocketing because mortgages are being issued in illegitimate basis, but also because we're adding a province worth of people every year. That's a ton of housing being built.
It will take a lot to change my mind on that, I believe we are truly f*ked and I don't believe humanity will get out of this one. It requires such drastic change in lifestyle that most are simply not ready to do unless facing imminent (in your face type) catastrophe. Most likely scenario in my mind is global disruption of food supply chain, wars for water access, lots of migrations and lots of death/suffering.
Planet is going to be fine, we don't need to "save it". Us? Not so much.
They then proceed to give some different scenarios based on their models of what we do in those years from now to 2050. The models explain what changes we will likely experience, if the temperature rises post 2050 from a range of 2 to 6/7 degrees. The ideal scenario is a 1-2 degrees, which is still bad and can lead to a lot of global destabilization. But not as bad as all the other scenarios. The worse and worst case scenario is cause for concern, and if we don't do our best, we are in for a hell of a ride.
So no matter what we do, we will experience more and more harsh effects, that is most likely the reality now. It is not delusional, and it says so in the ippc reports you are referring too. I am referring to the latest one from 2021, made for policy makers.
I don't think we will all just have no future, we can still do a lot to mitigate the risks post 2050. It is neither productive to say it is hopeless, but neither that the risks aren't very very real. But if we don't take it seriously now, things are gonna be capital B bad. It's like one of the execs of an oil company said when asked about the implications of using oil, and I'm paraphrasing; "It's not my concern, the future generations will just invent tech and solve it". How arrogant and careless can you be....
Of course not.
This is a political problem, not a technological one.
We can pretty much see how a zero carbon energy future can be realized, if there is just the political will to allow it to happen.
Solar is already close to beating fossil fuels in pure cost terms, without subsidies. And we are a long, long way from maxing out the potential of harnessing solar energy.
And then there's nuclear to see us through until storage is good enough to supply all our needs from solar. Again it's political stupidity failing to see that the risks of nuclear power are minuscule compared to the threat of carbon.
Tesla is probably the most popular car manufacturer in the world. And the other major automobile manufacturers are pushing hard in developing new electric vehicles. Building out fast recharging stations is not a complicated technical problem. Except for reducing the charging time, but I'm confident that will improve as well. So again, migrating to electric vehicles is a political and cultural problem, not a technical one.
I really so no reason at all why lifestyle needs to degrade at all to get off of fossil fuels. We have a road map to solve every single one of the technology problems. We just need the dumb politicians (and voters) to get out of the way.
Looking at the marginal cost to produce renewable energy today in a world doped with fossil fuel is meaningless. It's only cheap because we have ample cheap fossil fuel energy supply at our disposition to support production and logistics. Try to completely build, ship and install your solar panel and your wind turbines only using renewable energy and I bet you would see the cost increase by at least an order of magnitude.
I think we need to look at alternate solutions.
If even environmentalists can’t stop flying - literally the most important thing you can do as a individual to help the globe - we have no hope for others to take necessary reductions in quality of life.
It’s clear we either need to accept climate change, or engineer some other solution.
We like to think we live in unusual or unique times… we don’t.
Changes that used to take hundreds of millions of years now happen in decades. And there is no sign of slow down.
I am not arguing negatively or positively about the future, simply that the efficiency of innovation and scaling new changes are increasing, so the rate of change continues to increase.
This is the Holocene.
I think geo-engineering the planet is inevitable, completely aside from that as a climate issue. We already have many planet wide systems, and the number and scale of them are growing.
Reading the article it seems that the author is opining on Climate Communication, but that is not his main subject.
They pick a headline from climate activists “famines in Europe in 20 years” as an example of hyperbole, but “Half of the Great Barrier Reef Is Dead” is a headline.
Sure, extreme claims will hurt credibility when they don’t pan out. But does this really matter when solid climate science has already been “debunked” and dismissed by a range of Murdochian talking heads and cranks?
A necessary amount of emotional energy is needed for momentum to shift in stories. Even more energy is needed when someone is manipulating climate change coordination. Large scale communication for a movement is simple and designed for ease of repetition and emotional resonance.
This is what it looks like when you have enough pressure in the pot to counteract suppression.
Part of the reason is that the "green" movement has a long history of promoting de-industrialization and generally opposing human flourishing, using "nature" as a type of proxy for this anti-human, anti-development sentiment. Some examples:
* rigid opposition to nuclear power, which continues until the present. We could have moved completely off fossil fuels for electricity production if it were not for the green movement.
* the "environmental" regulations pushed through by the green movement were written with the aim of making development more expensive, resulting in the high price of housing as developers are sued into oblivion in disputations over environmental impact reports.
* the green movement is responsible for our disastrous forest management practices, resulting in thousands of deaths and massive ecological destruction by making it prohibitively expensive to harvest timber from federal lands. See, e.g. https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article25495772...
* prominent leaders in the green movement have gone on record wishing for mass culling of humanity in order to "save the planet". The most notorious example would be Prince Phillip, fantasizing that he would be reincarnated as a virus to wipe out millions of people in order to help the environment. See, e.g. https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/308...
* Absurd crusades such as trying to ban plastic straws, plastic grocery bags, or promoting wasteful recycling programs that are not backed by any rational basis and cause more harm than good.
* Opposition to modern agricultural practices such as use of fertilizer, GMO crops, etc, that allow billions of people to eat in the name of a kind of unscientific primitive romanticism.
* The methods of various "pro environment" groups involving tactics such as domestic terrorism (including murder) to blocking highways as privileged activists lie down in public spaces and sob to "save the planet" turn off a lot of people and cause them to discount what environmentalists have to say.
> Sure, extreme claims will hurt credibility when they don’t pan out.
This has already happened. There really doesn't seem to be much in the way of quality control when it comes to wild claims being made, which leads people to discount all the claims.
Interestingly, this was already known in the 1990s, and the NYTimes science writer, John Tierney, wrote an article about how recycling is actually harmful for many of the items recycled, and that this has taken on a type of upper middle class religious ritual (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...). No science article ever published by the times received so many death threats and angry letters as that article.
But things have gotten much worse since then, as demands for recycling increased and city budgets began to be eaten by the costs of subsidizing this. See https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-... for an update in 2015.
Then when China stopped accepting US trash, cities around the country began dumping recycling into landfills as they could no longer afford it. (https://fee.org/articles/america-finally-admits-recycling-do...).
See also:
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/as-city-budgets-shrink-i...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local-recycling-...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-...
"The green movement" is in fact a vast multitude of movements, people and ideas, of which several would probably shoot each other on sight if given the chance. The reason it was opposed is certainly not that it is exceedingly bloodthirsty, inhumane or counter-productive.
Like, not so long ago mining companies deemed it appropriate to mount a machine gun on a rail and slowly roll through their workers camp as a response to a worker's strike and the US government god damn firebombed an apartment block to silence two dozens lefties. But somehow, a handful assassinations by individual radicals are responsible for "rightful opposition" of this supposed single green movement? We don't discount Computer Science even though von Neuman was a fanatic intent on nuclear eradication of Japanese civilians, yet we should discount this green movement because a B-promi said idiotioc things in a lifestyle magazine?
"The green movement" might not have the right idea to solve humanities problem and one may reasonably be opposed to some or even most of "their" ideas and plans, sure. But to say that this oppositions rightfully stems from the greens all being mean and dumb is facetious and bad faith.
This is a strange way of saying "Yes, you make a lot of good points I can't argue against, and you should feel bad for doing that." followed by a no true scottsman fallacy.
Yes, the green movement is not perfectly homogeneous and of course they are not all the radical bomb throwing types, but they protect and defend those radical groups and don't police their own movement to try to deradicalize it or to make it more scientific.
You don't see is greens condemning other greens for being too radical or insufficiently scientific. The condemnation only goes in one direction -- not being radical enough and not supporting unscientific agendas (anti-nuclear, anti-logging, pro-recycling, plastic straw bans, etc).
In society there will always be the Y2K and Mayan Calendar people. Climate change is a much more reliable source compared to some ancient Mayans.
There are also ideologues pushing a political position. Saying that the world ends in X years unless you do what I say is not going to go away.
There are people justifying their rent. Give me grant money and I'll say the world ends in X years.
Hey, I got it! "Don't worry, be happy"! That should do it!
Unfortunately there are scant few reasons to be happy after reading the article. We're moving too slow and we're not hitting any targets. Meanwhile much of the world is heading for climate catastrophe. What are the doomsday scenarios we should leave aside then?
But when I hear about the incoming climate catastrophe, I wanna just crawl in a corner and die.
The way a message is transmitted matters.
What's needed is action now. Specifically, not "Mission Accomplished" ostensible, piece-meal virtue-signaling planting a tree, divestment, or changing fuels. Large-scale, oceanic bio-CSS is one of the primary technologies that must be deployed at a minimum rate of several trillion USD per year.
Only drastic carbon negative civilization will work for the foreseeable future, and CCS is the only way to get there because carbon, lifestyle, and economic austerity sure won't work.