So what? Ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere usually started to rise only after temperatures had begun to climb.
So you've identified a feedback loop. Milankovich cycles warm the Earth, which cause a release of CO2, which further warms the Earth. Now imaging what an Earth warming would be like that is _caused_ by increased CO2 emission, rather than just being fed back by it.
It's just scaremongering to mention this and imply that this could actually happen as a consequence of current CO₂ levels. Sea levels have been changing throughout all of human history and they've never drowned a large city instantly because people just resettle over the course of hundreds of years when needed.
Two-party system makes it really tough to vote for the party that can do what you think is right, no? Either party is the enemy and basically the justification for the existence of the other, and as long as they throw back and forth petty issues those who want power and money get to keep it.
Imagine you are made one of the politicians in the waffling party. Say you find the politician whose stated preferences most closely match your own. They step down. You take their place. What will you do now to ensure the wafflers stop waffling?
The problem isn't that they choose to waffle, but that their power is on a knife edge when they have any power at all and they disagree about what to do.
I'd claim one party is accelerating the fire, while the other is secretly stacking firewood next to the fire while also complaining that the other is using it.
That said, human ingenuity and economic forces are starting to stem the global warming tide, despite what governments are doing.
Really it's both. The leaders find stories the voters respond to, which gives them power. The leaders find and exploit a flaw in the voters which the voters are happy to expose.
The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic.
Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.
With plant based diets we could reverse the warming [0], deforestation [1] and mass species extinction [2], while making the population healthier [3], too.
It’s going to take some more radical action. I very much respect the protesters who risk their freedom to disrupt coal mining operations in Australia or deflating oversized SUV tires in the UK.
It’s going to take everyone actively blocking the activities causing this problem.
US and EU emissions are down a quarter in the past 15 years. And world emissions have likely peaked (or at worst are in the process of doing so). If the world does nothing more proactively, warming will be limited to less than 3C, based on best estimates. That's still bad for many people and places, but it's probably not world-ending bad.
Governments taking further action will further mitigate the problem and might save places like Miami. That's the opportunity here that humanity isn't really taking advantage of.
Before someone will counter with “we outsourced our emissions to China”, this is wrong.
Even when we take this into account US and EU emissions have been dropping for years.
I've read plenty of papers on this but the ability to track "imported CO2" is fairly limited.
The most obvious place that's usually missing in capital gained from foreign investments. If, in a hypothetical example, an investment firm make a billion dollars running a foreign oil company, then put that money into a US startup, this wouldn't count as "imported emissions", but clearly if you worked at that startup your job and all the money you spend would have come from exported emissions.
The second place these studies tend to fail is how long of a trail of CO2 they follow. If one of the reasons it's cheaper to build a product in China is because the factory is closer to a carbon intensive raw material producer this not counted. If the energy to keep your low cost workers is cheaper and that's part of why they are low cost, that's not counted.
It's not the fault of these reports that they can't track all of this, but it's not a great argument for green technology reducing emissions.
If also doesn't matter if the US and EU reduce emissions, it matters if we do globaly. I can also promise you that if we forced China to reduce emissions we should feel that impact pretty dramatically in the west Economically. The best proxy globally to economic development is energy production, we live in a global economy, we all share that energy.
Where would the trees be planted? A recent study showed that just to offset _the yearly increase_ in CO2 emissions we would need to plant an entire continent of trees every year. And then ensure that they get adequate quantities of water.
Human CO2 emissions are so far off the scale of anything that has ever happened naturally that nature as she evolved on Earth has no way coping.
I'm not sure what that means, as forest/jungle density varies greatly as well as species and their absorption of CO2. Did the paper take into account the rest of the ecosystem changes that could capture even more CO2?
Regardless, this is only one of potentially thousands of ways we can make an impact. We won't solve the problem without cooperation, but we also don't even have to cooperate at all to start. All of us can start right now and the combined effort will lead to results.
Disclaimer up front: I live as if human caused climate change is real, haven't traveled by plane for years, went on holiday abroad three times since I'm old enough to remember - and this includes honeymoon, I buy used, repair etc etc.
So please read me out instead of shouting "JAQ" at me.
This cannot be true, can it?
I have a simple thought experiment here:
Take a globe. Or imagine one.
Look at the areas where the oil fields are. It should be small areas outside the Norwegian coast. Small areas in the middle east. Small areas in Ukraine and Russia. Small areas in US, in the Mexican Gulf, outside Brazil etc.
Then compare with a single continent.
Feel free to reason about it and tell me why I am wrong.
Because I am actually interested in the answer, because I live like it matters and it would be great not to have to convince myself to care.
And, if your calculations change, feel free to stop demotivating people from trying to help.
PS: If you take this as a defense for senseless consumption you are misreading. For those who have given up already I give you another reason: Very often the things I do makes very good sense economically too. I think I have a better, more enjoyable life because I don't waste my money on buying new crap all the time and instead prioritize long lasting goods and experiences and prioritize maintaining what I already got.
I don't think I understand your actual question. What does the size of oil fields have to do with size of continents?
If you are confused about why you'd need to plant a whole continent of trees to offset our CO2 emissions, rememeber(or discover for the first time) that your average oil field(or coal mine for that matter) is a product of literally millions of years worth of carbon deposits - that's why oil is so incredibly energy dense.
According to some quick googling one tree absorbs about 25kg worth of CO2 per year. My car emits that much by just driving ~100 miles (using about 10L of petrol in the process). If I do 10k miles per year, that is a lot of trees just to offset emissions of a single vehicle, and there are millions of personal cars out there - and they aren't even the largest source of emissions.
But after that, an EV, solar panels and heat pump heating are 3 steps that will eliminate hundreds of tons of CO2 vs alternatives, and will increase your standard of living since they're cheaper over the long term.
Going vegetarian and eliminating flying also would have a big impact, but that involves real sacrifice, unlike the above options.
In the US, where in most places the general election is preceded by a "primary" election for the parties to select candidates for the general election and in which you can only vote for candidates from your party, I'd suggest one other thing when it comes to voting.
If you live in an area where one party pretty much always wins in the general election, register for that party so that you can vote in their primary. That way your vote does actually have some influence on the outcome.
It won't change which party wins the general election, but it can help move the winning party toward the center. Primaries are usually lower turnout than the general election, which can make it easier for an extremist candidate to win them because the people who vote for the extremists tend to be more enthusiastic and thus more likely to actually vote in the primary.
If you are in an area where both parties have a good chance of winning the general election, but one party seems more susceptible to extreme candidates winning their primary, consider registering for that party to try to move them more toward the center. It means giving up influencing the other party, but if that party usually picks OK candidates your vote is probably better used trying to help get rid of extremists.
Bernie Sanders was operating on all cylinders in this last primary. There is a documentary on all the efforts by his own party to stop his progress. In the end, the turnout was superb but it still was not enough because the older generation did not want take a chance on the radical policies that Sanders proposed.
So no the idea of a primary challenge is a lost cause and the younger generation internalized it this past election.
I'm gonna get downvoted but this is the same perspective I've taken as well. I can only have paralyzing anxiety for so many years before I just have to stop caring and get on with my life.
“CO2 levels are now comparable to the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when they were close to, or above 400 ppm. During that time, sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than today offsite, high enough to drown many of the world’s largest modern cities. “
Oh boy, that’s not good. I mean it’s going to take a while for it to raise up, but so long Florida.
Where has this water gone exactly? Freezing wouldn’t explain it. Is it lagged thermal expansion of the ocean water as it catches up to the air in heat?
Pretty sure freezing is exactly it — Greenland and Antarctica contain lots of water stored well above sea level. These fluctuated a lot worth sea levels.
Several people are saying this so I’ll reply to just this one. It wouldn’t make sense for water to freeze up over Antarctica over time as a way to reduce sea level. Water freezing on top of water doesn’t affect water height. And water freezing on top of submerged land would just raise the water levels because it’s more voluminous. There needs to be a mechanism for the ice to accumulate on top of itself far above sea level for sea level to go down beyond just water freezing. As another poster explained, it’s snowfall accumulating semi-permanently in the same spots that moves water to these areas. Excuse my pedantry.
Not pedantic, I think people just didn't realize you were narrowly thinking of seawater freezing directly when you said "freezing wouldn't explain it".
A lot of it is in the glaciers of Antartica, which cover the whole continent with around 1900m of ice. They weren't created from seawater freezing, but from snow getting packed down. But the water will go into the ocean if they melt.
I’m not saying it’s wrong, but this graphic is very difficult for me to understand. Is there any geographical significance to the location of the water blobs? No, right? But they also don’t include saltwater which is most of it. Right?
By far most of the water is in the oceans, which have an average depth of 3688m. 2% of the water is currently frozen, so one can easily estimate how much would the sea level raise, had it all melt.
EDIT: Corrected km to meters, as comment below points out.
It's not the volume of the ocean that matters for sea level rise but the surface area, right? Ocean surface area is 140M square miles, so 6.4M cubic miles of water would naively be like a 241 foot rise -- each cubic mile gets split into 140/6.4 slices.
Additionally the crust is elastic and will move around a bit (especially lifting) with the ice weight off. This is still occurring in many places that were glaciated previously.
I'm a bit stupid, but I understand if we are dropping 6.4M cubic miles from space, there will be an increase in water level, but if the 6.4M cubic miles of water was already present in the system, just frozen, how does it increase the total sea level? There is no net change in volume right?
Sea ice floats in the sea. When melted ... it's still floating in the sea, as water. There's no net sea-level change, at least not from contributed ice.[1]
Land ice sits on land. When it melts, most of it flows to the sea.[2] That increases the total amount of water in the oceans, and hence, sea level. The total rise if all Antarctic and Greenland ice melted would be about 60-70m (200-230ft).[3]
________________________________
Notes:
1. There are other effects, including thermal expansion (water expands slightly as it warms), and centripetal effects (water can flow more than continental crust does, and would spread out slightly more at the equator than the poles with more liquid water in the oceans). Those effects are comparatively small, though not fully negligible.
2. The exception would be enteric basins which have no outlet to the oceans, in which case melted ice flowing into these would form lakes. Examples of enteric basins include the Great Salt Lake and surrounding former Lake Bonneville, the Dead Sea, and Death Valley. Note that as glaciers melt, there's a rebound effect in continental crust, and regions presently below sea level or which would otherwise form enteric basins might not after that rebound effect is taken into account.
The sea-levels have always fluctuated, no need to worry for Florida, if it happens, it happens. Also, no need to look 4 million years back for similar events, Doggerland [1] was still a thing with actual humans living on it only ~8,000 years ago.
>> During that time, sea levels were between 5 and 25 meters higher than today offsite, high enough to drown many of the world’s largest modern cities.
That makes for a great headline, but a large part of the Netherlands' coastal areas are currently below sea level, and yet are not "drowned".
It is clearly a real threat, that's why we have advocates for strict "climate regulations" buying multiple beach-front homes, their own islands, and private jets...
Also it is probable that we will see a big extinction event even before +1m sea level mark. Imagine climate changes enough and staple crops start to fail en masse - wheat, rice etc. The hunger and rising costs will likely case a world war, or several.
I remain stunned by the lack of action on fossil fuels and lifestyles generally. Even leaving aside the fact we are wrecking the planet, we rely on some deeply unsavoury countries for oil, gas and coal and we could have made a conscious choice to mitigate our dependence on them years ago and simply haven't done it.
What's worse is politicians have no desire to lead, so it is life to people with "alternative" (eg sustainable) lifestyles to retrofit their homes, ride bicycles, and generate less waste. Presumably the fear is that we have invested so deeply in fossil fuels that we can't unwind that rapidly. I'm sure everyone here knows a sunk cost when they see one.
I really do fear for my old age, and my kids lives. We've created too many incentives to wreck the world and people quite reasonably respond to them. Things have to change.
Don’t have to look much further than this very website to see examples. Just look at the frothing rage in the comments every time the topic gets to reducing car and natural gas usage.
The formula is very clear. When mankind has access to cheap and affordable energy, they prosper. When they don't, they struggle. And it's not about getting rich. We've already spent trillions on "green energy" and we are no where near getting rid of fossile fuels. It's embedded in everything we do.
There's also a lot of doom on this page thinking the end of the world is nigh. Scientists do not walk in lockstep on this question. There are climatologists who have pulled back on the alarm - like Lomborg and Shellenberger. I'm not saying they are right, just to be wary of anyone telling you they know what's going to happen.
Do you navigate in your car by staring only in the rear-view mirror?
There's parlous little contention that fossil fuels transformed the world for exceptional capabilities and productivity over the past 250 years. That's simply not the argument.
The problem is both what their continued use will do to the overall environment, and what their finite supply means in terms of continued prosperity.
Quite simply, you're ignoring (and repeatedly) the elephant in the room: unintended consequences of the continued use of fossil fuels.
You might care to recognise the beast. It's formidable.
You realize that "companies clean[ing] up their act" involves sacrifice from you? Fossil fuels are used today because they're cheap. Not using fossil fuels will obviously make things more expensive, which is ultimately borne by the consumer.
Considering the utter shitshow that is any kind of political system, modern democracies included, I am frankly surprised that we are tackling this at all, even if it 99% appearance and 1% substance.
Anyway politicians to "lead" need a mandate from voters and to lead in a direction good for the climate they need to be able to take the heat for extremely unpopular policies. Unfortunately in the systems where unpopular policies can get through the leaders have the tendency to exploit that for their own gain rather than for sustainability sake.
I believe it won't change until the situation will become so obvious and tangible that something will be done to mitigate it.
The problem is that currently, the people in power to change things won’t really be affected by global warming - they have enough money to buy their way out of it.
In a couple generations the problem will be critical enough that buying your way out of it will no longer be possible, and then we’ll see change.
Right, and the mechanism that will bring that about will be enough of the poorer classes being affected that they start to make the status quo less profitable. Inconvenient resource wars, rioting in the streets, maybe even some old fashioned eco terrorism. All of that could be accelerated if people felt strongly enough to demand change sooner and were willing to make sacrifices in order to force the issue, but they generally aren't and those at the top put effort into keeping it that way.
I think that rioting and eco-terrorism can be kept at bay with increased surveillance. My bet is that the protests can be quashed long enough until the situation becomes so bad that actual life-threatening consequences arise even for those in power (extreme food scarcity and the breakdown of every supply chain out there).
People have to live in that environment. They are busy raising children, getting an education, living life. Most people don't live life sacrificing themselves to someone else's cause. Be very careful of falling into someone else's narrative.
> The problem is that currently, the people in power to change things won’t really be affected by global warming - they have enough money to buy their way out of it.
No, this assumes that civilization won't collapse. Their money means nothing if industrial society breaks down due to the catastrophic consequences of climate change. States are what enforce property rights and states fall apart as soon as the food runs out.
Are the Heat Dome, massive floods in Germany and 50C in May in India not enough to make an induction that things have a pretty reasonable chance of getting a lot worse a lot faster than that?
Anybody with a good credit rating can increase their standard of living by buying an EV, putting solar panels on their roof and switching to using a heat pump for heating. All three of these pay off their premium in under a decade in most jurisdictions.
You've already excluded a huge segment of the population with your very first line. Regardless, all that does very little to stop the worst sources of the problem: industry. In fact, this obsession with mainting a lifestyle that only exists because of fossil fuels and environmentally damaging industry is part of the problem in my opinion.
I'm responding to a comment about rich people. Also, anything that reduces TCO benefits poor people more than rich people, so if they don't have the capital for an up-front investment governments should be providing cheap loans or grants.
IMO the obsession with requiring sacrifice is alienating, counter-productive and unnecessary.
Yeah, exactly my point. World going to shit around us as a direct consequence of our lifestyles and nobody is going to do anything about it because they feel entitled to said lifestyle. We could do something, we choose not to.
Future generations will revile us, as we deserve that.
"the world going to shit" carries a lot of assumptions. It's not just about amassing money. It's a bout survival for many people. Getting enough food to eat. Up to 100 million people (mostly Africans) could be facing starvation from not being able to import grain from the Ukraine. A crisis which is about the availability of energy. A little humility in realizing we don't know what's going to happen. There are consequences to any choice we make here.
Probably not a great time for most people to take out huge loans ($80-100k?) for nonessential purchases right as we're entering a recession. Also, the things you listed are "green" but they're substitutions and not significantly increasing standard of living above their alternatives. So to the average person this is a big ask.
Of course, any action taken by the government would have much more impact and would be way more effective than individuals trying to tackle this problem.
This is only true in your country. Most people in the world do not have the luxury of affording this, and for many that do it's not worthwhile.
I live in Ontario, Canada. Almost all of my electricity comes from nuclear, hydroelectric and wind. Solar panels are not particularly efficient so far up north and they are covered in snow five months of the year anyway. Solar is mostly a waste of money here. (I still see the occasional house with solar panels but I mostly interpret it as a protest against nuclear power.)
Electric cars also don't fare particularly well in our winters. It's pretty hard to go visit family out of town when your car has half its stated range. I'm of the opinion that pervasive plug-in hybrid vehicles would do far more to reduce our collective carbon emissions and buy us time to get plug-in hybrids with renewable fuel (biodiesel, ethanol, hydrogen, etc.)
Heat pumps I agree would help. Unfortunately my country has huge amounts of cheap natural gas. Until carbon taxes start ramping up and heat pumps are subsidized I don't think most people will willingly increase their heating costs.
I live in Ontario. I drive an EV, which works fabulously in the winter. Solar panels are viable, with 10 year payback periods since we still have full net metering.
I’ve personally added solar panels, downsized from 2 cars to 1 ev, planted hundreds of trees (reforesting an acre), stopped eating meat, started composting and collecting rainwater… and lie awake every night thinking that it’s all basically undone by some senator with 5 houses…
This is similar to the paradox of voting [1], and it is an important reason why many people don’t do as much, if anything. It depends on the individual’s psychology whether taking such measures are meaningfully beneficial for them personally (as opposed to for society).
I guess this might also explain a little of why older people vote in greater numbers? They've seen that their vote has an eventual impact, while young people don't have such perspective?
I believe it’s because older people have experienced how politics impacts their live, and because they follow politics more. However they can’t have seen that their individual vote has had a discernible impact, as that would be counterfactual. Voting because you believe your personal vote will change the course of history is objectively irrational — you’re more likely to win the lottery.
If we would have done nothing, we'd be looking at about 6 degrees C of rise. If we stop at what we've done already, we're aiming for 4 degrees C. If our governments follow through on all our concrete commitments, we'd stop at about 2.5 degrees C. (Concrete commitments are specific, not nebulous like "net 0 by 2050").
2.5 degrees is still too much, but it's not nothing, far from it.
Saying "we've done nothing" is counter-productive IMO, it just encourages defeatism. IMO it's easier to do more when you acknowledge that what we have done has been effective.
But we have done nothing. This is easy to demonstrate.
You're claiming that we've made some progress regarding climate action, and that counterfactually it could have been worse.
There is, essentially, one source of human CO2 emissions: fossil fuels.
If what you claim is true then we should have a set of fossil fuels that we know about, can easily exploit, but refuse to because we won't be using them. This is the only way we can make progress on reducing emissions.
So far the only limiting factor I know of for limiting fossil fuel extraction is the economic difficulty in extraction.
A war is happening right now in order to control more oil and natural gas production, if we already have more oil in gas known about than we need, why are we fighting this war?
The problem I have is that the action is designed to cause no inconvenience whatsoever to anybody. 2.5C is going to cause megadeaths, and we in the west aren't interested in giving up our cars for it, or raising prices in our datacentres, producing less e-waste, and generally consuming less so we end up with less embodied energy in our lives, etc.
This attitude is exactly the problem. You twist it around to pin the blame on green activists somehow not doing enough in their personal lives, and no matter what they do, it's never enough. If he had given up his car, you'd ask when he'll give up meat. If he'd given up meat you'd ask when he'll put solar panels on his house, or whatever other excuse you can come up with to feel superior and justify doing nothing.
These things only work if everyone does them. If we want people to give up their cars we need massive investment in electrified public transit. Without that it is impossible for most people to survive without cars. A few people who have the freedom and the will to suffer under public transit choosing to give up their cars will do nothing to stop climate change.
> You twist it around to pin the blame on green activists somehow not doing enough in their personal lives
Do we all have to do them.or not? That seems pretty simple. Yes, if you want everyone in the world to give up eg cake, then you need to start first. Otherwise you are virtue signaling - indicating group membership by taking no cost actions like wearing a pin, changing your facebook icon or commenting asserting others are not doing enough.
I too can tell other people to not drive or not eat meat. I don't because I still drive and I still eat meat.
> If we want people to give up their cars we need..
I have never had a car. I'm 31 and I don't plan on having one. It is definitely a privilege to have planned my life around transport options that are more environmentally friendly, but I'm actually pretty committed to it.
As for renewables, I've bought shares in green energy in my pension and some in this scheme which allows people to co-own wind turbines:
When I buy my own home, I'll be installing an air source heat pump and solar panels.
As for flying, I've done it a few times but less than half a dozen flights in total in my life. My plan is to interrail one day.
So yes, actually I have more or less done what you suggested. It takes time and commitment, and the centre of my argument is that making the choices I have made should be easier than making the choices that contribute to climate change. Down vote all you like.
Short term certainly, long term it's harder to predict: warmer air also has a much higher moisture carrying capacity, thus the cascading changes in weather patterns could also lead to better water circulation over and to currently dry areas.
For instance the sahara was extremely dry (even more than currently) during the last glacial maximum, the african humid period started with the Bølling–Allerød warming / Late Glacial Interstadial (and as its name indicates, greened up the sahara area).
Then it dried up again with the cooling of the Younger Dryas, before humidifying again at its end.
It also underwent a dry spell during the 8.2kYa "cold event", before the african humid period ending entirely during the 4.2kYa aridification event (which seems related to the Bond Event 3).
The primary limiting factor on plant growth is not generally CO2. You can know that by observing that CO2 is not really what fertilizers concern themselves with.
Water, nitrogen, and micronutrients, tend to be the big issues. Existing plants deal fairly well with around 200~250ppm CO2 because that's been the concentration for the last 20 million years.
For individual ecosystems or individual plants, yes, the limiting factor is nitrogen fixing in the soil. For the global biosphere however, the limiting factor to the creation of biomass (via photosynthesis) is carbon dioxide availability.
I was of the understanding oceanic alge were much more responsible for oxygenation than any form flora. Not to down play the importance of trees of course.
So is water. Trees simply do not grow if they not have water to generate new bark. We've had severe (for German standards) droughts the last few years here in Germany. All in all, the climate forecast for the upcoming years is currently: Less rain in the summer and more rain in the winter, which is also bad [1].
It's possible that higher CO2 levels are going to be great for some plants, however higher temperatures (with all the resulting consequences) will definitely be terrible for humans.
I'm always at a loss about people arguing about CO2. Like there is a single graph to rule them all - a so called Keeling Curve, is is freely available to all, it is always monitoring and it is NOT POSSIBLE AT ALL to derive any conclusion from looking at it, other than we are heating the planet fast. Also it is painfully obvious that ALL so called "green" technologies are either fake or not impacting climate at all (especially those "carbon neutral" ones are def. scam, just shuffling emissions like a hot potato game, to other corporations or countries).
The rate of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing every year and the rate of increase (acceleration) is also only increasing every year. It takes one minute to confirm this :)
The graph is not the sole reason we think the planet is heating.
If it was just the graph, there would be other possible interpretations. (You know, causation vs correlation and all that). However we have more than just a graph to confirm climate change.
I agree with what you said but it seems this graph alone should be enough to convince people there is a problem. The heat trapping effects of CO2 are well known and beyond dispute, right? Forgetting all other evidence, isn’t the fact of the massive increase in CO2 alone enough to cause alarm? This was talked about in the late 1800s.
It is, I believe, beyond dispute that CO2 has heat trapping effects. All else remaining the same, increasing CO2 increases the heat. That at another time there was higher CO2 levels with lower heat merely means that not all else remained the same.
You just ignored all of the challenges to your current worldview. Cognitive dissonance is just as difficult for the people you are trying to convince as it appears to be for you.
I did no such thing. Increasing carbon dioxide, keeping all else equal, traps more heat. This isn’t disputable. Hence my refusal to say otherwise can’t possibly be cognitive dissonance.
It might be a good thing to increase CO2. It might be bad. It might be the case that increasing carbon dioxide causes counter balancing effects and therefore increasing CO2 does not increase temperature (I remain skeptical of this but I’m not a climate scientist). But what is beyond dispute is that massively increasing CO2 will cause climatic disruptions while the weather system reaches a new equilibrium.
Oh definitely. But it seems to me that it is obvious that increases in CO2 on a massive, rapid scale will necessitate climatic changes (not necessarily bad) as the system finds a new equilibrium. This may in turn cause massive disruptions to human societies.
Note that there are many seemingly obvious things that are false so I could be wrong.
"This may in turn cause massive disruptions to human societies."
The word "may" is doing a lot of work here. Lots of things may cause massive disruptions to human society. One thing we can say with certainty: the mitigation efforts being proposed to reduce CO2 levels will cause massive disruptions to human society.
Like, wonder of wonders, by killing people and pouring their blood on a rock, the Mayans were successful, fantastic, amazing, keeping the sun moving across the sky!!!
The next time I teach correlation/causation I’m using this as my goto example.
Susan Milbrath, Star Gods of the Maya:
Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars
(The Linda Schele Series in Maya and
Pre-Columbian Studies), ISBN-13
978-0292752269, University of Texas Press,
2000.
with
"Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for
the sun to move, according to Aztec
cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950
- 1982, 7:8)."
To answer your chemistry question, once a molecule of CO2 absorbs infrared light, it then emits infrared light.
On average it’s in a random direction, so some goes out into space eventually. But some goes straight toward the Earth’s surface, which also absorbs and then re-emits it.
The result is that some IR energy is trapped bouncing back and forth between the surface and atmospheric greenhouse gases (there are a few, not just CO2). This is the so-called “greenhouse effect” that keeps the surface habitable.
As you increase the amount of greenhouse gases, there are more molecules available to absorb and re-emit IR energy. So the total amount of energy that can be trapped bouncing back and forth goes up. More heat is trapped.
CO2 is particularly worrisome because the carbon cycle is slow. Water vapor has a larger effect, but it varies on the order of weeks (when it rains, for example). CO2 can take hundreds of years to get fixed again once it is in the atmosphere.
1) If insolation falls, global temps can be lower even with more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If insolation stays constant, increasing greenhouse gases will increase the amount of energy trapped under the atmosphere (aka heat). Insolation varies slowly based on orbital variations, which created the historical record you’re referencing. Right now we don’t have any evidence that insolation is declining fast enough to offset the effect of the greenhouse gases we are adding to our atmosphere. Which makes sense because we independently measure an upward trend in heat trapped in the atmosphere.
2) In the global historical record the peak of CO2 has usually trailed the peak of temperature. Again this reflects changes in insolation: as more sunlight makes the climate get hotter, more CO2 is released. Then as sunlight declines, the climate cools but the CO2 lingers for a while. This is actually really concerning because it implies that we should expect a natural spike of CO2 on top of our anthropogenic spike of CO2, meaning it will get much worse than it even looks now.
3) Yes, “life” can thrive at higher temps, but our bodies, culture, and infrastructure are adapted for these temps. And it’s not just temperature; sea level rise (primarily driven by the metric expansion of water as it is heated) will inundate large amounts of livable land including some of the most productive and populated. Maybe good for neritic life, but bad for us.
4) The negative and positive effects don’t necessarily balance. Again, losing dry land to the sea is not balanced by increased ocean algal growth. “I destroyed your house, but gave you more fertilizer for your lawn”—does that seem like a fair trade?
CO2 is transparent to visible light: E.g., pop open a brewski and observe that can't see the CO2 and that it does not cast a shadow.
CO2 absorbs photons in three narrow wavelength bands, one for each of bending, stretching, and twisting of the molecule, out in the infrared. The absorption spectrum is shown at the Web site of the US NIST.
That absorption makes CO2 a greenhouse gas.
The usual claim is that the infrared does not come from "sunlight" but from Planck black body radiation from the surface of the earth.
The broad, intuitive idea that the CO2 acts like a thick insulating blanket over all the earth and trapping all heat is not very close to reality.
Then there is the question of, how much warming does CO2 cause? Some dozens of studies, with computer models, etc. were done. Results varied. A summary of the results is in a graph at
Also it appears that the names of the studies are in small print in a box in the upper left of the image.
Some results predicted significant warming, but the times of the predicted warming came and went years ago without the predicted warming.
Al Gore's movie showed a graph of data from ice cores from Vostok station in Antarctica. The ice cores went back
800,000 years of so. Gore graphed both temperature and CO2 concentration and observed that the two went up and down together.
As I read the graphs:
(1) When temperature started to rise, CO2 concentration was low, not high. So, something made temperature rise, but it was not high CO2.
(2) About 800 years after temperature rose, CO2 concentration rose, and the usual explanation is that the extra CO2 was from more biological activity from the higher temperature.
(3) Some thousands of years later, temperature fell. Then CO2 concentration was high, not low. So, something made temperature fall, but it wasn't low CO2 concentration.
(4) We had some CO2 from WWII and the post war economic boom, but from 1945 to 1970 we had some significant cooling.
For one more, not from Gore's graph, recently I heard a claim that the three highest temperatures on record happened in just the last few years or some such. There is some issue about the relevance of extreme values: E.g., in any stochastic process, of course the highest values observed so far never go down, and in real processes, say, the fastest 100 yard dash, we can expect the highest values to go up.
Thank you for the illumination. Is it correct to say that CO2 causes an increase in temperature provided all else remains the same? I realize that not else will remain the same but it was my understanding that increases in CO2 have a heating effect, in the sense of keeping everything else the same, and that this is indisputable. Am I wrong?
And yes, it is as dire as it sounds. My children are breathing 1/3 more CO2 than my parents were at the same age. But it's not the breathing that is a concern (not until we get above 1000 ppm at least), but rather the warming. There is significantly more sunlight energy being trapped in the biosphere today than there was two generations ago.
It will probably be the breathing that will prompt action because maybe we can shrug away drowned cities and infrastructure but really toxic air not so much (or do we?)
Anyway drowned infrastructure will directly or indirectly kill a lot of people and that could mitigate the growth of all greenhouse gases except maybe H2O, because there is more and more of that in the air as temperature increases. It's a reinforcing feedback loop.
The chart in the article you linked to shows that currently, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 0.04% of the air we breathe, and that lifetime symptoms of hypercapnia do not appear until that number is 1.0%.
That means that CO2 levels would have to increase 25 times their current level in order for your fear of hypercapnia to become a problem.
> A study of humans exposed in 2.5 hour sessions demonstrated significant negative effects on cognitive abilities at concentrations as low as 0.1% (1000 ppm) CO2 likely due to CO2 induced increases in cerebral blood flow. Another study observed a decline in basic activity level and information usage at 1000 ppm, when compared to 500 ppm.
With some caveats about the quality of those studies.
considering how many people are allowed to die of air pollution as a matter of standard policy, even in "nice" western countries and cities, I don't know that this argument holds
> Also it is painfully obvious that ALL so called "green" technologies are either fake or not impacting climate at all (especially those "carbon neutral" ones are def. scam, just shuffling emissions like a hot potato game, to other corporations or countries).
You’re gonna have to provide some evidence for these assertions please
Well, PV costs have declined by nearly three orders of magnitude since they were invented. You now seem to be arguing that unless a technology is mature right out of the lab, it is worthless. You aren't arguing in good faith here.
Not really arguing at all, policy and lifestyle changes could do it, but we’re obsessed with growth and technology. We won’t live with less so our solutions always rely on making more. We’ve missed several climate change milestones waiting for technology to save us.
This is a fair point: if we ditched car centric urban planning and were freer with capital for experimental projects like tidal lagoons and so on, we'd have achieved much of what we need to do.
What we've been waiting for is technologies improving to the point that the cost of using them is considerably less than the cost of not using them. This is how local air pollution worked: the Clean Air Act could be imposed because the cost of pollution control measures was much less than the cost of letting pollution continue. Ditto for the (perhaps more relevant, because it's global) control of ozone destroying emissions.
Right now, in the US, we're using CO2-emitting sources on the grid mainly because of sunk costs. Almost all new generating capacity is renewables. Motor vehicles will reach this point soon, if they haven't already. Technological advancement enables social change, it's not a distraction from it. What you should be arguing for are policies that accelerate the maturation of these necessary technologies.
Sure, but I still think it's true that we could have done this without the technology if we had a functional Senate in the US and the stomach for small personal lifestyle changes. It's kind of silly that we don't. California could stop wasting huge amounts of water on almond farms, for example. We have more fuel efficient cars, but Americans are also driving larger cars than ever. We could stop buying bottled water in plastic bottles, but sales are higher than ever.
Our use of renewables has increased significantly, but the use of fossil fuels has increased more over the same time period.
I am certainly exaggerating a lot, but the point still stands.
Imagine a box with an input slot on one side and output slot on the other. We say "look, we have reduced input flow by X% this year, it is even more than last year. Surely we are doing great or at least acceptable?". But if we go around and measure the output flow and it is always increasing, then I must say the actions are not so great.
I do realize that for example we may be slightly slowing are acceleration rate compared to the situation if we did nothing, but in the end the result is not acceptable. We need an active GH gasses sequestration technologies deployed on the planetary scale, that is the only way to do anything for climate - to introduce actual negative flows in the equation. Decreasing emissions won't work alone.
In the U.S. (don’t know about other countries) the issue got tied to politics and religion. Some peoples’ identities and beliefs are zealously tied to denialism. A refutation of their beliefs in this area is an attack on them personally. So any objective evidence to the contrary is discounted. Often times using conspiratorial thinking. Such is the way for all extremists.
I’m not expecting 40 years at the current rate. Given the way PV deployments have been growing and how long they last, I expect electricity to be mostly green in the first few years of the 2030s, and most other sectors soon after.
It's not the direct effect on us that causes problems, it is the runaway greenhouse effect that would wreck high efficiency agriculture. Think mid double digits drops in yield. If you are focusing on the direct effect on humans you are looking at the wrong thing, that is manageable, the other one probably is not.
Yield yes, but not nutritional contents. Most vital nutrients require more than just CO2 to have more production in a plant (notably, Nitrogen is needed).
Nitrogen is 70% of the atmosphere, I don’t see any way for it to run short until the death of the sun (or the use of von Neumann probes) boils off Earth’s atmosphere.
If you’re going to worry about fertilisers, worry about phosphate and potassium… but even then, the problem and solution is unrelated to greenhouse gases.
Nitrogen is 70% of the atmosphere but unlike CO2 it's concentration isn't going up in an appreciable way. So if a plant is constraint in nutrients by Nitrogen, it can't make more of those if CO2 goes up. If CO2 goes up it can only make things that require more Carbon and Oxygen, both of which only form very basic structures the plants can use to build. Not nutrients.
That assumes the plants get it directly from the air. Legumes do (hence the invention of crop rotation), but most plants get it from fertilisers, the manufacturers of which get it from the air and can scale up independently of the farms. The manufacturing process currently uses methane… but only because that’s historically been the cheapest source of hydrogen.
That still leaves getting it on the field. Overfertilization is a problem and as mentioned, the plant will require that Nitrogen in proportion to the amount of CO2 to even begin to compensate the lack of Nitrogen. With CO2 being 50% higher that means you'd already have to fertilize 50% more to get the same Nitrogen to CO2 ratio as preindustrial levels. And that number isn't going to get better anytime soon. I don't think that adding 50% fertilizer on top of the current fertilization is a solution, overfertilization already causes way to many problems. I've had to stay of the tap water more than once as a child because a farmer didn't follow the fertilization limits.
This is a solved problem since the invention of the bucket and pointy stick, when “fertiliser” meant “manure”.
> With CO2 being 50% higher that means you'd already have to fertilize 50% more to get the same Nitrogen to CO2 ratio as preindustrial levels.
Why do you want to match the air rather than the plant’s actual growth? Plants are limited by a lot of different factors, so while CO2 helps a bit, doubling it doesn’t double the nitrogen use all by itself.
> a farmer didn't follow the fertilization limits
While this is a real issue, there are many solutions, and worrying about CO2 altering crop yields isn’t one of them.
Absolutely. Thanks for your other comment, I shared a belief with @swader999 that the world was greening, it’s useful that you suggested an alternative hypothesis.
Overfertilization is a major issue, there is only so much fertilizer you can put on the field without making next years harvest impossible due to oversalting or damaging root systems. And you can bet farmers are already maxing that out as much as they can on an industrial scale.
An unrelated issue. That’s important. I have no reason to expect it to get worse. What runs off the fields is necessarily not used by crops.
> And you can bet farmers are already maxing that out as much as they can on an industrial scale.
I doubt that.
All industries, agriculture included, are incentivised to maximise profits. Optimising profit sure isn’t environmentally friendly, but it also doesn’t mean treating fertiliser as a magic potion.
That’s pointlessly expensive right now for most crops, so those are fairly limited. Likewise, the economically optimal quantity of fertiliser used by farms is different from the optimal quantity for the health of people living down-river — but that’s just as true regardless of if CO2 is higher or lower than we consider desirable for the general global climate.
Yes, but not faster than the total mass of crops drops due to the increase in heat. Crop yield per plant in a controlled environment where only CO2 is increased != total crop yield given all of the circumstances involved in climate change.
CO2 as a heat trap is the problem, not so much CO2 in the atmosphere as an input to plant and animal life.
You are well into 'just asking questions'[1] territory, something that really ticks me off because all of these are a google search away, but just for the record:
Replanting and more (and more intense) agriculture is what is making our planet greener. For the moment. But there are pretty clear upper limits to what the planet can deal with temperature wise, at some point it will get so hot that plants will not be able to retain their moisture. Already there are territories that were arable in the recent past that today are not or are subject to extreme droughts almost every summer.
For Europe the estimates are that Portugal (and Spain) are going to be the first to be hit really hard, and in a way that is already underway:
Also the planet could well become greener with global warming but the issue is the rate of change. Even if the new growing conditions were great for some crops, evolving our entire agriculture and food regimen to them in a few decades is a huge ordeal.
By the time you get to CO2 levels that are toxic to plants, animal life (including humans) is all long-dead.
Normally when I have to remind people that humans are not plants it’s right after they state (accurately) that plants do better with somewhat more CO2 than is in the natural atmosphere.
3 doublings of PV at that rate gets us to about 9-10 TW peak. I don’t know the actual average global capacity factor, but I do know the current global electricity usage is only about 3 TW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
Massive wars, displacement on a scale never seen before, famine. In short: go watch some movie about the apocalypse, then multiply by 10 or so unless they include the earth becoming entire uninhabitable because that likely will not happen. But for the vast majority of our species, and many others besides it will be permanent curtains. And I'm not sure if you could call the survivors lucky.
It's not that the CO2 level itself would be fatal to humans, it is the cascade from large scale agricultural collapse that would do us in.
Also sustained wet bulb temperatures > 35C rendering some areas pretty much uninhabitable for anyone not in an AC building or vehicle. Would anyone want to live somewhere where if your AC or power dies then you die when you can try and migrate somewhere more hospitable?
Edit: And I am acutely aware that I live somewhere that is likely to suffer the least directly consequences from climate change.
I was in Portugal a while ago in summer and it was hitting 45 Celsius, absolutely unbearable. We sprinted from the car to the nearest AC'd building. No way you can deal with that kind of temperature unassisted for any length of time.
There are a lot of alarmist comments here - but the direct effect on humans is minimal up to 10,000ppm[1]. The effect on the environment on the otherhand isn't easy to predict.
It's not extremism not to want to change your habits. You could argue that it's wrong, etc. But trying to defend for example your right to have a car and move freely is not "extremism". And it's normal to feel personally attacked when they tell you to give up your car. It's literally a personal attack on your freedom.
I suggest that your feeling of being attacked is more imagined than real. The questions are:
1. Is the climate being changed by human activity and rapidly so?
2. What should one do with this knowledge if the answer to 1 is yes?
Perhaps you don’t want to do anything about it. That is fine for you to decide this. But one should not answer ‘no’ to question 1 because doing something about it feels personal to you. The answer to 1 should have nothing to do with 2.
> And it's normal to feel personally attacked when they tell you to
give up your car. It's literally a personal attack on your freedom.
It's a really interesting comment which I wish we could explore
deeper.
I get the same feelings but about different things. So I know you are
sincere. But also, it's cultural and quite superficial. In psychology
it's called "identification". An attack on a thing you identify with
feels like an attack on you personally.
So for example, for me, attacks on free software, or my "right" to
program in a language I choose, or to run a server, feel like actual
attacks on my fundamental "freedom" as you say.
In reality though, if the world took those things away, within a
couple of months or years I'd have forgotten and moved along with the
flow. I know this from the experience of being half a century old :)
Now, if I took away your car, I can promise you'd feel the same in no
time at all. Why? I don't own a car, and haven't for about 30 years. I
git rid of my car when I moved to London, because private cars are a
liability there. One or twice it's been a minor inconvenience. But
apart from that I feel as free as ever - I go where I like, when I
like, with who I like.... just rarely by car.
Even though I'm a fairly conservative person in some ways, I think we
must recognise that many things we cling to as "essential freedoms"
are actually just in our minds.
I don't understand what you're getting at. Freedom of movement is absolutely a freedom for humans. In places like London, or even New York for a US example, you may be able to achieve this without a car.
Are you arguing that all it takes is the saturation of public transportation for the entire US? Or are you arguing that people should just all move to mega-cities? I'm genuinely confused about what you're trying to explain to OP.
yea the "well I can do it so you can to" approach is pretty weak. I'm not sure how good faith the original comment is being anyways, but I don't think this response is very effective regardless. It should at least be caveated with "if you are in a similar location to London" or "your car will be replaced by effective public transit".
"You'll adapt just like I did" is not very convincing for the majority of people.
> "You'll adapt just like I did" is not very convincing for the
majority of people.
That's not my assertion, nor the point of my comment. The point is
that identification (and misplaced sense of ownership) makes us very
reluctant to be convinced [1]. A point which you agreeing with.
Nonetheless, people adapt when change comes. Another example, only just
in my living memory was "decimalisation" (and for other Europeans when
the currency switched to Euro). My grandmother swore blind the world
would end if they brought in decimal currency. Within weeks she was
the strongest supporter.
In 1752 people in England rioted because the calendars changed from
Julian to Gregorian. People thought they were being robbed of 11
days. When the day arrived everybody awoke, got on with their lives as
usual and in no time completely forgot it ever happened.
EDIT:
[1] In fact people can be so challenged by identification they'll
downvote the most polite and reasoned of comments to feel better
rather than respond intelligently.
I like and agree with the general sentiment of your comment (people are more adaptive than they may think) but I think the example isn't a great one... What would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US (we have a lot of them in almost every state)? Public transit would operate at a pretty significant loss in these areas and would be a logistical nightmare. Given enough time, I'm sure some solutions could help make it possible, but there would be significant inconvenience, loss of security/safety in the short term.
> would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the
US (we have a lot of them in almost every state)? Public transit
would operate at a pretty significant loss in these areas and would
be a logistical nightmare. Given enough time, I'm sure some
solutions could help make it possible, but there would be
significant inconvenience, loss of security/safety in the short
term.
I honestly don't think I have any suggestions. Not technical ones. I
am neither an expert on transportation nor planning. My comment is
about psychology, and to some extent about history.
As you say, given enough time maybe new solutions would make changes
possible. But also, maybe not. Given enough time it may be that people
living in rural areas accept that the world has changed, and travel
far less. Given time, maybe the societal pressures to travel will
ease. It may be that in time the main attraction of rural life returns
to being its pace and relative isolation. These are not necessarily
good or bad things, progressions or regressions, just change.
To the extent that change involves loss as well as gain I do think that
change is like the stages of grief. The early stages, before
acceptance, involve various mental tricks to try carrying on as
before.
Yes, the only reason for my comment was that you gave multiple examples where you and family members and historical groups made a big deal out of something and it turned out it didn't have any significant impact on their lives. There are probably few rural folks who wouldn't experience significant life altering consequences of losing their personal transportation autonomy.
> What would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US?
ALCOHOL FUEL! (Forgive me for shouting.)
If they are that spread out, they almost certainly have room to grow some sugar beets or sugar cane or potatoes or something like that, then they can ferment and distill alcohol fuel. This was pretty common for a long time.
> Before the American Civil War many farmers in the United States had an alcohol still to turn crop waste into free lamp oil and stove fuel for the farmers' family use.
> In 1826, Samuel Morey uses alcohol in the first American internal combustion engine prototype.
> By the 1890s, alcohol-fueled engines are starting to be used in farm machinery in Europe, making countries more fuel independent.
> By 1896, horseless carriages (cars) were showing up on roads in Europe and the United States. Because gasoline is so cheap and abundant, and also because ethanol is taxed at a high level, early US automobiles are adapted to gasoline from the beginning. Racing cars, on the other hand, usually used ethanol (and other alcohols) because more power could be developed in a smaller, lighter engine.
> In 1902, the Paris alcohol fuel exposition exhibited alcohol powered cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters, and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine powered by alcohol.
Alcohol is clean-burning, non-toxic, carbon-neutral, much higher energy density than any battery, cheap and easy to make, feed stocks are everywhere (I knew a guy who had a deal with a donut shop to collect and use their old scrap dough!), and the leftovers are a nutritious and valuable animal feed (yeast are protein.)
This is an interesting comment: it makes me wonder if those places that we feel are habitable really are habitable. If humanity needs to inhabit parts of the world that can not be reached unless you have a particular mode of transport then it may turn out that effectively those places are no longer inhabitable. Just like the North Pole isn't habitable. We already give up on some areas of the planet for practical reasons (mountains with too steep a slope, for instance). We'd just add more of those, and the fact that they were habitable in the past probably should not make a difference.
Good creative analysis. I think time not distance may be adjustment we
will make first. Barring a catastrophic technology collapse I doubt
at this stage of human development we'll withdraw so fully from
wilderness and remote rural settlement. But perhaps the change we can
embrace is just chilling out. Other than firefighters and paramedics,
lifestyles where people "need" to be in a city 1000 miles away in a
few hours are untenable. Slower transport like rail and airships will
likely make something of a comeback in less dense countries.
> People thought they were being robbed of 11 days. When the day arrived everybody awoke, got on with their lives as usual and in no time completely forgot it ever happened.
Not accurate.
Isaac Asimov pointed out that people only got paid for 19 days' work, but had to pay a full month's rent, so they were perfectly reasonable to demonstrate.
Yes, and if you hadn't moved to London then you would indeed have a car and consider it being part of your transportation "must haves"
In most of North America, and now Latin America and bits of Asia, car dependancy is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs
Hopefully eventually most cities will move to a scheme closer to London's, but if anything, things might be moving the other way
> Yes, and if you hadn't moved to London then you would indeed have a
car
I've since moved out of London, and still have no car.
> transportation "must haves"
There are no "must haves" in this world.
> car dependency is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in
China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car
moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs
Yes, that's tragic. And I don't think those places have a long-term
future as they are. Fortunately urban areas can undergo radical
redesign. I think the post-pandemic is going to force that on us
anyway.
There are many places where you can live without a car. However they are overall a minority. Most people in the US live where living without the car is next to impossible. either there isn't any transit at all, or there is transit that only works for someone working 9-5 downtown, but you are still expected to drive a car for all other errands.
Yes in the core of a few other cities (New York is most obvious) you can reasonably live without a car. Most people don't live close enough to the core though.
The bad transit options is the first thing that needs to change. However nobody actually cares about that. Democrats are more interested in union jobs even though it drives costs up to the point where it isn't cost effective. Republicans don't even realize that it would be possible to have useful transit and so they fight throwing good money after bad.
The self indulgence of your comment is laughable (aside from the ugliness of a philosophy in which "you'll adapt" is a good reason for being subjected to restrictions, regardless of their deeper merit).
Because you live in one of the densest, oldest and most public transit-packed urban areas in Europe, you think that your easy shift to not having a car is worth a damn to hundreds of millions of people who don't live in London, or another big, dense, highly developed city like it? A Texas farmer or Louisiana fisherman isn't just being a selfish, green-hating ass when he or she says that they NEED their truck or car. They really do, to live, and almost every day. What kinds of mental bubbles do some of the privileged people who comment on this site live in?
Thank you, your outraged reaction has entirely proved the point I was
making about identification and its effects. Change is coming, whether
you like it or not. The greatest obstacles are probably not technical,
but psychological. It's coming for reasons of ecological fact, not
because anyone wants to subject others to meritless restrictions. (As
if one guy on the internet had that power.)
And people will adapt to it, because that's what we've been doing for
hundreds of thousands of years. That's not ugly, it's beautiful. It's
beautiful that humans are adaptable, resilient and inventive.
No, not outraged, just derisive. Change is indeed innate to the human experience and to the course of civilization, but the kind of bubble mentality you display with your comment is if anything especially brittle against practical realities. In a genuine catastrophic climate change context, do you really think your privileged urban lifestyle will be better suited for adaptation? Maybe, I can't be sure, but maybe circumstances cause you to rethink your current idea of change being beautiful.
That aside, it really is absurd to dismiss the needs and complaints of hundreds of millions of diverse vehicle-owning non-urban dwellers based on how smugly easy you think it was to not own a car in London of all places. There's nothing psychologically obtuse about pointing out the closed mindedness of your notion. Yet you speak of identification and its effects.
is someone trying to take away your car or is this some sort of New Green Deal fearmongering? Or do you actually feel personally attacked just by people suggesting you give up your car?
No one is going to literally take away anybody's car. They will increase the price of using one so much as to make it impossible for poor people to keep their cars.
The only fair price of using a car accounts for the price of removing its GHG emissions from the air. If operating a car costs less than that, then we are all indirectly subsidizing the use of cars, and we'd all be better off subsidizing the use of electric cars / public transport / etc. If using a car costs more than that, then we are unfairly targeting cars.
We are not only indirectly subsidizing cars, we are directly subsidizing it in several ways.
It can be in the form of direct support of various activities of the petroleum industry, such as drilling, refinement and pipelines in the name of creating new jobs, but also in giant infrastructure projects reserved for cars, and legal requirements of square meter prices for car parking many orders of magnitude below market cost.
It was the way post-war society was built up and will take a very long time to change. It's so entrenched that once you start seeing it, it is really everywhere.
Do you have so little faith in the free market? Do you really think no one is capable of coming up with a cheap enough car that is climate friendly, if they had to?
We're only talking about pricing in the externalities that societies already pay for you. I favor a revenue neutral carbon tax. Increase the cost of fossil fuels and give it back as reduced income tax. Let the people find ways to 'dodge' this tax by reduced emissions.
If you properly price an externality, the free market will help you deal with it.
> It's literally a personal attack on your freedom.
Yes, it is, and it is important to grow up and realize that actions have got consequences, heating meats is also unsustainable, flying planes is also unsustainable, the general levels of developed countries consumption rates are also unsustainable
As that rather famous "debater" says, "reality doesn't care about your feelings"
Liberties go partnered with duties and responsibilities, it is widespread commonplace at least in US related discourse to behave in a wholly entitled manner and simply ignore the most important parts of these social system (responsible freedom)
Sustainability is almost always subject to circumstances and context in a practical sense. Many people who decry "unsustainable" practices seem to forge this despite all the lessons of history.
250 years ago, it would have been completely unfathomable to imagine feeding 8 billion people with the technologies of the time. I'm not just talking about it being unsustainable but temporarily doable, it would have simply not happened without maybe two thirds of the world rapidly dying of hunger. Yet, here we are today, with the lowest relative proportion of the world in recorded history in danger of famine.
This of course slowly isn't sustainable WITH present technologies being widely used. If those technologies change however, it could indeed become sustainable, just like what we have now is far beyond the capacities of previous centuries. Instead of default leaps to new prohibitions in environmental and climate change discussions, more focus should be made on promoting new developments that let us both live well and in large numbers while harming the world less.
> trying to defend for example your right to have a car and move freely is not "extremism".
It is if the justification you provide for having this right is that it is "God-given" or a consequence of "natural law" or something like that. Because what that boils down to is that you are claiming the right to ignore the economic externalities of your actions because you are somehow special, despite being unable to provide any evidence for your specialness beyond your own personal beliefs. That is the defining characteristic of extremism. Extremism does not have to be extreme, it just has to be unassailable.
"any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies"
I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies even if the right you claim doesn't seem "extreme" at first glance. (And I qualify it in this way because "the right to drive" doesn't seem extreme at first glance, but could in fact result in the destruction of technological civilization if enough people claim it, so whether or not driving is "extreme" depends on your perspective.)
That definition is different than what you are saying. Having the privilege to drive is a moderate position, not an immoderate one. We also place restrictions on it, so it's not uncompromising either.
'I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies even if the right you claim doesn't seem "extreme" at first glance.'
Just because someone claims an improper reason, doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong (you could have false premises and a true conclusion - that makes a bad argument but the conclusion can still correct). Often times the people claiming natural rights (or really any of their rights) just don't know the proper reasoning and instead resort to claiming something gave them that right - nature, God, government, etc.
It would be hard to fully explore any argument without getting to the point of someone's subjective reasoning that something is good or bad as perspective can come into play (good for me vs bad for you, why is society more important than individuals, etc).
> Having the privilege to drive is a moderate position
I don't dispute that, but 1) you used the word "privilege" rather than "right" which really changes the tenor of the claim. "Driving is a privilege, not a right" implies that the "privilege" can be revoked while the (putative) right could not. And 2) my claim was about the justification that people offer for their claimed rights, not the rights themselves.
> Just because someone claims an improper reason, doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong
I didn't say it was. Just because someone is an extremist doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong. The problem with extremism is not that it always leads to wrong conclusions or even to bad outcomes. The problem is that it makes it a lot harder to correct errors.
This is particularly relevant in the case of climate change. When the Taliban chops people's heads off it produces an immediate visceral reaction in most people, which helps motivate them to act. Our collective decisions to keep driving today don't have the same effect on our psyches, even if a lot more people are going to end up dead in the future as a result.
Generally people call things rights even if they are technically privileges. People do that all the time with "right to drive" and others. Even rights can be taken away by the government. It seems that driving as it is treated now is consistent with other many rights when it comes to restrictions and removal of those rights/privileges. There's really no distinction necessary in the context of this discussion given that the function similarly.
"2) my claim was about the justification that people offer for their claimed rights, not the rights themselves."
The definition that you provided says nothing about justification being a part of something being extreme.
"Our collective decisions to keep driving today don't have the same effect on our psyches"
That's because driving is not extreme. It's considered a moderate position and people accept compromises on it. Even the people that say it's a right accept some level of restrictions such as traffic laws, at least from a standpoint of not wanting to be punished.
Simply wanting the freedom to move about by driving is not an extreme position.
>"any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies"
>I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies
I (and pretty sure a sizeable portion of HN) want precisely zero on-device CSAM scanning and encryption backdoors. I'm not willing to compromise on this (eg. "okay we'll backdoor encryption but only for terrorists"). Does that make me an extremist? Based on your definition it certainly sounds like it.
That depends on the justification that you offer. If your justification is (say) that you have a God-given right to sexually exploit children with impunity, then yes, I'd say that qualifies you as an extremist. If your justification is that CSAM scanning does more harm than good, and you can back that up with actual facts, then no.
> If your justification is (say) that you have a God-given right to sexually exploit children with impunity, then yes, I'd say that qualifies you as an extremist.
It's easy to call pedophiles "extremists", but what if my argument is
"I have a God-given right to not have my on-device data searched"?
The part that makes that position extremist in my view is the "God-given" bit, not anything that comes after. Because anyone can say "I have a God-given right to X" for any X and there is no way to challenge that. It is the built-in immunity to challenge that makes such a position extremist.
There's nothing in the definition you gave earlier to support this interpretation. All that is required is that it be an immoderate or uncompromising position.
But justification is part of one's position. If you hold your position because you believe it is grounded in the Word of God, then no evidence or argument is going to dissuade you.
If you hold your position because you believe it is grounded in the Word of God, then no evidence or argument is going to dissuade you. That is what "uncompromising" means.
> any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies
There is a compromise position - accepting that driving a car is right, but also accepting that everyone must pay for its externalities, w.r.t. CO_2 by uniform revenue-neutral carbon tax, like any other fossil CO_2 emission.
Revenue-neutral carbon tax is an approach proposed by many economists, but governments are hesitant to use that and instead go with selective bans and subsidies.
> driving a car is right, but also accepting that everyone must pay for its externalities
Sure, but what most people mean when they say they have a "right" to something is that they are entitled to that thing without strings attached.
Also, there are factual disagreements about what the externalities of driving actually are. For example, should you have to pay for the people who suffer respiratory illnesses because of vehicle emissions? The cost of accidents? By what mechanism should these costs be assessed and payment made? How should the costs be distributed? If I drive 5000 miles a year should I pay the same as someone who drives 10,000? And how exactly do you assess the cost of moving the needle on an existential threat by a teeny tiny bit?
And just look at people's reaction to the recent increases in the cost of gas! They are indignant, outraged, because they think that they are entitled to cheap gas. It's their right.
"Pay for the externalities" is a fine principle, but very hard to put into practice.
And it's likely that the diesel trucks contribute the most die to fuel type, miles driven, etc. So cost to individual personal vehicles would likely be low, while the price of goods shipped via trucks would increase to offset those taxes.
> It's literally a personal attack on your freedom.
This is clearly false. It may feel like a personal attack on your freedom but:
1. It's not personal, this is a systemic problem and no one is trying to punish or harm you. The aim is ultimately to prevent harm, not just to you but to your whole community.
2. It's not an attack. The goal is not to cause you harm, again it's to prevent harm.
3. I'm not even sure what "freedom" means in this context. Do you feel that your freedom has been infringed upon when you have to stop at a cross walk for a pedestrian? Does not taking a shit in a public pool infringe upon this "freedom"? Freedom, for social organism, cannot mean complete and unrestricted action. The only people who have this view are actual toddlers, and part of them growing up to be elementary school kids is to learn about their role in society and the limits of their own rights in the face of others.
Well since it will be the poor who suffer the most one could argue it is a personal attack. If the law was that each individual gets X amount of carbon credits then you are stuck walking it would actually mean something. Instead it will be you get X amount of carbon credit then you buy more. So the rich will continue to pollute without worry and the poor will suffer. We need a system that everyone follows the same. But that will never happen.
> If the law was that each individual gets X amount of carbon credits then you are stuck walking it would actually mean something. Instead it will be you get X amount of carbon credit then you buy more.
Revenue-neutral carbon tax is pretty much equivalent to giving everyone carbon credits and allowing trading them (just with less overhead). If some rich people pay more tax to pollute more, then more money would be distributed back to everybody.
>Well since it will be the poor who suffer the most
The poor always suffer most. What do you use your money for, if not to avoid suffering? Immediate, short term, and long term, that's probably how you spend most of your money, plus spending to avoid your children and family suffering.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way: since the environmental improvements of the mid-20th century, urban environments have been the clear winners for living affordably, to say nothing of the accessibility of public services. Poor people may not be able to live in the most expensive zip code of NYC, LA, SF, etc., but then they were hardly going to be living on 100-acre estates when they're living in rural or suburban settings. Car-dominated infrastructure poses enormous personal costs for every single person and miserable additional costs to ferry around non-driver children.
So, enough of your government-subsidized 'freedom'. I want the freedom to safely cross the street to church without a police officers (and half the other cars) accelerating into me in the crosswalk. I want the freedom to bike to work safely. I want the freedom for my children to bike to parks, schools, and libraries, like I could growing up. I want the federal and state governments to stop dumping money on my town to build roads as wide as runways to facilitate firetrucks doing 3 point turns and police flying through neighborhoods like action-movie jackasses.
> 1. It's not personal, this is a systemic problem and no one is trying to punish or harm you. The aim is ultimately to prevent harm, not just to you but to your whole community.
This is the most tone deaf statement. If green policies make it harder for me to provide for my family, live our life as we see fit, or force me to do things I don't want to it is _very_ personal, like incredibly personal. There is no reason for you or anyone else to have any power over my life as a voter or a king, period.
I think your understanding of what a society means and entails is badly out of whack with reality. Living in a society entails curbs on “freedoms”. People in every society are subjected to the norms, ideals, and views of that society. These things change over time. Sometimes change is forced by external events and sometimes changes occur from within. Lots of people have power over you and power over your life today, right now. You are apparently comfortable with the ways and means of that control over your life and don’t want it to change but please don’t think that no one should have power over you.
> There is no reason for you or anyone else to have any power over my life as a voter
Unless you have your own private air that never touches anyone else's air, we all have a right to control your actions that change our collective air. If you don't agree, go find your own planet and live there.
And what if non green policies now will make it harder to provide for your family tomorrow?
Those arguing in good faith for green policies are thinking this. They are not out to get you, and take away your freedom. They fear all of our freedoms will be obliterated by the harsh realities of climate change.
The only reason you think cars are a good thing and give you freedom and not say, busses and trains, is because cars are available to you and the infrastructure is available to you. Others who have fantastic public transport feel cars are restricting and expensive way to move around.
You are simply a product of an environment you had no say in creating.
I'll start by saying that I believe that we need societal changes to help mitigate climate change.
BUT, 1) it is personal, 2) it is an attack and 3) it is a limitation on personal freedoms.
If we wish to make actual changes to save the planet rather than just preach, we need to recognize these truths. Telling people that their feelings are wrong just makes them dig in their heels all the more. IMO, a better approach is to recognize these sort of objections and think creatively about how to deal with them or mitigate the impact. Remember, the objective isn't to win arguments, it's to heal the Earth.
> But trying to defend for example your right to have a car and move freely is not "extremism". And it's normal to feel personally attacked when they tell you to give up your car. It's literally a personal attack on your freedom.
What most "anti-car" people are advocating for amounts to the option to not drive. As it is now, driving is practically a requirement for full participation in society.
Have you used public transit outside of NYC in the US? It's a laughable token service. It takes me ~ 15m to drive to work. Taking public transit would extend that to 93m. It would legitimately be faster to bike there. I do not live in a small town. This is in one of the top 10 cities in the US.
Very few people in our political discourse are asking people to give up their privilege of owning a car. However, some are asking for car owners to pay for the externalities of owning a car. That might lead to some lifestyle changes, like a two-parent household owning one car instead of two like they're used to.
And yes, maybe that restricts a car owner's "freedom", but should those car-based externalities be free?
> This sounds like a typical US thing. Suffering from a solvable problem, while creating the maximum public drama and having the society incapable of reform
If you read their comment, you'll see this doesn't apply for two reasons:
1) This is a global problem that is not specific to the US (even if the US is a huge contributor). No other country has solved the issue.
2) The comment is implying that this isn't a solvable problem (or at least a solution has never been proposed) since all the green tech/policy isn't having an impact.
The reason China, Australia and India gets away with what they are doing without sanctions is because they are pointing at the US and saying "they get away without doing anything so why shouldn't we?". That creates a form of international stalemate because no one can form the necessary coalition required for the agreements to have any sort of economical and political teeth.
I think that's just wishful thinking, honestly. There wouldn't be a significant change even if the US got it's act together. They'd just use different excuses
Obviously, but having US onboard opens up possibilities to create incentives that credible international accords are built on.
Or the other way around, without the US, China and Australia, even if the rest of the world does everything right, global carbon dioxide levels will not only keep increasing, but do so in an accelerating manner.
And before you ask why not China could create credible incentives for the US, the answer is that they do not have the institutions for it, which the US has. At least in theory.
The possible solution is for the world to place limits on making, buying, and selling things. Use less, buy less, travel less, mend your own clothes, grow some of your own food (if possible), be able to repair and use your device for 20 years, turn off your devices at night, use mass transit, don't use the AC, buy furniture that lasts for decades, etc.
That won't happen because of an economic collapse and no politician would ever get elected with this thinking (at least in the US). Plus, you've now taken away many freedoms that are inherit in democratic societies.
To me green technologies are better than nothing but there's really a consumption problem. And I'm completely guilty of it as well.
You're right. The average voter considers carbon tax, very high VAT, and scaling back of mass consumer good production indistinguishable from poverty. Airline flights in the US used to cost a month's salary before deregulation.
Your sources on meat & dairy being the largest contributors to climate change are a Daily Mail article quoting the CEO of a vegan food company, and a paragraph in wikipedia that doesn't mention climate change?
The identity goes even deeper than this. You're talking to a country of people that had it so bad wherever they were originally, that they decided to uproot everything they could carry and start a completely new life. Some are first generations of this today, while many are only two to three generations away from that source. Our indigenous people also carry this identity because the ones remaining know the ultimate face of evil and carry on under that load.
These are very, very different psyches of people. The subtleties show up in all elements of the current prevailing culture, and what is truly happening right now is the war between those that remember how bad it was and can be, and those who experienced life with a completely new set of pains outside the horrors of the bottom of hierarchy of needs.
To tie this back to the climate and culture of the US, having gone through two major hurricanes in the gulf region, I can tell you the mindset of everyone is 'so what.' You lose your house, all possessions, and have $500 in your bank account with 4 kids -- but you are not alone, every single person around you, rich or poor is going through some chaos. Every single person is reaching out to help you clear your road, cook food for you, keep the kids together -- (first hand account).
So in these communities, a big scary 'climate change' event is already happening, and they are pulling through just fine. They live in unconscious safety because they have direct evidence that their community has their back - and life continues on happily until someone comes with a shaking finger to say, 'you really need to stop everything you're doing and fight climate change.'
Who pays for the reconstruction costs after these events - isn't there a frequency of events when things simply becomes unsustainable and people migrate (like the Okies and the Dust Bowl)?
Many insurance companies have gone under, and those left, have left the region. Natural consequences are taking their toll. So you will see many migrations from this region - but I don't believe any of it will make these people say, "I must stop what I am doing and fight climate change." They will just adapt and endure.
While I'm willing to accept that I may lose my home and possessions to a natural disaster or accident (like a fire), I really would rather not if at all possible. Sure I'd survive, but it'd still suck (also survival is not guaranteed either, Hurricane Katrina killed 1833 people back in 2005, for example).
The only real risk around here is tornadoes (and we did have one touch down within 5 miles of us just last year, damaged a couple hundred homes, uprooted some trees, and rendered 20 homes unlivable). From a recent article, some of the people with damaged homes are still dealing with it six months later, and some homes just have tarps where a couple of their walls were, still (it was already hard to hire people even before the tornado struck, also they had issues getting insurance to approve things).
I wouldn't want to willingly move to even more likelihood of problems, like near a beach in the Gulf Coast or Arizona (which is about to have severe water problems soon as Lake Mead upstream is drying up fast).
> Sure I'd survive, but it'd still suck (also survival is not guaranteed either, Hurricane Katrina killed 1833 people back in 2005, for example).
Yep, exactly the point! And look at the adaptive community response to Hurricane Katrina and recent flooding events: the Cajun Navy.
All I'm saying is telling this type of voter to ignore their lives and change their lifestyle, when they adapt in pretty incredible ways - is going to be a hard sell.
From my perspective this sounds like a great story with very little evidence to back it up. Look to South Texas as a counter example. There is a high percentage of immigrants, a high risk of disastrous impacts from climate change, and massively higher support for government intervention than other parts of the region, some counties even beating out Austin.
Looking at the maps it seems much more likely that the obvious thing is true, this is an issue driven almost entirely by political identity with a side helping of how badly you might actually feel the effects.
I get that a grand narrative of people pulling together feels nice, but if it isn't true its just a waste of time.
It sounds like you haven't seen this experience first hand, that's ok. The lack of direct experience doesn't make my first hand accounts of repeated experience a grand narrative that isn't true though.
The climate emergency will devastate crops all over the world, render parts of it simply unlivable, but you believe that Americans, with their "very, very different psyches" and the "culture of the US", will simply band together, "rich or poor", and "live in safety"?
If it weren't the case that people with the same false-to-the-fact beliefs were setting policy through America, your beliefs could simply be ignored by the polite, but as it is, it's simply tragic and rather horrifying.
Yes, I'm very much pointing to the reasoning why the logical argument to think and do something about climate change is not heard in these areas, and specifically with the US leadership. Every culture has their myths, so I encourage you to learn about the Cajun Navy (just one of the many from the gulf region).
Making a change requires acknowledging and accepting that many of the US populace will not respond well to the incredulity of their direct lives.
The ongoing pandemic demonstrates that we have neither US Government preparation nor grassroots social organization to be resilient in the face of crisis. At least we have enough military firepower to shoot at a problem. That side of national risk management is well funded.
As a non-American who lived in the US, I've noticed that Americans tend to do a lot of navel gazing about the state of America - without knowing much about how other countries deal with it. A lot of blame is on the media which tend to exaggerate and sensationalize news and the US outlets are experts at it.
If you spend time outside the US, you'd realize the problems the US deal with are pretty similar to the problems other countries deal with.
But Americans with little knowledge of the world outside the US catastrophize what's going on the in the US - "the Republic is falling!", "it's never been this bad!", "Americans are so ignorant!" and "nobody has ever had this problem, ever!".
I’ve lived in Germany for a while and grew up in Central America (though in an American colony). From my perspective the U.S is in a state of imperial decline. The republic is indeed failing. In fact, I think it’s dead but most people just don’t realize this. I can list a number of reasons for this belief and I could be completely wrong.
However, reasons for my beliefs are not due to a lack of knowledge of the world outside the U.S. Empires die eventually and change happens. The major power and structural problems in the U.S. are not sustainable and will eventually have to change. Whether that change comes peacefully or violently I can’t say.
I assume you get most of your news from mass media and their "BREAKING" headlines? If so, I'm not surprised you hold that view.
Accusations of the US "in decline" were happening back in the 60's and 70's when things were much worse than they are now, like order of magnitude worse.
As I said, navel gazing and lack of perspective tend to dominate news in coverage of the US.
I don’t watch television news or any television news program or talk show. I don’t listen to radio news or radio talk shows either. I don’t read the news as such. I will read comments that people write on this site and some others but I am not a consumer of news as such.
As I said, I can give reasons for my beliefs and those reasons are not due to ignorance.
The empire might be failing, but it is possible for the US to peacefully step back, like the UK did after WWII.
One thing I wonder is, who steps up? China, for sure, though it's grappling with population decline as an existential crisis. The EU? The EU has never 'stepped up' for anything. The US sat patiently by and tried to let Europe deal with Milosevich. That utterly failed. The EU was also almost ripped apart by the greek debt crisis, so it too is having real issues.
A post US hegimon world is going to be a very different world, and not necessarily a better one.
NATO, lead by the US after we waited ages for the European community to sort things out. Europe really dropped the ball there, and proved themselves almost wholly incapable of dealing with an internal security problem.
Hmmm, I guess and maybe you remember better than I do but how is that not the same thing as NATO and the UN dropping the ball? Is it not the case that everyone waited a year to do anything?
The UN will never solve anything because it requires unanimous support from russia and china on the security council. nato is a defensive alliance that only really comes into effect when a member is attacked. I'm not even sure what pretext allowed nato to get involved here, but Europe basically twiddled their thumbs while genocide happened on the european continent. This only really changed when the US got involved to keep things from spiraling out of control like 1914.
FWIW, I've noticed this with non-Americans too. I did a backpacking trip around the world when I was 25, and the proportion of European women (always women) who felt like it was their duty to lecture or question me about the US's unique evil was absurd.
Unsurprisingly, I was a lot more informed and a _lot_ better at arguing than they were, so it was pretty trivial to completely demolish their points quickly enough that it didn't turn into "an argument", with the attendant social friction of disagreements that drag on.
I no longer spend much time around women in their early 20s, so I'm spared these extremes of ignorance, but I still occasionally come across the same tendency occasionally, albeit with a lot more maturity. The US is still something close to a global hegemon, so it's a target for hyperbolic projection by every simpleton in the world that wants to sound educated on geopolitics. Note that this also includes the best-country-in-the-world jingoists that can't recognize America's exceptional positive qualities without violently dismissing its exceptional negative qualities.
I have an uncle who's convinced that literally every conflict in the Middle East is entirely the US's fault, entirely ignoring a region that's been beset by conflict for millennia, as well as the modern borders drawn in crayon by the British on their way out. The best strategy, on HN and in real life, is to nod & smile & understand that these people have no hope of and no interest in understanding reality.
Climate policy is going to be a sledgehammer. If you let your opposition wield it, they will destroy your way of life, because the opposition won't care (or won't realize) about the adverse effects it will cause on you. A vegan making climate policy could pretty easily make eating meat illegal, then respond to any counterarguments with "Do you not care about the climate?!" It's a fight over the sledgehammer. They fight dirty because a lot is at stake.
The above assumes that the proposed policy would actually work too. Some climate policies are clearly not going to have a significant positive effect, but we're doing them anyway (eg banning plastic bags in favor of paper bags@). Other policies could be designed just to keep yourself in power (deny the opposition power).
@ this does have a different reason too - to fight plastic pollution, but climate change is also cited as a reason. Paper bags are heavier and require more resources though, which makes it difficult for them to end up as better than plastic bags when it comes to climate change.
I wasn’t talking about policy. I was referring to the phenomenon of people denying what is obvious and beyond scientific dispute. You are referring to a different group of extremists. And by extremist I mean a person for whom the cause (dogma) is more important than the truth.
Believing nothing should be done about climate change does not make one an extremist. Believing animals should not be eaten does not make one an extremist. Adhering to those beliefs by automatically discounting contravening evidence makes one an extremist.
"I was referring to the phenomenon of people denying what is obvious and beyond scientific dispute."
The problem is that this is the religious position, not the other one. If you go investigate this properly you'll find there's tons of scientific dispute about even very basic things like what the temperature actually was 5 years ago in specific places, let alone more complex topics like what the climate would do in response to an immediate doubling of CO2 levels (so called ECS).
And the impact of global warming itself isn't at all obvious. All the effects so far are so small you can't directly detect them with your own senses, you have to use sensitive monitoring equipment and/or accept a lot of conjecture about chance and probability. In turn that requires you to have absolute confidence in the people doing the measurements and processing the data, but plenty of people don't have that confidence for various legitimate reasons (e.g. the Climategate emails). So it's pretty much by definition not obvious.
"Believing nothing should be done about climate change does not make one an extremist"
Doing nothing is the default position in any debate so arguing for it by definition makes one not an extremist. You can't be a "nothing extremist", that's a contradiction.
Extremism takes the form of positing extreme scenarios like the end of the world, and demanding extreme solutions like massive changes to everyone's ways of life. The people who say "let's not do that" are the ones pushing back on extremism.
This is at the root of a lot of the fighting over climate change: it creates enormous cognitive dissonance in people. Those who decide they want to fight it want to see themselves as rational devotees of science, but find themselves being the guy in the sandwich board yelling "The End Is Nigh" and demanding extreme policies. And just like sandwich board guy they struggle to explain the details of how the world is meant to end. Very few people who have tied their identity to climate extremism can actually handle a debate about the details which is why they instantly retreat into screaming that it's all "settled science" (which is a lie).
You did not understand what I wrote. I clearly defined what I meant by “extremist”. The holding of a particular belief is not what makes one an extremist (under my definition).
No, I understood, my reply was meant as a disagreement. You're defining "extremist" as someone who ignores evidence that counters their beliefs, but that isn't what the word means, is it? Or rather I've never seen someone define it that way before. You could use words like "stubborn", "closed minded", "ideological" or whatever to describe such people but "extremist" always means someone whose views or actions depart seriously from the mainstream.
In particular, most people recognize the possibility (at least theoretically) that someone can be both an extremist and also correct. Whereas by your definition that's impossible.
> If you let your opposition wield it, they will destroy your way of life,
Plenty of things in climate-forward policy actually improve everyone's quality of life, even if the "way of life" changes.
Take EVs for example. As we transition to them, local air quality improves, not just for the EV drivers but also for non EV drivers.
Same for heat pumps replacing fossil burning furnaces - they are so efficient that it still results in a CO2 and emissions reduction if we burn natural gas at a power plant to power them.
And for most people and drives EVs are just a better experience (acceleration, vibration, smoothness), and heat from a heat pump feels better than a gas furnace since it doesn't excessively dry the air, and also has no risk of leaking combustion byproducts into your living space.
But sure, if "way of life" means the "principle" of burning fossil fuels directly for day to day propulsion and space heating, then yes climate policy is a threat to that, but being wedded to a technology for its own sake seems backwards.
I’m assuming “politics” here is being used in its modern sense, as a synonym for senseless/childish rivalry, instead of “collective and competitive decision-making”. And the type of religious belief you’re discussing is centered around zealotry, presumably deriving from a priori beliefs.
I think these are derivative factors. The primary factor is material, as it almost invariably is. There are massive organizations and affiliated organizations with a material stake in having things be this way, and they have almost zero interest in “societal net benefit” action, or concern for “societal net deficit” harm, so long as “private net benefit” is maintained.
There is no shadowy cabal, but as with other aspects of the system, lack of explicit coordination is why it works so well (think of it as a perverse version of Milton Friedman’s “pencil”).
Greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union (EU) decreased by almost 4 % in just one year (2019). Even accounting for imports, it's decreasing.
Green tech clearly works.
The last decade or so for me have really confirmed the old fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" or the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I never understood how people could believe such obviously foolish things. I think part of it for me is just getting older, but I also think the last decade has just been more blatant in a lot of ways.
> ALL so called "green" technologies are either fake
WTF? Let's take one example, the F-150 Lightning. When it replaces a gasoline truck sale, it eliminates 150 tons of CO2 from burning gasoline, and about 80 tons of CO2 from drilling, refining and transporting that gasoline.
Sure, producing the truck takes a little extra energy, and electricity isn't carbon free in most places, but that doesn't come anywhere close to 200 tons of CO2.
There is no climate benefit to opening a wind farm. The climate benefit comes when a wind farm causes a fossil fuel power plant to be shut down.
When you look at what politicians and corporations boast about, it's always about adding. New renewables, new solar panels on our roof. Not about taking away fossil fuels.
As an example, "carriers reduced their fuel consumption per passenger-kilometer by approximately 39 percent between 2005 and 2019 (pre-COVID-19), a compound annual growth rate of about 3.4 percent per year". [globally] - you can be sure the industry touts its increased efficiency.
Even with your example - is the new truck going to travel more miles than the previous one? The US is still building urban sprawl by default. Does the owner use the pickup truck or, like most pickup truck owners, they could be use a smaller more efficient vehicle?
As in the famous talk "Hans Rosling: the magic washing machine", we haven't done anything to actually reduce emissions. Yet we are sold a narrative of constant progress towards our climate goals.
The F150 Lightning has a carbon footprint comparable to a Prius. Not every Lightning sold is replacing a truck, but in general they're replacing something considerably larger than a Prius.
And coal plants are being shut down at a very significant rate.
The number of ICE vehicles being sold annually is also going down.
The US and every country continue to license new fossil fuel extraction, knowing that any carbon extracted will end up in our atmosphere, regardless of where the power plant is.
Coal peaked, but gas and oil extraction are still growing fast.
If you look at the last decade, gas consumption has been going up even if the share of electric vehicle has been going up.
Why?
Because people with ice vehicles have been buying suv and pickups in higher percentage and driving more. So the average personal “car” consumption is up.
I’m not as gloomy. I can acknowledge progress. But when it comes to cars, it’s been worse, not better. But at least now the technology is better and can hope for the curve to finally invert itself.
Weird, I thought it was because gas cars (EDIT: This should say electric cars) only just recently approached 4% of total sales and are still under 1% of the cars on the road.
Normal growth is enough to explain why that hasn't (yet) resulted in a net decrease. If the growth rate continues at 50+%, that will change in about 5 years, though.
Thanks. I was trying to remember the name of that. Highly relevant and likely explanatory for at least some of what's going on.
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating the efficiency gains.
> but in general they're replacing something considerably larger than a Prius.
You are conceding the point with extra words here
Reality is that the amount of vehicles is increasing, and by rule of thumb 50% of the emissions released by vehicles come from their own construction, steel, copper, manufacturing, chemicals needed for the production
Given the size of a f150, would you take the bet that its manufacturing cost co2 wise is lower than a prius?
This is obviously, bypassing the fact that rather than having to buy a 0km vehicle instead someone could have bought a second hand f150 and therefore not strictly needed to increase the total amount of vehicles in circulation
Your rule of thumb is from 2012, and is very wrong in 2022. A recent paper came out that determined that the production emissions of gasoline and electric vehicles are now equivalent. I can't dig it up and it hasn't been generally accepted yet, but the generally accepted number now is that an EV is net carbon negative after 6 months of driving.
But that's for an electric car vs a fuel efficient car. An electric truck vs a 15 mpg gasoline truck will go carbon negative a lot faster than 6 months.
The other poster is saying that what’s happening is there are MORE vehicles so carbon production continues to rise.
That the real deal is figuring how to reduce the number of vehicles in total.
Is the F150 Lightning better than commuting to work in a deuce and half? Sure. But it is not carbon neutral or negative except when compared to something worse - and there’s always something worse that could be compared.
> The other poster is saying that what’s happening is there are MORE vehicles so carbon production continues to rise.
I think people are looking at different derivatives.
If you compare the rate of change of emissions, they do continue to rise as new electric vehicles are produced. But, the claim that an EV is more efficient than a regular truck is not a claim about the first derivative, but about the second.
That is, in theory, an EV raises CO2 emissions less than the equivalent truck. That's saying the impact should be visible in the *2nd* derivative being negative, but not necessarily the first.
Yeah, the question is if there's some sort of "traffic expands to fill the highways" argument, that as vehicles become less emissive we'll get more and more of them so our total emissions continues to grow.
I suspect there is not in the US (as almost everyone who wants a vehicle has one or two already) but there certainly could be in less vehicle-saturated markets.
When it's a straight 1 over 1 it's easy - for example, if someone were to buy me a Milwaukee M18 lawnmower, I'd be willing to scrap the existing gas one, so it can no longer pollute. If I were to give it away or sell it, it would still be doing whatever it does for someone else.
> Yeah, the question is if there's some sort of "traffic expands to fill the highways" argument
Yep, that's always a concern, and one of the reasons I framed my response around what the argument was, and what the claim was. I haven't really done enough research to know or feel confident in whether that claim is borne out or holds and the concern you've raised is the major thing that could get in the way.
I was largely just commenting on the disconnect in the discussion that I was observing.
This goes back 50 years to 1972, when they realized that renewables don’t avoid peak oil, just delay it. The justification is delaying buys us time, but delaying means we are adding more years of fossil fuels into the atmosphere.
> There is no climate benefit to opening a wind farm. The climate benefit comes when a wind farm causes a fossil fuel power plant to be shut down.
In many countries, this is exactly what's happening.
In the UK for example, gas and electricity usage has been declining for the last 15 years. Coal has been almost eliminated from the grid, and renewables now account for about 40% of generation, from less than 10% a decade ago. Overall carbon emissions are below 1890 levels.
Obviously we have outsourced some of our emissions but there's very clearly a huge reduction that can't be entirely explained by that.
It's happening throughout Europe and North America. The United States has had declining per-capita carbon consumption since around 1970. Absolute levels, which include population growth, have been going down since around 2000. We're replacing high-carbon power sources (i.e. coal) with lower carbon power sources (i.e. nat gas) and carbon-based sources with renewable sources, with wind and solar now producing some 13% of the total energy consumption and 20% of domestic energy production, more than double the percentages from 2015.
>There is no climate benefit to opening a wind farm. The climate benefit comes when a wind farm causes a fossil fuel power plant to be shut down.
Or when it prevents a new fossil fuel power plant to open.
No one is going to sell their old vehicles just because there's a greener version, but if all new vehicles are green you'll eventually phase down the old ones. You can't expect people to care overnight, much less to lose money because of it.
I looked close at replacing my current vehicles. A new EV minivan would cost more per month than gas in my wife's current van (which is paid for), but it won't last forever and the difference is not that much. Of course that assumes something that will work is available, in our case adjustable pedals a must (my wife is short) and nobody makes an EV minivan with them as far as I can tell.
My truck is a little trickier. The F150 lightening would do everything I need a truck for, but I drive my truck so rarely (one fill up per year). too bad nobody will rent me a truck for what I want t truck for.
>Or when it prevents a new fossil fuel power plant to open.
That's not a benefit, that's a loss averted. These claims are usually over egged as well for "net zero" calculations. Net zero against some hypothetical averted future, but in physical reality the emissions are still there heating the atmosphere.
As an analogy, I can "prevent spending" by buying a coffee machine, bulk buying some products, etc. However, there are more ways to spend money than I can even notice, and I can pile up the "savings" but still find I have no money left at the end of a month to... actually deposit into my savings. I think it's a common experience.
If production of fossil fuels is not decreased by regulation, then a drop in domestic demand means more is available to export. The export price goes down, encouraging the continued use of fossil fuels abroad. Another power plant is built over there and emits GHGs.
> There is no climate benefit to opening a wind farm. The climate benefit comes when a wind farm causes a fossil fuel power plant to be shut down.
Or when a new fossil fuel power plant is _not_ built, or when demand spikes but the renewable sources handle the load and make fossil fuels less attractive.
We aren’t socially set up with the mechanisms to make this change overnight. Basically no society is, we have to move people there with a viable alternative to them going without energy, or they will find ways to burn the earth to keep warm as the previous generations of all of us have.
Producing the battery takes a LOT more energy, and the electricity is MOST LIKELY not carbon free, so total creation and operation CO2 output EXCEEDS the CO2 output from the gasoline truck over most of its lifetime.
Maybe we should provide (edit: sourced) data to back up our claims.
> EXCEEDS the CO2 output from the gasoline truck over most of its lifetime.
The combustion of a gas plant or of a coal plant is more efficient than the combustion happening in a internal combustion engine, a turbine on a gas power plant can reach 44 to 60%[1] , a thermal plant 33% to 49%, an internal gasoline combustion engine tops at 35% in an idealized state, which real performance between 20 and 29%
Unless you have got strong metrics which quantitatively show this to be true, then it is not a claim that can be spouted easily
gasoline truck: 1/15 gallons per mile * 17 pounds CO2 / gallon = 1.1 pounds/mile
electric truck: 0.5 kWh per mile * 0.8 pounds CO2 / kWh = 0.4 pounds / mile
That 0.8 pounds CO2/kWh number is the US average from 2020. It's predicted to halve by 2025.
And I didn't include the numbers for drilling, refining and transporting the gasoline used, which are massive, and increase the 1.1 pounds/mile figure by at least 40%.
Every claim I made is not false. For example I said "electricity is MOST LIKELY not carbon free". If that were false, then are you suggesting that most electricity is carbon free? Are we only talking about vehicles operating in Costa Rica or something? I think it is easy to verify that your statement is incorrect.
The comment I was responding to was one sided and without sourced information. I provided an argument for the other side without sourced information as well. I'm not sure that anything I said is wildly false, and I thought it would provide balance. If you're curious, have a look at this TedX [talk]. I just happened across it yesterday so those arguments were top of mind. It's another example of a whole bunch of "facts" being presented with no source so I don't give it much weight but it's a good presentation.
Great example. Let's see. Compared to the previous model it is: bigger, heavier (like 150% the weight), faster, more powerful, more torque.
More, more, more.
Increased efficiency of internal combustion engines has not led to decreased fossil fuel usage. It has led to bigger and more powerful vehicles and increased fossil fuel usage. There is no reason at all to believe electric vehicles will be any different. People simply refuse to sacrifice anything.
This is because of two things: (1) fetishization of size, weight, speed. This is modernism, a monomaniacal obsession with measurements, a very infantile mindset. (2) self-preservation; People are more inclined to buy bigger vehicles when they are surrounded by oversized death machines anyway.
It's a textbook tragedy of the commons. This can never resolve positively in a bottom-up manner. It's a local maximum that will require top down intervention, or some serious soul searching.
Do we have a sustainable solution for 'green' roads? Or are we going to continue using asphalt and concrete? And of course there's the source of the electricity for charging. Those affect warming too. I wouldn't call it really green if it still relies heavily on non-green tech to operate. Maybe a step in the right direction, but the overall system it requires to operate in is still 'dirty', with no end in sight.
That could be viable, but would only solve half the issue assuming the electricity was 100% renewable. Then you still have the solar absorption problem.
Exactly. If this Kurzgesagt video is to be believed, then the average road costs as much carbon to build PER METRE (!!) as it takes to produce one car:
Heavier vehicles like trucks (and EVs are heavier in general) cause much quicker degradation of roads. And doubling down on private vehicle use with EVs is going to increase demand for roads across the board. It's just so far from a useful solution to go down this route.
"... Let's take one example, the F-150 Lightning. When it replaces a gasoline truck sale, it eliminates 150 tons of CO2 from burning gasoline, and about 80 tons of CO2 from drilling, refining and transporting that gasoline."
For some perspective, it is likely that the production of a full sized truck embodies 30-40 tons of carbon.
"The only way the graph doesn’t tell us anything about heat is if we intentionally separate it from any context or larger system of knowledge."
That's nonsense. Temperature isn't a direct function of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even climatologists don't believe it's that simple. That's why there's so much debate about the true value of ECS, that's why they spent much of the 2010s trying to explain the pause in global warming by reference to heat absorption of the oceans, etc (they since changed the mind and now argue that they were simply failing to correctly measure temperatures for decades, which is even worse).
The false belief that climate = CO2 levels is one of the things that creates skepticism about climatology, because anyone who bothers to check the actual facts instead of relying on "high school level chemistry" will immediately see that it's false. Moreover if it were actually that simple then there'd be no need to worry because if you simply map CO2 level increases to temperature increases then you don't get anything even close to a doomsday scenario. All the "we need to reach net zero yesterday" type claims are predicated on hypothetical and quite complicated feedback loops that involve far more than just a straight mapping of temperature=CO2 levels.
You originally said the graph doesn’t tell us anything about heat. Now you’re arguing that it doesn’t tell us everything about heat. Which is obviously correct; but not what you started out with.
Edit: I see now that you’re not the person I replied to, sorry. I agree with you that one CO2 graph is not the whole story. It’s a big piece, though.
It might be, but it's also possible that the larger body of context or knowledge is flawed in some way. Not so much the core physics of CO2 but the scalings of things. For instance some climatologists believe that natural cycles dominate anything done by humans. That isn't something you can prove or disprove from simply looking at a graph of CO2 and temperature together.
> It’s like saying your car’s gas gauge doesn’t tell you anything about how far you can drive, just how much gas you have in the tank.
People have direct experience with the movement of their gas gauge and the distance they travel. They come to know directly that a certain point on the gauge represents a certain available distance to travel. They don't need to know anything about how the gas interacts with the air, and eventually ends up involved in a combustion reaction.
There's no such direct experience with CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and heating. And atmospheric temperature is wildly variable on day to day time scales so it's impossible to make such a simple, direct, one to one association between them.
You expect most people to have this particular grasp of high school level chemistry (and physics, I'd say), to the point where the interaction between CO2 and infrared radiation is accepted and internalized so well that one can directly jump from a graph of CO2 concentration to a conclusion about atmospheric heating. I'd say you're intentionally over simplifying. You have a conclusion you've come to, and you just expect others to accept it based on your point of view and your experience.
I think a lot of the green technologies are intended more to make us feel better about warming the Earth, not so much actually turning the corner. Simply blaming Fox News viewers is a helpful distraction for the industry owners who are actually in charge.
Just stop arguing. Seriously, we don't have to wait until every last person is convinced climate change is real (or is dead). We can act now (any many do). If you live in a democracy, all it takes is a majority willing to act.
Some people seem to think that a democracy means the world has to act my way. If you argue with them, try to convince them, you only fuel their belief that their opinion matters. Just move on and do something productive with your day.
In the US, you've also got the problems of: not all votes count equally (Senate, electoral college) so some people's opinions (say, those in Wyoming) count a whole lot more than others; you need 60 Senate votes to do anything remotely controversial, and that's the same body subject to the first problem, so even 60% support for a position among the general population may not be enough to make something happen; our voting system forces people to compromise lots of things they care about, in favor of a few things they care about a whole lot, so you're never going to see someone who's, say, very pro-life but nonetheless cares about climate change, vote for action on climate change at the expense of their pro-life position.
Wouldn't matter if there were major US cities underwater, hot areas freezing, cold areas overheating, even if there was not only 100% indisputable proof but 100% inconvenience and 100% cost increase.
The past two years of dealing with a pandemic shows you exactly what will be done. Nothing. Millions will suffer from it and it will all be written off, spun politically and turned into another part of the rat race for people to literally walk over other people to get whatever they want at that moment.
The well off will just move up higher in their apartment buildings and turn up the A/C higher, while looking down at the masses made to fight among themselves for less and less resources.
I really don't like imprecise headlines like this one, where many people with superficial knowledge of the topic will be made to believe that CO₂ levels were never higher. But they were and the planet was much more hospitable, even the poles were probably green and bristling with life.
Hospitable for which biological organisms? The issue is not that the planet is going to be destroyed. The issue is that the current political systems and human organization of the world is going to be destroyed (or greatly disrupted) in a short period of time. Talking about what the climate was like millions of years before humans evolved is not germane to the discussion at hand.
You have an unstated assumption that a change to the current political systems and organization is fundamentally catastrophic, but I’m not sure I agree.
Life today evolved over time and adapted to the changes of the planet. Present day life is not adapted to living on the planet as it was millions of years ago. Rapidly increasing the heat of the planet and rapidly increasing the amount of CO2 will cause biological disruptions. It will also cause disruptions for societies as we too have adapted our current ways of life for a climate that increasingly doesn’t exist.
The political impact is one of civilizational collapse. Some people are not nihilists and want to avert this.
> It will also cause disruptions for societies as we too have adapted our current ways of life for a climate that increasingly doesn’t exist.
Okay — can you quantify “disruptions”, because that comes across as a “scare word” that just means “things will change”.
> The political impact is one of civilizational collapse. Some people are not nihilists and want to avert this.
Okay, how exactly?
That last sentence, where you impeach the character of people who disagree with you, makes me think that this is political tribalism and an excuse for totalitarianism rather than a scientific point.
Which has been my experience of people “fighting global warming”: they’re more interested in the excuse to reform society to their totalitarian vision than the science.
I didn’t impeach anyone’s character. Me, I tend toward nihilism. I believe the only outcome is going to be massive political disruptions. I think things must get much worse before anything meaningful will be done. Hence my vote for Trump. I voted for the apocalypse. As I see things right leaning people in the U.S. burry their head in the sand and think everything will be just fine. Left leaning people tend to think that driving a Prius is a meaningful action toward the problem and in a sense equally burry their heads in the sand.
My views on this are not normative to any major political group in the U.S. One thing that ought to be indisputable is that massively increasing the energy into the weather system will cause major disruptions before the system stabilizes into a new normal (equilibrium).
I love a good out of left field comment! People are so quick to assume and paint everyone with an extremely blunt brush. We'd all be better to not do that and engage in meaningful conversations with each other rather than rely on what we think we know about everyone's political associations.
There are environmentalists who have notably pulled back on the global warming alarm bells. Shellenberger and Lomborg are two notable examples. They still agree with the science, but think the rhetoric only inflames things and leads to unnecessary panic. Not saying they are right, but it's important to note scientists are not all in unison on this topic. The fact the media want you to thnk so should be a red flag, in my opinion. They create a fear that only instills a panic that forces you to accept their solution. These solutions should be rationally discussed and not stampeded into.
I haven’t studied the issue so my opinion doesn’t matter. It seems to me that there will need to be far fewer people in the future in order to have a planet worth living on. I think all policies not designed to ensure this outcome will fail. So for me policy doesn’t matter since none of the ones I’ve read about have this as their goal. Mine is a minority opinion. Maybe even and extremist one!
I'd be wary of all or nothing platitudes. Not only is it mentally unhealthy, it's also highly destructive to consider our relationship with the environment an adversarial one. Most of straightline projections are wildly off the mark. We were told we only have ten years left 20 years ago.
People are not just cattle. They are also a resource itself. Not just consumers. and remarkable good resources at being able to adapt.
Renewables have gotten so cheap that it's mostly fine that they're so unpredictable(for a certain definition of that word though, because we have weather reports to account for that) - at least for the time being, especially that so many long-distance HVDC are currently in place to distribute all that energy.
Also all this CO2 in the air postponed the next glaciation by tens of thousands of years, so if our species gets through this crisis, it will have ample time to prepare for the inevitable decrease in temperatures.
It is not reassuring whatsoever that one article 2 years ago says that we have just managed to avoid near human extinction. Sure there will still be people alive after 3.9 degrees of warming, but I for one wouldn’t like that very much.
One can "get started" with unpredictable renewables, and they are certainly extremely beneficial as they displace fossil fuels in the generation mix. 10% or 30% of yearly energy coming from renewables is great already. Some gas or hydro that has already been built can be used to flatten the worst peaks and valleys etc.
But once renewables go to higher percentages, the issues get worse. The main problem is that energy storage is currently very expensive and still dependent on geography (hydro power). So the electricity price will crash when it's very sunny or windy. That hurts the profitability of solar or wind power.
Like you mentioned, we would need to invest hugely in long distance ultra high voltage transmission lines, load buffering like green hydrogen for steel making, green concrete etc and maybe ultimately even batteries. These are large investments. Changing from fossil fuels takes a lot of money. The steel produced this way is more expensive than coal or natural gas based steel.
So renewables have a compensating effect. On the other hand as technology develops, they get cheaper - but when their penetration increases, they also become more expensive since they require bigger infrastructure changes.
Yet we still need to do this one way or another. Your new car or house will be smaller and more expensive because of it. Your electricity or heating bill will be more. The sooner we admit that yes, it will cause a lower material standard of living in the short term, but we still need to do it for the long term, the further we get.
Meaningful action will happen by semi-random chance (breakthrough in low-emission energy) or by force of nature (climate changes so much that we have no choice but to act). In general, I don't think the average, or even somewhat above-average, person will be motivated by an abstract risk like the specter of CO2-induced climate change, unless incentives are created at a societal level to celebrate advancements in this field of technology and the associated low-emission lifestyle.
And would it be safe to assume that low-emission energy has much lower ROI, in a traditional sense, than fossil fuels? If so, I double down on my above predictions about triggers for meaningful change.
But that's life, isn't it? We're only capable of optimizing towards a finite distance in the future. If that weren't the case, we would be gods, not humans. And we certainly wouldn't be in this mess, or perhaps any mess, in the first place.
I agree, and I've been a proponent of remediation technology rather than preventative technology, since I have no faith we can actually pull off prevention. The incentives are not there for the majority of people. There has been no meaningful evidence to the contrary, as sad as that is.
I think the severity of the issue is what makes it so easy to dismiss, and ignore. Just like people can ignore the impact a car accident would have on them, because such a thing is so severe that well, it's best not to think about it, so people don't.
All you need to look at in the US is the current conversation around subsidizing gasoline / lowering taxes in most states currently due to inflation. I don’t think the average voter is going to care if cities they don’t live in are under water as much as they care about their own gas prices.
Yes, andt sea-level CO2 have almost no impact on average temperature. Its only in the high troposphere that its impact is felt. And on average, CO2 takes twenty year to rise up to the level where it start to be impactful (and as it is an oxide, is ultra stable there). The the deregulation we have right now is caused by the emissions from 2002.
What we emit today will start to have an impact on average temperatures (energy level, infrared re-emissions, whatever you want to call it) in 2042. That does not help us take decisions.
For one, plants don't build cities, so if we have to deal with sea level rises than that's a problem for our buildings. The same with any increase in natural disasters: it's easier for a tree to grow again after a hurricane than it is to rebuild an electrical grid.
We could deal with it, the issue is that civilisation entails cooperatively working to deal with it as opposed to going to war and killing everyone the second your crops fail.
It's great if you are a plant. However, you are human, so higher temperatures, rising sea levels, extremer weather is a problem for you. Plants will be fine (at least some types of plants), humans have a problem.
As you said, every country needs to reduce. Anybody asking your first question is usually involved in blame shifting rather than actually doing anything. "Why should we do anything if China and/or the US isn't?".
This is where the proverb "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" comes from. You don't have the moral standing to criticize the CO2 emissions of others if you aren't doing anything yourself, even if the others are worse than yourself.
OTOH, only when you are leading by example do you have the moral standing.
So are you saying the "right" answer is to not focus on the biggest sources of CO2 production? And this is the best way to lower CO2 production?
It seems like whenever anyone points out the obvious above, others will jump in saying we can't point fingers but they don't offer any real solutions either. Around and around we go.
I don't think that's quite the case. For a simple example you can consider a developing area without an electric grid, where people individually or on a community level burn fossil fuels to provide lighting and heat, power schools and medical facilities.
This use is fundamentally different from an industrialized nation that has a fully powered electric grid and alternative means to power it, but uses fossil fuel out of price or convenience considerations.
Yes, it's rarely this clear-cut in reality, life and economics are complicated, etc. Still though, it's clear to me that not all fossil fuel use is ethically the same, and people still using fossil fuels can indeed have valid moral positions against others using them.
>>Isn't it objectively true that the countries producing the most CO2 are more to blame?
No, I would say the countries that have already produced(in total) the most CO2 are the ones most to blame. And those aren't the same countries as the ones emitting the most right now.
Good point about blame not being a point in time measurement.
As far as going forward though, the countries currently producing the most CO2 are the ones most able to have an impact by reducing their CO2 emissions.
I think that the most wealthy and powerful can have a greater impact than the largest producers.
Why does China produce so much CO2? A lot of it is to satisfy the massive demand coming from the West for all the cheap stuff they make. If we put a carbon tax on imported goods, and used the revenue to invest in sustainable infrastructure (ideally back into those same producers, not just at home), I believe we would see positive changes pretty quickly.
Simply pointing fingers at producers will get us nowhere if we don't actively try to change incentives and support other countries and institutions to get up to speed. After all, many of the poorest countries that have begun to grow were historically prevented from modernising by their western colonisers. So in some sense the blame still falls largely on the West.
One problem with this line of thinking is you just end up with a deadlock between countries pointing at each other with "You're higher pollution per capita" vs "You're higher total pollution"
e.g. Canada as a whole doesn't emit that much CO2 but we emit a lot per capita because it takes a lot of energy to keep warm and renewables are not as reliable further north. Our political parties frequently like to point out we're <2% of the global footprint as justification to increase investments in oil/gas while conveniently omitting that we're 0.5% of the global population.
Of all the possible debate proposals for the exploration of complexity in the problem, the one that can have the most limited credit is the idea that "total production" could be the metric to base policy.
That better metrics than "per capita" could be found (energy spent how, by what, with which care towards compensating the externalities), sure, granted, complex but interesting - but that a gross aggregation could mean anything is hardly serious. It would be akin to "The one with the highest total GDP picks the short straw".
It may happen that somebody steps in with the idea, sure, but the answer - at least in terms of discussion - would be easy (and involve a "this is not serious").
Well unfortunately we may be headed for a situation where the world is unliveable forany people, and we don't have a way to colonise another planet. We're all stuck on earth.
That's exactly what my thoughts are about all the drama. I believe also that we're too small in what we do to actually have any meaningful impact on what the planet is going to look like. The planet will just fart and we're gone, but she we'll do just fine.
This just completely and naively sidesteps the issue though? "Save the earth" or whatever is obviously a simplification and a euphemism, a marketing approach not a moral necessity.
What we're obligated to prevent is avoidable human death and suffering on a massive scale. It is the lives that matter not the origin of the threat.
And it's not a simple dichotomy between total extinction and we're all fine. A plausible scenario is that hundreds of millions of people who are living right now will die preventably, and those with the most resources, including fossil fuel use, will be able to ride it out at their expense. We have obligations going beyond merely weakening the mechanisms of climate change; we must also address its consequences now and in the near future.
We need to stop extracting fossil fuels from the ground. Period. Any other solution is just a gimmick. Unfortunately, the rate of extraction hasn't slowed. It's increased, or, at best, stayed relatively flat. The outcome, of course, will be quite predictable.
All of this "green" technology we've produced hasn't made an iota of a difference, yet, in terms of the actual problem. Maybe it will soon? Let's hope.
Looking at that graph, it looks like a mirror: the more coal decreased recently, the more other fossil fuel extraction increased. This goes back to my original point: The rate of fossil fuel extraction is the only metric that matters. And it's not going down in any meaningful way, is it? Hopefully soon, but I'm doubtful.
In terms of electricity, net fossil fuel use per person is also down significantly from 9,616 kWh per person in 2008 to 7,861 kWh in 2019. Gasoline is fairly steady and responds to economic activity, from 141 billion gallons in 2004 to 134 in 2012 and back up to 146 in 2019. That looks slightly better when you consider the 12% population increase from 2004.
Strangely, the climate doesn't care at all how many people there are. No matter how much the emissions drop per person, if they're not dropping overall, then no progress has been made. We're in just as bad of a situation as we've ever been. This is no way looks good -- the scale of the problem is so immense, and progress on the only metric that actually matters continues to be non-existent.
On a global scale, worldwide production of fossil fuels is not going down. I fail to see any evidence that this is being fixed. Maybe someday the various technologies will converge in a way that fixes the issue -- but I doubt it.
Good thing you’re misinformed. The US released 6.13 Billion tons of CO2 in 2007 down to 5.26 billion tons in 2019. 2020 and 2021 are even lower but that’s from the pandemic.
Global trends are more troublesome, but coal peaked in 2013 and it’s use has declined from 44,993 TWH in 2013 to 43,839 in 2019.
Anyway, per person numbers are critical for understanding trends. Infrastructure ages, the average US power plant is over 41 years old in 2020. The industry is essentially running off a huge cliff, which is less obvious when you look at year over year production. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-age-o... In China on the other hand the average coal power plant is 11, that infrastructure is likely going to be around for decades.
Long term the rest of the world is catching up developed economies, but what that meant in 2006 looked much worse than what that means today.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't matter if one country becomes completely carbon neutral. We're screwed anyways if oil extraction continues unabated. It's easy to play around with different numbers to find ones that are favorable, but you can't hide the fact that fossil fuel extraction hasn't gone down. Unless it rapidly slows, and then stops, we're screwed, no matter which countries emit less carbon. And no matter which populations are more "efficient."
It very much matters if the former #1 CO2 producer slows down. Look back at predictions from say 1990 or even 2000 and global CO2 emissions are much lower than predicted. That is progress.
Climate change is cumulative so both reducing past emissions, reducing growth in emissions, and slowing down future emissions matter, but the sooner you start the less rapid the change needs to be.
That’s especially true when for example old cars are exported to developing countries. Those hybrids people bought in 2010 are going to end up in South America, Africa, India etc.
> It very much matters if the former #1 CO2 producer slows down.
That's where I'm quite skeptical. I'm very doubtful that overall fossil fuel extraction will decrease. This is a worldwide problem. The climate is affected by the global level of fossil fuel use, not by the amount released by individual countries. The extraction rate is still at or near record highs (worldwide). Will it slow down? Maybe? However, it seems unlikely, given the political and economic cost necessary to actually make a real dent. Governments just aren't taking the problem as seriously as they should.
I agree that it’s a worldwide problem. My point was simply individual countries slowing down is necessary even if it’s not sufficient to solve the problem.
Where I see real progress globally is more efficient processes release less CO2 so there are economic incentives even if governments do nothing. India isn’t building solar farms to look green, they are building solar farms to save money. That means even more economies of scale and thus more solar farms.
As these trends continue eventually fossil fuels lose economies of scale. That’s by far a more realistic path to success than every single government making wise long term policy decisions. Will that be fast enough is kind of an arbitrary metric, it’s not going to be as fast as possible but it will avert the worst possibilities.
We stop extracting it and we're back in the 19th century. The whole economy runs on the stuff. From energy extraction to product development involving anything made of plastic. That's not going to change any time soon. That's the cold hard fact. We are already starting to see some of the consequences of scarcity of energy in farmers not being able to get enough fertilizer to grow the crops. The Ukraine crisis is largely about energy availability which could lead to 100 million people in Africa and elsewhere facing food shortages. These policy changes have consequences.
I've been hearing that for the past 40 years in some form or other. How many times did we only have 10 years left? At some point, you have to question why you assume they are right when they have been wrong so many times. And who is profiting from your panic?
False alarms are false alarms until they're not. The evidence for climate change is so abundant that debate about whether it is happening or not is pointless, nobody was 'wrong so many times', we are pretty much on track for a pretty massive adjustment. The question isn't 'if' but 'when' and as far as I understand it the point at which we could have taken meaningful action is already past.
Which is the way these things go: "we should do nothing because it is so far into the future", "we should do nothing because it is too expensive and affects our lifestyle too much and besides it doesn't affect us, but only our children", "we should do nothing because we're already past the point of no return".
You are somewhere in the middle, and I'm already at the third stage but still believe we should do something because it might take the edge of. Sticking your head in the sand certainly isn't going to help.
If anything, countries should stop fossil fuels as a matter of their own security. The Russia situation alone should be a wakeup call for Europe. E-bikes, electric cars, solar, electrified rail, and heat pump systems should be a top priority for every country for that reason alone.
I agree but it's impossible. Right now, my electricity bill was 3x what it has been over the last few years for last month because of Russia and this is in the greenest country in the world (highest investment and generation per capita[1]). We are extremely fucking fucked. If we can't do it, you can't do it. We're ahead of you (the U.S.) by a factor of 4.3. If you try to do this, you will starve. Am I wrong? What's the plan?
As you point out, the status quo is very much not ideal. Being dependent on oil/gas means being part of a global commodity market and refusing to buy Russian oil does nothing as some other country will still buy it. My point is national security is enough reason alone to move off from oil and thus it should a matter of security for a country to do so.
> and refusing to buy Russian oil does nothing as some other country will still buy it
Yeah I've been saying this for months but people refuse to get it. I can't even get people to the point where they'll rebut that Russian oil is at least discounted; they don't even admit the chain exists.
> My point is national security is enough reason alone to move off from oil and thus it should a matter of security for a country to do so.
Great discussion. This is indeed the heart of the problem, and I suspect we are going to collectively play ostrich until we are hit over the head with the consequences.
Nobody cares... most people are completely ignorant to what is going to happen, so nobody fucking cares. I was in college in '99 taking earth science, thinking people were reasonable. I took up cycling as transit at the time and cut down sharply on meat consumption. I assumed i was getting a head start on the changing infrastructure.
I fought hard for transit-alternatives in Austin... left the city when they ditched the bicycle master-plan to build an express lane on the freeway. I fought for transit alts in NYC, and they've seen a bunch of progress, and I'm fighting for the same in SF now, also seeing slow progress.
To this day, the vast majority of people are so deeply dependent on fossil fuels, the asks put forward are considered unacceptable. How do we run AC in Texas? How do we convince people to, not just build up, but to build anything. How do we turn suburbs into commuter towns? How do we convert interstate highways into high-speed rail. How do we convince people that meat should be a special occasion food, not the basis for every meal. The concept of a carbon tax is so, so obvious, but people have built their lives around carbon every second of every day. We can't even solve the fucking duck curve for electric generation even though getting batteries in every home is an easy solution.
I'm so jaded at this point, but I'll never give up fighting for mitigation, even if it seems so fucking impossible. I have my plans in place to move to places that will likely benefit from the changes... but that's just the world we live in.
Same here. Built a solar/wind powered off grid house. The only people interested were people that were forced to live off grid simply because the grid didn't reach where they lived and renewable energy hobbyists, people in it mostly for the tech, not to actually switch their dependency or coming from a motivation of sustainability (though there were a couple like that). Interestingly enough this is now seeing something of a revival because energy prices have been steadily rising.
But indeed, jaded is the term. I've pretty much given up, I could no longer justify making all these changes while around me everybody is partying like it's 1999, yes, I'm an idealist and would love for people to wake up but I don't have the energy to be a living example for decades without any meaningful impact.
I still try to drive as little as possible and do the bulk of my trips on the e-bike but I'm not going to overdo it and I'm happy to take the car when it rains. Frustrating, but ultimately a few people are not going to be able to convince a public that 100's of times larger that they should change their ways when society's momentum is still moving the other way, and politicians will not move until they feel that such a move will land well with their electorate. We've made a lot of changes in spite of all that, too little, too late, but given the amount of headwind I still consider that an impressive result.
The dutch have a proverb 'the ship will be turned by the shore', if you don't change course in time then your course will be changed for you, but then by main force. It would have been better to avoid that but apparently collectively we only really learn the hard way. Which is a pity because if humanity would resolve its differences amicably and start pulling in the same direction for a change this place could be paradise, for all of us instead of just for a select few.
My response to you as a ray of hope is that some do care albeit a very small informed few while even less from those few have made proactive lifestyle adaptations. Should the scientific discoveries and interpretation of the data from extracted ice cores hold true then we know what surface temperatures earth will be experiencing in due time with CO2 at 421. “Time” being the key term as few humans concern themselves with events that transpire beyond the scope of an individual human's time, aka “life”. I can greatly respect your anger as expressed from your choice of vulgar words as I at times use the same words under the same expression of statements but I believe we have all but solidified what is to come since very few people are willing to change how they live. I anticipate more and more increased tragedy at all levels as this modus operandi has already begun. One being the regional heat dome anomalous events which will bring many more deaths from the wet bulb temperature effect since nature does not see race, religion, wealth, politics or any of the other human created points that we argue constantly that mean nothing in the grand scheme of our existence. While entities continue to have meetings to discuss how to fix the problem without wanting to change how we live the earth is certain at some point to force everyone's hand while Darwinism continues to play out, with or without humans.
Currently it also is an extremely profitable business again while prices for fossil fuels dropped significantly in the years before. So you either mandate it internationally, which has a very low chance of being accepted, or you at least try to reduce consumption.
My understanding is that land plants are probably doing better. However, the acidification of the oceans is the real problem. Despite what most people think, at least half of our oxygen comes from marine plants. The main concerns it that continued acidification will continue to decrease plankton growth and have drastic effects on the entire ocean ecosystems.
«50-80% of the oxygen production... comes from the ocean ... (Prochlorococcus... produces up to 20% of the oxygen in our entire biosphere) ... although... roughly the same amount is consumed by marine life» (from https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ocean-oxygen.html )
At first appearance, «drastic effects on the entire ocean ecosystems», surely with massive consequences for humans, but a non clearly computed effect on the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
It's true that total emission and reuptake is quite large compared to human-caused emissions: about 29GT from humans, 750GT total in the carbon cycle annually. However, the systems that reuptake the CO2 are fairly sensitive and don't have a lot of slack in them, so adding that additional 29GT turns out to have an impact.
The Earth's atmosphere weighs about 5.5 quadrillion tons. Ignoring the differences in weights of different air molecules, adding 5.5 billion tons of CO2 would increase the CO2 concentration by ~1PPM.
So if all 29 billion tons of human emissions were not reabsorbed into the biosphere, we would expect to see global CO2 concentrations increase by between 5 and 6 ppm. In reality we see an increase of just over 2ppm per year, meaning that while much of human emissions are indeed reabsorbed into the biosphere, ~40% is not.
To expand on this: the molar weight of dry air is ~28g/mol, while CO2 is ~44g/mol.
So each increase in atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm corresponds to about 8.6GT of unabsorbed CO2. The Keeling Curve shows an increase of 1.86PPM from May 2021 to May 2022, meaning that the amount of CO2 emitted from all sources was greater than the amount absorbed by 15.7GT. So of the 29GT emitted by humans, 13.3 was reabsorbed.
Obviously this is not the whole story. The Keeling Curve shows that worldwide CO2 levels were already rising in the 50s and early 60s, when total emissions were below the 13.3 our biosphere is absorbing annually. But this is sufficient to show that a (substantial) reduction in human emissions would reverse the currently increasing global CO2 levels, and the greenhouse warming that comes with it.
Imagine you have a big tub, and it has a faucet which outputs 100 gallons per hour, and a drain which drains 100 gallons per hour. Over time, the amount of water in the tub will be stable. Now suppose I come by and start pouring in 3 gallons of water per hour. Now what happens to the amount of water in the tub over time? My contribution is only about 3% (a hair under that, even), but it can still change a stable tub to an overflowing tub.
Unfortunately, most Republicans in Congress (and Trump) don't believe in human made climate change. But I guess that's not a surprise, since they don't believe in human evolution and other scientific models.
There will never be any major solution here in the US unless this changes
There's an escalating proxy war between the two largest nuclear powers on the planet right now and we're heads in the sand arguing about a problem that could easily be adapted to over many decades.
Don't care; nothing I can meaningfully do about it. Just going to focus on earning enough money and living in the right location for my family and myself to continue eating steaks
My back of the envelope calculations show that 30 years of coal mining alone would dump that much CO2 into the atmosphere... so most of it is getting absorbed... which is good, or we'd be roasted by now.
Perhaps, in addition to burning less fossil fuels, it would be a good idea to see where the carbon sinks are, and help those work more effectively? I know that sustainable farming captures a lot of carbon in the soil, for example.
486 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 306 ms ] threadAn entire party is basically accelerationist, and the other one largely just waffles about.
The problem isn't that they choose to waffle, but that their power is on a knife edge when they have any power at all and they disagree about what to do.
That said, human ingenuity and economic forces are starting to stem the global warming tide, despite what governments are doing.
Look at the current political situation in the US, it's dominated by the cost of gas and groceries. Nothing else really matters.
The leaders should speak truth and act in the common interest. The voters should love the truth rather than lies, and should be mature enough to own their mistake rather than seek fairy tales in which their selfishness is good, even heroic.
Also, the voters in the US aren't uniquely bad. It's just that there's a deep cultural fissure in the US which is ripe for exploitation. It's easy to make the voters prefer punishing their neighbors over any other goal.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Tot...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/01/Global-land-use-g...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
[3] https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/plant-based-diets/
It’s going to take everyone actively blocking the activities causing this problem.
Governments taking further action will further mitigate the problem and might save places like Miami. That's the opportunity here that humanity isn't really taking advantage of.
I've read plenty of papers on this but the ability to track "imported CO2" is fairly limited.
The most obvious place that's usually missing in capital gained from foreign investments. If, in a hypothetical example, an investment firm make a billion dollars running a foreign oil company, then put that money into a US startup, this wouldn't count as "imported emissions", but clearly if you worked at that startup your job and all the money you spend would have come from exported emissions.
The second place these studies tend to fail is how long of a trail of CO2 they follow. If one of the reasons it's cheaper to build a product in China is because the factory is closer to a carbon intensive raw material producer this not counted. If the energy to keep your low cost workers is cheaper and that's part of why they are low cost, that's not counted.
It's not the fault of these reports that they can't track all of this, but it's not a great argument for green technology reducing emissions.
If also doesn't matter if the US and EU reduce emissions, it matters if we do globaly. I can also promise you that if we forced China to reduce emissions we should feel that impact pretty dramatically in the west Economically. The best proxy globally to economic development is energy production, we live in a global economy, we all share that energy.
Human CO2 emissions are so far off the scale of anything that has ever happened naturally that nature as she evolved on Earth has no way coping.
Regardless, this is only one of potentially thousands of ways we can make an impact. We won't solve the problem without cooperation, but we also don't even have to cooperate at all to start. All of us can start right now and the combined effort will lead to results.
Disclaimer up front: I live as if human caused climate change is real, haven't traveled by plane for years, went on holiday abroad three times since I'm old enough to remember - and this includes honeymoon, I buy used, repair etc etc.
So please read me out instead of shouting "JAQ" at me.
This cannot be true, can it?
I have a simple thought experiment here:
Take a globe. Or imagine one.
Look at the areas where the oil fields are. It should be small areas outside the Norwegian coast. Small areas in the middle east. Small areas in Ukraine and Russia. Small areas in US, in the Mexican Gulf, outside Brazil etc.
Then compare with a single continent.
Feel free to reason about it and tell me why I am wrong.
Because I am actually interested in the answer, because I live like it matters and it would be great not to have to convince myself to care.
And, if your calculations change, feel free to stop demotivating people from trying to help.
PS: If you take this as a defense for senseless consumption you are misreading. For those who have given up already I give you another reason: Very often the things I do makes very good sense economically too. I think I have a better, more enjoyable life because I don't waste my money on buying new crap all the time and instead prioritize long lasting goods and experiences and prioritize maintaining what I already got.
If you are confused about why you'd need to plant a whole continent of trees to offset our CO2 emissions, rememeber(or discover for the first time) that your average oil field(or coal mine for that matter) is a product of literally millions of years worth of carbon deposits - that's why oil is so incredibly energy dense.
According to some quick googling one tree absorbs about 25kg worth of CO2 per year. My car emits that much by just driving ~100 miles (using about 10L of petrol in the process). If I do 10k miles per year, that is a lot of trees just to offset emissions of a single vehicle, and there are millions of personal cars out there - and they aren't even the largest source of emissions.
As expected I got a couple of downvotes, but it is worth it for answers like this.
Edit:
That is 100 trees for each car, isn't it? But the same 100 trees would do the job for the same car next year?
Edit 2:
Assuming steady state.
But after that, an EV, solar panels and heat pump heating are 3 steps that will eliminate hundreds of tons of CO2 vs alternatives, and will increase your standard of living since they're cheaper over the long term.
Going vegetarian and eliminating flying also would have a big impact, but that involves real sacrifice, unlike the above options.
In the US, where in most places the general election is preceded by a "primary" election for the parties to select candidates for the general election and in which you can only vote for candidates from your party, I'd suggest one other thing when it comes to voting.
If you live in an area where one party pretty much always wins in the general election, register for that party so that you can vote in their primary. That way your vote does actually have some influence on the outcome.
It won't change which party wins the general election, but it can help move the winning party toward the center. Primaries are usually lower turnout than the general election, which can make it easier for an extremist candidate to win them because the people who vote for the extremists tend to be more enthusiastic and thus more likely to actually vote in the primary.
If you are in an area where both parties have a good chance of winning the general election, but one party seems more susceptible to extreme candidates winning their primary, consider registering for that party to try to move them more toward the center. It means giving up influencing the other party, but if that party usually picks OK candidates your vote is probably better used trying to help get rid of extremists.
So no the idea of a primary challenge is a lost cause and the younger generation internalized it this past election.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAfMn2l3yAA
Oh boy, that’s not good. I mean it’s going to take a while for it to raise up, but so long Florida.
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/sealevel.html
Pretty sure freezing is exactly it — Greenland and Antarctica contain lots of water stored well above sea level. These fluctuated a lot worth sea levels.
It's pretty common in the arctic regions that water forms ice crystals and falls out of the sky, landing on the ground.
Snow, I believe they call it.
It also sort of explains how easy it would be for earth's water to have come from asteroid impacts.
https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/...
Here's an article showing comparisons to various moon ice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/earth-water-ice-volume-versu...
I don’t think the big bubble includes the ocean.
EDIT: Corrected km to meters, as comment below points out.
Sea ice floats in the sea. When melted ... it's still floating in the sea, as water. There's no net sea-level change, at least not from contributed ice.[1]
Land ice sits on land. When it melts, most of it flows to the sea.[2] That increases the total amount of water in the oceans, and hence, sea level. The total rise if all Antarctic and Greenland ice melted would be about 60-70m (200-230ft).[3]
________________________________
Notes:
1. There are other effects, including thermal expansion (water expands slightly as it warms), and centripetal effects (water can flow more than continental crust does, and would spread out slightly more at the equator than the poles with more liquid water in the oceans). Those effects are comparatively small, though not fully negligible.
2. The exception would be enteric basins which have no outlet to the oceans, in which case melted ice flowing into these would form lakes. Examples of enteric basins include the Great Salt Lake and surrounding former Lake Bonneville, the Dead Sea, and Death Valley. Note that as glaciers melt, there's a rebound effect in continental crust, and regions presently below sea level or which would otherwise form enteric basins might not after that rebound effect is taken into account.
3. See: https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophy... https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-would-sea-level-change-if-all-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorheic_basin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enteric
It stores enough ice to raise sea levels by nearly 60m if / when that melts entirely.
It currently loses more than 250Gt/year of ice, up from 40Gt during the 80s. But it holds an estimated 26500000Gt (26.5Pt) of ice.
https://www.antarcticglaciers.org/question/antarctic-ice-she...
There was a discussion about this effect on hn years ago, the original link send to be dead now. But this is the thread on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23389690
I've read that this will be the primary contributor. Might want to double check the answers you're getting here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
That makes for a great headline, but a large part of the Netherlands' coastal areas are currently below sea level, and yet are not "drowned".
What's worse is politicians have no desire to lead, so it is life to people with "alternative" (eg sustainable) lifestyles to retrofit their homes, ride bicycles, and generate less waste. Presumably the fear is that we have invested so deeply in fossil fuels that we can't unwind that rapidly. I'm sure everyone here knows a sunk cost when they see one.
I really do fear for my old age, and my kids lives. We've created too many incentives to wreck the world and people quite reasonably respond to them. Things have to change.
There's also a lot of doom on this page thinking the end of the world is nigh. Scientists do not walk in lockstep on this question. There are climatologists who have pulled back on the alarm - like Lomborg and Shellenberger. I'm not saying they are right, just to be wary of anyone telling you they know what's going to happen.
There's parlous little contention that fossil fuels transformed the world for exceptional capabilities and productivity over the past 250 years. That's simply not the argument.
The problem is both what their continued use will do to the overall environment, and what their finite supply means in terms of continued prosperity.
Quite simply, you're ignoring (and repeatedly) the elephant in the room: unintended consequences of the continued use of fossil fuels.
You might care to recognise the beast. It's formidable.
Anyway politicians to "lead" need a mandate from voters and to lead in a direction good for the climate they need to be able to take the heat for extremely unpopular policies. Unfortunately in the systems where unpopular policies can get through the leaders have the tendency to exploit that for their own gain rather than for sustainability sake.
I believe it won't change until the situation will become so obvious and tangible that something will be done to mitigate it.
In a couple generations the problem will be critical enough that buying your way out of it will no longer be possible, and then we’ll see change.
So what is that line? The inability to maintain high quality food production? Modern manufacturing? Mass migration?
No, this assumes that civilization won't collapse. Their money means nothing if industrial society breaks down due to the catastrophic consequences of climate change. States are what enforce property rights and states fall apart as soon as the food runs out.
IMO the obsession with requiring sacrifice is alienating, counter-productive and unnecessary.
Future generations will revile us, as we deserve that.
Of course, any action taken by the government would have much more impact and would be way more effective than individuals trying to tackle this problem.
I live in Ontario, Canada. Almost all of my electricity comes from nuclear, hydroelectric and wind. Solar panels are not particularly efficient so far up north and they are covered in snow five months of the year anyway. Solar is mostly a waste of money here. (I still see the occasional house with solar panels but I mostly interpret it as a protest against nuclear power.)
Electric cars also don't fare particularly well in our winters. It's pretty hard to go visit family out of town when your car has half its stated range. I'm of the opinion that pervasive plug-in hybrid vehicles would do far more to reduce our collective carbon emissions and buy us time to get plug-in hybrids with renewable fuel (biodiesel, ethanol, hydrogen, etc.)
Heat pumps I agree would help. Unfortunately my country has huge amounts of cheap natural gas. Until carbon taxes start ramping up and heat pumps are subsidized I don't think most people will willingly increase their heating costs.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
If we would have done nothing, we'd be looking at about 6 degrees C of rise. If we stop at what we've done already, we're aiming for 4 degrees C. If our governments follow through on all our concrete commitments, we'd stop at about 2.5 degrees C. (Concrete commitments are specific, not nebulous like "net 0 by 2050").
2.5 degrees is still too much, but it's not nothing, far from it.
Saying "we've done nothing" is counter-productive IMO, it just encourages defeatism. IMO it's easier to do more when you acknowledge that what we have done has been effective.
You're claiming that we've made some progress regarding climate action, and that counterfactually it could have been worse.
There is, essentially, one source of human CO2 emissions: fossil fuels.
If what you claim is true then we should have a set of fossil fuels that we know about, can easily exploit, but refuse to because we won't be using them. This is the only way we can make progress on reducing emissions.
So far the only limiting factor I know of for limiting fossil fuel extraction is the economic difficulty in extraction.
A war is happening right now in order to control more oil and natural gas production, if we already have more oil in gas known about than we need, why are we fighting this war?
These things only work if everyone does them. If we want people to give up their cars we need massive investment in electrified public transit. Without that it is impossible for most people to survive without cars. A few people who have the freedom and the will to suffer under public transit choosing to give up their cars will do nothing to stop climate change.
> You twist it around to pin the blame on green activists somehow not doing enough in their personal lives
Do we all have to do them.or not? That seems pretty simple. Yes, if you want everyone in the world to give up eg cake, then you need to start first. Otherwise you are virtue signaling - indicating group membership by taking no cost actions like wearing a pin, changing your facebook icon or commenting asserting others are not doing enough.
I too can tell other people to not drive or not eat meat. I don't because I still drive and I still eat meat.
> If we want people to give up their cars we need..
Now you are changing the problem.
As for renewables, I've bought shares in green energy in my pension and some in this scheme which allows people to co-own wind turbines:
https://rippleenergy.com/
When I buy my own home, I'll be installing an air source heat pump and solar panels.
As for flying, I've done it a few times but less than half a dozen flights in total in my life. My plan is to interrail one day.
So yes, actually I have more or less done what you suggested. It takes time and commitment, and the centre of my argument is that making the choices I have made should be easier than making the choices that contribute to climate change. Down vote all you like.
For instance the sahara was extremely dry (even more than currently) during the last glacial maximum, the african humid period started with the Bølling–Allerød warming / Late Glacial Interstadial (and as its name indicates, greened up the sahara area).
Then it dried up again with the cooling of the Younger Dryas, before humidifying again at its end.
It also underwent a dry spell during the 8.2kYa "cold event", before the african humid period ending entirely during the 4.2kYa aridification event (which seems related to the Bond Event 3).
Water, nitrogen, and micronutrients, tend to be the big issues. Existing plants deal fairly well with around 200~250ppm CO2 because that's been the concentration for the last 20 million years.
[1] https://www.klima-warnsignale.uni-hamburg.de/der-klimawandel...
The rate of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing every year and the rate of increase (acceleration) is also only increasing every year. It takes one minute to confirm this :)
If it was just the graph, there would be other possible interpretations. (You know, causation vs correlation and all that). However we have more than just a graph to confirm climate change.
(1) The Earth has been cooler with CO₂ levels 10 times higher. We currently have some of the lowest levels in the history of the planet.
(2) CO₂ increases and decreases also usually seem to trail temperature changes.
(3) Warmer temperatures are not necessarily negative. We've been in an ice age for 2 million years, but life thrived at higher temps.
(4) You have to balance negative effects with positive effects, like increased greening.
It might be a good thing to increase CO2. It might be bad. It might be the case that increasing carbon dioxide causes counter balancing effects and therefore increasing CO2 does not increase temperature (I remain skeptical of this but I’m not a climate scientist). But what is beyond dispute is that massively increasing CO2 will cause climatic disruptions while the weather system reaches a new equilibrium.
The reasonable pushback against this is per se isn't a realistic assumption in a system as dynamic as our biosphere.
Note that there are many seemingly obvious things that are false so I could be wrong.
The word "may" is doing a lot of work here. Lots of things may cause massive disruptions to human society. One thing we can say with certainty: the mitigation efforts being proposed to reduce CO2 levels will cause massive disruptions to human society.
The next time I teach correlation/causation I’m using this as my goto example.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
at
http://books.google.com/books?id=DgqLplWtGPgC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA...
(but not now, no longer)
from page 76 of
Susan Milbrath, Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (The Linda Schele Series in Maya and Pre-Columbian Studies), ISBN-13 978-0292752269, University of Texas Press, 2000.
with
"Indeed, blood sacrifice is required for the sun to move, according to Aztec cosmology (Durian 1971:179; Sahaguin 1950 - 1982, 7:8)."
On average it’s in a random direction, so some goes out into space eventually. But some goes straight toward the Earth’s surface, which also absorbs and then re-emits it.
The result is that some IR energy is trapped bouncing back and forth between the surface and atmospheric greenhouse gases (there are a few, not just CO2). This is the so-called “greenhouse effect” that keeps the surface habitable.
As you increase the amount of greenhouse gases, there are more molecules available to absorb and re-emit IR energy. So the total amount of energy that can be trapped bouncing back and forth goes up. More heat is trapped.
CO2 is particularly worrisome because the carbon cycle is slow. Water vapor has a larger effect, but it varies on the order of weeks (when it rains, for example). CO2 can take hundreds of years to get fixed again once it is in the atmosphere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
2) In the global historical record the peak of CO2 has usually trailed the peak of temperature. Again this reflects changes in insolation: as more sunlight makes the climate get hotter, more CO2 is released. Then as sunlight declines, the climate cools but the CO2 lingers for a while. This is actually really concerning because it implies that we should expect a natural spike of CO2 on top of our anthropogenic spike of CO2, meaning it will get much worse than it even looks now.
3) Yes, “life” can thrive at higher temps, but our bodies, culture, and infrastructure are adapted for these temps. And it’s not just temperature; sea level rise (primarily driven by the metric expansion of water as it is heated) will inundate large amounts of livable land including some of the most productive and populated. Maybe good for neritic life, but bad for us.
4) The negative and positive effects don’t necessarily balance. Again, losing dry land to the sea is not balanced by increased ocean algal growth. “I destroyed your house, but gave you more fertilizer for your lawn”—does that seem like a fair trade?
CO2 absorbs photons in three narrow wavelength bands, one for each of bending, stretching, and twisting of the molecule, out in the infrared. The absorption spectrum is shown at the Web site of the US NIST.
That absorption makes CO2 a greenhouse gas.
The usual claim is that the infrared does not come from "sunlight" but from Planck black body radiation from the surface of the earth.
The broad, intuitive idea that the CO2 acts like a thick insulating blanket over all the earth and trapping all heat is not very close to reality.
Then there is the question of, how much warming does CO2 cause? Some dozens of studies, with computer models, etc. were done. Results varied. A summary of the results is in a graph at
http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
Also it appears that the names of the studies are in small print in a box in the upper left of the image.
Some results predicted significant warming, but the times of the predicted warming came and went years ago without the predicted warming.
Al Gore's movie showed a graph of data from ice cores from Vostok station in Antarctica. The ice cores went back 800,000 years of so. Gore graphed both temperature and CO2 concentration and observed that the two went up and down together.
As I read the graphs:
(1) When temperature started to rise, CO2 concentration was low, not high. So, something made temperature rise, but it was not high CO2.
(2) About 800 years after temperature rose, CO2 concentration rose, and the usual explanation is that the extra CO2 was from more biological activity from the higher temperature.
(3) Some thousands of years later, temperature fell. Then CO2 concentration was high, not low. So, something made temperature fall, but it wasn't low CO2 concentration.
(4) We had some CO2 from WWII and the post war economic boom, but from 1945 to 1970 we had some significant cooling.
For one more, not from Gore's graph, recently I heard a claim that the three highest temperatures on record happened in just the last few years or some such. There is some issue about the relevance of extreme values: E.g., in any stochastic process, of course the highest values observed so far never go down, and in real processes, say, the fastest 100 yard dash, we can expect the highest values to go up.
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
And yes, it is as dire as it sounds. My children are breathing 1/3 more CO2 than my parents were at the same age. But it's not the breathing that is a concern (not until we get above 1000 ppm at least), but rather the warming. There is significantly more sunlight energy being trapped in the biosphere today than there was two generations ago.
Effects at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercapnia
Anyway drowned infrastructure will directly or indirectly kill a lot of people and that could mitigate the growth of all greenhouse gases except maybe H2O, because there is more and more of that in the air as temperature increases. It's a reinforcing feedback loop.
That means that CO2 levels would have to increase 25 times their current level in order for your fear of hypercapnia to become a problem.
> A study of humans exposed in 2.5 hour sessions demonstrated significant negative effects on cognitive abilities at concentrations as low as 0.1% (1000 ppm) CO2 likely due to CO2 induced increases in cerebral blood flow. Another study observed a decline in basic activity level and information usage at 1000 ppm, when compared to 500 ppm.
With some caveats about the quality of those studies.
considering how many people are allowed to die of air pollution as a matter of standard policy, even in "nice" western countries and cities, I don't know that this argument holds
You’re gonna have to provide some evidence for these assertions please
Right now, in the US, we're using CO2-emitting sources on the grid mainly because of sunk costs. Almost all new generating capacity is renewables. Motor vehicles will reach this point soon, if they haven't already. Technological advancement enables social change, it's not a distraction from it. What you should be arguing for are policies that accelerate the maturation of these necessary technologies.
Our use of renewables has increased significantly, but the use of fossil fuels has increased more over the same time period.
Imagine a box with an input slot on one side and output slot on the other. We say "look, we have reduced input flow by X% this year, it is even more than last year. Surely we are doing great or at least acceptable?". But if we go around and measure the output flow and it is always increasing, then I must say the actions are not so great.
I do realize that for example we may be slightly slowing are acceleration rate compared to the situation if we did nothing, but in the end the result is not acceptable. We need an active GH gasses sequestration technologies deployed on the planetary scale, that is the only way to do anything for climate - to introduce actual negative flows in the equation. Decreasing emissions won't work alone.
https://digital.hbs.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-parent...
What happens to humans at that level?
I’m not expecting 40 years at the current rate. Given the way PV deployments have been growing and how long they last, I expect electricity to be mostly green in the first few years of the 2030s, and most other sectors soon after.
If you’re going to worry about fertilisers, worry about phosphate and potassium… but even then, the problem and solution is unrelated to greenhouse gases.
This is a solved problem since the invention of the bucket and pointy stick, when “fertiliser” meant “manure”.
> With CO2 being 50% higher that means you'd already have to fertilize 50% more to get the same Nitrogen to CO2 ratio as preindustrial levels.
Why do you want to match the air rather than the plant’s actual growth? Plants are limited by a lot of different factors, so while CO2 helps a bit, doubling it doesn’t double the nitrogen use all by itself.
> a farmer didn't follow the fertilization limits
While this is a real issue, there are many solutions, and worrying about CO2 altering crop yields isn’t one of them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31643970
An unrelated issue. That’s important. I have no reason to expect it to get worse. What runs off the fields is necessarily not used by crops.
> And you can bet farmers are already maxing that out as much as they can on an industrial scale.
I doubt that.
All industries, agriculture included, are incentivised to maximise profits. Optimising profit sure isn’t environmentally friendly, but it also doesn’t mean treating fertiliser as a magic potion.
A productivity optimised farm looks like this: https://farmingaquaponics.com/aeroponics-vs-hydroponics/
That’s pointlessly expensive right now for most crops, so those are fairly limited. Likewise, the economically optimal quantity of fertiliser used by farms is different from the optimal quantity for the health of people living down-river — but that’s just as true regardless of if CO2 is higher or lower than we consider desirable for the general global climate.
CO2 as a heat trap is the problem, not so much CO2 in the atmosphere as an input to plant and animal life.
Replanting and more (and more intense) agriculture is what is making our planet greener. For the moment. But there are pretty clear upper limits to what the planet can deal with temperature wise, at some point it will get so hot that plants will not be able to retain their moisture. Already there are territories that were arable in the recent past that today are not or are subject to extreme droughts almost every summer.
For Europe the estimates are that Portugal (and Spain) are going to be the first to be hit really hard, and in a way that is already underway:
https://portuguese-american-journal.com/wildfires-severe-cli...
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Just_asking_questions
Normally when I have to remind people that humans are not plants it’s right after they state (accurately) that plants do better with somewhat more CO2 than is in the natural atmosphere.
Renewable sources are growing exponentially but carbon emitting sources continue to grow exponentially as well, simply somewhat slower.
It seems wildly, unreasonably optimistic to look at that graph and imagine most of that majority at the bottom suddenly vanishing within ten years.
Here’s some graphs for PV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics
PV is doubling every 3 to 3.5 years.
3 doublings of PV at that rate gets us to about 9-10 TW peak. I don’t know the actual average global capacity factor, but I do know the current global electricity usage is only about 3 TW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
How long before we start putting adsorption scrubbers on our HVAC systems' intakes?
Reference?
It's not that the CO2 level itself would be fatal to humans, it is the cascade from large scale agricultural collapse that would do us in.
Edit: And I am acutely aware that I live somewhere that is likely to suffer the least directly consequences from climate change.
[1] https://www.fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/202...
1. Is the climate being changed by human activity and rapidly so?
2. What should one do with this knowledge if the answer to 1 is yes?
Perhaps you don’t want to do anything about it. That is fine for you to decide this. But one should not answer ‘no’ to question 1 because doing something about it feels personal to you. The answer to 1 should have nothing to do with 2.
It's a really interesting comment which I wish we could explore deeper.
I get the same feelings but about different things. So I know you are sincere. But also, it's cultural and quite superficial. In psychology it's called "identification". An attack on a thing you identify with feels like an attack on you personally.
So for example, for me, attacks on free software, or my "right" to program in a language I choose, or to run a server, feel like actual attacks on my fundamental "freedom" as you say.
In reality though, if the world took those things away, within a couple of months or years I'd have forgotten and moved along with the flow. I know this from the experience of being half a century old :)
Now, if I took away your car, I can promise you'd feel the same in no time at all. Why? I don't own a car, and haven't for about 30 years. I git rid of my car when I moved to London, because private cars are a liability there. One or twice it's been a minor inconvenience. But apart from that I feel as free as ever - I go where I like, when I like, with who I like.... just rarely by car.
Even though I'm a fairly conservative person in some ways, I think we must recognise that many things we cling to as "essential freedoms" are actually just in our minds.
Are you arguing that all it takes is the saturation of public transportation for the entire US? Or are you arguing that people should just all move to mega-cities? I'm genuinely confused about what you're trying to explain to OP.
That people adapt. That deeply held beliefs about the importance of some things turn out to be skin-deep.
"You'll adapt just like I did" is not very convincing for the majority of people.
That's not my assertion, nor the point of my comment. The point is that identification (and misplaced sense of ownership) makes us very reluctant to be convinced [1]. A point which you agreeing with.
Nonetheless, people adapt when change comes. Another example, only just in my living memory was "decimalisation" (and for other Europeans when the currency switched to Euro). My grandmother swore blind the world would end if they brought in decimal currency. Within weeks she was the strongest supporter.
In 1752 people in England rioted because the calendars changed from Julian to Gregorian. People thought they were being robbed of 11 days. When the day arrived everybody awoke, got on with their lives as usual and in no time completely forgot it ever happened.
EDIT:
[1] In fact people can be so challenged by identification they'll downvote the most polite and reasoned of comments to feel better rather than respond intelligently.
I honestly don't think I have any suggestions. Not technical ones. I am neither an expert on transportation nor planning. My comment is about psychology, and to some extent about history.
As you say, given enough time maybe new solutions would make changes possible. But also, maybe not. Given enough time it may be that people living in rural areas accept that the world has changed, and travel far less. Given time, maybe the societal pressures to travel will ease. It may be that in time the main attraction of rural life returns to being its pace and relative isolation. These are not necessarily good or bad things, progressions or regressions, just change.
To the extent that change involves loss as well as gain I do think that change is like the stages of grief. The early stages, before acceptance, involve various mental tricks to try carrying on as before.
ALCOHOL FUEL! (Forgive me for shouting.)
If they are that spread out, they almost certainly have room to grow some sugar beets or sugar cane or potatoes or something like that, then they can ferment and distill alcohol fuel. This was pretty common for a long time.
> Before the American Civil War many farmers in the United States had an alcohol still to turn crop waste into free lamp oil and stove fuel for the farmers' family use.
> In 1826, Samuel Morey uses alcohol in the first American internal combustion engine prototype.
> By the 1890s, alcohol-fueled engines are starting to be used in farm machinery in Europe, making countries more fuel independent.
> By 1896, horseless carriages (cars) were showing up on roads in Europe and the United States. Because gasoline is so cheap and abundant, and also because ethanol is taxed at a high level, early US automobiles are adapted to gasoline from the beginning. Racing cars, on the other hand, usually used ethanol (and other alcohols) because more power could be developed in a smaller, lighter engine.
> In 1902, the Paris alcohol fuel exposition exhibited alcohol powered cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters, and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine powered by alcohol.
&c.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel
Alcohol is clean-burning, non-toxic, carbon-neutral, much higher energy density than any battery, cheap and easy to make, feed stocks are everywhere (I knew a guy who had a deal with a donut shop to collect and use their old scrap dough!), and the leftovers are a nutritious and valuable animal feed (yeast are protein.)
Not accurate.
Isaac Asimov pointed out that people only got paid for 19 days' work, but had to pay a full month's rent, so they were perfectly reasonable to demonstrate.
Yes, and if you hadn't moved to London then you would indeed have a car and consider it being part of your transportation "must haves"
In most of North America, and now Latin America and bits of Asia, car dependancy is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs
Hopefully eventually most cities will move to a scheme closer to London's, but if anything, things might be moving the other way
I've since moved out of London, and still have no car.
> transportation "must haves"
There are no "must haves" in this world.
> car dependency is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs
Yes, that's tragic. And I don't think those places have a long-term future as they are. Fortunately urban areas can undergo radical redesign. I think the post-pandemic is going to force that on us anyway.
Yes in the core of a few other cities (New York is most obvious) you can reasonably live without a car. Most people don't live close enough to the core though.
The bad transit options is the first thing that needs to change. However nobody actually cares about that. Democrats are more interested in union jobs even though it drives costs up to the point where it isn't cost effective. Republicans don't even realize that it would be possible to have useful transit and so they fight throwing good money after bad.
Because you live in one of the densest, oldest and most public transit-packed urban areas in Europe, you think that your easy shift to not having a car is worth a damn to hundreds of millions of people who don't live in London, or another big, dense, highly developed city like it? A Texas farmer or Louisiana fisherman isn't just being a selfish, green-hating ass when he or she says that they NEED their truck or car. They really do, to live, and almost every day. What kinds of mental bubbles do some of the privileged people who comment on this site live in?
And people will adapt to it, because that's what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. That's not ugly, it's beautiful. It's beautiful that humans are adaptable, resilient and inventive.
Well most of us anyway.
That aside, it really is absurd to dismiss the needs and complaints of hundreds of millions of diverse vehicle-owning non-urban dwellers based on how smugly easy you think it was to not own a car in London of all places. There's nothing psychologically obtuse about pointing out the closed mindedness of your notion. Yet you speak of identification and its effects.
Well, you've said it yourself. There's nothing a reasonable person can add to that, or hope to gain by doing so. So, have a lovely day. :)
It can be in the form of direct support of various activities of the petroleum industry, such as drilling, refinement and pipelines in the name of creating new jobs, but also in giant infrastructure projects reserved for cars, and legal requirements of square meter prices for car parking many orders of magnitude below market cost.
It was the way post-war society was built up and will take a very long time to change. It's so entrenched that once you start seeing it, it is really everywhere.
If you properly price an externality, the free market will help you deal with it.
Yes, it is, and it is important to grow up and realize that actions have got consequences, heating meats is also unsustainable, flying planes is also unsustainable, the general levels of developed countries consumption rates are also unsustainable
As that rather famous "debater" says, "reality doesn't care about your feelings"
Liberties go partnered with duties and responsibilities, it is widespread commonplace at least in US related discourse to behave in a wholly entitled manner and simply ignore the most important parts of these social system (responsible freedom)
250 years ago, it would have been completely unfathomable to imagine feeding 8 billion people with the technologies of the time. I'm not just talking about it being unsustainable but temporarily doable, it would have simply not happened without maybe two thirds of the world rapidly dying of hunger. Yet, here we are today, with the lowest relative proportion of the world in recorded history in danger of famine.
This of course slowly isn't sustainable WITH present technologies being widely used. If those technologies change however, it could indeed become sustainable, just like what we have now is far beyond the capacities of previous centuries. Instead of default leaps to new prohibitions in environmental and climate change discussions, more focus should be made on promoting new developments that let us both live well and in large numbers while harming the world less.
It is if the justification you provide for having this right is that it is "God-given" or a consequence of "natural law" or something like that. Because what that boils down to is that you are claiming the right to ignore the economic externalities of your actions because you are somehow special, despite being unable to provide any evidence for your specialness beyond your own personal beliefs. That is the defining characteristic of extremism. Extremism does not have to be extreme, it just has to be unassailable.
Definition 3 is:
"any political theory favoring immoderate uncompromising policies"
I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies even if the right you claim doesn't seem "extreme" at first glance. (And I qualify it in this way because "the right to drive" doesn't seem extreme at first glance, but could in fact result in the destruction of technological civilization if enough people claim it, so whether or not driving is "extreme" depends on your perspective.)
'I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies even if the right you claim doesn't seem "extreme" at first glance.'
Just because someone claims an improper reason, doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong (you could have false premises and a true conclusion - that makes a bad argument but the conclusion can still correct). Often times the people claiming natural rights (or really any of their rights) just don't know the proper reasoning and instead resort to claiming something gave them that right - nature, God, government, etc.
It would be hard to fully explore any argument without getting to the point of someone's subjective reasoning that something is good or bad as perspective can come into play (good for me vs bad for you, why is society more important than individuals, etc).
I don't dispute that, but 1) you used the word "privilege" rather than "right" which really changes the tenor of the claim. "Driving is a privilege, not a right" implies that the "privilege" can be revoked while the (putative) right could not. And 2) my claim was about the justification that people offer for their claimed rights, not the rights themselves.
> Just because someone claims an improper reason, doesn't mean their conclusion is wrong
I didn't say it was. Just because someone is an extremist doesn't mean they are necessarily wrong. The problem with extremism is not that it always leads to wrong conclusions or even to bad outcomes. The problem is that it makes it a lot harder to correct errors.
This is particularly relevant in the case of climate change. When the Taliban chops people's heads off it produces an immediate visceral reaction in most people, which helps motivate them to act. Our collective decisions to keep driving today don't have the same effect on our psyches, even if a lot more people are going to end up dead in the future as a result.
"2) my claim was about the justification that people offer for their claimed rights, not the rights themselves."
The definition that you provided says nothing about justification being a part of something being extreme.
"Our collective decisions to keep driving today don't have the same effect on our psyches"
That's because driving is not extreme. It's considered a moderate position and people accept compromises on it. Even the people that say it's a right accept some level of restrictions such as traffic laws, at least from a standpoint of not wanting to be punished.
Simply wanting the freedom to move about by driving is not an extreme position.
>I think that "I have this right because I say so" qualifies
I (and pretty sure a sizeable portion of HN) want precisely zero on-device CSAM scanning and encryption backdoors. I'm not willing to compromise on this (eg. "okay we'll backdoor encryption but only for terrorists"). Does that make me an extremist? Based on your definition it certainly sounds like it.
That depends on the justification that you offer. If your justification is (say) that you have a God-given right to sexually exploit children with impunity, then yes, I'd say that qualifies you as an extremist. If your justification is that CSAM scanning does more harm than good, and you can back that up with actual facts, then no.
It's easy to call pedophiles "extremists", but what if my argument is
"I have a God-given right to not have my on-device data searched"?
Justification isn't really part of the position, it's how you arrived at it.
There is a compromise position - accepting that driving a car is right, but also accepting that everyone must pay for its externalities, w.r.t. CO_2 by uniform revenue-neutral carbon tax, like any other fossil CO_2 emission.
Revenue-neutral carbon tax is an approach proposed by many economists, but governments are hesitant to use that and instead go with selective bans and subsidies.
Sure, but what most people mean when they say they have a "right" to something is that they are entitled to that thing without strings attached.
Also, there are factual disagreements about what the externalities of driving actually are. For example, should you have to pay for the people who suffer respiratory illnesses because of vehicle emissions? The cost of accidents? By what mechanism should these costs be assessed and payment made? How should the costs be distributed? If I drive 5000 miles a year should I pay the same as someone who drives 10,000? And how exactly do you assess the cost of moving the needle on an existential threat by a teeny tiny bit?
And just look at people's reaction to the recent increases in the cost of gas! They are indignant, outraged, because they think that they are entitled to cheap gas. It's their right.
"Pay for the externalities" is a fine principle, but very hard to put into practice.
This is clearly false. It may feel like a personal attack on your freedom but:
1. It's not personal, this is a systemic problem and no one is trying to punish or harm you. The aim is ultimately to prevent harm, not just to you but to your whole community.
2. It's not an attack. The goal is not to cause you harm, again it's to prevent harm.
3. I'm not even sure what "freedom" means in this context. Do you feel that your freedom has been infringed upon when you have to stop at a cross walk for a pedestrian? Does not taking a shit in a public pool infringe upon this "freedom"? Freedom, for social organism, cannot mean complete and unrestricted action. The only people who have this view are actual toddlers, and part of them growing up to be elementary school kids is to learn about their role in society and the limits of their own rights in the face of others.
Is there only one poor person?
Harming a class of people is not a personal attack.
Revenue-neutral carbon tax is pretty much equivalent to giving everyone carbon credits and allowing trading them (just with less overhead). If some rich people pay more tax to pollute more, then more money would be distributed back to everybody.
The poor always suffer most. What do you use your money for, if not to avoid suffering? Immediate, short term, and long term, that's probably how you spend most of your money, plus spending to avoid your children and family suffering.
Now that we've gotten that out of the way: since the environmental improvements of the mid-20th century, urban environments have been the clear winners for living affordably, to say nothing of the accessibility of public services. Poor people may not be able to live in the most expensive zip code of NYC, LA, SF, etc., but then they were hardly going to be living on 100-acre estates when they're living in rural or suburban settings. Car-dominated infrastructure poses enormous personal costs for every single person and miserable additional costs to ferry around non-driver children.
So, enough of your government-subsidized 'freedom'. I want the freedom to safely cross the street to church without a police officers (and half the other cars) accelerating into me in the crosswalk. I want the freedom to bike to work safely. I want the freedom for my children to bike to parks, schools, and libraries, like I could growing up. I want the federal and state governments to stop dumping money on my town to build roads as wide as runways to facilitate firetrucks doing 3 point turns and police flying through neighborhoods like action-movie jackasses.
This is the most tone deaf statement. If green policies make it harder for me to provide for my family, live our life as we see fit, or force me to do things I don't want to it is _very_ personal, like incredibly personal. There is no reason for you or anyone else to have any power over my life as a voter or a king, period.
Yes, it's terrible. Were it not for that accursed law thar robs us of our liberty, I would murder you on the spot for such an asinine comment.
Understand now partially what a society is about?
Unless you have your own private air that never touches anyone else's air, we all have a right to control your actions that change our collective air. If you don't agree, go find your own planet and live there.
You are simply a product of an environment you had no say in creating.
BUT, 1) it is personal, 2) it is an attack and 3) it is a limitation on personal freedoms.
If we wish to make actual changes to save the planet rather than just preach, we need to recognize these truths. Telling people that their feelings are wrong just makes them dig in their heels all the more. IMO, a better approach is to recognize these sort of objections and think creatively about how to deal with them or mitigate the impact. Remember, the objective isn't to win arguments, it's to heal the Earth.
What most "anti-car" people are advocating for amounts to the option to not drive. As it is now, driving is practically a requirement for full participation in society.
And yes, maybe that restricts a car owner's "freedom", but should those car-based externalities be free?
> This sounds like a typical US thing. Suffering from a solvable problem, while creating the maximum public drama and having the society incapable of reform
1) This is a global problem that is not specific to the US (even if the US is a huge contributor). No other country has solved the issue.
2) The comment is implying that this isn't a solvable problem (or at least a solution has never been proposed) since all the green tech/policy isn't having an impact.
Or the other way around, without the US, China and Australia, even if the rest of the world does everything right, global carbon dioxide levels will not only keep increasing, but do so in an accelerating manner.
And before you ask why not China could create credible incentives for the US, the answer is that they do not have the institutions for it, which the US has. At least in theory.
That won't happen because of an economic collapse and no politician would ever get elected with this thinking (at least in the US). Plus, you've now taken away many freedoms that are inherit in democratic societies.
To me green technologies are better than nothing but there's really a consumption problem. And I'm completely guilty of it as well.
I think you're talking about cognitive dissonance [0].
Btw, biggest contributor to climate change is meat & dairy eating [1][2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Reduction
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10464793/Tot...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Meat-eati...
Additional sources here:
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/02/01/new-model-explores-link... https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po... https://www.hsi.org/issues/climate-change/
So what do we do when neither side wants to tank the economy by implementing strict, lifestyle-altering controls?
These are very, very different psyches of people. The subtleties show up in all elements of the current prevailing culture, and what is truly happening right now is the war between those that remember how bad it was and can be, and those who experienced life with a completely new set of pains outside the horrors of the bottom of hierarchy of needs.
To tie this back to the climate and culture of the US, having gone through two major hurricanes in the gulf region, I can tell you the mindset of everyone is 'so what.' You lose your house, all possessions, and have $500 in your bank account with 4 kids -- but you are not alone, every single person around you, rich or poor is going through some chaos. Every single person is reaching out to help you clear your road, cook food for you, keep the kids together -- (first hand account).
So in these communities, a big scary 'climate change' event is already happening, and they are pulling through just fine. They live in unconscious safety because they have direct evidence that their community has their back - and life continues on happily until someone comes with a shaking finger to say, 'you really need to stop everything you're doing and fight climate change.'
The only real risk around here is tornadoes (and we did have one touch down within 5 miles of us just last year, damaged a couple hundred homes, uprooted some trees, and rendered 20 homes unlivable). From a recent article, some of the people with damaged homes are still dealing with it six months later, and some homes just have tarps where a couple of their walls were, still (it was already hard to hire people even before the tornado struck, also they had issues getting insurance to approve things).
I wouldn't want to willingly move to even more likelihood of problems, like near a beach in the Gulf Coast or Arizona (which is about to have severe water problems soon as Lake Mead upstream is drying up fast).
Yep, exactly the point! And look at the adaptive community response to Hurricane Katrina and recent flooding events: the Cajun Navy.
All I'm saying is telling this type of voter to ignore their lives and change their lifestyle, when they adapt in pretty incredible ways - is going to be a hard sell.
Looking at the maps it seems much more likely that the obvious thing is true, this is an issue driven almost entirely by political identity with a side helping of how badly you might actually feel the effects.
I get that a grand narrative of people pulling together feels nice, but if it isn't true its just a waste of time.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
Of course not, but anecdotal evidence contradicting empirical evidence without a convincing explanation is usually a pretty good sign.
Willing to wager something meaningful on that? ;D!
The climate emergency will devastate crops all over the world, render parts of it simply unlivable, but you believe that Americans, with their "very, very different psyches" and the "culture of the US", will simply band together, "rich or poor", and "live in safety"?
If it weren't the case that people with the same false-to-the-fact beliefs were setting policy through America, your beliefs could simply be ignored by the polite, but as it is, it's simply tragic and rather horrifying.
Making a change requires acknowledging and accepting that many of the US populace will not respond well to the incredulity of their direct lives.
If you spend time outside the US, you'd realize the problems the US deal with are pretty similar to the problems other countries deal with.
But Americans with little knowledge of the world outside the US catastrophize what's going on the in the US - "the Republic is falling!", "it's never been this bad!", "Americans are so ignorant!" and "nobody has ever had this problem, ever!".
However, reasons for my beliefs are not due to a lack of knowledge of the world outside the U.S. Empires die eventually and change happens. The major power and structural problems in the U.S. are not sustainable and will eventually have to change. Whether that change comes peacefully or violently I can’t say.
Accusations of the US "in decline" were happening back in the 60's and 70's when things were much worse than they are now, like order of magnitude worse.
As I said, navel gazing and lack of perspective tend to dominate news in coverage of the US.
As I said, I can give reasons for my beliefs and those reasons are not due to ignorance.
The only information source about the US is based on comments on social media?
No wonder your view of the US is so pessimistic.
One thing I wonder is, who steps up? China, for sure, though it's grappling with population decline as an existential crisis. The EU? The EU has never 'stepped up' for anything. The US sat patiently by and tried to let Europe deal with Milosevich. That utterly failed. The EU was also almost ripped apart by the greek debt crisis, so it too is having real issues.
A post US hegimon world is going to be a very different world, and not necessarily a better one.
What do you mean? NATO bombed the shit out of what became Serbia, they withdrew from Kosovo and he was arrested two years later...
Unsurprisingly, I was a lot more informed and a _lot_ better at arguing than they were, so it was pretty trivial to completely demolish their points quickly enough that it didn't turn into "an argument", with the attendant social friction of disagreements that drag on.
I no longer spend much time around women in their early 20s, so I'm spared these extremes of ignorance, but I still occasionally come across the same tendency occasionally, albeit with a lot more maturity. The US is still something close to a global hegemon, so it's a target for hyperbolic projection by every simpleton in the world that wants to sound educated on geopolitics. Note that this also includes the best-country-in-the-world jingoists that can't recognize America's exceptional positive qualities without violently dismissing its exceptional negative qualities.
I have an uncle who's convinced that literally every conflict in the Middle East is entirely the US's fault, entirely ignoring a region that's been beset by conflict for millennia, as well as the modern borders drawn in crayon by the British on their way out. The best strategy, on HN and in real life, is to nod & smile & understand that these people have no hope of and no interest in understanding reality.
The above assumes that the proposed policy would actually work too. Some climate policies are clearly not going to have a significant positive effect, but we're doing them anyway (eg banning plastic bags in favor of paper bags@). Other policies could be designed just to keep yourself in power (deny the opposition power).
@ this does have a different reason too - to fight plastic pollution, but climate change is also cited as a reason. Paper bags are heavier and require more resources though, which makes it difficult for them to end up as better than plastic bags when it comes to climate change.
Believing nothing should be done about climate change does not make one an extremist. Believing animals should not be eaten does not make one an extremist. Adhering to those beliefs by automatically discounting contravening evidence makes one an extremist.
The problem is that this is the religious position, not the other one. If you go investigate this properly you'll find there's tons of scientific dispute about even very basic things like what the temperature actually was 5 years ago in specific places, let alone more complex topics like what the climate would do in response to an immediate doubling of CO2 levels (so called ECS).
And the impact of global warming itself isn't at all obvious. All the effects so far are so small you can't directly detect them with your own senses, you have to use sensitive monitoring equipment and/or accept a lot of conjecture about chance and probability. In turn that requires you to have absolute confidence in the people doing the measurements and processing the data, but plenty of people don't have that confidence for various legitimate reasons (e.g. the Climategate emails). So it's pretty much by definition not obvious.
"Believing nothing should be done about climate change does not make one an extremist"
Doing nothing is the default position in any debate so arguing for it by definition makes one not an extremist. You can't be a "nothing extremist", that's a contradiction.
Extremism takes the form of positing extreme scenarios like the end of the world, and demanding extreme solutions like massive changes to everyone's ways of life. The people who say "let's not do that" are the ones pushing back on extremism.
This is at the root of a lot of the fighting over climate change: it creates enormous cognitive dissonance in people. Those who decide they want to fight it want to see themselves as rational devotees of science, but find themselves being the guy in the sandwich board yelling "The End Is Nigh" and demanding extreme policies. And just like sandwich board guy they struggle to explain the details of how the world is meant to end. Very few people who have tied their identity to climate extremism can actually handle a debate about the details which is why they instantly retreat into screaming that it's all "settled science" (which is a lie).
In particular, most people recognize the possibility (at least theoretically) that someone can be both an extremist and also correct. Whereas by your definition that's impossible.
Are nuclear power plants being shut down for climate policy reasons?
Plenty of things in climate-forward policy actually improve everyone's quality of life, even if the "way of life" changes.
Take EVs for example. As we transition to them, local air quality improves, not just for the EV drivers but also for non EV drivers.
Same for heat pumps replacing fossil burning furnaces - they are so efficient that it still results in a CO2 and emissions reduction if we burn natural gas at a power plant to power them.
And for most people and drives EVs are just a better experience (acceleration, vibration, smoothness), and heat from a heat pump feels better than a gas furnace since it doesn't excessively dry the air, and also has no risk of leaking combustion byproducts into your living space.
But sure, if "way of life" means the "principle" of burning fossil fuels directly for day to day propulsion and space heating, then yes climate policy is a threat to that, but being wedded to a technology for its own sake seems backwards.
I think these are derivative factors. The primary factor is material, as it almost invariably is. There are massive organizations and affiliated organizations with a material stake in having things be this way, and they have almost zero interest in “societal net benefit” action, or concern for “societal net deficit” harm, so long as “private net benefit” is maintained.
There is no shadowy cabal, but as with other aspects of the system, lack of explicit coordination is why it works so well (think of it as a perverse version of Milton Friedman’s “pencil”).
I never understood how people could believe such obviously foolish things. I think part of it for me is just getting older, but I also think the last decade has just been more blatant in a lot of ways.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his identity depends upon his not understanding it."
WTF? Let's take one example, the F-150 Lightning. When it replaces a gasoline truck sale, it eliminates 150 tons of CO2 from burning gasoline, and about 80 tons of CO2 from drilling, refining and transporting that gasoline.
Sure, producing the truck takes a little extra energy, and electricity isn't carbon free in most places, but that doesn't come anywhere close to 200 tons of CO2.
There is no climate benefit to opening a wind farm. The climate benefit comes when a wind farm causes a fossil fuel power plant to be shut down.
When you look at what politicians and corporations boast about, it's always about adding. New renewables, new solar panels on our roof. Not about taking away fossil fuels.
As an example, "carriers reduced their fuel consumption per passenger-kilometer by approximately 39 percent between 2005 and 2019 (pre-COVID-19), a compound annual growth rate of about 3.4 percent per year". [globally] - you can be sure the industry touts its increased efficiency.
But globally, the emissions of the airline industry have gone up, meaning it's damaging the climate more than every before. https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...
Even with your example - is the new truck going to travel more miles than the previous one? The US is still building urban sprawl by default. Does the owner use the pickup truck or, like most pickup truck owners, they could be use a smaller more efficient vehicle?
As in the famous talk "Hans Rosling: the magic washing machine", we haven't done anything to actually reduce emissions. Yet we are sold a narrative of constant progress towards our climate goals.
And coal plants are being shut down at a very significant rate.
The number of ICE vehicles being sold annually is also going down.
Coal peaked, but gas and oil extraction are still growing fast.
I’m not as gloomy. I can acknowledge progress. But when it comes to cars, it’s been worse, not better. But at least now the technology is better and can hope for the curve to finally invert itself.
Normal growth is enough to explain why that hasn't (yet) resulted in a net decrease. If the growth rate continues at 50+%, that will change in about 5 years, though.
> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand, negating the efficiency gains.
You are conceding the point with extra words here
Reality is that the amount of vehicles is increasing, and by rule of thumb 50% of the emissions released by vehicles come from their own construction, steel, copper, manufacturing, chemicals needed for the production
Given the size of a f150, would you take the bet that its manufacturing cost co2 wise is lower than a prius?
This is obviously, bypassing the fact that rather than having to buy a 0km vehicle instead someone could have bought a second hand f150 and therefore not strictly needed to increase the total amount of vehicles in circulation
But that's for an electric car vs a fuel efficient car. An electric truck vs a 15 mpg gasoline truck will go carbon negative a lot faster than 6 months.
That the real deal is figuring how to reduce the number of vehicles in total.
Is the F150 Lightning better than commuting to work in a deuce and half? Sure. But it is not carbon neutral or negative except when compared to something worse - and there’s always something worse that could be compared.
I think people are looking at different derivatives.
If you compare the rate of change of emissions, they do continue to rise as new electric vehicles are produced. But, the claim that an EV is more efficient than a regular truck is not a claim about the first derivative, but about the second.
That is, in theory, an EV raises CO2 emissions less than the equivalent truck. That's saying the impact should be visible in the *2nd* derivative being negative, but not necessarily the first.
I suspect there is not in the US (as almost everyone who wants a vehicle has one or two already) but there certainly could be in less vehicle-saturated markets.
When it's a straight 1 over 1 it's easy - for example, if someone were to buy me a Milwaukee M18 lawnmower, I'd be willing to scrap the existing gas one, so it can no longer pollute. If I were to give it away or sell it, it would still be doing whatever it does for someone else.
Yep, that's always a concern, and one of the reasons I framed my response around what the argument was, and what the claim was. I haven't really done enough research to know or feel confident in whether that claim is borne out or holds and the concern you've raised is the major thing that could get in the way.
I was largely just commenting on the disconnect in the discussion that I was observing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
In many countries, this is exactly what's happening.
In the UK for example, gas and electricity usage has been declining for the last 15 years. Coal has been almost eliminated from the grid, and renewables now account for about 40% of generation, from less than 10% a decade ago. Overall carbon emissions are below 1890 levels.
Obviously we have outsourced some of our emissions but there's very clearly a huge reduction that can't be entirely explained by that.
Or when it prevents a new fossil fuel power plant to open.
No one is going to sell their old vehicles just because there's a greener version, but if all new vehicles are green you'll eventually phase down the old ones. You can't expect people to care overnight, much less to lose money because of it.
My truck is a little trickier. The F150 lightening would do everything I need a truck for, but I drive my truck so rarely (one fill up per year). too bad nobody will rent me a truck for what I want t truck for.
That's not a benefit, that's a loss averted. These claims are usually over egged as well for "net zero" calculations. Net zero against some hypothetical averted future, but in physical reality the emissions are still there heating the atmosphere.
As an analogy, I can "prevent spending" by buying a coffee machine, bulk buying some products, etc. However, there are more ways to spend money than I can even notice, and I can pile up the "savings" but still find I have no money left at the end of a month to... actually deposit into my savings. I think it's a common experience.
If production of fossil fuels is not decreased by regulation, then a drop in domestic demand means more is available to export. The export price goes down, encouraging the continued use of fossil fuels abroad. Another power plant is built over there and emits GHGs.
Or when a new fossil fuel power plant is _not_ built, or when demand spikes but the renewable sources handle the load and make fossil fuels less attractive.
We aren’t socially set up with the mechanisms to make this change overnight. Basically no society is, we have to move people there with a viable alternative to them going without energy, or they will find ways to burn the earth to keep warm as the previous generations of all of us have.
Maybe we should provide (edit: sourced) data to back up our claims.
The combustion of a gas plant or of a coal plant is more efficient than the combustion happening in a internal combustion engine, a turbine on a gas power plant can reach 44 to 60%[1] , a thermal plant 33% to 49%, an internal gasoline combustion engine tops at 35% in an idealized state, which real performance between 20 and 29%
Unless you have got strong metrics which quantitatively show this to be true, then it is not a claim that can be spouted easily
[1] http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-sources/fossil-fuels...
[2] https://www.williamson.edu/2018/05/the-most-efficient-therma...
They're easy to find.
gasoline truck: 1/15 gallons per mile * 17 pounds CO2 / gallon = 1.1 pounds/mile
electric truck: 0.5 kWh per mile * 0.8 pounds CO2 / kWh = 0.4 pounds / mile
That 0.8 pounds CO2/kWh number is the US average from 2020. It's predicted to halve by 2025.
And I didn't include the numbers for drilling, refining and transporting the gasoline used, which are massive, and increase the 1.1 pounds/mile figure by at least 40%.
Every claim I made is not false. For example I said "electricity is MOST LIKELY not carbon free". If that were false, then are you suggesting that most electricity is carbon free? Are we only talking about vehicles operating in Costa Rica or something? I think it is easy to verify that your statement is incorrect.
The comment I was responding to was one sided and without sourced information. I provided an argument for the other side without sourced information as well. I'm not sure that anything I said is wildly false, and I thought it would provide balance. If you're curious, have a look at this TedX [talk]. I just happened across it yesterday so those arguments were top of mind. It's another example of a whole bunch of "facts" being presented with no source so I don't give it much weight but it's a good presentation.
[talk]: https://youtu.be/S1E8SQde5rk
Great example. Let's see. Compared to the previous model it is: bigger, heavier (like 150% the weight), faster, more powerful, more torque.
More, more, more.
Increased efficiency of internal combustion engines has not led to decreased fossil fuel usage. It has led to bigger and more powerful vehicles and increased fossil fuel usage. There is no reason at all to believe electric vehicles will be any different. People simply refuse to sacrifice anything.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/03/17/suvs-pickups...
This is because of two things: (1) fetishization of size, weight, speed. This is modernism, a monomaniacal obsession with measurements, a very infantile mindset. (2) self-preservation; People are more inclined to buy bigger vehicles when they are surrounded by oversized death machines anyway.
It's a textbook tragedy of the commons. This can never resolve positively in a bottom-up manner. It's a local maximum that will require top down intervention, or some serious soul searching.
A scaled tax based on vehicle weight compared to number of seats or something would make the smaller cars more attractive.
What do you mean, lower albedo?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc
Heavier vehicles like trucks (and EVs are heavier in general) cause much quicker degradation of roads. And doubling down on private vehicle use with EVs is going to increase demand for roads across the board. It's just so far from a useful solution to go down this route.
For some perspective, it is likely that the production of a full sized truck embodies 30-40 tons of carbon.
No. You're coming to a conclusion based on some internalized facts that may not be internalized by the people you're referring to.
Looking at the graph doesn't tell you anything at all about heat. It tells you about CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
The only way the graph doesn’t tell us anything about heat is if we intentionally separate it from any context or larger system of knowledge.
It’s like saying your car’s gas gauge doesn’t tell you anything about how far you can drive, just how much gas you have in the tank.
That's nonsense. Temperature isn't a direct function of CO2 in the atmosphere. Even climatologists don't believe it's that simple. That's why there's so much debate about the true value of ECS, that's why they spent much of the 2010s trying to explain the pause in global warming by reference to heat absorption of the oceans, etc (they since changed the mind and now argue that they were simply failing to correctly measure temperatures for decades, which is even worse).
The false belief that climate = CO2 levels is one of the things that creates skepticism about climatology, because anyone who bothers to check the actual facts instead of relying on "high school level chemistry" will immediately see that it's false. Moreover if it were actually that simple then there'd be no need to worry because if you simply map CO2 level increases to temperature increases then you don't get anything even close to a doomsday scenario. All the "we need to reach net zero yesterday" type claims are predicated on hypothetical and quite complicated feedback loops that involve far more than just a straight mapping of temperature=CO2 levels.
Edit: I see now that you’re not the person I replied to, sorry. I agree with you that one CO2 graph is not the whole story. It’s a big piece, though.
People have direct experience with the movement of their gas gauge and the distance they travel. They come to know directly that a certain point on the gauge represents a certain available distance to travel. They don't need to know anything about how the gas interacts with the air, and eventually ends up involved in a combustion reaction.
There's no such direct experience with CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and heating. And atmospheric temperature is wildly variable on day to day time scales so it's impossible to make such a simple, direct, one to one association between them.
You expect most people to have this particular grasp of high school level chemistry (and physics, I'd say), to the point where the interaction between CO2 and infrared radiation is accepted and internalized so well that one can directly jump from a graph of CO2 concentration to a conclusion about atmospheric heating. I'd say you're intentionally over simplifying. You have a conclusion you've come to, and you just expect others to accept it based on your point of view and your experience.
Some people seem to think that a democracy means the world has to act my way. If you argue with them, try to convince them, you only fuel their belief that their opinion matters. Just move on and do something productive with your day.
The past two years of dealing with a pandemic shows you exactly what will be done. Nothing. Millions will suffer from it and it will all be written off, spun politically and turned into another part of the rat race for people to literally walk over other people to get whatever they want at that moment.
The well off will just move up higher in their apartment buildings and turn up the A/C higher, while looking down at the masses made to fight among themselves for less and less resources.
You have an unstated assumption that a change to the current political systems and organization is fundamentally catastrophic, but I’m not sure I agree.
If the only impact is political, so what?
The political impact is one of civilizational collapse. Some people are not nihilists and want to avert this.
Okay — can you quantify “disruptions”, because that comes across as a “scare word” that just means “things will change”.
> The political impact is one of civilizational collapse. Some people are not nihilists and want to avert this.
Okay, how exactly?
That last sentence, where you impeach the character of people who disagree with you, makes me think that this is political tribalism and an excuse for totalitarianism rather than a scientific point.
Which has been my experience of people “fighting global warming”: they’re more interested in the excuse to reform society to their totalitarian vision than the science.
My views on this are not normative to any major political group in the U.S. One thing that ought to be indisputable is that massively increasing the energy into the weather system will cause major disruptions before the system stabilizes into a new normal (equilibrium).
People are not just cattle. They are also a resource itself. Not just consumers. and remarkable good resources at being able to adapt.
Last time "the planet was much more hospitable", the temperature climb happened over a much, much longer time period.
The present speed of C02 increase is unprecedented in Earth's geological history.
What speed of change in actual effects on humans are we currently observing?
Heat waves, tornados, floods etc. all have been seen in similar or greater numbers and with more casualties in the past 100s of years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-worst-climate...
Renewables have gotten so cheap that it's mostly fine that they're so unpredictable(for a certain definition of that word though, because we have weather reports to account for that) - at least for the time being, especially that so many long-distance HVDC are currently in place to distribute all that energy.
Also all this CO2 in the air postponed the next glaciation by tens of thousands of years, so if our species gets through this crisis, it will have ample time to prepare for the inevitable decrease in temperatures.
But once renewables go to higher percentages, the issues get worse. The main problem is that energy storage is currently very expensive and still dependent on geography (hydro power). So the electricity price will crash when it's very sunny or windy. That hurts the profitability of solar or wind power.
Like you mentioned, we would need to invest hugely in long distance ultra high voltage transmission lines, load buffering like green hydrogen for steel making, green concrete etc and maybe ultimately even batteries. These are large investments. Changing from fossil fuels takes a lot of money. The steel produced this way is more expensive than coal or natural gas based steel.
So renewables have a compensating effect. On the other hand as technology develops, they get cheaper - but when their penetration increases, they also become more expensive since they require bigger infrastructure changes.
Yet we still need to do this one way or another. Your new car or house will be smaller and more expensive because of it. Your electricity or heating bill will be more. The sooner we admit that yes, it will cause a lower material standard of living in the short term, but we still need to do it for the long term, the further we get.
And would it be safe to assume that low-emission energy has much lower ROI, in a traditional sense, than fossil fuels? If so, I double down on my above predictions about triggers for meaningful change.
But that's life, isn't it? We're only capable of optimizing towards a finite distance in the future. If that weren't the case, we would be gods, not humans. And we certainly wouldn't be in this mess, or perhaps any mess, in the first place.
I think the severity of the issue is what makes it so easy to dismiss, and ignore. Just like people can ignore the impact a car accident would have on them, because such a thing is so severe that well, it's best not to think about it, so people don't.
What we emit today will start to have an impact on average temperatures (energy level, infrared re-emissions, whatever you want to call it) in 2042. That does not help us take decisions.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
We could deal with it, the issue is that civilisation entails cooperatively working to deal with it as opposed to going to war and killing everyone the second your crops fail.
It seems like the challenge is getting all countries to take action to reduce CO2 emissions, especially the biggest emitters.
As are the ones doing the least to curb emissions.
This is where the proverb "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" comes from. You don't have the moral standing to criticize the CO2 emissions of others if you aren't doing anything yourself, even if the others are worse than yourself.
OTOH, only when you are leading by example do you have the moral standing.
It seems like whenever anyone points out the obvious above, others will jump in saying we can't point fingers but they don't offer any real solutions either. Around and around we go.
This use is fundamentally different from an industrialized nation that has a fully powered electric grid and alternative means to power it, but uses fossil fuel out of price or convenience considerations.
Yes, it's rarely this clear-cut in reality, life and economics are complicated, etc. Still though, it's clear to me that not all fossil fuel use is ethically the same, and people still using fossil fuels can indeed have valid moral positions against others using them.
No, I would say the countries that have already produced(in total) the most CO2 are the ones most to blame. And those aren't the same countries as the ones emitting the most right now.
As far as going forward though, the countries currently producing the most CO2 are the ones most able to have an impact by reducing their CO2 emissions.
Why does China produce so much CO2? A lot of it is to satisfy the massive demand coming from the West for all the cheap stuff they make. If we put a carbon tax on imported goods, and used the revenue to invest in sustainable infrastructure (ideally back into those same producers, not just at home), I believe we would see positive changes pretty quickly.
Simply pointing fingers at producers will get us nowhere if we don't actively try to change incentives and support other countries and institutions to get up to speed. After all, many of the poorest countries that have begun to grow were historically prevented from modernising by their western colonisers. So in some sense the blame still falls largely on the West.
e.g. Canada as a whole doesn't emit that much CO2 but we emit a lot per capita because it takes a lot of energy to keep warm and renewables are not as reliable further north. Our political parties frequently like to point out we're <2% of the global footprint as justification to increase investments in oil/gas while conveniently omitting that we're 0.5% of the global population.
Of all the possible debate proposals for the exploration of complexity in the problem, the one that can have the most limited credit is the idea that "total production" could be the metric to base policy.
That better metrics than "per capita" could be found (energy spent how, by what, with which care towards compensating the externalities), sure, granted, complex but interesting - but that a gross aggregation could mean anything is hardly serious. It would be akin to "The one with the highest total GDP picks the short straw".
It may happen that somebody steps in with the idea, sure, but the answer - at least in terms of discussion - would be easy (and involve a "this is not serious").
What we're obligated to prevent is avoidable human death and suffering on a massive scale. It is the lives that matter not the origin of the threat.
And it's not a simple dichotomy between total extinction and we're all fine. A plausible scenario is that hundreds of millions of people who are living right now will die preventably, and those with the most resources, including fossil fuel use, will be able to ride it out at their expense. We have obligations going beyond merely weakening the mechanisms of climate change; we must also address its consequences now and in the near future.
All of this "green" technology we've produced hasn't made an iota of a difference, yet, in terms of the actual problem. Maybe it will soon? Let's hope.
Globally industrialization and increased economic activity hides these improvements, but without green technology things would be much worse.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/natural-ga...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-production?co...
Looking at that graph, it looks like a mirror: the more coal decreased recently, the more other fossil fuel extraction increased. This goes back to my original point: The rate of fossil fuel extraction is the only metric that matters. And it's not going down in any meaningful way, is it? Hopefully soon, but I'm doubtful.
In terms of electricity, net fossil fuel use per person is also down significantly from 9,616 kWh per person in 2008 to 7,861 kWh in 2019. Gasoline is fairly steady and responds to economic activity, from 141 billion gallons in 2004 to 134 in 2012 and back up to 146 in 2019. That looks slightly better when you consider the 12% population increase from 2004.
On a global scale, worldwide production of fossil fuels is not going down. I fail to see any evidence that this is being fixed. Maybe someday the various technologies will converge in a way that fixes the issue -- but I doubt it.
Global trends are more troublesome, but coal peaked in 2013 and it’s use has declined from 44,993 TWH in 2013 to 43,839 in 2019.
Anyway, per person numbers are critical for understanding trends. Infrastructure ages, the average US power plant is over 41 years old in 2020. The industry is essentially running off a huge cliff, which is less obvious when you look at year over year production. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-age-o... In China on the other hand the average coal power plant is 11, that infrastructure is likely going to be around for decades.
Long term the rest of the world is catching up developed economies, but what that meant in 2006 looked much worse than what that means today.
That's exactly my point. It doesn't matter if one country becomes completely carbon neutral. We're screwed anyways if oil extraction continues unabated. It's easy to play around with different numbers to find ones that are favorable, but you can't hide the fact that fossil fuel extraction hasn't gone down. Unless it rapidly slows, and then stops, we're screwed, no matter which countries emit less carbon. And no matter which populations are more "efficient."
Climate change is cumulative so both reducing past emissions, reducing growth in emissions, and slowing down future emissions matter, but the sooner you start the less rapid the change needs to be.
That’s especially true when for example old cars are exported to developing countries. Those hybrids people bought in 2010 are going to end up in South America, Africa, India etc.
That's where I'm quite skeptical. I'm very doubtful that overall fossil fuel extraction will decrease. This is a worldwide problem. The climate is affected by the global level of fossil fuel use, not by the amount released by individual countries. The extraction rate is still at or near record highs (worldwide). Will it slow down? Maybe? However, it seems unlikely, given the political and economic cost necessary to actually make a real dent. Governments just aren't taking the problem as seriously as they should.
Where I see real progress globally is more efficient processes release less CO2 so there are economic incentives even if governments do nothing. India isn’t building solar farms to look green, they are building solar farms to save money. That means even more economies of scale and thus more solar farms.
As these trends continue eventually fossil fuels lose economies of scale. That’s by far a more realistic path to success than every single government making wise long term policy decisions. Will that be fast enough is kind of an arbitrary metric, it’s not going to be as fast as possible but it will avert the worst possibilities.
Which is the way these things go: "we should do nothing because it is so far into the future", "we should do nothing because it is too expensive and affects our lifestyle too much and besides it doesn't affect us, but only our children", "we should do nothing because we're already past the point of no return".
You are somewhere in the middle, and I'm already at the third stage but still believe we should do something because it might take the edge of. Sticking your head in the sand certainly isn't going to help.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/renewable-electricity-per...
Yeah I've been saying this for months but people refuse to get it. I can't even get people to the point where they'll rebut that Russian oil is at least discounted; they don't even admit the chain exists.
> My point is national security is enough reason alone to move off from oil and thus it should a matter of security for a country to do so.
Okay, fair enough and I agree.
I fought hard for transit-alternatives in Austin... left the city when they ditched the bicycle master-plan to build an express lane on the freeway. I fought for transit alts in NYC, and they've seen a bunch of progress, and I'm fighting for the same in SF now, also seeing slow progress.
To this day, the vast majority of people are so deeply dependent on fossil fuels, the asks put forward are considered unacceptable. How do we run AC in Texas? How do we convince people to, not just build up, but to build anything. How do we turn suburbs into commuter towns? How do we convert interstate highways into high-speed rail. How do we convince people that meat should be a special occasion food, not the basis for every meal. The concept of a carbon tax is so, so obvious, but people have built their lives around carbon every second of every day. We can't even solve the fucking duck curve for electric generation even though getting batteries in every home is an easy solution.
I'm so jaded at this point, but I'll never give up fighting for mitigation, even if it seems so fucking impossible. I have my plans in place to move to places that will likely benefit from the changes... but that's just the world we live in.
But indeed, jaded is the term. I've pretty much given up, I could no longer justify making all these changes while around me everybody is partying like it's 1999, yes, I'm an idealist and would love for people to wake up but I don't have the energy to be a living example for decades without any meaningful impact.
I still try to drive as little as possible and do the bulk of my trips on the e-bike but I'm not going to overdo it and I'm happy to take the car when it rains. Frustrating, but ultimately a few people are not going to be able to convince a public that 100's of times larger that they should change their ways when society's momentum is still moving the other way, and politicians will not move until they feel that such a move will land well with their electorate. We've made a lot of changes in spite of all that, too little, too late, but given the amount of headwind I still consider that an impressive result.
The dutch have a proverb 'the ship will be turned by the shore', if you don't change course in time then your course will be changed for you, but then by main force. It would have been better to avoid that but apparently collectively we only really learn the hard way. Which is a pity because if humanity would resolve its differences amicably and start pulling in the same direction for a change this place could be paradise, for all of us instead of just for a select few.
It has, without all the green tech we'd be in even worse shape.
At first appearance, «drastic effects on the entire ocean ecosystems», surely with massive consequences for humans, but a non clearly computed effect on the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.
Is that wrong?
The Earth's atmosphere weighs about 5.5 quadrillion tons. Ignoring the differences in weights of different air molecules, adding 5.5 billion tons of CO2 would increase the CO2 concentration by ~1PPM.
So if all 29 billion tons of human emissions were not reabsorbed into the biosphere, we would expect to see global CO2 concentrations increase by between 5 and 6 ppm. In reality we see an increase of just over 2ppm per year, meaning that while much of human emissions are indeed reabsorbed into the biosphere, ~40% is not.
So each increase in atmospheric CO2 by 1ppm corresponds to about 8.6GT of unabsorbed CO2. The Keeling Curve shows an increase of 1.86PPM from May 2021 to May 2022, meaning that the amount of CO2 emitted from all sources was greater than the amount absorbed by 15.7GT. So of the 29GT emitted by humans, 13.3 was reabsorbed.
Obviously this is not the whole story. The Keeling Curve shows that worldwide CO2 levels were already rising in the 50s and early 60s, when total emissions were below the 13.3 our biosphere is absorbing annually. But this is sufficient to show that a (substantial) reduction in human emissions would reverse the currently increasing global CO2 levels, and the greenhouse warming that comes with it.
There will never be any major solution here in the US unless this changes
Perhaps, in addition to burning less fossil fuels, it would be a good idea to see where the carbon sinks are, and help those work more effectively? I know that sustainable farming captures a lot of carbon in the soil, for example.