For some reason, climate change news always stays at the problem-description level and doesn’t go further than that. That’s one of the missing pieces to solving it, I think. Framing it better:
We’ve been able to put a man on the moon, build nanometer scale transistors, and created tools to collaborate effectively without having to physically meet (for example, Git). Wouldn’t it be possible too to solve global warming?
No, its not. Not only.
The political problem is a epxression of a deeper pathology. This species is unable to form innovative (free) societies without a constant surplus of ressources and energy.
We "unchanged" are a exponential curve, bumping against a linear ceiling and this needs to fixed first, to even have the mental tooling and stability to handle grand projects.
I guess that's true in the technical sense, but it doesn't mean much. Electric cars were a thing in the 19th century, yet it was only in the past decade or so that they gotten popular. Would you characterize the failure of electric cars to get traction as "The problem isn't technological, it's political"?
The first result for "cost to decarbonize"[1] says it would cost $340T, compared to global GDP of $80T. You could argue that it's a political problem that we're not allocating our budget towards that goal, but at the same time you could argue that if technology improved it would be a much easier pill to swallow.
That climate change is a serious problem was established science at the end of the eighties. Had we started to address the problem in earnest back then, it would've been much cheaper to decarbonize. Instead we built bigger cars, dismantled public transport, continued to build houses with poor insulation and stopped building nuclear power plants. That consumed so much of our carbon budget that today, when there are very few technical hurdles left, we ran out of time and costs exploded.
Then I can reply by saying that it was not a "gutting," the supreme court was blocking a new regulation on the grounds that it was beyond any that had been enacted before, and in their opinion (using the previous fact as evidence) beyond what Congress had empowered the EPA to do. No presently enforced regulations were overturned.
The solutions to a number of problems, from climate change, inequality, inflation, housing crises, are all obvious. It's always capitalism that will actively prevent them from being implemented, because it would hurt their profits.
As a person inside such a complex and incomprehensible system as the world socioeconomic machine it's far from apparent that anything is obvious, except that humans are incapable of perceiving all of the complexity at once.
How is it not obvious that we shouldn't be burning fossil fuels? Or that we should have mental institutions instead of letting people wander in the street? Easy solutions like this have been obvious for scientists in these fields for decades. You don't have to understand the complexity, just listen to the experts who do in this domain, and they have been hollering the obvious to deaf ears who would prefer a profitable status quo versus a collectively beneficial overhaul of how we do things.
You seem to be arguing that until you understand everything you don't understand anything and mustn't act. This just leads to paralysis. We don't fully understand human biology but that doesn't render our existing medical and pharmaceutical knowledge useless.
The problem is that the venn diagram of those two groups is nearly a perfect circle, especially the ones influential and powerful enough to effect any change that would reign in the excesses.
Why is communism better at solving country level collective action problems?
The only way I can think of is that communism frequently devolves into a dictatorship and if that dictator is more motivated to solve climate change than the democracy he'll do a better job solving it.
That and communist countries tend to be really poor which usually results in less carbon use per person.
They didn't actually propose communism as an alternative, it's not likely that there are only and exactly two possible systems of organizing markets so plausibly they had another one in mind.
Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
> Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships
Because even dictators realized that free markets are very effective. Just like science is very effective.
Trying to run a country without free markets is like trying to run a country without science. You can try but you'll be doomed to insignificance and pushed to the margins of the world.
When I hear stuff like this it just sounds like theological nationalism to me. "For what is a country, without God at its head?"
It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.
Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.
Funny, I think the obsession with dismantling capitalism is a religion. "First, we must dismantle capitalism" is the Communist equivalent of "first, you must renounce other gods and accept Jesus into your life".
You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.
Nor will I. Capitalism must be dismantled because of the horrors it perpetrates on living people today. If you want to defend those atrocities you may, but saying this is the best we can do is a kind of pessimism I don't find in myself.
At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.
Despite not having studied history or economics or politics or war, surely you must see the risks of dismantling an economic system that has raised billions out of poverty without any type of replacement?
It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.
That doesn't feel like a particularly charitable reading of their comment. I don't think they're suggesting we just burn everything down with no plan for what comes after, they're simply stating that they believe we need to find a better alternative while acknowledging that they don't know what that alternative is yet.
They don't say "we should replace capitalism when stumble upon a better way of organizing human economic activity". Which is a pretty bland statement everyone agrees with.
They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.
That is a very strong statement.
But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."
Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.
"First, we must dismantle capitalism" is the Communist equivalent of
The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.
You can have free markets without capitalism. Consider a system almost exactly like we have now, with independent companies competing for profits in free markets, but where those companies are worker-owned [0]. Such a system could have the benefits of capitalism with regards to innovation and resource allocation while reducing some of its negative effects (inequality, worker alienation, etc.)
No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.
Sure, but by restricting ownership of companies to workers only, you've obviously made the market less free. If a worker wants to sell their share of the company to anyone else, that's forbidden, right? So workers can't diversify their risks away from their particular industry.
Which also doesn't prevent inequality. If software engineers own Google, and baristas own Starbucks, what with Google being way more profitable, the software engineers will still be much richer than the baristas.
Free markets with a tax funded social safety net seems like a much more efficient way of reducing inequality to me.
China has certainly achieved an amazing increase in wealth through its combination of authoritarianism and free market capitalism. But given they were Communist before, that's clearly a case of authoritarians adopting capitalism, not capitalists adopting authoritarianism.
History happens over long timespans: the fact we haven't seen one doesn't mean our children won't. You may be right in that it's easier to introduce capitalist practices into a highly ordered and controlled economy than the other way around - when capitalist countries face regulatory capture (as a proxy for authoritarianism, because there is still a "democracy" element, the efficiency of their economies seem to suffer while the oligarchs who effectively captured the state reap the benefits of increasing inequality. It feels like that last path is inherently unstable, but history will answer that as well.
> They didn't actually propose communism as an alternative, it's not likely that there are only and exactly two possible systems of organizing markets so plausibly they had another one in mind.
What other ways are there to organize markets or the economy have there been that we've seen at a country scale?
>Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
I think it's easy to blame every woe that we have such as climate change on "capitalism" without offering an alternative. The reason we have emitted a lot of carbon is capitalism made us a rich, and we don't care enough to stop it. Capitalism is at fault only in the sense that it made us rich.
> The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
There are plenty of market based economies that more or less function like a democracy. I'm not aware of any communist countries that function like a democracy.
>Solving the Climate Change crisis demands questioning Capitalism. Good luck with that.
Are non-capitalist economies any better? ie. are there non-capitalist economies out there with fossil fuel reserves that aren't extracting/burning them?
How is this relevant? If a small communist country emits the same amount of carbon as similarly sized/developed capitalist economies, that would certainly put a dent in OP's implication that refusing to fix climate change is a capitalist problem.
We would need numbers to say that. The countries I mentioned are relatively small and have small energy footprints. The outlier would be Venezuela, but I wouldn't blame them if they needed to burn their own oil to generate energy because they are under economic sanctions.
Oh my gosh does capitalism allow it. Every time I see the price of a Chinese solar panel drop I buy them (as well as lifepo4 cells). I'm 100% off grid so I need all the panels I can get and they are super cheap compared to a $600 california electric bill.
- Every single place on the earth up to the year 2000 had an average temperature as well as a max and min temperature, along with a variance of predictability along those days. What do we need for our communities to stay stable if the max goes up, the min goes down, the variance of predictability goes up (and continues to go up every year)?
It would be more accurate to bring up the expanding population of Humanity
The world reached one billion for the first time in 1804. It would be more than 100 years before it reached two billion in 1927, but it took only 33 years to reach three billion in 1960. Thereafter, the global population reached four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999 and, by some estimates, seven billion in October 2011
There are more people living in more places then ever before. If a hurricane hit an area no human lived, did anybody notice?
There is no missing piece. We all know we need to drastically cut carbon emissions, capture as much carbon as we can, and use energy sources that do not emit carbon into the atmosphere. That's pretty much it.
Well I mean there's obviously something missing because these things aren't happening. And if that's just lack of political will, then political will is the missing piece.
Is that really enough? To truly reach levels where we spend efforts of capturing carbon means forgoing electric cars for private transport. And heat pumps true, valid choice. In much much denser accommodations.
To reach carbon neutrality you essentially have to decarbonize transportation, heating and cooling, industry, agriculture, and electricity. Electric vehicles don't lower quality of live, heat pumps don't lower quality of life either. Changes in how we power industry and agriculture also don't change quality of life. Electricity is the same no matter how it's produced. Once we reached this state we can start worrying about capturing excess carbon.
So the only argument for "this will lower quality of life" is that things might become more expensive. But renewable energy in fairly cheap, so I'm not convinced that on average quality of life will suffer. Some things will get more expensive, others will get cheaper.
They will become more expensive. I have no idea how much, but my initial guess is too much. At least for those already struggling. The rich might manage it, but for poor it might be too much to ask for.
What is your reason for believing this? Renewable power is not that expensive. The expensive part is replacing all the power plants the we already paid for.
> carbon neutrality you essentially have to decarbonize transportation, heating and cooling, industry, agriculture, and electricity.
You're missing one of the biggest contributors: construction. Cement and steel are both huge sources of carbon emissions. There are potential solutions to this, but it's another very difficult area to transition.
I kinda counted them under "industry", but you're right that it might make sense to have them separate. Steel is a smaller problem than cement though, since steel can be made with hydrogen, you only need a little carbon.
The promise has always been that electric cars will get cheaper once we're through the early adopters. I'm a little nervous about long-term battery life, but I guess we'll see.
The problem isn't the framing. The problem is a post-truth political climate that refuses to acknowledge climate change is a problem that needs solving to begin with.
Idk... I'm pretty sure US has solid infrastructure on average. In Illinois the roads / bridges have to withstand temperatures ranging form 110F to -20F every year. My house withstands the same temperatures, hail, winds 70+ mph 3-4 times a year. A foot of snow in the winter.
"U.S. Infrastructure" is some of the best of the world and also varies WILDLY between states. Each state manages its own infrastructure, so it's unfair to compare the US as a whole vs individual states.
The weather in Illinois is much more robust than say, Germany or the UK. The UK is much closer to the weather of Portland than that of Illinois.
""U.S. Infrastructure" is some of the best of the world". Is this actually true? I mean, at one point it certainly was but much of that infrastructure is quite aged at this point. Also, compared to the world at large, sure, but when compared to the developed world I'm really not sure. I think when we upgrade and fix things we do a good job and are amongst the best but again, we have some extremely elderly infrastructure in huge parts of the country.
Just to put it into perspective -- Illinois gets >60% of it's energy from clean sources (nuclear, solar, wind) - compare to germany (85% fossil fuels). You can travel around the state going 70+mph and hit any major city. You can take public transit from the suburbs of Chicago down town and get around easily. You can also take trains from the southern cities to Chicago in 2-3hrs (I've done this regularly). There are multiple airports, and one of the largest hubs in the world. Some of the tallest buildings in the world, massive bridges all over the place, there's almost never blackouts (very stable energy grid), fiber is available in most places at this point, clean water is abundant, etc, etc.
Places like Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, etc. you can get 10Gb/s fiber for $70/month; there's massive dams, again very high quality roads interconnecting most towns and cities, air conditioning is available everywhere that wants it, etc.
Yes, the United States is the richest and easily one of the most advanced countries in the world by almost any measure (including infrastructure).
Given Texas's own "very stable energy grid", could that bargain-price fast fiber plan possibly be, in reality over time, just an expensive plan for slower fiber? (I.e., looking at actual amounts of data transferred interleaved with downtime, rolling blackouts, etc.) /s, although you do make Illinois sound pretty cool!
I was curious about this, so I looked at one source. The World Economic Forum's 2019 Global Competitiveness Report[0] lists the US as 13/141 in terms of transport infrastructure, and 23/141 in terms of utility infrastructure on page 583.
I have this exact gripe with anything and everything that compares the US with other countries, some states are huge, bigger than multiple European countries, imho all charts and metrics should include each state, whether it’s part of a union or not. It would squash a lot of the otherwise unfair comparisons of the US vs other countries which are often used for politically motivated framing which is why I am extra cynical about this topic.
Yeah - in the same way the worst US stats are always compared to the best or average EU stats - it's interesting you don't often see the reverse.
Why is no one comparing gay rights in Massachusetts to Hungary? But everyone is comparing gay rights in Mississippi to Norway?
There's a lot of variance in the US and the EU. There's even a lot of variance in a single state like California!
The US - by design - is supposed to be pretty similar to the EU - in that the states have A LOT of rights and autonomy.
Frankly, I'm willing to let Mississippi and Alabama do what they want if that means they don't get to tell New York and California what they can and can't do.
The vast, vast majority of the US does not live in ultra conservative counties. Even within a state like Texas that has some crazy laws, a lot of that is undone in the metros where everyone lives - Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, & El Paso are all decently liberal and make up >50% of Texas's population.
The idea that Texas is "a 3rd world country" is laughable. But you'll hear this from the "left" that wants to take states rights away so they can tell the "right" how to live. They never really think about what it would be like if the "right" got the say to tell them how to live...
Considering Texas is usually one of the culprits leading the charge on repressive laws that steer the country further in that direction, and reliably elects far-right conservatives to statewide positions, I think it's fair to label Texas a very conservative state on the whole.
I don't think you live in Texas. Considering I do, and Texas has been telling people how to live for as long as I've been here, I'd say my experience stands in stark contrast compared to your ideas of what Texas is or does. Especially as Texas has been specifically waging war against the metros and enacting state laws to supercede any local laws that might be passed.
Texas is something of an outlier in US statehood assertiveness. When I go to NM to visit family, if my rental car has TX plates, the locals run me off the road.
If the argument goes “The US is the world greatest at …” there is not much of a point to compare it to the worst countries in the world* and then pat yourself on the back that the US, say, has better infrastructure than Ukraine during a war.
> I have this exact gripe with anything and everything that compares the US with other countries, some states are huge, bigger than multiple European countries
And a lot of those huge states are filled with a whole lot of nobody. The US population is fairly concentrated: one-third lives in a county on a coastline:
Everybody complains that the potholes are worse than ever. Not sure if it's actually true or they've always had the same complaint, but I've definitely adapted my driving pattern to get around the ones that I know.
Half the world doesn't have pavement... And potholes are almost always created due to extreme weather (very hot -> very cold -> repeat).
My parents recall potholes so bad it'd destroy your car in the 80s. Concrete and the ability to fill potholes have improved over time. There's little reason to assume it's any worse than before, except some roads need replacement... but if you don't replace it (or prior to building the road) it was clearly worse.
In regions with colder winters, it's typically a function of freeze/thaw cycles. Water gets inside cracks, freezes, and the expansion breaks up the pavement. Then it thaws and softens, and traffic knocks bits loose. Then more water gets in the now bigger cracks, it freezes again and the cycle repeats, but a little worse this time. Then again and again.
Saying "Half the world doesn't have pavement" is like saying "Eat your broccoli, because some children halfway around the world are starving." It doesn't change the fact that we used to be able to do routine maintenance that covered this, and now we don't.
Did you read the rest of the comment? It's not clear it's worse than before.
> It doesn't change the fact that we used to be able to do routine maintenance that covered this, and now we don't.
When you first build a road you don't need to do said maintenance. So as we expand the number of roads and convert them from gravel to concrete, you'll have more potholes. It's not clear it's any worse per-mile of concrete road than before. But even if it was "worse" we have significantly more road than say 30 years ago.
Maybe I'm zeroing in on a much shorter term; the potholes, winter reflectors, and other various road items are clearly worse than say, five years ago. 30 years, maybe not; expectations in the world of phone booths were way different.
I've lived in Illinois my whole life (Im in my 40s). I've heard how the potholes are terrible and getting worse as long as I can remember. They aren't particularly bad, nor do they seem to be getting worse.
Observations I've made:
* Snow plows have 2 functions: moving snow and making potholes. The frequency of pothole complaints starts climbing in November and peaks around April (when construction season gets started).
* "that pothole has been there 20 years" typically actually means "that pothole is near where a different one was located at some point in the last couple decades", or "that's a spot where the plows often can tear up the road"
* The people who often complain about potholes on some stretch of road tend to suddenly be the people who complain about how re-doing that stretch of road is a waste of money because "it was just fine before".
* 10 years after a re-pave when some street gets it's first new pothole - "ugh they just redid this road and it's already got potholes? typical $city_name"
I wonder if this is more correlation than causation. The pot holes are result of freezing/thawing cycle. And this happens when there is need for snow plows. Though snow plows certainly can make them worse.
The freeze/thaw cycles put cracks in the road. The snowplows (basically a fast bulldozer) excavate those into potholes (when the blade catches the crack, it tears up a chunk of asphalt with it, starting a feedback loop because theres more space for freezing to exert force causing more cracks...).
The American Society of Civil Engineers might have some bias towards ensuring Civil Engineers have jobs, seeing as how that's part of their mission statement. This might additionally bias them towards suggesting that infrastructure needs improvement more often than strictly necessary.
It might also bias them towards reporting the work of their members is of a quality that justifies their continued employment and thus avoid suggesting that recent or ongoing improvements were inadequate.
Next you will tell me the American Medical Association says we should pay doctors more, and prevent nurses from performing procedures.
Or you will tell me the the Teachers Unions give American schools a poor report card, and we need to double our spending on Education
I think flooding in the midwest is largely due to farming practices. Lands are engineered to immediately dump excess rain into the local streams which feed the rivers and end up flooding some town in Iowa. If the farm land was allowed to flood this would happen far less often.
Finding a way to collect that rain and get it down into the aquafer would also mean they wouldn't have to keep drilling deeper wells to reach it.
Related to this is that we insist on farming flood plains, and then "protecting" them with levees.
Nature already has a perfectly good system to deal with excess rain. Rivers expand to fill flood plains to buffer the excess water. Unfortunately we've blocked nature from doing this by building levees and otherwise channelizing rivers.
We've "gotten away with it" in large part, but ultimately somewhere is going to flood as climate events get more extreme. We'd be better off choosing to let farm fields flood a little on semi-regular occasions than building levees to the point that flood stage raises even higher and it's a complete catastrophe when a levee breaches near a city or town.
I think it's not so simple. Flood plains are agriculturally very productive, close to a river it's near transportation and a source of fresh water. Famously, the 4 Cradles of Civilization developed along rivers. I dont think we can assume we can simply abandon the riparian zones and continue along for the better.
There's a lot of localized flooding happening too with these summer rainstorms. You have these 100 year old storm sewer systems that need to be replaced. You end up with flooded out roads nowhere near rivers, and flooded basements. It's not "row a boat through it" flooding, but its a significant cost for the municipalities and the people who have to deal with flooded basements.
In that regard, I don’t think it’s reasonable to allow construction of basements in those places. It makes more sense to think about building on stilts.
Its definitely not an unreasonable expectation. In fact, its usually a crucial aspect of the design decisions made in the planning of that infrastructure.
Texas' grid failure was absolutely a planning/operations failure and should have had the capacity to operate during a blizzard.
(And extended heat waves, too. But still a hypothetical for now)
It was a widespread infrastructure failure that ultimately caused the power grid to fail too.
> The widespread winter storm produced low temperatures across the region. This is an unusual event, much worse than the worst case that was considered in recent prior planning. The result was loss of power plants, loss of natural gas supply, felled power transmission lines, damaged gas pipelines, damage to water systems, and so on, across the board. There was a loss of more than 50 percent of generation capacity at the same moment as electric power demand surged above the predicted peak forecast.
Infrastructure should be the most resilient part of the system, that's why your organs are mostly surrounded by your ribcage and your arteries are on the inner side of your limbs. How are you going to recover from any given disaster if your infrastructure is too unreliable to deliver resources?
Sure you assess probabilities in your design, but not to the point of assuming the most probable outcome will always obtain. If there's only a 2% probability of some unwanted outcome need to consider not only the probability but what's at risk if your probability assessment turns out to be wrong, and make sure at least some of your infrastructure is bomb proof.
It's unreasonable to expect those things as the norm, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that they might occur and have some sort of contingency plan in place. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last 30 years to ignore the possibility of freak weather events.
> that's why your organs are mostly surrounded by your ribcage and your arteries are on the inner side of your limbs
Yes, but it would be unreasonable to expect my ribcage to withstand a 12 gauge buckshot from point blank range.
You could argue that I could wear a bulletproof vest. That would stop the said 12 gauge buckshot blast, but would it be reasonable to wear it in the first place?
It should be noted that the St. Louis Stormwater Drainage System was built in the 1910s and 1920s. For context, most American infrastructure was built with the expectation of a ~50 year lifespan. While upgrades have been made in the intervening decades, most have been towards water treatment to reduce pollution and public health risks. In fact about half of the drainage outlets have been blocked off over the years to reduce untreated water runoff. The deficiency of the system has long been a known problem, and there are multibillion dollar plans to replace this system, but even in the best case scenario these new drainage tunnels will not be operational until the 2030s.
The lifespan issue is significant. The suburb I grew up in is doomed because of this. 14 thousand people live in it but they don't generate enough tax revenue to retrofit the entire storm sewer system much less square the budget very well as it is. The storm sewer system is increasingly overcapacity and in need of more maintenance with these larger storms dumping more water at once. You can't exactly add more apartments to generate more tax revenue in an area where no one wants to invest in since there isn't any job growth to speak of either. This is the rust belt. The city has several huge lots and ample commercial and industrial property that they've been trying to have developed for decades now, and about the only interest they've gotten is an amazon warehouse and a carvana. The walmart actually left town already.
> the suburb I grew up in is doomed because of this. 14 thousand people live in it but they don't generate enough tax revenue
Yeap. It's pretty much a feature of suburbs. They don't generate nearly enough revenue to pay for their infrastructure. The only solution is to pack them more tightly and mix and match with businesses.
Well that's the thing, you can't just pack them more tightly. Maybe in places with demand, but not here. There is no demand. Shops open and they close before long. Derelict properties are razed and left as vacant lots because there's no interest in investing on renovating. The major city this suburb feeds into is half its historical population peak, still reeling from white flight in the 1960s.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadWe’ve been able to put a man on the moon, build nanometer scale transistors, and created tools to collaborate effectively without having to physically meet (for example, Git). Wouldn’t it be possible too to solve global warming?
[1] Which are hard enough to solve without malicious actors actively undermining us.
We "unchanged" are a exponential curve, bumping against a linear ceiling and this needs to fixed first, to even have the mental tooling and stability to handle grand projects.
I guess that's true in the technical sense, but it doesn't mean much. Electric cars were a thing in the 19th century, yet it was only in the past decade or so that they gotten popular. Would you characterize the failure of electric cars to get traction as "The problem isn't technological, it's political"?
The first result for "cost to decarbonize"[1] says it would cost $340T, compared to global GDP of $80T. You could argue that it's a political problem that we're not allocating our budget towards that goal, but at the same time you could argue that if technology improved it would be a much easier pill to swallow.
[1] https://boereport.com/2019/02/26/the-cost-of-decarbonization...
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/30/1103595898/supreme-court-epa-...
But those systems and beliefs are orthogonal. Corporatists just picks the parts of capitalism they like and ignores the rest.
Corporatists = greedy
But why though?
Can you really ascribe character traits to these groups with a single brush?
The only way I can think of is that communism frequently devolves into a dictatorship and if that dictator is more motivated to solve climate change than the democracy he'll do a better job solving it.
That and communist countries tend to be really poor which usually results in less carbon use per person.
Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
Because even dictators realized that free markets are very effective. Just like science is very effective.
Trying to run a country without free markets is like trying to run a country without science. You can try but you'll be doomed to insignificance and pushed to the margins of the world.
It's completely deranged to think there is exactly one economic structure that can function. Capitalism won, absolutely, I wouldn't dispute that. But taking its victory as inevitable and permanent is such a failure of imagination.
Like thinking cats are the only viable mammals because lions dominate their ecosystems. There are other ecosystems! Mice still exist. Carnivores are vulnerable to their ecosystems changing and boooooy are the ecosystems changing.
You talk of imagination but you haven't even described your solution or why it would be better than the well studied economics concepts of free markets with carbon taxes.
At the same time I'm not a scholar, historian, economist, politician, or powerful military leader. My capacity to conceive of another future, or author it, is constrained. My ability to condemn evil where I find it is not, however.
It's like a diabetic stopping their insulin in the hopes something better will come along.
They said we must replace capitalism because of the horrors it perpetrates.
That is a very strong statement.
But I guess they could be saying "we are morally compelled to replace capitalism with a system that may or not work exist that may or may not solve the problems we have attributed to capitalism without showing that any other workable system fixes these problems, only that they happen to exist under our current system."
Which doesn't strike me as the most useful criticism of capitalism.
The person you're replying to has already expressed doubt about whether it's a simple capitalism/communism dichotomy. Responding to a communist straw man of your own creation isn't helpful.
No idea if it would work in practice, but we need to move beyond this mindset that there are only two possible options for how to structure an economy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Which also doesn't prevent inequality. If software engineers own Google, and baristas own Starbucks, what with Google being way more profitable, the software engineers will still be much richer than the baristas.
Free markets with a tax funded social safety net seems like a much more efficient way of reducing inequality to me.
What other ways are there to organize markets or the economy have there been that we've seen at a country scale?
>Anyway you don't even need to endorse communism per se to point out that the current setup is pretty fucked and entirely incapable of cleaning up the mess it has created.
I think it's easy to blame every woe that we have such as climate change on "capitalism" without offering an alternative. The reason we have emitted a lot of carbon is capitalism made us a rich, and we don't care enough to stop it. Capitalism is at fault only in the sense that it made us rich.
> The conflation of democracy/capitalism and dictatorship/communism is dated and not very useful either. We haven't seen a new communist state rise in a generation or more so it's not clear if that cold war logic holds. Meanwhile we've seen plenty of capitalist dictatorships, and an increasingly authoritarian swerve in a lot of solidly market-based economies so idk. Doesn't seem like a strong link to me.
There are plenty of market based economies that more or less function like a democracy. I'm not aware of any communist countries that function like a democracy.
How do you propose to implement and maintain your communism without some system of government that's up at the totalitarian end of the spectrum?
Are non-capitalist economies any better? ie. are there non-capitalist economies out there with fossil fuel reserves that aren't extracting/burning them?
You do realize their impact is very small.
- Every single place on the earth up to the year 2000 had an average temperature as well as a max and min temperature, along with a variance of predictability along those days. What do we need for our communities to stay stable if the max goes up, the min goes down, the variance of predictability goes up (and continues to go up every year)?
There is no missing piece. We all know we need to drastically cut carbon emissions, capture as much carbon as we can, and use energy sources that do not emit carbon into the atmosphere. That's pretty much it.
So the only argument for "this will lower quality of life" is that things might become more expensive. But renewable energy in fairly cheap, so I'm not convinced that on average quality of life will suffer. Some things will get more expensive, others will get cheaper.
You're missing one of the biggest contributors: construction. Cement and steel are both huge sources of carbon emissions. There are potential solutions to this, but it's another very difficult area to transition.
Thus deferred maintenance …
"U.S. Infrastructure" is some of the best of the world and also varies WILDLY between states. Each state manages its own infrastructure, so it's unfair to compare the US as a whole vs individual states.
The weather in Illinois is much more robust than say, Germany or the UK. The UK is much closer to the weather of Portland than that of Illinois.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264753/ranking-of-countr...
Broken down by state is also interesting
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/infrastruct...
Just to put it into perspective -- Illinois gets >60% of it's energy from clean sources (nuclear, solar, wind) - compare to germany (85% fossil fuels). You can travel around the state going 70+mph and hit any major city. You can take public transit from the suburbs of Chicago down town and get around easily. You can also take trains from the southern cities to Chicago in 2-3hrs (I've done this regularly). There are multiple airports, and one of the largest hubs in the world. Some of the tallest buildings in the world, massive bridges all over the place, there's almost never blackouts (very stable energy grid), fiber is available in most places at this point, clean water is abundant, etc, etc.
https://certasun.com/illinois-energy-generation/
That's just Illinois.
Places like Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, etc. you can get 10Gb/s fiber for $70/month; there's massive dams, again very high quality roads interconnecting most towns and cities, air conditioning is available everywhere that wants it, etc.
Yes, the United States is the richest and easily one of the most advanced countries in the world by almost any measure (including infrastructure).
Where specifically can you get that and via which carrier? Mine is $70 for 1Gb/s in central Austin, via Google Fiber.
[0] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_TheGlobalCompetitivenessRe...
Why is no one comparing gay rights in Massachusetts to Hungary? But everyone is comparing gay rights in Mississippi to Norway?
There's a lot of variance in the US and the EU. There's even a lot of variance in a single state like California!
The US - by design - is supposed to be pretty similar to the EU - in that the states have A LOT of rights and autonomy.
Frankly, I'm willing to let Mississippi and Alabama do what they want if that means they don't get to tell New York and California what they can and can't do.
The vast, vast majority of the US does not live in ultra conservative counties. Even within a state like Texas that has some crazy laws, a lot of that is undone in the metros where everyone lives - Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, & El Paso are all decently liberal and make up >50% of Texas's population.
The idea that Texas is "a 3rd world country" is laughable. But you'll hear this from the "left" that wants to take states rights away so they can tell the "right" how to live. They never really think about what it would be like if the "right" got the say to tell them how to live...
*whatever that means for the US Greatest du jour
I suppose "stop bullying/oppressing" is a type of telling people how to live.
And a lot of those huge states are filled with a whole lot of nobody. The US population is fairly concentrated: one-third lives in a county on a coastline:
* https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/07/millions-of-a...
And two-thirds live with-in 100 miles (160 km) of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone
80% lives in urban areas:
* https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
Yes, the US and particular states are big, but where people actually live is in a much smaller area. Concentrate infrastructure spending there.
My parents recall potholes so bad it'd destroy your car in the 80s. Concrete and the ability to fill potholes have improved over time. There's little reason to assume it's any worse than before, except some roads need replacement... but if you don't replace it (or prior to building the road) it was clearly worse.
> It doesn't change the fact that we used to be able to do routine maintenance that covered this, and now we don't.
When you first build a road you don't need to do said maintenance. So as we expand the number of roads and convert them from gravel to concrete, you'll have more potholes. It's not clear it's any worse per-mile of concrete road than before. But even if it was "worse" we have significantly more road than say 30 years ago.
Observations I've made:
* Snow plows have 2 functions: moving snow and making potholes. The frequency of pothole complaints starts climbing in November and peaks around April (when construction season gets started).
* "that pothole has been there 20 years" typically actually means "that pothole is near where a different one was located at some point in the last couple decades", or "that's a spot where the plows often can tear up the road"
* The people who often complain about potholes on some stretch of road tend to suddenly be the people who complain about how re-doing that stretch of road is a waste of money because "it was just fine before".
* 10 years after a re-pave when some street gets it's first new pothole - "ugh they just redid this road and it's already got potholes? typical $city_name"
Is it? At best it seems average, on average.
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/
Finding a way to collect that rain and get it down into the aquafer would also mean they wouldn't have to keep drilling deeper wells to reach it.
Nature already has a perfectly good system to deal with excess rain. Rivers expand to fill flood plains to buffer the excess water. Unfortunately we've blocked nature from doing this by building levees and otherwise channelizing rivers.
We've "gotten away with it" in large part, but ultimately somewhere is going to flood as climate events get more extreme. We'd be better off choosing to let farm fields flood a little on semi-regular occasions than building levees to the point that flood stage raises even higher and it's a complete catastrophe when a levee breaches near a city or town.
I think it's not so simple. Flood plains are agriculturally very productive, close to a river it's near transportation and a source of fresh water. Famously, the 4 Cradles of Civilization developed along rivers. I dont think we can assume we can simply abandon the riparian zones and continue along for the better.
It’s unreasonable to expect a blizzard in southern Texas. It would be unreasonalbe to expect snow in Miami.
No country could deal with it. It’s not a US problem.
Texas' grid failure was absolutely a planning/operations failure and should have had the capacity to operate during a blizzard.
(And extended heat waves, too. But still a hypothetical for now)
It was a widespread infrastructure failure that ultimately caused the power grid to fail too.
> The widespread winter storm produced low temperatures across the region. This is an unusual event, much worse than the worst case that was considered in recent prior planning. The result was loss of power plants, loss of natural gas supply, felled power transmission lines, damaged gas pipelines, damage to water systems, and so on, across the board. There was a loss of more than 50 percent of generation capacity at the same moment as electric power demand surged above the predicted peak forecast.
Sure you assess probabilities in your design, but not to the point of assuming the most probable outcome will always obtain. If there's only a 2% probability of some unwanted outcome need to consider not only the probability but what's at risk if your probability assessment turns out to be wrong, and make sure at least some of your infrastructure is bomb proof.
It's unreasonable to expect those things as the norm, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that they might occur and have some sort of contingency plan in place. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last 30 years to ignore the possibility of freak weather events.
Yes, but it would be unreasonable to expect my ribcage to withstand a 12 gauge buckshot from point blank range.
You could argue that I could wear a bulletproof vest. That would stop the said 12 gauge buckshot blast, but would it be reasonable to wear it in the first place?
Yeap. It's pretty much a feature of suburbs. They don't generate nearly enough revenue to pay for their infrastructure. The only solution is to pack them more tightly and mix and match with businesses.