I suspect it might be if one thinks of significantly slowing the process. I don't see the nations of Earth coming together in a meaningful way, but I could be wrong. Even were they to do so it might be best to prepare for change wherever possible.
I was a meteorologist many, many years ago. Too long ago to be of any use.
even those climate "skeptics" are saying we should probably do something -- just in case all the world's climatologists are correct.
Except these guys maybe:
I'm usually an optimist but my gut feel is that democracies will reject any government that makes meaningful commitments. Rather, 'normal' will just be adjusted ever downwards until you're barbecuing your own son in a cave in a mile-high trash pile wondering if this is really what God intended.
Since I’m not big on defeatism: Too late relative to what? Too late for us to live as we’ve so far lived in relation to the climate? But of course it is! (At the very least, we should have taken the Kyoto Protocol a bit more seriously, but its too late for that now.) Is it too late for future generations to not have it as bad as it would be were humanity to go about its business as usual. Nope, not at all. One interesting fact I’ve so far learned in life, no matter how bad things get, things can always get worse.*
This however pivots on how much most of us care about future generations. At the very least the kids we're related to.
Is there ANYONE out there who still doesn't consider this the issue of our times?
Yes. Most of the people I’m surrounded by, for starters. Then there is a fair sum of the same in government. Also in the media …
---------
* Doctor calls up a guy saying, “Your tests are in. I’ve got bad news and worse news. Which do you want to hear first?” Guy replies, “The bad news”. Doc: “The tests are conclusive in you having only 24 hours left to live.” Guy: “What the hell can possibly be worse?” Doc: “I forgot to tell you yesterday.”
If so, will we reach tipping points no matter what policies we enact?
Kinda hard to say since no-one knows what the tipping points are exactly, but I think it's unlikely enough will be done to avoid very serious climate changes.
If it's not too late, what exactly can we do to contribute to mitigating it?
The best way is probably to organise and join in mass protests. No individual consumer level decisions are likely to be very effective. Or rather the effective decisions are very impractical and so unlikely to be adopted by enough people to make a difference.
Is there ANYONE out there who still doesn't consider this the issue of our times?
Climate change is not a disease, it's a symptom. I know quite a few doctors and they all say, while relieving the symptom has its merits, treating the disease is the primary goal!
If it's not too late, what exactly can we do to contribute to mitigating it?
A lot of things. Radical changes, not so radical changes and everything between. Unfortunately there the actual policy actions, the scientific socio-economic policy discourse, and the politicized agenda-driven public debate have veered all into different realms.
But we can have an effect on our environment. Even if I'm not so sure that with the current numbers of nuclear weapons detonating all of them would actually cause a nuclear winter. A super-volcano eruption would make global warming not the climate change we are worried about.
The best way is probably to organise and join in mass protests. No individual consumer level decisions are likely to be very effective. Or rather the effective decisions are very impractical and so unlikely to be adopted by enough people to make a difference.
What would be the object of these protests if the changes required are considered too impractical to be adopted? Presumably, living in a democracy, such changes are going to be ephemeral at best, window-dressing at worst if the population hasn't the stomach to adopt them.
What would be the object of these protests if the changes required are considered too impractical to be adopted? Presumably, living in a democracy, such changes are going to be ephemeral at best, window-dressing at worst if the population hasn't the stomach to adopt them.
Well, stuff that is impractical for the individual might not be if it was coordinated by the community. A simple example is avoiding to drive the car - impractical if you need to regularly travel longer distances without access to public transport. But can be solved communally.
I used to think it was too late, and we were all going to die, but then I came across this Quora called Doomsday Debunked: https://robertinventor.com/Quora/DebunkingDoomsday.htm
It's run by a guy and a team of volunteers who made a career out of reading academic/sciency papers so they put this blog together to fact check scary end of the world scenarios, climate change included. No, they definitely aren't climate deniers , more like climate realists and they seem pessimistic/optimistic depending on the scenario. The news really likes to amp up "tipping points" and "earth will be venus" crap but these scenarios are usually cherry picked or blown way out of proportion. Hell, the IPCC doesn't even think "collapse of civilization" is on the trajectory despite what the Guardian articles make you think
In fact, their debunk here on the "Venus Earth" scenario really soothed a lot of my fears
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Not-as-scary-as-it-seems-Planet-at-risk-of-heading-towards-Hothouse-Earth-state
Reply to Albero Yep. The oceans will eventually absorb all of the CO2 we emit and the climate will return to baseline. In the worst case scenario, most of it will be absorbed in 10,000 years.
I get the theory, but doesn't it leave a rather unconvincing model of a governing system that somehow has no way of determining what services are required other than by waiting for the information to be painted onto a placard?
If people are willing to travel long distances without their cars, as in the example you give, but can't simply decide as an individual to do so, are you suggesting that information wouldn't come to light without a protest?
I get the theory, but doesn't it leave a rather unconvincing model of a governing system that somehow has no way of determining what services are required other than by waiting for the information to be painted onto a placard?
We don't have a governing system whose goal is to determine what services are required though. LIke yeah it would be cool if we could simply expect the leaders we put in power (or that we are not willing or able to dislodge) to make the best decisions on the available evidence, but that isn't the case, is it?
If people are willing to travel long distances without their cars, as in the example you give, but can't simply decide as an individual to do so, are you suggesting that information wouldn't come to light without a protest?
No, I'm suggesting that the only way to get the powers that be to move is to properly scare them.
Why would they need to be scared into providing a really popular and sought after solution?
Why wouldn't they be? Is your impression that current governments around the world are on average very good at dealing with medium to long term crisis? If your answer is "no", I don't understand the point of this line of questioning.
Presumably we're both aware of the basic reasons behind why many reasonable and scientifically well supported policies aren't enacted by governments around the world, democratic or otherwise, in fields like environmental protection, consumer protection, healthcare etc.
I say we burn more fossil fuels, since that's the only thing that powers air conditioning, water irrigation, and generally allows us to create the proper climate. Let the earth change; it's ridiculous to assume that we can stop it. I'm not going to let this new religion of the left convince me that the planet as a whole matters at the expense of my immediate environment. That I must save the planet with petty, trivial actions like recycling and turning off the lights.
Is it already too late?
— Xtrix
I suspect it might be if one thinks of significantly slowing the process. I don't see the nations of Earth coming together in a meaningful way, but I could be wrong.
Well there's really no alternative I can see -- so you're either wrong or we're dead. What we feel about this shouldn't really matter -- rather, what is the evidence? There's little reason to believe it can't be done, in fact we know it can be. So what's the real problem? That people like you and I and others aren't pushing hard enough for it.
I'm usually an optimist but my gut feel is that democracies will reject any government that makes meaningful commitments.
As I said to Jgill above, it's not really about gut feelings. This isn't a problem we can be optimistic or pessimistic about -- I don't think that applies. We're either going to make it happen or we're dead. I do like that cartoon though.
If so, will we reach tipping points no matter what policies we enact?
— Xtrix
Kinda hard to say since no-one knows what the tipping points are exactly, but I think it's unlikely enough will be done to avoid very serious climate changes.
We do know what the tipping points are. If you're looking for something like exact numbers, you won't find it, but we have very good idea about what will trigger an irreversible spiraling.
The best way is probably to organise and join in mass protests. No individual consumer level decisions are likely to be very effective. Or rather the effective decisions are very impractical and so unlikely to be adopted by enough people to make a difference.
Climate change is not a disease, it's a symptom. I know quite a few doctors and they all say, while relieving the symptom has its merits, treating the disease is the primary goal!
What, in your opinion, is the disease?
Depends on the level of analysis. But on the whole, aspects of human nature -- in the case, greed -- that have been magnified by a system that prioritizes private power -- namely, capitalism.
If so, will we reach tipping points no matter what policies we enact?
— Xtrix
First you should define just what is the tipping point you refer to. Or what you have in mind with climate change.
There are multiple potential tipping points. See above for some links, or you can Google "climate tipping points."
Climate change in this context refers to a rapid change in the Earth's climate driven by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
If what this comment really implies, however, is something like "the climate always changes," then there's no sense in continuing. That's just the latest line for climate change denial, and I have no interest.
The news really likes to amp up "tipping points" and "earth will be venus" crap but these scenarios are usually cherry picked or blown way out of proportion. Hell, the IPCC doesn't even think "collapse of civilization" is on the trajectory despite what the Guardian articles make you think
True, they haven't mentioned the "end of civilization," but they include various scenarios that certainly lead to that. But even if it's not the end, it would be a hell on earth. People would probably survive a nuclear war, too...should we therefore not be concerned? Is that really an argument?
In fact, their debunk here on the "Venus Earth" scenario really soothed a lot of my fears
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Not-as-scary-as-it-seems-Planet-at-risk-of-heading-towards-Hothouse-Earth-state
This website is kind of a joke.
The Venus question is not meant literally.
We can nit-pick about "collapse of civilization" or anything else if we want to, but it's simply another form of denial. If you're happier because you found a website that "debunks" the "doomsday" scenarios that those awful "climate alarmists" talk about, you're welcome to. But I suggest balancing that with questions for actual climatologists, someone like Dr. Lenton (linked above) -- who has quite a different view.
The fact remains that we're already seeing signs all around us of a rapidly warming planet, and its effects are also all around us -- right now. Not off in the future -- not according to some model. There are such things as tipping points, and there is a real chance we can make the Earth a nearly-unlivable hellhole (true, maybe not exactly Venus, and people may still survive).
This "debunking" website seems to be obsessed with the fact that it may not happen for a long time to come -- centuries, even. But even there they're likely wrong, given the increase in global temperature, droughts, wildfires, floods, etc., that we're already experiencing -- and giving what scientists are warning us about, including the IPCC.
As the CO2 keeps rising (somewhere near 400 ppm), we'll see more and more warming. That's locked in for decades. We can all push to do something about it, or we can pacify ourselves by reading only what makes us feel better, and thus helping the worst outcome come true. Not a hard decision, in my view, but to each his own.
Let the earth change; it's ridiculous to assume that we can stop it.
So that makes a total of 2 or 3 climate deniers so far. My advice: go back to your echo chamber. You won't learn anything here, since you don't care to in the first place.
What I do not see mentioned above is the interests of the young as expressed by them. I'm too old to worry much. But the children of the world are looking down a real gun barrel that's pointed at them. When enough of them understand that and grasp that as a fact, then they will start to change things, and pretty quickly. Nor do I see them indulging in great patience - why should they? I give it one generation.
An interesting point. Notice that polls of younger people (including those identifying as Republicans) show that they are much more concerned about climate change. We're also seeing movements across the globe -- Greta Thunberg, the Sunrise Movement, etc. All youth-led. That gives me great hope and is very inspiring -- but also pretty embarrassing, given that the adults have failed them so much that they have to pick up the slack.
I hope you're right, and that it takes only one generation. We'll see. I just hope that it's not too late by then in terms of salvaging a relatively decent existence.
Don't you realize that you're guilty of what you just criticized me of?
You're ignoring someone who disagrees with you and only choosing to talk to people that fundamentally agree with you. So much for not living in an echo chamber. I don't get the feeling that you have anything to learn from me.
Also, I'm NOT denying climate change. I'm saying that we shouldn't fight climate change. Burning more, not less, fossil fuels will improve our lives. As I said. Fossil fuels allow for electricity, air conditioning, and water irrigation.
People who are opposed to fossil fuels, are against a cheap, reliable, and powerful source of energy. If you take away fossil fuels it will hurt everyone economically, and essentially decrease everyone's quality of life.
Don't you realize that you're guilty of what you just criticized me of?
You're ignoring someone who disagrees with you and only choosing to talk to people that fundamentally agree with you.
No, not with me, with the overwhelming scientific consensus and the undeniable evidence. You choose to ignore all of that -- that's fine. People believe in a flat earth and deny the holocaust -- I have no interest in engaging with them either. At least not on this thread.
That people like you and I and others aren't pushing hard enough for it.
I could push every minute of every day, along with everyone else, but that's probably not enough to keep those gulf streams warming Europe in place. London and Dublin are further north than Calgary, Canada, and are roughly the same latitude as southern Alaska. Get your woolies out, mates!
Climate change is happening. So what? I'm not denying that. I'm saying we should burn more fossil fuels anyway. We should not enforce government policies; we should let free people decide for themselves. That's what I'm saying. I'm not denying the science.
What about the possibilities of the climate changing for the better? Does the science really say that all climate change is bad? Climate change can be good and open up new opportunities.
Then you really don't know what you're talking about, and I suggest taking literally 10 minutes, type in "climate change" in Google, pick one result -- whether from NASA or NOAA or the Royal Academy or MIT or anything you like -- and read about it. Because you're making an utter buffoon of yourself.
I might be wrong on this, and may I be corrected if I am, but I think you’re missing @Kasperanza's crucial background issue of us not being deprived of our freedoms on account of mitigating a global calamity. Like one’s freedom to benefit from all that society has provided without the taxing requirement that one contributes back to it in return. Or maybe the freedom to grab vaginas non-consensually as one pleases on account of it being empowering, with recently elected presidents as our role model in so doing. To keep this short, last but not least, our right to freedom from the despotism of nature, be this from the evils of a corporeal death, from the tyranny of gravity in not allowing us to spontaneously fly by sheer will, or, most importantly to this discussion, our freedom from nature’s absurd injunction that we need a sustainable environment in order to continue living. We are free in our isolationist individualism to not give a damn about the rest of humankind; their present or future plight is their problem, not ours, and our helping them out in their plight as best we can is our own self-enslavement. As I said, I might be wrong about this, but the concern of losing freedoms in the name of mitigating global warming has been brought up more than once. And I deem it to be a widespread concern.
It’s like parents losing their lifelong freedoms once the kids are birthed. Its not just! So, to hell with the kids’ well-being; our freedoms to do as we please come first.
Thinking of Johnathan Swift, this is my little "modest proposal" for the day.
Mitigation and adaptation. The former requires worldwide commitments. The latter can be dealt with by individual nations. Which do you think has the better chance of succeeding?
we're both aware of the basic reasons behind why many reasonable and scientifically well supported policies aren't enacted by governments around the world
Indeed, and yet above we were talking about 'popular and sought after' policies, not 'reasonable and scientifically well supported' ones. That the two are not the same is the crux of the problem.
A government has three main priorities - to remain in power, to benefit from the privileges that being in power bring, and to make necessary decisions about the running of the country (I think it would be excessively cynical not to at least include that last, but let's not pretend it's a priority). So what of those three does a protest scare them into thinking is at risk? Remain in power? Well, unless the various jugglers and street performers of the protest movements swap their batons and guitars for Kalashnikovs, I don't think their power (mandated by a very specific demographic of swing voter) is a risk. Benefit from privileges? Obviously not. Make decisions about the running of he country? Well, here the one thing we don't want them to do is listen to the hysterics of the latest fad, so why would we encourage such a course of action?
Protests need to properly threaten the group they are protesting against, otherwise they're nothing more than virtue signalling. Governments have some quite well-developed means of gauging the mood in their key demographics - sophisticated multi-metric tools. Do you think they're going to throw those away because they see a few hundred hipsters having a street party?
The "It's not practical to make the necessary changes" excuse is a fairly limp one. That there are limits to what can be done by individual choice is incontestable, but equally incontestable is the fact that most people are absolutely nowhere near those limits, sending the various governments a very clear message indeed that issues like climate change score slightly below issues like who's going to make it to the next round of the FA cup (swap in your sport/cultural event of choice).
So the question should not be "how do we make governments listen to the scientists?" - that's a cause we lost four hundred years ago, governments listen to the people (or at least a key sub-section of them). we quite deliberately designed the system that way. The question should be "Why, when faced with such an obvious prospect of harm to the next generation, do people still consider their replacement Disney-themed electric toothpaste dispenser to be more important?" That's not even a political question, and I suspect it has more to do with the very same reason why people join protests than it is actually opposed by protest.
Mitigation and adaptation. The former requires worldwide commitments. The latter can be dealt with by individual nations. Which do you think has the better chance of succeeding?
Why pit one against the other? Last I checked economy is dependent upon resources. When resources vanish, economy plummets. Our economy is now global. Individual nations won't be able to [s]adapt[/s] acclimate economically when our resources become unsustainable due to lack of mitigation. To address this in only economic terms.
Depends on the level of analysis. But on the whole, aspects of human nature -- in the case, greed -- that have been magnified by a system that prioritizes private power -- namely, capitalism.
A couple of statements that one might (might've) encounter(ed) in one's life.
1. It was completely out of character for him to have done that.
2. It's not in his nature to talk like that. Something's wrong!
Statement 1 is comforting. We're not slaves to human nature - we can put up a fight against it and, on occasion, hopefully these being critical to our welfare, win!
Statement 2 also suggests if not demonstrates that we have, loosely speaking, free will - a silver lining on the edges of an ominous dark cloud (human nature). What dampens my spirits is that when people behave atypicially, the immediate reaction is, "something's wrong!" As if we expect ourselves to be in line with our nature, deviations are perceived as wrong instead of right. It's almost like, may be is, taking offense, being deeply distressed, by free will. Odd that! On the one hand, we've built our civilization around free will and when someone does display it, we're taken aback, even suspicious (something's wrong!). A paradox in its own right!
How does climate change fit into all that I've said? All I can say is, it's totally in charater, typical! Of humans. If we're to do anything about it, we need to offend, surprise, shock even, as many people as possible, make them utter, "it's not in faer nature to think/say/do like that!" but the follow up statement should be not, "something's wrong!" but "something's right!" As you might've noticed, "something's right!" is harder to say than "something's wrong!" - it just doesn't sound right, it feels like a mistake. Thereby hangs a tale...
It looks like, taking climate change as the holotype of all of our problems, the world's problems by extension, it's ultimately about free will! Choices! We must convert must (necessity/no free will) into may (possibility/yes free will).
You think it's unlikely that anything gets done. So essentially we're doomed, in your eyes. Interesting perspective.
Well Things are already being done. Just not nearly enough things, though we're slowly getting better as the catastrophes are becoming more obvious.
Extrapolating from the CoViD response, it seems likely to me that drastic action will only occur once it's undeniably obvious that a lot of people are dieing, and a lot more people will die in the short term (and if we're being realistic it probably helps if they're white or chinese). Something like a major food shortage that is felt even in European stores
Are we doomed at that point? We've certainly doomed a lot of species on our planet. Unlike most, we have a lot more capacity to adapt though. Apart from recognising the stakes, I prefer to be optimistic about our ability to throw resources (and we do have access to tremendous amounts) at the problem until we stabilise. I don't think there's much use in fatalism either way.
Indeed, and yet above we were talking about 'popular and sought after' policies, not 'reasonable and scientifically well supported' ones. That the two are not the same is the crux of the problem.
I didn't really talk about what's popular. I only said that individual consumer level actions are unlikely to be adopted by enough people on their own initiative to make a difference. You could take that to mean such measures aren't popular enough.
As for measures in general, I think it's pretty hard to establish how popular exactly they are. There are broad majorities for robust action on climate change in many democracies, but I suspect most people don't have anything very specific in mind.
Protests need to properly threaten the group they are protesting against, otherwise they're nothing more than virtue signalling. Governments have some quite well-developed means of gauging the mood in their key demographics - sophisticated multi-metric tools. Do you think they're going to throw those away because they see a few hundred hipsters having a street party?
I think you're discounting the psychological effects that very visible movements have. The first goal would of course be to get enough critical mass going that the protests shift the general mood of the electorate. This has already happened with e.g. Fridays for Future. Of course a backlash is also possible, but I think would be unlikely.
A large part of the reason why there isn't more electoral push towards dealing with climate change is that people are constantly being distracted by other, seemingly more immediate, issues.
The "It's not practical to make the necessary changes" excuse is a fairly limp one. That there are limits to what can be done by individual choice is incontestable, but equally incontestable is the fact that most people are absolutely nowhere near those limits
I agree with you here, but I guess my question would be how you would address that if not by mass protest?
we quite deliberately designed the system that way.
I don't think that's a very accurate analysis of current democratic systems. Noone designed those systems to deal with Billionaires running influence campaigns on Facebook.
The question should be "Why, when faced with such an obvious prospect of harm to the next generation, do people still consider their replacement Disney-themed electric toothpaste dispenser to be more important?"
Don't we know the answer to that? I thought the psychology behind that was pretty clear, and it is your field.
Why pit one against the other? Last I checked economy is dependent upon resources. When resources vanish, economy plummets. Our economy is now global. Individual nations won't be able to adapt acclimate economically when our resources become unsustainable due to lack of mitigation. To address this in only economic terms.
You can't have economics if you take away people's freedom.
Yes, it does. Though it's not so much the direction of the change as the rate of change that is the problem.
I mean how fast is too fast? Why not just burn more fossil fuels? Oh, things are too hot? Blast the air conditioning. Things are too cold? Turn up the heat. I don't really see why it matters what the climate does. As long as we have technology and fossil fuels, let the climate do what it wants.
I mean how fast is too fast? Why not just burn more fossil fuels? Oh, things are too hot? Blast the air conditioning. Things are too cold? Turn up the heat. I don't really see why it matters what the climate does. As long as we have technology and fossil fuels, let the climate do what it wants.
And where are you going to get food? We do not have replicators running on gasoline yet.
Reply to Echarmion
Well this is why I asked if all climate change is all bad. I imagine that colder climates that didn't allow crops, would allow crops. When some opportunities go away, new ones come up.
Well this is why I asked if all climate change is all bad. I imagine that colder climates that didn't allow crops, would allow crops. When some opportunities go away, new ones come up.
And that would generally be true, if the rate of change is slow enough to allow ecosystems to adapt. But imagine what happens if 90% of all remaining fish in the oceans die off within a couple of years. Sure new fish will eventually repopulate the oceans, but that will take hundreds of years. Meanwhile millions of people rely on daily catches of fish to survive.
I didn't really talk about what's popular. I only said that individual consumer level actions are unlikely to be adopted by enough people on their own initiative to make a difference. You could take that to mean such measures aren't popular enough.
That's right. It's kind of where I was going. If the measures necessary are not popular enough, then protesting to persuade a democratic government to adopt them is self-defeating, especially given the recent rise in populism, but even without it...
The government already know that a vocal minority are willing to shout about climate change, they also know their key demographic are unwilling to adopt the measures necessary to combat it, so 'awareness' - the metric protestors are so enamored with raising - is not what's lacking, willingness is.
Protest would, therefore, only be useful if it were to raise willingness. So...
I think you're discounting the psychological effects that very visible movements have. The first goal would of course be to get enough critical mass going that the protests shift the general mood of the electorate.
... We'd need to look closely at those effects. Studies on the effect of protest give mixed results. The key takeaway seems to be that some protests work and others don't, but that very few change people's minds simply by virtue of the awareness raised. The best study I've seen recently was this one https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13457753/TeaParty_Protests.pdf?sequence=1 which undermines Lohmann's informational idea of protest effectiveness in favour of a more social group theory (which, full disclosure, is my specialism, so I'm going to be a bit biased). So the issue then with any protest is the effect it has on local social groups, particularly on criteria for membership (what one has to do to be accepted as a member). There's a good study here https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(18)30017-2, though I think it might be paywalled for most, which goes through some of the ideas.
Briefly, membership criteria are signalled by the protest group and when this is something like attending political rallies, voting, or (especially) hustling others to do so, one cannot gain membership without actually taking part, non-members are freely encouraged to join by the very token of membership.
Contrastingly, movements which identify an outside actor whose actions they seek to alter, whose membership criteria and hierarchy are measured by the degree to which one is willing to take that actor to task, create barriers to entry, and very little normative pressure to join (so long as you're not personally that outside actor, membership seems entirely optional). High entry barrier and little reason to join. Not an appealing recipe for attracting members.
Hence the appeal of the Disney-themed toothpaste dispenser - high membership reward, little expense in joining. The expense in joining bit is insurmountable - what we want to achieve with something like climate change is going to require sacrifice - whether that's in terms of reduced consumption or in spending to fund community solutions. So social pressure to become a member needs to be higher. What we see in protest movements around climate change is the exact opposite. Basically, unless you're a government minister or the CEO of BP, you're not the target and so membership is optional. Middle class householders only need to take one glance at the giant leap they'd need to take feel members of the circus troop protesting outside their window, realise that non-membership will have no impact on their lives at all, to sit comfortably and watch the show.
What we're seeing at the moment, is high risk - high reward membership (arrests, violence, etc) where the high risk membership criteria are unrelated to the sacrifice the cause actually requires (reduced consumption, increased community spending) or low risk - low reward membership (so called clicktavism) where membership is easy but membership is disconnected from the actual cause. These are basically useless as engines of social change.
Both are, however, extremely useful engines of consumer management...
Reply to TheMadFool discomfort is the primary disease, followed closely by lazy.
Most people will do a great deal to avoid discomfort and a reduction in lifestyle. Combine that with a pronounced level of laziness and poof! A great deal of no change is the result.
Now if we eliminated people...likely things would rebalance after a century or so. However, from a planet history perspective, the earth has undergone repeated heating and cooling cycles. Vast mostly desert regions to vast mostly green verdant forests and vegetation. Likely humans have increased the rate of change of this process, for a little while. Once we are gone the world will spin onwards and move into the next cycle. We may or may not be around, and outside of our opinion, does that matter?
The dinosaurs had a good run and now we use them to fuel our cars. What will the bulk of humanity's remains be used for in 250,000 years. Likely, nothing. But hey, you never know.
It’s like parents losing their lifelong freedoms once the kids are birthed. Its not just! So, to hell with the kids’ well-being; our freedoms to do as we please come first.
So what passes for modern parenting for most of those under 50. Yeah!
121 degrees F, 49.6 C, in Canada, more associated with moose and permafrost. More than 500 deaths associated with heat, and the village of Lytton BC totally destroyed by fire.
'Climate emergency' is not political rhetoric, it describes exactly what is happening.
Lazy :point: Global Energy Consumption. We're lazy more or less and so we use machines. Machines consume energy and the earth is more active than ever. Human laziness manifests as global activeness.
Discomfort, via our instincts to relieve it, maybe either a contributory factor or an independent alternative pathway to skyrocketing global energy consumption.
I say we burn more fossil fuels, since that's the only thing that powers air conditioning, water irrigation, and generally allows us to create the proper climate. Let the earth change; it's ridiculous to assume that we can stop it. I'm not going to let this new religion of the left convince me that the planet as a whole matters at the expense of my immediate environment. That I must save the planet with petty, trivial actions like recycling and turning off the lights.
I say we stop using fossil fuels altogether - and drill for magma heat energy, near to magma chambers and subduction zones in the earth's crust. We line the bore holes with pipes - and pump water through to produce superheated steam, to drive turbines - to produce limitless quantities of clean electrical power.
I believe this form of energy is more than sufficient to meet the world's current energy demand, and the surplus could be used to capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle - so that it would not be necessary for you to 'pay more and have less' to save the world, or feel guilty every time you turn on a light!
In the tropics, there was a traditional form of agriculture called 'slash and burn'. You create a clearing in the jungle by chopping everything down and having a bonfire. The ash makes the ground fertile for a few years to grow crops, and then when it is depleted, you move on and make a new clearing. On a small scale (relative to the jungle) there is no problem and the jungle will heal its wound in a hundred or two years. The problem, environmentally, is always one of scale. The global economy is still slash and burn, and move on, but there is nowhere left to go.
Climate change, though has already baked in sea level rise; the current rate is about 3cm per decade, and the seas continue to warm and the land ice continues to melt even if we stop burning fossil fuels today. The best agricultural land is low-lying flood plains. This will not be affecting us drastically for probably a hundred years; people will starve and drown in Bangladesh as they always do, but in larger numbers, St Louis will become more dangerous. The frog will slowly boil, but not notice.
Weather becomes more violent and unpredictable - we adapt. Trees do not. A hundred years is a very short time in forest migration, but a very long time in deforestation.
The question being asked by most people is entirely human centred; will we survive, will we lose our freedom, will we suffer? Meanwhile, the frog is boiling. I mention, not really for discussion, but for consideration, a strand of environmentalism that actively welcomes the climate apocalypse as the cure for the disease that is humanity en-mass. Top predators need to be few in number for a balanced environment. But the question for philosophy is not, is it happening or is it going to be bad, but how do we need to reimagine ourselves and our societies to include our dependencies on environment? The top of the tree must feed the roots.
The irony that the main concern is to find 'alternative' sources of energy to solve a problem of excess energy is amusing and pathetic. The conversation is more than 50 years old already, and it might be worth folk's while to catch up a little with what has already been discussed.
Having lived through the northern heatwave just now of 40+C temperatures, pretty much yeah. Most conversation isn't even about stopping climate change altogether but adapting and mitigating it. The ship has already sailed, and humanity is gonna feel some pain these coming years even if they do eventually get it together.
If so, will we reach tipping points no matter what policies we enact?
Depends on what tipping points you're talking about. There's a 1.5C limit and the 2C limit according to the Paris Accord, but things could get much more worse if we don't do anything right now. Even if climate change is already here I'm firmly against defeatist attitudes and frankly find them irrational. Action is important as it's always been, since it will allow us to get this under control.
If it's not too late, what exactly can we do to contribute to mitigating it?
Plenty of things, though I'm pretty sure you're aware of some of it. Switching to renewables, adopting EVs, planting trees, building carbon capture plants, building more climate resilient infrastructure, getting off meat, reducing methane producing waste, etc.
There's also geoengineering, which I fear will be the political right's "easy" response to the crisis once they can no longer ignore the asteroid that they've been downplaying for decades, but I don't think we're at that phase yet for them.
Is there ANYONE out there who still doesn't consider this the issue of our times?
I say we stop using fossil fuels altogether - and drill for magma heat energy, near to magma chambers and subduction zones in the earth's crust. We line the bore holes with pipes - and pump water through to produce superheated steam, to drive turbines - to produce limitless quantities of clean electrical power.
I believe this form of energy is more than sufficient to meet the world's current energy demand, and the surplus could be used to capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle - so that it would not be necessary for you to 'pay more and have less' to save the world, or feel guilty every time you turn on a light!
I'm all for clean, green, and hip energy if it can be sustained under capitalism and not through government intervention.
Oh, things are too hot? Blast the air conditioning. Things are too cold? Turn up the heat. I don't really see why it matters what the climate does.
That’s because you’re completely ignorant about this topic. If you continue to choose not to take 10 minutes to read about it, please stop trolling this thread.
From a scientist hired by Exxon in the 80s to study the effects on climate:
“We were doing very good work at Exxon. We had eight scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including a prediction of how much global warming from carbon dioxide buildup 40 years later. We made a prediction in 1980 of what the atmospheric warming would be from fossil fuel burning in 2020. We predicted that it would be about one degree celsius. And it is about one degree celsius.
It never actually occurred to me that this was going to become a political problem. I thought: “We’ll do the analyses, we’ll write reports, the politicians of the world will see the reports and they’ll make the appropriate changes and transform our energy system somehow.” I’m a research scientist. In my field, if you discover something and it turns out to be valid, you’re a hero. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to convince people, even when they saw objective evidence of this happening.”
121 degrees F, 49.6 C, in Canada, more associated with moose and permafrost. More than 500 deaths associated with heat, and the village of Lytton BC totally destroyed by fire.
'Climate emergency' is not political rhetoric, it describes exactly what is happening.
And this is only one part of the world. We simultaneously have a drought going on here in New England, and one of the hottest Junes on record.
Climate is not weather, but it disrupts the weather. We’re seeing it happen before our eyes. The pattern is obvious, provided we can read a graph.
But the question for philosophy is not, is it happening or is it going to be bad, but how do we need to reimagine ourselves and our societies to include our dependencies on environment?
There's also geoengineering, which I fear will be the political right's "easy" response to the crisis once they can no longer ignore the asteroid that they've been downplaying for decades, but I don't think we're at that phase yet for them.
Unfortunately I agree with you, although I’m still hopeful that the carbon removal technology can ramp up quickly. Bill Gates is on the job, after all.
The irony that the main concern is to find 'alternative' sources of energy to solve a problem of excess energy is amusing and pathetic. The conversation is more than 50 years old already, and it might be worth folk's while to catch up a litt
I agree. Most of the human race should revert to a Stone Age level.
The small number who hold onto the progress we've made will eventually leave earth and have fun abroad.
The rest can enjoy the earthly sunsets and die early, in pain, in the dirt. :up:
Who goes to shit where their kids eat?
Or their kids' kids?
Climate impact, pollution, increasing extinctions, ...
Perhaps now is a good time to consider the longer term.
At least try to avoid some future suffering?
There's an ethical thing going on here.
But of course anyone is free to have no such considerations, to not care.
Hence the appeal of the Disney-themed toothpaste dispenser - high membership reward, little expense in joining. The expense in joining bit is insurmountable - what we want to achieve with something like climate change is going to require sacrifice - whether that's in terms of reduced consumption or in spending to fund community solutions. So social pressure to become a member needs to be higher. What we see in protest movements around climate change is the exact opposite. Basically, unless you're a government minister or the CEO of BP, you're not the target and so membership is optional. Middle class householders only need to take one glance at the giant leap they'd need to take feel members of the circus troop protesting outside their window, realise that non-membership will have no impact on their lives at all, to sit comfortably and watch the show.
Interesting information, thanks.
So is there something in the research that tells us how we increase pressure to become a member?
Most of the human race should revert to a Stone Age level.
No one is- or ever has - said this is what’s necessary. This is yet another common strawman used by science deniers. It’s either catastrophe or Stone Age, according to you. Must take real effort to remain so ignorant.
You should have quoted H G Wells and agreed with him, instead of quoting me and agreeing with yourself. Even quite smart people have to respond to your post, not your thoughts.
Reply to unenlightened
I was agreeing with you that the whole species doesn't need to discover new energy sources, just the part that wants to remain hi-tech.
Reply to frank And I was disagreeing with you in no uncertain terms.
Furthermore, expressing it as "back to the stone age" is hyperbolic scaremongering. No, we don't have to give up modern medicine and dentistry, modern communications, modern housing, clean water and sewage treatment, a varied diet, and so on. We might have to give up petrol engined cars, eat less meat, stop flying as routine, work a bit harder at recycling, use public transport and stay at home more, stop buying fashion clothes like they're going out of fashion. We need to give up some of the crap we have been persuaded to want that we would lose nothing by doing without.
But we might lose them if we let runaway global warming destroy our societies.
No, we don't have to give up modern medicine and dentistry, modern communications, modern housing, clean water and sewage treatment, a varied diet, and so on.
We would need a new energy source for all that.
Interestingly, population growth rates are turning downward in core nations due to education and opportunities for women. That will help.
Unfortunately I agree with you, although I’m still hopeful that the carbon removal technology can ramp up quickly. Bill Gates is on the job, after all.
Well, carbon capture is also an option for the right (and oil companies) to run on too since it doesn't require a big change in the current status quo. That is probably where I imagine the lines will be drawn politically in the future. Not ideal, but frankly that would be much better than where we are now with one side accepting the problem and the other thinking that it doesn't even exist.
So is there something in the research that tells us how we increase pressure to become a member?
Quite a lot, yeah. Most popular theories are based on the social capital costs of available identities (after Henri Tajfel) - polarise the range of available social identities such that fewer intermediary positions are available. People will be pulled to one or the other. Personally, I look more at narratives than social identity, but it's not the most popular position. Like Tajfel, I agree that in times of social stress options become polarised, but I think support for any 'identity' theory is sketchy (and that's me being polite about it), rather we take part in narratives which become available as part of our cultural milieu, it's these which become polarised such that we face a choice of becoming part of a narrative that's a little outside of our comfort zone, or being without a culturally available narrative to locate our behaviour in, and most people find the latter position quite uncomfortable.
I'd recommend having a look at the work of Shelly Grabe, she's extensively studied women's empowerment movements in Nicaragua from a social narrative perspective and gives a really good account of how the approach works using a concrete example.
Most accounts, however, muddy the distinction between being part of a protest movement and making sacrifices (which is why I like Grabe's work). The reasons people join social change movements where there's little risk to their own social status in doing so will be quite different from the reasons people join groups where the risk is higher.
One of the areas that's of interest now is the effect of mass social media on social group membership A few interesting studies have shown how the ability of social media to build opinion-based social groups very quickly (way beyond what was previously possible) can lead to these ephemeral motivators for action which don't have long-term robustness because the opinion-based social group dissipates as rapidly as it was formed. In a kind of 'perfect storm', opinion-based social groups are also far more strongly associated with political action than class or functional groups (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.334). The result, so the theory goes, is that we have a load of flash-in-the-pan mass protests which achieve virtually nothing long-term because no-one involved had a strong social identity to motivate their actions (or a distinct narrative, as I would prefer to see it).
The upshot is that in the modern age, polarising available narratives might be just too easy and so not really apply the pressure they used to. It's just too easy to find a group to join these days so little pressure to join one slightly outside of your comfort zone. so we need more real-life social groups rather than virtual ones as they are less flexible, and so more able to pull in the direction of social change. Can't see it happening though...
I think you're discounting the psychological effects that very visible movements have.
Not if the government is right-wing. Recently in Slovenia, a right-wing government politician called the protesters "rabble" and another such politician called them "pigs".
The upshot is that in the modern age, polarising available narratives might be just too easy and so not really apply the pressure they used to. It's just too easy to find a group to join these days so little pressure to join one slightly outside of your comfort zone. so we need more real-life social groups rather than virtual ones as they are less flexible, and so more able to pull in the direction of social change. Can't see it happening though...
With the popularization of right-wing politics, joining a group that isn't in line with the right-wing government might just be the right kind of pressure and might make people take such group membership seriously. But because the real-world consequences of such membership are likely going to be severe (e.g. losing your job), fewer people are likely to go through with it.
We're either going to make it happen or we're dead.
I don't think that's true. There's not one thing to make happen. There are lots of apocalyptic scenarios, but also lots of survivalist scenarios. Even some of the apocalyptic ones are quite optimistic: we might wipe ourselves out, maybe take a lot of species with is, but leave a living planet that obtains some kind of harmony. That's not necessarily a bad outcome. The survival outcomes could be anything from ideal (complete reversal of manmade climate change in the nick of time) to abject (a minority survive but resort to cannibalism) via horrifying (we survive as cyborgs). It's not a coin toss. Options on the table today may not be on the table tomorrow, but there'll be other, less good ones.
The upshot is that in the modern age, polarising available narratives might be just too easy and so not really apply the pressure they used to. It's just too easy to find a group to join these days so little pressure to join one slightly outside of your comfort zone. so we need more real-life social groups rather than virtual ones as they are less flexible, and so more able to pull in the direction of social change
They change behaviour as well. Online everyone's an individualist at the centre of their own virtual world. Real groups have real group dynamics.
Climate is not weather, but it disrupts the weather. We’re seeing it happen before our eyes. The pattern is obvious, provided we can read a graph.
For most people, this is too abstract. It seems to me that unless people experience climate change directly, in a way that doesn't depend on trusting others, they can't really relate to it.
For example, those who have had a garden for at least 20 years, and, of course, crop farmers know climate change first hand. But how are city people supposed to relate to it?
We've had a considerable garden for 40+ years and we try to grow at least the seasonal vegetables for ourselves. Up until some 30 years ago, it was barely ever necessary to water the plants, there was enough and evenly distributed rain. Now, it's impossible to grow anything by relying solely on rain. Also, most of the rain now is torrential, making erosion a major problem, so we had to build terraces and frame all the allotments. In the past, torrential rain was so rare that it was possible to maintain a classical garden on steep terrain. We also need to use ground covers, we had to adapt in terms of choice of varieties, and so on.
That’s because you’re completely ignorant about this topic. If you continue to choose not to take 10 minutes to read about it, please stop trolling this thread.
Bu that's just it: If he read about it, it would be yet another thing he read. And as such, easily dismissable.
I believe the climate is changing, as it always has, but I do not see it as inherently frightening. What is frightening to me is watching the same all-too-human hands that led us here work to send it in the opposite direction. The idea of solar geoengineering, spraying aerosols to dim sunlight or to brighten clouds, is the stuff of dystopian nightmare. The hubris in this respect is worrisome.
There are multiple potential tipping points. See above for some links, or you can Google "climate tipping points."
Climate change in this context refers to a rapid change in the Earth's climate driven by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
Then the solution is simply to create a cheaper energy resource that burning fossil fuels. Even in aircraft design they are looking for using other fuels.
But I guess the perspective still is on our own asses, because life on Earth will surely adapt to situations where the polar caps have melted etc. We humans on the other hand might have huge problems.
There are lots of apocalyptic scenarios, but also lots of survivalist scenarios. Even some of the apocalyptic ones are quite optimistic: we might wipe ourselves out, maybe take a lot of species with is, but leave a living planet that obtains some kind of harmony. That's not necessarily a bad outcome.
Perhaps one philosophical question (as this is a Philosophy Forum) is the following: Do we look at ourselves as being part of the fauna on Earth or do we have the somewhat Christian view that this is a garden that has been given us to keep and make the separation with nature and us. Some might say that this is totally unimportant, but actually it's very important.
As never in the timeline of life on Earth has one single species been so dominant and abundant, it's not surprising that it can teeter on a collapse based on it's own existence. The whole advanced economy (that we call globalization) is needed to sustain such large populations. But at least I'm an optimist. We have already seen Peak-conventional-Oil (production). And we are living during one of the worst pandemics in history.
Still life is quite good and I can discuss this issue with people I don't personally know that are on other continents.
(Some other species have difficulties, when humans have introduced them to habitats without enough predators...building more advanced societies would help.)
Well, carbon capture is also an option for the right (and oil companies) to run on too since it doesn't require a big change in the current status quo. That is probably where I imagine the lines will be drawn politically in the future. Not ideal, but frankly that would be much better than where we are now with one side accepting the problem and the other thinking that it doesn't even exist.
Your point is well taken. This is why I'm hopeful but not pushing too hard for this -- I know it can be "appropriated" by those who want to see nothing happen whatsoever.
Lol -- how pathetic. Can the moderators please boot this guy -- at least from this thread? He's contributing nothing, resorts to name-calling, and apparently plagiarizes without citation. Just a thought. I flagged it as well, so take a look.
We're either going to make it happen or we're dead.
— Xtrix
I don't think that's true. There's not one thing to make happen. There are lots of apocalyptic scenarios, but also lots of survivalist scenarios.
It's amazing that people continue on like this.
Yes, a nuclear war would probably not wipe out everyone as well. Would you want to live in that world, however? Probably not. Likewise for climate change -- if we do nothing, we're dead. Period. If we do little, there's a chance we survive in a hellish world. It does seem like the latter is a real possibility, yes.
And I never said "one thing" needs to happen. This is going to take many different changes in many different fields, involving many different countries.
Climate is not weather, but it disrupts the weather. We’re seeing it happen before our eyes. The pattern is obvious, provided we can read a graph.
— Xtrix
For most people, this is too abstract. It seems to me that unless people experience climate change directly, in a way that doesn't depend on trusting others, they can't really relate to it.
Yes indeed. But the ozone was a bit abstract too, in a way. Easier to picture, because it was a "hole" and there was a lot of talk about it. But the other difference was that there wasn't as much of a pushback from powerful capitalist industries.
What's happening with climate denial is more on par with what Big Tobacco did when it became clear that smoking causes lung cancer: major pushback, sow doubt, undermine the science, associate it with communism or socialism, make it a matter of "freedom," etc. Some of the same lawyers who represented tobacco companies also represent Exxon, Chevron, etc.
I think that's the real culprit here. We forget that not long ago, George HW Bush, Newt Gingrich, W Bush, and John McCain would openly talk about climate change and the need to do something about it. That was up to about 13 or so years ago. The push came especially from the Koch network. This has been well documented, in fact. That's where I place the majority of blame.
Have you read the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein?
You mean the non-scientist/climate denier/Ayn Rand cultist who was destroyed in debate by Bill McKibben years ago? Regardless, I'm not watching a single thing you suggest until you've shown you've done the minimal amount of reading required to even be taken seriously on this topic. You remind me of a person who, because he's watched a few videos on quantum mechanics on YouTube, feels confident enough to walk into an MIT physics class and lecture the professor. Grow up.
I believe the climate is changing, as it always has.
:yawn:
Shocker that this tired, stupid line gets regurgitated by you.
That's sarcasm -- not shocked at all. In case that was unclear.
In case others are reading (not you -- go back to sleep):
The latest bullshit from climate deniers is the phrase "the climate is ALWAYS changing." This way they can appear to agree when asked "do you believe in climate change?" An old and rather obvious tactic, straight from the lawyers.
But no, the climate has not "always changed." Not like this, and not since we've been around. There's a mountain of evidence that shows why it's dangerous, and why the scientists are warning us about it. They're being ignored, largely due to propaganda (in my view). Same as all the people who were duped, by tobacco companies, into believing that cigarettes were harmless -- the science wasn't "settled," after all. Exactly the same tactics, almost exactly the same people involved (see above).
NOS is right in the meaty part of the curve for Trump-voting right-wingers. Nothing shocking there, but a good example of what I was saying above about the effectiveness of propaganda.
Next up: "CO2 is good for the planet!" or "It's the sun!" or "It's water vapor!" or "It's all funded by George Soros!" etc. etc.
You mean the non-scientist/climate denier/Ayn Rand cultist who was destroyed in debate by Bill McKibben years ago? Regardless, I'm not watching a single thing you suggest until you've shown you've done the minimal amount of reading required to even be taken seriously on this topic. You remind me of a person who, because he's watched a few videos on quantum mechanics on YouTube, feels confident enough to walk into an MIT physics class and lecture the professor. Grow up.
Wow, you're a really closed-minded person. I'm not expecting you to agree, but it would be nice if you could understand some of the points that Alex Epstein makes. I don't think he's some lunatic. He provides something genuine to the discussion – something that you rarely hear regarding climate change. With your insults and intimidation, I doubt you do any justice for your cause. Which is good. If you alienate enough people they won't take you seriously.
But I guess the perspective still is on our own asses, because life on Earth will surely adapt to situations where the polar caps have melted etc. We humans on the other hand might have huge problems.
Well yes, of course. That's all I'm talking about, although a lot of people here are taking a much broader view. But I don't care as much about whether other life exists, necessarily. I care about human existence. I assumed we all do. Some like to posture about this, of course, but appearing to be above it all often leaves me with two reactions: the person is silly or sick.
I'm talking about human life, not general biological life. So in case that wasn't clear, there you go. Yes, bacteria will probably go on without us. That's little consolation to me, my grandkids, or my great-great grandkids.
That doesn't provide perspective at all, really. Not if we're talking about human life. Because, if you notice, we haven't been around that long. Behaviorally modern humans, maybe 200 or so thousand years. Better to look at that record. Also best to take a look at what scientists say about this and why it's important.
I'm not expecting you to agree, but it would be nice if you could understand some of the points that Alex Epstein makes. I don't think he's some lunatic.
I'm very familiar with Alex Epstein. I'm also familiar with other very famous climate "skeptics" -- Marc Morano. James Inhofe. Myron Ebell. Bjorn Lomborg. Fred Singer. Roy Spencer. (These latter two are especially prominent in online circulation.) None of them are "lunatics" (well, perhaps Inhofe). Some are scientists (in other fields), some are politicians, some are complete industry-funded charlatans who don't believe a word of what they're saying, and some are (I imagine) pretty nice guys who are sincere in their beliefs.
Sure, you can stick exclusively with those guys if you'd like. I've been discussing this issue with their followers for years. They, much like you, don't seem to have the slightest interest in consulting any climatologist, academy, or institution that represents the vast consensus. Won't spend 10 minutes on anything by NASA, by the Royal Academy, by Nature or Science magazine or any other research journal, by the IPCC, by NOAA, American Institute of Physics, National Center for Atmospheric Research, American Meteorological Society, Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), etc. etc. etc.
I mean I grew up the American education system. I was fed your perspective my entire life and I believed it for most of my life.
I just wonder what your solution is to climate change. Is it enforced public transportation? Limited electricity use? More solar energy? My opinion is that free minds in a free market will come up with a faster and more powerful solution than government programs and eco-fascistic institutions. I mean what if your solution is wrong, and you will be punishing people who don't want to follow a wrong solution? Think about all the power grabs politicians can use with climate change. Climate change is a great excuse to subsidize a company that promotes "clean energy" when really the company is NOT even helping the economy or the environment.
I mean yeah there's all this science, but what are we supposed to do about it? Just cut out fossil fuels without a real replacement? To me that's scary. Epstein's point is that fossil fuels protect and enhance people's lives. Fossil fuels protect people from heat waves. And yet the environmentalists want to limit them. I find it to be worrisome.
Lol -- how pathetic. Can the moderators please boot this guy -- at least from this thread? He's contributing nothing, resorts to name-calling, and apparently plagiarizes without citation. Just a thought. I flagged it as well, so take a look.
I mean I grew up the American education system. I was fed your perspective my entire life and I believed it for most of my life.
Believed what? Going solely on what you've said thus far, it seems very obvious to me that you really haven't taken the time to understand the (now) other point of view -- which happens to be the overwhelming consensus amongst people who have dedicated their lives to the field -- climatologists, oceanographers, geophysicists, astrophysicists, etc.
The climate is changing rapidly. We're already seeing some of the results, as was predicted years ago. This was known way back in the 50s, in fact. Exxon scientists noted it in the 70s and 80s. It's long been known that burning fossil fuels, along with agricultural practices and deforestation, will lead to a build-up in greenhouse gases -- CO2, methane, etc.
The higher these concentrations, the warmer the planet. This is what we're seeing. It seems like a small change, but it is having (and will continue to have) a very large effect on the planet. It's true that it's been much warmer in the past, and that CO2 has (in conjunction) been much higher as well -- during the time of the dinosaurs, for example. But humans weren't around then. That was a much different world with a different biosphere.
Since the industrial revolution, we've pumped tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and, as isn't a surprise, the global temperature average has increased. There are graphs available that show this correlation very clearly if you're more visual (like me).
So the greenhouse gases are climbing rapidly and the climate is changing rapidly. More so than in the last 100,000 years -- and we have CO2 measurements/temperature measurements from that far too (ice core samples, etc). That's really dangerous for life on Earth, because it will effect many things -- leaving even tipping points aside.
It'll effect where we live, as sea level rise will impact coastal communities. It'll effect agriculture -- so the global food supply, due to droughts and desertification. That will be devastating. It will effect fishing. It will effect water supply (as the mountain ice caps disappear, as they're already doing, and rivers dry up due to increase heat, as is already happening). There will be massive movements of people from one area to another -- much larger than anything in human history (think Bangladesh alone, which is increasingly becoming more and more inundated with water). That's millions of refugees -- not thousands. I could go on and on. Much of this is already happening, as you know.
I write all this out in case you're really curious. I would much prefer you read some of the links I've provided, but so be it.
I just wonder what your solution is to climate change.
There are many solutions. The IPCC provides some, but I like Robert Pollin's ideas myself (he's an economist, not a climatologist -- but he starts with the premise that climate change is real and something needs to be done econimically). He outlines a plan that would require about 3% of GDP annually to enact. A smooth transition.
The solutions are already known. A magic bullet isn't necessary. No miracles, no totalitarianism, no radical/shocking upheaval of human life: investments in clean energy and research, a shift in subsidies, carbon taxes (proposed by many Republicans), a shift in investments to cleaner industries (which the major asset managers are already doing), divestment from fossil fuels, retrofitting buildings, infrastructure -- including high-speed rail and the public transportation systems, higher efficiency standards, better regulations, and so on.
Plenty of solutions, plenty of plans. Nothing extremist. It can easily happen, provided there's political will. But there hasn't been any, and for obvious reasons. The people of this country (and around the world) are in favor of it, and those numbers will continue to rise as things get worse. The IPCC and others have given us maybe 10 or 20 years to really get moving on this, and we have to start right away. There are some bright spots, but still a lot more needs to be done.
It's a big moment -- right now in congress there's a chance for the use of a reconciliation bill to fund much of this stuff, which would be a good start. Republicans are trying to block it all, and some moderate democrats are also standing in the way. It seems like an absurd scenario, but that's what "capitalism" does. When congress is bought by special interests who don't want anything done, usually nothing gets done. Not until it's too late or enormous damage has been done -- which is already true.
There are no such thing as "free markets." I know Ayn Rand talks about this a lot -- but it's a fantasy. She ignores a lot of history. If you want someone a little more tricky, try Milton Friedman. He's had a much bigger impact than Rand, and has a better understanding of history. His thesis is equally flawed, though. There are no "free markets" in the world. There's only state-capitalism, which is what we have here in the US. Major intervention in markets by the state. So if an industry is largely the cause of a problem -- whether lung cancer or climate change -- and have benefited from state subsidies for decades, then the state can intervene in the opposite direction as well.
The higher these concentrations, the warmer the planet. This is what we're seeing. It seems like a small change, but it is having (and will continue to have) a very large effect on the planet. It's true that it's been much warmer in the past, and that CO2 has (in conjunction) been much higher as well -- during the time of the dinosaurs, for example. But humans weren't around then. That was a much different world with a different biosphere.
Hmm.. aren't greenhouses good for the environment? It is a "green" gas. That's good for nature. Having a hot climate like a the dinosaurs did sounds great! Maybe our climate can change to a more dino-like biosphere.
And how do you know this is all due to CO2? What if the planet is going through a generational shift, or getting solar flares from the sun? And do you really think the climate would stop changing if we stopped releasing CO2 in the air? Would it slow it down enough to stop climate change? Why limit fossil fuels if climate change is inevitable?
The solutions are already known. A magic bullet isn't necessary. No miracles, no totalitarianism, no radical/shocking upheaval of human life: investments in clean energy and research, a shift in subsidies, carbon taxes (proposed by many Republicans), a shift in investments to cleaner industries (which the major asset managers are already doing), divestment from fossil fuels, retrofitting buildings, infrastructure -- including high-speed rail and the public transportation systems, higher efficiency standards, better regulations, and so on.
These are pretty vague and without focus. Better regulations? That sounds so empty. To me that just sounds like more laws and less productivity
And considering the doom and gloom many environmentalists associate the future with, I think we will need a totalitarian dictatorship to save the planet. Public transportation still puts CO2 in the air, and by the looks of the science, I doubt the climate will stop changing.
Also, I'm not a republican. I don't like republicans or democrats.
It's a big moment -- right now in congress there's a chance for the use of a reconciliation bill to fund much of this stuff, which would be a good start. Republicans are trying to block it all, and some moderate democrats are also standing in the way. It seems like an absurd scenario, but that's what "capitalism" does. When congress is bought by special interests who don't want anything done, usually nothing gets done. Not until it's too late or enormous damage has been done -- which is already true.
Which is why I think environmentalism will lead to a fascist dictatorship. Under capitalism, people wouldn't be waiting around for the government to fix the issue, individuals with their free minds would take their own actions to fix the climate, if they even see it as a threat. The government doesn't get things done. PEOPLE get things done. Policies don't save the planet. Businesses, products, and fossil fuels save the planet. Innovators and entrepreneurs save the planet with their ideas. People need to be FREE to test out their ideas.
t'll effect where we live, as sea level rise will impact coastal communities. It'll effect agriculture -- so the global food supply, due to droughts and desertification. That will be devastating. It will effect fishing. It will effect water supply (as the mountain ice caps disappear, as they're already doing, and rivers dry up due to increase heat, as is already happening). There will be massive movements of people from one area to another -- much larger than anything in human history (think Bangladesh alone, which is increasingly becoming more and more inundated with water). That's millions of refugees -- not thousands. I could go on and on. Much of this is already happening, as you know.
I mean yeah it will effect us, but I don't see any impending doom. You talk like humans won't be handle this. When problems arise, people adapt. Also, fossil fuels are the greatest defense against these issues. Fossil fuels can help us grow more food, irrigate water, build new and exciting cities. Capitalism can innovate to build walls, or island cities or whatever solutions people come up with.
Haha wow, fishing will be affected. Okay so fishing affected? So what all the fish die. People can find food elsewhere.
When some lands become dry and barren, new lands will open up. Maybe Canada and Russia will become much warmer and inhabitable.
If the sea levels rise, just move. It's great there will be mass movements of people. Immigration is good.
A really great point that Alex Epstein makes is that as CO2 emissions have gone up, climate related deaths have plummeted.
https://youtu.be/0_a9RP0J7PA at 16:55
If no one is dying, what are we so worried about? Why would we take away fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are preventing deaths and increasing people's quality of life?
You can't have economics if you take away people's freedom.
To my mind Reply to Banno already answered this aptly. My post on freedom which you gave 10 out of 10 to ought to have indicated via its satire that freedom, while being an all-around feel-good term, is not a good thing in all conceivable cases. The freedom to pursue happiness via the mass murder of others is an example most take to be a bad freedom. Going by this example, a proposed truism: freedom is good only in so far as it doesn’t unfairly harm others.
Do you agree with this premise? If not, on what grounds should a person’s freedom to pursue happiness via mass murder be prohibited by others? Or should it not be?
If you do agree, then by what consistent reasoning should freedom to devastate the world and the humans that inhabit it in the name of personal happiness not be prohibited?
Please note, I ask from a philosophical perspective in respect to the generalized notion of freedom. Whether or not global warming is real, is human caused, is a means of devastating the world, etc., is not the issue I’m presently addressing here.
They change behaviour as well. Online everyone's an individualist at the centre of their own virtual world. Real groups have real group dynamics.
True, that anonymity of online discourse also allows multiple personalities, so they're not just one individual, but several. I actually think this might be a good thing for adolescents, but coming into the adult world needs to have the reality of a groups you can't so easily re-form. Oddly (or perhaps obviously) it ties in with your line of thought about hunter-gatherer moral and economic decision-making. The less flexible and easily replaceable the social group around you is, the more effort it is advisable to but into social relations and proportionately less into individual self-construction. Social media seems to be the pinnacle of a move away from focus on the network links and more toward the nodes.
Anyone not addressing the relationship between the shift in social dynamics and the failure to tackle issues with socially-owned resources is just pissing in the wind as far as I'm concerned, but then I'd be naive to think they were doing so out of a strong desire to solve the problem.
I mean yeah there's all this science, but what are we supposed to do about it? Just cut out fossil fuels without a real replacement? To me that's scary. Epstein's point is that fossil fuels protect and enhance people's lives. Fossil fuels protect people from heat waves. And yet the environmentalists want to limit them. I find it to be worrisome.
This is very typical in my experience. It'd be like trying to ban guns in the US, people would just lose their minds.
I'm all for clean, green, and hip energy if it can be sustained under capitalism and not through government intervention.
Meeting the climate challenge without constant and crushing interventions in the market is precisely the point. Magma energy can sustain capitalism - and so maintain the personal and political freedoms capitalism allows for.
I’m just stating what I believe on a popular topic, and the only effect I’ve had is your weird, baffled rage. I assure you, though, I’m not some nefarious figure in your little propaganda fantasy. I don’t care enough about what people believe to even bother. I just despise the conformity and invariable statism your kind of proselytizing demands. It doesn’t seek to change minds; it seeks control, and I will dissent from it every time. That’s all.
Do you agree with this premise? If not, on what grounds should a person’s freedom to pursue happiness via mass murder be prohibited by others? Or should it not be?
i was talking about economic freedom, a freedom that is sustained with individual rights. Why would I advocate for a freedom in which murder is legal?
If you do agree, then by what consistent reasoning should freedom to devastate the world and the humans that inhabit it in the name of personal happiness not be prohibited?
The world, environment, or nature is not the standard of value. Human beings are the standard of value. Individual rights allow for a rational freedom.
Policies don't save the planet. Businesses, products, and fossil fuels save the planet. Innovators and entrepreneurs save the planet with their ideas. People need to be FREE to test out their ideas.
You complained above about a statement being "vague and without focus". This here is certainly vague and without focus. Just a collection of nice sounding words.
Hmm.. aren't greenhouses good for the environment? It is a "green" gas. That's good for nature. Having a hot climate like a the dinosaurs did sounds great! Maybe our climate can change to a more dino-like biosphere.
It’s comments like this that make it obvious you don’t have a clue. Excess amount of greenhouse gases produces a greater greenhouse effect. That’s not good for human beings or nature as we know it. If we have a climate like the dinosaurs, we’re toast as a a species. Which you’d know if you deign to read anything about this topic outside denialist propaganda.
And how do you know this is all due to CO2? What if the planet is going through a generational shift, or getting solar flares from the sun? And do you really think the climate would stop changing if we stopped releasing CO2 in the air? Would it slow it down enough to stop climate change? Why limit fossil fuels if climate change is inevitable?
It’s not all due to CO2, but that’s the main driver. Methane and other gases also contribute.
It’s not solar flares or generational shifts— believe it or not, this has been considered by climate scientists. What we see is outside of natural variation. But feel free to believe that because you’ve watched a YouTube video by a well known climate denier, you’ve cracked the case. Maybe a lecture from you on why quantum mechanics is “stupid”?
Yes, stopping burning fossil fuels will have an effect on the earth’s global temperature average, which is the goal.
Under capitalism, people wouldn't be waiting around for the government to fix the issue,
“Under capitalism”?
The capitalism you’re talking about — Rand’s version— doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy. Try looking at the real world instead.
There’s no reason to believe our government can’t solve this issue, and rather easily. What’s in the way is what you’d call “capitalism”: greedy, profit-driven industries who buy off politicians and lobby for what they want. Pretty obvious.
I mean yeah it will effect us, but I don't see any impending doom. You talk like humans won't be handle this. When problems arise, people adapt. Also, fossil fuels are the greatest defense against these issues.
No, they’re the cause of the problem. They and the privileging of profit over people. You’re simply deluded.
You don’t see impending doom? Oh good. Your expert opinion gives me solace.
Because you're apparently completely unwilling to consider future consequences.
And because he apparently doesn’t read anything outside climate denial— and maybe not even that, given that the only reference given thus far has been to a YouTube video.
Just some kid doing his impression of Ayn Rand. I don’t see much point in continuing.
A really great point that Alex Epstein makes is that as CO2 emissions have gone up, climate related deaths have plummeted.
https://youtu.be/0_a9RP0J7PA at 16:55
If no one is dying, what are we so worried about? Why would we take away fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are preventing deaths and increasing people's quality of life?
The capitalism you’re talking about — Rand’s version— doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy. Try looking at the real world instead.
There’s no reason to believe our government can’t solve this issue, and rather easily. What’s in the way is what you’d call “capitalism”: greedy, profit-driven industries who buy off politicians and lobby for what they want. Pretty obvious.
Yeah, the real world sucks because people don't know what real freedom is.
I've lost my faith in government, especially after COVID. The government passes laws, in other words, restrictions. Restrictions take away freedom. People need freedom to be happy and flourish. Really basic concept.
If we have any hope of dealing with climate change, it's allowing capitalism to come up with solutions with competition and innovation, not the government controlling people like animals. And depriving them of fossil fuels, which is our only means of survival from the climate.
No, they’re the cause of the problem. They and the privileging of profit over people. You’re simply deluded.
You realize that's a contradiction? When people make a profit, it's because they've provided value to the economy, people are benefitting from the product.
Restrictions take away freedom. People need freedom to be happy and flourish. Really basic concept.
So laws are "restrictions," in Ayn Rand's eyes (sorry, I mean "your" eyes), and thus restrict freedom. How quaint.
By this I gather you exempt the laws ("restrictions") that keep the wealthy in their positions of powers, like the corporation as a person (a gift from the state), patent laws, copyright laws, private property laws, etc. To say nothing of roads, bridges, police, military, subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts when they fail. All from the government. That's all fine, I assume.
Traffic laws should probably go, though. So should laws against malpractice. That's not cancer you're dying from -- it's "real freedom."
Laughable if it wasn't so sad that people really think like this.
Actually, I think people like him have it really good in life. So often, ignorance in fact is bliss.
Yeah, another kid who thinks he has it all figured out because he's discovered some Ayn Rand or Thomas Sowell (the latest "libertarian" darling) videos on YouTube. I can see that. They speak with authority, are well educated, and aren't completely insane. Some things of theirs I even agree with. But when I see how their followers apply their thinking to issues like climate change or corporate malfeasance, it's fairly obvious that something's gone wrong.
If we have any hope of dealing with climate change, it's allowing capitalism to come up with solutions with competition and innovation, not the government controlling people like animals. And depriving them of fossil fuels, which is our only means of survival from the climate.
I've asked you to take ten minutes to read about climate change, and you've refused. Eventually I'll just ignore you. But since 10 minutes may be a long time to some, here's literally 60 seconds worth:
You keep repeating this, and you're confused. So I'll repeat: there is no "capitalism." I don't know what you're referring to when you say that. So either explain what you mean or stop embarrassing yourself by mindlessly repeating slogans.
Second, fossil fuels (and the greed of the industry, driven by profits at the cost of society -- what some would call "capitalism") are the cause of this crisis. Using more of them is literally the opposite of what needs to happen. Do you see that or not? Clearly you don't. Which, again, is why I would recommend learning about this topic.
Lastly, you likewise keep repeating that fossil fuels are the "only means of survival from the climate." Based on what you've previously said, you mean air conditioning and electricity and things like that, which is mind-boggling. The more we use fossil fuels, the worse the situation will get. Period. So yes, we need electricity for heat and air conditioning, and we need transportation. This can all be done with renewable energy -- nuclear energy, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. That's what needs to happen. That's what we're transitioning to.
Your position is literally: "Wow, it's getting really hot out -- who cares? As long as we can stay cool inside, with our air conditioners, what difference does it make what happens 'out there'?"
Lastly, you likewise keep repeating that fossil fuels are the "only means of survival from the climate." Based on what you've previously said, you mean air conditioning and electricity and things like that, which is mind-boggling. The more we use fossil fuels, the worse the situation will get. Period. So yes, we need electricity for heat and air conditioning, and we need transportation. This can all be done with renewable energy -- nuclear energy, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. That's what needs to happen. That's what we're transitioning to.
This new energy is expensive and difficult to come by. It's absolutely 100% not true that fossil fuels make things worse.
The more we use fossil fuels, the easier it is to manipulate our surroundings to make life on Earth comfortable. Fossil fuels are not the enemy. Fossil fuels are a reliable, cheap, and plentiful source of energy.
I don't give a squawk what the climate does, I'm not departing from fossil fuels.
Just as I thought. Stick with your dogma and be happy. The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels, which are 100% contributing to the climate crisis (despite your delusions), whether you like it or not. Sorry!
That’s because you’re scientifically illiterate. But I don’t care if you don’t care— by all means troll somewhere else and be happy with your Ayn Rand/capitalism worship. This happens to be titled “climate change.” If you don’t care about it, next time don’t comment.
That’s because you’re scientifically illiterate. But I don’t care if you don’t care— by all means troll somewhere else and be happy with your Ayn Rand/capitalism worship.
Ayn Rand makes me happy; I think she's a beautiful thinker. So I'll stick to it.
Yeah, the real world sucks because people don't know what real freedom is.
I've lost my faith in government, especially after COVID. The government passes laws, in other words, restrictions. Restrictions take away freedom. People need freedom to be happy and flourish. Really basic concept.
Laughable if it wasn't so sad that people really think like this.
/.../
Yeah, another kid who thinks he has it all figured out because he's discovered some Ayn Rand or Thomas Sowell
Some people really are able to think and live in cutthroat terms, though. They don't have humanist sensitivities. For them, it's perfectly normal that species, including humans become extinct -- nothing to make a fuss about. They can be quite careless about their own death as well.
For them, it's perfectly normal that species, including humans become extinct -- nothing to make a fuss about.
If one finds epic poignancy in contemplating the demise of our species, that's love. It means all the cynicism and religious based self hatred has dropped away.
Not everyone can handle experiencing that love. Some can't stop hating humanity because they can't stop hating themselves. These are the people who can't think rationally about climate change. All they can do is rage like toddlers as if that will make any difference.
[quote=] According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress, there are still 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress, including 109 representatives and 30 senators, who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. All 139 of these climate-denying elected officials have made recent statements casting doubt on the clear, established scientific consensus that the world is warming—and that human activity is to blame. These same 139 climate-denying members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil, and gas industries.
While the number of climate deniers has shrunk by 11 members (from 150 to 139) since the CAP Action Fund’s analysis of the 116th Congress—largely in the face of growing and overwhelming public support for action on climate—their numbers still include the majority of the congressional Republican caucus.* These climate deniers comprise 52 percent of House Republicans; 60 percent of Senate Republicans; and more than one-quarter of the total number of elected officials in Congress. Furthermore, despite the decline in total overall deniers in Congress, a new concerning trend has emerged: Of the 69 freshmen representatives and senators elected to their respective offices in 2020, one-third deny the science of climate change, including 20 new House Republicans and three-of-four new Republican senators. Of note, no currently serving Democratic or independent elected officials have engaged in explicit climate denial by this analysis’ definition. [/quote]
Reply to Xtrix I've said my piece, and I think its fair. Nowhere does this blog say "everything is fine, go back to consuming" it just said "not as bad as the media makes it out to be". There's lots to do, and undoubtedly the third world is going to suffer tremendously so we agree there. But you don't have to be disagreeable and go "oh you're just delusional, you don't know anything. We're fucked and you're an idiot." You've given me two articles, one of which is not written by a scientist and the other which is an interview with a scientist. That's fine and all, but scientists aren't infallible. I could easily flip what you're saying around and just say this particular scientist is being alarmist and going against established literature. You're going to say I have my head in the sand and that I'm trying to make myself feel better, when all I'm doing is trying to make things as realistic as possible. Hell, even Michael Mann who tends to exaggerate the severity of the issue admits that the "we're doomed" mindset is a new form of denialism. I agree with you that the other poster here is being silly-free market capitalism isn't the proper solution to climate change, but it's also false that current governments aren't doing anything about climate change. Many are doing the bare minimum, but a lot of other countries (most notably China) consistently manage to overachieve their IPCC pledges. So no, I'm not a climate denier-I'm just not an eco pessimist or an "everything is fine there is no climate change" moron
Nowhere does this blog say "everything is fine, go back to consuming" it just said "not as bad as the media makes it out to be".
It says it's not as bad as the media make it out to be because it's nit-picking. Playing semantic games at a moment like this, when scientists around the world are alarmed and telling us how catastrophic this can be if we don't do something very quickly, is just irresponsible and feeds right into climate denialism, or at best climate apathy. It's "not as bad" because some people make the (potentially) erroneous claim that not all humans will survive, or it won't occur for another 100 or so years -- and by then we'll know how to solve the problem. This is the logic. If you don't see why this is misguided, you haven't been listening to the vast majority of climatologists.
But you don't have to be disagreeable and go "oh you're just delusional, you don't know anything. We're fucked and you're an idiot."
I don't think you're an idiot, and I don't think we're fucked if we act on this issue right now. As I said many times, there are sensible solutions. It's right there. It just takes pressuring of these so-called leaders of ours.
What I disagree with is when people -- like you -- choose to give far more attention and weight to a small minority of people (usually not climatologists) who claim that either nothing is happening or, in your case, that it's happening but it won't be as bad as the most extreme claims and so we don't need to worry as much about it. That's not delusional, it's dangerous.
That's fine and all, but scientists aren't infallible. I could easily flip what you're saying around and just say this particular scientist is being alarmist and going against established literature.
It's worth paying attention when 97% + scientists, around the world, are telling us we have about 12 years to get a move on things. It's also worth opening your eyes to what's happening right now. If you want more literature or references, I'll be happy to give them.
I agree with you that the other poster here is being silly-free market capitalism isn't the proper solution to climate change, but it's also false that current governments aren't doing anything about climate change. Many are doing the bare minimum, but a lot of other countries (most notably China) consistently manage to overachieve their IPCC pledges.
When did I say that governments aren't doing anything? Like you say, they are -- but not nearly enough. Especially the US and China.
Hmm.. aren't greenhouses good for the environment? It is a "green" gas. That's good for nature. Having a hot climate like a the dinosaurs did sounds great! Maybe our climate can change to a more dino-like biosphere.
Illuminati confirmed, Exxonmobil lobbying against climate science to terraform dinosaurs back to life.
Reply to XtrixReply to Xtrix The thing is though is that most climate scientists aren't really saying we only have "12 years" to save the world. The people who are giving this "12 years" slogan are journalists who in my opinion don't actually have the proper credentials or time to sift through dense papers and technical models on the climate.
Here is a paper published and peer reviewed by several sociologists who specialize in human geography, climate change and public policy who disagree with the 12 year deadline idea. https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41558-019-0543-4
And here is Michael Mann talking about doomism and its dangers:
You have a right to feel urgency about it, but all I'm saying is that the science shows the most extreme and out there scenarios aren't even on the table anymore thanks to the pledges. A 4 degree rise was once a possibility, but the current rise is projected to be 2.5 degrees by 2050 and is expected to lower even more as pledges ramp up in the coming years (sadly the consensus is that we will probably not get to 1.5 degrees though). Even Mann agrees that corporations are largely to blame for this, and blaming people for their lifestyle isn't the root of the issue (not that you've indicated that, but some here were suggesting market only solutions)
It's worth paying attention when 97% + scientists, around the world, are telling us we have about 12 years to get a move on things. It's also worth opening your eyes to what's happening right now. If you want more literature or references, I'll be happy to give them.
Yeah this isn't fear mongering being used to grab political power.
The thing is though is that most climate scientists aren't really saying we only have "12 years" to save the world. The people who are giving this "12 years" slogan are journalists who in my opinion don't actually have the proper credentials or time to sift through dense papers and technical models on the climate.
First of all, you're making things up. No one is saying we have "12 years to save the world." Absolutely no one. No one serious anyway. That you reflexively mischaracterize it this way already exposes your warped perspective.
Secondly, it is absolutely coming from climate scientists, not from journalists. The journalists have reported on it. If some have stated we have "12 years to save the world," they're probably from Fox News. From other media, it's usually straightforward. It comes from an IPCC report, which you can read here.
What it states, as I stated, is that we have 12 years (less now), or until about 2030 to really get a move on things. The year 2050 is the more important (and more realistic) target -- but it becomes increasingly unlikely if we don't start working towards more immediate goals as a foundation.
Here is a paper published and peer reviewed by several sociologists who specialize in human geography, climate change and public policy who disagree with the 12 year deadline idea.
No, they disagree with how the 12-year IPCC recommendation is being interpreted, and how that can be dangerous. That's a reasonable issue, but completely separate from what actually is recommended by the IPCC, which is exactly as I mentioned: we have until 2030 to get things moving. That doesn't mean the world will end. The danger with giving any kind of "deadline" like that, as the paper mentions, is that it becomes a political weapon.
"You say that fossil fuel interests are not just fighting against renewable energy. They are also pushing the idea that it is too late—that climate change cannot be stopped, and it is pointless to try to do so at this stage.
MM: Conservative media are promoting people such as Guy McPherson, who says that we have 10 years left before exponential climate change literally extinguishes life on Earth and that we should somehow find a way to cope with our imminent demise. I call it “climate doom porn.” It’s very popular, it really sells magazines, but it’s incredibly disabling. If you believe that we have no agency, then why take any action? I’m not saying that fossil fuel companies are funding people like McPherson; I have no evidence of that. But when you look at who is actually pushing this message, it’s the conservative media networks that air his interviews."
I agree wholeheartedly. But again, no scientists are saying "we're doomed," and neither am I. Neither is the IPCC. What they're saying is that we need to do something quickly, and they lay out a plan. The only ones who want to twist it as "forget it, we're already doomed, so don't bother" or mischaracterize it as "we only have 10 years left or the world will explode!" are conservative media and fossil fuel propaganda. That's not what the scientists are saying.
To invoke Michael Mann in relation to the original article you quoted is strange -- because it's exactly that attitude that he's fighting against, even in the very article you cite (if you read it in its entirety).
You have a right to feel urgency about it, but all I'm saying is that the science shows the most extreme and out there scenarios aren't even on the table anymore thanks to the pledges. A 4 degree rise was once a possibility, but the current rise is projected to be 2.5 degrees by 2050 and is expected to lower even more as pledges ramp up in the coming years
Again, I have to ask for references here. I think there's still very much a good possibility we get to 4 degrees or more. I'd love to believe the opposite, so I'm happy to take a look.
Not once did I say we’re doomed. Yes, if we do nothing — we’re dead. “If.” That’s not hard to understand, and that’s not saying “we’re doomed.” The choice is ours — it’s not foregone.
So those are the choices: we make it happen or we don’t. If we don’t, we’re dead. That’s obvious, and that’s why scientists are saying we need to ACT. The fact that you equate this with “we’re doomed” says a decent amount about your reading comprehension.
Doomed implies it’s inevitable. Which justifies doing nothing, since we’re doomed anyway.
Here’s a cartoon version. An asteroid is approaching Earth. Scientist A: “We’re doomed.” Scientist B: “If we don’t act, we’re all gonna die.” Most will see the difference here.
I don’t expect you to understand the difference, so just go back to sleep.
Doomed implies it’s inevitable. Which justifies doing nothing, since we’re doomed anyway.
I don't know of any legit scientists who say we're doomed either way.
But you realize that this is a long-term problem?
Broaden your temporal horizon and take in more of the situation.
Imagine that 200 short years from now humans decide to release all the CO2 they can get their hands on. This means all the North American coal, which is humongous.
The climate will be altered pretty drastically for a couple thousand years. In about 10,000 years, things will be be getting closer to baseline. In 100,000 years, the CO2 level will be back to preindustrial levels
So we'll have a couple of jolts for life on earth to deal with. Humans will be fine. Primates evolved in the PETM, so there's no reason to think we'll face anything we can't handle. Civilization us a different question.
So if we succeed in completely transitioning off fossil fuels now, that doesn't solve any problems. It's just one hurdle. The problem will still exist for our descendants.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but this issue comes up in any freshman class in climate change: the fact that we have no experience dealing with long range problems. Doesn't mean we couldn't develop the ability, but we haven't even begun to speculate how.
I'm talking about human life, not general biological life. So in case that wasn't clear, there you go. Yes, bacteria will probably go on without us. That's little consolation to me, my grandkids, or my great-great grandkids.
Well, then we should not say that the goal is to save the World, but just to say to help us and the few next generations of humans after us.
That doesn't provide perspective at all, really. Not if we're talking about human life. Because, if you notice, we haven't been around that long. Behaviorally modern humans, maybe 200 or so thousand years. Better to look at that record. Also best to take a look at what scientists say about this and why it's important.
A holistic view is sometimes quite important. You see, if you start from thinking about yourself and then come to conclusions to what to do, you might not think about the broader effects your actions do.
Understanding that we are a part of nature too, helps think of the situation better in my view.
Better than building rabbit-proof fences, yeah. This mentality is what I was thinking of btw:
[quote]I mean yeah there's all this science, but what are we supposed to do about it? Just cut out fossil fuels without a real replacement? To me that's scary. Epstein's point is that fossil fuels protect and enhance people's lives. Fossil fuels protect people from heat waves. And yet the environmentalists want to limit them. I find it to be worrisome.
This is very typical in my experience. It'd be like trying to ban guns in the US, people would just lose their minds.
Sometimes it's hard to even face the facts how these things work. Like a Democrat administration banning guns in the current political environment wouldn't do wonders to the already vitriolic political environment. The same problems are when we let's say talk about replacing fossil fuels. The way things work in our global economy is that you would have the cheaper alternative energy resource. Even that still would leave the plethora of uses that for example oil has, which shouldn't be forgotten.
And perhaps there is the distinction of whom we want to listen. We will listen to the scientist and to the activist we agree with. Yet many would be hesitant to listening to economists or people from the corporate sector who basically are in charge of these issues (as we don't trust them). Yet the issue isn't just environmental, it is economic, logistical and political. All those issues have to be tackled before we have the true environmental solution. Otherwise the politicians will just fool us with grand promises of getting solutions in a decade or two that will not become reality.
I don't know of any legit scientists who say we're doomed either way.
No one is saying we’re doomed.
If we continue business as usual? Yes, then we’re dead. There’s a chance, of course, that we survive— just as there’s a chance that we survive nuclear war. We can focus on that chance if we like. Doesn’t change what scientists are saying.
Yes, one that we need to act on very quickly — in the short term. If we listen to scientists, of course. I choose to listen to them. I recommend others do too.
If we continue business as usual? Yes, then we’re dead.
No. You've got a truckload of self-righteous anger, but few facts. Whether you correct that or not depends on how much you are actually interested in the topic
Reply to frank As you may recall from a former conversation a while back, that all humans die is a given. So the issue is not one of whether or not humans will die.
The issue, at least as some of us see it, is the degree of suffering experienced by us and other humans - including that which is to be experienced by future generations - while alive.
And, while others will speak for themselves, I for one don't find overall positions such as that of @Xtrix's in any way discordant to the issue I've just addressed.
The issue, at least as some of us see it, is the degree of suffering experienced by us and other humans - including that which is to be experienced by future generations - while alive
Finally, an element of intelligence in this conversation, rather than hysteria. Then one gets into the nitty gritty of degrees of suffering and how to possibly mitigate some of that.
Read The Long Thaw by David Archer. He says there is no reason to believe humans won't survive the changes.
You haven't read David Archer -- who's a serious person and a climate scientist.
As I've said before, there is very good reason to believe it could wipe us out completely. That's one scenario. I view it as the most likely IF we don't take significant actions.
True, there's a chance it may not wipe us out if we continue business as usual. There's a chance nuclear war won't wipe us out either. That seems to be comforting enough for you.
Climate scientists. What you don't seem to understand, but which I'll repeat again, is that this assumes "business as usual," which is what I (and Tim) mentioned. There are feedback loops and tipping points that can be reached -- it's called the "hothouse earth" scenario, and many climatologists take it quite seriously. Not surprising that you've completely missed all the literature on this.
“...attention has been given to a ‘hothouse Earth’ scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining. This ‘hothouse Earth’ planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower."
[...]
From an interview about the above:
“Our argument is in essence that on the present path, including the commitments in Paris, warming will be three or three and a bit degrees. If you include climate cycle feedbacks, which are not included in the IPCC analysis, it’ll be effectively higher.” For both those claims, there’s significant published science backing him. Then he gets to the controversial bit: “Three degrees may end our civilization.”
For that claim, he cites climate scientist John Schellnhuber, who said in an interview early this year, “if we get it wrong, do the wrong things ... then I think there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation,” and UN Secretary General António Guterres, who has said “The problem is that the status quo is a suicide.”
Again -- these arguments could be wrong. The arguments about whether a nuclear holocaust would truly wipe out every human being could be wrong too. But I see no reason not to take them seriously, and absolutely no reason to dismiss or ignore them outright (a line that you've apparently taken, for whatever reason).
"A doomsday future is not inevitable! But without immediate drastic action our prospects are poor. We must act collectively. We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind."
And, while others will speak for themselves, I for one don't find overall positions such as that of Xtrix's in any way discordant to the issue I've just addressed.
That climate change, like nuclear war, is an existential threat? Good. When I say this, I'm repeating what I've read from scientists, not the media.
People don't like hearing this, of course. That's the real issue. So maybe it's better to pretend these scenarios don't exist -- I don't know, I'm not a politician or pundit. But even if they aren't true, and humans will go on living -- I don't think anyone would want to live in that world, or have their grandkids live in it.
Those who dismiss it all as "alarmism" simply represent another variant of climate denialism.
Thanks for reading what I wrote and taking the time to correct me, you're right I didn't really think what I said through. But I'm honestly confused as to what you mean by get things moving. Do you mean get things moving to avoid 4 degrees by 2050? If so, I doubt that's really possible. With pledges increased and continuing to increase, I think that even in 2021 we could get below 2 degrees by 2100 with further pledges in 2025 and 2030. The business as usual scenario would probably be like if we had our current pledges now and stopped doing anything else for the next 50 years which is incredibly unlikely.
If the Hothouse Earth Hypothesis is correct, then stabilising at or above 2°C would lead to a gradual but inevitable drift up to 4°C by say the year ~3000 (because of the tipping points i think) making the 2-4°C range impossible to remain stable in on long timescales. But as you can read here, a lot of scientists are unsure if it would really trigger past 2 degrees:
I actually read most of the articles and papers linked too here, and if anything a lot of scientists seem agree that climate change is very unlikely to be an existential risk. It's for the most part politicians and policy advisors that seem to be overstating the scientific case, I would presume because they think that is needed to inspire political action.
And while I do think climate change is a serious problem that needs to be resolved, I don't think this kind of rhetoric serves that cause really. I think it damages their credibility, handing out free ammunition to climate deniers... and maybe more importantly accurate assessment of risks is important to determine what kinds of drastic solutions we need to consider to solve the problem.
What could potentially be an existential risk, and typically not included in these risk-analysis, are the social and political problems we cause as a reaction to the effects of climate change. The last thing we need it is more oil on the fire of an already overheated debate (pun intended!).
I actually read most of the articles and papers linked too here, and if anything a lot of scientists seem agree that climate change is very unlikely to be an existential risk.
That's just nonsense. Climate change is an existential risk -- there's little doubt about that. What you -- and others -- want to do here is split hairs: "Well, it's not really existential because some humans may survive" or "We'll probably get enough things done, so it's not very likely," etc. You have no idea what you're talking about, I'm afraid.
I'll repeat a thousand times: if we keep business as usual -- which means the pace we're going, pumping more and more CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere -- we're dead. Yes, the IPCC doesn't put it quite like that, but they have to be balanced. This latest leak shows how alarmed they're getting.
Between the IPCC and climate denial there's another large group: those who believe we're under-estimating the effects of climate change. If you pay attention to the news lately, again and again you read of how scientists have underestimated how quickly these negative effects would happen, whether it be the ice caps melting or whatever else. That doesn't seem to get much attention from the major media.
So yes, we should be much more alarmed than we are right now. Much more. In the same way we would be if an asteroid were approaching Earth. In that scenario, I'm sure there'd be people who claim it's "asteroid alarmism." but that's not really worth much attention.
And while I do think climate change is a serious problem that needs to be resolved, I don't think this kind of rhetoric serves that cause really. I think it damages their credibility, handing out free ammunition to climate deniers... and maybe more importantly accurate assessment of risks is important to determine what kinds of drastic solutions we need to consider to solve the problem.
What kind of rhetoric? The truth?
If by "rhetoric" you mean claiming that "we're doomed," then yes -- that's stupid, does no good, and isn't true. That's not what I'm saying, nor what climate scientists are saying.
If that's difficult, I'll put it this way: an asteroid is heading to earth. (1) If we do nothing -- what happens? We're dead. (2) If we act, we'll survive. Suppose someone starts saying, "We're doomed." What does this imply exactly? It seems to exclude (2), and thus no matter what we do we're dead.
So no, we're not doomed. But we need to start being far less nonchalant about this, and start taking it much more seriously. I see it in this very forum. Not outright denial, but not nearly alarmed enough. I chalk it up to not paying attention.
But I'm honestly confused as to what you mean by get things moving. Do you mean get things moving to avoid 4 degrees by 2050? If so, I doubt that's really possible.
If we hit 4 degrees Celsius by 2050, we can wave goodbye to human life as we know it. If you think that's somehow not "really possible," then you're resigned to our probable demise. That's fine. But in that case, one would think you'd be on the front lines of this issue rather than pacifying yourself with articles about how these scientists are "probably" wrong about the effects and are being a bit too pessimistic.
If the Hothouse Earth Hypothesis is correct, then stabilising at or above 2°C would lead to a gradual but inevitable drift up to 4°C by say the yea
What?
It's not inevitable, and it's not about 2 degrees C. It's about whether we trigger various tipping points which speeds up the effects. That's very possible even at 2C, but not inevitable. I also don't know where exactly you get the year 3000 -- but it seems to me there's a lot of talk about how "far away" the effects of climate change are, which makes me rather suspicious.
"The year 3000? Eh, we'll have it figured out by then." So now we can all continue on with our lives. Meanwhile, every year is breaking temperature records and there's major wildfires, heat waves and draughts as we speak.
That's just nonsense. Climate change is an existential risk -- there's little doubt about that. What you -- and others -- want to do here is split hairs: "Well, it's not really existential because some humans may survive" or "We'll probably get enough things done, so it's not very likely," etc. You have no idea what you're talking about, I'm afraid.
I'm splitting hairs when that's how the term is used in the article you linked to and literally the conclusion of the article?
So where does this all leave us? It’s worthwhile to look into the worst-case scenarios, and even to highlight and emphasize them. But it’s important to accurately represent current climate consensus along the way. It’s hard to see how we solve a problem we have widespread misapprehensions about in either direction, and when a warning is overstated or inaccurate, it may sow more confusion than inspiration.
Climate change won’t kill us all. That matters. Yet it’s one of the biggest challenges ahead of us, and the results of our failure to act will be devastating.
And apparently it's not even close to an existential risk, even in worst case scenario's:
Further, “the carbon effects don’t seem to pose an existential risk,” he told me. “People use 10 degrees as an illustrative example” — of a nightmare scenario where climate change goes much, much worse than expected in every respect — “and looking at it, even 10 degrees would not really cause the collapse of industrial civilization,” though the effects would still be pretty horrifying.
Poltical rethoric from climate activists and the like... Of course there is rethoric from both sides, that is what happens in politics, only scientists are after the truth.
If that's difficult, I'll put it this way: an asteroid is heading to earth. (1) If we do nothing -- what happens? We're dead. (2) If we act, we'll survive. Suppose someone starts saying, "We're doomed." What does this imply exactly? It seems to exclude (2), and thus no matter what we do we're dead.
See that is exactly not what this problem is, and only further proves the point I was trying to make. Climate change is a slow building problem and can have varying effects on a wide spectrum over centuries and millenia depending on how much greenhouse gasses will be pumped into the atmosphere. It's nothing like an astroid hitting the earth where we either prevent the impact or die immediately.... The analogy is only good if you want to scare people into action, it's rethoric.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 07, 2021 at 08:02#5625030 likes
Let me save all the "it's not an existential threat" crowd on here some time. Here's Republican Dan Crenshaw for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQAGr1s1XFc
If you're convinced by this, that's your own issue.
I've said this before, I'm not an American, I'm not invested in republic-democratic politics either way. I fully expected some cherry-picking of scientific findings at best and outright distortion of the science more probably... to suit his political agenda. He's a politician afterall, that's what I expect.
But I have to say the claims he's making in this particular video concerning the impact of climate change don't even seem to be all that outrageous (i'm not talking about the particular policies he proposes, which I generally don't agree with). And sure he leaves out a whole lot, but science does seem to support the things that he does say. Democrats are making it easy for him to sound somewhat reasonably on these points because they are overstating the scientific case.
It's not an existential threat, not even close. Calling attempts to clarify or nuance what is meant by existential threat "hair-splitting" is a bit disingenuous. Given the gravity of the claim and the consequences thereof, it would seem especially important to be clear about what kind of threats we should be expecting.
Well there's really no alternative I can see -- so you're either wrong or we're dead.
There's lots of possibilities in between we all take drastic action right now or the human race is doomed in a few decades. Maybe civilization manages to adapt. Maybe new technology helps mitigate the worst of the changes. Maybe the doomsday scenarios are worst-case, lower probability outcomes. Maybe all we need is moderate changes to cleaner energy and slightly less consumption with tax incentives in place over the next couple decades, plus some tree planting campaigns and what not.
Maybe trying to push for drastic changes right now is counter productive. For one thing, it's likely to face political backlash and the politicians supporting those changes getting voted out of office in the next election cycle. Even if governments and corporations embraced more radical changes that the public were willing to endure, maybe that would retard technological progress into finding better solutions.
We are talking about predicting how humanity reacts to the climate warming up, not the climate models themselves. That's a whole different ball of wax.
It's not an existential threat, not even close.
— ChatteringMonkey
Based on what we understand now, this is true.
How would you reframe the issue to give it a little punch?
I'm not great at punchy lines but.... We're degrading the earth at the expense of current and future generations? Probably not punchy enough?
The longer version is that greenhouse gasses warm the earth which will cause a number of problems, for us, and for the rest of biological life and ecosystems which will in turn have effects on us. More floods and heat waves, food and water shortages, more extreme weather, disturbed ecosystems, new pandemics etc etc... This is very unlikely to kill us all or even most of us, but a number of people will die because of it and it will make things generally worse for most.
And this are only the direct consequences of climate change. Imagine what kind of immigration problems Europe will have when it gets really bad in sub-Saharan Africa with its massively rising population. It's already a major political and social problem now, and that could be dwarfed by climate refugees to come. The real danger is that societies that are already under tension now, will collapse under the strains of climate change. And when tensions get high that also increases the chances of wars between nations for resources that have become more scarce. If you lose control over that, the problems could compound...
Greenhouse gasses stay a long time in the atmosphere and are hard to remove, even with foreseeable future technologies. This means that if we don't do enough now and in the coming decades we are essentially condemning future generations to put massive amounts of effort in dealing with it... we're restricting their potential to flourish.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 07, 2021 at 11:05#5625630 likes
I look at it this way Frank, after a long history of human struggle we are on the verge of finally pulling our shit together somewhat. Coming technological advances, in bio-tech, genetics, AI and what have you, have the potential to define the future course of humanity. If we mess up with how we deal with those we could have some real nasty dystopias on the horizon... I think, especially now, it is of prime importance that we keep our sanity as societies, because the state of our societies will determine how we will handle those. Climate change, if not dealt with properly, has the potential to become a problem we definitely could do without.
I have a simple question to ask. First off the climate change/global warming claims need to be made clear. I recently had a conversation with my brother-in-law and I made a comment about a recent heat-wave and that global warming really is true; he was kind enough to correct me - global warming doesn't necessarily imply heat, it could also manifest as unusual cold weather.
I thought nothing of it until now.
My question: So, those who claim that global warming/climate change is a fact are claiming if it suddenly starts snowing all over the world, temperatures drop below freezing, rivers and lakes in the tropics freeze over, it's all caused by global "warming"? :chin:
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 07, 2021 at 12:02#5625730 likes
Are you serious? The climate is not the weather. It's about the average global temperature over longer periods, not local temperatures on a certain day. The fact that is snows somewhere, some day doesn't mean anything for climate change. Average global temperatures rising is what is meant with global warming.
I recently had a conversation with my brother-in-law and I made a comment about a recent heat-wave and that global warming really is true; he was kind enough to correct me - global warming doesn't necessarily imply heat, it could also manifest as unusual cold weather.
It could locally and temporarily manifest as unusual cold weather, because of the effects of global warming on phenomena like the gulf stream which gives Northern America and Europa a warmer climate then you would expect based solely on latitude.
Are you serious? The climate is not the weather. It's about the average global temperature, not local temperatures on a certain day. The fact that is snows somewhere, some day doesn't mean anything for climate change. Average global temperatures rising is what is meant with global warming.
I was talking about the climate, not the weather - global cooling in the form of worldwide snow, freezing temperatures in (say) the Sahara, and so on. Remember climate change is about extremes - that cuts both ways (h9t or cold). Ergo, global warming can lead to global cooling. Paradox or climate change is a hoax, a well-orchestrated one.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 07, 2021 at 12:10#5625770 likes
Are you serious? The climate is not the weather. It's about the average global temperature, not local temperatures on a certain day. The fact that is snows somewhere, some day doesn't mean anything for climate change. Average global temperatures rising is what is meant with global warming.
— ChatteringMonkey
I was talking about the climate, not the weather - global cooling in the form of worldwide snow, freezing temperatures in (say) the Sahara, and so on. Remember climate change is about extremes - that cuts both ways (h9t or cold). Ergo, global warming can lead to global cooling. Paradox or climate change is a hoax, a well-orchestrated one.
No it couldn't lead to global cooling, then it would be global cooling instant of global warming.
Extremes are possible, temporarily, but then that's not climate, or locally, but then that's not global.
Why not? All climate-change-is-real believers (what do you call 'em?) talk about is extreme weather. Ergo, if it snowed heavily (6 - 10 ft) all day for a month (that would be weather) all over the earth, it would be because of global warming but such an event will cause long-term global cooling, no? Ice, snow, cools, right?
We could aim to overcome climate change completely.
Sufficient clean energy is available from the molten interior of the earth; that we could decide and agree to solve this problem, and we could solve it. It must be possible to extract energy from magma heated rock given the sophistication of drilling technologies developed by the fossil fuel industry; and assuming so - there is the potential to meet and exceed global energy demand in short order, from a vast, clean, constant source of base load power.
Producing electrical power converted to hydrogen via electrolysis, and compressed; liquified hydrogen contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum, and when burnt produces only water vapour. Shipping liquified hydrogen fuel in tanker ships; to be burnt in existing power stations would produce and distribute clean electricity via exiting grids - and so would work with the larger part of existing energy infrastructures.
Given an effectively limitless surplus of energy to power carbon capture and storage, desalination and irrigation, and recycling, there's no scientific or technological reason why we could not meet and overcome the climate challenge, and secure a sustainable balance between human welfare and a viable ecosystem going forward.
It's just a matter of looking at the science and technology first, and the solution is fairly obvious, and could sustain continued economic growth going forward, such that it does not require action in direct opposition to natural human motives and ideological interests to address. It seems improbable precisely because we are limited by our ideological horizons, forced into a bottleneck of ever tighter regulation and taxation without end or hope! But just beyond, there is a viable solution, and beyond that - a hopeful future!
No it couldn't lead to global cooling
— ChatteringMonkey
Why not? All climate-change-is-real believers (what do you call 'em?) talk about is extreme weather. Ergo, if it snowed heavily (6 - 10 ft) all day for a month (that would be weather) all over the earth, it would be because of global warming but such an event will cause long-term global cooling, no? Ice, snow, cools, right?
Extreme weather in the form of cold, for a month, 'globally' probably is very unlikely in a global warming scenario.
And even then it does not cause climate cooling. Climate is an average over years. One month would have an impact on that number sure, a month is a fraction of years after all, but not significantly.
It's not an existential threat, not even close.
— ChatteringMonkey
Really? It certainly is for some people and some nations. Killed some, and soon will make some uninhabitable. Of course, those aren't the important people, so voila, no existential threat!
Come on, put in some effort please. Existential threat is defined as a threat to all human life. It's right there in the article Xtrix linked to. I'm well aware that people will die because of climate change, and that we need to do something about it, I've said so multiple times already in this thread alone.
Extreme weather in the form of cold, for a month, 'globally' probably is very unlikely in a global warming scenario.
How do you know that? A lot of that liquid water, a predicted outcome of global warming, means more clouds, more clouds means less sun, less sun means (more) cooling. As a case in point, it's early July, peak summer, where I am and I picked up a cool idiom a coupla months ago - "it'll be a cold day in July when x happens" - and it feels like mid-September, coldish. Who's to blame? Thick cloud cover over the week with mild rain. Global warming is going to, heat up the oceans, and all that water will eventually end up as a vast blanket of clouds covering the skies from pole to pole. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 07, 2021 at 14:11#5626310 likes
How do you know that? A lot of that liquid water, a predicted outcome of global warming, means more clouds, more clouds means less sun, less sun means (more) cooling. As a case in point, it's early July, peak summer, where I am and I picked up a cool idiom a coupla months ago - "it'll be a cold day in July when x happens" - and it feels like mid-September, coldish. Who's to blame? Thick cloud cover over the week with mild rain. Global warming is going to, heat up the oceans, and all that water will eventually end up as a vast blanket of clouds covering the skies from pole to pole. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
Greenhouse gasses trap heat, and causes global warming. This is well documented, from the geological record, and follows from the physics of how light and heat radiation interacts with greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
As for the cloud scenario, Venus is covered in a thick blanket of clouds... should be freezing cold over there then, right?
Greenhouse gasses trap heat, and causes global warming. This is well documented, from the geological record, and follows from the physics of how light and heat radiation interacts with greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
As for the cloud scenario, Venus is covered in a thick blanket of clouds... should be freezing cold over there then, right?
That's a non sequitur - Venus is Venus, Earth is Earth. Also, look up Year Without A Summer - volcanic ash clouds over the entire earth caused global temperatures to nosedive to winter levels. Global "warming" is going to blot out the sun with clouds at an even grander scale. Earth cooling down is what I think'll happen.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 07, 2021 at 14:33#5626420 likes
That's a non sequitur - Venus is Venus, Earth is Earth. Also, look up Year Without A Summer - volcanic ash clouds over the entire earth caused global temperatures to nosedive to winter levels. Global "warming" is going to blot out the sun with clouds at an even grander scale. Earth cooling down is what I think'll happen.
This is a non sequitur, volcanic ash is volcanic ash and not clouds and a lot of greenhouse gasses.
Anyway, read up on some science TheMadFool, you seem to be missing the basics.
I agree. I spent a while immersed in the Bronze Age collapse, which was probably a result of natural disasters, war, and civil unrest.
In a short amount of time, two cultures just disappeared. No one factor would have brought the bronze age down. It was the combination of forces.
So the troubled times ahead will have climate change amplifying whatever stresses are native to the situation.
Yet the Bronze Age collapse didn't mean that humans became extinct. The wording which many here use of an "existential" threat in my view shouldn't taken literally as an extinction event of the human race. Earth has had mass extinction events and some say that the change that now species are dying at such rate that one can say that this is a mass extinction event. However the collapse of our present way of life is something totally different from the extinction of the human race. There never has been such an adaptive animal as us, so the idea that climate change will doom us is in my view an exaggeration.
What happens to our current society is another thing. Yet even if that "collapses", it really doesn't mean an existential danger to the human race.
And to make this point, notice that we are living through one of the worst pandemics which was just a few years ago a hypothetical scenario, and we have adapted.
Ash/clouds, the effect is the same - no sunshine! Venus is closer to the sun by the way, that must surely mean something.
It matters what kind of molecules the stuff in the atmosphere is made of. They don't all have the same effect on light coming in and energy radiating out. Some reflect light coming in, like volcanic ash, some trap infrared energy bouncing back from the earth, like greenhouse gasses...
The difference in distance between the earth and Venus matters, but doesn't account for the almost 500 degrees Celsius difference.
It matters what kind of molecules the stuff in the atmosphere is made of. They don't all have the same effect on light coming in and energy radiating out. Some reflect light coming in, like volcanic ash, some trap infrared energy bouncing back from the earth, like greenhouse gasses...
The difference in distance between the earth and Venus matters, but doesn't account for the almost 500 degrees Celsius difference.
Yet the Bronze Age collapse didn't mean that humans became extinct. The wording which many here use of an "existential" threat in my view shouldn't taken literally as an extinction event of the human race.
It turns out to be really difficult to get that message across, though.
Earth has had mass extinction events and some say that the change that now species are dying at such rate that one can say that this is a mass extinction event.
High speed dying doesn't make a mass extinction, though. Some essential part of the Earth's ecosystems has to break down for that. Extinction events are also usually cold, due to vulcanism or depressed greenhouse effect.
However the collapse of our present way of life is something totally different from the extinction of the human race. There never has been such an adaptive animal as us, so the idea that climate change will doom us is in my view an exaggeration.
Definitely. But we'll have to transition to another energy source sooner or later. There's a limited amount of hydrocarbons to burn.
Yet the Bronze Age collapse didn't mean that humans became extinct. The wording which many here use of an "existential" threat in my view shouldn't taken literally as an extinction event of the human race.
Tbf an infrastructural collapse would be somewhat more impactful. I agree, it wouldn't likely wipe out every human. We're omnivores: even if the bees die out, we'll find something to eat and we'll have a lot more time to fuck when there's no on-demand TV. I think the fear is more end-of-civilisation.
Although there will be ample beef in the early days. If we stockpile on pinto beans, rice, salsa verde and Monterey Jack cheese we'll have some good living for a few years before the cannibal apocalypse I reckon.
It's nothing like an astroid hitting the earth where we either prevent the impact or die immediately
It's very much like an asteroid hurling towards earth. Not the same, of course. But regardless, you completely missed the point. The point was that no one, including myself, is saying we're doomed.
You can go on comforting yourself with the idea that tipping points and feedback loops are improbable, or whatever else you'd like. But it's pure irrationality, honestly. If the chances of an existential threat were 0.1%, it'd still be absurd to not take that seriously.
Again, it's worth reading about this. Tell these authors that it's "not even close."
[quote=] The 17 experts, including Prof Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University, author of The Population Bomb, and scientists from Mexico, Australia and the US, say the planet is in a much worse state than most people – even scientists – understood.
“The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,” they write in a report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which references more than 150 studies detailing the world’s major environmental challenges. [/quote]
Pretty thorough interview with Will Steffen: here.
If you're really going solely by whether it wipes out every last human on the face of the planet, then I suppose nuclear weapons aren't an existential threat either. Perhaps the aforementioned asteroid (depending on the size) isn't an existential threat.
So it'll only be a radically changed, hell-like earth. But we'll survive in some capacity -- so we can't call it "existential." If you're somehow comforted by that, you're welcome.
It's not an existential threat, not even close.
— ChatteringMonkey
Based on what we understand now, this is true.
You don't know what you're talking about. It's "true" in the sense that you simply refuse to read anything about it. I've provided plenty of sources. The rest is your business.
My question: So, those who claim that global warming/climate change is a fact are claiming if it suddenly starts snowing all over the world, temperatures drop below freezing, rivers and lakes in the tropics freeze over, it's all caused by global "warming"? :chin:
When the climate changes this rapidly (and the issue is the rate of change), it disrupts all kinds of cycles we've been used to for thousands of years. This means disruptions in the weather, as well -- more extreme swings in rainfall, for example. So we can have flooding and drought happen at the same time within the same country. Likewise, it can impact how cold it gets in winter. We saw Texas freeze over this year, for example. Some of that is related to the changing climate, yes. That doesn't mean we're heading for an ice age. We're heading in the opposite direction.
Remember climate change is about extremes - that cuts both ways (h9t or cold). Ergo, global warming can lead to global cooling. Paradox or climate change is a hoax, a well-orchestrated one.
While extreme cold events may take place as part of an overall disruption, the direction we're going is warming, not cooling. That's why the global temperature average keeps increasing, not decreasing.
It's not an existential threat, not even close.
— ChatteringMonkey
Really? It certainly is for some people and some nations. Killed some, and soon will make some uninhabitable. Of course, those aren't the important people, so voila, no existential threat!
Good point.
If we're going to split hairs about the word "existential," then how about instead of meaning the "human species" we mean the people of Bangladesh? What about them? Or India? Or some of the Polynesian islands? Tell those people it's not "existential."
Okay, so no need to answer my question above -- apparently it wasn't a joke.
So the earth will cool down is what you "think", eh? Guess we can tell those idiots who've studied this carefully all their lives that they're wasting their time -- some guy on the Internet has figured it out from perusing the literature and using his keen philosophical powers.
So the earth will cool down is what you "think", eh?
— Xtrix
Guess what happens if the AMOC shuts down.
Yes, and you've definitely shown yourself to be someone who can tell us.
For those interested in the actual science:
"In climate model simulations of future climate change, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is projected to decline. However, the impacts of this decline, relative to other changes, remain to be identified. Here we address this problem by analyzing 30 idealized abrupt-4xCO2 climate model simulations. We find that in models with larger AMOC decline, there is a minimum warming in the North Atlantic, a southward displacement of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, and a poleward shift of the mid-latitude jet. The changes in the models with smaller AMOC decline are drastically different: there is a relatively larger warming in the North Atlantic, the precipitation response exhibits a wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier pattern, and there are smaller displacements of the mid-latitude jet. Our study indicates that the AMOC is a major source of inter-model uncertainty, and continued observational efforts are needed to constrain the AMOC response in future climate change."
Look up Younger Dryas. That's what happened the last time it stopped.
It's kind of obvious that you don't know much about this and other features of climate change. If you can manage to get your ego under control, we'll all forgive that. We don't care. If you continue, you're just making a fool of yourself. Just a heads up.
Definitely. But we'll have to transition to another energy source sooner or later. There's a limited amount of hydrocarbons to burn.
Limited yes, but never forget the price mechanism: with higher price, more costly production methods and resources become profitable. And here is where the "feelgood" narrative of wishful high minded thinking stumbles upon ignorance of the actual reality. It is far too easy for the high minded to simply declare that we have to consume less.
The best example in my view are the hostile attitudes towards nuclear energy, a zero emissions energy resource. Countries that have made decisions either to go off or radically reduce nuclear energy have either simply not kept their promises (Sweden) or then built coal plants (Japan) or resorted to export energy typically from coal plants (Germany). Japan, where nobody did die in the Fukushima accident (but many thousands in the actual Tsunami in 2011) just shows how illogical energy policy can be:
(Feb 5th, 2020 the NY Times) It is one unintended consequence of the Fukushima nuclear disaster almost a decade ago, which forced Japan to all but close its nuclear power program. Japan now plans to build as many as 22 new coal-burning power plants — one of the dirtiest sources of electricity — at 17 different sites in the next five years, just at a time when the world needs to slash carbon dioxide emissions to fight global warming.
Electricity production by fossil fuels has increased in Japan:
Okay, so no need to answer my question above -- apparently it wasn't a joke.
So the earth will cool down is what you "think", eh? Guess we can tell those idiots who've studied this carefully all their lives that they're wasting their time -- some guy on the Internet has figured it out from perusing the literature and using his keen philosophical powers.
:rofl: I was only trying to explore alternative pathways to how global warming could eventually pan out. Cooling seemed plausible.
It's kind of obvious that you don't know much about this and other features of climate change.
:lol: Truly out of Trump’s playbook: look like a complete buffoon, then simply pretend like you’re a very stable genius. Well done. You’re right: you’ve shown multiple times just how knowledgeable you are about climate science.
Whatever I know about climate change, this much I’m clear on: I know more about it than you. Can’t speak for others.
Which is so idiotic I didn’t think it was serious. That’s my fault for thinking you were making more sense than you were. I’ll work on that.
As the IPCC says— which, given your climate expertise you must know— there’s almost no chance that there’s a complete shutdown. Even if there were, we don’t know what would happen.
But please keep lecturing— so far you’ve earned that right.
Existential threat for some and not all I suppose. Even on the optimistic targets Miami is still going to be underwater by 2050. It would be foolish to think it isn’t existential
IPPC said there’s almost no chance that there’s a complete shutdown
I think they just say "unlikely” in the near future. It's on the table because the conditions for it are developing now.
It wouldn't kill off our species, but that kind of double shock would make maintaining civilization tricky. As soon as people adapted to the cold NH, it would reverse and get hotter than before. It would cause mass migrations not once, but twice in a relatively short time.
The best example in my view are the hostile attitudes towards nuclear energy, a zero emissions energy resource. Countries that have made decisions either to go off or radically reduce nuclear energy have either simply not kept their promises (Sweden) or then built coal plants (Japan) or resorted to export energy typically from coal plants (Germany). Japan, where nobody did die in the Fukushima accident (but many thousands in the actual Tsunami in 2011) just shows how illogical energy policy can be:
I'd be curious to know what kind of debate there was in Japan before they decided to build a bunch of coal burning plants.
You can go on comforting yourself with the idea that tipping points and feedback loops are improbable, or whatever else you'd like. But it's pure irrationality, honestly. If the chances of an existential threat were 0.1%, it'd still be absurd to not take that seriously.
If you're really going solely by whether it wipes out every last human on the face of the planet, then I suppose nuclear weapons aren't an existential threat either. Perhaps the aforementioned asteroid (depending on the size) isn't an existential threat.
So it'll only be a radically changed, hell-like earth. But we'll survive in some capacity -- so we can't call it "existential." If you're somehow comforted by that, you're welcome.
You keep saying I want to comfort myself by not calling it an existential threat, but that was never my intention. At every opportunity I said it was going to be very bad... but not an existential threat. I agree that we shouldn't be comforting ourselves by underestimating the risk or ignoring small risks with grave consequences, but at the same time we shouldn't overstate how bad it's going to be either, because really it's bad enough as it is.
Anyway I think we actually agree for the most part, just not on the way we want to communicate the issue. I think you lose credibility by overstating the case and people get desensitized by continual doomsaying (i.e. the boy cried wolf), while you seem to think we need to spur people into action by putting it into the strongest of terms. Maybe this is a result of you living in the US and me being in Europe. Most here, except maybe for that stubborn minority that you'll never reach anyway, seem well aware of the dangers of climate change, while in the US there's probably more ignorance and apathy about the issue still.
And I think accurate assessment of risks matters, for the kind of measures we are willing to take. If it really were an impending existential threat or even "just" a civilization collapsing threat, a la a large asteroid about to impact, we should we willing to contemplate the most drastic of measure, like shutting down all fossil fuels and slaughtering all livestock overnight, pumping aerosols into the atmosphere, declaring war on nations that aren't complying with zero-emissions etc... Some measure would be more or less disruptive for our societies. That's the question for me.... not should we do something about it, but how far and how fast should we be willing to go? How much disruption to current societies do the risks warrant?
I'd be curious to know what kind of debate there was in Japan before they decided to build a bunch of coal burning plants.
Actually now they are coming to grasp how utterly stupid this is.
(Bloomberg, April 2021) A joint venture in Japan has scrapped plans for a coal-fired power plant, leaving the country with no new construction on the horizon as companies drop the dirty fuel amid tighter emissions rules and strong growth outlook for renewables.
Kansai Electric Power Co. and Marubeni Corp. won’t move forward with a 1.3 gigawatt coal power project in Akita prefecture that was slated to begin operations in 2024, a unit of Kansai Electric said Tuesday.
The firms decided to cancel the project due to the government’s tighter environmental rules and banks curbing financing for carbon-intensive projects, the Nikkei reported ahead of the announcement. The companies are considering building a cleaner biomass facility instead, the Nikkei said.
While there are still several coal projects currently under construction, Japan has no plans for additional new plants, according to BloombergNEF. A 1.2 gigawatt coal project in Yamaguchi prefecture was also canned earlier this month as electricity demand was expected to remain flat, while renewable energy expands.
So just several coal plants are under construction. But they do also have two nuclear power plant under construction. Here's how nuclear energy is being built (stats by IAEA):
Country Number of Reactors_____ Total Net Electrical Capacity [MW]
ARGENTINA 1 ________________ 25
BANGLADESH 2 ________________ 2160
BELARUS 1 ________________ 1110
BRAZIL 1 ________________ 1340
CHINA 13 ________________ 12565
FINLAND 1 ________________ 1600
FRANCE 1 ________________ 1630
INDIA 6 ________________ 4194
IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF 1 ___ 974
JAPAN 2 ________________ 2653
KOREA, REPUBLIC OF 4 __________ 5360
PAKISTAN 1 ________________ 1014
RUSSIA 3 ________________ 3459
SLOVAKIA 2 ________________ 880
TURKEY 3 ________________ 3342
UKRAINE 2 ________________ 2070
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES 3 _______ 4035
UNITED KINGDOM 2 ________ 3260
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 2___ 2234
With that, let's compare that above to coal plants being under construction.
(The Guardian, June 2021) Five Asian countries are jeopardising global climate ambitions by investing in 80% of the world’s planned new coal plants, according to a report.
Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, has found that China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam plan to build more than 600 coal power units, even though renewable energy is cheaper than most new coal plants.
The investments in one of the most environmentally damaging sources of energy could generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy – enough to power the UK more than three times over – despite calls from climate experts at the UN for all new coal plants to be cancelled.
Catharina Hillenbrand von der Neyen, the author of the report, said: “These last bastions of coal power are swimming against the tide, when renewables offer a cheaper solution that supports global climate targets. Investors should steer clear of new coal projects, many of which are likely to generate negative returns from the outset.”
So just five Asian countries are building over 600 coal plants with over 300 gigawats (300 000 MW), while only 51 nuclear power plants are built producing under 54 gigawats of power.
Anyway, there is an very interesting and eye opening Global Coal Plant Tracker , which I advise to people to look at. A lot of info on coal plants!
(Here's what it looks like:)
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 08, 2021 at 22:38#5635191 likes
Catharina Hillenbrand von der Neyen, the author of the report, said: “These last bastions of coal power are swimming against the tide, when renewables offer a cheaper solution that supports global climate targets.
This make no sense at all, why are they doing this? Even if they don't give a damn about effects on climate change, you'd think they choose the cheaper option.
I couldn't quite get a clear reason why they'd go with coal over renewables, but
- Economic growth of 6% a year is still far and above the prime directive
- Those decisions apparently depend on decentralized authorities for a large part and/or the central party isn't all that serious about cutting emissions
- Coal magnates have a lot of influence
- There are some practical/technical reason renewables can't supply their demand for energy?
- They want to use it as leverage in geopolitical negotiations (really?)
Anyway, the official line is that they will keep ramping it up until somewhere in the beginning of the 2030, and then reduce it slowly it to reach neutrality in 2060. If that's the official line, one should what... take the square root of that to gauge their real intentions?
This really won't do it, will it, considering they are good for a third of global emissions?
You keep saying I want to comfort myself by not calling it an existential threat, but that was never my intention. At every opportunity I said it was going to be very bad... but not an existential threat. I agree that we shouldn't be comforting ourselves by underestimating the risk or ignoring small risks with grave consequences, but at the same time we shouldn't overstate how bad it's going to be either, because really it's bad enough as it is.
Have it your way. So any time I say "existential" just translate that as "very, very bad." Still, even if there's a small chance that it's existential -- as you said, we should be taking that very seriously. That was my only point. I can't see how that doesn't motivate people more, unless it gets interpreted as "we're all doomed," which isn't the case.
Anyway I think we actually agree for the most part, just not on the way we want to communicate the issue. I think you lose credibility by overstating the case and people get desensitized by continual doomsaying (i.e. the boy cried wolf), while you seem to think we need to spur people into action by putting it into the strongest of terms.
You could be right in the way it's communicated -- I have no way of knowing. But I do think the hothouse earth scenarios are not talked about nearly enough. Will Steffen's version, not the media saying the world's going to end in 10 years or something ridiculous. That indeed is foolish, not because it's too shocking but because it isn't true.
That we could reach tipping points that run out of control is a possibility, and a serious one which we should consider.
And I think accurate assessment of risks matters, for the kind of measures we are willing to take. If it really were an impending existential threat or even "just" a civilization collapsing threat, a la a large asteroid about to impact, we should we willing to contemplate the most drastic of measure, like shutting down all fossil fuels and slaughtering all livestock overnight, pumping aerosols into the atmosphere, declaring war on nations that aren't complying with zero-emissions etc... Some measure would be more or less disruptive for our societies. That's the question for me.... not should we do something about it, but how far and how fast should we be willing to go? How much disruption to current societies do the risks warrant?
If people understood the risks, I think we should be disrupting the world much more than the pandemic did. But even if we shut things down, as the pandemic did, or something on that level, I think that would probably be more than enough to solve this issue. We don't even need that extreme level, though -- there are sensible solutions which we have right now. The problem is political will -- which isn't coming from the population, unfortunately. That's a failure in education, a success for propaganda, a failure of the media, and a major failure of corporate America, who'd rather sell the future than do anything right now about this issue.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 09, 2021 at 09:14#5638451 likes
I've thinking about it some more, and perhaps I've been understating the importance of the US reducing its emissions a bit.
The US is still the most powerful country in the world. Even aside from its own contribution to emissions, it gives a signal to the rest of the world.... you can't really go demanding other nations to reduce their emissions if you have among the highest emissions per capita.
Edit: I accidentally messed up this post by editing it instead of replying in a new one, ooh well...
This make no sense at all, why are they doing this? Even if they don't give a damn about effects on climate change, you'd think they choose the cheaper option.
Cheaper to whom? Likely sooner or later the iron laws of free market capitalism will take charge, but the transit isn't usually so quick.
I assume that once they have a large coal power plant infrastructure and companies building the power plants, things go with the already input motion. And then there's the political aspects: Trump isn't the politician that wooed and will woo areas where coal mining is important.
Remember? Trump digs coal. Many other politicians do like the votes from coal producing areas too.
Turning around energy policy is easier said than done. And those countries that produce coal will surely look at it also as a security issue in times of war or sanctions etc. If you have domestic resources, they are better than resources that have to be bought on the global market.
Of course the writing is on the wall already. From this chart below the number of jobs in the coal mining sector has halved to 44 000 jobs. So no wonder those areas would be desperate for politicians promising a change.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 10, 2021 at 09:20#5643090 likes
Cheaper to whom? Likely sooner or later the iron laws of free market capitalism will take charge, but the transit isn't usually so quick.
I assume that once they have a large coal power plant infrastructure and companies building the power plants, things go with the already input motion.
Yes ok, that's along the lines of what I'd expect is happening. You've got the knowledge, the technology and the logistics already figured out and fine-tuned, the labour-force already trained, the connections for investments established etc etc... Renewables are maybe "cheaper" now in the abstract, if you'd have to start from nothing, but we're never actually starting from nothing.
Renewables are maybe "cheaper" now in the abstract, if you'd have to start from nothing, but we're never actually starting from nothing.
Yet that is the very promising aspect of this technological development: alternative renewables have come down dramatically in price. I think the reason is that enough players do notice the writing on the wall and understand that the dominance of the fossil fuels is going to diminish, hence there is a real competition for the new market shares.
Offshore wind turbines are huge, btw. And out of sight of the NIMBY types.
The US is still the most powerful country in the world. Even aside from its own contribution to emissions, it gives a signal to the rest of the world.... you can't really go demanding other nations to reduce their emissions if you have among the highest emissions per capita.
True, but there's no one to pressure the US, and it's not headed toward limiting emissions in any sort of meaningful way. The Democratic party is weak and the Republicans have become the alternate reality party. The US is going to be exporting stupid and crazy for the foreseeable future, until we have a system reset.
A disinterested view of the science seems to recommend we harness the massive heat energy of magma to produce limitless electrical power - to sustain civilisations carbon free, and to capture carbon, produce hydrogen fuel, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle!
Or we can continue to presume sustainability requires sacrifice - apply wholly inadequate technological solutions disguised as a 'diverse energy mix' - carbon tax this, stop that, have less and pay more, guilt trip the consumer, tax businesses into bankruptcy, and still not save the world!
I'm for the former!
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 10, 2021 at 11:58#5643310 likes
From an energy theoretical point of view that might be true, but I suspect there are practical and technological reasons why it isn't used more as of now. I don't know enough about the technology to judge it myself, but I do know one of the research centres of my county has been trying to develop this for years now, with only moderate success. For instance they had some serious setback because drilling apparently caused seismic activity in the region. So sure, by all means why not use a virtually unlimited pool of energy, but you do have to have the technology working first.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 10, 2021 at 12:04#5643320 likes
The US is still the most powerful country in the world. Even aside from its own contribution to emissions, it gives a signal to the rest of the world.... you can't really go demanding other nations to reduce their emissions if you have among the highest emissions per capita.
— ChatteringMonkey
True, but there's no one to pressure the US, and it's not headed toward limiting emissions in any sort of meaningful way. The Democratic party is weak and the Republicans have become the alternate reality party. The US is going to be exporting stupid and crazy for the foreseeable future, until we have a system reset.
That's a pity, because I really do think this is the most effective way to turn this around... if we had some of the world players committed to and actively pushing for reduction of emissions, the rest of the world could fall in line pretty quick.
That's a pity, because I really do think this is the most effective way to turn this around... if we had some of the world players committed to and actively pushing for reduction of emissions, the rest of the world could fall in line pretty quick.
But even if that happened, things could easily return to present level emissions in the next generation.
Short term doesn't mean much, does it?
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 10, 2021 at 12:24#5643420 likes
That's a pity, because I really do think this is the most effective way to turn this around... if we had some of the world players committed to and actively pushing for reduction of emissions, the rest of the world could fall in line pretty quick.
— ChatteringMonkey
But even if that happened, things could easily return to present level emissions in the next generation.
Short term doesn't mean much, does it?
Changing your energy supply systems is not that easy, as is illustrated by China building more coal plants despite renewable energy being cheaper than ever... So presumably once you have made the switch to reduce emissions, there'd be some inherent resistance to switching back to fossil fuels too. And I'd think some of the whole earth ecology point of view will stick in the consciousness of next generations, we just know more now about it than we used to... you typically don't unlearn these kind of things.
A disinterested view of the science seems to recommend we harness the massive heat energy of magma to produce limitless electrical power - to sustain civilisations carbon free, and to capture carbon, produce hydrogen fuel, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle
This is one option which has been used for years—nothing new. But we need more than geothermal. You have to have the right conditions for it to be viable. It may work well in Iceland or Hawaii, but it can’t work everywhere.
Wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear are all going to be necessary. Becoming dogmatic about one option, or treating it as a silver bullet, isn’t helpful.
Reply to counterpunch Likely at the global scale, energy production will always be a "diverse mix", that's for sure.
In my view, geothermal has been used quite a long time in places with volcanic activity. How about in Finland, where there is a solid bedrock of stone with only ancient traces of past volcanic activity?
The use of geothermal energy in Finland is restricted to the utilization of ground heat with heat pumps. This is due to the geological conditions as Finland is a part of the Fennoscandian (or Baltic) Shield. The bedrock is Precambrian covered with a thin (<5 m) cover of Quaternary sediments. Topography is subdued and does not easily produce advective re-distribution of geothermal heat by groundwater circulation systems. Due to crystalline character of the bedrock, rock porosity and its water content are low. This practically excludes geothermal systems utilizing hot wet rock.
From an energy theoretical point of view that might be true, but I suspect there are practical and technological reasons why it isn't used more as of now. I don't know enough about the technology to judge it myself, but I do know one of the research centres of my county has been trying to develop this for years now, with only moderate success. For instance they had some serious setback because drilling apparently caused seismic activity in the region. So sure, by all means why not use a virtually unlimited pool of energy, but you do have to have the technology working first.
This is one option which has been used for years—nothing new. But we need more than geothermal. You have to have the right conditions for it to be viable. It may work well in Iceland or Hawaii, but it can’t work everywhere. Wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear are all going to be necessary. Becoming dogmatic about one option, or treating it as a silver bullet, isn’t helpful.
Likely at the global scale, energy production will always be a "diverse mix", that's for sure. In my view, geothermal has been used quite a long time in places with volcanic activity. How about in Finland, where there is a solid bedrock of stone with only ancient traces of past volcanic activity?
Those are reasonable concerns I'm in no position to refute empirically, but nonetheless, I think otherwise. The word 'geothermal' covers a lot of ground - pun intended. A wide range of technologies that draw heat from the ground, are described as geothermal. I prefer to use the term magma energy to describe a form of geothermal a little closer to the bone.
I think vast quantities of 'recoverable' geothermal heat can be harnessed by drilling close to magma chambers and subduction zones in the earth's crust. There must necessarily be mile after cubic mile of rock heated to hundreds of degrees centigrade, we could drill into, or through. I imagine two technologies:
drill a hole and insert a probe directly into the rock with pipes carrying water in and out;
or drill right through, line the borehole with pipes and pump water through.
In this way, produce steam to drive turbines, for endless quantities of carbon free electricity.
Of course, it will be difficult to do - a complex engineering challenge, but it is at least conceivably feasible. There is a vast source of energy there; large enough to make sense of our response to climate change. We need that energy. Are you saying it is technologically impossible to harness the heat energy of the planet on a large scale? I think otherwise.
I'm in no position to refute empirically, but nonetheless, I think otherwise.
Sums up your position pretty well. No empirical support whatsoever but repeating the same messianic sermon at every opportunity with a faux shock that anyone could be so crazy as to think otherwise.
Sums up your position pretty well. No empirical support whatsoever but repeating the same messianic sermon at every opportunity with a faux shock that anyone could be so crazy as to think otherwise.
It's not an unreasonable question to ask - if it is possible that humankind might survive? Turns out it is possible - and here's how! What's messianic about that?
It's not an unreasonable question to ask - if it is possible that humankind might survive? Turns out it is possible - and here's how! What's messianic about that?
Yet what energy policies we choose on this planet is the aggregate sum of the various energy policies the nations states choose and what competition on the free market gives us. The fact is that energy production is such an existential question for our societies that it will be a question of national security to every country. They won't give up the independence to choose their energy production (they are called sovereigns for a reason).
There simply isn't one "logical" answer to this. "Science" doesn't give us one answer. As everybody has noticed, we here on this Planet do not decide these questions as one entity (or have them decided for us by one entity).
If there will be the technology that gives us cheaper geothermal energy anywhere, even in Finland, than by any other production means and this technology is available to everybody, then geothermal will surely dominate.
It's a similar question like if we get low price and highly efficient fusion power online, it will be the answer to a lot of our current problems. But there's that if: if it's price competitive.
I don't see it that way. I'm pointing toward a scientific understanding of reality as a trustworthy rationale for the application of technology - not to myself. I invite you to conclude that it is possible for humankind to survive - and then there will be two of us!
Yet what energy policies we choose on this planet is the aggregate sum of the various energy policies the nations states choose and what competition on the free market gives us.
Exactly! The problem lives in the real world. Energy policies are fashioned by sovereign nation states in service to their interests, and the sum of all national energy policies does not add up to a global energy policy rational to the climate change threat. Hence, we need a global approach to climate change.
The fact is that energy production is such an existential question for our societies that it will be a question of national security to every country. They won't give up the independence to choose their energy production (they are called sovereigns for a reason).
That wouldn't be necessary. Imagine a global effort to develop magma energy technology, and that energy applied initially to carbon capture and storage and desalination and irrigation - thus, mitigating climate change directly, and adapting to climate change due to occur. Energy generating capacity could be developed without disrupting energy markets - and used directly to achieve environmental benefits without imposition upon anyone.
There simply isn't one "logical" answer to this. As everybody has noticed, we here on this Planet do not decide these questions as one entity (or have them decided for us by one entity).
Unless you ask - is there a simple logical answer to this? And as it turns out, yes, there is! Assuming magma energy is there, and can be extracted - hydrogen fuel has 2.5 times more energy than petroleum per kilo. Shipping it around the world is already 2.5 times more efficient than shipping petroleum!
I invite you to conclude that it is possible for humankind to survive - and then there will be two of us!
What you or I believe is possible is of no relevance or consequence. Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance.
I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all. Such a belief would be irrelevant if the actual scientists studying the matter disagreed.
We just need fusion reactors. We'll have them eventually.
There's a famous saying that fusion has been 5 years away for the past 30 years. And that was 20 years ago. It's still five years away. I'm not optimistic. Drilling for magma energy seems a lot more certain, and a less complicated source of energy.
Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance.
I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all. Such a belief would be irrelevant if the actual scientists studying the matter disagreed.
Could you? I could not simply believe that, because I don't believe it.
Exactly! The problem lives in the real world. Energy policies are fashioned by sovereign nation states in service to their interests, and the sum of all national energy policies does not add up to a global energy policy rational to the climate change threat. Hence, we need a global approach to climate change.
Hence?
A global approach that is the sum of the most important nation states, perhaps 20 or so of the largest energy producers, that in aggregate tackles the crisis is what we should aim for. Actually what you said is the real answer: the sum of the largest national energy policies that does add up to tackle the climate change threat. And still those national energy policies will differ...as countries are in different environments. What works for Iceland might not exactly work for Finland. It's not realistic to think that somehow everybody will morph to being Borgs and get to the same conclusion as you have. And why cannot there be a multitude energy resources?
That wouldn't be necessary. Imagine a global effort to develop magma energy technology, and that energy applied initially to carbon capture and storage and desalination and irrigation - thus, mitigating climate change directly, and adapting to climate change due to occur. Energy generating capacity could be developed without disrupting energy markets - and used directly to achieve environmental benefits without imposition upon anyone.
I lost your logic here... Can you explain this better?
Unless you ask - is there a simple logical answer to this? And as it turns out, yes, there is!
There simply is no simple logical answer as this isn't just a "logical" question! Societies that have formed independent nation states is the reality that we live in. To assume it's "logical" to just rule them out not looking at the energy question from their own view isn't realistic. There's no golden bullet. That's just how we operate.
A global approach that is the sum of the most important nation states, perhaps 20 or so of the largest energy producers, that in aggregate tackles the crisis is what we should aim for.
I can maybe understand why you say so, but I think it would be better to develop magma energy as the global energy commons precisely because it would ultimately provide limitless clean energy. It would not do so immediately, but the potential is there, and quite that large. It would be better to develop that potential as a global response to climate change; to capture and store carbon, and desalinate and irrigate, and so mitigate and adapt to climate change, building capacity toward an eventual transition. This approach would be far less disruptive to energy markets; than the current approach which requires huge market disruption to achieve environmental benefits. With magma energy, that kind of up front sacrifice is not necessary, and I hope, that's what makes it possible.
Of course, it will be difficult to do - a complex engineering challenge, but it is at least conceivably feasible. There is a vast source of energy there; large enough to make sense of our response to climate change. We need that energy. Are you saying it is technologically impossible to harness the heat energy of the planet on a large scale? I think otherwise.
We do need that energy. But it won’t work everywhere, and the technology isn’t advanced yet. I’d love to see it work, and it’s important to talk about. We should be spending a good deal of money researching and developing this option.
Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance.
Exactly right. I was thinking along similar lines.
There's a famous saying that fusion has been 5 years away for the past 30 years. And that was 20 years ago. It's still five years away. I'm not optimistic. Drilling for magma energy seems a lot more certain, and a less complicated source of energy.
Yes but you have no empirical basis for this. If it’s simply a gut feeling— who cares?
If you’re going to advocate as strongly as you have been for it, I’d expect you to know more about it and tell us where the research is at. You yourself admit that you haven’t really done that.
So what all this talk amounts to is strongly advocating for something you FEEL is potentially a great solution. Others may sincerely feel it’s nuclear energy. Or wind. Or solar. Or geoengineering.
Not very interesting or informative, unfortunately.
Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance. — Isaac
I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all. Such a belief would be irrelevant if the actual scientists studying the matter disagreed. — Isaac
Could you? I could not simply believe that, because I don't believe it.
It was rhetorical. The point is that, as far as publicly debatable issues are concerned, unless we're going to have good ground for believing what we believe then there's no point in talking about it. It is the grounds we have for believing that are the substance of the discussion. If you just 'believe' that geothermal energy can support our current levels of material consumption then that's of no interest to a discussion community unless you have some ground to believe it which you can present.
Honestly, this seems like such a simple thing and yet absent in some substantial proportion of all the posts (across the forum, not just this thread). It's probably just me being old fashioned, but I'm not interested in what you believe, I'm interested in why you believe it.
Reply to counterpunch I understand your point, but just like with the discussion you have had with @Xtrix about fusion energy where your opinion is just "I'm not optimistic", so too can it be that others are "not too optimistic" about geothermal as a silver bullet answer to everything (as it has high initial capital cost and with the present technology you don't find hot rocks everywhere). Yes, increasing geothermal energy production surely is one thing to do.
In fact many renewables could make the claim to handle all our energy needs "if only" enough should be invested in them and the technology would be improved. But it simply won't happen like that: energy production methods will compete against each other on the market and the price mechanism will select the ones which will dominate the energy sector. And even if for a long time, basically from the time humans had the ability to burn wood, fossil fuels have dominated energy production as it has been the cheapest way to produce energy, it hasn't been that people have used only fossil fuels.
There simply are various ways to produce energy and they simply won't go away. I suspect you don't have anything against hydropower? Those dams already built will likely to be used in the future too.
Oldest hydroelectric powerplant was built in 1882 in Fox River, Wisconsin. Yet the first water wheels go back to Antiquity (just as the idea of windmills).
Model of a Persian Windmill. Note that the Panemone windmill has a vertical axis rotating a millstone:
It was rhetorical. The point is that, as far as publicly debatable issues are concerned, unless we're going to have good ground for believing what we believe then there's no point in talking about it.
I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all.
For you, it's rhetorical. I express opinions that are justified with reference to research, and obviously so - but what I don't have is tens of billions in folding cash and a great big drill, or I'd prove my point empirically.
If you just 'believe' that geothermal energy can support our current levels of material consumption then that's of no interest to a discussion community unless you have some ground to believe it which you can present.
If you believe wind and solar can support our current levels of material consumption then you haven't done any research, or indeed, applied much in the way of reason. The UK alone would need something like 15,000 windmills, costing £250m each, producing 7 MW each, and even then, would have to store that energy or back it up with a fossil fuel generating capacity for when the wind stops blowing. Maintaining all those windmills - presumably at sea, is no small or inexpensive feat; and replacing them in 25 years at similar cost, does not constitute a cost effective means of producing an adequate amount of clean energy.
There are very good reasons to look for more substantial clean energy technologies; and magma is there - a huge source of clean energy seemingly within reach. I'm at a loss to understand your fierce opposition to that proposal. Can you see a reason it's impossible? Is the world not a big ball of molten rock?
I understand your point, but just like with the discussion you have had with Xtrix about fusion energy where your opinion is just "I'm not optimistic", so too can it be that others are "not too optimistic" about geothermal as a silver bullet answer to everything (as it has high initial capital cost and with the present technology you don't find hot rocks everywhere). Yes, increasing geothermal energy production surely is one thing to do.
I didn't express my opinion on fusion. Not really. I said I'm not optimistic, but actually, I think it won't work, not profitably anyway. My hunch is that the enormous gravity of the sun overcomes the Exclusion Principle, allowing fusion to occur, and that a sustained, profitable fusion reaction cannot be maintained in earth gravity. The input of energy, to simulate that gravitational pressure - and to contain the superheated plasma, will always be greater than the energy produced. IMO.
In fact many renewables could make the claim to handle all our energy needs "if only" enough should be invested in them and the technology would be improved. But it simply won't happen like that: energy production methods will compete against each other on the market and the price mechanism will select the ones which will dominate the energy sector.
We are threatened with a global scale catastrophe, and that's a problem we cannot solve doing business as usual. Applying technologies for power and profit brings us to this impasse. We need to look beyond ourselves, and apply the right technology for the right reasons - and that's science, and magma energy technology.
Magma energy is the only very large source of constant, high grade renewable energy that can be rapidly and safely developed, and has the potential to replace fossil fuels entirely. I don't particularly enjoy attacking other forms of renewables, but I don't see any other technology doing more than take the edge off fossil fuel use and GHG emissions.
We need to look beyond ourselves, and apply the right technology for the right reasons
Societies will function as they do. Don't think you can change them.
We are living now through a time of a global pandemic. We got many vaccines in break neck speed that usually have taken many years to develop. The implemented policies have been quite out of the normal and rapid. Yet the society has functioned as before. Markets have worked, it has been "business as usual" even if it has been totally out of the usual.
Hence this issue has to be dealt realistically, not to assume something that won't happen.
Science is also a body of knowledge; a worldview, to contrast with an ideological worldview.
Applying technology in accord with an ideological worldview is the cause of climate change. That's how we come within sight of species extinction; and it's why we have the knowledge and technology to solve climate change, but don't apply it.
Applying technology in accord with a scientific understanding of reality is the answer to climate change.
I express opinions that are justified with reference to research
Well good, but the rest of us aren't going to just take it on faith are we. Let's have links to the research which says that sufficient clean energy can be obtained from magma to supply our current energy requirements.
I'm at a loss to understand your fierce opposition to that proposal.
I presume people far more knowledgable than me have looked into it already. It's not the strategy I'm fiercely opposed to, it's the maniacal advocation of it without a shred of supporting evidence.
Why would I? I'm not a geothermal engineer. I don't expect to be able to have a 'bit of a think about it' from my armchair and deduce all the problems that might arise. I'm sure it's a very complex field which requires thousands of hours training to understand.
Well good, but the rest of us aren't going to just take it on faith are we.
If you refuse to value the opinion of someone who is clearly interested in, and knowledgeable about a subject then that's your too bad. I could, I suppose - produce a list of links you wouldn't even click on, never mind read - and allow you put me to work merely for your amusement. But I don't think so. I haven't seen any substance to your weirdly fierce opposition.
I presume people far more knowledgable than me have looked into it already. It's not the strategy I'm fiercely opposed to, it's the maniacal advocation of it without a shred of supporting evidence.
You presume? Why not produce evidence? You demand evidence from me, while allowing yourself license to presume someone has already looked into it? With regard to magma energy, the basic technologies exist. The energy is there. The middle of the bridge is yet to be constructed, but I think it is possible.
It would certainly require specialist knowledge; for example, the question of how big a hole to drill is immensely complicated. Have you ever heard of Poiseuille’s Law? The materials science of pipes able to conduct heat, and withstand huge pressure is another area where specialist knowledge is indispensable. Dozens of other fields of specialist knowledge would need to be brought to bear - but the basic idea of harnessing the heat energy of the earth, at high temperatures and on a very large scale, is kinda obvious - and that's where I shine! Big ball of molten rock, d'uh!
I don't wish to take on all the baggage of scientism, but but on this one key issue - science offers an objective rationale for the application of technologies, it is necessary to apply if humankind wishes to continue to exist, or at least keep that option open. In face of the threat of climate and ecological catastrophe there are things we need to do to survive, and magma energy is necessary to any conceivable future. At the very least, we need that energy to power carbon capture and storage, desalination and irrigation and recycling.
One day magma energy would replace fossil fuels, but that need not be immediately, and so huge socially transformative infrastructure costs would not be pre-requisite to; and standing in the way of environmental benefits. If the world got together and developed this technology as a global good, we could carry on much as we are, and attack the problem from the supply side - offsetting carbon produced today by investing in the capacity to sequester it tomorrow.
It makes sense on more levels than merely the scientific, even if it is necessary to look first to a scientific understanding of reality to see the real world possibility, beyond the ideological battlements.
I could, I suppose - produce a list of links you wouldn't even click on, never mind read - and allow you put me to work merely for your amusement.
What makes you think we'd be a) interested enough that your posts are worth your while writing yet b) not interested enough to read papers on the subject. You must have a very high opinion of yourself to consider you might hold our attention in a way no other source could.
You presume? Why not produce evidence? You demand evidence from me, while allowing yourself license to presume someone has already looked into it?
Because its a reasonable assumption. I really shouldn't have to explain this. To posit a world where no one but you has thought of a brilliant solution to global energy supply is a fantastic claim, definitely requires support. To assume a world in which at least one of the many thousands if scientists whose job it is to look into these prospects has, in fact, done just that, is not a particularly fantastic claim and needs reason to doubt it, not to hold it.
You given nothing to indicate the underlined. Everything you say might be nonsense for all we know because you refuse to cite anything.
What I propose hasn't been done. As far as I'm aware, the research doesn't exist. There is other research that is relevant in some respect, a piece of technology here, a geological fact there, but as far as I'm aware, there are no significant plans to plug into the planet at scale.
In any case, my contribution to the subject is not engineering expertise. It's philosophical. It's about the rightfulness and trustworthiness of science as a rationale for the application of technology - as demonstrated by the possibility of a prosperous sustainable future, against the likelihood of a grim march upon authoritarianism, poverty and oblivion.
What makes you think we'd be a) interested enough that your posts are worth your while writing yet b) not interested enough to read papers on the subject. You must have a very high opinion of yourself to consider you might hold our attention in a way no other source could.
I hope I'm saying something others are not; something interesting and worthwhile thinking about. That's the best I can do. How long you can manage to focus is entirely your affair!
To posit a world where no one but you has thought of a brilliant solution to global energy supply is a fantastic claim, definitely requires support.
That's not what I'm saying though. I'm saying, using existing technologies it's possible for humankind to survive - and prosper. The future need not be a Malthusian nightmare. Because resources are ultimately a function of the energy available to create them, we could transcend limits to resources if we applied the right technologies, and could do so if we recognised a need to apply technology in relation to a scientific understanding of reality.
demonstrated by the possibility of a prosperous sustainable future
But you've yet to demonstrate this. That you think it's possible without any expertise in the matter at all, is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is, in fact, possible.
I'm saying, using existing technologies it's possible for humankind to survive - and prosper.
No, you're just declaring it to be the case without any evidence presented whatsoever. I don't think anyone has ruled out the mere possibility, so you declaring it is of no consequence at all. It's the likelihood relative to other options we're all concerned about, not the mere possibility.
we could transcend limits to resources if we applied the right technologies
We could, yes. Or we could not. Which it is will depend on the actual facts of the matter regarding the extent to which technologies can extract sufficient energy to combat the consequences of doing so.
As an illustration, let me ask you this. You seem opposed to solar power, yes? The sun provides 37 Petawatts of energy, our global needs only amount to about 4, so there's plenty of energy there to provide all our needs. so why oppose solar? Your oppose it on the grounds of the limitations of current technology, yet when it comes to your pet theory, you ignore limits of current technology and assume we'll find a way.
But you've yet to demonstrate this. That you think it's possible without any expertise in the matter at all, is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is, in fact, possible.
First, I said I'd demonstrated the rightfulness and trustworthiness of science as a rationale for the application of technology - not demonstrated that the extraction of heat energy from magma is possible. Second, if we only ever commented on things we were experts in, you'd be unable to speak at all, unless someone wanted advice on being insufferable!
Why? What's special about your guesswork that makes it worth thinking about?
Many things, but if there were one indicator I'd point to, it's that I explain the problem and the solution in the same terms. That's when I really knew I was onto something.
No, you're just declaring it to be the case without any evidence presented whatsoever.
I haven't presented evidence to you, no. I don't intend to. I've told you that. People like you get a kick out of making other people jump through hoops, and I'm not here for your entertainment. So pour your incredible toxic scorn, but it remains, the earth is a big ball of molten rock, and we need that energy to tackle climate change. Wind and solar are weak and inconstant, while magma energy can give us vast, constant base load power.
As an illustration, let me ask you this. You seem opposed to solar power, yes? The sun provides 37 Petawatts of energy, our global needs only amount to about 4, so there's plenty of energy there to provide all our needs. so why oppose solar? Your oppose it on the grounds of the limitations of current technology, yet when it comes to your pet theory, you ignore limits of current technology and assume we'll find a way.
I suppose I am opposed to solar, yes! But not for the reasons you might imagine. It's a matter of entrenching an approach to sustainability I don't believe can work. This is the dominant narrative in the field; the pessimistic Malthusian, limits to resources approach to sustainability. I think it's wrong, and can only lead to disaster.
We need more energy - not less; less reliable and more expensive energy. We need lots of reliable clean energy and magma is potentially, a high grade source of limitless base load power. We need that amount of energy to spend to attack the climate and ecological crisis from the supply side, and sustain capitalist growth - accounting for the externalities of capitalism by internalising them with magma energy, carbon capture, desalination, irrigation, recycling - rather than internalising them to the economy.
That so, solar is not the right technology. I have a solar powered calculator! I don't hate solar. But gathering a weak and inconstant form of energy from 225,000 square miles - just to meet current global energy demand; the staggering ongoing costs of constructing and maintaining such an array, and the question of recycling and replacing those panels after 25 years, to say nothing of the facilities required to store that energy, we be locked in and bankrupted, and have no more energy to spend than before. We need a way forward, and potentially, magma energy offers a better future.
You given nothing to indicate the underlined. Everything you say might be nonsense for all we know because you refuse to cite anything.
Yes, and that’s pretty suspicious to me. It doesn’t take long to provide some links or references. So far it’s been nothing but gut feelings, which is of no value whatsoever.
What I propose hasn't been done. As far as I'm aware, the research doesn't exist. There is other research that is relevant in some respect, a piece of technology here, a geological fact there, but as far as I'm aware, there are no significant plans to plug into the planet at scale.
Okay— then why go around repeating this dream over and over again? Are you an engineer? Or geologist? Or geophysicist? No? Then enough already. No one is interested in your delusions of grandeur.
I could “propose” something too— so what? I can propose we geoengineer the planet to cool it down. I’ll go around preaching this, offer no evidence or references about it, and then act surprised when people ignore me.
But gathering a weak and inconstant form of energy from 225,000 square miles - just to meet current global energy demand; the staggering ongoing costs of constructing and maintaining such an array, and the question of recycling and replacing those panels after 25 years, to say nothing of the facilities required to store that energy, we be locked in and bankrupted, and have no more energy to spend than before.
No, solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels now. You haven’t been paying attention. They pay for themselves within a few years. But most importantly, they’re green. Any issue with them — replacement, etc — pales in comparison to fossil fuels and the magma technology which you propose— which would currently be hugely expensive. But since you provide no numbers, we can only guess. Since it’s not being done, we can assume why.
True, we can think some internet guy has figured it all out and that actual experts have overlooked this amazing discovery— but forgive me if I don’t bet on that.
Wind and solar are weak and inconstant, while magma energy can give us vast, constant base load power.
No, it can’t. I’ll present just as much evidence to support this claim as you have with yours: my gut feelings.
Just stop already. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You offer no evidence. You have no expertise. You admit there’s no research on this yet. So why continue on? The fact that you think you’re “really on to something” just sounds embarrassing.
I’m sure your heart is in the right place, but now you’re just sounding ridiculous. Your point has been made— move on.
No, it can’t. I’ll present just as much evidence to support this claim as you have with yours: my gut feelings.
Just stop already. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You offer no evidence. You have no expertise. You admit there’s no research on this yet. So why continue on? The fact that you think you’re “really on to something” just sounds embarrassing.
I’m sure your heart is in the right place, but now you’re just sounding ridiculous. Your point has been made— move on.
Is it that - having me point out a possible, but seemingly unlikely means of securing a sustainable future implies horrors too terrible to contemplate? Because, if that's why you would rather not hear from me - I'd counter that's exactly why you need to listen. Sustainability is the biggest philosophical question we have ever faced, and your cowardly viciousness doesn't alter the fact I've been thinking about this, reading about it, and worrying for over 25 years. I know what I think about the most important philosophical question of our time, and what I think is at least interesting, but if you're not interested please feel free to go fuck yourself elsewhere!
the staggering ongoing costs of constructing and maintaining such an array, and the question of recycling and replacing those panels after 25 years, to say nothing of the facilities required to store that energy
And the equivalent costs for geothermal are...? Let me guess, you just reckon they'd be less.
You're transparent. Ideological opposition to left wing politics (and therefore existing renewables by association) supported post hoc by a shambolic edifice of speculation.
For all sorts of reasons; where to begin. Capitalism works. Capitalism has the knowledge, technology and skills to develop and apply the technology. It is the prevailing economic paradigm, upon which billions of people depend for their supper! What do you mean, why?
And the equivalent costs for geothermal are...? Let me guess, you just reckon they'd be less.
Infrastructure costs associated with a facility, drawing on magma heat energy to produce electricity are likely to be heavy up front, falling almost to zero thereafter. Once constructed - it would not cost much to run, and would outlast wind and solar, which needs replacing after 25 years. So, yes, it would be less expensive than solar. That said, I'm loathe to put a figure on how much energy can be extracted from magma, and so cannot give you an ROI or £/Kwh figure. I expect that would vary for each specific location this technology could be deployed, and relate to what heat could be reached at what depth, and so on. But I think it would be a better investment in the long term.
You're transparent. Ideological opposition to left wing politics (and therefore existing renewables by association) supported post hoc by a shambolic edifice of speculation.
I am transparently opposed to a left wing approach to sustainability, you're right. I make no secret of that fact. I told you so in the previous post. I argue for an approach that can sustain capitalism going forward; an approach that does not imply an ongoing anti-capitalist stranglehold on civilisation, to no tangible or quantifiable end.
Albeit I argue for an approach based in science, that applies the necessary technologies first, because the physics cannot change - nonetheless, via the mechanisms, and in support of the prevailing capitalist economic system. We have to get there from here - not throw some huge ideological obstacle; i.e. tearing down capitalism, in the way of a sustainable future.
The sun provides 37 Petawatts of energy, our global needs only amount to about 4, so there's plenty of energy there to provide all our needs.
I wasn't closely following the debate with the crackpot, but these numbers jumped out at me.If our energy needs were on the order of 10% of all solar energy that reaches the surface, that would be a shockingly huge amount! But I think you made a mistake somewhere, perhaps conflating yearly and hourly rates or something like that. This wiki page gives a handy comparison table: Solar energy
Yearly solar fluxes & human consumption Solar 3,850,000
Wind 2,250
Biomass potential ~200 Primary energy use 539
Electricity ~67
Energy given in Exajoule (EJ) = 10[sup]18[/sup] J = 278 TWh
I wasn't closely following the debate with the crackpot,
Then let me bring you up to speed. I'm saying a left wing anti-capitalist green commie approach to sustainability is wrong, because the root problem is a mistaken relationship to science, and the consequent misapplication of technology. Applying the right technologies; starting with magma energy technology we could sustain capitalist growth going forward, and would not need to crush the poor with taxes - the rich will hardly notice. I'm actually quite surprised the left could advocate such a policy approach!
Yeah, it does look crazy the way I've written it! The figures I quoted were from memory from a paper out of the Max Plank Institute from several years back. If I recall, the 37PW was available solar energy, so would be the equivalent of about the 174PW in the Wikipedia article minus the amounts returned to the atmosphere and in water vapour latent heat (89 absorbed-12-40=37). The total power figure was for all energy, including agriculture and I think included ecosystem services too (hence much higher than our actual electricity consumption - which is only about 15TW I think). It was about sustaining the human population rather than supplying our electricity. I'm afraid the paper is so old that I actually read the literal paper copy and I can't recall the title, otherwise I'd recommend it, it was very interesting. The main point was, that we can't just use up all the solar energy because most of it is busy doing stuff - like driving the climate and ecosystems etc. Apologies for the confusion, but in my defence, clarity wasn't my top priority!
Is it that - having me point out a possible, but seemingly unlikely means of securing a sustainable future implies horrors too terrible to contemplate? Because, if that's why you would rather not hear from me - I'd counter that's exactly why you need to listen.
No, it's you who need to listen. I didn't say a word of that. You've put those words in my mouth.
I'll repeat: you preach about something you don't understand. You offer to evidence, no research, and refuse even to provide a single link. Later, you admit there *is* no research, and that you're essentially going on your gut. This is why no one is interested. Otherwise, I'm all for magma energy -- and I hope I'm completely wrong and you turn out to be completely right -- I would love nothing more. But anyone can go around claiming they have the silver bullet. Anyone. Without evidence, it's just a claim by a non-expert on the internet. My claim for geo-engineering (as an example) is just as relevant, in that case.
Sustainability is the biggest philosophical question we have ever faced, and your cowardly viciousness doesn't alter the fact I've been thinking about this, reading about it, and worrying for over 25 years. I know what I think about the most important philosophical question of our time, and what I think is at least interesting, but if you're not interested please feel free to go fuck yourself elsewhere!
The fact that you're this defensive, and apparently too blind to see what others are trying to show you here, tells me that this really isn't about sustainability at all. It's about you wanting to believe you've found something other people (including thousands of experts) have somehow ignored. That's your own issue.
So you've been "thinking about, reading about, and worrying about" this for 25 years, yet provide no references whatsoever? Interesting.
magma is potentially, a high grade source of limitless base load power.
— counterpunch
So is absolutely any source whatsoever according to your current usage of 'potentially', which seems to include anything anyone reckons.
100% correct. The difference? This happens to be something he's staked his identity on. Good to know, so I can ignore him easily in future conversations. Just placate him and maybe he'll go away.
The fact that anyone can delude themselves into believing they've got an answer to a global crisis is astounding enough. But then to demonstrate no expertise whatsoever, and no references, is beyond the pale.
No, it isn't. Because capitalism doesn't exist anywhere. What we have is a state-capitalist system, with massive state intervention on all levels. Subsidies, bailouts, a central bank, etc. etc. We have what boils down to a corporate welfare/socialist system. It's easy to see, when you look around.
No, it isn't. Because capitalism doesn't exist anywhere. What we have is a state-capitalist system, with massive state intervention on all levels. Subsidies, bailouts, a central bank, etc. etc. We have what boils down to a corporate welfare/socialist system. It's easy to see, when you look around.
All economies are mixed economies to a greater or lesser degree. That's true, but is that relevant to the question of whether we approach climate change back peddling, having less and paying more, and taxing the poor to supress demand, and failing to secure the future anyway, or by harnessing massive clean energy from magma and continuing to prosper?
The left have dominated environmentalism for decades; while admittedly, the right have buried their head in the sand, allowing a limits to resources, anti-capitalist narrative to go unchallenged. Everyone just assumes sustainability implies huge, across the board anti-capitalist sacrifice. I don't believe that's true; scientifically and technologically, it is not necessarily so. Besides, Malthus was wrong. We invented tractors and fertilizers, and food production hugely outpaced population growth. Climate change is the same sort of panic, but there is a glaring technological solution - if the technology to harness magma energy can be developed and applied we can transcend limits to growth. And we should.
If I recommended a book, what are you going to do? Run out and buy it? Read it so we can discuss it? What the point?
Lol. So confused! What is this "reference" you ask for?! I'm a wealth of information about this subject, having read and worried about it for years, but there's no need to point to a single source about the topic when you can Google it all yourself! True, I'm the one making the claims and in fact raising this subject in the first place, but never mind that -- take me on faith, and don't expect me to provide YOU with anything of substance. I'm not your secretary.
Etc.
You have no idea what you're talking about, pal. So don't worry your little head about references or evidence for your crackpot ramblings. Just be happy with knowing that you've cracked the climate crisis -- and I hope humanity starts listening to your extraordinary solution! Well done!
Just be happy with knowing that you've cracked the climate crisis -- I just hope humanity starts listening to your extraordinary solution! Well done!
Thanks. But credit should really go to Wilson Clark - who wrote an encyclopaedia of potential energy technologies published in 1972, entitled Energy for Survival - the alternative to extinction!
Let's make people put their property where their mouth is. At the end of thirty days of individual research, everyone has to choose: Stop petroleum hydrocarbon use or continue it. Then we continue it. If it turns out we were wrong, all those who chose to continue it forfeit all they own to those who chose to stop. If it turns out it was no big deal, all those who chose to stop it forfeit all they own to those who chose to continue. Or we could up the anti and kill the losers. Or, we could require the posting of bonds. Or we could require insurance and let the premiums set by the insurance companies based upon market assessment of the science determine which way we go.
Any of these would force an honest assessment of the science out into the daylight of the market where people would put up or shut up.
But this whole open conspiracy where we agree to do what we think might be wrong simply because we don't want others to tell us to stop what we are doing is just BS. It's gambling with our children's future and in the end we all get to say "oops! Sorry!" DOH!
Any of these would force an honest assessment of the science out into the daylight of the market where people would put up or shut up.
Put up or shut up on the question of whether to continue to use fossil fuels, or stop suddenly with no back up plan in place? That's not a choice. If the question, rather, were for science to put up or shut up on a viable alternative to fossil fuels, that might offer people a choice.
Magma energy is one potential, and I think promising source of high grade clean energy, in theory, more than adequate to replace fossil fuels. But even then, it wouldn't be either/or. Developing magma energy; it would take time to build capacity, and that might more be more possible, politically - if the energy produced were dedicated initially to carbon capture, desalination and irrigation, recycling.
Put up or shut up on the question of whether to continue to use fossil fuels, or stop suddenly with no back up plan in place? That's not a choice. If the question, rather, were for science to put up or shut up on a viable alternative to fossil fuels, that might offer people a choice.
You didn't read. I said we'd continue on our merry way, not "stop suddenly."
But even if we did stop suddenly, that is a choice. History is replete with examples of sudden, uncontrollable change that we responded to. In fact, some of our best work comes out of exigency. Time-shmime. Cut off the petroleum tit and see how fast your magma or whatever the hell else gets done.
In fact, some of our best work comes out of exigency.
There's exigency aplenty to come if we don't develop an adequate alternative to fossil fuels, you can bet your bottom dollar on that! Just been looking at a world temperature map. A million football fields...or whatever, in the US northwest and Canada on fire. Tip of what's left of the iceberg!
There's exigency aplenty to come if we don't develop an adequate alternative to fossil fuels, you can bet your bottom dollar on that!
You are correct, and I would bet my bottom dollar on that. I wish "the other side" would bet their bottom dollar on their position. But they won't be forced to do so. They will just shrug, and say "oops!" And future generations will forgive them, saying "Well, they didn't know any better back then." Thus, they have no incentive to change their minds. And I'm not talking about the big exec. I'm talking about the knuckle-dragging muscle truck moron rolling coal.
On the point of "knowing better", while I haven't vetted this, check it out, from 1912: https://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-in-1912-linked-coal-to-climate-change-2018-8
On the point of "knowing better", while I haven't vetted this, check it out, from 1912: https://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-in-1912-linked-coal-to-climate-change-2018-8
It's strange how age imparts credibility. Supercomputer generated climate models are a dime a dozen, but if the 1912 editor of the Commonwealth of Columbia Cryer said it, it must be true!
It is, he was right, but even so - there has to be a viable alternative. You can't blame people for operating rationally within the reality presented to them. Not even the:
A viable alternative needs to be an attractive offer; it needs to solve problems, not create them - whereas, currently, everyone seems to believe sustainability necessarily implies huge social political and economic disruption. I don't believe that need be the case. Magma energy could be developed in parallel to fossil fuels, and be applied initially to carbon capture, desalination and irrigation, recycling - doing environmental good while building capacity to replace fossil fuels entirely. All smooth and orderly like; no pain, no blame!
It's strange how age imparts credibility. Supercomputer generated climate models are a dime a dozen, but if the 1912 editor of the Commonwealth of Columbia Cryer said it, it must be true!
Not strange at all. The "I told you so" aspect of it refutes the open conspiracy of ignorance and forgiveness. I think it's important for future generation to know we were lying sacks of shit when we pretended that we didn't know better. And when we pretended we were doing it "all for the children" (when we were really doing it for our own selfish selves, that next man-toy, vacation, McMansion, etc.).
You can't blame people for operating rationally within the reality presented to them. Not even the:
See, you are already making excuses for us. I can blame us for operating irrationally with the reality presented to us 100 year ago and every day since the 1960s. You see, it shouldn't take your johnny-come-lately computer models and science to make us do the right thing. Had we just been required to post a bond with our personal property, we wouldn't be here in a "too-late" status quo.
A viable alternative needs to be an attractive offer;
No, it does not need to be attractive. It needs to work. If that's magma, fine. I've got no truck with your magma gospel. Get out there and get it done. But in the mean time, people should be forced to own up to what they are doing.
Imagine if Big Tabaco had just been required to put up or shut up. All the champions of free market capitalism need to be forced to abide their own rules and quit socializing their costs. Want to pump a billion tons of shit in the air? Okay, pay everyone what they demand for their air in a negotiation. (I'm not selling.) Either that or keep your poison on your own property. And if we all agree to "look the other way" in an open conspiracy, because we all want to drive cars, then pay true cost of doing so. We are going to do that. And so are our kids.
Not strange at all. The "I told you so" aspect of it refutes the open conspiracy of ignorance and forgiveness. I think it's important for future generation to know we were lying sacks of shit when we pretended that we didn't know better.
My assumptions are that we have to be right in relation to reality to survive and prosper. The best knowledge of reality we have is science. And if we acted rightly with regard to the science, we could overcome the climate and ecological crisis, survive and prosper long term.
The fear is that science as truth would be dictatorial; that because, and insofar as science is true it cannot be disagreed with. And therein lies an end to freedom. But I don't think that follows - because Hume was wrong. Reconciling the is and the ought is exactly what people do - what they're meant to do, such that the ideal human, if you like, is one that knows what's scientifically true and does what's morally right in terms of what's true.
That's not who we are by a long chalk; but we could acknowledge the principle, and on that basis, in face of a challenge the like of which we've never known - do the one thing that science says is absolutely necessary, and our generation will have done our job. We don't need to change everything, but we do need abundant clean energy to power carbon capture, and desalination and irrigation, just to get through the next decades of the coming century.
No, it does not need to be attractive. It needs to work. If that's magma, fine. I've got no truck with your magma gospel. Get out there and get it done. But in the mean time, people should be forced to own up to what they are doing.
I get that you're angry, but it's not about blame for me. It's about the least disruptive adequate solution. It is about doing the right thing - and knowing it's the right thing, with the future of the species on the line. Fearless in establishing what's true; in practice, I'm not out looking for toes to step on. Developing magma energy on a monolithic scale may sound disruptive, but actually, it is a far less disruptive and more hopeful approach than windmills, brownouts, carbon taxes and the stranglehold of ongoing green regulation.
There's a basic physical problem called the "recharge" rate, which reduces to simple geometry. To extract energy efficiently from rock, we don't dig down and then install a big metal plate as a single surface heat exchanger. Rather, we dig a bunch of tubes over a volume or then use natural occurring tubes of water in fissures and cracks that's is already down there.
Point is, this volume of rock will only heat back up as if it had a big surface plate heat exchanger below it. In terms of "renewable" it's this recharge rate below the volume of rock that matters, which is very low per square meter. The earth is efficient at trapping heat, that's why it's hot down there, but it doesn't produce much heat. This is the general problem of geothermal energy.
Now, exceptions like volcanoes, where energy gets out more efficiently and look more impressive, still have the basic problem of being recharged in energy and pressure overtime. In addition, volcanoes are in inconvenient locations, so even if the recharge rate was better than elsewhere, there's a large added cost of transporting the energy.
For instance, Iceland is a place where you can get a lot of geothermal energy, and they do make a lot pretty cheaply; so much that they have a big aluminum industry as processing aluminium takes a lot of electricity. However, they don't have so much that they could power all of Europe.
In general, Geothermal is, along with tidal, bio-energy, hydro, an energy source that is not globally applicable, there's just some impressive "sweet spots" (some bays, big forests, large rivers, Iceland). Those sweet spots aren't so great that you could transport energy all over the globe.
The globally applicable renewable energy source is the sun, with it's first derivative wind power (2% of sun energy is converted to wind energy ... but even then it's still localized in a "sweet spot" of higher latitudes, due to the Coriolis affect, and so, we only think of it as "on par" with solar energy because there's a lot of rich countries North, where there's lot's of clouds and good wind; and rich countries determine research and investment dollars). Point is, "recharge" rate of the sun is way higher than geothermal and there's no surface area to volume problem.
Not strange at all. The "I told you so" aspect of it refutes the open conspiracy of ignorance and forgiveness. I think it's important for future generation to know we were lying sacks of shit when we pretended that we didn't know better. And when we pretended we were doing it "all for the children" (when we were really doing it for our own selfish selves, that next man-toy, vacation, McMansion, etc.).
20 years ago, leading up to the "Kyoto Protocol" I would say there was actually more concern and less denialism then there is now.
I would say "more concern" because there was simply less "big issues" back in the 90s to compete, such as the "big existential" of terrorism, new cold war, financial collapse, China, Trump, of course coronavirus today, and, ironically, weather catastrophes I would argue also take up this discursive concern space (the awareness climate change is a problem may increase, but the actual time and energy spent on climate change is still displaced by discussing the catastrophe in question, be it hurricane or wildfires or drought, and of course money on the symptom and not the cause).
The denialism industry back then was less robust than it is now. Back in the 90s, denialists still at least pretended to be "doing science", and they then they lost the scientific debate. "Pretending to do science" at least focuses on what the scientific issues are and people can decide what case is more credible. Likewise, "science based denialism" of the 90s still implicitly accepted the basic framework that if there was a problem, we'd have a moral onus to do something about it ... just, there isn't a problem. Since then, denialism has shifted to what I would call "moral denialism" which is far more effective. Moral denialism simply refutes, one way or another, the basic premise that "we should do something", even if there is a problem, which there isn't (and no moral onus to back that up, one has a right to believe anything) ... but even if there was a problem, we shouldn't do anything about it. True believers are beyond the reach of critical and factual debate, and, more importantly, these doctrines tip people in the middle towards apathy. I.e. it both fuels an insane cult while creating a powerful apologetics for the lazy moderates (who would otherwise want something to be done, maybe over a long period of time with little personal cost, but at least something that would actually work; such as had the movement in the 90s achieved something significant, instead of the weakly worded "suggestion" of the Kyoto protocol).
For instance, when I started to get environmentally aware and talk about issues, my father's extended family and acquaintances etc., all left or far left on social issues, would always joke "I'll be dead by then!" and then laugh about it, whenever the subject of climate change was brought up, by me or anyone. The moral denialism of moderates, fueled by a total misunderstanding of what exponential rise in fossil consumption means and the risks of that, was already germinating.
Denialists in the 90s at least pretended to be working in a sane intellectual framework, just claiming "the facts" aren't in yet (taking advantage of the general public's lack of risk analysis skills, in an otherwise coherent debate where arguing on the facts did move people's opinions).
The 90s itself, was an echo of the 70s, where the same environmentalism debate also occurred, due to the oil shocks and discovering how poisonous pesticides and the like are.
Anyways, just my perspective supporting your basic point that we did know, did nothing, and future generations will view the Westerners that caused this as worse than the Nazi's (who only tried to illegitimate a few group in one species, in a mad lust for power and greed, and not destroy most species, in a mad lust for power and greed).
Weather catastrophes are leading people, who live through them, to regret the inaction of the last 40 years, but I think we are definitely in the "too little too late" phase and the large scale catastrophe is now "baked in". Though this was obvious to me 15 years ago (after the "environmental movement" declared biofuels a success), and, looking at the computer models that were still pretty good back then for decision making purposes, looked at where on the globe would become uncomfortably hot and where would stay ok (both in terms of environment and political stability) for a long time. I couldn't afford to move to New Zealand, so I moved to Northern Europe. If you're going to be a climate refugee, I highly recommend doing so at least a decade in advance. What does my old network say now: "it's really hot".
Although I would agree climate change, in itself, isn't an existential threat to humans, it is through interaction with nuclear war systems and, now, also killer AI systems (assuming they get good enough that, if set to "kill all enemies" (if friend and enemy is even a stable definition to these machines through time), and then those people who pressed that button die, they would simply track down and kill everyone using the most creative, ingenious, and patient means possible, essentially guaranteed to succeed against dispersed populations regressing in technological capacity).
Point is, "recharge" rate of the sun is way higher than geothermal and there's no surface area to volume problem.
I was going to step in and make this point, you beat my to it.
We could easily produce sufficient energy from solar power and solar generation plants are being built, but probably not fast enough. Although it’s probably to late anyway, as the tipping points are already being triggered. Even if we do manage to reduce emissions significantly, the damage is already sufficient for civilisation collapse, as we have discussed before.
We could easily produce sufficient energy from solar power and solar generation plants are being built, but probably not fast enough. Although it’s probably to late anyway, as the tipping points are already being triggered. Even if we do manage to reduce emissions significantly, the damage is already sufficient for civilisation collapse, as we have discussed before.
We definitely agree on this.
Of course, from a purely engineering point of view, things could be radically changed and the result (still a pretty big catastrophe by any standard) still a lot better than otherwise.
However, the environmental movement of the "large scale" essentially doesn't exist anymore. The denialist industry won with the moral delialism in the exterior, as I explain at some length in my post above, but this geothermal debate is the denialism industry winning from within the climate movement
Promoting "niche" energy sources that have no global relevance consumes research, development and installation capital, while solving nothing. Environmentalists that don't bother with basic engineering principles, then spend time arguing about which of the irrelevant nice ideas (always in the future) are best, and declaring "small victories" along the way that are actually counter productive (and generate subsidies for the oil industry who own and promote these "clean" niches; subsidies that finance more denialism), while everyone else sees that "renewable energy" doesn't really work (doesn't actually displace fossil on a large scale).
It is also not just a question of energy source, but of organizing society to use those energy sources efficiently. Trying to keep a system (such as highways and personal vehicles) going that doesn't even use fossil fuels efficiently (but was invented precisely because fossil fuels starts in a super abundance and needs to be wasted on a large scale to profit), is just pure intellectual insanity.
Yet, decades after the "biofuels" revolution proved to be a total lure (which was obvious at the time to even the most cursory scrutiny), what's all the rage? Electric cars!!
There's a basic physical problem called the "recharge" rate, which reduces to simple geometry. To extract energy efficiently from rock, we don't dig down and then install a big metal plate as a single surface heat exchanger. Rather, we dig a bunch of tubes over a volume or then use natural occurring tubes of water in fissures and cracks that's is already down there.
I'm looking to drill through rock at temperatures of 700'C - close to magma chambers and subduction zones, line the bore holes with pipes and pump water through - producing contained superheated steam. The volume and temperature of the rock suggests there would be no recharge rate issue.
In addition, volcanoes are in inconvenient locations, so even if the recharge rate was better than elsewhere, there's a large added cost of transporting the energy.
I plan to convert electrical energy into liquified hydrogen fuel for transport. Liquified hydrogen gas contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per kilo - and we ship petroleum around the world.
In general, Geothermal is, along with tidal, bio-energy, hydro, an energy source that is not globally applicable, there's just some impressive "sweet spots" (some bays, big forests, large rivers, Iceland). Those sweet spots aren't so great that you could transport energy all over the globe.
It's difficult to generalise about geothermal energy because every geothermal energy source has different characteristics. Current extraction techniques are sub-optimal. The particular design, I've described here many times - was created with these problems in mind. There are over 500 volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire alone, and 1500 globally, plus subduction zones - where large volumes of rock heated to very high temperatures, are within reach of modern drilling technologies.
Solar energy is weak and diffuse; it must be gathered from a large area and concentrated. An area of 225,000 square miles would need to be covered to meet current global energy demand from solar. Then, the same transport problem arises. How do you get that energy to where it is needed? Solar energy must be stored, for when the sun doesn't shine, which is around half the time. All sorts of toxic metals are used in production, to make solar panels, and after 25 years, solar needs replacing at similar cost, plus the cost of recycling.
I'm looking to drill through rock at temperatures of 700'C - close to magma chambers and subduction zones, line the bore holes with pipes and pump water through - producing contained superheated steam. The volume and temperature of the rock suggests there would be no recharge rate issue.
700 C rock isn't all that much energy; it sounds more impressive than it is. Heat capacity of rock isn't so high, and if we're talking super heated steam at 400 C, then there's only 300 C difference to work with.
To power a whole major country we're talking massive amount of rock, that costs money to put pipes through. If the heat extracted is equal to the recharge rate, no problem. However, even in incredibly convenient places for this technology, like iceland, the idea of powering a substantial part of Europe is just not remotely feasible.
Drilling pipe and circulating water is simply not all that hard, if this massive energy source was there, we'd be tapping it on a significant, and not niche, scale.
It's basic thermodynamics, very well understood, extremely low room for improvement of our heat engines (as you mention, steam is still a pretty solid choice of working fluid ... which is what was used at the very beginning of the aptly called steam age). This isn't something like nuclear fusion where we can always spectacular a breakthrough is possible.
Compared to our advancements in computing, heat engines have basically not advanced in a hundred years.
I plan to convert electrical energy into liquified hydrogen fuel for transport. Liquified hydrogen gas contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per kilo - and we ship petroleum around the world.
The problem this plan is:
- hydrogen is so small it seeps through materials, causing micro cracks; this isn't a problem if you need hydrogen and just a) tolerate leakage since the amount isn't a danger nor relevant economic loss b) replace the equipment when you need to, but is a problem if you want to build out a massive complex infrastructure of tanks, pipes, valves, gauges, etc. with high efficiency and low maintenance and few explosions.
- Even with the technical challenges resolved, the infrastructure involved is so massive that it would take decades to actually build.
- The only point of hydrogen infrastructure is to power personal vehicles and trucks ... but trains exist and can be built and powered by electricity far cheaper. I.e. even if it was doable, the basic justification doesn't exist, outside some niche applications that have no relevant to climate change.
It's difficult to generalise about geothermal energy because every geothermal energy source has different characteristics. Current extraction techniques are sub-optimal. The particular design, I've described here many times - was created with these problems in mind. There are over 500 volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire alone, and 1500 globally, plus subduction zones - where large volumes of rock heated to very high temperatures, are within reach of modern drilling technologies.
Volcanoes are impressive as they release stored energy in a short amount of time. To power anything significant, we're talking about a massive continuous volcanic eruption; the earth doesn't recharge the magma chambers fast enough. Magma moves pretty slowly, significant pressure can be stored up over time, but release that pressure and it doesn't just flow out like a tap. The exceptions of super active volcanoes, are not impressive but really small, not regular Mount Saint Helen eruptions (which is impressive in terms of energy).
Solar energy is weak and diffuse; it must be gathered from a large area and concentrated. An area of 225,000 square miles would need to be covered to meet current global energy demand from solar. Then, the same transport problem arises. How do you get that energy to where it is needed? Solar energy must be stored, for when the sun doesn't shine, which is around half the time. All sorts of toxic metals are used in production, to make solar panels, and after 25 years, solar needs replacing at similar cost, plus the cost of recycling.
Incorrect. Geothermal has a transport problem because the "sweet spots" where it's economic are concentrated in very few locations (such as the 500 active volcanoes you mention), so, the energy is far from where people live and you'd need a massive and costly transport infrastructure even if the energy was there (which it isn't).
Solar, on the other hand, is diffuse but not in a bad way, it lands where people live.
Imagine you had the following:
- garden (powered by sunlight)
- energy (powered by sunlight)
- wood or bamboo construction material (powered by sunlight)
- ceramics (powered by sunlight)
- basic tool and machine shop, both in hour home and short distance in the community (powered by sunlight)
- the ability to recycle metals (powered by sunlight)
Then, ask yourself how much personal transport you would need.
Then ask yourself how much high volume transport infrastructure you would need. Certainly some inputs and trade are still needed for this local economic system to work ... but 10, 20, even 1 lane highways? Would they be needed?
If you actually calculate out how much energy is required to run this techno-peasant system, it's a small fraction of what is anyways required to grow food and materials. We grow food and materials (we mostly waste) in this way now, and with a lot of transport, mono-crop and rotting inefficiencies (with lot's of good land occupied by suburban sprawl accomplishing noting food wise), so, basically by definition, if you matched people to where food is currently grown, then matched solar technology (mainly solar thermal technology is needed in this system) to the enclosure of inefficiencies in the current system (roads, mono-crops, suburbia), etc. problem solved.
People can easily live in this semi-autonomous way right now, growing most of their food and making most of their capital equipment themselves, imagine if a large system to make it easy and efficient was in place? (a network of drones delivering materials and small things that do need a factory (like computer chips), local blacksmiths, and elevated bike and small vehicle paths connecting everywhere, and the Uber of helicopters if you need to go somewhere quickly, like to a hospital). Infrastructure that still enables high mobility and trade of dense quality (metals that can be recycled, "clean-room" electronics, medicines, machine tooling, and, of course, spice) could be insanely light compared to today's infrastructure, if bulky things (like food, wood, other plant fibers, and clay) are derived locally, and energy input (the sun) also derived locally.
If you've ever encountered this homesteading life, it's actually pretty lazy compared to most jobs in the capitalist system (especially low-paying jobs), and far more fulfilling. The homesteaders that work hard is because they make a point to do even more for themselves than is economically efficient in their system (to make a political point that it is possible to do it locally, leading by example, even if, right now, it would take less effort to trade for it), but even these hard working hippies would work a lot less hard if they had a network of craft-people and a light infrastructure of the kind I describe (to enable ethical and sustainable trade).
Why doesn't this happen if it's so lazy? Lot's of poor people try, but they can't buy the land necessary.
Why is land expensive? Because the private control of land is the foundation of capitalism. Had land remained a communal resource, where, of course, you just put a poor person in a "cottage" and at least they'll make enough food for themselves, maybe produce a soldier or two.
700 C rock isn't all that much energy; it sounds more impressive than it is. Heat capacity of rock isn't so high, and if we're talking super heated steam at 400 C, then there's only 300 C difference to work with.
To power a whole major country we're talking massive amount of rock, that costs money to put pipes through. If the heat extracted is equal to the recharge rate, no problem. However, even in incredibly convenient places for this technology, like iceland, the idea of powering a substantial part of Europe is just not remotely feasible.
Not feasible, why? You're not suggesting are you, that the energy is not there? There is an unimaginably massive amount of energy in the earth's interior. That so, it's a matter of the right technological approach to extracting that energy; and I agree that existing technological approaches are sub-optimal.
Geothermal refers to a great many technologies, and recharge rate refers to a form of geothermal wherein heat energy is harnessed from an underground body of hot water fed by convection. Only so much energy can be drawn; against the time it takes convection to heat the body of water. The technology I envisage is not remotely like that.
A cubic kilometer of rock heated to 700'C contains something like 420000000000 joules; a reservoir of energy fed by conduction from liquid magma at a higher temperature. Through this rock would be cut (perhaps) one meter diameter bore holes, containing pipes, containing water - which would be raised to the ambient temperature of the surroundings. Any replacement rate deficit of the environment surrounding the pipe would be immediately compensated for via conduction from an adjacent higher temperature energy source. The replacement rate issue refers to another form of geothermal; which is why I prefer the term magma energy.
the energy is far from where people live and you'd need a massive and costly transport infrastructure even if the energy was there (which it isn't).
You mean, like the transport infrastructure for coal, oil and gas? We manage to get that from A to B somehow, and I explained how I intend to distribute magma energy in the previous post. I said:
I plan to convert electrical energy into liquified hydrogen fuel for transport. Liquified hydrogen gas contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per kilo - and we ship petroleum around the world.
Not feasible, why? You're not suggesting are you, that the energy is not there? There is an unimaginably massive amount of energy in the earth's interior. That so, it's a matter of the right technological approach to extracting that energy; and I agree that existing technological approaches are sub-optimal.
It's not about "sub optimal", it's about needing to drill a lot of pipe, and then cooling that volume of rock, which doesn't recharge at the same rate of depletion, requiring more drilling.
These processes are pretty close to optimal. There are basic physical limits to the efficiency of cleaving and lifting rock out of the ground, of heat engines. There's not some "drilling breakthrough" anyone is proposing to happen ... except for Elon Musk but that was walked back to "it's cheaper to drill smaller diameters! so we'll do that".
You mean, like the transport infrastructure for coal, oil and gas? We manage to get that from A to B somehow, and I explained how I intend to distribute magma energy in the previous post. I said:
We manage to get that from A to B by burning a lot of coal, oil and gas in both building up massive infrastructures and also to run them.
Your point of shipping around petroleum (using petroleum) is not analogous to shipping around hydrogen.
First, technically, hydrogen is a lot more challenging (need to compress and freeze it, and much more difficult to store even compared other gases).
More importantly, hydrogen is not a cheap source of energy like petroleum (insofar as it's still in easy accessible locations in forms easy to process). Petroleum pays the energy cost itself to transport it as well as build the infrastructure. If you have a bunch of petroleum, you can always "get it somewhere" on the globe to sell it (the only wrinkle is if plenty other people have plenty petroleum too, so the margins are thin; solution: promote an insanely inefficient economy that wastes energy wantonly and also make both implicit and explicit cartels to control the price; both to extract profit sometimes with high prices as well as disrupt competing industries with super low prices sometimes).
Hydrogen needs to be made, which costs energy, as it's not a source, and that energy cost and the cost of infrastructure can easily exceed the costs of other sources of energy that are available at the location you want to sell in (like the sun shining there, or the wind blowing there, and just way cheaper than buying magma-to-hydrogen energy ). Hydrogen doesn't "pay" the energy cost to make and move it. Why your system doesn't exist, but solar and wind systems do; but they are most efficient locally, as, if you don't need to move energy, there's only an energy cost to doing so with no benefit (distributed system also has less, or no, systemic failure points, could be robust against Carington events, etc. etc.).
It's not about "sub optimal", it's about needing to drill a lot of pipe, and then cooling that volume of rock, which doesn't recharge at the same rate of depletion, requiring more drilling.
I understand the principle; but it doesn't apply. Underground water sources fed by convection can hold a limited amount of energy and take time to heat up; whereas conduction from a higher temperature energy source is a constant and vast pressure that would immediately compensate for the escape of heat via a bore hole.
What processes? In what way optimal? I also said previously, geothermal refers to a great many technologies. You've taken a problem with one form of geothermal and applied it incorrectly to the technology I propose, so that's just wrong.
Hydrogen needs to be made, which costs energy, as it's not a source,
When energy is converted from one form to another, it costs energy. That's correct. Hydrogen is not a source of energy, no. Hydrogen is a fuel; a means to store and transport energy. Less than 100% of the magma heat energy extracted will be stored as hydrogen. These are true physical facts. I know of, and account for these facts.
Hydrogen fuel is clean and versatile, and contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per kilo. There are very well understood issues with hydrogen embrittlement; hardly worth mentioning. And I'm not sure you get the point that shipping hydrogen would be 2.5 times more efficient, simply by weight.
Petroleum pays the energy cost itself to transport it
Petroleum is a refined product. It does not come out of the ground. Oil comes out of the ground, which then needs to be transported to where it is refined, and refined, before being distributed again as petroleum. All these processes imply energy costs. These are physical facts, but are not valid criticisms of hydrogen if fossil fuels are even less efficient by the same measure.
What processes? In what way optimal? I also said previously, geothermal refers to a great many technologies. You've taken a problem with one form of geothermal and applied it incorrectly to the technology I propose, so that's just wrong.
The problems I describe are inherent to the geothermal energy source, they apply to all implementations of geothermal energy.
For instance, all solar energy technologies won't work in a dark cave, for reasons to do with the characteristics of solar energy source, not the technology.
literally the first search engine result for the word 'petroleum':Petroleum, also called crude oil, is a fossil fuel. Like coal and natural gas, petroleum was formed from the remains of ancient marine organisms, such as plants, algae, and bacteria.
All these processes imply energy costs. These are physical facts, but are not valid criticisms against hydrogen; if fossil fuels are even less efficient by the same measure.
Yes, my point is that petroleum pays that energy cost. So, if it is "on hand" (such as high quality, close to the surface, oil fields), then it easily pays the energy cost of it's transport.
Hydrogen is never "on hand" in a similar way, and so the situation is no analogous.
I just read a headline about "Moon Wobble", to occur in 2030. This will be the new punching bag for the deniers: "Ocean levels aren't rising due to hoax global warming; it's the result of perfectly natural "moon wobble. Calm down! I can continue to pump poison into the air. It's all good, you Chicken Littles."
I just read a headline about "Moon Wobble", to occur in 2030. This will be the new punching bag for the deniers: "Ocean levels aren't rising due to hoax global warming; it's the result of perfectly natural "moon wobble. Calm down! I can continue to pump poison into the air. It's all good, you Chicken Littles."
I saw that too. Order is a phase in Chaos. Next up, the sun will now show us what it can really do! WTF?
The problems I describe are inherent to the geothermal energy source, they apply to all implementations of geothermal energy.
Whether you are right, (you are not right) or wrong - we are close to an impasse of direct and repeated contradiction. I can't explain why again, because I tried twice. Then again, they say third time's a charm.
Imagine a fire, and on that fire there's a pan containing water, and you dip your pipe in that water, and pass water through the pipe to extract energy from the body of water which consequently cools down. It takes time to heat up. And this is the replacement rate. It applies to hydrothermal energy.
Now imagine a pipe containing water inside the fire box of a steam engine. It is incidental to the heat of the fire how much water you pass through the pipe. No amount of water passed through the pipe will diminish the heat of the fire.
The same physics is obliquely relevant in calculating how much water, at what rate would pass through a pipe of what diameter for optimal steam pressure, to drive turbines, to generate electricity. But rock heated to 700'C by proximity to magma would not become depleted in the way a subterranean body of water does, and so replacement rate does not apply.
If you still don't get it, there's no need to contradict me again. Just say good chat, and I'll know what you mean!
Drilling 10,000 m deep geothermal wells
15 September 2010
It may be possible to collect geothermal energy from depths down to 10,000 m, according to Norwegian researchers.
Commonly used geothermal energy comes from a depth of 150-200 m where temperatures are around 6-8°C. Researchers at NTNU, University of Bergen, the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) and SINTEF believe it is possible to drill down to 10,000 m where temperatures can reach at least 374°C and the water has a pressure of at least 220 bars.
“If we manage to produce this kind of energy it would clearly be a ‘moon landing’. This is one of the few sources of energy that we really have enough of. The only thing that we need is the technology to harvest it,” says Researchers at SINTEF Materials and Chemistry, Odd-Geir Lademo.
Drilling 10,000 m deep geothermal wells
15 September 2010
I have been reading these sorts of press releases for over 20 years.
"Moon landing" and "we just need to technology to harvest it".
People have even literally made press releases of harvesting the moon's orbital energy, and of course mining it for stuff ... if we only had the technology.
There's actually plenty of energy sources "we really have enough of": Quasars, stars in general, zero point energy.
The point of these press releases is to get some grants. Scientists are always like "peer review, evidence, skepticism" ... except when it comes to grant applications and the press releases that provide plausible reasoning (on part with any creationist) for spending public money on their project.
Meanwhile, solar energy, the energy source humanity has mostly used for it's entire history (to grow crops, trees, grow plankton for fish, and also heat most buildings most of the year), and has been pointed to as the obvious better source of energy than fossil with easily demonstrated calculations that don't change, has proven itself cost-effective (even against fossil fuels with subsidies and basically no "polluter pays" principles), and it wouldn't be all that complicated to replace fossil with solar energy on a global scale (indeed, the savings would be enormous, as all the various costs of the pollution are very real and paid somewhere, sometime, by somebody; indeed, all of us), not "if only we had the technology to harvest it"; we have the technology now.
The problem is not now, nor has ever been, a technological one. Had the "polluter pays" principle as Reply to James Riley has been referring to, been implemented; our climate change problem would not exist, and, by definition, it would not have cost us any money (as what the polluter is paying are real costs to the economy; so, making the polluter pay, by definition, doesn't harm the economy: just moves it in a more efficient direction of technologies with low real-costs, rather than simply low production production costs).
Every time I hear someone whining about the price of a gallon of gas I think about how shocked they'd be if true cost were charged. We are all subsidized by the Earth, future generations, people with asthma, and the list goes on and on.
Even if we all agree to this open conspiracy so we can drive, etc. you'd think the purveyors wouldn't balk at paying a modicum of taxes on their gargantuan profits so we could offset a fraction of the costs they socialize onto the backs of innocent third parties and the Earth. But no. They instead lobby for and receive additional subsidy from Uncle Sugar.
There's actually plenty of energy sources "we really have enough of":
There really isn't though, and herein lies the point. We'd have to cover an area of 225,000 square miles with solar panels to meet current global energy demand. Sunlight is spread over a large area, and we cannot physically gather energy from the entire surface of the earth. But we could extract enough magma energy to meet and exceed current global energy demand because magma is a concentrated, high grade source of clean energy, and there's a lot of it.
Sunlight is spread over a large area, and we cannot physically gather energy from the entire surface of the earth.
We should not gather it all up when nature is doing it for us for free. She's been doing exactly that for millions of years. All that sun gathered up for photosynthesis, converted to protein steaks so we can sit around, burp, fart, fuck, craft, laugh, dance, science, innovate, and generally enjoy a garden Eden paradise. We have the technology now to make everyone live like kings, without all the negatives of tooth and claw that our forefathers had to deal with. The problem is, too many of us. That's on us. Everything we want is there for the asking. We are not as bright as we think we are when we think that we must continue to do what got us where we are because it worked so far.
Edjumacations is what we need. Fewer, smarter, wiser people.
We should not gather it all up when nature is doing it for us for free. She's been doing exactly that for millions of years. All that sun gathered up for photosynthesis, converted to protein steaks so we can sit around, burp, fart, fuck, craft, laugh, dance, science, innovate, and generally enjoy a garden Eden paradise. We have the technology now to make everyone live like kings, without all the negatives of tooth and claw that our forefathers had to deal with. The problem is, too many of us. That's on us. Everything we want is there for the asking. We are not as bright as we think we are when we think that we must continue to do what got us where we are because it worked so far. Edjumacations is what we need. Fewer, smarter, wiser people.
Over-population is not a thing. The misapplication of technology is a thing. If we applied the right technologies the world could easily sustain 8 billion people. We are 8 billion people. Thus, we need to apply the technologies necessary to sustain such numbers. Simple logic!
UN mid range projections suggest global population will level out at around 10-12 bn people by the end of the century; and those numbers can be sustained if we harness massive clean energy from magma - to capture carbon, desalinate, irrigate, recycle etc. We should do that. The alternatives are too terrible to contemplate.
Over-population is not a thing. The misapplication of technology is a thing. If we applied the right technologies the world could easily sustain 8 billion people. We are 8 billion people. Thus, we need to apply the technologies necessary to sustain such numbers. Simple logic!
You are wrong. Over-population is a thing. We are already (and have been for a long, long time) way past sustainability. Simple logic: We can no longer sustain hunting or gathering. We can no longer go down to the local river and drink long and deep. We can no longer trek for miles across untracked wilderness without trespass. We can no longer breath pure air.
We have to pay for everything. The world has been clear-cut, strip-mined, subdivided, paved, fenced, dammed, domesticated and lit up like a god dam Christmas tree so most people have never seen the stars at night.
I remember about forty years ago some idiot said the entire population of the world would fit in the state of Texas at a population density of New York City. He said, ergo, we had plenty of room left. But people like this fail to account for the giant sucking sound of resources being ripped from the rest of the planet into Texas just to sustain that throbbing pustule; not to mention the untold waste generated therefrom. People like this think food comes from the grocery store and heat comes from the radiator.
These are the same idiots who drive for miles down roads lined with trees and think they see a forest, so all must be well. These people have never heard of "view sheds." When they drive through Iowa, or fly over the fly-over country, they see vast farm fields and think they are looking at wilderness because they don't know what the fuck they are talking about. They see a deer in somebody's yard and consider it wildlife. They've never seen a wolf, except on T.V. They don't know what diversity is.
People are so fucked up they actually think sustainability is the ability to sustain people. What an ignorant, arrogant, simple definition of sustainability. Sustainability has left the building. The base line was what we started with, not what have left. If we want sustainability then we can't squeeze more out the Earth for people; rather, we have to get rid of people and re-wild the Earth.
Simple logic. As a little boy I remember the Fish and Game guy coming to our school and explaining the food pyramid, apex predators, and how all that worked. And how to fuck it up. We now have an upside down pyramid with seven billion apex predators at the top, trying to figure out how to drain what's under them so they can put even more up there. We should put the pyramid back right side up and have about 500k to 1m people on the planet at the top, at our current rate of individual first world consumption. The planet *might* be able to sustain that.
No, it's really not a thing. Resources are ultimately a function of the energy available to create them. It's morally repugnant to consider people surplus; particularly given that, scientifically and technologically speaking, no-one need have a carbon footprint. Given a scientifically advised application of technology, starting with magma energy technology, to power carbon capture, desalination, irrigation and recycling, 10bn people can live well, and sustainably.
No, it's really not a thing. It's morally repugnant to consider people surplus; particularly given that, scientifically and technologically speaking, no-one need have a carbon footprint. Given a scientifically advised application of technology, starting with magma energy technology, to power carbon capture, desalination, irrigation and recycling, 10bn people can live well, and sustainably.
Over population is a real and horrible thing. It is morally repugnant and patently arrogant to think otherwise. All the clap-trap about what could be, but is not, is the proof of it. It's just more humanity spouting shit into the wind as part of an open conspiracy against the Earth and ourselves. We should really put up or shut up. Don't talk. Make it work, now.
"anyway i think an apt way to think about climate change is that there are 'no non-radical futures.' either we change everything or the earth changes everything for us. anyone selling you 'realistic' incremental change is performing the work of charlatans and denialists." roshan
As for me, what I want is already gone because our population is not and has not been sustainable. Over population and surplus people are the reason.
I want to commend you for an excellent post, and very informative. Nice to have someone who knows what they're talking about. Good luck getting through to the buffoon, but thank you for the reasoned responses for the rest of us.
The geothermal claims were vague. References to magma are confusing with respect to geothermal energy. I'll remind everyone of the operating temperatures of drilling equipment and what happens when you open up a hole to something under tremendous pressure.
We are 8 billion people. Thus, we need to apply the technologies necessary to sustain such numbers. Simple logic!
I don’t want to be part of a pile on, only to point out the flaw in this argument( although James Riley has already laid out the reality).
What do those 8 billion people do when the sea level has risen by 30 metres, do they all move uphill a little?
And what about the people already inhabiting the higher land, do they have a say. I would hazard a guess that at least 2-3billion live below 30m altitude, many of the worlds largest cities are below this level and a lot of fertile farmland would be lost.
Not to mention societal collapse and despotic rule, which hasn’t been mentioned yet. Our world would soon become dystopian, making the degrees of cooperation required for your scenario to work, impossible.
Over population is a real and horrible thing. It is morally repugnant and patently arrogant to think otherwise. All the clap-trap about what could be, but is not, is the proof of it.
You want to murder most of the population of earth and you call me unrealistic because I want to drill to harness magma energy? I asked how you plan to accomplish this mega-genocide, and you've got nothing. People won't just sit around and be killed you know. WWII - the economies of nations were turned to the purposes of mass murder, and they hardly killed 100 million people.
"anyway i think an apt way to think about climate change is that there are 'no non-radical futures.' either we change everything or the earth changes everything for us. anyone selling you 'realistic' incremental change is performing the work of charlatans and denialists." roshan
Limitless clean energy from magma is a radical future; and one that offers hope.
The geothermal claims were vague. References to magma are confusing with respect to geothermal energy. I'll remind everyone of the operating temperatures of drilling equipment and what happens when you open up a hole to something under tremendous pressure.
Idiots are often easily confused, and I'm wondering if that might be the problem.
There really isn't though, and herein lies the point. We'd have to cover an area of 225,000 square miles with solar panels to meet current global energy demand. Sunlight is spread over a large area, and we cannot physically gather energy from the entire surface of the earth. But we could extract enough magma energy to meet and exceed current global energy demand because magma is a concentrated, high grade source of clean energy, and there's a lot of it.
You keep repeating this number as if it's some sort of problem for solar energy.
Your 225 000 square miles is about 580 000 square kilometres.
Surface area of earth is 510 000 000 square kilometres.
Assuming your value is correct, it is not really a problem; it is a thousand times less than the surface of the earth. We occupy (and degrade) far more land with mono-crop agriculture than we would need with solar energy.
Solar energy devices can be placed on roofs, over roads (or replace roads that we no longer need), placed over plants that require shade, and other duel use purposes, and so the "land cost" can be close to zero in this regard.
Furthermore, by reducing and reversing large scale infrastructure (that not only occupies a lot of land in itself, such as those 20 lane highways, but also divides the ecosystem making it less efficient), would actually be a net-positive in terms of land bio efficiency (the ecosystems being the primary value of land).
Whether you are right, (you are not right) or wrong - we are close to an impasse of direct and repeated contradiction. I can't explain why again, because I tried twice. Then again, they say third time's a charm.
Do some calculations then, of the volume of rock/magma you need at 700 C to power the world.
I can assure you it's a huge volume of rock, and, once it's cooled (the energy extracted from it) it will recharge very slowly, either through the heat diffusion from below or the slow recharge of magma chambers. The volcanoes we have aren't taps that can be opened to release indefinite magma flows.
This the basic problem of all sources of geothermal energy.
There are "sweet spots" where the recharge rate is pretty good, like iceland, but it is no where good enough to power all of the UK, not to mention Europe.
I guess I must be. There's no other reasonable explanation. I must be too stupid to understand why a big ball of molten rock - 4000 miles deep and 26,000 miles around, isn't a viable source of energy for those living on the surface, particularly given the nature and scale of the threat from climate change. I'm such an idiot, it just seems obvious to me we'd want to tap into that energy, and I get frustrated that I cannot understand why no-one else wants that.
The geothermal claims were vague. References to magma are confusing with respect to geothermal energy. I'll remind everyone of the operating temperatures of drilling equipment and what happens when you open up a hole to something under tremendous pressure.
It is kind of frustrating though, after repeatedly talking about drilling "close to magma chambers and subduction zones" to have you say I propose drilling into a magma chamber under pressure. Also, the melting point of carbon steel drilling equipment is around 1500 degrees centigrade; so drilling rock at 700'C is not going to melt the drill.
You keep repeating this number as if it's some sort of problem for solar energy. Your 225 000 square miles is about 580 000 square kilometres. Surface area of earth is 510 000 000 square kilometres.
It's just to give an idea of how much solar you're talking about. And the sheer size of the thing is just the start of your problems. Solar only produces energy half the time, at best, and so that energy needs to be stored. Storage is expensive, both in terms of the infrastructure, and the energy cost of translating one form of energy into another. Transmitting energy from one place to another requires high voltages, and solar is low voltage - which is another huge energy cost. Solar panels are expensive, they last 20 years tops, and they're difficult or impossible to recycle because they contain toxic metals. Metals that have to be mined prior to manufacture.
Furthermore, by reducing and reversing large scale infrastructure (that not only occupies a lot of land in itself, such as those 20 lane highways, but also divides the ecosystem making it less efficient), would actually be a net-positive in terms of land bio efficiency (the ecosystems being the primary value of land).
You think we're going to rip up highways? How would your huge solar panel manufacturing plant get raw materials without roads? How will they distribute the finished product? Off road horse and cart? You cannot change everything, and you can't kill everyone. You want the least disruptive, most effective adequate intervention; and the most bang for your buck is magma energy.
It is kind of frustrating though, after repeatedly talking about drilling "close to magma chambers and subduction zones" to have you say I propose drilling into a magma chamber under pressure. Also, the melting point of carbon steel drilling equipment is around 1500 degrees centigrade; so drilling rock at 700'C is not going to melt the drill.
As I've pointed out it's silly to call it magma energy for obvious reasons. It's geothermal energy. But it's nice to see how you've not done any research on how drilling works. It's not about the melting point of carbon steel but making sure your equipment doesn't break. Here's 157 degrees celsius, our current record for drilling at high temperatures: https://www.hartenergy.com/ep/exclusives/high-temperature-drilling-pushes-limits-176820
Drills need lubricants. Oops.
And yeah, great fucking idea to drill close to areas proven to be under pressure (there are volcanoes) and fuck around with the structural integrity of the rock above it. And while we're at it, let's add water! That will definitely go well.
Here's 157 degrees celsius, our current record for drilling at high temperatures:
That's not a record temperature.
World's hottest borehole nearly complete
By Rebecca Morelle
Science Correspondent, BBC News, Iceland
Published 14 December 2016
Geologists say they are close to creating the hottest borehole in the world. They are drilling into the heart of a volcano in the south-west of Iceland. They have told the BBC that they should reach 5km down, where temperatures are expected to exceed 500C (932F), in the next couple of weeks.
And yeah, great fucking idea to drill close to areas proven to be under pressure (there are volcanoes) and fuck around with the structural integrity of the rock above it. And while we're at it, let's add water! That will definitely go well.
You want to murder most of the population of earth and you call me unrealistic because I want to drill to harness magma energy?
I'm beginning to see why people think you are flakey. I didn't say anything about murder. I didn't say you were unrealistic. I don't want to engage with you any more.
Limitless clean energy from magma is a radical future; and one that offers hope.
If you are here on the internet telling us about it instead of getting out there and making it happen then it's just more noise. I don't know shit about magma and I've got no truck with it, like I said. But apparently others here who are smarter than me think you of full of it. I'm not taking sides on that. I'm just saying "go to work and good luck."
Is there ANYONE out there who still doesn't consider this the issue of our times?
It might be more accurate to put it this way. Climate change is a symptom of "the issue" of our times, our relationship with knowledge.
To illustrate, imagine that we somehow fixed climate change completely right now, and also developed a new method of totally free unlimited clean energy.
That fixes climate change, but the price tag would be that the economy would take off like a rocket and so we'd been burning through non-renewable resources at a faster pace, civilization expansion would accelerate leading to quicker species extinction and so on etc.
In other words, fixing climate change would just move the problem from one category to another.
Climate change is a product of the primitive relationship with knowledge which characterized the 19th century industrial revolution. Full speed ahead at all costs, more is always better, don't bother to worry about the consequences etc. We're still doing that with the current emerging technologies like AI, genetic engineering.
Until we can wrap our minds around a more mature relationship with knowledge, we're going to keep creating more and bigger problems at an accelerating rate. Take climate change off the table, something else replaces it.
Indeed. Despite it being explained to you over and over again. I guess some people just need to believe they have a secret that solves the world's problems, despite knowing next to nothing about it. Oh well.
Despite what being explained to me over and over?
The key difference between us is, I hope humankind survives and prospers. And far from keeping it a secret - I seek to communicate my ideas.
I do believe magma energy is viable, and the only source of clean energy, large, high grade and close enough to meet and exceed global energy demand.
We need this energy if future generations are to have any chance at all of striking a balance between human and environmental welfare. I hope they can - but people like you, I can only conclude you want to see the world burn.
Reply to counterpunch Cool, I wasn't aware as I'm only familiar with the oil and gas industry. That's pretty interesting.
You should work out the numbers boethius has asked for. How much square meters of rock do you need and what will be the recharge rate. Then you also need to prove it's an economical viable option aside from some obvious engineering challenges of operating equipment under high pressure and high temperatures with moving parts. Generally, engineers aren't happy with both high pressure and high temperature.
I'm beginning to see why people think you are flakey. I didn't say anything about murder. I didn't say you were unrealistic. I don't want to engage with you any more.
I thoroughly endorse your plan of not talking to me anymore. But before you go, please explain how you would go about de-populating the planet:
Cool, I wasn't aware as I'm only familiar with the oil and gas industry. That's pretty interesting. You should work out the numbers boethius has asked for. How much square meters of rock do you need and what will be the recharge rate. Then you also need to prove it's an economical viable option aside from some obvious engineering challenges of operating equipment under high pressure and high temperatures with moving parts. Generally, engineers aren't happy with both high pressure and high temperature.
I'm only going to say this one more time before I get very pissed off. Recharge rate applies to hydrothermal - a form of geothermal that draws heat from underground water. Water is a poor conductor of heat. It takes time to heat up - so there's only so much energy that can be drawn from it, over time.
Recharge rate is not an issue where there is conduction through rock, from a higher temperature energy source. Rock is a good conductor of heat. Any energy you take out of heated rock will immediately be replaced from the higher temperature region adjacent. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Heat always moves from hotter to cooler regions, and passes easily through stone. This is why magma energy is a better term than geothermal.
It's not possible to work out the numbers boethius demanded without doing physical research at a specific location, but clearly, drilling at high temperatures and pressures is possible, and there are millions of cubic meters of rock heated to 700'C. This temperature is desirable because it allows for dry superheated steam - making the most of the thermal expansion properties of water, so to create greater pressure to drive turbines.
Thermal conductivity of rocks falls usually in the range of 0.40–7.00 W m?1 K?1 [8]. Low values are characteristic for dry, not consolidated sedimentary rocks, as gravels and sands. Higher thermal conductivity values are for most sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, while very high are typical for felsic igneous rocks. Rocks with high quartz content (e.g. quartzite, sandstone), as well as water-saturated rocks, are the best heat conductors [9]. Balckwell and Steele [10] provide thermal conductivity values for sandstones in the range of 2.50–4.20 W m?1 K?1, for shale: 1.05–1.45 W m?1 K?1, and for claystone and siltstone: 0.80–1.25 W m?1 K?1.
Near volcanoes it will therefore be high because that's igneous rock. Let's assume there's no temperature drop, how much rock do you need to power a city like New York? How many holes?
How about the engineering part? What existing machines come close and how are you going to make them suitable for those environments? How much is it going to cost? Is it economically viable? How does it compare to other renewable energy sources?
And finally, are there any long term risks? Let's say we only use geothermal energy, how much faster will the core cool? Are we sure that's neglible? If people think "unlimited energy" how will energy usage develop differently?
wiki:Geothermal power requires no fuel; it is therefore immune to fuel cost fluctuations. However, capital costs tend to be high. Drilling accounts for over half the costs, and exploration of deep resources entails significant risks. A typical well doublet in Nevada can support 4.5 megawatts (MW) of electricity generation and costs about $10 million to drill, with a 20% failure rate.[23] In total, electrical station construction and well drilling costs about 2–5 million € per MW of electrical capacity, while the levelised energy cost is 0.04–0.10 € per kW·h.[10] Enhanced geothermal systems tend to be on the high side of these ranges, with capital costs above $4 million per MW and levelized costs above $0.054 per kW·h in 2007.[52]
Geothermal power is highly scalable: a small power station can supply a rural village, though initial capital costs can be high.[53]
The most developed geothermal field is the Geysers in California. In 2008, this field supported 15 stations, all owned by Calpine, with a total generating capacity of 725 MW.[38]
Recharge rate is not an issue where there is conduction through rock, from a higher temperature energy source. Rock is a good conductor of heat. Any energy you take out of heated rock will immediately be replaced from the higher temperature region adjacent. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Heat always moves from hotter to cooler regions, and passes easily through stone.
This is simply not true. On the scale of literal insulation being a good insulator and a heat pipe being a good heat conductor, rock is closer the insulation side. Energy flows from hot to cold, but it takes time.
Indeed, the reason you need to drill to the depths you're talking about it because the rock is insulating pretty well. If you drill to those depths and extract heat from a small volume, it will indeed recharge pretty fast, but the larger the volume the slower it will recharge.
The volume of rock you need to power something significant (like a continent) is completely massive. To justify the capital equipment of the power station, not to mention the hydrogen production and storage and transport terminals you've been talking about, the amount of power needs to be "worth it".
Which is why, as Reply to Benkei has posted, many wells fail even in super sweet spot regions such as Geysers that is "the most developed", 15 wells produce 725 MW. An average of 49 MW per well.
That's just not a lot of energy. If heat just "instantly" recharged the rock at 700 C, you wouldn't limit your generation capacity to 49MW per well, you'd just "let her rip" and have nuclear gigawatt power station sized pipes. The reason, once you have a well, you can't just circulate as much water as you want to get as much energy as you want with the rock heat recovering "instantly", is because it's not instant. You're energy extraction must be equal to the recharge rate of the rock volume you're extracting energy from, otherwise the heat source cools to a point you can no longer generate power. Indeed, many geothermal stations end up running at a fraction of their original design capacity, because the recharge calculations were wrong.
The volume of rock will cool as energy is extracted from it, but will only heat up proportional to the surface area below (and to the sides somewhat, but doesn't change the proportionality here).
When you have these sorts of volume to surface area proportionality constraints, the solution is to have a small volume to keep that proportion low; hence stations are in the single or double digit MW range and not the GW range.
Another way to look at it is the heat gradient from the core to the surface. The earth is efficient at trapping all that heat: i.e. the opposite of being efficient at bringing it to the surface; we can make it more efficient by drilling down there and circulating water, but once we do that for a large volume we are constrained again by general heat gradient context of the surrounding rock.
Solar energy does not have this problem, but the energy extraction is a surface area (PV or hot water panels, mirror for solar concentrates, or just windows to heat buildings) and the "recharge" rate is proportional to the surface.
That the energy is spread out over the globe just means it's its own distribution network and we don't need that capital cost.
However, I am not arguing that solar energy will prevent the the climate change catastrophe. I am arguing that it could have, if fossil costs were internalized in the 70s - 80s - 90s, but now it is too late to avoid major tipping points.
The Amazon being a carbon source now, instead of a carbon sink, is a major such tipping points (I remember being discussed literally decades ago as a "oh shit moment" we should try to avoid). Likewise, that temperature records have been recently broken by several degrees, is also evidence of the climate breaking out of the meta-stable Holocene epoch, but the entire Quaternary geologic period, and is currently in an unstable region that will move rapidly towards a new metastable point several degrees hotter than present.
The IPPC models are wrong, on the conservative side, but it was known that they were wrong on the conservative side. The "surprise" is only that the wishful thinking that making conservative models provides a sense of security, turns out to be completely stupid.
However, decades ago to the present some climate modelers worked on realistic models (sometimes the same modelers that work on IPPC models too, and pointed out the things missing that make them conservative), which have always been terrifying in terms of the risk indication (numerical models of complex systems and things that haven't happened yet, only inform risk, never actually predict what will happen).
So, I'm not arguing solar energy can now arrest or reverse the climate crisis, only that it could have easily do so in an economically feasible way if the costs of fossil were internalized (whereas your magma technology could not have done likewise), and, even today, a massive proliferation of solar technology (and adapting society to use solar energy efficiently) would mitigate the crisis, but that is a political problem that is less and less feasible as the world is disrupted more and more by climate change and derivative affects.
So yes, billions of people are likely to perish, and it is definitely murder by the West in both a collective sense of apathy and specific sense on the part of the denialist industry, but that is not a "solution" proposed by us environmentalists pointing it out, it's just largely inevitable at this point.
Certainly, if you could prove magma energy to work, or even be "worth a shot", some billions should be spent finding that out and then a few 10s of trillion building your system if you turn out to be right.
Likewise, some billions should be spent on solar energy to discover the same, and some 10s of trillions spent converting the world to solar (in both installation of solar energy, and converting infrastructure to efficiently use it, with more local production using local energy, removing the large energy costs of both transport and large transport infrastructure).
Neither of these scenarios are happening, and spending trillions on bailing out the banks (i.e. corruption) from the consequences of their own corruption, in combination with the costs of more bailouts of the system in general due to the pandemic, and costs bailing out the system due to the affects of climate change, will likely lead to the kinds of economic dislocations that make large scale global investments no longer possible.
But the reason no alternative to fossil is being developed in a serious way (a way that would actually reverse carbon emissions) is political, not technological nor economic (we have the technology, and, as the world is discovering, eating the costs of climate change head on is not "economic bravery and realism" but complete idiocy).
As a note, water is an excellent mover of heat via convection, and if heat conduction to rock was instant as you say, then it would efficiently re-heat any hot water that's down there.
You can also look at the physics and economics of heat storage for power. They exist (such as for solar thermal energy), but for relatively short periods of time, because the material volumes required are simply massive. You'll also note that things like molten salt are used that efficiently transfer heat by convection, and if you work out just having a big cube of rock heated from below, it's not an efficient system (which would be analogous to having a a large cube of rock below the surface heated from further below that).
As an aside, the solution to the intermittence of solar energy is to simply match energy consumption to the energy availability as much as possible, which brings the problem down to a manageable level.
Also, for people who think environmental "alarmists" have been saying the crisis is massive for decades ... but it never happens.
An analogy would be if an engineer on the Titanic pointed out the risk of hitting an iceburg in a couple of days to a few days, and people dismissed this as alarmism.
Then, the next day pointed out the same as a big risk tomorrow, and then people not only dismissed this as alarmism but ridiculed it as the exact same alarmism said yesterday and it didn't happen!!
Then with the iceburg literally approaching a day and a few hours later, people laughing at how the prediction didn't come true, as a couple days already passed!
Finally, after the iceburg is hit and the ship is obviously sinking, people say "idiot! we'll just innovate out of this problem; how'd we build the ship in the first place and make it go super fast if not for innovation".
That's pretty much the climate debate since decades.
That's pretty much the climate debate since decades.
Sad but true. 36 years ago, when I was 7, my father worked for Shell. When he was again working late and my mom complained I said "he's inventing things for a better environment". There was awareness then and even a kid understood it.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 16, 2021 at 11:56#5679640 likes
But what are you actually saying about what the models predict?
The non conservative models show stable states and tipping points, the holocene stable state we are leaving, and a new one we're heading to, several degrees higher (the anthropocene stable state let's say)?
- It to late now to stay in the holocene, because even if we cut emissions entirely (which won't happen anyway in the near future), having crossed tipping point will carry us further to the anthropocene?
- Is the implication then not that only reducing greenhouse gas-levels on a large scale, to maybe get back to holocene stable state, would have a tangible effect on climate, because anything less will just end us in the anthropocene stable state anyway?
Unless you have wishes left over, you are clearly suggesting mass murder.
Yeah. :roll: You're an idiot. If someone with a brain wants to discuss it, I will. But it's been discussed before.
Edited to add:
I’m letting my frustration with stupidity get the better of me. I banned TMF because he was saying that what I said implied something that was not implied by what I said. I’m beginning to think that saying someone is implying something might be a common method of engagement. I might end up banning everyone from my engagement if I were to do that.
So, I got to thinking about a few things. Since people seem to be incapable of just asking (like you finally did in your last post; you could lead with that), and they would rather just say the other person must be saying something they did not say, maybe there was a teachable moment in each such case.
In reading the other thread on “A new theory of proof” and your own statement about either/or and wishes on the murder question, I thought I’d try a new angle:
Let’s see if you, counterpunch, have the intellectual horsepower, or imagination, to think of some other way to reduce population to, say, a million people, without having to engage in murder. Let’s see if you can make my best case for me. You know, without sounding like an idiot. Really put yourself in a position of advocacy for population reduction and see if you can’t come up with at least of a few of the many alternatives to murder that others have already posited and would result in population reduction. As I said, this has been discussed by many people before but I want to see if you are capable of thinking, and thinking beyond the simple-minded “either/or”. Go ahead, stretch your brain. See what you can do. Show us all you what you are capable of.
Or you can just stick with telling other people what it is that they must mean. Or you could just ask instead.
I have a fairly good idea of my own intellectual abilities, and I'm far from idiocy. For example, I know there isn't time to reduce population by means other than murder within the timeframe climate change allows for. So it would be pretty fucking stupid of me to suggest population reduction as a solution. And then worse if I got all pissy about it!
But what are you actually saying about what the models predict?
Well, numerical models of complex systems don't really make "predictions" in the usual scientific sense (such as predicting the position of a star behind the sun during an eclipse is a "prediction", falsefying the theory if it doesn't happen).
Numerical models of complex systems basically inform us about risk.
For instance, that the earth will warm if we emit green house gases, is a prediction, made over hundred and twenty years ago using pretty basic analytical (in the math sense of on paper solutions) methods, following experiments on gases to understand their basic atmospheric properties.
However, having zero clue how this would impact the earth's ecological system, the discover of the global warming theory concluded this warming would actually be a good thing, helping pants grow and boost agriculture.
Had the globe not actually warmed, then this would have refuted the theory.
Numerical models come in to inform risk, but, even then, they are viewed as inferior to extrapolation from retrospective geological data. As soon as there is retrospective data, for instance data about galaxy types and sizes, the modelers can't be trusted anyways, as they obviously tweak their models to show what we see.
In other words, the models of relevance are simply basic extrapolation of climate history.
Where numerical models come in is informing more detailed risk analysis. For instance, there's no geological data on how past climate change affects city infrastructure, because cities didn't exist back then, so, you can (and people do) build models to try to evaluate infrastructure risks (like the recent damn and levy busting in Germany).
However, we don't actually need these models to know the risks are ridiculously high and we shouldn't change the climate. The basic thing is climate sensitivity, which we already know because of the ice ages: that very subtle changes caused by very slowly changing orbital characteristics (with basically no material being added or taken away from the earths surface bio-physical systems) can bring and take away massive glaciers kilometres thick over a significant area of the globe.
So, if slow and subtle orbital changes can cause such a big change, the risk that a really massive and sudden change (adding billions of tons of material to the earth's surface processes, every year! for over a century!!!) is simply extreme madness.
The non conservative models show stable states and tipping points, the holocene stable state we are leaving, and a new one we're heading to, several degrees higher (the anthropocene stable state let's say)?
Yes, basically this is correct. The earth has two meta-stable climate regimes, climatologists call the "hot-box" and the "cold-box". The cold box has ice at both polls and wild swings in ice-cover due to orbital changes. The "hot box" doesn't have ice at both polls and is much hotter. This is driven by the physics of snow, that it melts quickly passed a threshold (the aptly names melting point); i.e. the difference between rain and snow can be a few degrees, not some linear proportional change, such as at 20 C we get 90% rain and 10% now, at 0% we get a 50-50 mix, and then at -20 C we get 90% snow and 10% rain.
If there was land at both polls, we'd be essentially locked into a cold box state, very difficult to break out of.
If there were free oceans at both polls, we'd be for sure in a hot box state.
With land at one poll, and a constrained ocean surrounded by land at the other poll (making heat exchange with warmer oceans not so efficient), gives us the recent cold-box, but only insofar as an ice cap covers the North poll. It's "pretty stable", lasting millions of years, but it's no where near as stable compared to a situation where land simply covered the whole North poll connecting Canada to Russia.
- Is the implication then not that only reducing greenhouse gas-levels on a large scale, to maybe get back to holocene stable state, would have a tangible effect on climate, because anything less will just end us in the anthropocene stable state anyway?
If you're going to jump out of a building, it's still better to jump from a lower floor.
I have a fairly good idea of my own intellectual abilities, and I'm far from idiocy. For example, I know there isn't time to reduce population by means other than murder within the timeframe climate change allows for. So it would be pretty fucking stupid of me to suggest it. And then worse if I got all pissy about it!
So the answer is "no." You don't have the intellectual horsepower to come up with something other than murder. Instead, you put a qualifier of "time" on the ability to effectively do so. Time might be the same factor that you seem to allow yourself on the magma deal. Hmmm. Sounds like you might be an idiot after all.
So the answer is "no." You don't have the intellectual horsepower to come up with something other than murder.
It's your idea; you suggested population reduction - it's for you to say how you intend to achieve that. I said over-population isn't the problem. The misapplication of technology is the problem. Applying the right technologies 8-10bn people could survive and prosper long term - with very few government interventions in the market or civil sphere.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 16, 2021 at 15:42#5680510 likes
If you're going to jump out of a building, it's still better to jump from a lower floor
Not if the lower floor is insignificant relative the height you are jumping from... dead is dead.
But thank you for the info, I'm trying to get a handle on the science of climate change, the risks and possible consequences etc... without the political biases weaven through, which is not allways easy.
It's your idea; you suggested population reduction - it's for you to say how you intend to achieve that.
And had you lead with that, I might have deigned to entertain you. But instead, you pretended to tell me what my position was. So, I figure if you know so much about my position (instead of asking), I'd just have you explain population reduction protocols that I have overlooked in my trek toward murder. You know, since your such a prescient genius about my position.
And who misapplies technology? People? If there were fewer of them, would the misapplication matter as much? I mean sure, a nuke by one person could wreck havoc, but a million people driving cars? Probably not.
Applying the right technologies 8-10bn people could survive and prosper long term - with very few government interventions in the market or civil sphere.
First of all, fuck 8-10 billion people. It's not all about people. But second (and back on track), applying the time constraints that you placed on me, how quickly do you think you can get this done? And, more importantly (here is why your telling me what my position must be is so fundamentally fucking stupid), how would your time frame for tech to save us compare with the time frames for various population reduction avenues that you can't fathom? I guess you don't know what you don't know, so why should I waste my time engaging with you?
Well, it's never a guarantee, less fast you're going the more likely to survive.
However, in this analogy, the height is not yet guaranteed to be fatal. Right now it's comparable to just likely breaking a bone, nothing too "serious" (if we did everything we could do engineering wise to stop green house emissions, stop burning the Aamazon etc.).
However, although catastrophe is already "baked in", as I've mentioned by any standard of "catastrophe", there's really big variations. There's also natural variations that can work in our favour or not.
However, the biggest thing is that implementing the best sustainable system we can, sooner rather than later, stabilizes global society, making nuclear wars and AI warfare less likely.
For instance, converting all our mono-crop land to forest gardens would increase food yield but also be far more resilient, as trees are not only more resilient to droughts but protect the soil with shade and transpire more water into the atmosphere (making rain more likely) (and of course diverse plants are less risk than a single plant; basic "risk management" economists happily apply to investing ... but somehow a single plant species, and not only a single species but genetic copies, on huge areas is "economic").
However, it takes some decades to grow trees, decades we currently have. So, if we did that, we'd still have a lot of disruptions, but things would probably be "ok" (of course, there's still risk of the tipping points being severe anyways, but it's no a guarantee, so lowering the risk is still the coherent choice).
If forest gardens are so efficient, why don't we currently do so to make money?
Because they are efficient at making food in terms of energy input, but are not profitable in terms of labour input (low skilled labour to pick fruit from mono-crop orchards is high ... so imagine the cost of high skilled labour to manage a little ecosystems). Forest gardens do not "drive profits", through unsustainable extraction of soil wealth (it is more profitable to run machines over mono-crops while degrading the land ... then just move to other land using those profits, than make a sustainable system). However, if one says "hmm, well, maybe if we want a sustainable system we don't actually want unsustainable mono-crop plantations, with unsustainable mineral and fossil inputs (something like 9 calories of fossil energy are required to grow 1 calorie of food in the current system)", then the analysis changes, and highly skilled labour is not "profitable" but is super energy efficient, if those people happen to live there and like living in a forest garden and doing high skilled work over long periods of time because it's their home and source of food. Such people would still need energy of course, but solar technology solves that.
This is the sort of system that is "efficient", but it basically means ending capitalism as is currently practiced, in which the purpose is the running of personal vehicles.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 16, 2021 at 16:11#5680640 likes
Well, it's never a guarantee, less fast you're going the more likely to survive.
However, in this analogy, the height is not yet guaranteed to be fatal. Right now it's comparable to just likely breaking a bone, nothing too "serious" (if we did everything we could do engineering wise to stop green house emissions, stop burning the Aamazon etc.).
However, although catastrophe is already "baked in", as I've mentioned by any standard of "catastrophe", there's really big variations. There's also natural variations that can work in our favour or not.
But purely based on those models we're going from on stable state to another right? That's what crossing those tipping points does, even if we stop emmissions, temperature keeps rising. So then where do the variations come in is what I don't understand. Is it just a matter of slightly delaying the increase of temperature then, to buy more time until you get to the next stable state?
We have very different perspectives. I care about sustainability, but not because I conceive of nature as some romantic ideal - I put before human interests. Sure, after applying magma energy technology, I'd suggest desalinating water to irrigate and develop wastelands; rather than burn the forests and deplete natural water sources, but that's because forests are necessary to a sustainable biosphere. Not because I hate humanity, yet get all weepy about trees. I'm trying to describe ways to secure a decent future with minimal disruption, and you want to send out murder squads! Sad thing is, your plan is more likely than mine!
We have very different perspectives. I care about sustainability, but not because I conceive of nature as some romantic ideal - I put before human interests.
The funny thing is, your myopic, human-centered BS is precisely what put us the position we are in. Had our dumb asses conceived of nature as some romantic ideal then we wouldn't be having this conversation. But with your either/or mentality, it has to be bunny-hugging, or press on with tech. Murder or magma. Doh!
Nevertheless, unless you have wishes left over for your time line, you are clearly suggesting we fiddle while the planet burns.
But purely based on those models we're going from on stable state to another right? That's what crossing those tipping points does, even if we stop emmissions, temperature keeps rising.
There's lot of variations possible, it's not an inevitable process from one point to another.
For instance, a lot of ice melting is driven by black particles from burning fossil fuels. So, if we stopped burning fossil fuels and made sure what we do burn is done super cleanly, then maybe Greenland doesn't melt, antarctic doesn't melt, there's still snow in the arctic in winter.
In other words, ice-free summer arctic ocean may have a lot of snow covering meta-stable states associated with it. For, once we get an ice-free arctic ocean summer ... there's no more summer arctic ocean ice to melt, so that particular feedback process stops.
The arctic is currently in a climate regime transition to an summer-ocean-ice-free state, but this does not inevitably trigger all the other tipping points possible (this has little to do with the Amazon right now). Meta-stable transition is one subsystem at a time; some subsystems maybe strongly or weakly coupled, and we don't really know, and it could even be going from one climate subsystem transition to the next always requires human help of more emissions.
For example, another big tipping point would be shutting down the thermohaline current, which has been proven to be slowing, but, as far as I know, still seems unlikely in more scenarios ... but not impossible. The process that drives slowing down this current is fresh water melting into the arctic (that is not salty and so doesn't do the haline part of the process). So, the more we slow down ice melt, the less likely we are to hit this tipping point (which maybe difficult to trigger anyways, and really needs a "good go" at it to have a good chance).
Turning the Amazon into a carbon source rather than carbon sink (bad for the climate for obvious reasons), seems more to do with just normal capitalism driven deforestation, and not a climate change effect (such as snow melting at the poles; though, climate change doesn't help the Amazon). Snow-less ecosystems in the tropics could be not so affected by climate change, if we stopped destroying them directly and severely weakening them: as it stands, our direct destruction of these ecosystems in conjunction with a bit of climate change can tip them into transitioning to savanna type ecosystems.
In short, currently, we are going towards a snow-less summer arctic ocean; changes in ocean snow cover is the most rapid systems change (as warm water melts ice quickly). As far as I know, climate change could be more-or-less stabilized around this new meta-stable state (if we did massive, global action now). Other tipping points are not "inevitably" triggered by a ice-free arctic ocean summer.
There's also geo-engineering. Maybe with human intervention, we could "seed back" arctic winter ice that then survives summer. However, all such schemes only make sense if we actually stop the cause of more warming, otherwise it's a massive cost that doesn't actually solve anything (adds a tiny bit of delay, but not really, as more warming will eventually melt that "human caused ice" anyways; it's only useful if more warming actually stops, and "nudging" things back towards more ice therefore long term trend setting, not the fashion of the week).
On-land ice melt is a lot longer process, and preventing Greenland and the Antarctic from significant melting, would be a big difference. We know from the geologic record that glaciers can experience catastrophic melting, but it's not known the exact details; so again, less heating, less likely we are to trigger such events (even if it's already "likely", there's always a chance that action in combination of the luck of natural cycles still achieves a less likely result; however, especially with the antarctic, it's unlikely we could actually melt it all, only some parts that actually sit below the water line are at good chance of melting, and so more heating can make a big difference of what actually melts, and how fast; likewise for Greenland, if we stopped black particles and more heating, maybe it's melt rate stabilizes).
Land-ice, the shear volume of the ocean and time to heat it up, ecosystems that have not yet been completely destroyed for cattle and palm oil, etc. are all buffers in the system that have longer response times than ocean-ice.
The sooner we arrest green-house emissions, the less likely we are to saturate these buffers, the more time we have to try to get carbon out of the atmosphere and promote ice forming and staying over winter (in a slow and stable way, instead of some last-ditch effort fast and reckless way such as pumping reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere), and the more stable our ecosystems are throughout the changes, meaning less likely wars and so on will intervene to make things even more chaotic.
However, this is no longer the 90s. Severely problematic ocean rise is going to happen, severe climate disruptions are already happening and will get worse, crop failures, large scale famines. We do, however, currently have a choice of "how bad". "Survival" could mean 100 000 people in small communities around the poles, or, something more-or-less similar to our current civilization (based on solar energy, distributed, very different, but something we can "imagine" as "pretty good transformation" of current lifestyles around the world) and a world with more-or-less the current ecosystems (rather than basically the apocalypse with a totally unrecognizable world for those 100 000 survivors).
We've established that. What we haven't established is how you intend to reduce human population to under 1 million in time to save the planet. If that's not a viable option - and clearly it isn't, then we have to do something else. Like, what I was talking about before you so rudely interrupted me to advocate genocide.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 16, 2021 at 19:27#5681750 likes
Reply to boethius Thank you for the detailed response, and the examples. This does make a lot of sense, the models are only a rough approximation of an underlying reality afterall. We kindof know the rough ballpark of where, how and when things will go wrong, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about the specifics, and about what the interaction are between the moving parts. Nevertheless better save than sorry, I agree.
These kind of long term, high impact/uncertain probability risks are difficult to sell politically I suppose, because you do know the impact of the policy measures on your constituency typically. Things do seem to be picking up traction now, technologically, economically and politically.
What we haven't established is how you intend to reduce human population to under 1 million in time to save the planet.
I'd say that I have established it (I have) and you have not, but since you know what I'm thinking, then you must have established it too, right? But then I guess you proved you don't know what I'm thinking because you think I'm thinking murder. This proves that you don't know what you don't know. Teachable moment: From now on, don't tell other people what they are thinking. Ask instead. Doh!
But we haven't done it. We've talked shit about magma and shit. And even if that were viable, you haven't shown how it could be done in time or any faster than the options you don't know.
It's my understanding, from others on this thread, you are talking out your ass. I've yet to see you refute their rebuttals to your magma idea. Maybe you've got something. I don't know. I don't pretend to know what I don't know, or what you haven't told us; like how your magma idea overcomes the rebuttals. Normally I focus on what was said and not who said it, but your telling me what I think leads me to believe the others on this thread are right and you are an idiot.
In my fantasy world you would admit you were wrong to tell me I was advocating murder and genocide. You would apologize. You would then re-ask your belated question about how I would go about reducing population, and then we could discuss the merits of those ideas and the relative time lines between my ideas and yours. But you be you.
To hell with my fantasy. I'm done with you regardless. There are many proposals out there for population reduction scenarios. If you really cared, you can go educate yourself about what you don't know. Suffice it to say, all your ideas involve incentives. Follow the money.
But then I guess you proved you don't know what I'm thinking because you think I'm thinking murder.
And you're not? Okay then, for the last time of asking, how do you propose to reduce population from 8 billion to under 1 million?
Remember that I was talking about magma energy as a solution to climate change - and you suggested population reduction instead, so the time limit was always implied. There is no way to do that without committing genocide.
This proves that you don't know what you don't know. Teachable moment: From now on, don't tell other people what they are thinking. Ask instead. Doh!
I've asked several times, and you have still not given an answer. That's because you don't have one. Just admit that your post was an unreasoning expression of hate.
This does make a lot of sense, the models are only a rough approximation of an underlying reality afterall. We kindof know the rough ballpark of where, how and when things will go wrong, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about the specifics, and about what the interaction are between the moving parts. Nevertheless better save than sorry, I agree.
Yes, even before computer models were even possible, it had already been worked out that the earth would warm due to the amounts of pollution involved, and that even 1 degree of warming would be significant risk.
Computer models don't inform much more than this baseline analytic result worked out in the 70s.
They confirm this analytic result in demonstrating all sorts of catastrophic scenarios, but it's more of narrative than decision making value. In the 70s, the scientists that worked out the 1 degree of warming risk threshold, maybe couldn't tell a story about it other than they didn't know what would happen but the risk of experimenting on the entire globe isn't reasonable to take.
Computer models can provide stories ... but there are lot's of models, each model can be run thousands of times with different results, so it's still the same conclusion that the risk of running to the experiment to confirm which computer model got it "best" isn't reasonable to take.
These kind of long term, high impact/uncertain probability risks are difficult to sell politically I suppose, because you do know the impact of the policy measures on your constituency typically.
This is correct for most politicians, at any given time.
But the real question is why there isn't wide spread awareness and powerful movements, or then why the movements that do exist have so far failed. The denialist industry was and still is well funded, but it's not really a given they would win, and they've only really "won" in the US; here in Europe there's not really much climate denialism, but the policies are weak sauce; the "concerned" politicians of Europe never get together and do anything of significance.
I'm honestly not sure; it's not like the information is in secret books that an institution will systematically burn both the books and anyone possessing them. "Truth" seems to have gotten out far worse obstacles.
Things do seem to be picking up traction now, technologically, economically and politically.
Although I hope so, and I've been working in the field for 20 years, I am more pessimistic as you may have gotten.
It's been long predicted (by the people that do objective analysis) that once we start to feel the problems, it maybe too late.
First, 20 years of further warming is always inevitable, even if emissions suddenly stopped (which they obviously won't); so, even if we stopped now it would get worse for 20 years before stabilizing.
Second, actually "stopping" actually means stopping: no net emissions from mankind. A lot of journalists put the goal posts at stopping growth in emissions as what we need to do, and so write articles about not growing emissions "as much as expected" as some sort of victory and that with all the solar and wind and stuff we're getting close to zero growth (leading the reader to believe that's the goal, if we're getting close to it in an optimistic sense and the article doesn't mention any other metric).
However, all human caused net emission adds carbon to the atmosphere and increases warming. To actually stop warming we need to get net emissions to zero.
The size of this task is absolutely massive.
Therefore, all honest analysis I have seen by people (whatever their background) who have "gone deep" into the issue and clearly understand the subject matter and make coherent arguments, have all, over decades, come to the conclusion that business as usual until the affects are clearly felt, is basically too late. If we started feeling the affects and we were already down to 5% current levels of emissions, that would be one thing, but if we haven't even reversed growth in emissions, we are so far from the target it's simply not fathomable such a large change could happen in a decade or two.
These large infrastructure changes are 50 to 100 year time scales ... so, had we started in the 70s in a serious way we'd be probably net zero emissions by now, and had we started "more seriously" in the 90s, we'd be feeling some of the affects as we currently are, but less, and we'd be "on our way" to avoiding total catastrophe.
Not only are we now basically "screwed", as the infrastructure changes we need simply can't happen over night, but, an easy corollary of this prediction is that once we start feeling the affects, it disrupts economic systems taking away capital and "social energy" that could otherwise be directed towards the problem. Supply chains, financial systems, political tensions, all become disrupted, leading to a less stable world, less able to deal with the underlying problem.
An easy example is trains. A very large portion of transport (car, truck and plane) can be moved onto trains and trams, running on electricity, which, even powered by fossil fuels, is still far more energy efficient and can be burned far cleaner (it's much easier to control particle and other emissions from a power plant than millions of cars).
In terms of blank-page engineering, it's really easy to design an efficient train-tram-metro transportation based system that can displace a significant amount of emissions, even if still powered by fossil!
But it's a 2 birds with 1 stone situation, because transitioning an electric train based system powered by fossil fuels to being powered by sustainable electricity requires no changes to the transportation system. So, emissions for the transport are already lower, and it's easy to transition the system to low emissions by simply adding low-emissions electricity to the grid.
However, if you take such a blank-page engineering design and then overlay it on the current transport system and work out the costs and time to go from one to the other, the values are very large.
Assuming politics is not an issue, that there's "the will", it still involves a decade of simply planning and then multiple decades of building such a system and then a solid decade to transition to using the new system efficiently, for a country like the US (all while needing to maintain the previous system in the interim). Countries with truly robust rail networks have literally 2 centuries of continuous rail development, not only of the rail but also of organizing society in a way that's efficient for rail (many Europeans don't have a car; because they can easily move to places where they don't need a car, because things have been designed over centuries for people without cars), and it's actually ambitious to try to do likewise in a half century, with few technically possible ways of going much faster.
Hence, the electric car! Which still takes a lot of energy to make, needs new infrastructure ... and doesn't solve the truck or plane problem at all (whereas trains can move containers, and high-speed trains can also move people far faster than cars and so realistically compete with plane journeys in terms of time, especially when airports are outside of the city center and boarding times are long and weight restrictions exist and so on, and there's more space on the train, and it's much cheaper, especially if the plane's needed to internalize the real costs of the pollution).
Therefore, if we reach a point where infrastructure cannot be realistically changed, it won't be changed, but if it is not sustainable, neither will it be sustained.
Thanks very much for the detailed analysis. It's horrifying.
It's also quite distressing not knowing too well when a point of "no matter what we do, we are 100% fu*ked" will come. But it's likely sooner rather than later.
We've kind of reached the peak at which a typical species goes extinct, right? Something like 100,000 years or so. But taking most of life with you consciously, is a new phenomena...
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 16, 2021 at 22:53#5682870 likes
This is correct for most politicians, at any given time.
But the real question is why there isn't wide spread awareness and powerful movements, or then why the movements that do exist have so far failed. The denialist industry was and still is well funded, but it's not really a given they would win, and they've only really "won" in the US; here in Europe there's not really much climate denialism, but the policies are weak sauce; the "concerned" politicians of Europe never get together and do anything of significance.
I'm honestly not sure; it's not like the information is in secret books that an institution will systematically burn both the books and anyone possessing them. "Truth" seems to have gotten out far worse obstacles.
People tend to be myopic, it's hard motivate them with something that is gradual and in the longterm. If some accident happens they typically do want to jump into action.
There's the denialists definitely, but not so much in Europe indeed. I also do think green parties, and the left in general, have been bad strategically in selling their ideas to the public... to much finger pointing blame game, and to little constructive motivating vision put forward.
The real problem I think, at least in Europe, is just a general lack of agency in politics which goes a lot further than just the climate change-issue. They seem to have simply forgotten the art of coming together, making a deal and organizing their party and society to execute it... you know what politician are supposed to do. Its all just skin-deep, marketing games to attract voters for the next election it seems.
Although I hope so, and I've been working in the field for 20 years, I am more pessimistic as you may have gotten.
I'm kind of oscillating back and forth the more I get into it, but I do see reasons to be somewhat optimistic.
It has been dragging for a long time, and for someone invested in the topic as long as you have been I get that this doesn't exactly fill you with optimism, but I think once things start moving, they might move a lot faster than one thinks. I don't think the conversion to renewables is a linear process. A lot of resistance need to be overwon at all fronts initially. But once the technology is sufficiently improved, the prices start dropping, the science is more clear, there are some nasty events clearly linked to global warming (floods in Europe now, heat wave in Canada) etc etc... people start seeing the urgency of it and politicians and business see the writing on the wall. It all kind of reinforces eachother and gets accelerated.
The EU have announced climate measures this week I think, which one would call, for any other issue, 'unprecedented and draconian'.
China's climate commitments seem less ambitious at first glance, they are still building coal plants and didn't commit to start actually reducing emissions until 2030. But, so I've gathered, they would rather undercommit to a target and seem to usually overshoot their targets when it comes to renewables. They seem to be ramping up production of solarpanels on a scale hard to imagine.
And in the US at least Trump is gone, so there's certainly that.
The surest sign that things are moving though, is that even some of the fossil fuel companies seem to be convinced that they need to exit fossil fuels ASAP or perish.
What I'm more pessimistic about is that reduction of emissions does get harder to more you get to zero. We may have the political will to reduce to relatively low emissions, but what do those bottom percentages entail in terms of measures?
And yes, more importantly, it is/may already be to late to avoid some of the consequence of climate change. If those consequences are bad enough, the real danger is that it will disrupt societies to the extend that they can't do it anymore or that it causes all sorts of knee-jerk our-own-people-first kind of reactions.
Near volcanoes it will therefore be high because that's igneous rock. Let's assume there's no temperature drop, how much rock do you need to power a city like New York? How many holes?
Good question. I don't know, but I do know there is sufficient magma energy to power New York City, and every other city for that matter. An answer would depend on the efficiency of the technology, and that remains a question.
How about the engineering part? What existing machines come close and how are you going to make them suitable for those environments? How much is it going to cost? Is it economically viable? How does it compare to other renewable energy sources?
With regard to the engineering, I think exploiting each geothermal energy source will present a specific engineering challenge, and that practice makes perfect. General principles and techniques will emerge from, and guide the practice, and the energy developed can be applied to carbon capture and desalination while capacity is built to take over from fossil fuels.
Two or three times current global energy demand cannot put a dent in the heat energy of the planet, because the energy emitted by the earth every day is many, many times greater. Assuming we soon developed the technology to harness an effectively limitless quantity of energy, I imagine we'd achieve post materiality hundreds of years hence. Ultimately, resources are a function of the energy available to create them. But surely that's a better problem to be faced with than starving in the ruins of civilisation.
Reply to counterpunch The problem is that at this stage you have an idea but no plan. So if you're serious about it, you need to take it much further than these vague ideas. There's plenty of energy in currents and waves of the sea as well. Harnessing is another matter.
Point is, you can't expect others to take this seriously until you manage to conclusively answer at least some of my previous questions in detail.
The problem is that at this stage you have an idea but no plan.
I'm not sure that's what I have at all. To my mind, I have a problem, and a likely solution. It's not a vague solution; technical detail is lacking, but it's a specific idea, likely adequate to the problem, and if so, the least disruptive solution, with maximum benefit at least cost.
I have my limitations, but politically, it is the right answer - because, otherwise huge sacrifices in diametric opposition to the natural interests of people and capitalist democracies, are required in advance of - in order to achieve environmental benefits. That's not a road we want to go down. It leads nowhere.
This is about more than how to solve climate change, but about how not to go about it - and that's a matter of political philosophy, surprisingly! Can you provide any insight into the question, of to what degree the overwhelming left wing bias on this forum, or rather - my intention to solve climate change in a manner that doesn't require smashing capitalism first, has contributed to the generally negative reception for what seems to me a pretty darn good and right-minded idea?
But purely based on those models we're going from on stable state to another right? That's what crossing those tipping points does, even if we stop emmissions, temperature keeps rising. So then where do the variations come in is what I don't understand. Is it just a matter of slightly delaying the increase of temperature then, to buy more time until you get to the next stable state?
There is an angle I have been thinking about here. We are not going from one stable state to another in the short term. We may reach a stable state again in the future, but the instability in the meantime will be unpredictable, have numerous unforeseen effects and last what to us is a long time perhaps 10,000yrs, perhaps a couple of million years, we just don’t know.
The stable state we evolved in might have taken a long time to settle out, also, we don’t know what unsettled states are like. Already we are seeing torrential rainfall events, as in Germany last week, or unprecedented heatwaves near the artic circle as has been experienced all around the arctic circle during the last month. Irregular desertification, the irregular distribution of tornado alleys and high humidity, high temperature regions in the tropics in which humans cannot survive without air conditioning.
We don’t know if the rapid changes going on will affect seismic, or volcanic activity. Or have unforeseen effects in the oceans. Tsunami’s could become commonplace in some areas, along with earthquakes.
In short we are in for a rollercoaster ride for some time to come.
But the real question is why there isn't wide spread awareness and powerful movements, or then why the movements that do exist have so far failed. The denialist industry was and still is well funded, but it's not really a given they would win, and they've only really "won" in the US; here in Europe there's not really much climate denialism, but the policies are weak sauce; the "concerned" politicians of Europe never get together and do anything of significance.
I'm honestly not sure; it's not like the information is in secret books that an institution will systematically burn both the books and anyone possessing them. "Truth" seems to have gotten out far worse obstacles.
1) I blame the media.
The journalists pick up the most damning forecast (from a variety) and run with the worst possible early outcome. Some scientists are perfectly fine to go with this in order to "wake up" the people, so they go with the worst earliest hypothetical outcome. And once that worst hypothetical outcome didn't happen twenty years ago, people can come skeptical about the alarmists.
Just to name a few, in the 1960's it was the population explosion that would lead to severe famines even in the West. Then the possible torching of the Kuwaiti oil fields would lead to something like the nuclear winter. And the list of these alarmist forecasts with dates that have long gone are there. I know that referring to them will make many people extremely angry. That the forecast didn't hold seems to be totally irrelevant, as the cause is beneficial.
2) Then I blame that some issues have been overcome. DDT has been banned. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has been working: Since the ban on halocarbons, the ozone layer has slowly been recovering and the data shows a trend in decreasing area of the ozone hole – subject to annual variations. It has even closed sometime. We have already hit peak conventional oil production and oil production hasn't grown for some time.
3) And finally, I think that the society can cope with even more problems. We can have this economy limping with the pandemic limitations for years. We can not travel as much as before. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost in the tourism sector and flights have basically halved. We can change our behavior and never ever shake each others hands. Who needs so much travel? The fact is that our societies can endure radical changes. Thanks to the pandemic, carbon emissions have fallen at the most rapid rate since WW2. Primary energy consumption fell by 4.5% in 2020, the largest decline since 1945, yet solar Wind, solar and hydroelectricity all grew despite of this plummeting demand.
Above all, in 2020 we saw the lowest population growth in the World since at least 1950 with 1,05%. Just in 2012 the growth rate was 1,2%. It may be that some of us (those younger) will witness peak human population.
Part of the problem is that externalities that are difficult to calculate for differing countries of the world are already hard to calculate, and only the EU has taken steps to internalize these externalities with carbon tax credits.
It's not a vague solution; technical detail is lacking, but it's a specific idea, likely adequate to the problem, and if so, the least disruptive solution, with maximum benefit at least cost.
It's vague idea. You have no clue about its technical or economic viability. You don't even have a proof of concept at this point.
It's vague idea. You have no clue about its technical or economic viability. You don't even have a proof of concept at this point.
Very well, I accept your characterisation of my state of knowledge. You're right, but nonetheless, those were not my approaches to these conclusions. I don't pretend to be a geophysical engineer, or an economist. I am a philosopher addressing the question of whether a sustainable future is possible; and if so, how.
I have identified a series of technologies that would reasonably provide for sustainability in order to answer that question, and this raised the question of our current approach; the ubiquitous left wing limits to resources presumption that sustainability requires sacrifice via regulation and taxation. Scientifically and technologically speaking, that's not only untrue, but fatal. Resources are a function of the energy available to create them, and so we need more energy; not less - to balance human welfare and environmental sustainability in our favour. This in turn suggests a supply side approach that preserves freedom, by internalising the externalities of capitalism with a virtually limitless source of energy, rather than internalising them to the economy.
With regard to proof of concept, I can't help thinking of the Wright Brother's plane - because if that plane constitutes proof of concept, and I think, quintessentially, it does - then there's sufficient proof there's large amounts of energy underground we can harness for our benefit. I'm betting it could be done better.
Scientifically and technologically speaking, that's not only untrue, but fatal.
Wild, unfounded assumption that's just necessary to prop up your capitalist ideology. I don't share it nor the idea capitalism is a good system.
Anyhoo, back to your idea. If you're convinced, stop trying to convince people here and do the leg work to answer those questions and start a company or something. I did once and even though it failed, it was a fun ride and I learned a lot.
Wild, unfounded assumption that's just necessary to prop up your capitalist ideology. I don't share it nor the idea capitalism is a good system.
Really? How astonishing! I would have thought it were obvious capitalism is a good system, and the question therefore, is how it can be sustained? Would you rather be forced backward down a bottleneck of equalitarian poverty - because that's what a green windmill powered future looks like to me, based on the presumption of limits to resources. It's just not true. Look at Malthus, and how the invention of tractors and fertilizers allowed food production to far outpace population growth. Malthus was demonstrably wrong, and yet his argument continues to inform a left wing narrative, and it is so ubiquitous an assumption I fear it is leading to a further, and fatal misapplication of technology, in that a left wing approach to climate change will undermine capitalism such as to forgoe the opportunity that exists in the knowledge skills and industrial capacities capitalism currently commands - to transcend limits to growth via the application of technology.
It's vague idea. You have no clue about its technical or economic viability. You don't even have a proof of concept at this point.
But he, and he alone, has the solution. No clue about what he's talking about, or about pesky technical details, but he's got the solution. A solution overlooked by the thousands of actually qualified people working on this important issue.
Talk about delusions of grandeur. Leave the little crackpot to his illusions.
A solution overlooked by the thousands of actually qualified people working on this important issue.
This happens. I've been in this situation and it ended up stranding on investment negotiations and it being a very complex market where most players were banking on lobbying for another solution.
It could be a solution but he doesn't have one yet and appears to be not interested in actually doing the leg work to prove it. In the time he's been talking about it here and the years he claims he's spend on it I had attracted two partners, wrote a patent, and spoken with five different potential investors and 7 potential clients in three different countries. I think he actually knows what he has is a shit idea, good ideas generate money.
People tend to be myopic, it's hard motivate them with something that is gradual and in the longterm. If some accident happens they typically do want to jump into action.
True in a sense, and, in a general sense as well the fundamental cause of the problem of climate change (or any human caused problem) is "human weaknesses" of one sort or another.
At the same time, it's not inevitable. People can be lazy, but can also be disciplined; society's as well. Indeed, in a longer view, many societies seem to be very far sighted, building large defensive structures that might see use in the next centuries.
It's easy to link social problems to social vices, just as for the individual, but this simply begs the question of why such vices developed in the first place.
There's the denialists definitely, but not so much in Europe indeed. I also do think green parties, and the left in general, have been bad strategically in selling their ideas to the public... to much finger pointing blame game, and to little constructive motivating vision put forward.
I completely agree here. Why the movement doesn't have "more and better people" is one question (that may not have any definitive answer, just more and more historical context further and further back in time). However, what is clear is that the movement that does exist makes terrible decisions and is ineffective, even with the resources they have.
Though I agree with you point here in one sense, I think the fundamental (at least intellectual) problem is the exact opposite and not enough "finger pointing" to avoid (uncomfortable) critical debate around ethical and political theory questions.
It has been dragging for a long time, and for someone invested in the topic as long as you have been I get that this doesn't exactly fill you with optimism, but I think once things start moving, they might move a lot faster than one thinks. I don't think the conversion to renewables is a linear process.
I also had this theory while starting 20 years ago, and I do still believe the transition can be very rapid. However, it's too late to prevent catastrophe's, which are already happening.
For instance, 20 years ago, mass coral bleaching of, in particular, the great barrier reef but also reefs in general, was one of those unthinkable, terrible "apocalyptic signs" that we want to work hard to avoid.
The apocalypse comes and goes.
So yes, for exactly the reasons you describe, that were true 20 years ago in the 90s, and, as @Benkei points out, obviously true even for a 7 year old in the 80s, and also true in the 70s and 60s to all those dirty hippies, we can avoid "worse outcomes". However, the current outcome is already pretty bad, the climate catastrophe is already triggered, it's simply a question of how bad it will get.
Since effects are baked in 20 years (overcoming the ocean thermal buffer) after actually getting to 0 emissions, the affects are already bad now, we are no where close to zero emissions, therefore, the effects are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
And even the IPPC now concludes climate change is irreversible. So we are going "somewhere" new, and the nature of a system as complex as the whole world is that no one can know exactly where.
That the effects could be extremely bad -- that hitting a tipping point in arctic ocean ice, which may trigger tipping points with permafrost, forest ecocystems, land-based ice, and the system can accelerate and dominate human emissions (i.e. further human emissions become irrelevant) etc. -- is the reason to not run this experiment in the first place.
That maybe things aren't so bad, or then we should do our best for the survivors anyways (preserve as many seeds, and knowledge, and minimize our damage on the way out; i.e. clean up a bit when our party ends, before leaving unceremoniously), are all reasons to do what is morally justified, regardless of one's level of optimism or pessimism on the eventual outcome. That there is a chance of extinction means, by definition, there is also a chance of not-extinction.
The journalists pick up the most damning forecast (from a variety) and run with the worst possible early outcome.
I wouldn't say this is true. Also, if we're blaming the journalists, journalist in turn blame the collapse of paid journalism due to the internet (and no policies put in place for value-extraction of search engines and aggregators to pay for what they're using to make profits).
In the 90s, before the media collapse, I think communication was pretty good, and there was lot's of discussion and "in depth" reporting, denialists existed but were easily defeated (as they new forms of media entirely dedicated to propaganda, such as Fox News, didn't exist yet), and all this culminated in the Kyoto Protocol, which was supposed to be the "Montreal Protocol" protocol moment for the climate, and was sold as such.
2) Then I blame that some issues have been overcome. DDT has been banned. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has been working: Since the ban on halocarbons, the ozone layer has slowly been recovering and the data shows a trend in decreasing area of the ozone hole – subject to annual variations. It has even closed sometime. We have already hit peak conventional oil production and oil production hasn't grown for some time.
As mentioned above, Kyoto Protocol could have actually worked (been made better to begin with, or then actually followed), but it wasn't. So, although I agree we definitely can make these international agreements that effectively deal with pollution, so far we haven't for green house gases.
Yes, we've peaked in conventional "sweet" crude, but we've gone all in for things like tar sands and fracking and haven't even phased out coal globally. The Amazon turning from a sink to a source of greenhouse gas emissions also means that we need to cut the difference to be at the same "spot" of net-emission when the Amazon was still a sink.
We are starting to saturate other buffers as well (a cold ocean can dissolve CO2 pretty well, but a warmer ocean may start to emit the CO2 it previously absorbed).
3) And finally, I think that the society can cope with even more problems. We can have this economy limping with the pandemic limitations for years. We can not travel as much as before. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost in the tourism sector and flights have basically halved. We can change our behavior and never ever shake each others hands. Who needs so much travel? The fact is that our societies can endure radical changes. Thanks to the pandemic, carbon emissions have fallen at the most rapid rate since WW2. Primary energy consumption fell by 4.5% in 2020, the largest decline since 1945, yet solar Wind, solar and hydroelectricity all grew despite of this plummeting demand.
Sure, if you're arguing we can do something, no objections from me. The question is are we doing something, and fast enough.
Once systems get overwhelmed, they collapse. Has happened to previous civilizations, can happen to ours.
Above all, in 2020 we saw the lowest population growth in the World since at least 1950 with 1,05%. Just in 2012 the growth rate was 1,2%. It may be that some of us (those younger) will witness peak human population.
I don't think population matters much.
Of course, it's easiest to imagine just having less people would lower our impact, than to imagine some actually sustainable system.
However, in the equation of Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence; it's the technology and affluence that can be changed significantly in relatively short periods of time (without the catastrophe we are trying to avoid).
Since capitalism is the cause of this mess, one would hope it's not only undermined but destroyed completely.
That's incorrect. Capitalism is not to blame. The root cause of climate change is the misapplication of technology, based in turn on a disregard for a scientific understanding of reality in favour of ideological worldviews, dating back to the trial of Galileo in 1634.
As a philosopher, I have the luxury of looking beyond our ideological borders - and that's where the solution lies, in an alternate reality in which ideally, the Church greeted Galileo with open arms - as discovering the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation. In this reality, science was pursued and integrated into politics and society on an ongoing basis, as an authoritative truth - over 400 years, and technology was applied with regard to a scientific understanding of reality.
Capitalism isn't a problem in this reality, thus capitalism isn't the fundamental nature of the problem. It's the ideological context within which capitalism operates. Capitalism could operate fine within a context of science based regulation - so long as everyone were prohibited from dumping their waste in the river, there would be no economic incentive for a race to the bottom, and given limitless clean energy, to power a logical series of technologies, no limit to resources.
I accept, that's not where we are, but thinking in these terms identifies the possibility, and given the scale and nature of the threat; an objective rationale for the application of the technologies necessary to survival is worth thinking about - if technologically speaking, it is possible to sustain capitalism, we should. I think it is. I'm over-reaching slightly on my knowledge of drilling technology, but there is sufficient energy in the interior of the earth.
Yes, it is. Short term profits, all else is externalities. That’s the only reason we’re here right now. You’re not a philosopher, and you have no solutions — because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I know what I'm talking about. I accept no responsibility for the fact you still don't know what I'm talking about. I've been sufficiently clear that someone who wanted to understand my perspective, could do. Or is it that you understand it, but don't want to accept it; unable counter it - hence the abuse?
I'm sure you must be emotionally invested in making capitalism the villain of the piece, but it's just not true. It's a shallow, kneejerk, left wing analysis - proven wrong by the capitalist defeat of the Malthusian threat. Climate change is essentially the same problem; and similarly, capitalism can be sustained if politics can find an agreeable rationale for the application of the right technologies; limits to resources can be transcended via the application of technology.
Magma energy could be developed as a global public good; and used initially to sequester carbon, desalinate and irrigate - so to mitigate and adapt to climate change while building the capacity to take over from fossil fuels. It is a minimally disruptive approach to do this in support of capitalism; as capitalism is the prevailing economic paradigm, and so much nicer than slavery - to have some degree of personal and political freedom. Also, magma energy as a global good sidesteps all sorts of direct conflicts of interest in this issue, geopolitical, politics and business, politics and the consumer, environment versus human interest, so I think it's pretty well crafted. Sad you cannot appreciate it.
invested in making capitalism the villain of the piece, but it's just not true.
Capitalism is the reason for climate change. That’s a fact. Holding your hand to help you understand it isn’t of interest to me. When a system values short term profits, and anything else is considered an externality, this is what happens. Seen clearly in the Exxon memos.
. It is a minimally disruptive approach to do this in support of capitalism; as capitalism is the prevailing economic paradigm, and so much nicer than slavery - to have some degree of personal and political freedom.
That the effects could be extremely bad -- that hitting a tipping in arctic ocean ice, which may trigger tipping points with permafrost, forest ecocystems, land-based ice, and the system can accelerate and dominate human emissions (i.e. further human emissions become irrelevant) etc. -- is the reason to not run this experiment in the first place.
These tipping points are already breached. We’ve recently had 30+ centigrade heatwaves in all permafrost regions. They are melting rapidly, there is enough methane there to accelerate climate change beyond what we can mitigate. Even if we had zero carbon production now this methane would more than compensate for the reduction. It’s acceleration and a rollercoaster ride from now on, whatever we do.
It’s no accident that the super rich are using deregulated capitalism to extract as much wealth out of vulnerable countries as they can before economies start to collapse. They will be looking for hiding holes in remote places, like New Zealand right now for their bunkers.
These tipping points are already breached. We’ve recently had 30+ centigrade heatwaves in all permafrost regions. They are melting rapidly, there is enough methane there to accelerate climate change beyond what we can mitigate. Even if we had zero carbon production now this methane would more than compensate for the reduction. It’s acceleration and a rollercoaster ride from now on, whatever we do.
This is definitely being close to being the case, and maybe the tipping points are breached and a "runaway" process that is unstoppable is already underway.
However, I'm not completely certain. The scenarios I'm contrasting is zero emissions today.
Without further carbon dioxide, methane and black particles from humans, maybe the North stabilizes, and not all the permafrost melts.
Of course, zero emissions today is not happening, but the basic point I'm making is that from one tipping point to the next maybe further human emissions is required to get things "over the edge", or, then, maybe, and once we tip one (like ocean ice in the arctic) all the others will fall like dominoes.
My overall point is that we'er not certain, but we can be pretty certain that continued emissions will make things worse, ensure tipping over more dominoes and also driving the system even hotter even after all the dominoes are tipped (as there's still more green house gases at the end of the process).
If things are already dire, then we'd be working to make things "a bit less bad" for survivors.
If things aren't so dire right now (many tipping points could be avoided if we stopped emissions now), then there's even more to save in terms of people and ecosystems.
For, it does take time for ice to melt, especially Greenland and antarctic, and the thermal inertia of the oceans that buffers a bit, and there's also (if emissions are brought to zero) geo-engineering that could work in that context.
Though I'm sure you agree, a point I'd like to emphasize as much as possible, that Geoengineering only makes sense after zero emissions.
You seed some ice now, it will have a bit of a cooling effect, but if we continue to warm the planet anyways, it will just melt anyways accomplishing nothing.
Grow a bunch of forests now, it will sequester some carbon and make those ecosystems more resilient (if we're talking actual forest and not mono-crops) ... but, they'll just burn anyways, sooner or later, if we keep warming the planet releasing all that CO2 back.
Adding reflective aerosols to the atmosphere doesn't stop ocean acidification and other problems (even if it "worked no issues", which it won't, continuing business as usual we'd just consume other non-renewable resources and collapse our civilization another way, as Reply to James Riley mentions) and needs to be continuous and more and more extreme intervention the more we continue to add green house gases (making a chaotic climate changes anyways, leading to crop failures that way). And, as soon as civilization is disrupted enough to stop the program, by wars or what-have-you, then all that warming is going to happen even faster and even more disruptively.
However, if we actually stopped emissions, then growing large amount of forests wouldn't all burn, and so sequester carbon and attract rain to those areas, both things making those ecosystems more resilient.
Likewise, seeding ice or building a ship drone network to keep ice in the arctic can help stabilize or even reverse the libido losses (submersible drones that attach to icebergs and deploy sea anchors, or the attach to real anchors with chains brought relatively close to the surface for this purpose, which could be then attached horizontally to each other, forming a large chain network all the way around the arctic that drones can go around attaching ice too). A lot of ice is lost due to floating south. Of course, if we warm the arctic enough that ice doesn't stay anyways, just melts in situ, there's no point of my immensely cool drone chain network.
Maybe some very short term, localized and strategic uses of reflective aerosols could stop catastrophic melting scenarios (those 30C over Greenland days).
So, there is still uncertainty and also geoengineering options, which are total insanity as a way to compensate emissions, but we may have time to deploy, considering the inertia of the system, and in the context of getting to zero emissions, I think it stands to reason cautious geoengineering could stop those other tipping points.
Capitalism is the reason for climate change. That’s a fact. Holding your hand to help you understand it isn’t of interest to me. When a system values short term profits, and anything else is considered an externality, this is what happens. Seen clearly in the Exxon memos. Take your capitalist/magma wet dreams elsewhere.
The root cause of climate change is the ideological context within which capitalism operates; the overlapping religious, political and economic ideological architectures of societies, that for all sorts of historical and philosophical reasons, undervalue and exclude science as an understanding of reality.
When politics makes a law; i.e. no dumping waste in the river, and that law applies equally to everyone, there's no economic incentive to dump waste in the river. The cost of disposing of waste properly is absorbed into the costs of production and passed on to the consumer in similar proportion by all producers, so there's no competitive disadvantage. However if there's no law on dumping waste in the river, and my main competitor dumps their waste in the river, I could not unilaterally stop doing so - even if I wanted to.
So you see, it's not capitalism per se, but the ideological context within which capitalism operates. And thus, it's necessary to look beyond those ideological borders to a scientific understanding of reality, to justify the application of technology necessary to solve climate change. Queue magma energy wet dream sequence!
It is a minimally disruptive approach to do this in support of capitalism; as capitalism is the prevailing economic paradigm, and so much nicer than slavery - to have some degree of personal and political freedom.
— counterpunch
I don't see it. A left wing approach to sustainability, based on Malthusian pessimism and limits to resources, dates back to an era when communism was still a thing. Communism is no longer a thing; yet a left wing approach to sustainability remains violently anti-capitalist.
Ostensibly concerned with sustainability, the left haven't even considered whether capitalism might be sustained, because of their political interest in promoting communism. In the 1960's and 70's maybe, that was a justifiable political position, but it's not anymore.
Perhaps I'm being slightly bullish in drawing a direct parallel between communism and slavery, but communism does not allow for the kind of personal and political freedom capitalism allows for. And it would clearly be less disruptive to sustain capitalism, than force a failed economic ideology on capitalist societies under the guise of sustainability.
Scientifically and technologically, I believe it's possible to sustain capitalism. There's limitless amounts of clean energy available in the molten interior of the earth, we could use to meet all our energy needs plus capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, produce hydrogen fuel, and recycle. This would internalise the externalities of capitalism without internalising them to the economy.
Capitalism is an ideology. It’s the religious belief in the free market and the primacy of profit— all else is externality. Capitalism doesn’t exclude science at all.
I don't see it. A left wing approach to sustainability, based on Malthusian pessimism and limits to resources, dates back to an era when communism was still a thing. Communism is no longer a thing; yet a left wing approach to sustainability remains violently anti-capitalist.
Ostensibly concerned with sustainability, the left haven't even considered whether capitalism might be sustained, because of their political interest in promoting communism. In the 1960's and 70's maybe, that was a justifiable political position, but it's not anymore.
Perhaps I'm being slightly bullish in drawing a direct parallel between communism and slavery, but communism does not allow for the kind of personal and political freedom capitalism allows for. And it would clearly be less disruptive to sustain capitalism, than force a failed economic ideology on capitalist societies under the guise of sustainability.
Scientifically and technologically, I believe it's possible to sustain capitalism. There's limitless amounts of clean energy available in the molten interior of the earth, we could use to meet all our energy needs plus capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, produce hydrogen fuel, and recycle. This would internalise the externalities of capitalism without internalising them to the economy.
It's not either capitalism or communism and there's a lot of different "types" of capitalism too. One of the worse developments was that of limited liability, for profit corporations and that has exactly zero to do with capitalism. So corporate capitalism is something you can be opposed to, without being a communist for instance.
So yes, false dichotomies all over the place I'm afraid. And capitalism creates its own oppression, which has been so often in the news you must've been living under a rock if you think you can maintain "capitalism = freedom". Sooner the inverse.
I also don't share your optimism where it concerns science. There have been plenty of technologies that were superior to others and failed due to political or sociological circumstances or because of a bad advertisement campaign. Lots of ideas don't see the light of day because they don't attract investors, or fail because poor, unconnected people have to pay a premium to get a loan in the first place because of worse credit ratings. The system doesn't favour smart solutions, it favours the status quo, which is why unexpected circumstances cause market shocks, recessions and depressions.
Finally, "sustaining capitalism" is an utter shit goal. It is and always has been about people, not some system or ideology. People first, system second. Whatever system creates the best world for people is the one we should implement. It isn't capitalism despite the many good things it has brought when the excesses it's been causing since the 90s wasn't a problem yet.
Capitalism is an ideology. It’s the religious belief in the free market and the primacy of profit— all else is externality. Capitalism doesn’t exclude science at all.
The length of the post necessary to explain your confusion would be prohibitive. I might have induced myself to write it for a willing audience, but I'm sure you couldn't be bothered to read it. I'll keep it short. You say what you see, and so insist you're right, but you don't get to the root of the problem - and that's why you cannot solve it.
The root cause of climate change is our mistaken relation to science; a disregard for science as an understanding of reality, externalised by religious and political conceptions of reality. i.e. the context within which capitalism operates. We need to look beyond the ideological battlements, to a scientific understanding of reality for a solution; i.e. magma energy - and that so, capitalism would be sustainable.
I know you belieeeve in limits to growth, but scientifically speaking, it's not a valid theory. It's a physical fact that resources are a function of the energy available to create them. We would need to look beyond our traditional ideological worldviews to apply the technology to harness that energy, but in scientific terms, the energy we need is there - and technologically, it seems quite possible to harness it.
Surely, you would concede, that's a better approach to sustainability than a slow strangling to death of capitalist enterprise, and a low energy, poverty stricken, authoritarian green commie hell forever after. We must transcend limits to growth.
Finally, "sustaining capitalism" is an utter shit goal.
I think that's called "the old bait and switch!"
The aim isn't sustaining capitalism per se. The aim is to secure a sustainable future with minimal disruption; and that's because, disruption causes people to suffer.
It is and always has been about people, not some system or ideology.
Capitalism is the prevailing economic system the world over, and if you cared about people and sustainability - more than you do about promoting communism, you'd accept that - and seek minimally disruptive solutions to climate change.
I also don't share your optimism where it concerns science.
Optimism is irrelevant. It's a matter of fact that the earth is a big ball of molten rock, containing a truly massive amount of energy - more than adequate to meet and exceed current global energy demand, into the indefinite future.
I see you like to read extra things into what I say. Let me clarify. I'm against the current type of capitalism, I think it's implementation, especially when the corporation was introduced, has and will lead to untold misery. I'm not against "free" markets as we understand them in mixed economies but against the idiotic laissez-faire nonsense. I am against societies that are diminishing people, resources and everything else into their monetary value. I'm against the concentration of power that comes along with it, I'm against the asymmetry that arises from all these effects resulting in a split between "capitalists" and "labourers" and rich vs. poor.
The "goodwill" of a company is generated by its labourers so I believe one solution could be (if we must have corporations) is to introduce a dynamic equity system where labourers, over time, become majority shareholders as opposed to those providing capital. And that's logical because if labourers wouldn't add more value than capital, shareholders would be losing money.
But hey, yeah, I totally played into your unnecessary juxtaposition!
The aim isn't sustaining capitalism per se. The aim is to secure a sustainable future with minimal disruption; and that's because, disruption causes people to suffer.
So the French revolution was a bad thing? Your posts involve way too many absolutes, too many assumptions and too little examination.
Capitalism is the prevailing economic system the world over, and if you cared about people and sustainability - more than you do about promoting communism, you'd accept that - and seek minimally disruptive solutions to climate change.
That capitalism is the prevailing economic system is no argument for it to remain so. Where have I promoted communism? I have always maintained Marx' Kapital is one of the better critiques of capitalism. Thanks to Piketty, we have an additional one.
It's a matter of fact that the earth is a big ball of molten rock, containing a truly massive amount of energy - more than adequate to meet and exceed current global energy demand, into the indefinite future.
So would zero-point energy. This doesn't mean it's a viable option. For someone banging on about science, you sure like to spend very little time on the actual science of the problem. Those questions you need to answer are still unanswered. Until then we'll go with the science that actually is clear, proven to work and feasible, such as wind, water and photo-voltaic renewable energy.
The root cause of climate change is our mistaken relation to science
No, it isn’t. Assert it a million times— doesn’t make it so.
Science grew up with capitalism, and has been appropriated for profit, usually at the expense of the public (eg computers, the internet, pharmaceuticals, etc).
As usual, you have no idea what you’re talking about— and I have no interest in explaining it to you. You wouldn’t hear it anyway. Just be happy with your delusions of solving the world’s problem by fiat.
I'm not against "free" markets as we understand them in mixed economies but against the idiotic laissez-faire nonsense. I am against societies that are diminishing people, resources and everything else into their monetary value. I'm against the concentration of power that comes along with it, I'm against the asymmetry that arises from all these effects resulting in a split between "capitalists" and "labourers" and rich vs. poor.
This is well said— and wasted on the utter buffoon you’re talking to. Still I applaud you.
You’re forgetting a simple principle: capitalism is anything that’s worked and led to benefits, and anything that doesn’t— is not capitalism.
It’s a religious belief in capitalism as a magic system that cures all, provided we do it correctly, that lies at the heart of people like magma man. Unshakable belief.
I see you like to read extra things into what I say. Let me clarify. I'm against the current type of capitalism, I think it's implementation, especially when the corporation was introduced, has and will lead to untold misery. I'm not against "free" markets as we understand them in mixed economies but against the idiotic laissez-faire nonsense. I am against societies that are diminishing people, resources and everything else into their monetary value. I'm against the concentration of power that comes along with it, I'm against the asymmetry that arises from all these effects resulting in a split between "capitalists" and "labourers" and rich vs. poor.
The "goodwill" of a company is generated by its labourers so I believe one solution could be (if we must have corporations) is to introduce a dynamic equity system where labourers, over time, become majority shareholders as opposed to those providing capital. And that's logical because if labourers wouldn't add more value than capital, shareholders would be losing money. But hey, yeah, I totally played into your unnecessary juxtaposition!
It's basically the centre-piece of Corbyn's 2019 manifesto. It's been offered to, and rejected by the British public. Just as Kinnock's left of Clause IV platform saw him rejected by the British public three times. And obversely, Blair dropped Clause IV, and won three elections for Labour. When will the left learn they are there to represent working class people's interests, not prosecute their own ideological prejudices?
Just on the surface of things, why would someone start a business, risk their capital, invest their time, effort and ingenuity - knowing they are required to give that company away to factory floor workers whose sole contribution is their labour power? Business could not operate under those conditions; and then you really would see suffering. Immediately there'd be capital flight, mass unemployment, the value of the currency would tank, while interests rates would skyrocket.
So the French revolution was a bad thing? Your posts involve way too many absolutes, too many assumptions and too little examination.
Arguably, the revolution was a disaster for France that still echoes today in the all too frequent strikes, often turning into riots. A romantic desire to tear down the system, as if to birth the next republic - encourages social protest to become disproportionate.
That capitalism is the prevailing economic system is no argument for it to remain so. Where have I promoted communism? I have always maintained Marx' Kapital is one of the better critiques of capitalism. Thanks to Piketty, we have an additional one.
Let's take Pikkety's critique, and respond, so what?
"The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future."
Wealth inequality is good. Inequality means that people have been able to develop their talents, and use those talents to create social good, for a profit. Talent is unequally distributed by nature. Equality of opportunity, sure - I'm with Rawl's on equality of opportunity, but denying people the right to profit from their talents, for sake of equality of outcome with the talentless, is profoundly unjust and dysfunctional.
So would zero-point energy. This doesn't mean it's a viable option. For someone banging on about science, you sure like to spend very little time on the actual science of the problem.
That's crazy; zero point energy is not a form of energy outside of cartoons. It refers to the lowest energy state of a quantum system - even at absolute zero, there's a residual energy. That's zero point energy. Magma is a real source of huge amounts of clean energy we need, like yesterday. It cannot be developed quite that quickly, but doesn't have to be - assuming ultimately, it would be more than adequate, we can redress the damage in due course.
Those questions you need to answer are still unanswered. Until then we'll go with the science that actually is clear, proven to work and feasible, such as wind, water and photo-voltaic renewable energy.
Your unanswered questions are not due to a lack of scientific rigour, but that they could only be answered after conducting physical research. I'm not currently in a position to hire those specialist skills. Give me the money, and I'll start making calls - and get you your answers. But until then, it's just not possible to answer the questions you've asked. You can keep implying this constitutes some sort of deficiency on my part, but I can only do so much - and I'm doing what I'm qualified to do, and that is to speak on the philosophy, political theory and economics of the whole thing.
Wind and solar are sub-optimal at best. They will never meet our energy needs - and so will entrench fossil fuel dependence. They are inconstant sources of energy, and so that energy must be stored - meaning you don't just need to build windmills and solar panels, but energy storage facilities - and still maintain a fossil fuel generating capacity. Windmills cost about £250m each to manufacture and erect, and last around 25 years, after which time they need replacing at similar cost. And all this to barely take the edge off carbon emissions.
In order to make wind and solar make sense - living standards will have to fall dramatically. This means old people afraid to put the fire on in winter; the price of food, travel, everything that costs energy costing much more - to reduce demand, to address climate change. It's cruel and unnecessary, and leads nowhere good. We need to apply technologies that produce massive amounts of clean energy to balance human welfare and environmental sustainability in our favour.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 19, 2021 at 19:49#5695050 likes
Let's take Pikkety's critique, and respond, so what?
"The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future."
Wealth inequality is good. Inequality means that people have been able to develop their talents, and use those talents to create social good, for a profit. Talent is unequally distributed by nature. Equality of opportunity, sure - I'm with Rawl's on equality of opportunity, but denying people the right to profit from their talents, for sake of equality of outcome with the talentless, is profoundly unjust and dysfunctional.
You missed Pikkety's point. The point is that those with capital will only get richer, while others who do produce get poorer in relation. Investors don't develop their talents to create something, they only invest to get more money back. This incentivizes rent-seeking behaviour which makes the economy actually worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
The problem is not with the free-market mechanism as such, markets are good at producing, distributing and pricing goods etc... The problem is that they have 'forgotten' their role and have over the years essentially taken over the state by lobbying and by playing states against eachother after globalization. They have turned a means into the goal.
No, it isn’t. Assert it a million times— doesn’t make it so.
Science grew up with capitalism, and has been appropriated for profit, usually at the expense of the public (eg computers, the internet, pharmaceuticals, etc).
As usual, you have no idea what you’re talking about— and I have no interest in explaining it to you. You wouldn’t hear it anyway. Just be happy with your delusions of solving the world’s problem by fiat.
Thanks again for your abusive, ill informed, half assed, hateful opinion!
Scientific method emerged 100 years before the industrial revolution; and in effect, was condemned as heretical. It was this religiously motivated philosophical position that rendered science a mere tool to be used by capitalism and government.
Science is not just a tool, but is also an understanding of reality to contrast with an ideological description of the world. To maintain that religious, political and economic ideological description of the world - a scientific understanding of reality was ignored, downplayed, undermined - over hundreds of years. That's the context within which capitalism operates, and it's a mistake. You want to blame capitalism, and I'm not suggesting capitalism is entirely innocent, but it's not the problem.
Having established that - then we return to the real world, where things are not ideal, but nonetheless, thinking in these terms creates a rationale to apply the technologies necessary to sustainability - and in that course, magma energy is the most likely adequate technological solution - a solution that sovereign nations states in economic and political competition, would not naturally arrive at. But it's there, and our best bet, because as a matter of fact - resources are function of the energy available to create them. Ask a physicist!
Scientific method emerged 100 years before the industrial revolution
You don't know what you're talking about. But it's nice to see you fit right in with the typical behavior of most ignoramuses -- always speaking with utmost assurance in their own (believed) acumen.
The scientific method doesn't exist. That's a fairy tale. But even if it did, it didn't "emerge" at a date, and certainly not "100 years before the industrial revolution," which is itself difficult to date. Some estimate around 1750, which would make your bogus date 1650, which is completely arbitrary. Galileo was already dead by that point -- to take one example.
I don't even know why I'm bothering, to be honest. But almost everything you say is so stupid I feel compelled to respond. It's too easy a target.
To maintain that religious, political and economic ideological description of the world - a scientific understanding of reality was ignored, downplayed, undermined - over hundreds of years.
:yawn:
OK Richard Dawkins. What a boring analysis. Also has the benefit of being completely wrong.
But you're welcome to keep believing it. In your world, the problem is the ignoring of science and the solution to the climate crisis is magma energy. Got it. Everyone is riveted. Now go away.
You missed Pikkety's point. The point is that those with capital will only get richer, while others who do produce get poorer in relation.
I shouldn't have been required to answer to Pikkety's point. I'm not advocating capitalism per se; capitalism is the prevailing economic system, and imperfect as it may be, has the knowledge, skills and resources to apply the technology to prevent an imminent catastrophe. Your determination to put ideology ahead of the practicalities of sustainability is absurd. You would use sustainability as an anti-capitalist battering ram, to force your ideology on the majority. Pikkety should be required to answer to my proof that's unnecessary.
You missed Pikkety's point. The point is that those with capital will only get richer, while others who do produce get poorer in relation.
So, not real poverty then - but new all times highs in left wing envy? So what? The rich pay most of the taxes. Do you suppose they think that's fair? We can all complain about how unfair everything is, but it's just not about that for me. It's about finding a way to apply the technology necessary to sustainability - and I don't see that happening by making an enemy of government, wealth and industry. I want a solution that suits them - and counter intuitive blue sky thinking though it may be, magma energy ticks a lot of boxes.
capitalism is the prevailing economic system, and imperfect as it may be, has the knowledge, skills and resources to apply the technology to prevent an imminent catastrophe
Capitalism has personal traits now -- like knowledge and skill.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 19, 2021 at 20:27#5695250 likes
Reply to counterpunch You're barking up the wrong tree, I'm no left ideologue. I'm just saying the system is broken right now, however you want to look at it.
You're barking up the wrong tree, I'm no left ideologue. I'm just saying the system is broken right now, however you want to look at it.
You weigh in by telling me I misunderstand Pikkety - then forgive me for considering you an advocate of his position, and tailoring my remarks accordingly. I cannot comprehend how inequality of wealth is relevant to my proposal - even if I thought it were a problem, which I don't. I'm happy to see someone doing well for themselves - good on 'em! The question is about approaches to climate change, and frankly, the left wing limits to resources approach is factually wrong and requires great suffering to an intangible ideal - and the reply is, "Ah yes, but - if we sustain capitalism, some people will get very rich!" How awful!
I cannot comprehend how inequality of wealth is relevant to my proposal - even if I thought it were a problem, which I don't. I'm happy to see someone doing well for themselves - good on 'em!
Good god you're an imbecile.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 19, 2021 at 21:16#5695500 likes
You're barking up the wrong tree, I'm no left ideologue. I'm just saying the system is broken right now, however you want to look at it.
— ChatteringMonkey
You weigh in by telling me I misunderstand Pikkety - then forgive me for considering you an advocate of his position, and tailoring my remarks accordingly. I cannot comprehend how inequality of wealth is relevant to my proposal - even if I thought it were a problem, which I don't. I'm happy to see someone doing well for themselves - good on 'em! The question is about approaches to climate change, and frankly, the left wing limits to resources approach is factually wrong and requires great suffering to an intangible ideal - and the reply is, "Ah yes, but - if we sustain capitalism, some people will get very rich!" How awful!
I weighed in because you misunderstood Pikkety, which... you know, seems fair game on a philosophy forum.
And it's not only about inequality of wealth, even if you are not left politically, the system isn't working properly, by it's own standards.
Personally I don't think limiting energy is needed to solve this problem long term because renewables, solar in the first place, will be cheap enough to provide the energy... short term it could certainly help to be more energy-conserving though.
But climate change and energy-supply is not the only issue, there will eventually, sooner for some, be problems with other resources that are not renewable.
Either way, a model that relies on perpetual growth isn't sustainable I think, because at some point we will hit a wall of diminishing returns on possible innovations, which is what ultimately drives growth.
And that's only tackling the question of the feasibility, i.e. can or could we do it? The real question - and beyond the scope of this thread - is do we really want this?
I weighed in because you misunderstood Pikkety, which... you know, seems fair game on a philosophy forum.
And it's not only about inequality of wealth, even if you are not left politically, the system isn't working properly, by it's own standards.
Personally I don't think limiting energy is needed to solve this problem long term because renewables, solar in the first place, will be cheap enough to provide the energy... short term it could certainly help to be more energy-conserving though.
Wind and solar cannot possibly solve climate change. These technologies will never even meet current energy demand, less yet provide surplus energy to capture carbon, desalinate, irrigate and recycle. They'll cost a fortune to build, produce a trickle of energy, only slightly reduce total GHG emissions, and be impossible to recycle in 25 years time, when they'd need replacing at similar cost.
The technology is simply not adequate to the problem, and consequently, other forms of sacrifice will be necessary - an endless series of government interventions in the market and society to tax this and stop that, in hopes of eeking out our existence!
There is a viable source of energy, and it's massive beyond imagining. It's constant high grade clean energy, and there's a limitless amount of it. Harnessing this energy we would not need to impose upon people and business to secure a sustainable future. It's the difference between stopping flying and inventing a hydrogen powered jet engine. And you say let's stop flying? Then I think you're nuts!
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 19, 2021 at 22:04#5695750 likes
Wind and solar cannot possibly solve climate change. These technologies will never ever even meet current energy demand, less yet provide surplus energy to capture carbon, desalinate, irrigate and recycle.
If you have a sources for these claims, I'm willing to look at it... if not, I disagree.
If you have a sources for these claims, I'm willing to look at it... if not, I disagree.
East Anglia One is a wind farm offshore of the British Isles. It's 102 turbines produce enough energy to power 600,000 homes. There are approximately 35 million households in the UK. By dint of a back of the envelope calculation; saying nothing of the governments intention to phase out petrol powered cars in favour of electric vehicles from 2030, you'd need roughly 10,000 windmills to meet current energy demand. Maybe 15,000 once you source transport energy from the national grid. The 102 turbines cost about £2.5bn to build, which is to say, 15,000 windmills would cost.... oh no, my calculator has run out of zeros! So that's not going to happen, is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Anglia_Array
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 19, 2021 at 22:20#5695870 likes
:up: And where one technology (especially an unknown and unproven one) is given the grace of time to develop and improve, I would think the same courtesy should be extended to others; and those which are extant, with a head start, would be favored, I would think. It's my understanding windmills just keep getting better. Compare what they started with to where they are today. Solar panels, likewise. I've even heard you could make roads out of and drive on them. Just imagine if all oil subsidy were ripped away (including the use of public lands) and diverted to alternatives.
"The first three months of 2019 (January, February and March) showed good progression, topping all previous monthly data, but in April the plant was shut down because the project's sole buyer, NV Energy, terminated the Power Purchase Agreement for failure to produce the contracted power production. The power generated also cost NV Energy about $135 per megawatt-hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh available from a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm."
They shut it down because other solar technology was cheaper? Anyway, it's not representative for all solar energy, it's a specific technology being tested because it is more effective at storing energy.
:up: And where one technology (especially an unknown and unproven one) is given the grace of time to develop and improve, I would think the same courtesy should be extended to others; and those which are extant would be favored, I would think. It's my understanding windmills just keep getting better. Compare what they started with to where they are today. Solar panels, likewise. I've even heard you could make roads out of and drive on them.
Yeah, energy-efficiency is getting better and better. And there are enough ways to get around the irregular supply of energy, if you have enough of it. Most of it could also be recycled eventually...
The idea seems to be that, solar and wind, and sure if present other renewables, could get us there. No idea why he's so hung up on geothermal energy specifically.
And where one technology (especially an unknown and unproven one) is given the grace of time to develop and improve, I would think the same courtesy should be extended to others; and those which are extant would be favored, I would think. It's my understanding windmills just keep getting better. Compare what they started with to where they are today. Solar panels, likewise. I've even heard you could make roads out of and drive on them.
The potential is not there. Wind and solar cannot produce enough energy, cannot produce energy reliably, don't last long enough, cost a fortune to build, and are impossible to recycle. If all those problems were solved, we'd still need an unfeasibly large number of solar panels and/or windmills to meet current energy demand. We will always be behind the eight ball on climate change if we apply inadequate technologies to merely mitigate emissions. Magma energy, by contrast - has the potential to defeat climate change and transcend limits to resources.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 19, 2021 at 23:05#5696090 likes
No that's right, and we have no obligation to take your word on it.
You claim without evidence that solar power can solve climate change; and you demand I produce evidence to prove it cannot? Isn't it your obligation to prove it can? I'm not interested in solar. I'm interested in magma. You're interested in solar? You prove it! And while you're at it, can you explain to the people of Gwent why they ought to pave over 'the welsh amazon' with solar panels!
Reply to counterpunch What is tedious in the extreme is your supposition that one solution will solve the issue.
When faced with a complex problem, should one just decide that because a solution works in one place it will work everywhere, or should one try a range of solutions, and choose the best one for each situation? We have abundant sunshine in Australia, but the magma is unusually deep because of the age of the continent.
Assuming that your solution is the right one for everyone is imperialism.
We all know the ball of heat that is the Earth’s magma is freaking tiny compared to the ball of heat that is the sun. However, the magma is a lot freaking closer. Then again, there is quite the crust between us and it, while there is mere empty space between us and the sun. We have to work to get to the magma up, whereas the sun pours down whether we want it or not. Both have to be captured. Balancing it all out, which one is “more”, which one is less subject to man’s fucking it up, and which one is easier?
Which one is proven? Which one has been ignored by real scientists? Asking for myself.
On the "fucking it up" question, I find myself in that odd place of feelingstupidly ridiculous to think we could ever jeopardize the earth by tapping it’s inner heat. I mean, it’s so large and endless. It’s not like we could ever mess up the dynamo. Like the five billion carrier pigeons; there is no way a bunch of idiots with black powder muzzle-loaders could ever possibly wipe them out. There is no way humans could ever possibly affect the climate. It’s just too damn big. There is no way we could ever trash outer space. Talk about endless cubic miles! Oh, wait.
All the continents are the same age. They're made of granite and they sort of float on top of the mantle like marshmallows in hot chocolate.
The mantle has hot spots in it. Continents (or sea floor) will bulge and buckle as they pass over hot spots. This causes island chains like Hawaii, strings of volcanoes, or continental rifts.
What is tedious in the extreme is your supposition that one solution will solve the issue.
Not immediately, but there's more than adequate energy to meet and exceed current global energy demand in the molten interior of the earth. It would take time to develop that capacity, but eventually I expect it would succeed fossil fuels, and is sufficient to be the sole source of energy we rely on. That would be the ultimate aim, but I don't envisage it being developed and employed in the way you suggest.
I haven't talked about this often, because it's way beyond my pay grade, but the potential of the technology - the sheer volume of energy that could ultimately become available, allows for considerable discretion going forward, in how soon we'd need to replace critical and expensive parts of the infrastructure. There would be the potential to offset carbon produced today, in the capacity to sequester it tomorrow - in turn suggesting this technology be developed a global good, and when it does eventually enter the market, perhaps a sectoral approach might be possible, where high energy industries are transferred to renewable energy. There's no need to compete directly with fossil fuels right away, and thus - it's false charge you lay at my feet. What's tedious is your refusal to understand.
When faced with a complex problem, should one just decide that because a solution works in one place it will work everywhere, or should one try a range of solutions, and choose the best one for each situation? We have abundant sunshine in Australia, but the magma is unusually deep because of the age of the continent. Assuming that your solution is the right one for everyone is imperialism. Basically, it's not rational.
Australia exports about 350 million tonnes of coal per year to Asia - so yeah, you've got lot's of sunshine you! You've got so much sunshine you're bursting into flames!
Assuming that your solution is the right one for everyone is imperialism. Basically, it's not rational.
It's not an assumption; it's a consequence of the nature of the threat we face, and what I believe is the only adequate solution. Magma energy can solve climate change, and thereafter, could succeed fossil fuels, and ultimately, we could transcend limits to resources. It's that possibility that makes it the right answer for everyone, eventually - not because 'one size fits all' is my rule of thumb!
However, the magma is a lot freaking closer.
— James Riley
The sunlight is on my roof.
So, no, it isn't.
Let me slow it down for you:
"We all know the ball of heat that is the Earth’s magma is freaking tiny compared to the [i]ballof heat that is the sun[/i]. However, the magma is a lot freaking closer. [It is. WAY closer. Like 94.5m miles closer] Then again, there is quite the crust between us and it, while there is mere empty space between us and the sun. We have to work to get to the magma up, whereas the sun pours down [Doh!] . . ."
Australia exports about 350 million tonnes of coal per year to Asia - so yeah, you've got lot's of sunshine you! You've got so much sunshine you're bursting into flames!
True but irrelevant.
The critique I offered is based on the logic of your proposal: that one solution will work for all. It's wrong.
It's entirely relevant. Asia will build more coal fired power stations to support growing prosperity, but is unlikely to apply the technology to produce clean energy. Large parts of the planet simply can't afford it. Developing magma energy as a global good would allow us to attack climate change directly, and sequester carbon - building capacity to take over from fossil fuels eventually.
A coal fired power station does not require a huge amount of modification to burn hydrogen instead. Energy is transmitted using the existing energy infrastructure. So - in theory, magma energy would allow for the largest populations on earth, India and China, and poorer parts of the world to "go green" without massive and costly infrastructure changes. If then you said - Australia has loads of sunshine, then yeah, sure! As you prefer.
Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear. All excellent options, all getting easier and cheaper and more efficient as time goes on. Solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels. This, along with reforestation, carbon capture, etc., will all be needed to solve the crisis. This is straight out of the IPCC. Or we can instead take seriously the rantings of a crackpot on the internet, with his silver bullet. To me the choice is clear.
Reply to Xtrix Oh, you should have waited for Counterpunch... now all that will happen is that he will again list all the reasons he says they will not work.
Reply to Xtrix Oh, sure. Coincidence. A likely story. :wink:
I'm wondering if you are happy with Counterpunch obsessing on your thread - it keeps it on the top of the discussions list, after all - or if you would prefer a different discussion.
See if you can list them for yourself. Consider it a first step towards your redemption. Be your own devil's advocate.
Okay. We could capture an asteroid with a high copper content, and build a huge copper ring in space, and set it spinning within the magnetic fields of the earth to generate current. It's an idea I came up with in relation to the perpetual motion machine challenge - which, arguably, I won. Point being, if you think I haven't considered it, you're probably wrong, and after all due consideration I think magma - hydrogen is the best bet.
Incidentally, while Australia is a huge exporter of coal, and doing it's best to warm the world during these cold winter months, we also have a growing small-scale solar boom. Despite our neolithic federal government, there is a groundswell of support for energy alternatives.
I'm wondering if you are happy with Counterpunch obsessing on your thread - it keeps it on the top of the discussions list, after all - or if you would prefer a different discussion.
I don't consider this my thread, in this case. Just a general discussion. If he wants to make a fool of himself, that's his business.
Population growth is the natural reason for economic growth and demand growth. If populations are stable or decreasing, that is a huge issue on this issue. You don't have only decrease in use because of technological advancement, but also due to demand decrease. That is a huge issue. Besides, earlier population growth was seen as the primary reason for doom, starting from Malthus, which isn't something unimportant now.
Japan has a decreasing population. Notice what has happened to it's need of energy:
However, in the equation of Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence; it's the technology and affluence that can be changed significantly in relatively short periods of time
Technology has always been the real factor that the doomsayers have gotten wrong. The typical disaster-in-the-near-future predictions have simply ignored how technology can change the situation and also how markets adapt. And affluence? This isn't a simple thing. The naive idea would be to think that a more affluent economy would have a bigger impact. This actually doesn't go that way: the more affluent society can take into consideration environmental issues and ecological issues far better than a poorer one. Just compare West European policies and practices to let's say those in poorer countries. I think it was Jared Diamond who noticed that the biggest environmental crisis tend to happen in the poorest countries.
Reply to counterpunch I didn't raise economics to discuss whether my economic position is correct, merely to point out your representation of my position was false. One point though : It's funny to see how you consider aspects, such as shareholders and capital rates of return, as inherent to capitalism. They're not. They're fictions introduced by law. Earliest corporations only got limited liability for capital providers because they invested in something worthwhile to the public that they would benefit from themselves (for instance merchants building a bridge increasing commerce). Profit was expressly forbidden and when the goal was completed the corporation was dissolved. Laws allowing corporations to be for-profit and exist in perpetuity are distortions to market structures and not inherent to a capitalist system. So, one again too many assumptions about what I mean, what capitalism is and in general another demonstration of a lack of knowledge and context. It makes me wonder what you do for a living if you have such little historic and economic knowledge.
Aldo zero point energy is real just as real as geothermal. NASA had been working on a quantum vacuum fluctuation engine and published their results. It works. Breaks some fundamental physical laws but quantum effects have been known to screw with that before.
Reply to Benkei
Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
It's not a source of energy. It's a means to produce thrust without propellant.
"According to the team, the electromagnetic drive, or EmDrive, converts electricity into thrust simply by bouncing around microwaves in a closed cavity. In theory, such a lightweight engine could one day send a spacecraft to Mars in just 70 days."
It is still necessary to produce the electricity; and almost certainly, the whole things is less thermodynamically efficient than a steam train. i.e. costs of lot of energy, to produce a tiny amount of thrust. Probably in the region of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt of energy! It's great for space travel. Mini nuke generators can produce plenty of energy, spent through such an engine - you can have thrust without lugging around tons of propellant. That's a huge advantage, but it's not a source of energy, and not relevant to solving climate change.
It's funny to see how you consider aspects, such as shareholders and capital rates of return, as inherent to capitalism. They're not. They're fictions introduced by law. Earliest corporations only got limited liability for capital providers because they invested in something worthwhile to the public that they would benefit from themselves (for instance merchants building a bridge increasing commerce).
Okay, but the nature of capitalism has changed fundamentally, since around 1900 - when they introduced things like pensions and unemployment insurance, while at the same time industry began to produce consumer goods. If you don't like it, blame Marx' critique - to which capitalism responded by creating an interest in people's general prosperity, and we now have consumer capitalism. Just off the top of my head, it would seem to me consumer capitalism multiplies exponentially the liabilities to which shareholders might become subject through investment; so there's no valid inference from the fact LLC's only existed for occasional and philanthropic purposes way back when.
It makes me wonder what you do for a living if you have such little historic and economic knowledge.
Corporate law is a huge and complex area of specialist knowledge; why would I happen know about it? If you know something interesting about it; more interesting than the fact that at some unspecified time in the past there were no LLC's - do share, but don't hold my feet to your fire!
Finally, "sustaining capitalism" is an utter shit goal. It is and always has been about people, not some system or ideology. People first, system second. Whatever system creates the best world for people is the one we should implement. It isn't capitalism despite the many good things it has brought when the excesses it's been causing since the 90s wasn't a problem yet.
I'm against the current type of capitalism, I think it's implementation, especially when the corporation was introduced, has and will lead to untold misery. I'm not against "free" markets as we understand them in mixed economies but against the idiotic laissez-faire nonsense. I am against societies that are diminishing people, resources and everything else into their monetary value. I'm against the concentration of power that comes along with it, I'm against the asymmetry that arises from all these effects resulting in a split between "capitalists" and "labourers" and rich vs. poor.
The "goodwill" of a company is generated by its labourers so I believe one solution could be (if we must have corporations) is to introduce a dynamic equity system where labourers, over time, become majority shareholders as opposed to those providing capital.
Because these are three different positions. Or one lying ass commie!
...you always assume some sort of deficit on my part rather than assume I have reasons to say what I'm saying!
The deficit is apparent when you keep imputing "communism" on the criticisms I leveled at the current way capitalism is pursued but my comments are still entirely within keeping with capitalism as understood by Smith.
This is off-side. Read back on this thread, and you've attacked my intelligence, sanity, called me obsessive, and called me ignorant - over and over, page after page - and I'm asking you to stop it.
When I click on the notification, and find some shitty one liner reply to a post I poured heart and soul into - it negatively effects my emotional state. It's not a comment here or there, it's repeated abuse from a mob of bullies.
100 days until COP 26 - and I'd rather withdraw from this forum than place my argument in a prominent spot, with this kind of vicious ad hominem abuse going on. I'm not willing to tolerate this - so knock it off or I'm gone.
Reply to counterpunch I've actually not once insulted you, while your first post to me you called me an idiot. See Reply to counterpunch And after repeated corrections insist on misrepresenting my position.
Then like everywhere else on the net - you left wing bullies have driven out alternate opinion, and the kicker is that your idea of sustainability really is a pipe dream. On your head be it.
Then like everywhere else on the net - you left wing bullies have driven out alternate opinion
But your opinion is still here is it not? Very much in print and in its full 'alternate' majesty. Do you notice any deletions? Nothing of alternate opinion has been lost just by you ceasing to repeat it.
Reply to counterpunch I haven't bullied you either. I'm calling out your feigned victimhood. You started out disrespectful, I ignored it, you stayed disrespectful by misrepresenting my criticism as communist despite repeated clarification and plenty of indication you're ignorant of what capitalism and communism are. You don't get to play the victim card when you act like an asshole.
Magma is a real source of huge amounts of clean energy we need, like yesterday. It cannot be developed quite that quickly, but doesn't have to be - assuming ultimately, it would be more than adequate, we can redress the damage in due course.
This is, unfortunately, essentially the same crap I have heard all my life. You are using the "Magma" energy source, while the fossil fuel folks touted their crap, all the while spewing the "clean it up later" line of garbage. In this instance, "redress the damage in due course." Right. Except that it flat out never happens. EVER.
I am sitting in Alberta, home of thousands of orphan wells all built on the "clean it up later" bullshit. No one ever wants to clean it up. So, moving forward, if you have no way to accomplish something without making a mess you can't clean up, you have no way to accomplish something. END OF STORY.
No one wants to clean up the mess. They are unemployed up here, sitting around doing jack shit and still don't want to consider cleaning it up. It took a federal mandate to even make the provincial government look at it as a possible option. Never mind that it has been staring them in the face for decades.
Then like everywhere else on the net - you left wing bullies have driven out alternate opinion,
I usually leave people like you in the rear-view mirror. But I see here a teachable moment, and hope you can be taught. I’ve been banned from more internet discussion forums than I can shake a stick at. In fact, just yesterday, while I was not banned from LinkedIn as a site, I was banned from a conversation thereon. 98% of the time where I’ve been banned, it was conservative cancel culture. It was never due to my having conducted myself as you have here. It was always due to me giving as good as I got, logically or otherwise, in playing by the same rules as those with whom I was engaged.
I’ve seen more conservative gadflies buzzing around liberal sites than you would ever see if the roles were reversed. It has only been within the last few years that I’ve seen liberal-oriented discussion forums start to ban conservative gadflies. And that was simply in a tit-for-tat fit of frustration. There might also have been an acknowledgement of how well echo-chambers and confirmation bias and cancel culture seemed to be working for conservatives, and so the push-back was on. In other words, conservatives had brought it on themselves and now they are reaping what they sew.
But this place has not banned you, to my knowledge. In fact, where I envision a gadfly as somewhat of a loner, you are no gadfly here. This place has its fair share of conservatives. They just don’t act like petulant little children. If they do, I just ban them from my engagement and don’t rely upon the forum to do it for me. Besides, the forum's tolerance is higher than mine. Anyway, I digress. Let me get to my point. Here’s the lesson:
Next time you feel the urge to “ASSume”, or to say what it is that others must, in your mind, be saying, or before you arrive at a conclusion, do this: Ask a question. But first, ask yourself: Is this an honest question and is it founded in sincere intellectual curiosity? Or is it just a rhetorical device to gain points in a debate? But try to avoid straw men and telling people what it is that they think, or that the only logical conclusion is X. Ask instead. You might learn something you did not know.
As you may remember with me, you could have simply asked how I intended to accomplish my goal. But just as you have done to so many others on this thread, you did not ask. And you were not willing to take the steps to redeem yourself. Why, pray tell, should I continue to engage one who doesn’t even know what he did wrong, is in denial, or is afraid to admit it? Having been down this road before, I’ve found the perpetrator just continues with his transgressions. I can’t argue with such a person. (Much respect to those who have beat their head against the brick wall that you have become.)
P.S. I did not even know you were conservative until you just called out the site. As I’ve said before, I don’t know shit about magma and thought your interest in it was better than the denial of doubling down on big oil, like a true conservative would do. I thought you might just be a different left lane. But apparently not.
Anyway, back to the rearview mirror with you. If you have anything worth while in rebuttal on the magma science, I look forward to reading it.
The misunderstood genius with the magic (capitalist) solution to climate change, who goes around calling people "commies," is now leaving the discussion. Boo hoo. What a loss.
Everyone here, including myself, tried engaging you politely initially. When you prove yourself an imbecile over and over again, there's really no other way to respond -- unless you're the Dalai Lama.
Good luck with your magma dreams, of which you have no clue what you're talking about.
But your opinion is still here is it not? Very much in print and in its full 'alternate' majesty. Do you notice any deletions? Nothing of alternate opinion has been lost just by you ceasing to repeat it.
My opinion is not explored, because it is not understood - even if it is understood, I am faced with a constant barrage of incomprehension, misinterpretation, and abuse. These subjects are hard enough as it is. Do you imagine they haven't taken a toll? So to be attacked, mob handed, on the theme of mental competence is just too much. Every post for the last few pages has been met with aspersions insanity, and this has gone too far. A remark here or there is one thing. Developing a theme and inviting friends to join in is another. So, I'm outa here - and I'll leave you with this. If you are not aiming to transcend limits to resources you are aiming to fail. Best of luck!
Since the "Only-Magma!" -guy has hopefully left us, here's a question for others.
The natural reason for more (energy) production is population growth. Yet population growth is decreasing globally and likely will in the future make the global population hit a peak and from there on the population will get smaller. With advances in technology that would sound at first an environment where we can tackle our present problems.
Yet the problem is that our society is built on growth. Our system to finance those technological innovations and advances are built on a growth model. The debt-based monetary system needs economic growth. The social welfare models we use need growth to pay for them. With decreasing populations you might have a perpetual economic bust where not much improvements and advances will happen. The technology might be there, but it wouldn't be implemented. Fossil fuels might be used, because there's no money to build new alternatives because of the economic slump. Decreasing populations might sound like a good thing, but it might wreck havoc with our great plans to change the society from a carbon based to renewable energy based society.
Has any thought been given how to tackle this issue? What do people think here?
Reply to frank Yeah, deal with the current disaster once they happen. That's the way it will happen.
Yet smart people can anticipate those future disasters.
You see, it's not utterly crazy to think that the present financial system can collapse. It has already been close to collapsing, but has been sustained. Such events can ruin our present plans quite quickly. Or at least hinder them dramatically. Just to give one example.
Reply to ssu I actually raised this issue when I was working at the Ministry of Finance. How to get to a circular, zero-growth, fair and just society.
No real answer but my gut feeling: I think mostly it will be about doing more with less and technologies that will support that will continue to be implemented. I see a high risk that capital distributions will be locked in for a very long time with very little change as a result of less economic activity and mobility, which will likely lead to inescapable socio-economic classes.
I think mostly it will be about doing more with less and technologies that will support that will continue to be implemented. I see a high risk that capital distributions will be locked in for a very long time with very little change as a result of less economic activity and mobility, which will likely lead to inescapable socio-economic classes.
That is a well thought answer, Benkei.
If capital investments to technology will happen at good pace, then we can solve the problem where the decrease of the population will naturally decrease the size of the economy. And of course, we have two very advanced societies that are going to tackle this problem:
And other like China will face it in the future. Yet even if Japan hasn't gone off a cliff with very small economic growth, the "Japan disease" might be our future.
I myself see huge political difficulties in adapting to the new environment. Once people have benefits, they will fight for those benefits and hence transfer payments will likely win over investments to technology. Now investments in technology have been partly helped by the global financial-casino, which, we have to admit, has also given funding to smart tech research. The rapid decline in costs for renewable energy is a prime example for that.
You see, it's not utterly crazy to think that the present financial system can collapse. It has already been close to collapsing, but has been sustained. Such events can ruin our present plans quite quickly
Exactly. It's myopic to think of climate change just from our own perspective. That's like a flea assessing an elephant.
Yet the problem is that our society is built on growth.
The old saying "The bigger they are, the harder they fall" applies here, I think. The bigger our population gets and the longer we delay, the more catastrophic the inevitable fall. As opined by frank, though, the plan is no plan. We have and will continue to just muddle through in an open conspiracy to look the other way because we mistakenly think it will be too hard to bite the bullet. It's just going to get harder and, eventually Mother Earth will do what the stock market refers to as "a correction."
We think that just because we've pulled ourselves along, we always will. Because we are in the air, we are air borne. We fly. The sky's not a limit; space is next. We and our technology will save us. No one stops to think that we might be falling and just haven't hit yet. With our mere 200k years we have no context.
If no human being was born from today forward, then we'd be at about 2 to 4 billion in 30 years. Far from ideal, but way more sustainable. We don't need continuing innovation but there is no reason why we can't have it. We need to grow, but grow smaller; grow, but grow smarter. We have several hundred thousand years of experience and a wonderful solar power plant that has been working for long before we came along (photosynthesis). We can, but don't have to rest on our laurels.
All we have to do is what Aldo Leopold recommended so long ago: Make a virtue of necessity. What this means is, change what we now deem to be good to what we know would be better. If we exalt greed, then that is what we will get. If we exalt humble gratitude, grace and giving, then those who epitomize that will become the heroes, the leaders, the people we will endeavor to emulate.
Sorry, but I don't want to hear a bunch of "Yeah, but . . ." followed by a parade of horribles. As one recent meme I saw said: "The question isn't if we can afford to change; the answer is that we cannot afford not to." The money involved and the damage done by continuing on our current path far exceeds any cost created by an entire collapse of our current way of life and being tossed back into a cave. But we don't have to do that any more than we have to murder people.
What we need to do is to do to those who run the show what they have done to us: We need to harness them like work horses and put them to work for us. Subject them to the "human resources department" like they have done to us. Milk them for all they are worth. Trickle up, not trickle down. Stimulate those who actually do all the work and who will actually spend the stimulus stimulating. If those at the top want it to trickle up, then they can work for it. And work hard and smart for it. Working for the people, instead of the other way around. Pay a god damn tax for crying out loud.
So here's the sum and substance in anticipatory response to the inevitable "yeah, but . . ." BS that I am about to hear: Tough. Too late. We had our chance to reign ourselves in and unfuck this mess by executing a gradual turn of the ship. We were warned, in plenty of time, long ago. So now is the time to pay the piper. Crash this motherfucker now. And if we can be nimble on our feet with our tech and innovation, which we think we are so good at, then let's see what we got. Put up or shut up. NOW! Let's see what we got.
I don't want to hear a bunch of counterpunchian BS about trying to not upset the apple cart. The whole conservative attraction to Trump was about having lost patience with the foot-dragging, inside-the-belt-way, bureaucratic, deep-state dominant paradigm. They'd lost patience and wanted to risk it all. Okay, I'm calling their bluff. I'm calling humanities bluff.
Never mind. Let nature take it's course. Sorry, kids. We knew better but, we're only human.
P.S. There are many different theories on population reduction out there, for those who want to look into it. Fair warning: look out for nationalist/border groups; they come up with a lot of the same search terms but their goals aren't really concerned with humanity at large.
End rant. I have to go for several weeks. While I can read remotely I don't think I can contribute much, if at all.
18th — Germany knew the floods were coming, but the warnings didn’t work
I've noticed this too: weather forecast have become really accurate. They don't make mistakes on what is going to happen in the near future. A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. Regional forecasts for tomorrow (24h) are usually dead on. Wasn't like that only a decade or two ago.
Thanks to that rainfall in Central Europe, it has been nearly a drought here in Northern Europe.
What we need to do is to do to those who run the show what they have done to us: We need to harness them like work horses and put them to work for us. Subject them to the "human resources department" like they have done to us. Milk them for all they are worth. Trickle up, not trickle down. Stimulate those who actually do all the work and who will actually spend the stimulus stimulating. If those at the top want it to trickle up, then they can work for it. And work hard and smart for it. Working for the people, instead of the other way around. Pay a god damn tax for crying out loud.
So (if you still have the time to respond, or respond later) just what are you just exactly implying? More transfer payments in taxes? To whom are where? Just who works for whom?
Has any thought been given how to tackle this issue? What do people think here?
I think we will find ways of managing economies based more on sustainable models through having to deal with a succession of crises. The free market capitalism model was useful for a period of technological growth during the 20th century. But is now proving to destructive, a beast with an ever growing appetite.
We are dealing with such a crisis now, something more sustainable might come out of it. For example, a way of printing money which doesn’t result in the usual negative effects. Don’t ask me how this might work, but I think such solutions are possible.
The free market capitalism model was useful for a period of technological growth during the 20th century. But is now proving to destructive, a beast with an ever growing appetite.
Well, Soviet-style central planning was even more destructive, but I do get your point.
For example, a way of printing money which doesn’t result in the usual negative effects. Don’t ask me how this might work, but I think such solutions are possible.
I've been hoping that someone would explain and basically defend modern monetary theory, because it goes over my head even with having had university-level studies in economics and economic history.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 21, 2021 at 22:06#5702820 likes
The natural reason for more (energy) production is population growth. Yet population growth is decreasing globally and likely will in the future make the global population hit a peak and from there on the population will get smaller. With advances in technology that would sound at first an environment where we can tackle our present problems.
Yet the problem is that our society is built on growth. Our system to finance those technological innovations and advances are built on a growth model. The debt-based monetary system needs economic growth. The social welfare models we use need growth to pay for them. With decreasing populations you might have a perpetual economic bust where not much improvements and advances will happen. The technology might be there, but it wouldn't be implemented. Fossil fuels might be used, because there's no money to build new alternatives because of the economic slump. Decreasing populations might sound like a good thing, but it might wreck havoc with our great plans to change the society from a carbon based to renewable energy based society.
Has any thought been given how to tackle this issue? What do people think here?
I don't understand why decrease in economic growth would be a problem if it is caused by population decrease. Doesn't population decrease also imply that we need less goods and services because there are less people?
In fact, in looking for a definition it seems that economic growth is often defined in terms of per capita:
A definition that can be found in so many publications that I don’t know which one to quote is that economic growth is “an increase in the amount of goods and services produced per head of the population over a period of time.”
This would make sense because it seems to me that per capita goods and services is ultimately what we would be interested in. Increase only in GDP doesn't mean much if the population would grow quicker then GDP for instance...
I could see decline in population being a problem for goods and services per capita because you typically get an aging population in the short term, which means less economically active and so less production relatively. Or maybe you get less benefit from economies of scale, as your population is smaller... But other then that, i don't see the necessary connection?
I don't understand why decrease in economic growth would be a problem if it is caused by population decrease.
Think about the debt based monetary system of ours. Basically there has to be economic growth for the interest to be paid. Then think about the "pay-as-you-go" system of pensions (and basically health care system, as old people use it far more than the young).
Both are designed for a World were there are more younger generations than older. As I said, Japan is the case example of what is going to happen. It may not be a dramatic collapse, but Japan has serious problems. It is already in a situation where it cannot raise interest rates (as then too much of the government income would go to pay the interest). If you in this situation take more debt (as Japan has done year after year), what will you think the outcome will be?
I could see decline in population being a problem for goods and services per capita because you typically get an aging population in the short term, which means less economically active and so less production relatively.
It's not an aging population for the short term, it is basically permanently before some equilibrium is reached on some lower level. And that can take a long, long time.
Imagine a World the machines are as old as B-52s are now, which the youngest bombers are 58 years old. One hundred or two hundred year old power plants. A World where your fathers computer from two or three decades ago are as fast and capable of running the current programs as a new computer you can buy from the store. Great! We don't need new stuff you might think, until you notice that those old power plants are coal plants...
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 21, 2021 at 22:41#5702880 likes
I've been hoping that someone would explain and basically defend modern monetary theory, because it goes over my head even with having had university-level studies in economics and economic history.
Yeah I'm not sure I get it either. But the basic idea seems to be that countries don't seem to get financed by tax-money, as economists thought, but rather countries can just print money which only is a problem if it would create to much inflation (and we seemed to have had very little of that from the seventies onwards). The mistake was in thinking that they are regular economic entities that need to balance their books, as they can't default and print money as needed... they aren't subject to standard economic theories, but rather subject to monetary theory which comes with it's own particular set of regularities.
If true, it essentially flips things on it's head. Deficit spending is not the problem, it in fact stimulates the economy. Even moderate amounts of inflation is good because it reduces debt over time. One just has to avoid snowball inflation.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 21, 2021 at 22:56#5702940 likes
Think about the debt based monetary system of ours. Basically there has to be economic growth for the interest to be paid. Then think about the "pay-as-you-go" system of pensions (and basically health care system, as old people use it far more than the young).
Both are designed for a World were there are more younger generations than older. As I said, Japan is the case example of what is going to happen. It may not be a dramatic collapse, but Japan has serious problems. It is already in a situation where it cannot raise interest rates (as then too much of the government income would go to pay the interest). If you in this situation take more debt (as Japan has done year after year), what will you think the outcome will be?
You print money? ;-)
But, sure I get that a top-heavy demographic pyramid would cause problems for systems that were not designed with that in mind, but then you change the way you finance them?
The only "fundamental" problem it seems to me, is keeping your productivity up. You can try to increase economically active population by say increasing the pension age... or you can increase productivity by innovating production-processes. It think it would need to be a mix of both, but the latter seems promising with AI and robotization.
Imagine a World the machines are as old as B-52s are now, which the youngest bombers are 58 years old. One hundred or two hundred year old power plants. A World where your fathers computer from two or three decades ago are as fast and capable of running the current programs as a new computer you can buy from the store.
I can imagine it, but I don't see why the has to follow from population decline. Has innovation slowed down in Japan? I wouldn't know exactly, but they seem relatively up to par with the rest of the world technologically.
EDIT: You think this has to follow because less growth means less money you have to invest in innovation, right?
That's the alarming issue here. There are enough smart people on the PF that at least someone ought to have understood it and be a firm believer in it...if it was an economic school of thought with genuinely valid ideas. Once there is nobody defending a position, then that position might not be so strong in the first place.
The mistake was in thinking that they are regular economic entities that need to balance their books, as they can't default and print money as needed... they aren't subject to standard economic theories, but rather subject to monetary theory which comes with it's own particular set of regularities.
I don't think that the MMT disagrees with the thought that printing too much money will create inflation and finally a total loss of trust in the currency (which basically is what hyperinflation is). There argument is basically that the US is different.
And I can understand this...partly: The global monetary system is based on the US dollar so much that other countries and market agents have let the US to take as much as debt it wants (which has basically been the reason why it has had the ability to be the sole Superpower in the world). Besides, their first worry would be if the dollar collapsed (would devaluate to other currencies) what will happen to their exports.
But somehow it doesn't feel like a sustainable answer. So when would you be worried about the value of the currency? When the debt-to-GDP ratio is 10 000%? When the central bank has to double it's balance sheet in six months? Or every month? Or in a week? Inflation rates in the US are creeping up now...
All this comes to mind as yesterday the richest man in the World mimicked Alan Shepard's first space flight (but not Yuri's). When the internet billionaires can do things like that, some clever things towards replacing fossil fuels can be and are done also. But what happens when those financial cornucopias suddenly dry out? Suddenly the belief in tech saving us gets a whack by an anvil in the back.
I can imagine it, but I don't see why the has to follow from population decline. Has innovation slowed down in Japan? I wouldn't know exactly, but they seem relatively up to par with the rest of the world technologically.
Basically the thing is that the so-called "smart money" uses the low interest rates in Japan and then uses the debt to invest in some other country (usually in China and in Asian countries).
Hence the net investments in Japan have dramatically declined from earlier times:
Net investment (after covering depreciation) is very low and even gross private investment is crawling along. Japanese companies prefer to employ more labour at low wage rates rather than invest, or take their investment overseas
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 21, 2021 at 23:57#5703190 likes
Yeah I'm not sure I get it either.
— ChatteringMonkey
That's the alarming issue here. There are enough smart people on the PF that at least someone ought to have understood it and be a firm believer in it...if it was an economic school of thought with genuinely valid ideas. Once there is nobody defending a position, then that position might not be so strong in the first place.
Well maybe there aren't that many that have a firm grip on economy, I know I don't... it's no surprise I don't understand it.
And I take it that monetary theory is a different beast altogether, so maybe only the real specialists get it?
I don't think that the MMT disagrees with the thought that printing too much money will create inflation and finally a total loss of trust in the currency (which basically is what hyperinflation is). There argument is basically that the US is different.
And I can understand this...partly: The global monetary system is based on the US dollar so much that other countries and market agents have let the US to take as much as debt it wants (which has basically been the reason why it has had the ability to be the sole Superpower in the world). Besides, their first worry would be if the dollar collapsed (would devaluate to other currencies) what will happen to their exports.
Yes the US dollar is the reserve currency, the standard.
We haven't seen much inflation for a long time though, save for some South-American countries that did their very best to hyperinflate... so maybe it's not that big of a problem?
From what I've gathered it's not only that other countries have to let the US take debt, it's also that the world economy needs some countries to take debt, and import, to let other countries like Germany and China run an export-economy. It functions as a whole, not in isolation...
But somehow it doesn't feel like a sustainable answer. So when would you be worried about the value of the currency? When the debt-to-GDP ratio is 10 000%? When the central bank has to double it's balance sheet in six months? Or every month? Or in a week? Inflation rates in the US are creeping up now...
All this comes to mind as yesterday the richest man in the World mimicked Alan Shepard's first space flight (but not Yuri's). When the internet billionaires can do things like that, some clever things towards replacing fossil fuels can be and are done also. But what happens when those financial cornucopias suddenly dry out? Suddenly the belief in tech saving us gets a whack by an anvil in the back.
Maybe, don't know enough to comment with much insight here unfortunately.
Basically the thing is that the so-called "smart money" uses the low interest rates in Japan and then uses the debt to invest in some other country (usually in China and in Asian countries).
Yeah but isn't this more a function of high living standards and costs in Japan, rather than a decline in population. You see this race to the bottom everywhere.... That's another way globalization needs to be corrected I think, by taking into account social costs or lack thereof in cross-country trade-prices.
Yeah but isn't this more a function of high living standards and costs in Japan, rather than a decline in population.
The Swiss have high living standards too, yet their population is still growing. They don't have similar problems.
Population growth is the normal way for an economy to grow. Just think when people buy the most in their life: when they start a family. They likely move then to a new home, get a mortgage, buy a lot of stuff for the children etc. Afterwards the typical person doesn't do anymore such large investments like buying a home. And do note how positive this is for any economy: houses aren't built by robots in China, but by local people. So also is with the teachers that will teach the new children: again not robots in China. When the fertility rate of women is over 2, then the population is growing, hence there is a natural need for the economy to grow. Once it's less than 2 and there is no net immigration, you have a problem.
And when it comes to Japan, let's remember that there is nonexistent immigration to the country. Immigrants usually are people that want start their lives in a new country, hence they are also optimal individuals for that economic growth.
(Btw. a crazy sidenote: the dip in the Japanese fertility rate in 1966 was because of superstition about the Fire Horse)
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 22, 2021 at 11:21#5704210 likes
Reply to ssu There seems to be a myriad of reasons why the Japanese economy isn't doing so well:
But ok, you do make a good case for why decline in population, wouldn't only effect absolute growth, but also growth in terms of per capita, which I'd think is the more important number.
Then we are in a bid of a bind if we think population decline is necessary to solve a lot of our long term problems, climate change chief among them.
If we don't solve them, this will eventually have an negative impact on economy as well.
If we do want to try to solve them by lowering population among other things, we - if we assume it necessarily leads to less economic growth - will have to do with less. The total pie that can be distributed will be smaller... Best case scenario then is that we manage to spend those funds smarter and allocate them to the things that are more important. Worst case scenario, and probably more likely given how things usually go, is that the bill will have to be paid by the less affluent in the fist place... and that inequality only gets bigger.
Reply to ChatteringMonkeyReply to ssu I think an important way for societies to minimise the consequences is to move from shareholding to stakeholding. In my view that starts at reacquainting ourselves with the role of corporations and stock as it was understood originally. Original corporations received a charter and were gifted limited liability for activities that required a large upfront capital investment. This was considered fair in order to protect investors from liability since they did not receive a direct benefit from this investment (no interest could be calculated, no profit could be made). The goal of the corporation was limited in scope and upon reaching it the corporation would be dissolved. Why would people invest? Because the indirect benefits outweighed the capital investment. Roads, bridges, important buildings etc. were typically the subject of a corporation's charter.
The system of stock market has been about bringing borrowers and lenders together and easing the transfer of rights related to such loans.
Where the combination went off kilter is mostly the possibility for a corporation to exist in perpetuity.
A typical bond has a maturity (there are exceptions, perpetual bonds but these were still intended to be paid off put the moment of repayment wasn't enforceable). A loan has a maturity. A mortgage has a maturity. But stock doesn't. But it doesn't fulfill an essential different role than other loan instruments but it does give a right to profit in perpetuity. And this is weird, why should a shareholder who invested 100 guilders in 1910 in Shell stock still receive dividends for Shell's activities today?
The other point is that goodwill and market value increases due to the added value of labour and nothing else (ignoring financial industry for a moment which can passively generate profit). If I put 1 million into a company it's not going to magically increase in worth, if I buy capital goods (buildings, machinery, tools) it's not going to increase in worth. If I hire people to utilise capital goods for a specific purpose, there's a likelihood something will happen with the market value of the company.
And it's clear that companies like Shell, Google, Amazon etc. are worth a multitude of the paid up capital but we insist only those that originally provided capital and any persons subsequently buying the rights related to that initial capital investment (e.g. stock) are owners of the total worth of the company and the only ones with a right to profit. Whereas if I had funded this with a loan, after say, 5 years the loan was paid off, the interest received, everything else would be owned by other people.
My point is, that at some point capital investment is not responsible for the value of a company and the relationship between profit and initial capital investment is negligible. If this is the case, I don't see an ethical reason why a shareholder should continue to receive benefits from that initial investment.
My proposed solution would involve a dynamic equity system where the initial capital investor starts out with a 100% right to the profit but as the company grows in value and this added value is the result of labour activity, additional shares are issued diluting the share value of the company. These shares will go to employees and as long as they continue to work there, they receive more shares. If they move to another company, they too will see their shares dilute over time but will build up capital in another company.
What would have to be worked out is at what rate initial capital investments should dilute. We do have a lot of bond pricing that we can use as a benchmark.
I'd also get rid of all intellectual property rights except the obligation of attribution. But different story.
A loan has a maturity. A mortgage has a maturity. But stock doesn't. But it doesn't fulfill an essential different role than other loan instruments but it does give a right to profit in perpetuity. And this is weird, why should a shareholder who invested 100 guilders in 1910 in Shell stock still receive dividends for Shell's activities today?
Btw, a consol bond is a perpetual bond without any maturity date. Hence they are considered equity rather than debt. Basically what is so wrong with equity? People have owned things, real estate and businesses and they have been inherited by their children for a long time in history. Family businesses have actually been quite persistent in history, even if sometimes there comes the generation that ruins the business (or spends the wealth away). With stocks that ownership can just be divided and easily bought and sold. I'm not so sure what is so wrong with that.
Besides, saving is actually important. And many people save not only to spend later, but to have something for the "rainy day" that might never come and to give to their children when they die. If inheritance would be illegal, I guess many would simply donate part of their wealth to their children.
Family businesses have actually been quite persistent in history, even if sometimes there comes the generation that ruins the business (or spends the wealth away).
I'm not against stock. Additional stock is issued and given to employees but can still be traded.
Ok, but then our insurance system and also pension system uses these corporations too. The non-human "legal person" owner if equity is a reality. Lot of things would have to be restructured then.
In my view the problem often is about leadership of corporations, not the existence of corporations themselves. Modern corporative structure has create a class of executive level workers who sometimes can manage the corporations wealth differently then let's say a family owned business would do: squeeze everything out and throw it away, go on some self-gratifying empire building or simply not care so much as someone who has family bonds to the enterprise. The boards are made of similar executive workers. The entrepreneur-founder CEO (Gates, Jobs etc.) is very rare occurrence. Global competition creates markets ruled by oligopolies: ten or so large companies dominate the field and then there are small local niche producers.
Of course mismanagement can happen in other business structures as co-operatives. Once a cooperative grows big enough there is the possibility of the "owners" becoming a rubber stamp and then when you have bad leadership, everything goes astray. (Reminds me of the Finnish Communist Party going bankrupt and losing a considerable fortune when cooperatives close to the party went bankrupt after a speculative market bubble burst. The few times I was genuinely spiteful. Communists as businessmen...HA!!!)
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 22, 2021 at 13:35#5704730 likes
I think an important way for societies to minimise the consequences is to move from shareholding to stakeholding. In my view that starts at reacquainting ourselves with the role of corporations and stock as it was understood originally. Original corporations received a charter and were gifted limited liability for activities that required a large upfront capital investment. This was considered fair in order to protect investors from liability since they did not receive a direct benefit from this investment (no interest could be calculated, no profit could be made). The goal of the corporation was limited in scope and upon reaching it the corporation would be dissolved. Why would people invest? Because the indirect benefits outweighed the capital investment. Roads, bridges, important buildings etc. were typically the subject of a corporation's charter.
Ok maybe that's how it was originally intended, I don't know the history of it, but that doesn't mean that it has to stay that way. Things morph and get used in other ways/get other functions over time, and in principle that perfectly fine.
Limiting liability seems necessary to incentivise any type of investment in larger companies. Typically the amount of money any one person has is insignificant in relation to the amounts of money circulating in the books of any decent sized company. If you wouldn't limit liability, a company of any decent size failing, would typically mean the investors would be in debt for the rest of their lives. So even if there were only a small chance of failing, nobody would want to take that chance because very few things are worth the risk of being financially crippled for the rest of your life.
The system of stock market has been about bringing borrowers and lenders together and easing the transfer of rights related to such loans.
Where the combination went off kilter is mostly the possibility for a corporation to exist in perpetuity.
A typical bond has a maturity (there are exceptions, perpetual bonds but these were still intended to be paid off put the moment of repayment wasn't enforceable). A loan has a maturity. A mortgage has a maturity. But stock doesn't. But it doesn't fulfill an essential different role than other loan instruments but it does give a right to profit in perpetuity. And this is weird, why should a shareholder who invested 100 guilders in 1910 in Shell stock still receive dividends for Shell's activities today?
Isn't the issue just ownership, property here? A share is a piece of ownership right? Suppose there were no shares, everything would stay with the founder/owner of the company and you'd have essentially the same problem of a person getting a return on his initial investment in perpetuity.
The other point is that goodwill and market value increases due to the added value of labour and nothing else (ignoring financial industry for a moment which can passively generate profit). If I put 1 million into a company it's not going to magically increase in worth, if I buy capital goods (buildings, machinery, tools) it's not going to increase in worth. If I hire people to utilise capital goods for a specific purpose, there's a likelihood something will happen with the market value of the company.
This seems a bit oversimplified, and may in the future even not be the case anymore as labour could presumably be a thing for automation... but ok I'll follow along.
And it's clear that companies like Shell, Google, Amazon etc. are worth a multitude of the paid up capital but we insist only those that originally provided capital and any persons subsequently buying the rights related to that initial capital investment (e.g. stock) are owners of the total worth of the company and the only ones with a right to profit. Whereas if I had funded this with a loan, after say, 5 years the loan was paid off, the interest received, everything else would be owned by other people.
My point is, that at some point capital investment is not responsible for the value of a company and the relationship between profit and initial capital investment is negligible. If this is the case, I don't see an ethical reason why a shareholder should continue to receive benefits from that initial investment.
My proposed solution would involve a dynamic equity system where the initial capital investor starts out with a 100% right to the profit but as the company grows in value and this added value is the result of labour activity, additional shares are issued diluting the share value of the company. These shares will go to employees and as long as they continue to work there, they receive more shares. If they move to another company, they too will see their shares dilute over time but will build up capital in another company.
What would have to be worked out is at what rate initial capital investments should dilute. We do have a lot of bond pricing that we can use as a benchmark.
I'd also get rid of all intellectual property rights except the obligation of attribution. But different story.
You want to distribute added value to everybody that has contributed to it, and not only to the owners. I can get behind that goal certainly. And the idea of giving out shares which dilute over time seems like a clever way to do that. No sure how it would work out in practice, but at least it's a concrete idea to try to solve the issue, got to give you props for that!
Limiting liability seems necessary to incentivise any type of investment in larger companies. Typically the amount of money any one person has is insignificant in relation to the amounts of money circulating in the books of any decent sized company. If you wouldn't limit liability, a company of any decent size failing, would typically mean the investors would be in debt for the rest of their lives. So even if there were only a small chance of failing, nobody would want to take that chance because very few things are worth the risk of being financially crippled for the rest of your life.
Limiting liability was indeed necessary to incentivize investment in undertakings that wouldn't yield profit. Adding the possibility to corporations to make profit could've been incentive enough (partnerships don't have limited liability either) but politics resulted in profit and limited liability. I think that was a mistake. Limited liability externalises the costs of damages caused by the corporation to wider society, which is a reasonable exchange if the corporate activity is performed for a goal benefiting wider society but not if it's only for private gain. In that case, if you have all the profits, you should also bear all the responsibility.
In my ideal world, we would see non-profit pharmaceutical companies developing the "riskiest" treatments with limited liability and for-profit pharmaceutical companies but with normal liability that would automatically go for simpler products.
An alternative effect could also be that much of the useless day trading resulting in value extraction from the real economy and rent seeking could be entirely avoided if limited liability would be repealed for every corporation. You can also get rid of IFRS and GAAP accounting principles at the same time as no investor is going to touch a stock without having the necessary information to ensure they're duly informed about the risks of their investments if they would be liable for losses.
Isn't the issue just ownership, property here? A share is a piece of ownership right? Suppose there were no shares, everything would stay with the founder/owner of the company and you'd have essentially the same problem of a person getting a return on his initial investment in perpetuity.
That's how it was defined. It could also have been structured as a piece of a loan and related interest, pretty much like a variable interest rate bond, possibly collateralised but not necessarily involving ownership in property of the corporation directly. I do think that now that it is considered "property" there's a lot more resistance to making changes to how corporations are set up.
You want to distribute added value to everybody that has contributed to it, and not only to the owners. I can get behind that goal certainly. And the idea of giving out shares which dilute over time seems like a clever way to do that. No sure how it would work out in practice, but at least it's a concrete idea to try to solve the issue, got to give you props for that!
Thanks. Glad it's not served off as evil communism from the get-go!
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 22, 2021 at 16:09#5705400 likes
Limiting liability was indeed necessary to incentivize investment in undertakings that wouldn't yield profit. Adding the possibility to corporations to make profit could've been incentive enough (partnerships don't have limited liability either) but politics resulted in profit and limited liability. I think that was a mistake. Limited liability externalises the costs of damages caused by the corporation to wider society, which is a reasonable exchange if the corporate activity is performed for a goal benefiting wider society but not if it's only for private gain. In that case, if you have all the profits, you should also bear all the responsibility.
In my ideal world, we would see non-profit pharmaceutical companies developing the "riskiest" treatments with limited liability and for-profit pharmaceutical companies but with normal liability that would automatically go for simpler products.
I don't think profit alone would be enough, as the upside of profit for someone who already has enough money (which are typically the ones to invest), isn't worth the risk of being in debt for the rest of your life. Maybe it works for smaller business where the stakes are not that high, but otherwise it seems that removing limited liability would lead to less investment and less incentive to grow into larger corporations. And you know, there may be something to that, one of the problems is that we have these mega multi-national corporations that float somewhere over and between countries in a globalised world... they do have to much power.
Maybe one should pay a tax or something like that, for limiting liability, to pay for the externalised costs of potential damages caused by the corporation... like an insurance-fee where the fee is calculated based on the risks and the amount that is insured. Come to think about it, that's what it is now essentially, a free insurance against the averse consequences of failing that is paid by society, or by the creditors more specifically.
So maybe that's how it would go if you'd remove the limited liability granted by law, they would look for an insurance-type deal in the market to mitigate the risk. Then they have to pay a fee that covers the costs. And where the risks and fee-costs would be to high, government could always intervene for essential goods and services...
That's how it was defined. It could also have been structured as a piece of a loan and related interest, pretty much like a variable interest rate bond, possibly collateralised but not necessarily involving ownership in property of the corporation directly. I do think that now that it is considered "property" there's a lot more resistance to making changes to how corporations are set up.
Sure you could set up shares in another way for the purpose of attracting investment, but then you still have the issue of the owner raking in all the profit indefinitely no? Someone has to set-up the corporation initially and owns it, or how would that work otherwise?
Interesting ideas, but I have given this some thought and came up with a problem. The rich, some successful business people, elites and privileged people will resist the degree of sharing and cooperation required for any of these solutions to solve the problem.
Rather what I see is the super rich hoarding as much wealth as they can, by unscrupulous means sometimes. Also powerful people might prefer to live in a dystopian world, than a progressive sustainable world.Because of this fear of sharing that will be required and to continue exploitation and profiteering.
Reply to Punshhh I sincerely doubt it can work in several jurisdictions now that some corporations can claim human rights protections. I do think this can be incentived though. If a corporation is set up in such a way profits are more equitably distributed to stakeholders then wealth transfer tax mechanism can be waived, leading to lower taxes which should make the after tax profit much higher.
The rich, some successful business people, elites and privileged people will resist the degree of sharing and cooperation required for any of these solutions to solve the problem.
Rather what I see is the super rich hoarding as much wealth as they can, by unscrupulous means sometimes. Also powerful people might prefer to live in a dystopian world, than a progressive sustainable world.Because of this fear of sharing that will be required and to continue exploitation and profiteering.
In any situation those that have power will not want to lose their power, hence societal change is always difficult, no matter what the situation is. And do notice that not in all societies it's just a extremely rich who have the power, in many places there is a small cabal of career political people who are in charge and who aren't exactly super rich. Thinking that in every country the rich control everything is an exaggeration.
And if you go for the wealth of the rich, the next in line all the way down to the middle class will be worried when you will go after their wealth too. Killing the rich, a genocide by class, has been several tries been done or attempted and the outcome hasn't been a rosy one, but a huge tragedy.
The most important issue is to have social cohesion and make sure that doesn't vanish. Then changes, even radical ones, are possible. Without social cohesion the society simply doesn't work.
Reply to ssu Yes, we only need look at the tobacco, or oil lobbies.
Here in the U.K. we have a distinct privileged class. An overthrow of our class system. These people are dead against any kind of levelling up, or Universal basic income. It suits them fine for the status quo to continue, by propping up a Tory government. This is entrenched, because they only have to think about the alternative and they are horrified, this prejudice is more than financial, or economic. It’s social and cultural too. Personally I trace it right back to the Norman conquest and our country being ruled over for centuries by French overlords. Johnson has stepped into that role, groomed by Eton college and Oxford.
Here in the U.K. we have a distinct privileged class. An overthrow of our class system.
In my view the UK has a distinct and quite strict class system, where it isn't just the upper class that preserves and maintains the class structure. When you can notice the class from language, hobbies and the sports people watch, the class system has quite deep roots. For British what class they come from is very important.
These people are dead against any kind of levelling up, or Universal basic income. It suits them fine for the status quo to continue, by proving up a Tory government.
Yet you have universal health care and the Labour party. Something which actually the US doesn't have.
Johnson has stepped into that role, groomed by Eton college and Oxford.
And just like the Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Harold Wilson and Clement Attlee who also graduated from Oxford. And btw, Keir Starmer, the present leader of the Labour party and the opposition leader has also graduated from Oxford. You see societies that function basically as meritocracies do not erase classes. Those who get to the top universities will make the future elite, independently of what their political views are. France is another example of this.
Reply to boethius
It’s difficult to provide proofs for things like global tipping points. The signs are there and arguably the tipping point is reached somewhere we are not aware of at a time we are not aware of.
There is no doubt that the permafrost is melting all around the northern hemisphere as is documented in this article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00659-y
This was published before the record heatwaves in those areas just a few weeks ago. I don’t have figures for how much methane will be released. It won’t require much though to nullify all our efforts to reach carbon zero, as methane is at least 25 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
This combined with our lethargy in reaching carbon zero and the continued cutting down of forest(which is still increasing). Is a clear enough sign for me.
It’s difficult to provide proofs for things like global tipping points.
I definitely agree in a formal sense of "proof". However, tipping points are a general characteristic of complex systems we can pretty much always safely infer will be present in any such system.
There is mathematical work on this I saw a few years ago, I'll try to find, trying to quantify mathematically what is meant by tipping point and what conditions are necessary for tipping points to exist.
One interesting result of this work is that in systems with internal variables (things as they are) and external variables (things we can observe) tipping points can be triggered without any way to know based on the external variables (there is nothing that can track the actual tipping point, but it will only be inferrable in the future, that it happened at some point, in retrospect).
And this aligns well with our intuition. For instance, if we take people as complex systems, they do unpredictable things all the time (or then expected actions but at unpredictable times) and presumably hit tipping points that lead to such actions, but we can't really tell when exactly tipping points were. For instance, we may know someone unhappy at their work and expect them to quit at some point, and maybe many times something happens that seems "the last straw" but it isn't, but finally there is a last straw, that we didn't even see happening, and the person quits. An even more stark example is someone who is unhappy at their work, but is not expressive about it, and we don't suspect a thing, but someday they quit, and we can, in retrospect, assume some tipping point was reached that lead to the "radical simplification" of the work situation (at least temporarily).
But basically, all complex systems (we tend to encounter) respond to too much stress by simplifying (not getting more complex; a bit of stress may do that, but at some point there is a threshold that leads to simplification).
All this to say, and I'm sure you agree, that it's best not to push towards such thresholds on a global scale to see what happens.
What we can be relatively certain is that "pushing harder" on the climate isn't going to paradoxically make things better in any scenario, but we should stop pushing, hope for the best, and plan for both "radical simplification" as well as "keeping it together somewhat".
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 26, 2021 at 16:17#5720860 likes
Here's a podcast that deals with some of the issues we have touched on in this thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk1pIKI72jg
It's basically a debate around the question "Is the end of capitalism the answer to climate change?" One of the speakers argues for and the another against... Both present arguments worth looking into IMO.
The speaker on the side of 'capitalism is the problem' sets the stage by claiming there are inherent tendencies in capitalism that make a solution to the problem difficult and yes that capitalism has in part been the cause of the problem :
- Growth is inherent in capitalism. And so more of everything is needed, not in the least energy, so to reduce carbon emissions we have to swim upstream if our economy relies on growth.
- Money can buy anything in the natural world.
- The promise that everybody will have more luxuries. A world wherein everybody lives in luxury is not feasible and incompatible with avoiding climate change.
On the side of 'climate change can be solved within capitalism' the speaker makes a reasonable argument I think that we have dealt with some environmental and pollution issues in the past in capitalist countries, and so solving a similar problem is in principle feasible in a capitalist system... by passing legislation that takes into account environmental costs or legislation that just forbids certain things. The counter being given to this argument is that we have known about climate change for a long time now and still haven't really made any progress... part of the problem in capitalism is that money translates into political power (lobbying) and that this has prevented adequate legislation that might address the issue.
Another point worth mentioning on the pro-capitalism side is that the promise capitalism makes of luxury is a just another way of framing a basic human desire for prosperity, flourishing, and not really something unique to capitalism. And so doing away with capitalism won't actually do away with this desire, and would in any case be hard to sell to the public. Interesting points are being made that GDP is not the same as human flourishing etc..
Asked for an alternative to capitalism, the speaker on the side of 'capitalism is the problem' points to a system of commons which he think can fulfill the desire for prosperity by better and more shared commons, in stead of it being fulfilled by private property. Counter to this is that we don't have any idea how and if this would work on the larger scales that we would need it to work on given current world population.
My own assessment of the debate is that while there is more than grain of truth in the statement that capitalism has caused climate change and makes it more difficult to solve it because of perpetual growth, I don't really see a clear alternative. Maybe it's possible to eventually radically change our system, I just don't see it happening fast enough. It's not like we have a another couple of decades to sort this out first. The political will doesn't seem to be there for this kind of change, at this moment anyway, and even if the will would be there these kind of changes typically don't come without massive societal upheaval. How are we going to find the persistent agency to rapidly change our energy system into renewals in this kind of turmoil?
In principle growth doesn't seems necessarily tied to increase in emissions. You need energy yes, but that need not be based on carbon emissions. Long term growth and therefor capitalism is not sustainable I think because of other reasons, but that's another discussion. Also the argument that capitalism skews political decision-making and makes a solution more difficult is not lost on me either, but I think it's more likely that we find ways to deal with that, than it is to change the whole system and hope that we can do that fast enough and end up with a system that can deal with the issue adequately (which is not a given either).
Another point worth mentioning on the pro-capitalism side is that the promise capitalism makes of luxury is a just another way of framing a basic human desire for prosperity, flourishing, and not really something unique to capitalism.
If you have to manipulate your customers to want the luxury in the first place, and the means by which organisations do this are varied, sly and grim, then this doesn't really hold up.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 26, 2021 at 17:08#5721100 likes
Here's a podcast on the difficulties in communicating the science of climate change to the public:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdjLK4Qm86I
Basically to much and to little has been made of the 2030 'deadline' in the IPCC report on climate change.
To much in the sense that it is not supposed to be a hard "dead"-line... the world is not going to end in 2030. It was meant more as a deadline for societal change, i.e. if we want to get to carbon-neutrality in 2050, we should be well on our way in 2030 otherwise it's only going to get progressively difficult. Transition takes time...
And to little in the sense that despite the promises no a whole lot has happened in the meanwhile. Essentially the problem is that politicians aren't willing to move unless there is enough public support, so the question ends up being how do you get public support? There's some interesting discussion and different viewpoints on how to get that public support and best ways to communicate about the issue.
Also some info on the uncertain science behind tipping-points...
There are further episodes in this series which is on the whole excellent I think.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 26, 2021 at 17:12#5721120 likes
Another point worth mentioning on the pro-capitalism side is that the promise capitalism makes of luxury is a just another way of framing a basic human desire for prosperity, flourishing, and not really something unique to capitalism.
— ChatteringMonkey
If you have to manipulate your customers to want the luxury in the first place, and the means by which organisations do this are varied, sly and grim, then this doesn't really hold up.
Yes I agree for the most part. Human flourishing, or even simply prosperity, is something else than what we have been sold in capitalism. But so while this is true, part of the point that we still would need a system that could provide "prosperity/flourishing" stands I think.
part of the point that we still would need a system that could provide "prosperity/flourishing" stands I think.
I dunno. Maybe because now we're anchored to the myth of sustainable growth, it might be difficult to sell real sustainability. But again I feel that this is something that's been indoctrinated rather than meeting some demand. There is a very powerful (I can't say "good") capitalist reason to compel earners to exchange their salaries for luxuries, so if you live in a capitalist democracy, no one's going to allow the electorate to labour under the belief that keeping more of their earnings for the future is a good idea. But we used to do just that. Saving and thrift were virtues once.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 26, 2021 at 17:47#5721220 likes
part of the point that we still would need a system that could provide "prosperity/flourishing" stands I think.
— ChatteringMonkey
I dunno. Maybe because now we're anchored to the myth of sustainable growth, it might be difficult to sell real sustainability. But again I feel that this is something that's been indoctrinated rather than meeting some demand. There is a very powerful (I can't say "good") capitalist reason to compel earners to exchange their salaries for luxuries, so if you live in a capitalist democracy, no one's going to allow the electorate to labour under the belief that keeping more of their earnings for the future is a good idea. But we used to do just that. Saving and thrift were virtues once.
I'm not talking about luxuries, but about needs. Part of it is indoctrination yes, or just plain advertising I guess. And so I agree with you as far as western countries go, in principle we have more than enough to fulfill our needs. This is not the case in developing countries I don't think... real sustainability would probably require some increase in "general wealth". As their population has boomed it's hard to see how one would return to small scale sustainability. Those countries also happen to be the real problem for reducing carbon emissions going forward.
As their population has boomed it's hard to see how one would return to small scale sustainability.
And yet the more people, the less of a share of the Earth's resources they should have. But yeah I understand your point about poorer countries levelling up, and this only reinforces the need for richer countries to recede. The growing emissions of the third world are principally a problem while the first world is already unsustainably over-emitting. If we drop back, there's wiggle room to approach equilibrium.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 26, 2021 at 18:09#5721310 likes
As their population has boomed it's hard to see how one would return to small scale sustainability.
— ChatteringMonkey
And yet the more people, the less of a share of the Earth's resources they should have. But yeah I understand your point about poorer countries levelling up, and this only reinforces the need for richer countries to recede. The growing emissions of the third world are principally a problem while the first world is already unsustainably over-emitting. If we drop back, there's wiggle room to approach equilibrium.
Yes, we certainly bear a historic and moral responsibility, though there isn't much wiggle room even if we'd cut emissions entirely, if we want to reach emission targets that is. The best hope for getting there is that we develop green alternatives and that developing countries can 'leapfrog' to those technology by learning from us and directly implementing them. But this brings me back to the point of why we may need at least some of the production capacity capitalism has provided us, to be able to build these green alternatives on a large enough, and therefor cheap enough, scale.
Reply to ChatteringMonkey Yeah I'm in the green technology camp (my energy provider is 100% renewable, for instance), but to be fair that's to deal with a problem _caused_ by capitalism. Technology is what has to save us from irresponsible use of technology.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 26, 2021 at 20:57#5721630 likes
Reply to Kenosha Kid Capitalism is the cause, agreed, I'm just trying to figure where to go from here. One way or another we will need to change, the question is how, to what extent and when? If we believe climate scientists, which I do, there's not much time, which kind of restrains our options at this point.
Right now there’s smoke all over New England, from the wildfires in the west and Canada. Never seen anything quite like this — maybe once when there was a fire in NY.
Capitalism is the cause, agreed, I'm just trying to figure where to go from here. One way or another we will need to change, the question is how, to what extent and when? If we believe climate scientists, which I do, there's not much time, which kind of restrains our options at this point.
If the choice was between destroying capitalism or destroying earth, given the time frame we’d have no shot. Capitalism — the form we have — will stay around a while longer, and so there has to be alternatives.
And there are. The push by investors like BlackRock — and the endorsement of the Business Roundtable—towards “stakeholder capitalism” and ESGs, the acknowledgment if Exxon, Shell, etc, that something needs to be done about climate, the mobilization of young people, and (depressingly the most important) the immediate effects before our eyes— are all signs that things are shifting.
The Republican Party mainly stands in the way. The Democratic Party aren’t that far behind — they’d prefer nice words and to throw essentially crumbs at the issue, but at least there’s an acknowledgement of reality.
If voters keep turning up to elect these assholes, or too many dems stay home, we’re toast. But I can’t believe this will happen, and we should all try our best to make the opposite happen.
If the choice was between destroying capitalism or destroying earth, given the time frame we’d have no shot. Capitalism — the form we have — will stay around a while longer, and so there has to be alternatives.
You maybe confusing the sum total of our institutions with "capitalism". For instance, democratic institutions are not really "capitalism". You can have democratically elected politicians that implement a state or otherwise socialists economy. Indeed, you can have a nominal "communist party" that oversees a capitalists economy, as we have in China.
So, although I agree we cannot overhaul the entire political and economic system, a real solution to the climate crisis is now simply impossible through any semblance of the free market "acting by itself". It requires massive government intervention, which pro-capitalists, will cry "socialism" about (unless it benefits them of course, then they say it's just common sense).
Western society is a mix of capitalism and socialist / collectivist institutions.
Although I would agree that our capitalist components dominate our socialist components (socialist institutions, including elected political bodies, de facto serve at the leisure of our oligarchs, and only insofar as it is good for capitalism ... and the "really important things" like central banks and multi-national corporations are kept in direct oligarchal control, far from the dirty, filthy, putrid, weak and pathetic hands of elected representatives).
Though I cannot speak for @ChatteringMonkey, the concept that capitalism must be overthrown to solve the climate crisis, I would agree with, but not mean to say literally all our institutions (including the market) must be rebuilt from scratch, but rather our oligarchs must be deposed by democracy.
This may require a Nuremberg style trial and hanging of our oligarchs, which may seem fantasy now, but as the damage and pains become greater and larger, accountability for ecocide on par with the accountability (no sane person argues against) for the Nazi genocide, is entirely reasonable, and a an important expression of the intrinsic violent nature of politics, in order to move with de facto new institutions of power that can credibly say they are now in some sort of real control, and not the oligarchs (because they've been publicly hanged).
Obviously, this foundational aspect of our political institutions can go to far, such as the Terror of the French revolution, but I think Nuremberg was a reasonable thing; as the bodies pile up, I predict more and more people will agree with this sentiment.
Now, hanging our oligarchs would clearly be seen as a deep transition of power, but does not mean getting rid of all our institutions.
What matters is who controls our institutions.
Capitalism is an ideology which explicitly wants the rich to run the show. For instance, "how to prevent poor people from making laws", is the central question of the founding fathers of the United States. Democracy was needed to take power from the King of England (and pay less taxes and become more rich), since a revolution for a new American King simply would simply make no sense (and, the oligarchs would not have been able to agree on a new King even if they wanted to). Democracy was a very conscious compromise, carefully crafted to ensure poor people and slaves had no effective power. Of course, it was not fated to remain that way, and America has seen periods of effective democracy (certainly more effective than previous times or then today), but that is the ideology of capitalism.
The idea that democratic institutions should effectively "flex" control over the market (force internalization of costs), effectively stop the transformation of control of capital into political power (whether through a long list of laws interfering with money in politics, or just preventing too much capital accumulation in the first place and appropriating the capital of anyone that "succeeds" in that quest regardless), effectively provide critical goods and services to society through "collectivist" institutions where the market clearly fails to do so, as well as simply not allow poverty, are all in clear contradiction to capitalist ideology.
"Capitalists" who take credit for the success of "collectivist institutions" as capitalism "working", while simultaneously claiming "taxes are theft", and the creation of more such institutions is socialism, blah, blah, blah, are just idiotic hypocrites.
The central features (i.e. the dominant features that actually decide how our societies are organized) are that people can accumulate unlimited amounts of capital and this control of capital can be effectively be transformed into political power (the places where this is not the case, are small political islands with essentially no influence over global affairs).
Where this accumulation of, and transformation of capital to political power is "without friction", the system is fully "capitalist", and where there is a lot of friction to this process (such as Scandinavia), then democratic institutions start to dominate the organization of society (using markets insofar as they produce, at least perceived, "good" for most people, using the socialism of free money and services when the market clearly doesn't provide the goods, and constraining the market when it can work fine, but with a bunch of rules to discourage negative forms of competition, such as damaging externalities), are socialist ideas, of one brand or another (and "capitalists" do not hesitate to identify those ideas as socialism; there's no good counter argument to such accusations, because it's true; it's socialists and communists and anarchists that proposed and fought for things like free education, minimum wages, free health care, safe working conditions, and so on, not "capitalists"; for capitalists to take credit for such socialists victories to make the argument it's capitalism and the market that has provided all good things anywhere, is just stupid).
The 90s saw the environmental movement make the faustian bargain with our oligarchs, based on the idea of "fix the climate within capitalism; because overthrowing the oligarchs seems, so, so hard, and it's so, so much easier to take oligarch money and such oligarch dick; and they seem like such nice people too!". Oligarchs did feign sympathy and did provide money (strings attached of course), but what are they doing now? Trying to go to space and look out for number 1, as they always can be counted on to do.
For, it was believed that even the oligarchs needed a planet and would agree with evidence and rational based reasoning of how to prevent planetary catastrophe, and would accept some loss of capital and power, to themselves or fellow oligarchs. Two decades later the oligarchs have literally popped out of their yachts, bunkers and New Zealand compounds (they were hiding in to avoid Corona), yelled "wrong, bitches!" and blasted off to space (what they called space anyways; certainly, a good first step to becoming swashbuckling, intrepid galactic explorers), to thunderous applause in the media no less.
Getting rid of the oligarchs -- which may require a good perfectly fair and legal Nuremburg style hanging -- is the key issue. Doing so does not mean a radically different society; if you go to countries with little oligarchic control, they do not look so different in terms of the nominal names of the institutions they have, but they are very different.
And the civilizations you are referring to? Seems to me the civilizations in history were far more fragile to collapse.
Doing things like changing the global climate makes our civilization far, far more fragile.
Other civilizations always had the chance to at least move somewhere else. For instance, Roman civilization did effectively move to Byzantine and survived for another 1000 years.
We have no where to go.
(Oligarchs are trying to change that, but I don't think on behalf of "we".)
Also, I don't get how this view squares with your view that population is the problem. If we're not fragile, why would population be a problem?
Population growth is the natural reason for economic growth and demand growth. If populations are stable or decreasing, that is a huge issue on this issue. You don't have only decrease in use because of technological advancement, but also due to demand decrease. That is a huge issue. Besides, earlier population growth was seen as the primary reason for doom, starting from Malthus, which isn't something unimportant now.
Japan has a decreasing population. Notice what has happened to it's need of energy:
I disagree with your disagreement.
As I explained, I am not arguing a large population is not a pre-condition for our currently large resource consumption.
If there was only 1 person on earth, our present environmental problems would not be here.
Neither am I arguing that simply depopulating the world wouldn't solve the environmental crisis. If however many people are needed, volunteered themselves for extermination: problem solved!
The problem is that people don't volunteer (even those advocating depopulation, I never see volunteer for it).
It's easy to accomplish depopulation through environmental collapse, massive droughts and crop failures, but environmental collapse is what we are trying to avoid.
In other-words, depopulation is simply not realistic.
Depopulation through lowing the birth rate is not a solution. We need to solve our environmental problems in the coming decades, but it would be centuries to lower substantially the population through birth rates.
You are arguing in a hypothetical realm divorced from reality. If we actually lived in this hypothetical realm where the consequences were centuries out, then just lowering the birth rate would be an option worth discussing.
On the time scales imposed by the actual reality we live in, depopulation would be required in the next couple of decades; and the only feasible way to do that is through environmental collapse: the problem we are trying to avoid. Otherwise, people try to survive and try to help other people survive, no one volunteers themselves for depopulation.
However, our technological systems and infrastructure and level of affluence can be radically changed in mere decades. It requires high level of effort, but it is feasible.
Depopulation is a mental crutch of the apathetic. It's a way of both simultaneously viewing oneself as a "tough realist" while accomplishing nothing at all and denying reality.
The tough realist position (that includes effective actions) is not depopulation, but radical transformation of our political system (which, as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs) to implement feasible solutions to our problems, on the span of decades and not whimsical imaginings of centuries that have no relevance to the present.
Other civilizations always had the chance to at least move somewhere else. For instance, Roman civilization did effectively move to Byzantine and survived for another 1000 years.
Moving is a bad term here.
Understanding the difficulties of reigning such a vast landmass, the Empire was divided peacefully to two parts. Eastern part, which we call "Byzantium" after the fall of West Rome (and they themselves called the Roman Empire) as you said, survived for a thousand year afterwards. It's not that West Romans moved to East Rome, it is simply the question that having a city of million people in Antique Times, you need a huge landmass and functioning shipping routes to feed those million people. This was possible when Rome was basically fed with grain coming from North Africa and in the case of Byzantium and Constantinople, when they had the fertile Nile delta to grow food for the huge city. When West Rome lost North Africa to the Vandals and Byzantium lost Egypt, then where people moved was the countryside. Feudalism and Dark Ages was basically an issue of de-globalization.
You are arguing in a hypothetical realm divorced from reality.
What I'm arguing is that to solve these problems take more than 20 years and yes, long term changes in population growth do matter. They simply are so subtle that those focusing just on the present day don't notice their effects. And it's not just technological advancement, but also the market mechanism which also is an important factor here.
On the time scales imposed by the actual reality we live in, depopulation would be required in the next couple of decades; and the only feasible way to do that is through environmental collapse: the problem we are trying to avoid. Otherwise, people try to survive and try to help other people survive, no one volunteers themselves for depopulation.
So in your view in 20 years there is a catastrophy, a collapse?
The tough realist position (that includes effective actions) is not depopulation,
First, actual global population growth to be negative will take a long, long time. It possibly can happen in the next Century, which is quite a way off. Second, it's not the kind of "depopulation" some antinatalists think about. It's simply what is already happening in Japan and in many countries all around the world.
radical transformation of our political system (which, as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs)
Democracy has it's faults, but it's still the thing I believe in. It has some safety valves built into it, if only the citizens would apply them. The alternatives usually don't have them. Radical technological transformation, yes. Radical political transformation, be careful just what you wish for.
It's a perfectly good term, and makes the point that if the entire climate isn't destabilized, and there's "elsewhere" to go to, then previous civilizations have not been fragile in this sense, which seems to me pretty major.
It also seems to me pretty trivial that moving one's civilization somewhere else will require conquering that place first. It's only us that calls the Byzantine empire by that name, they called themselves Roman.
Feudalism I would argue was not "moving Roman civilization" to the country side, but the collapse of the Western Roman civilization.
For instance, most of the written classics of the Roman, and the preceding Greek, civilization that we now have, were preserved by Muslims, and then re-introduced to Europe. The monastic tradition I would argue is people trying to preserve what they can from a collapsed civilization. To argue feudalism was Roman civilization "moving" to the countryside is nonsensical. Feudalism was a response of people to the collapse of Roman civilization.
Otherwise, I don't really see what your arguing ... other than running out of grain and so on precipitated the collapse of the Western Roman empire, which I think historians would agree played a part.
What I'm arguing is that to solve these problems take more than 20 years and yes, long term changes in population growth do matter.
Then maybe read up on the topic. The carbon budgets we have to work with (to avoid civilization ending climate "discontinuities", as they are called) are on decade time scales, in which de-population via falling birth rates has no meaningful consequence.
They simply are so subtle that those focusing just on the present day don't notice their effects. And it's not just technological advancement, but also the market mechanism which also is an important factor here.
What's subtle about the world going from 1 billion to 8 billion in a single human life time?
I have no idea what you're talking about i terms of technology advance and market mechanism in this context.
So in your view in 20 years there is a catastrophy, a collapse?
The carbon budgets we have to work with, to stay under 2 degrees Celsius (and not a guarantee, just a reasonable chance) are exhausted in about 20 years at present consumption rate.
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_budget;Caption from the wikipedia page on carbon budgets]Emission budget and necessary emission reduction pathways to meet the two-degree target agreed in Paris Agreement without negative emissions, depending on the emission peak[/quote]
Now, if we started really major actions now, and overran the carbon budget on our way to zero emissions (but we do make it there), then another major effort could be spent growing massive amounts of trees every year and sequester that carbon back underground, as well as other geoengineering schemes to "nudge" systems a bit -- in a race against the lag time of the climate system. (This is by no means a "clever risk" to take; it is far less riskier and far less costly to not emit the carbon in the first place: for, even if we emit less there's the risk the carbon budget was miscalculated and it's still not enough, so we need to do the geoengineering and we'll thank our lucky stars we played it as safe as we did; and 2, it's simply expensive and causes more ecologic damage to sequester compared to reasonable short-term actions to decarbonize, as well as stop deforesting the amazon, stop over fishing, stop so much meat eating, etc..)
So, I would agree there is some flexibility, but only if we were actually on track to zero emissions; currently we are not, not even close to being on track. Just pie in the sky denialist thinking.
Continuing business as usual and just blowing by the carbon budgets (just as we simply blew by the Kyoto targets), will be a state of inevitable collapse.
Collapse won't happen in 20 years "to the day", but would be a process of unrelenting droughts, floods, fires, leading to crop failures, political upheaval, and both civil and inter-nation wars.
It is this next 20 years where we can have the biggest impact on how events unfold and preserve our civilization and most people alive today with a ok probability. Just like the last 20 years would have been even easier ... and 20 years before that when we actually first understood this problem in all the essential aspects.
Our global society seems pretty stable, but only because we currently have enough to eat for everyone ... that matters politically (the people we don't give enough to eat, but could, such as those starving in Yemen, don't matter to our global political system, otherwise they could use that leverage to get more food; but that's far from being everyone in the Yemenize category).
Once food goes from "enough" to "not-enough" on a global scale, and even once many people die, and the warming and droughts and fires don't stop, so it just happens again and again to those left over each time, both coherent global action and maintaining our present infrastructure will be more and more difficult.
There is only so much disruption and challenges our system (as with previous systems) can take. Critical supply chains (such as your Egyptian grain example) start to unravel and our technological infrastructure will start to be defunct.
Armies (running out of food) won't simply sit around and starve to death, so the habitable places that remain will face relentless invasion and piracy with dwindling weapons systems that can no longer be renewed without the present global technological manufacturing platform. What happens to these people is anyone's guess, but I'm very certain they would view our current civilization as "collapsed" and "in ruins".
This is the basic process of collapse.
It is avoidable with radical actions now, not "subtle changes to population growth" over a century or two.
Democracy has it's faults, but it's still the thing I believe in. It has some safety valves built into it, if only the citizens would apply them. The alternatives usually don't have them. Radical technological transformation, yes. Radical political transformation, be careful just what you wish for.
You obviously didn't read my previous post which I literally say "as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs" is effective democracy.
Then just what historical study shows a huge migration of people from the Western parts moving to East Rome that you are talking about. Seriously, I've not heard about it so inform me.
However, our technological systems and infrastructure and level of affluence can be radically changed in mere decades. It requires high level of effort, but it is feasible.
That radical technological change needs also the market mechanism. Competition is a way to make things efficient.
I'll respond to you later about the last part of your post.
The problem is capitalists setting societies goals, yes, but democracy let that happen or made that possible even. The idea of democracy rests on the assumption that the people are knowledgeable, responsible and independent enough to recognize what is in their and societies best interest.... a kind of free will if you will. But Google, Youtube and Facebook know people can be manipulated, and so did the church and rulers in the past.
Isn't it telling that after all these years people still can't be moved to vote for parties that want to solve the problem, given that this one of the most important challenges we face in the 21th century, and perhaps ever?
There will always be factions like business vying for control of the institutions that make the decisions. If a system can't deal with that, that would be a (fatal?) flaw in said system it seems to me.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 29, 2021 at 23:06#5732470 likes
I wanna say part of the problem is inherent in human beings... it's evolutions fault that we will destroy us.
Like all life on earth we want to survive and reproduce, and we need energy for that. Normally a species only fills certain evolutionary niches, and is kept in check by the niche getting saturated or other species adapting to it.
But evolution has given us a combination of traits that enable us to transmit complex information almost instantly, making us very adaptable and overpowered. In the game of genetic evolution, cultural evolution is broken. If it takes a species millennia to evolve a new trait like a claw or a tooth, we can develop a gun in a couple of generations...
Our fatal flaw is that we are to successful, ultimately leaving us in the predicament that we have to devise a culture that goes against some of our nature.
Reply to ChatteringMonkey Yes, although this happened many thousands of years ago. It is only recently that we have run out of new lands to colonise. And only recently that we have polluted the planet. We have to find a way to live sustainably quickly, or the ecosystem will do it for us. The later being rapid population collapse as has been happening to over dominant species for hundreds of millions of years. It’s all there in the fossil record.
Now that the effects of climate change are writ large we may have rapid political change in favour of Green party’s. Industry will adapt quickly as they prioritise providing what the market demands. The worry is groups or nations who turn against this imperative and exploit warfare to resist. Or become failed states in which there is no effective power structure, or capital to instigate the required change.
I am quite confident that China, EU, US and other Western developed countries will successfully adapt. South America is a worry along with India, the Middle East and other populous Asian countries. Smaller failed states are not so significant because as they fail their carbon foot print will fall. Although if they have forests, these will be cut down for fuel.Which is the problem with South America, the Amazon basin is already seeing climate collapse, which could turn the forest into desert.
I wanna say part of the problem is inherent in human beings... it's evolutions fault that we will destroy us.
And yet we lived for 192,000 years with virtually no measurable impact on the climate or global ecosystem, and in the last few thousand are in a position to make the earth uninhabitable.
If your computer worked without fault for 192 years and then in the last year started to go wrong are you seriously telling me your first port of call for blame would be that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the computer was made and not "oh no, I must have picked up a virus, or dropped it, or something"?
I wanna say part of the problem is inherent in human beings... it's evolutions fault that we will destroy us.
— ChatteringMonkey
And yet we lived for 192,000 years with virtually no measurable impact on the climate or global ecosystem, and in the last few thousand are in a position to make the earth uninhabitable.
If your computer worked without fault for 192 years and then in the last year started to go wrong are you seriously telling me your first port of call for blame would be that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the computer was made and not "oh no, I must have picked up a virus, or dropped it, or something"?
192.000 years is a very precise number.... when human culture evolution really started is a bit in contention I'd say. Either way the point at which we started spreading across the globe, a lot of megafauna did become extinct, and we did reshape whole ecosystems as we progressed into agriculture, domesticated species etc etc...
And obviously this is not a linear process, it had to get some traction first. The rate of cultural Innovation is a function of population size and density... and innovations in turn have a positive reinforcing effect on those. In the video Boethius linked to, Dr Suzuki compares economic growth with bacteria in a test tube that grow exponentially every minute. If at minute 60 the tube would be saturated with bacteria, at minute 59 it would only be half that, and at minute 58 only a quarter etc etc... At minute 50 or so you would hardly notice them, yet the fact that they are an entity that doubles every minute is the cause of the tube being saturated. This just to say that the larger part of our history being relatively non-impactfull doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.
when human culture evolution really started is a bit in contention I'd say.
That it started some huge multiple of 2000 years is not 'in contention', it's a fact. The contention is only over the exactness of that multiple. That we lived without noticeably impacting the global ecosystem for the overwhelming majority of our existence is just not a thing you can reasonably question.
In the video Boethius linked to, Dr Suzuki compares economic growth with bacteria in a test tube that grow exponentially every minute.
Indeed. And it applies admirably to economic growth. The imact we had on the global ecosystem as a species is not exponential. It was practically zero for hundreds of thousands of years and then grew exponentially from the birth of agriculture, ramping up a significant notch after the industrial revolution. There's been nothing remotely steady or progressive about it, it's been clearly triggered by significant changes in technology.
the point at which we started spreading across the globe, a lot of megafauna did become extinct, and we did reshape whole ecosystems as we progressed into agriculture, domesticated species etc etc...
The megafauna issue is contested (funny how you so easily raise the uncertainty of something opposing your view yet treat speculative theories as fact when they support it). Notwithstanding, the progress to agriculture is exactly what I'm talking about. It happened about 200,000 years into our existence as a species, prior to which no appreciable effect on the global ecosystem was detectable, rendering your "we're naturally inclined this way" theory complete nonsense.
Reply to IsaacReply to ChatteringMonkey If I may interject, I think we are a victim of the slow development of human nature that cannot keep up with the rapid changes resulting from technological inventions and our ability to easily transfer knowledge and cooperate. Our moral intuitions aren't developed to take into account far off risks or other people in the abstract. We pursue impartiality and abstraction by expressing everything in terms of money, which becomes a self perpetuating beast mostly out of our control (the Market) so that we don't have to feel anything about a decision, further divorcing it from morality.
What you're left with is a society that rumbles along with barely a chance to steer it in another direction simply because of its size and complexity and people incapable of making moral decisions most of the time and it's not even their fault.
I think that's very true. Like the fox in the hen house, it never evolved an off switch because it never faced a room full of trapped prey, it never needed one.
The point I was trying to make is that whilst this makes us vulnerable, it does not, in theory, prevent there from being a set of circumstances which suit our nature sufficiently to prevent such catastrophic failures to adapt.
I'm generally distrustful of any evolutionary psychology, we're really quite a malleable species in terms of our cultural adaptation to new circumstances, but that doesn't mean we don't have our limits, nor that solutions which work with those tendencies won't work a good deal better than those trying to work against them.
What I find unhelpful about any "it's in our nature" type of arguments is the defeatism which inevitably plays into the hands of those who prefer to maintain the status quo.
So yeah, I agree - "we're not very well adapted psychologically to handle the technology" is a much better way of talking about the role of 'human nature' than to resign on the clichéd "'twas ever thus". It clearly wasn't.
Our moral intuitions aren't developed to take into account far off risks or other people in the abstract. We pursue impartiality and abstraction by expressing everything in terms of money, which becomes a self perpetuating beast mostly out of our control (the Market) so that we don't have to feel anything about a decision, further divorcing it from morality.
This is a very interesting take, one I've not heard before. It seems related to Millgram's work on social roles (his work on obedience gets all the limelight, but in my opinion his work on social roles is much better). He talks about the psychological limits of being part of a large system (such as a corporation) and how we responded to that by limiting the nodes in our 'Markov Blanket' of knowledge about the system. We know what our boss wants us to do, we know what we want our staff to do, but we neither know nor understand what our boss's boss wants, nor what our staff's staff should do. It seems as though you're saying a similar thing could happen with spending. We cannot manage the chain of consequences more than a few steps so we end consideration there. Or have I misunderstood completely, perhaps?
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 10:28#5733660 likes
There's some always something arbitrary about where we draw the boundaries around a species or not, and it's not as if we know exactly what subtle evolutionary changes in behavior or the brain may have happened between say 600.000 and 60.000 years ago... we have some semi-informed guesses.
But this is all a bit besides the point, as soon as the ice-age came to pass and conditions were such that we could have enough population and density, cultural evolution took off all across the world in multiply isolated locations, and the rest is history.
We want to survive and reproduce like any form of life, and because of the particular abilities we have we are very successful at it... which is part of the reason why we are where we are now. If you want to call this complete nonsense, fine.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 10:33#5733680 likes
Aah right, you are generally distrustful of people making an argument about human nature, promoting a defeatist attitude, put me in that box and thought I deserved a good beat-down.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 10:45#5733710 likes
If I may interject, I think we are a victim of the slow development of human nature that cannot keep up with the rapid changes resulting from technological inventions and our ability to easily transfer knowledge and cooperate. Our moral intuitions aren't developed to take into account far off risks or other people in the abstract. We pursue impartiality and abstraction by expressing everything in terms of money, which becomes a self perpetuating beast mostly out of our control (the Market) so that we don't have to feel anything about a decision, further divorcing it from morality.
What you're left with is a society that rumbles along with barely a chance to steer it in another direction simply because of its size and complexity and people incapable of making moral decisions most of the time and it's not even their fault.
While I agree with all of this, we do find ourselves in a situation we are not especially equipped to deal with, we wouldn't find ourselves in this situation if we weren't with this many people to begin with. It all starts there, we have made major advances in medicine, food production, have no real predatory species left in nature that concern us etc etc... all of which made it possible for our population to grow as it has. However one wants to slice it, this is a major part of the problem.
Aah right, you are generally distrustful of people making an argument about human nature, promoting a defeatist attitude, put me in that box and thought I deserved a good beat-down.
That's about the size of it, yep.
If you want to draw conclusions about human nature and prehistory, I suggest doing some research on the matter might be a good start.
as soon as the ice-age came to pass and conditions were such that we could have enough population and density, cultural evolution took off all across the world in multiply isolated locations, and the rest is history.
...for example, is hopelessly wrong.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 11:11#5733760 likes
Yes it's not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, you just had to get that adjective in there didn't you... just in case it's wasn't abundantly clear how ignorant i am.
Why don't you take a less adversarial approach to debates on this forum? Surely you don't expect us to all be scientific scholars on every subject and post on a science journal level or shut up? If you think it's wrong, just say why and leave out this demeaning BS please.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 11:33#5733780 likes
Our moral intuitions aren't developed to take into account far off risks or other people in the abstract. We pursue impartiality and abstraction by expressing everything in terms of money, which becomes a self perpetuating beast mostly out of our control (the Market) so that we don't have to feel anything about a decision, further divorcing it from morality.
What you're left with is a society that rumbles along with barely a chance to steer it in another direction simply because of its size and complexity and people incapable of making moral decisions most of the time and it's not even their fault.
Expanding on this point, I think it's not only our moral intuitions that fails us at this point, but also our cognition in general. The way we abstract the world, via language, cutting it in small bits, is ill-suited to deal with complex problems that would be better served with a more holistic approach. Measuring everything against something like money is an example of this, but any criterium or set of criteria small enough so that an average human being can deal with is, probably leaves out a lot of complexity.
Surely you don't expect us to all be scientific scholars on every subject and post on a science journal level or shut up.
Well I sort of do, yeah, insofar as one is interested enough to post about it on a public forum I think the least prerequisite effort should be to familiarise oneself with the basic facts about which one is theorising. There are a number of very approachable books on the subject - I recommended Clive Finlayson's work on early humans - which requires very little 'scholarly' prior knowledge. Jared Diamond's work is pretty famous now, also Alice Roberts (off of the telly!) has written a really nice summary called 'The Incredible Human Journey'. Failing that, there's Wikipedia, which should take no more than half an hour to read through the pertinent links.
Collapse won't happen in 20 years "to the day", but would be a process of unrelenting droughts, floods, fires, leading to crop failures, political upheaval, and both civil and inter-nation wars.
I think it's very likely that we will have some countries collapsing to civil war especially in the Sahel region, that already is hit the most. For example the hunger index shows on map quite well what the areas are were conflict can happen and is happening:
Global Hunger Index by severity:
The inter-nation wars isn't necessary going to happen and those can be limited as, obviously there are two or more established sides that can cut their losses and control their forces (as they control their militaries). The societal collapse to civil war is the problem, that we've seen in many places (Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, etc) is the real danger. For example Yemen is as bad as it is thanks to the Saudi coalition intervention.
Yet let's look at were we stand. So perhaps you would anticipate a turn to the 1960's and 1970's?
And then the stats of people dying at famines:
Yet will this happen in Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, South Korea? Just going to the situation of early 20th Century or 19th Century would be bad, but did that collapse our global society?
The fact is that there has been a lot more famine, wars and unruly places in history than now and still the human society has prevailed.
Armies (running out of food) won't simply sit around and starve to death, so the habitable places that remain will face relentless invasion and piracy with dwindling weapons systems that can no longer be renewed without the present global technological manufacturing platform.
This isn't at all realistic.
Armies don't run out of food and then roam around as an army. Armies "collapse" simply when the pay doesn't come in. Functioning and lethal armed forces are actually very fragile and need huge resources and support. If the pay doesn't come, cracks appear immediately. Hence they either a) are cut in size and manpower by the government, b) go home if they aren't paid or c) stage a coup to get their pay. This happens far earlier than the issue becomes food. You shouldn't forget what Napoleon said about warfighting and armies: "You need money, money, money". To give an example: Iraq still had a huge army when Dubya Bush invaded. Saddam's army simply started to melt away with soldiers and officers taking off their uniforms, but a lot of units were still quite intact. Then the Americans had the great idea to just let them go. First they (the ex-armed forces) demonstrated for getting pay, then they went home and some started the insurgency in small uncoordinated groups. These uncoordinated group won't invade any country with a standing army, but the sure can start a low intensity guerilla conflict... or a civil war.
You obviously didn't read my previous post which I literally say "as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs" is effective democracy.
On the contrary.
If that arresting control "from our sociopathic oligarchs" would happen through the ballot box, that is great! Unfortunately in the World we live in people who want to "arrest control" mean they literally go and arrest people without giving a damn about the institutions as they are "corrupt and in control of the sociopathic oligarchs" in the first place. That was what I meant. Hence democracy and the necessary institutions are sidelined, which freaks out everybody. Then likely we get true sociopaths or even bloodthirsty psychopaths competing for power. Democracies are saved with guns only if an outside aggressor attacks them. There are far and few examples when guns have overthrown dictatorships and replaced them with democracy. Portugal and their Carnation Revolution is for example an exception.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 12:41#5733920 likes
I have read more about paleontology, pre-history, evolution etc... than you think.
You came in here mis-interpreting what I said as some 'human nature'-type justification for defeatism concerning climate change and immediately went in the offence. That was never my intention, which should be clear from my other posts in this thread.
What I said in defense of my posts also wasn't meant as some scientifically accurate or nuanced description, just some broad strokes that I think would suffice in support of my claims.
I'm not even sure what you disagree with, as it's almost a truism what I said.
Always great to see the Republican Party trying their best to not only destroy the planet, but preventing even minor efforts to save it. That’s commitment— they take death pacts seriously.
ChatteringMonkeyJuly 30, 2021 at 15:23#5734250 likes
Always great to see the Republican Party trying their best to not only destroy the planet, but preventing even minor efforts to save it. That’s commitment— they take death pacts seriously.
Can't have the state restricting free competition for energy now can we? 19 states apparently have passed such legislation... insane.
I do wonder as a non-american, what is their thinking? Is it just only short-sighted protection of their interests, without much consideration for anything else? Do they realize what is at stake, or have they actually managed to convince themselves that the whole climate change thing is a hoax propagated by their political adversaries? I mean, how do you justify something like that to yourself?
I mean, how do you justify something like that to yourself?
In many ways. First and foremost: “I’m just following orders.” They’re doing what comes “naturally” within a capitalist system: make profits, raise stock prices, post huge quarterly earnings, repeat. Or you’re out. All else is an externality, including climate change.
“It’s a job for Congress.” That’s another one. Knowing full well Congress is dysfunctional, and that they will lobby against any changes.
The solution is planetary-scale geo-engineering, all other solutions are moot at this point.
I don't think people have understood yet the full implications of golbal warming and the response this will require.
On the other hand at a practical level it seems incredibly easy. Just direct, say, 3 trillion dollars every year toward geo-engineering and research, as well as producing good policy, mass-transit etc.
The solution is planetary-scale geo-engineering, all other solutions are moot at this point.
I don't think people have understood yet the full implications of golbal warming and the response this will require.
On the other hand at a practical level it seems incredibly easy. Just direct, say, 3 trillion dollars every year toward geo-engineering and research, as well as producing good policy, mass-transit etc.
If someone who do not commute tell other people how to commute, that is not necessarily a good thing. I'm not saying you do, but that is a possibility in discussions like this. A lot of people do, for instance blame "capitalism" for causing problem when they themselves get the pleasure of not having to do a daytime job thanks to a social position guaranteed by some grandparent who made money enough to let relatives become scientists, artists or musicians, having the cultural capital to do that. One has to be very careful in discussions like this, not to talk about what "we" have to do when it is in fact "they" who will pay the price. You didnt, which is good.
That said, Geo-Engineering is a viable way to reduce impact of global warming, or rather, reduce global warming but I doubt that that will actually happen. But again, one never knows.
Reply to AnsiktsburkReply to boethius
Well I feel like that covers only a small range of people, those who proscribe things that they themselves wouldn't have to do because they are shielded by money in one way or another.
Global warming is like a guest at a dinner party who embarrasses everyone, doesn't respect the rules of polite conversation, mentions the elephant in the room etc.
We could spend trillions on geo-engineering but we don't. We don't because rich people have all the money and states work for them. The logical conclusion is to get rid of rich people, but that's awkward because for many decades rich people have made us believe that they are gods.
?Ansiktsburk ?boethius
Well I feel like that covers only a small range of people, those who proscribe things that they themselves wouldn't have to do because they are shielded by money in one way or another.
Global warming is like a guest at a dinner party who embarrasses everyone, doesn't respect the rules of polite conversation, mentions the elephant in the room etc.
We could spend trillions on geo-engineering but we don't. We don't because rich people have all the money and states work for them. The logical conclusion is to get rid of rich people, but that's awkward because for many decades rich people have made us believe that they are gods.
What to do in such situation?
That like the trillion dollar question and the right one. What to do?
In a situation where right wingers like me (in Scandinavia which is probably midway btw Democrats and Republicans in the US) tend to try to say that global warming isn't happening. But, being anti-activist-as-a-lifestyle I still would say that IF global warming was not probable you would have seen big studies by relevant institutions saying so. The economic backup for such studies should be no problems... but we do not see such studies, just odd scientist having doubt. So - as far as I am concerned - and, unlike some activists who probably sees fighting the global warming as a "goal in life" and in line with their red-green agenda, I sadly must believe the global warming is happening and that it will have consequences.
And it seems like most western countries are at that place. I do not see the situation is "something our lifestyle" has produced, capitalism or whatever. I come from a poor family, most scandinavians were around 1900, and the society has given my family a much better life, which I cannot for my life see as a bad thing. I would say that people being angry on "capitalism", should do some genealogy.
But, the problem is that our good efforts, to make life better, do cost a lot of energy, and that energy mainly comes from burning of fossil fuel.
Unless you start discussions from another standpoint I think you will be unsuccessful. You will only make the majority of people angry, and the majority will decide in some way. True, governments and big companies have agendas to make money but at the end of the day its about people.
And I think what is actually done, Windmills, solar power and - yes - nuclear power do work, energy is produced. And I think the psychological effect of that is good. As well as practical stuff people can do in societies where a lot of energy is consumed, eating less red meat, recycling, drive cars that have low emissions. That is important, to get people in favor of getting things done.
Then, bigger measurements are needed, maybe geo-engineering, maybe restrictions - including ALL energy consuming countries. It's not like Canada and Sweden that emit the most. But the world must be in a Corona state of mind to get things done. Sadly, Corona impact was very visible and very fast. Global warming is not.
What I wish is that people like my Countrywoman Greta Thunberg would try to side up with people having a good reputation even among "right wingers" of the world, like maybe Bill Gates, to de-activistify the question. It is much too important to become a flower power romance ingredient for children from academical families looking for "things to do with their lives". Which is, imho and to a large extent, how certain protests, and sadly also warnings by scientists(very seldom coming from a daytime worker background), are perceived by the people of the world not being left wing, daytime workers, and which will only do bad for getting things actually done.
And it seems like most western countries are at that place. I do not see the situation is "something our lifestyle" has produced, capitalism or whatever.
How does this make any sense?
What has produced the pollution, if not capitalism (as is practiced today and since the industrial revolution)? and if not the lifestyles industrial capitalist growth has enabled?
I come from a poor family, most scandinavians were around 1900, and the society has given my family a much better life, which I cannot for my life see as a bad thing. I would say that people being angry on "capitalism", should do some genealogy.
Yes, capitalism creates winners and losers, and the winners tend to like their winnings.
However, regardless of social issues related to your statement, if the system isn't sustainable then who cares about standards of living meanwhile. It's like a captain that doesn't prepare a voyage where resources run out half way through and everyone starves to death, does it matter if the passengers were comfortable for the first part of the journey; does that excuse the second half of the journey being a tortuous hell?
And that, a tortuous hell, is what most passengers on earth are going to experience if today's capitalist system (whatever version of capitalism you want to call it) continues unsustainably.
If billions or more people starve to death (what necessarily goes with a globally unsustainable system), are you really willing to say "well, me and my Scandinavian family have had it pretty darn good; so, I think it was a good system that brought us here".
Of course, you can argue that the system is sustainable, that the climate and other biodiversity alarmists are wrong, but you recognize yourself that argument doesn't really work.
So, that being the case, you are basically saying "yes, the system isn't sustainable and we are moving towards the disasters all major credible environmental institutions are predicting ... but, it was good for my family for a bit, so I can't put the that into question".
It seems to me your family is a pretty small subset of the entire planet with all its inhabitants and life forms.
What has produced the pollution, if not capitalism (as is practiced today and since the industrial revolution)? and if not the lifestyles industrial capitalist growth has enabled?
What I don't like about this attack on capitalism is that it seems to imply that a leftist approach to life would have been carbon neutral.
Reply to frank hypericin is not saying that the Leftist alternative is 100% going to be just as polluting as capitalist production. He is saying a minor point, that the ecological record of the communist countries was/is not good at all. Nothing controversial here.
But if capitalism is "a tool like a hammer" like you say, then it is the wielder who really matters. There is no 'written in the stars' or totally worked-out blueprint for a post-capitalist society. The point is for men and women to have complete democratic mastery over the economy and all spheres of life, so that society only goes where its constituents will that it should go. In such a self-conscious society, the issue of global warming could be solved very simply. Nobody knows precisely how, but it is not superstition to suggest that with enough resources and a united planet, the conditions for technological mastery over the biosphere would be possible.
Nobody knows precisely how, but it is not superstition to suggest that with enough resources and a united planet, the conditions for technological mastery over the biosphere would be possible.
I assume you mean by working with nature as opposed to trying to supersede it?
Reply to frank No I'm not saying that. I really do mean it when I say the technological mastery over the biosphere. 'Working with nature', what does this actually mean? Nature is chaos, catastrophe, meaningless processes etc. The aim of a self-conscious society should be toward domination of these processes, whereby the reproduction of human society more and more relies on the 'artificial'.
Think of it like this. If you terraformed a barren planet, you would not be saying 'work with nature', you would be saying 'how can we artificially produce a society out of the bare bones elements we find on, say, Mars or Europa?' Here 'nature' as you are conceiving it (i.e. biological life) is non-existent, the only way to conquer these barren planets are pure artificial human productive processes, converting different elements, combining them, dragging ice asteroids into the atmosphere, digging boreholes or whatever.
This is exactly how we should think of Earth's biosphere. We are already 'mastering' this, but it is of course unplanned, chaotic, self-defeating etc. (i.e. global warming). Forget all that sentimentality about 'disturbing nature', we are already doing it, it is inevitable that there will be mass-extinctions and so on. The point is to 'disturb nature' in such a way that you have self-conscious and rational technological mastery over these processes. I am thinking of, why not, the rings in the video-game 'Halo', or the transformation of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
But let's go even further. Once we rid ourselves of this religious-like superstition about 'not messing with nature (a nature which doesn't even exist the way most people conceive of it), why not go to the end? The human body, that fragile meat sack which gets cancer and so on, let's get rid of it. Why not upload our subjectivities into an artificial technological infrastructure? I claim this would be the result of a self-conscious societies' drive toward immortality, the end of ageing, disease etc.
It's not about 'superceding' nature, of course everything outside of human subjectivity does exist and you cannot exist outside of this material. It's about ending arbitrary processes like freak weather, ageing, even death.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 03, 2021 at 14:16#5748700 likes
The human body, that fragile meat sack which gets cancer and so on, let's get rid of it. Why not upload our subjectivities into an artificial technological infrastructure? I claim this would be the result of a self-conscious societies' drive toward immortality, the end of ageing, disease etc.
Of course we do not know if this is even a possibility, maybe subjectivity and meaning is inseparably linked with that fragile meat-sack. I mean, what's the point of thinking, a subjectivity, if you don't have some needy mortal body to keep alive... just computation for more computation sake until the heat dead of the universe? That doesn't sound very appealing to me.
Reply to ChatteringMonkey You are right, it is possible that this physical separation of mind and body (in all relevant respects they are already separated anyway but that's another story) is impossible.
As far as concerns 'whats the point of thinking if you don't have a body?' I know what you mean but isn't it the case that in all ways that matter, you really do think without a body. Think about thinking, when you are thinking, are you really concerened/aware that you have a body? Is not the act of thinking itself it's own proof that we are not our bodies? When you are deep in thought, you are working on some ideas or whatever, it doesn't matter to you, you lose awareness even that you have a body.
Also why would this be an issue? Surely inter-subjectivity (in whatever form) would survive this 'upload'? I cannot imagine that we would all become totally insular self-referential computers, not at all. Surely human society would continue, simply that human beings become physically what they were spiritually all along, pure subjectivity. This is not about 'computation for computation's sake', I am not suggesting that we degrade the idea by associating this with meagre computing power (whatever that means). This would be society, but in a higher form.
Doesn't sound appealing? Well it doesn't sound appealing to me either! I am not suggesting this as an action taken tomorrow, but as one of the possible points a socially self-conscious (let me cut the BS here, I mean a communist) society would approach, long into the future, as contingent impediments to humanities' conquering of the galaxy and mortality are overcome. This is deep future, don't worry I will not now force you to climb into a USB stick or whatever.
As for the heat death of the universe, I don't see this as likely. More likely to me is that the universe is infinite. But even if entropy is real, I have faith (ok I know I sound insane) that man can conquer this entropy as well.
As far as concerens 'whats the point of thinking if you don't have a body?' I know what you mean but isn't it the case that in all ways that matter, you really do think without a body. Think about thinking, when you are thinking, are you really concerened/aware that you have a body? Is not the act of thinking itself it's own proof that we are not our bodies? When you are deep in thought, you are working on some ideas or whatever, it doesn't matter to you, you lose awareness even that you have a body.
Also why would this be an issue? Surely inter-subjectivity (in whatever form) would survive this 'upload'? I cannot imagine that we would all become totally insular self-referential computers, not at all. Surely human society would continue, simply that human beings become physically what they were spiritually all along, pure subjectivity. This is not about 'computation for computation's sake', I am not suggesting that we degrade the idea by associating this with meagre computing power (whatever that means). This would be society, but in a higher form.
I think human motivations (bodily) are behind the intellectual problems we work out. The process of thinking itself maybe isn't influence by it, but the initial motivation for it seems to be.
My reasoning here is that the physical, biological forms came first, and then we evolved thinking brains because it increased survival chances of some biological forms. So to me that is the reason d'etre of thinking... i'm not sure what to do with the idea of just taking that away, what would be the point of any of it?
Doesn't sound appealing? Well it doesn't sound appealing to me either! I am not suggesting this as an action taken tomorrow, but as one of the possible points a socially self-conscious (let me cut the BS here, I mean a communist) society would approach, long into the future, as contingent impediments to humanities' conquering of the galaxy and mortality are overcome. This is deep future, don't worry I will not now force you to climb into a USB stick or whatever.
Sure, I just wanted to voice some concerns with the idea of uploading digitally, which many futurist seem to take for granted.
As for the heat death of the universe, I don't see this as likely. More likely to me is that the universe is infinite. But even if entropy is real, I have faith (ok I know I sound insane) that man can conquer this entropy as well.
Yeah betting against entropy is insane ;-). But you know, all of this is far from settled, just the best guess we have based on current understanding.
I think human motivations (bodily) are behind the intellectual problems we work out. The process of thinking itself maybe isn't influence by it, but the initial motivation for it seems to be.
My reasoning here is that the physical, biological forms came first, and then we evolved thinking brains because it increased survival chances of some biological forms. So to me that is the reason d'etre of thinking... i'm not sure what to do with the idea of just taking that away, what would be the point of any of it?
Here of course I agree with you. But think, what really does a human being (as animal) need to survive? On pure subsistence, we need a little water, some food, a little exercise etc. And yet most of the articles of consumption are not for pure bodily subsistence. Our mind needs diversion, conversation, love, pleasurable sensation, diverse diet, meaningful work etc. None of this is simple subsistence, in fact if any of us were to eat porridge oats every meal (like one of our cabinet ministers here in the UK suggested that those on welfare should do to save money), we would go crazy, feel completely undignified, spiritually destroyed and so on.
On your second point, of course I cannot answer that immortal question, 'why/when did human consciousness emerge?' But I can answer the implications you draw from it. Human thought is no longer 'tethered' to biological considerations. That is, those processes that were once regulated by the biological order, have come to be fully regulated by that wholly distinct and higher order of being, the social order. You can also call this the 'symbolic' order or in Marxian terms, the moment when human society must be actively (consciously) reproduced by man himself, as opposed to the 'just being' of animals. That means that the human mind is forever separated from nature. We can only know that we were once 'natural' because we became (for whatever reason) separated from this nature. We can only see this point of departure after it has already gone forever. We can only 'see' at all, because we took this point of departure from nature. Now that we have the social order, biology doesn't enter into it. Our brains are exacctly the same as the brains of the ancient Greeks, and yet conceptually we are leaps and bounds ahead of them. If human thought was even remotely regulated biologically, this would be an impossibility. How can biology act upon 'you' if you can already, in thought, abstract yourself as a self? That is, if you can abstract an element from the chaos of nature in thought, you are already unbound by that chaos, that undifferentiated 'thing-in-itself that is nature (which doesn't really exist).
Sure, I just wanted to voice some concerns with the idea of uploading digitally, which many futurist seem to take for granted.
You know, I really find technology boring to be honest, and I am not familiar with futurist writings. Do you have any good reccomendations? My thrust is always first and foremost philosophical, but I try to take things to the end, and I see uploading as a nescessary possibility in any future society who's drive will consist in the conflict between the world of man (society) and non-human nature.
As for the link with what we have been saying and climate change, I hope it is evident that it is relevant. The way we ideologically conceive of climate change is most often by attributing to nature this 'humbling' power, as something that punishes the hubris of man. I hope I demonstrate here that I find this view revolting. I will write more on it later.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 03, 2021 at 18:17#5749480 likes
Here of course I agree with you. But think, what really does a human being (as animal) need to survive? On pure subsistence, we need a little water, some food, a little exercise etc. And yet most of the articles of consumption are not for pure bodily subsistence. Our mind needs diversion, conversation, love, pleasurable sensation, diverse diet, meaningful work etc. None of this is simple subsistence, in fact if any of us were to eat porridge oats every meal (like one of our cabinet ministers here in the UK suggested that those on welfare should do to save money), we would go crazy, feel completely undignified, spiritually destroyed and so on.
Sure there's of course other variables then mere survival to the evolution-equation, like procreation which has given life all kinds of exuberant stuff like the tails of peacocks... but I think all of this can ultimately still be tied back to the biological.
On your second point, of course I cannot answer that immortal question, 'why/when did human consciousness emerge?' But I can answer the implications you draw from it. Human thought is no longer 'tethered' to biological considerations. That is, those processes that were once regulated by the biological order, have come to be fully regulated by that wholly distinct and higher order of being, the social order. You can also call this the 'symbolic' order or in Marxian terms, the moment when human society must be actively (consciously) reproduced by man himself, as opposed to the 'just being' of animals. That means that the human mind is forever separated from nature. We can only know that we were once 'natural' because we became (for whatever reason) separated from this nature. We can only see this point of departure after it has already gone forever. We can only 'see' at all, because we took this point of departure from nature. Now that we have the social order, biology doesn't enter into it. Our brains are exacctly the same as the brains of the ancient Greeks, and yet conceptually we are leaps and bounds ahead of them. If human thought was even remotely regulated biologically, this would be an impossibility. How can biology act upon 'you' if you can already, in thought, abstract yourself as a self? That is, if you can abstract an element from the chaos of nature in thought, you are already unbound by that chaos, that undifferentiated 'thing-in-itself that is nature (which doesn't really exist).
I'm not sure I follow here... I think we are only ahead of the Greeks in scientific knowledge and technology. Because we can record that knowledge in writing and pass it on to next generations there's a progression to it, sure, but I'm not sure it follows that we have departed from nature or our biology. We use cellphones and the internet for instance to do what we essentially always did, communicate with each other, just faster and on a larger scale. This in particular I don't get:
Jingo7:How can biology act upon 'you' if you can already, in thought, abstract yourself as a self? That is, if you can abstract an element from the chaos of nature in thought, you are already unbound by that chaos, that undifferentiated 'thing-in-itself that is nature (which doesn't really exist).
You know, I really find technology boring to be honest, and I am not familiar with futurist writings. Do you have any good reccomendations? My thrust is always first and foremost philosophical, but I try to take things to the end, and I see uploading as a nescessary possibility in any future society who's drive will consist in the conflict between the world of man (society) and non-human nature.
It's not that I have read that many futurist per se, I mostly picked that up in the media I tend to follow... but Yuval Harari has a couple of books that you might call futurist, and he's generally a clear thinker. And then there's Nick Boström who deals with possible future scenario's, mostly from the point of view of existential risk, and those who work with him at the same institute.
As for the link with what we have been saying and climate change, I hope it is evident that it is relevant. The way we ideologically conceive of climate change is most often by attributing to nature this 'humbling' power, as something that punishes the hubris of man. I hope I demonstrate here that I find this view revolting. I will write more on it later.
Yes I do kind of agree with this, especially if this comes from some kind of dogmatic religious inspired point of view. But at the same there is a kernel of truth to this accusation of hubris I think. I've said something earlier along those lines. The way our cognition works is by abstracting away from the world, by cutting things up into little bits via language... which is essentially simplifying things so we can get our head around it. If we are dealing with complex systems like the biosphere this kind of simplified thinking can cause all kinds of trouble, especially if we have to much faith in our ideas... And there's some 'intelligence' to nature too, because it has been a process of trial and error that has been running for billions of years, evolving and adapting too 'itself'. Compared to that our trials and errors are still relatively shallow, so you know, maybe there is reason to not be too confident that we can do it better.
Yes, capitalism creates winners and losers, and the winners tend to like their winnings.
Capitalism has made few far more richer than others, but it also has improved our prosperity far more than central planning of socialism ever did. Worth mentioning that socialism was (is) far more disastrous for the environment. Environmental factors simply weren't thought of.
If we look at where we have been successful, we have the case of handling the ozone layer hole, which at the largest was in the Antarctic in 1994 and now is estimated to shrink in size to what it was in 1980. Let's look at just why we were successful:
- the problem was easily noticed and measurable.
- CFC gasses being the culprit was identified (as early as 1974).
- CFC gasses were used mainly by rich countries.
- there was will to take action on the problem (Montreal accord in 1987, Kyoto in 1997).
- replacing CFC gasses was totally possible and the development continues.
The rich countries reduced their use of ozone depleting substances by 99,2% where the developing countries reduced only by 72,5%. What can we learn from this?
The fact is that prosperous wealthy countries can adapt and change their production and set new rigorous standards were the poorest countries poorer countries aren't able to. This is important to understand when the issue is something like deforestation, which happens basically in poorer countries.
We can cope with the problems when more countries are like the Netherlands, less are like the DRC. It may sound paradoxical, but the truth is that more development will be the solution. We will have more awareness of the problems and more ability to cope with the problems, to change our ways. Yet if we have more failed states, more poverty, then less will be done.
Then there is the question of China. Again a non-democratic country where environmental issues aren't as important as in the West thanks to it's socialism (or fascism). To show how important China is when it comes to CO2 emissions, here's a telling video showing the total CO2 emission by country from the 1960s onwards. Notice what happens with China on this 2000s.
Then there is the question of China. Again a non-democratic country where environmental issues aren't as important as in the West thanks to it's socialism (or fascism)
Comparing absolute emissions and relative rise in emissions isn't really telling us much, China has 3 times the population of the US and was a developing country. The US, the beacon of capitalism, still has double the emissions per capita of China.
Yes, and while it certainly looks bad in absolute numbers (which does matter for the physics of climate change), I have more confidence in their ability to turn it around faster than Western countries. Apparently they tend to underpromise and overshoot on declared reduction-targets, unlike the west.
Comparing absolute emissions and relative rise in emissions isn't really telling us much,
When it comes to the actual climate change, it's absolute emissions that ACTUALLY DO MATTER, as you said later. Otherwise Qatar would be far more important than the US or China.
The US, the beacon of capitalism, still has double the emissions per capita of China.
And it also has the ability to decrease it's emissions, which it actually has. And likely can take the example from some states that have been more successful than others. The frightening aspect is WHEN China get more and more wealthier. There's a lot of more potential demand both in China and India than there is in the US, hence those countries are crucial here.
Again, the most important issue is to deal where the growth is. Not where positive reductions are taking place, even if continuing that trend is important.
I have more confidence in their ability to turn it around faster than Western countries. Apparently they tend to underpromise and overshoot on declared reduction-targets, unlike the west.
Capitalism has made few far more richer than others, but it also has improved our prosperity far more than central planning of socialism ever did.
So the fact that China's kicking our ass in growth means what exactly? That's not central planning? Or is that not socialism? We don't have "central planning" in the US? On the contrary, there is massive state intervention and direction in the economy, at all levels -- from the Fed on down.
So the fact that China's kicking our ass in growth means what exactly?
It means that they changed their socialism to controlled capitalism, basically fascism, and then they got their take off. The Great Leap or the Cultural Revolution didn't bring more prosperity and economic growth. Even India got it's rapid growth when it left socialist programs out.
Socialist central planning is literally doing away with the market mechanism. It doesn't work. It's totally different from having let's say "an industrial policy" as many capitalist countries have had. South Korea, Taiwan are great examples how industrial policies have been successful transforming a poor country to a wealthy one.
Hence the real question is, how awesome would China be if it had similar economic growth as Taiwan has had?
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 04, 2021 at 14:29#5752940 likes
And it also has the ability to decrease it's emissions, which it actually has. And likely can take the example from some states that have been more successful than others. The frightening aspect is WHEN China get more and more wealthier. There's a lot of more potential demand both in China and India than there is in the US, hence those countries are crucial here.
Again, the most important issue is to deal where the growth is. Not where positive reductions are taking place, even if continuing that trend is important.
Well yes absolute emissions matter for climate change, and so everybody will have to reduce its emissions.
India and China are crucial just because they have the largest populations by far. That's why growth there is such a big issue.
Reduction in emissions have been meager in the US and in Europe. This has been the result of some 'low-hanging-fruit' policies that didn't have to hurt. The question is will they continue to find democratic support for more drastic measures?
China may be more resolute and effective in implementing the energy-transition because of it's governance-structure, it doesn't need democratic support. And India, yeah, don't know about them.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 04, 2021 at 14:35#5752970 likes
This may sound a bit unfounded because the numbers aren't there yet... but they are on the rise, they seem to have the confidence and will to get things done as a society right now.
The west on the other hand? Well we all know the story, a lot of political and societal uncertainty... can we still muster the political will to get projects on such scale done?
The west on the other hand? Well we all know the story, a lot of political and societal uncertainty... can we still muster the political will to get projects on such scale done?
When we do muster the political will, the standard response is that it isn't enough. We sideline positive news. Our critical media is showing us where we fail. In China that critical media isn't tolerated. Needless to say, for example the smog problem is far more difficult in China than in let's say West European large cities or even New York. London doesn't have the famous smog as it had earlier. There is pervasive bias that shows in the ecological reporting from a totalitarian country and a Western democracy.
For example the air quality in New York is multiple times better than in Chinese Mega-cities. Just think how American media would treat politicians if it would be the other way around.
The Soviet Union and Communist China have literally pillaged their environment and environmental issue were not all important under Marxism-Leninism. The problem is that there were none of those safety-valves that a democracy has. There are no watch-groups or simply private landowners to make notice. When everything is owned by the state, who cares what happens?
(A smelter surrounded by an ecological disaster zone in Norilsk.)
Environmental protection isn't at all anywhere in large Asian countries as China (and India) where it is in the West. Just to give an example, think about the large river systems:
Up to 95 per cent of river-borne plastic polluting the world's oceans pours in from just ten rivers, according to new research.
The top 10 rivers - eight of which are in Asia - accounted for so much plastic because of the mismanagement of waste.
About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources - such as the Yangtze and the Ganges - could almost halve it, scientists claim.
Despite the fact Madrid is the second city of the world with the most trees planted, I am happy our Mayor is motivated to keep planting more than 100.000 of many species. I guess it is important not only because our health and living but to show how a developed European capital city should look like.
I really want to see more green in this picture of my city!
It's really nice when cities turn green. And in many ways city planning has improved especially from the 50's and 60's. But the most important thing is to have a plan. Cities growing without any plans are the problem.
(How about that waste management? Street in Lagos after rains)
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 04, 2021 at 22:08#5754540 likes
Environmental protection isn't at all anywhere in large Asian countries as China (and India) where it is in the West. Just to give an example, think about the large river systems
One shouldn't forget that China is relatively late to the industrialization-party. Of course they are worse at dealing with it if you only take a snapshot of where we are today, they have had far less experience with it than we have.
Anyway I would even agree with the statement that communism isn't any better, or maybe even worse, at dealing with environmental problems. People get antsy very fast if they are confronted with environmental problems in their backyard, there I would agree that democratic societies are more responsive in solving those issues. But climate change isn't just any environmental problem. What sets it apart is precisely that we don't experience any direct adverse effects from it, and that it requires some foresight, some vision to deal with it.
Because I've been immersing myself in this issue a lot lately, I've been harassing people with it, maybe a bit to much... . Usually their response is essentially that they won't do anything about it if it costs them anything. They are waiting for the government to take action, to take some policy-measure to support renewables or some other government incentive that addresses the issue... but the government generally won't do anything if it isn't something that would be supported by a large part of the population, which is only democratic I suppose. But then you end up with a catch 22 where no one will take initiative to solve the issue if it "costs" something.
So here is the nub of the matter, things like overall change of the climate aren't valued in our system because it only has indirect, long term effects on us. Of course that's not to say communism is necessarily any better in dealing with it, it's not. They value mostly in the same way we do, as they too are bound by the same world-economy logic for the most part. What is different is that China at least have the capability of a longer term vision because they aren't bound to a 4 or 5 year democratic election cycle... and in a system that allows for longer term vision there is at least the possibility that climate change is something that can be valued. The CCP knows climate change will come back to haunt them because they think they will still be in power when the effects become apparent... A Trump or a Biden on the other hand don't really care because it probably won't matter one iota to them.
Anyway I would even agree with the statement that communism isn't any better, or maybe even worse, at dealing with environmental problems. People get antsy very fast if they are confronted with environmental problems in their backyard, there I would agree that democratic societies are more responsive in solving those issues.
Yes, there is something positive about the NIMBY.
Now the socialist system did have a lot of committees and so on, yet what was lacking was the huge thing that turns people to behave differently: when they are landowners. Might sound funny, but there's a big truth to this. Let's say a person is working in a student body as a student. He or she has then some incentive as a student on what the body does. Now put him or her to be a landowner and the issue about the use of his or her land. Likely he or she won't take it so lightly. Socialism needed for people to be as devoted to the "common thing", the country, as an individual landowner can be to his or her land. That is a big thing to ask from people and that's why some refer to what the Soviet Union did to it's environment as Ecocide.
Usually their response is essentially that they won't do anything about it if it costs them anything. They are waiting for the government to take action, to take some policy-measure to support renewables or some other government incentive that addresses the issue... but the government generally won't do anything if it isn't something that would be supported by a large part of the population, which is only democratic I suppose.
The basic problem is that people are OK with restrictions, limitations or fees when they aren't personally affected. Yet they can and will go with draconian measures if everybody goes with them. The pandemic response has been a good example of this. My best friend died last year (not of Covid) and in his funeral there was only the priest, his mother and father and one uncle. He had more friends than me and more relatives. Now to argue that the government here could decide that more than five people cannot meet would have sounded quite incredible few years ago. But here there were no complaints about it, perhaps in all two or three small demonstrations have happened in the whole country.
Yet for draconian measures, you need a big catastrophy.
What is different is that China at least have the capability of a longer term vision because they aren't bound to a 4 or 5 year democratic election cycle... and in a system that allows for longer term vision there is at least the possibility that climate change is something that can be valued. The CCP knows climate change will come back to haunt them because they think they will still be in power when the effects become apparent... A Trump or a Biden on the other hand don't really care because it probably won't matter one iota to them.
I think it matters at least to the Democrats. Let's not forget Al Gore and his favorite subject.
Yet notice that a lot in the environmental standards and environmental protection happens in the US in the state level with California having a big role. If California sets some standards, manufacturers apply to them. You could argue that on the federal level there for example hasn't been a true energy policy or industrial policy, yet the US can do a lot even without the White House getting involved. Don't think that one person, the US President, actually can do much. A lot happens without him too.
Yes, the CCP has had quite successful 5-year plans and has long term plans. But note that such have been there with other capitalist countries, that have been quite successful.
In all, we need cooperation, yet as this is a case of "learning-while-doing", it can be also good that countries adapt various policies as then we can see what have been the best ones. There is no silver bullet: our climate is such a complex maze that we will be learning new things and lessons as we go. Many things that we now look to be good ideas might later be showed to have been disasters.
So the fact that China's kicking our ass in growth means what exactly?
— Xtrix
It means that they changed their socialism to controlled capitalism
The standard line of most people still stuck in capitalist propaganda. So it has to mean that. Why? Because socialism "never works." End of discussion.
They are ruled by the communist party. But magically, the gains they've achieved is "capitalism"?
China, like the United States -- but more so -- directs and intervenes in their economy. Without state intervention, there would be no "capitalism."
There’s plenty of literature on the true history of development: Ha-Joon Chang, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, many others. The fact that from England, to the US, to Europe and Japan and the recent Asian “tigers,” large-scale state intervention and radical interference with markets has been a leading factor in economic development. In the US it’s so extreme that it’s laughable.
Socialist central planning is literally doing away with the market mechanism.
China massively interferes with markets. As does the United States. The former has a communist government, the latter a republican government. China is outpacing the US in GDP, by far -- so that must be capitalism. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.
As I'll say a thousand times: free markets are fantasies. They don't exist. You're simply doing what all capitalist apologists do: when something succeeds, call it capitalism. When it fails, call it socialism. No matter the context or details or history.
What next? Pointing to Venezuela as an example of a "socialist nightmare"? I can hear the same thing on Fox News.
The standard line of most people still stuck in capitalist propaganda. So it has to mean that. Why? Because socialism "never works." End of discussion.
They are ruled by the communist party. But magically, the gains they've achieved is "capitalism"?
The official line is that they have 21st Century Marxism and it works just well as they aren't fixated to dogmatic principles or take Marxism as a religion. Others would say that it is government controlled capitalism as they do use the market mechanism and there is private property.
Yes. China opening up was important. Starting from the Shenzen area opposite to Hong Kong. Actually it was the typical rags to riches story that has happened in many countries.
With socialism, they got their atomic bomb and intercontinental missile, yet then there was the possibility of famine still. Today this isn't so.
Yes, marxism-leninism, stalinism or maoism didn't work so well. They really genuinely sucked. You have even two countries with similar culture, heritage and history that were divided with one part being capitalist and the other socialist. These examples leave nothing in doubt.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 05, 2021 at 15:21#5757190 likes
Now the socialist system did have a lot of committees and so on, yet what was lacking was the huge thing that turns people to behave differently: when they are landowners. Might sound funny, but there's a big truth to this. Let's say a person is working in a student body as a student. He or she has then some incentive as a student on what the body does. Now put him or her to be a landowner and the issue about the use of his or her land. Likely he or she won't take it so lightly. Socialism needed for people to be as devoted to the "common thing", the country, as an individual landowner can be to his or her land. That is a big thing to ask from people and that's why some refer to what the Soviet Union did to it's environment as Ecocide.
Property works yes, but it's not the only thing that can get people to care about something, and it need not be on the level of the individual either. You'd be surprised what sportsfans would do for 'their team', yet there's no property-relation of any kind... there just needs to be some identification. That's maybe easier said than done, sure, but it's possible to have this kind of relation without property.
I'd certainly agree Sovjet-communism didn't get there, there was a sense of everybody knowing that everybody knew that it was a bit of a farce. And I think this applies to some extend to governments of western societies too at this moment. Kings and statesmen of old maybe still had some sense of the country being 'their country', a sense of ownership and the responsibility that comes with that... Now most politicians seem predominately careerists and are mostly only concerned with that.
The basic problem is that people are OK with restrictions, limitations or fees when they aren't personally affected. Yet they can and will go with draconian measures if everybody goes with them. The pandemic response has been a good example of this. My best friend died last year (not of Covid) and in his funeral there was only the priest, his mother and father and one uncle. He had more friends than me and more relatives. Now to argue that the government here could decide that more than five people cannot meet would have sounded quite incredible few years ago. But here there were no complaints about it, perhaps in all two or three small demonstrations have happened in the whole country.
Yet for draconian measures, you need a big catastrophy.
It depends on the particular culture I suppose. Fins probably are more reasonable then most. In the US for instance there was more resistance to relatively non-intrusive measures like wearing a face-mask.
Yet notice that a lot in the environmental standards and environmental protection happens in the US in the state level with California having a big role. If California sets some standards, manufacturers apply to them. You could argue that on the federal level there for example hasn't been a true energy policy or industrial policy, yet the US can do a lot even without the White House getting involved. Don't think that one person, the US President, actually can do much. A lot happens without him too.
Sure states can do a lot, but California probably isn't all that representative for the states of the US, as they have an atypical demographic and culture. But okay maybe we can get there if general culture everywhere shifts along the same lines... it's kind of crossing our fingers though and hoping that we will get there in time.
In all, we need cooperation, yet as this is a case of "learning-while-doing", it can be also good that countries adapt various policies as then we can see what have been the best ones. There is no silver bullet: our climate is such a complex maze that we will be learning new things and lessons as we go. Many things that we now look to be good ideas might later be showed to have been disasters.
I will say sometimes you just got to push something through. The writing of renewables is on the wall, some sectors and political factions are just holding onto something that had its time. It's like the coal-mines in the seventies or eighties that were struggling to survive in my country. We pumped in tons of money in an effort to preserve the industry and the jobs it provided, only to have to shut them down anyway a decade later. If they had the vision to transition earlier by investing in other industries, it would have been better for everybody involved.
There maybe is no one silver-bullet, but there are some no-brainers like transitioning the energy-sector to renewables as fast as possible. I would bet money on countries transitioning early being better off in the long-run.
You'd be surprised what sportsfans would do for 'their team', yet there's no property-relation of any kind... there just needs to be some identification.
Being a fan of a sports team is something that can bind the rich man and the poor man. These kind of issues that both the poor and the rich can both support are unfortunately quite rare. Yet they are extremely essential. One thing that usually works, is patriotism. Assuming the whole country doesn't work at all and simply sucks. Even Stalin as a shrewd politician understood this an made the fight against the Nazi "the Great Patriotic War" for those who ought to have been globalists at heart.
But okay maybe we can get there if general culture everywhere shifts along the same lines... it's kind of crossing our fingers though and hoping that we will get there in time.
A good reference would be then to look at what Texas is doing. If things there change, that is important.
It's like the coal-mines in the seventies or eighties that were struggling to survive in my country. We pumped in tons of money in an effort to preserve the industry and the jobs it provided, only to have to shut them down anyway a decade later. If they had the vision to transition earlier by investing in other industries, it would have been better for everybody involved.
That is the real obstacles for the change needed. People that worry that they will become paupers, that everything will stop and die where they live. The fear for example in the rust belt in the US is real and that fear basically gave us Trump. I think this political clash will obviously grow larger in the future.
For the industry I think reality has dawned on them. Just like BP preaches to it's workers that it now stands for "Beyond Petroleum" the writing is on the wall. Hence the desperation in the old coal mining areas is real and hence the voters there will give their votes to any Trump there is that promises them help.
It's a similar fear of the people who get their income farming in Brazil in the new areas claimed from the forest. They see the outside pressure as literally something stealing their livelyhood. Hence for a populist like Bolsonaro it's easy to choose what strings to pull.
Hence articles which depict the situation in Brazil are like this:
Carlos Rittl, a Brazilian environmentalist who works at Germany’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, said the numbers were “humiliating, shameful and outrageous” – and a clear sign of the damage being done to the environment since Bolsonaro took office in January 2019.
"This is an area a third the size of Belgium – gigantic areas of forest that are being lost simply because under Bolsonaro those who are doing the destroying feel no fear of being punished,” Rittl said.
“Bolsonaro’s great achievement when it comes to the environment has been this tragic destruction of forests which has turned Brazil into perhaps one of the greatest enemies of the global environment and into an international pariah too.”
So does the media report on the things in Brazil. Yet what are the feelings in Brazil among those who support Bolsonaro?
The standard line of most people still stuck in capitalist propaganda. So it has to mean that. Why? Because socialism "never works." End of discussion.
They are ruled by the communist party. But magically, the gains they've achieved is "capitalism"?
— Xtrix
The official line is that they have 21st Century Marxism and it works just well as they aren't fixated to dogmatic principles or take Marxism as a religion. Others would say that it is government controlled capitalism as they do use the market mechanism and there is private property.
"Government controlled capitalism." That's state-capitalism, which is the only capitalism that exists. It's what exists in the United States as well. Government direction and interference on every level. No "free market" fantasies. So to attribute China's gains to "capitalism," despite their government being communist, is saying exactly nothing.
Yes, marxism-leninism, stalinism or maoism didn't work so well.
Actually they worked just fine, by many metrics. They also had plenty of problems -- major ones. The United States has plenty of problems, too.
The most vicious, most brutal, and most lethal of all, of course -- if this is the game we're going to play -- has to be capitalism, by far. So perhaps include that on your list of things that "haven't worked so well."
You have even two countries with similar culture, heritage and history that were divided with one part being capitalist and the other socialist. These examples leave nothing in doubt.
They leave plenty to doubt -- about your depth of analysis.
Again, way not just point to "Venezuela"? Nice and easy, and no need to think. Throwing around terms like "capitalism" and "socialism," when you have no idea what they mean, is pointless. All that has existed is state capitalism, and there are many measures of what's considered successful or not, and many reasons for the successes or failures. If pointing to East/West Germany, calling one capitalist and the other socialist, really settles it for you -- then you're welcome to that.
"Government controlled capitalism." That's state-capitalism, which is the only capitalism that exists. It's what exists in the United States as well. Government direction and interference on every level. No "free market" fantasies.
The government doesn't interfere all the time and everywhere. Housing prices, the prices of taxi cabs and many other prices are usually left alone. The vast majority of companies and corporations are privately owned. The Western Mixed-Capitalism model is really different from China.
There is a difference when you compare China to other countries:
For example in the UK, you do have the occasional partly-owned BP, but otherwise...
The government doesn't interfere all the time and everywhere.
That's like saying the law doesn't interfere all the time and everywhere. That doesn't mean we're lawless. Likewise, if one can point to instances where markets are somehow not influenced by government, that doesn't mean we have "free markets."
Housing prices, the prices of taxi cabs and many other prices are usually left alone.
Sure, and we're "left alone" sometimes too. When driving, and there's no police around -- for example.
Furthermore, there are some instances of "free markets" throughout the world and throughout history. Maybe Egypt or Greece? Even there it's dubious.
When it comes to countries and their governments, however, the state is always involved -- on every level. I can't think of a time in modern history where that isn't true. If you know of one, I'll be happy to look at it.
Take your housing example. The government doesn't "usually" interfere? What's "usually"? Of course they do -- nearly all the time. How? Through the control of interest rates and money supply. Whether and how banks are regulated matters a great deal. Look no further than 2008, not that long ago. Yes, the corporate world -- specifically the financial sector -- had a big responsibility themselves (perhaps a taste a "free markets"?). But it wouldn't have happened without government essentially allowing it.
Regardless, whether housing prices are up or down is very much a matter of fiscal and monetary policy.
The vast majority of companies and corporations are privately owned. The Western Mixed-Capitalism model is really different from China.
Different, not "really different." There's massive state influence here, there's massive state influence there. Both can be "capitalist" or "socialist," depending on what you want to believe.
Actually they worked just fine, by many metrics. They also had plenty of problems -- major ones. The United States has plenty of problems, too.
— Xtrix
Let's start with the famines in the US. How many have there been thanks to US economic policy been inflicted to the American people?
Or we could start with slavery in the US. As capitalist as it gets. Or the huge income inequality. Millions of Americans are in poverty, homeless, hungry or food-insecure (around 35 million). As far as economic growth, China beats us by far in GDP.
It's convenient to highlight the flaws, mistakes, and failures of other countries and ignore our own. To attribute the great Chinese famine to "socialism," but not slavery to capitalism, is an interesting trick -- but not worth taking too seriously.
There's massive state intervention in all "capitalist" societies, and nothing like the free market fantasies that ideologues have dreamt up. Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, usually, but is unique in its employer-employee relationship -- which is a better definition of it. Socialism, likewise, can mean state ownership of production. That's one strand, and one definition. A better one, in my view, is simply democracy at the workplace, where there's no employer-employee dynamic, and where the employees own and run the company democratically, as many co-op models demonstrate. Neither China nor the US has a system which is predominantly socialist, then. What actually exists is state-capitalism -- which is really just capitalists (employers, owners, especially organized in the form of the multinational corporation) more or less controlling the state. In China, one could argue the state has more power than the corporate sector, but the influences are there as well. They're just as capitalist as America, in this respect -- the difference being that the state runs things rather than the multinationals.
Hardly socialism. Or "pure" laissez faire capitalism.
Take your housing example. The government doesn't "usually" interfere? What's "usually"? Of course they do -- nearly all the time. How?
There is a perfect example of this from my own country. The government brought in price controls in the 1970's which basically crushed the rental market and basically made a structural over demand for rental homes. My great aunt remembered being as a land-lord that people were so desperate that they even sent the first monthly payment through mail. In the 1990's if you put an announcement in the paper, you would start getting phone calls right from the morning with 40 to 100 calls daily. The demand was far more than the demand and public housing was only for the most poor or unemployed and basically didn't do anything to counter the demand.
Then the government deregulated the market. No caps for prices, total freedom in the writing of rental agreements. And what happened? Companies sprang up that rented flats and a lot of supply for rental homes appeared. Now if you put an announcement up, you'll get a couple of inquiries. And unlike with the housing prices, the rental prices have gone up only modestly basically with inflation. Suddenly a supply has emerged that wasn't there before. And this is what many don't understand at all from the importance of a market mechanism.
Furthermore, there are some instances of "free markets" throughout the world and throughout history. Maybe Egypt or Greece? Even there it's dubious.
Actually, modern Egypt is the perfect example why people are poor and stay poor in Third World countries: when a normal working family cannot get a loan to buy a house, no wealth is created when they have rent all their life a home. And once when people are poor and stay poor, there isn't that important domestic demand that would create jobs and growth.
And the US got rid of it in the 19th Century. Obviously not an inherent part of capitalism.
Last famines in Western Europe were in Ireland and Finland, actually, in the 19th Century. Yet the Chinese and Russians saw famines in the 20th Century directly because of the implemented socialist programs. The famine because of the Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 30 to 55 million people. North Korea has seen famine in our lifetime in the 1990's and likely even in this Century. What is common to all is the implementation of socialist central planning that really didn't work. Even North Korea has had to veer of from strict socialism. So it's a bit different, really.
As far as economic growth, China beats us by far in GDP.
When you start from far poorer state, naturally growth is far more rapid. Let's remember that the US nominal GDP is larger than China's GDP, even if China has three times more population.
Living basically as north as Alaska is, the collapse of the Gulf stream would have an effect here. "Nicest" outcome would be just hotter summers and colder winters. Oh well, Anchorage isn't so bad.
The ocean current responsible for western Europe’s temperate climate could be at risk of collapse due to global warming, according to new research.
Scientists at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, could have reached a point of “almost complete loss of stability” over the last century. The AMOC is a system of ocean currents that acts like a conveyor belt carrying warm surface water from the tropics to the North Atlantic where it cools and sinks to the lower depths of the ocean. This colder water gradually moves southward several kilometers deep, before warmer ocean temperatures eventually pull it to the surface and the process begins again.
The Gulf Stream, the current of warm water flowing from the tip of Florida across the Atlantic toward Europe, is part of the AMOC and makes western Europe significantly warmer than it would otherwise be. Research has found the AMOC has “two distinct modes of operation” — strong and weak — and if it were to flip from its current strong mode to weak, it could have huge ramifications for the climate.
Lead author Dr. Niklas Boers said it could trigger “a cascade of further transitions” in other key components of the global climate system, such as the Antarctic ice sheets, tropical monsoon systems and the Amazon rainforest.
Take your housing example. The government doesn't "usually" interfere? What's "usually"? Of course they do -- nearly all the time. How?
— Xtrix
There is a perfect example of this from my own country
And this is what many don't understand at all from the importance of a market mechanism.
This is completely irrelevant. It's also anecdotal.
So I'll repeat: government interferes all the time, on every level. There's no denying this. Whether this interference works out well or not is another question.
The "market mechanism" you refer to is more free market fantasy. So while you attribute the so-called successes of deregulation on the housing market, you apparently ignore another rather better example of deregulation: the crash of 2008. Deregulation caused the crash (small government), and then the companies that caused the crisis were bailed out (by big government). That's exactly the point, too. An excellent example of the results of neoliberal policies -- and the false consciousness of those who promote them.
Furthermore, there are some instances of "free markets" throughout the world and throughout history. Maybe Egypt or Greece? Even there it's dubious.
— Xtrix
Actually, modern Egypt
Given the reference to "throughout history," it should be fairly obvious I'm referring to antiquity. Modern Egypt and modern Greece are a different story.
is the perfect example why people are poor and stay poor in Third World countries: when a normal working family cannot get a loan to buy a house, no wealth is created when they have rent all their life a home. And once when people are poor and stay poor, there isn't that important domestic demand that would create jobs and growth.
Yes, and ask why they're poor in the first place, when they were a very wealthy country around the turn of 20th. Because textbook "capitalist" principles were forced upon them. So it's funny you should bring that up.
What is common to all is the implementation of socialist central planning that really didn't work.
It's as much attributable to socialism as it is to capitalism, if one is so inclined to define things that way. China and Russia also had very significant successes, which you will undoubtably ignore -- or will attribute to "capitalism," I suppose.
I'm not interested in defending the policies of China -- but I'm also not inclined to ignore the facts: they have a communist government that controls the market on levels even greater than the United States, and they're dominating us. So much for "communism" leading to nothing but famine and disaster. So then you try to either minimize these facts or else attempt to attribute them to "capitalism" -- which is completely absurd, on every level, even if you don't mean "free market capitalism" (which doesn't exist).
If China is beating us in growth -- shouldn't that mean they're MORE capitalist? Would anyone argue this? Quite a neat trick to pull.
As far as economic growth, China beats us by far in GDP.
— Xtrix
When you start from far poorer state, naturally growth is far more rapid.
China is not poor. They're the second biggest economy in the world. Their growth of 6% a year is more than the 2-3% for the US.
But I see where this is going with you: whatever happens that's good is capitalism, whatever happens that's negative is communism. Or else highlight the failures of the latter while ignoring the successes. So there's no reason in pretending to have a rational discussion. Stick with your dogma.
"Nicest" outcome would be just hotter summers and colder winters.
Yeah, I guess we can all believe what we want to believe. Personally I'd rather listen to the people who know what they're talking about. But that's me.
So I'll repeat: government interferes all the time, on every level. There's no denying this. Whether this interference works out well or not is another question.
If you assume that having rules and legislation is "inteference", then I guess your idea that governments interfere all the time on every level is true.
Yet how typically people understand government interference, there is a huge difference between classic socialist countries and modern mixed economies.
But I see where this is going with you: whatever happens that's good is capitalism, whatever happens that's negative is communism.
Communism hasn't simply not worked. Marxism-Leninism didn't work. Maoism didn't work. Juche-ideology still doesn't work.
Besides, when you disregard the most successful and most popular branch of leftist thought (which is SO typical nowdays), then this is quite irrefutable.
This is completely irrelevant. It's also anecdotal.
— Xtrix
Hardly. Price fixing simply doesn't work. What else is central planning that replaces the market mechanism?
Simply repeating "market mechanism" ad nauseam means absolutely nothing.
Lots of things replace the "market mechanism," as I've stated several times, if by "market mechanism" we essentially mean free markets. The Federal Reserve is the most "central planning" you can get. What they do effects the entire economy in extreme ways. What China does is also "central planning" -- massive involvement in the economy.
Mixed economies is what we have. No free market fantasies.
If you assume that having rules and legislation is "inteference", then I guess your idea that governments interfere all the time on every level is true.
It's not simply regulations, laws, or rules. Although that's significant enough. It's subsidies, tax incentives, tax breaks, government contracts, and bailouts. It's also, of course, monetary policy -- of which the "central" bank is in charge. Where is this elusive "free market" system in this scenario?
Communism hasn't simply not worked. Marxism-Leninism didn't work. Maoism didn't work. Juche-ideology still doesn't work.
Capitalism hasn't simply not worked. Neoliberalism doesn't work. Keynesianism hasn't worked. Etc.
(And to emphasize this air-tight argument, I can point to slavery, frequent economic crashes -- some devastating, income inequality, monopoly, the government bailouts, too big to fail, financialization, outsourcing, worker layoffs, shutting down plants, union busting, hundreds of legal violations and criminal convictions, ...and on and on -- all while ignoring the good that's come of a mixed economic system. Not a great way to argue, but I'll simply continue to mirror what you're doing until you come to understand its absurdity.)
Besides, when you disregard the most successful and most popular branch of leftist thought (which is SO typical nowdays), then this is quite irrefutable.
It's so typical these days that people ignore the most successful/popular branch of leftist thought -- which is what, exactly? By ignoring this leftist thought, it makes the statement "Communism has never worked" irrefutable?
Besides, when you disregard the most successful and most popular branch of leftist thought (which is SO typical nowdays), then this is quite irrefutable.
What is this branch? Where can I get me some? Sounds successful and popular.
ArguingWAristotleTiffAugust 11, 2021 at 14:02#5785930 likes
I have a question for you:
What am I supposed to do with freezer burnt, year old meat that is raw and I don't have a willing human to consume it.
BUT....I was told NOT to just throw it away but absolutely make use of the energy of the meat and not just waste it.
Waste the meat?
Waste the energy contained within the meat?
Waste the means to cook the meat?
I know this sounds absurd on a great deal of levels in my mind but these younger people, who also share the ranch with us are SERIOUS!
I had to talk them back from tossing it out into the desert because it draws more than seed eaters which are all I would really like attract since we have animals as pets.
Suggestions on how to achieve what they are shooting for?
Deleted UserAugust 11, 2021 at 14:08#5785970 likes
This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.
ArguingWAristotleTiffAugust 11, 2021 at 14:11#5786010 likes
Simply repeating "market mechanism" ad nauseam means absolutely nothing.
— Xtrix
And if you don't understand how socialism worked in Soviet Union or China...
I haven't made any claims about how "socialism" worked in either, because it's a ridiculous notion. Completely meaningless until we say what we mean by "socialism." Turns out what you mean by it is very strange indeed, at least for anyone who's familiar with the intellectual tradition, if you equate socialism with the USSR or China.
So (1) what is meant by "socialism," and (2) if socialism is "central planning," then where does socialism end and capitalism begin in China? (Likewise for the United States -- who are in many ways a socialist country as well -- but socialist for the wealthy. for multinational corporations, and for the finance sector.)
I have no idea what you're talking about here.
— Xtrix
Seems so. And that's why you use socialism and communism as synonyms.
No, it has nothing to do with either. A fatuous remark.
I have no idea what you're talking about because it's poorly written. If you wrote better, then I would understand what you mean. Unlike you, who apparently values feigning understanding for some reason, I will admit when I have no idea what you're saying. But I deeply suspect, given this interchange, that the fault is with you. I'm happy to be proven wrong. A comment like the above isn't leading me to lean that way.
Turns out what you mean by it is very strange indeed, at least for anyone who's familiar with the intellectual tradition, if you equate socialism with the USSR or China.
Wow.
Who would equate socialism with the USSR and Communist China (or Cuba, Venezuela or North Korea)? :roll:
Who would equate socialism with the USSR and Communist China (or Cuba, Venezuela or North Korea)?
As I said: those who know very little about the socialist tradition. Kind of like modern usage of “conservative”, or “libertarian.”
If socialism is central planning, then the US has major elements of that— look at the central bank, for example. (To say nothing of fiscal policy, which also interferes on a massive scale.)
China’s GDP growth is far more than ours. Yet your strategy is to either dismiss that or attribute it to capitalism (by which you apparently mean free markets).
This alone should tell you that your concepts aren’t serving you well. In my view, you’re yet another victim of years of indoctrination on this matter. So much so that it seems ludicrous to suggest the USSR and China aren’t in line with mainstream socialist thinking at all (which is true). National socialism had the word right in it— are we convinced that was socialism?
It helps to know the tradition and the varying strands that developed. First and foremost, of course, is to actually read Marx. But then Rocker, Bakunin, Luxemburg, etc. Otherwise — begging your pardon— your understanding of these matters is very superficial.
In my view, you’re yet another victim of years of indoctrination on this matter. So much so that it seems ludicrous to suggest the USSR and China aren’t in line with mainstream socialist thinking at all (which is true).
I think you are living proof of how shallow and nonexistent historical knowledge is and how people pick just what they want to hear. Because I don't think you are trolling. Oh yes, USSR and Communist China weren't mainstream socialist thinking!
First and foremost, of course, is to actually read Marx. But then Rocker, Bakunin, Luxemburg, etc.
Let's do that!
Here's Rosa on the Soviet Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks:
The Russian Revolution represents the most tremendous event to have occurred during the world war. Its outbreak, its unprecedented radicalism and the effect that it continues to exert give the lie to the rhetoric employed zealously by official German social democracy as an ideological cover for German imperialism’s campaign of conquest when this campaign was initiated—i.e. the rhetoric according to which it was the mission of German bayonets to overthrow Russian Czarism and to liberate its oppressed peoples. The revolution in Russia has assumed an enormous scale; its far-reaching effects have convulsed all class relations; it has enveloped all social and economic problems; and it has made consistent progress since the initial stage of the bourgeois republic, such that the overthrow of Czarism remains a mere brief episode and is virtually reduced to a trifling significance. All these circumstances clearly demonstrate that the liberation of Russia was not the work of the war and the military defeat of Czarism, that it was not to be credited to ‘German bayonets in German fists’—contrary to the pledge thus formulated in a leading article in Die Neue Zeit under Kautsky’s editorship. Instead they show that the liberation of Russia had deep roots in Russia itself, and that internally it was fully ripe. The military adventure of German imperialism under the ideological cover provided by German social democracy did not bring about the revolution in Russia—on the contrary, this military adventure initially interrupted the revolution for a period following the latter’s first storm surge in the years from 1911 to 1913, and served to create the most adverse, abnormal conditions for the revolution following its subsequent eruption.
* * *
Lenin’s party was thus the only one in Russia that had a grasp of the true interests of the revolution in this initial period—it was the element which drove the revolution forwards, being in this sense the only party to pursue a socialist politics.
This also explains how the Bolsheviks, who at the beginning of the revolution constituted a minority that was ostracized, slandered and hounded on all sides, were led within the briefest period of time to the forefront of the revolution and were able to rally under their banner all the genuinely popular masses—the urban proletariat, the army, the peasantry—alongside the revolutionary elements within democracy (i.e. the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries).
The actual situation in which the Russian Revolution found itself came down within a few months to the following alternative: victory of the counter-revolution or dictatorship of the proletariat—i.e. Kaledin or Lenin. Such was the objective situation which very soon arises in every revolution once the first intoxication has evaporated; in the Russian case, this situation resulted from those concrete, burning questions—the question of peace and that of land—for which no solution was to be found within the framework of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution.
Here the Russian Revolution has merely confirmed the basic lesson of every great revolution, whose vital law can be formulated as follows: the revolution must either press forward very rapidly and decisively, tearing down all obstacles with an iron hand and setting its goals ever further ahead, or else it will very soon be cast back behind its weaker starting point and crushed by the counter revolution. In revolution there can be no standing still, no running on the spot, no settling for the first goal that happens to be achieved. And those who attempt to apply the homespun wisdoms gleaned from the parliamentary battles of frogs and mice to revolutionary tactics merely demonstrate that the psychology of the revolution and its very vital law are utterly alien to them, and that all historical experience is to them a book with seven seals.
* * *
Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades have fully accomplished all that a party could possibly muster in the hour of revolution in the way of courage, forcefulness of action, revolutionary far-sightedness and consistency. The Bolsheviks evinced the revolutionary honor and cap acity for action that was so entirely lacking in western social democracy. Their October uprising not only actually rescued the Russian Revolution, it also salvaged the honor of international socialism.
Soo...Reply to Xtrix tells us that USSR was "non-mainstream socialism" and we (or I) should read, among others, Rosa Luxembourg. Well, after reading that praise of Lenin and the bolsheviks above from Rosa Luxembourg herself, I think it's obvious that one of us doesn't know history, or what people actually wrote, and in this case it isn't me.
Reply to ssu
You can contradict this with her conclusion to the text if you like, but can't you just let the council communists have their venerable Rosa Luxembourg?
can't you just let the council communists have their venerable Rosa Luxembourg?
I have no problem with that. Besides, people contradicting themselves isn't anything new.
Yet if people start saying that Marxism-Leninism wasn't socialism or mainstream socialism, then I oppose that argument. That is the worst kind of rewriting of history. The next phase would be to argue that the USSR was actually capitalist. And noboby, NOBODY, has tried to implement true Marxist theories into reality.
Of course, with mainstream socialism (in the West) one could argue to be talking about social democracy, not communism. That would have a point. But I don't think that people here are making that argument.
Soo...?Xtrix tells us that USSR was "non-mainstream socialism" and we (or I) should read, among others, Rosa Luxembourg.
You should read Rosa Luxemburg. You haven't so far, and I urge you to.
Apparently you don't understand even what you quoted. You also fail to cite the source (relevant, given the very fluid circumstances of the revolution) -- which is from 1918. Not once is "mainstream socialism" (which is my wording) mentioned -- so that remark is irrelevant, but yes there is a spirit of solidarity -- of course. Lenin endorsed many aspects of mainstream socialism at first-- and that almost immediately changed. (Trump talked a populist game -- so what?)
Where, for example, is the mention of a "labor army" in Luxemburg? What happened to worker control over production? Luxemburg criticized Lenin for this, and the "opportunistic vanguardism" as Chomsky mentions above, and Lenin himself justified his policies as only "temporarily necessary" as a holding action until the real revolution happened in Germany.
But I'm sure you know all that, given your very nuanced views.
Well, after reading that praise of Lenin and the bolsheviks above from Rosa Luxembourg herself, I think it's obvious that one of us doesn't know history, or what people actually wrote, and in this case it isn't me.
No -- it's exactly that.
Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, were not in the mainstream socialist tradition. The mainstream socialists/Marxists advocated for worker control over production. There's none of that in the above mentioned policies.
So I repeat: your view of socialism is a weird one. But very much in line with pop culture and average, mainstream opinion -- which is very superficial, and which is a result of indoctrination in the educational and media systems. Sorry! That's ultimately no real fault of your own, in my view.
Of course, with mainstream socialism (in the West) one could argue to be talking about social democracy, not communism. That would have a point. But I don't think that people here are making that argument.
No, I'm talking about 19th century socialist and Marxist thought, which advocated worker control. Not top-down state control, not socially beneficial state legislation, and certainly not autocratic rule. There were socialists that were statist and anti-statist, for example.
That workers control the factories they work in goes way back. Being their own board of directors. Basically eliminating "owners" and employers. That's the mainstream socialism in the 19th century. I didn't say that was mainstream today. If what's mainstream today is "democratic socialism," then that's a different story.
The core of socialism was understood to be workers control over production. That was the core. That's where you begin, and then you go on to other things. The beginning is control by the workers over production. That's where it begins.
What does this have to do with what the USSR and China? They can call themselves "socialist" or "communist," and maybe they represent some deviation of the mainstream thought, or maybe it's a pretense. But it doesn't matter much when you look at how they run their societies.
Reply to ssu
I hear what you're saying and have even authored a post on it myself, which also devolved unto a debate about Rosa Luxembourg, but you do as a certain disservice when you fail to recognize the distinctions between what I guess that I'll call the "authoritarian" and "libertarian" Left. There's a long and troubled political history of collaboration, persecution, betrayals, conversions, generalized avoidance, and animosity between us. Plenty of people within the libertarian Left have plenty of ideas as to what to do about them, but, I am of a rather exclusive position within the libertarian Left, which is often mistaken for so-called "sectarianism", a very serious problem within the Left that has little to nothing to do with being wholly unwilling to either collaborate or associate with Marxist-Leninists and the like.
Right -- it's hilariously funny for those with a shallow understanding of the socialist tradition and who apparently have never read a word of Marx.
Actually I was taught Marxist economics in the University. Along with mainstream economics, perhaps I should add.
But I guess you never did visited East Germany or the Soviet Union. I had opportunity to do so, even lived for a short time with a Russian family in Moscow during the Gorbachev era. Pretty interesting to compare that experience to the few years I was in the US as a child.
Be just in your fantasies about what "true socialism" is and rewrite history to what you want it to be.
Right -- it's hilariously funny for those with a shallow understanding of the socialist tradition and who apparently have never read a word of Marx.
— Xtrix
Actually I was taught Marxist economics in the University. Along with mainstream economics, perhaps I should add.
They had you read Marx in university? I know you're not in the US, but I can guarantee you didn't go to an American university. Glad to hear.
I had opportunity to do so, even lived for a short time with a Russian family in Moscow during the Gorbachev era. Pretty interesting to compare that experience to the few years I was in the US as a child.
I'm sure Russia was a shithole and the US was much nicer. That would be my guess.
The fact that you think this proves something is exactly what I'm driving at when I mention your indoctrination. But again, indoctrination doesn't mean you're a bad human being, in my view. You're just mistaken. I would fault you for being unwilling to learn and listen, however.
you do as a certain disservice when you fail to recognize the distinctions between what I guess that I'll call the "authoritarian" and "libertarian" Left.
Actually, there is a "libertarian" left. They are the social democrats, parties like the Labour party in the UK. And they have been very successful politically, opposed to the communists in Western democracies.
Perhaps it's one thing to have an academic or philosophical debate about socialism and then have the situation were people actually implement it in reality. Then the question really is, are they OK with any of the "Old" institutions, or is everything out and in with the new. If so, that everything old has to go, what then to do with those who oppose such reform. I think there goes the real divide: not in words, but in actions by with we should make the difference between "authoritarian" and "libertarian".
They had you read Marx in university? I know you're not in the US, but I can guarantee you didn't go to an American university. Glad to hear.
Of course. Something as important as Marxism ought to be naturally taught in an university. And the assistant professor was a Marxist, actually. He made his best effort to teach just what Marx had in his mind. Far better than the brief introduction I got in philosophy at the gymnasium.
I'm sure Russia was a shithole and the US was much nicer.
It wasn't a shithole. Russians as people are really great and friendly. When they have a guest, they really treat you very well. Here people try to be "decent" and just give you something modest in order not to "show off". But they, the Russians, didn't believe at all in the system. I remember that I wanted to go a Lenin museum we walked by in the City Center. I remember the expression of the girl from the family and her reply: "Uuuhh...OK, let's go". Even if she was a pioneer (or something) and could then visit my country.
On the other hand, Seattle was nice in the start of the 1980's.
Reply to ssu
I understand that you have a preference for Social Democracy, which I think is just fine, but you are kind of dismissing distinctions that have been made throughout our political history.
In order to take over the International Workingman's Association, Karl Marx waged a slew of polemical diatribes against the anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin. Such partial demagogy became fully pronounced by one, Vladimir Lenin, in his various diatribes against more or less any of his political opponents, particularly, in this case, the left-wing communists. There was considerable initial support for the so-called "Russian Revolution" on the part of the libertarian Left, but they did, by and large, end up fighting against the Bolsheviks during the latter half of the Russian Civil War. That resulted in their near complete and total elimination from Soviet society during the early stages of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, as well as considerable condemnation from various factions of the libertarian Left abroad. There was the lengthy intellectual dispute, of which France was the center, beginning, perhaps, with Socialism ou Barbarie, a notably anti-Leninist and libertarian socialist organization, and subsuquent quote unquote third camp political philosophies to emerge, all of which contributed to the culmination of the protests in France in May of 1968. Within the former Czechslovakia, there was "Socialism with a Human Face" and Prague Spring. Within the United States, there's a clear history of Anarchist movements, most notably, perhaps, the International Workers of the World. A lot of Anarchists came out against Stalin from the immediate outset. It's not like every faction of the libertarian Left took the long course away from Marxism-Leninism like the French Communist Party.
There are plenty are critiques to make of the libertarian Left, a failure to cope with the history of Marxism-Leninism being one of them, of which the notion that the Soviet Union was "state capitalist" you have cited, but, to simply essentialize all of Anarchism, Socialism, and Communism as necessarily resulting in totalitarianism is fairly unfair. There was the Paris Commune, Republican Spain, and a few libertarian Left communities to have arisen throughout all of human history, and, so, we do kind of get of being perpetrators of humanitarian catastrophes purely by only ever having waged failed revolutions, but there is not a historical instance of humanitarian catastrophe that anywhere near approaches that of other political philosophies.
I was still typing. I don't feel a need to keep debating this, but, that may or may not be possible as @Xtrix's solution to the ecological crisis, like mine, though I'm willing to exit this thread, as they have taken a disliking to me, may involve some sort of alternative to Liberal democracy.
If we want to continue, then I guess another thread may be more correct. Still climate change is worth a thread...even if one has said everything there is to say (at least by one's own thinking).
I'll guess I'll end my remarks with this:
Good summary. But notice that it follows a very distinct line. Because the line is about more like different groups among the communists and the anarchists. I'm not an ardent supporter of social democracy, but I think it has had more impact on our lives than Marxism. Why?
Because there are things like workers rights and the building of the welfare state, like with the government of Clement Attlee creating an extensive system of social welfare (including a National Health Service). Or the Fabian Society in UK. Or the SPD in Germany. Francois Miterrand in France.
That kind of socialism, the social democratic type and not the revolutionary type has had an effect in our own societies.
unenlightenedAugust 12, 2021 at 19:51#5790360 likes
So, no change in the political climate at least.
Arguing about whose political system is more responsible, and what it should be called, and not even addressing the issue is a very clear demonstration of how all your politics have failed and all your philosophies likewise.
Reply to unenlightened
That's only because you fail to see how nonviolent gradualist Anarchism, blind faith in Noam Chomsky, or Social Democracy are all actual solutions to the ecological crisis.
I was still typing. I don't feel a need to keep debating this, but, that may or may not be possible as Xtrix's solution to the ecological crisis, like mine, though I'm willing to exit this thread, as they have taken a disliking to me, may involve some sort of alternative to Liberal democracy.
It’s a disliking with your ideas, perhaps. No one knows each other here. We’re all using screen names after all.
Depends on what you mean by liberal democracy. I’ll be clear as to what I want: democracy though and though, including within corporate governance. As it stands now, we have very limited democracy in the political sphere (structurally and through legislation and court decisions— and continually right up to the present), and when it comes to how corporations are organized and run, literally zero.
I think this is related to climate change, but it’s several steps removed from the more immediate solutions available and so perhaps a stretch to argue it should continue on this thread.
Reply to Xtrix
Right, like, some form of economic democracy, probably somehow coupled with some form of participatory democracy, which it doesn't necessarily have to be, but probably is, all of which, I have no qualms with, but would be a solution beyond Liberal democracy, which is effectively representative democracy.
I think that only gradualist nonviolent Anarchism, a unanimous support the better of the green movements, or both can even completely resolve the ecological crisis. You, I suspect, have a similar postulate.
It's your thread, though, and there is plenty that can be done now, and, so, we don't have to continue to debate this, as it is kind of off-topic.
I agree with everything you said except this. I don’t consider it “mine” — someone had to start a thread on climate change and it happened to be me. But it’s a general repository for discussions.
Reply to Xtrix
Sure, everyone can participate in the thread however, but it is your prompt that everyone responds to. Most people probably just read your original post and then a few on the last few pages. Most of my threads usually devolve unto debates about Anarchism, which I generally agree to, but do kind of feel like people should stay somehow on topic. I'm pretty open to whatever discourse as well, though.
It's interesting to note that the cool and level headed Germans decided to abandon nuclear, while Japan followed suit.
France on the other hand doesn't have much to worry about and exports it's power to the EU.
Oil and gas effectively killed nuclear with hype and batshittery in the US with fear and paranoia.
I sure do hope molten salt new nuclear reactors or Thorium reactors make a comeback, because I don't see hydrogen replacing petroleum or solar satisfying demand in the near future.
Oh, yeah, fusion is always 50 years away, blah blah blah.
Reply to Shawn
Molten salt reactors and Thorium reactors are both still preferable to the nuclear reactors that we have now, particularly because of the decrease in waste and difficulties that arise in producing nuclear bombs from them, but, I kind of feel like, should they have been put into effect, it should have happened in the 1950s.
It seems to me that abandoning nuclear power altogether and investing in greener technologies is the only real way forward.
It seems to me that abandoning nuclear power altogether and investing in greener technologies is the only real way forward.
That's not how it works out in practice in my opinion. 'Green' technology simply cannot compete with nuclear in certain domains that are essential to shifting from fossil fuels. Nuclear pretty much beats green technology on levelized cost of exploitation. A multi-gigawatt nuclear power station will last some 50+ years and requires little maintenance rather than fuel exchange.
Wind is pretty significant in my opinion, yet, still nuclear wins out most of the time.
Try and build a gigawatt solar farm for example or a gigawatt wind farm.
Reply to Shawn
It says in the "100% renewable energy" article on Wikipedia that "supporters of 100% renewable energy do not consider nuclear power as renewable or sustainable due to perceived risks of disasters and high-level waste management, ignoring scientific consensus about these risks being both manageable and comparable with risks from renewable energy sources, and consider carbon capture and storage to have limited safe storage potential", the citation for said consensus being this document, and, so, I don't really know who to trust. I watched Into Eternity awhile ago and that didn't make it seem like nuclear energy wasn't dangerous.
Yeah, we went a certain direction with nuclear in the 50's, and this was a conscious choice for the attainment of weapons grade material. Whilst there are already demonstrated molten salt reactors with a 0% chance of meltdown... It's literally melted down, get it? Bad'tish.
And then there is the chance event of nuclear fuel escaping a nuclear power plant seems so farfetched, yet is taken sooooo seriously, that essentially you negate a positive future for hundreds of millions of people by fear alone.
Reply to Shawn
Well, the proponents of molten salt and Thorium claim that there is no possibility of creating nuclear weapons due to the reactors, but, it is actually just very difficult to. I'm kind of thinking that, where there's a will, there's a way, y'know what I mean?
Being said, what'll probably happen is that we'll transition to nuclear power for electricity, whilst continuing to develop other clean and renewable energy sources. That's, of course, assuming that even those things happen. If they do, molten salt and Thorium reactors would be preferable.
I still think that we ought to be developing technologies currently and seek to move beyond nuclear power eventually, though.
Being said, what'll probably happen is that we'll transition to nuclear power for electricity, whilst continuing to develop other clean and renewable energy sources. That's, of course, assuming that even those things happen. If they do, molten salt and Thorium reactors would be preferable.
I still think that we ought to be developing technologies currently and seek to move beyond nuclear power eventually, though.
With regards to this thought, we are desperately in need of alternate sources for base power that can substitute for existing gas and oil power plants. Wind is a contender; but, the US spends a miniscule amount on wind as it is, while the EU went solidly with wind.
The real contender is fusion, but it's still a far away goal as it is. The only substitute that doesn't need huge investment in storing electricity is still nuclear. For some reason this doesn't get mentioned enough that power actually needs to be replaced, not created out of thin air. Bad'tch, another wind power reference
I tend to be on your side in terms of nuclear. While I appreciate arguments against nuclear power, like the fact that they occasionally explode, like the problems of extracting uranium (or whatever), and the problems of storage -- it's still clean energy in terms of carbon emissions. It should therefore be a big component of future targets. But that'll require, above all, rehabilitating its reputation.
But that'll require, above all, rehabilitating its reputation.
It only took Chernobyl (actually exploded), Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to do it. I tell you there's something psychological about nuclear that commands human irrationality...
But, when you do the research, how many people have actually died from nuclear power?
But, when you do the research, how many people have actually died from nuclear power?
Right. It's extremely rare. But people don't want it in their back yard. I think that's the problem. Understandable, but ultimately mistaken -- when you have a far greater chance of dying in a car accident or in your tub.
It only took Chernobyl (actually exploded), Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to do it. I tell you there's something psychological about nuclear that commands human irrationality...
Well, the opposition to nuclear power was born out of the anti-nuclear movement, originally set forth in favor of disarmament and later led to the creation of a number of environmentalist movements, and, so, you're asking the environmentalist movement to change a basic assumption concerning its original basis. There was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and it was also quite easy to associate nuclear power with the atomic bomb, which is even still kind of a concern.
* A huge fire in Siberia is casting out smoke for 3,000 miles.
* Greece – burning.
* California – burning.
* Oregon – burning.
* Historic flooding in Germany and Belgium.
* Italy just experienced the hottest European day ever.
* July 2021 is the hottest month ever recorded.
* Drought and extreme weather disturbances are cutting food production, increasing hunger and raising food prices worldwide.
* Rising sea levels threaten Miami, New York, Charleston and countless coastal cities around the world in the not-to-distant future.
The above is from a Bernie tweet, but it's a good synopsis. This isn't the world I remember from the 80s and 90s, or even the 2000s. We've wasted 30 years thanks to the same stall tactics the tobacco industry used and which the fossil fuel lobby is now using.
Krugman has two very good articles in the Times worth a read as well:
[quote=Paul Krugman]Of course, these facts won’t change Republican minds. It’s painfully obvious that politicians opposing climate action aren’t arguing in good faith; they’ve effectively decided to block any and all measures to ward off disaster and will use whatever excuses they can find to justify their position.
Why has the G.O.P. become the party of pollution? I used to think that it was mainly about money; in the 2020 election cycle Republicans received 84 percent of political contributions from the oil and gas industry and 96 percent of contributions from coal mining.
And money is surely part of the story. But I now think there’s more to it than that. Like pandemic policy, where the G.O.P. has effectively allied itself with the coronavirus, climate policy has become a front in the culture war; there’s a sense on the right that real men disdain renewable energy and love burning fossil fuels. Look at the dishonest attempts to blame wind farms for Texas blackouts actually caused by freezing pipelines.
In any case, what you need to know is that claims that taking on climate change would be an economic disaster are as much at odds with the evidence as claims that the climate isn’t changing. [/quote]
1 Brother JamesAugust 18, 2021 at 18:55#5813770 likes
Can anyone name one thing in the Creation that does not change? Is not the climate an element of the Creation? Therefore, how is it that a person [other than a "Phobic-D" type personality] would view climate change as unusual? Peace
1 Brother JamesAugust 18, 2021 at 19:09#5813820 likes
"Phobic-D" type personality? A person whose reasoning ability is compromised by one or more intense non-conscious fear(s) deeply repressed in his or her MIND [which is Invisible to the brain], and this phobia is taken-on in early childhood and involves a real or imagined traumatic event. And the self-protection against exposing this bit of trauma to conscious awareness takes precedence over, and automatically influences all of that person's thoughts, thinking and views of life.
What is your meaning of Creation? Because deserting or flooding the most part of the world because of pollution and bad decisions does not seem to be a Creation significant to me but the contrary, we are literally destroying instead of building...
There is no argument about climate change.
12.000 years ago there was an ice age, it has been warming since that time in history!
The purpose of political parties and religion is to divide people, create fear of the other group,
and fundraise.
Can anyone name one thing in the Creation that does not change? Is not the climate an element of the Creation? Therefore, how is it that a person [other than a "Phobic-D" type personality] would view climate change as unusual?
There is no argument about climate change.
12.000 years ago there was an ice age, it has been warming since that time in history!
The purpose of political parties and religion is to divide people, create fear of the other group,
and fundraise.
Interesting that my post would elicit a political response, given by two "recent" members.
Yes, climate is an element of creation. Nuclear weapons are elements of creation. Should we not be cautious about them? Should we not understand the science beyond them, and the severity of the consequences if left unchecked?
The issue is not the change, but the rate of change. Yes, the climate has changed throughout a long history -- 4 billion years or so. But modern human beings have only been around about 200,000. In that time, but especially the last 12,000 years since the invention of farming, CO2 and warming haven't occurred to this degree. When you flash forward a few millennia to when scientific instruments were used deliberately to measure CO2, in the late 1800s, you have a very definite trend. Easy to see:
Interesting that my post would elicit a political response, given by two "recent" members.
I am neither political or a new member.
Your misdirection of the discussion in an effort to continue a fear based non argument
could have only one purpose. Focus tax dollars on research.
There are many scientists that do not agree and denial of funding is the main reason
they are not herd.
Are you aware of the tons of carbon dioxide we produce daily and ship to
food processors, scientists, and others. Nurseries produce co2 to help plants grow.
CLIMATE CHANGE is not an answer to a problem, it is an invitation to divide people
so that you can call the other side STUPID!
For all of the years that we used the word Pollution no one argued that there is no pollution!
In 1983 the bold headlines in the Newspaper read "ICE AGE COMING"
In 1984 "GLOBAL WARMING" 15 years to live if we don't change!!
In 1994 "GLOBAL WARMING" 10 years an we will be beyond hope!!!
In 2004 "CLIMATE CHANGE" 10 years and it's too late!!!!
In 2014 "CLIMATE CHANGE" Yada Yada 10 years..beyond hope.
In 2016 "OBAMA BUYS 38 MILLION HOUSE AT SEA LEVEL"
In 2020 "GLOBAL WARMING" Greta says it's been 2 years and you haven't done anything!!
I'm not taking either side, I'm saying you don't want to solve the problem,
you just want to divide people and take their money!!
You are being political. Climate denial is political. Much like the tobacco industry propaganda, the fossil fuel industry has used social issues to associate with the science in an attempt to discredit it. But the science is clear.
Your denial is political, ultimately, even if you are not a political person. I don't expect you to acknowledge this or agree with it, but it's true.
There are many scientists that do not agree and denial of funding is the main reason
they are not herd.
Actually, climate deniers are better funded that most climatologists, and are heard far more than the vast consensus. This is one of the byproducts of "equal time" and "both-sides" that we often hear.
Scientists who "do not agree" are a minority, but are disproportionately heard and funded -- why? Because fossil fuel companies seek them out. They're usually not climate scientists, either. Plenty of good studies about this.
Have you done any reading on this topic at all? I ask seriously. If not, I have a question: are you willing to learn about it? If not, there's no sense in continuing.
There are not two sides. There's the fact of climate change, and there's denial. If denial is a "side," then you have clearly chosen that side -- based solely on what you've said so far. It appears you've been exposed almost exclusively to denialist media, my guess being conservative media.
I'm saying you don't want to solve the problem,
you just want to divide people and take their money!!
You don't know anything about me. Making a claim like this is absurd.
I have no desire to divide people, and in fact the opposite: we need everyone to solve this problem. Repeating slogans about "taking people's money" does you no credit.
It's not a misdirection at all. It's exactly the point: CO2 has increased to levels not seen in 800,000 years. Temperatures have risen accordingly. The effects are already being seen, as has been predicted for years now. What they are finding out is that the predications were far too optimistic.
It's a hard thing to face, but putting our heads in the sand will do nothing. This problem can be solved, and we have the tools to solve them. Like with the coronavirus, we have solutions. It's up to people and the people they elect to face reality, follow science, and make the right decisions. If the science is rejected in favor of conspiracies and misinformation -- for political reasons -- then this only exacerbates the problem.
You don't know anything about me. Making a claim like this is absurd.
No one disputes climate change!
It is only anthropomorphic that they challenge.
Roy Spencer who designed and launched the equipment for NASA disputes many of the claims.
His equipment could not support these conclusions.
I am 64 and was in college when the articles I quoted came out.
You are an open book, you have no desire to bring people together by insulting them.
And both parties have had 29 years to solve the problem
Have you done any reading on this topic at all? I ask seriously. If not, I have a question: are you willing to learn about it? If not, there's no sense in continuing.
I am 64 and was in college when the articles I quoted came out.
There are no such articles. Your memory is incorrect. What you're citing is a myth often repeated in right-wing media and elsewhere, claiming that scientists in the 70s were warning about a coming ice age. This has been debunked many times. Also, no one was claiming there were only a "12 years" left to solve the climate crisis in the 1980s. Absolutely no one. It was only beginning to be widely understood at a high degree of certainty at that point.
Have you done any reading on this topic at all? I ask seriously. If not, I have a question: are you willing to learn about it? If not, there's no sense in continuing.
— Xtrix
I ran a Nursery from 2000 to 2006
Okay, but that answers neither of my questions. One can run a nursery, or even be a botanist, and still know next to nothing about quantum mechanics, or in this case climate science. So far you've repeated a number of denialist slogans and referred to a well-known climate denier, Roy Spencer. That doesn't tell me you've read much on this topic from the overwhelming majority of climatologists who have studied this all their lives. It's at least worth a minute to see what they have to say, rather than exclusively trust and listen to what you would call "skeptics" (and I would call denialists).
A very famous climate denier and fraud, unfortunately. As has been well documented. So is this the major source of your information about the topic?
If the person (Roy Spencer) who designed, launched, and calibrated the equipment used to
prove Anthropomorphic Climate Change says your conclusions are faulty, you calling him a fraud
is a double edged sword.
PLEASE stop embarrassing yourself.
Reply to Rxspence Well done Rxspence, now we all have to have more than half a page of uncritical un-self-aware stupidity to marr this thread. Can an admin remove these stupid posts please?
Perhaps take your own advice. Roy Spencer, like yourself, is a climate denier— and has also taken money from fossil fuel companies.
There were plenty of scientists who were bought by big tobacco too. This is nothing new. You’re welcome to continue on with your denial if you wish, given your lack of answer to my question generally means you’re unwilling to learn about this topic. So be it.
As wildfires ravage the Mediterranean region, many have asked if such blazes are an inescapable part of global warming or whether steps can be taken to reverse the trend.
I think it is both. But one of the things that tears me off is the fact of how some persons can be so evil. They burn down all the forest and vegetation in a period of year where there is a lot heat and lack or rain. Obviously, the fire spreads so quickly around all the Mediterranean making a completely catastrophe.
What I want to share here is the worrying of notice the existe of such bad persons without ethics and moral. I can't even understand what they see as "fun" burning down trees and destroying the environment. I wish if they are catched by police officers they would receive a heavy sentence.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 20, 2021 at 09:08#5819430 likes
More worrying is the trend of climate change itself and the lack of action to stop it:
- At 1.3 C rise in temperature we are allready experiencing serious adverse effects all over the world.
- The Paris accord has some loose references to 1.5, but really it aims for 2 C maximum rise.
- 2 C maximum rise can only be attained if countries decarbonise rather quickly
- what countries have committed to amounts to nowhere near what is needed to stay under that 2 C
- and even then it's worse because typically countries don't deliver on these commitments and numbers are generally made to look better than they are through some bureaucratic hocuspocus
So if nothing really drastically changes, we are heading over 2 C easily.
The thing that most people don't fully appreciate I think, and I didn't too until recently, is that such a "small" rise in global average temperature is already really bad for a lot of things.
It seems to me that abandoning nuclear power altogether and investing in greener technologies is the only real way forward.
If it was only so. Still, nuclear power is a totally reasonable alternative. What's so bad in France using a lot less fossil fuel based energy production than other countries of it's size. All thanks to an investment in nuclear power.
The likely outcome is that if you ban nuclear power, you will get a lot of promises of investing in greener tech, but actually you have to resort to fossil fuels or otherwise start facing rolling blackouts.
What newspaper? No scientific journal was saying an ice age was coming. This claim has been debunked for years.
Have to say what a meteorologist said about this. He firmly believed that an an ice age is coming and climate change (global warming or the greenhouse effect) is coming too. The first one in perhaps 50 000 to 500 000 years and the other one is happening just now.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 20, 2021 at 12:34#5819840 likes
If it was only so. Still, nuclear power is a totally reasonable alternative. What's so bad in France using a lot less fossil fuel based energy production than other countries of it's size. All thanks to an investment in nuclear power.
While it's true that the risks with nuclear power are not that great if we can assume a stable society and when they are treated with care. But they do need some continuous care and aftercare even after shutdown. Problem is that if society would break down, terrorism or war would become a thing again, this isn't longer all that evident... and the consequences are immense if something does go wrong, unlike with other power sources.
Have to say what a meteorologist said about this. He firmly believed that an an ice age is coming and climate change (global warming or the greenhouse effect) is coming too. The first one in perhaps 50 000 to 500 000 years and the other one is happening just now.
The claims about a coming ice age have been debunked, as I mentioned. This article is a good summary.
The claims about a coming ice age have been debunked
We're presently in an interglacial period of an ice age. The glaciers will come back eventually. They're due to start coming back in the next 500-1000 years, but we'll probably miss the trigger this time. They'll be back in about 40,000 years or so.
Reply to Xtrix generally speaking we have several options. It’s quite interesting to see how each option aligns with people’s belief as to whether we can successfully tackle such a seemingly insurmountable threat to the entirety of humanity.
Option one: the most talked about. Cut emissions, transition to renewable clean energy. There seems to be a race on towards fusion power for obvious reasons - harnessing the power of the sun on our planet will revolutionise the accessibility and abundance of power available to us as a species and its byproduct is helium and other inert and harmless compounds.
Option two: divide and conquer. Outsource to other planets. This is a bit of a “cop-out to me” as it’s more “dilutional” than “solution” based. Simply carry on activity as is but in new domains where resources are available.
Option three: cut demand. Birth control and population decline. Less people less demand. This involves bringing all countries to a first world parity where self actualisation takes precedent over reproduction and large families.
Option four: adapt. This to me is the most likely scenario. If there’s anything humans are good at it is innovating and adapting when our hand is forced and there is simply no other choice than to deal with our problems head on. This doesn’t mean climate change is avoided but rather our culture lifestyle and socioeconomic activity is slowly altered to sustain a quality of life in a changing world.
Option five: do nothing. Ignore the signs and see what happens.
Right now we’re essentially option 4. That’s the problem.
Preparation for more frequent disasters is barely beginning. Every year will see more of these wildfires and extreme temperatures from this point on, until it gets to the point where everyone has to wake up or die.
Rock bottom.
But by that point, we may not have time to turn it around. It may already be too late if we started tomorrow. That’s a hard fact to face, but it’s true. I really wish we weren’t gambling about this.
The coronavirus is an excellent parallel. The distrust in government has spread everywhere: the church, science, journalism, the media, teachers, education generally, advertising and business. They’re all treated with an equally skeptical eye, and that’s a mistake.
A particular consequence is manifested in widespread misinformation about the vaccines, a distrust of vaccinations, the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and even doctors.
What would you expect the outcome to be? Exactly what we’re seeing. Now what if COVID were more deadly? Then that mistrust will not only get them killed, which is sad enough, but many others as well who they infect. That’s happening now, but at a small scale. I can’t imagine what a larger one would look like. But that’s probably coming.
Climate change is slower and even less visible, and yet has the potential to be far more deadly. Far less media coverage, too. We’re gambling with this as well.
But they do need some continuous care and aftercare even after shutdown.
Absolutely. But the when actual alternative is energy production THAT KILLS PEOPLE ALL THE TIME EVERY DAY, it's a no brainer.
Let's take an example. Yes, for ages people and especially women cooked food with open fires and that smell of burning wood is at least to me very nice and calming. For a Finn immediately comes to mind that someone is warming a sauna, which is nice. Yet to cook with an open fire and inhale that smoke daily, many times during the day is simply a health hazard. Far more dangerous one fallout from a Chernobyl accident that happened over 1000km or more away from you.
I remember very well when Chernobyl happened. Just before it happened on Sunday there was a very small demonstration against nuclear power in front of our Parliament, but as nothing happens here actually, the main TV channel news was covering the demonstration. Even the activists were wavering in the effectiveness of their cause.
And then a warning came on the radio and TV. The Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) that supervises radiation and nuclear safety in Finland announced that the radiation levels had risen, yet the level wasn't yet so dangerous to active safety precautions (like shelter inside). Only after that came the announcement that there had been a nuclear accident in Ukraine. Then for the next two weeks, the radiation levels went lower day after day.
And that summer there were far less butterflies than before. Only now (thanks to global warming) there are again a lot of butterflies. This of course isn't a scientific conclusion about the butterflies.
But that's it. The world worst nuclear accident, that put radiation into the atmosphere far more than all the nuclear test done above aground (which is equivalent of Pakistan and India having an all out nuclear war). That's nuclear energy at it's worst. A proper question would be, how many people has nuclear energy killed compared to coal energy?
Problem is that if society would break down, terrorism or war would become a thing again, this isn't longer all that evident... and the consequences are immense if something does go wrong, unlike with other power sources.
Yeah well, notice just what you are referring to. Starting from the fact that I wouldn't be communicating with you @ChatteringMonkey, I guess it wouldn't be our biggest concern then.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 20, 2021 at 21:40#5821680 likes
I'm certainly not prima facie or ideologically against nuclear power,... under stable conditions it does have somewhat of an overblown bad rep because of the few accidents, it's actually reasonably safe it seems.
I think it should be considered as a replacement for fossil fuels, certainly because carbon is the biggest problem right now. Nuclear waste would become a problem long term eventually, but short term that could be managed.
What does give me pause is that nuclear power only has been used in the relatively stable post WWII-period. That kind of stability is historically far from a given. And I think given climate change and other technological and societal challenges that are coming, things could get rough for a while. The numbers for death rate per watts don't capture that eventuality.
The question is do we really want to rely on something that potentially has disastrous consequences if things do go south? Maybe it's still better then the alternative, but it's something to consider I think.
There are about 60 nuclear power plants within 1000km from where I live, so you know, if any of them would meltdown, it probably would be quite bad.
It's at least worth a minute to see what they have to say, rather than exclusively trust and listen to what you would call "skeptics" (and I would call denialists).
By the way, in 1986 I was teaching Exploring Technology and 1996 Science.
This was part of the curriculum and we discussed scientific articles in Class.
What we need to do is to do to those who run the show what they have done to us: We need to harness them like work horses and put them to work for us. Subject them to the "human resources department" like they have done to us. Milk them for all they are worth. Trickle up, not trickle down. Stimulate those who actually do all the work and who will actually spend the stimulus stimulating. If those at the top want it to trickle up, then they can work for it. And work hard and smart for it. Working for the people, instead of the other way around. Pay a god damn tax for crying out loud.
— James Riley
So (if you still have the time to respond, or respond later) just what are you just exactly implying? More transfer payments in taxes? To whom are where? Just who works for whom?
I'm sorry, but I didn't think I was implying anything. I thought I spelled it out pretty clearly.
What does give me pause is that nuclear power only has been used in the relatively stable post WWII-period. That kind of stability is historically far from a given. And I think given climate change and other technological and societal challenges that are coming, things could get rough for a while. The numbers for death rate per watts don't capture that eventuality.
Let's just think here just why nuclear energy is seen as so dangerous while as coal is simply forgotten. If you say that far more, many multiple times more people die because of coal, people just shrug. Why so?
- When people think about nuclear energy, nuclear weapons and Hiroshima and Nagasaki come to mind. With coal or burning wood such thoughts don't come into mind.
- Radiation doesn't smell and cannot be fealt. People usually don't have any idea of what is a dangerous amount of radiation.
- People don't know that there is totally normal radiation in our environment. For example here in the Finnish capital there is so much radioactive Radon gas in the ground that special notice has to be taken in venting underground cellars and storage spaces.
- People can understand that inhaling smoke isn't good. If you inhale too much smoke, you will die. However, we have burnt wood and used coal for example for a really, really, long time.
The question is do we really want to rely on something that potentially has disastrous consequences if things do go south? Maybe it's still better then the alternative, but it's something to consider I think.
Actual alternatives and actual effects have to be what we base our decisions. Not lofty promises.
Running down or banning nuclear power is stupid if and unfortunately when it leaves to more use of fossil fuels. Only in the last years I think finally have renewables become competitive alternatives as the prices have come down.
ChatteringMonkeyAugust 22, 2021 at 11:52#5827900 likes
Australian climate change politics has been a national and international disgrace and embarrassment since about 2010, largely due to the malign influence of mining interests and the reactionary knuckle draggers of the incumbent Conservative party, supported by the reactionary Murdoch press.
Finally the Murdoch media outlets in Australia have been directed to change their editorial tune, which has been vehemently denialist for decades. Scientists welcome the change, but say it’s too little, too late.
On a more positive note, read about the proof-of-concept factory in Iceland built to sponge CO[sup]2[/sup] from the atmosphere. Long way to go, but it’s a start.
Yes. Also, some more good news: Harvard University, after 9 years of student activism, has finally divested their 42 billion dollar endowment from fossil fuels.
Adam McKay tackles climate change. Looks like a decent cast.
AnsiktsburkSeptember 13, 2021 at 08:35#5936150 likes
Trivia : My Scandinavian home country had a national referendum 1980 on whether Nuclear Power was to be allowed here. All the discussions here on the last page, I do remember(Just barely not old enough to actually vote) from the discussions leading up to that referendum. If something, better discussions, since the late 1970's-early 1980´s was a time(at least here) when political agendas were on a low for sexual appeal.
Global Warming was definitely a part of the discussions.
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 09:13#5936290 likes
Let's say climate activists haven't been able to make the case for global warming. Basically, we don't know if climate change is real/not.
Humans pride themselves as great strategists, we've even established a discipline that studies strategizing (game theory) and let's not forget to mention how much we praise good planning whether in the civilian or military sector.
What's the best gameplan for us given that we don't know the truth about climate change? Should we assume climate change is real or should we assume it isn't and act accordingly?
It seems that the whole issue of climate change is a problem in game theory. Go figure.
SoftEdgedWonderSeptember 13, 2021 at 09:15#5936300 likes
Basically, we don't know if climate change is real/not.
— TheMadFool
???? It's VERY real!
I have my doubts. Firstly, is it real? Secondly, have we found its cause, are humans to blame?
That said, my point is, let's give the naysayers their due and meet them halfway by admitting we aren't sure but then they'll have to come up with a strategem to deal with this unknown. Which is the best course of action - assume climate change is real or assume climate change isn't real? Game theoretically speaking.
You have zero reason to doubt climate change, other than the misinformation you've been fed.
:up:
SoftEdgedWonderSeptember 13, 2021 at 09:53#5936460 likes
This year already holds a record. Of forrest fires and floods. Koyaanisqatsi. The Hopi knew already: trays of burning ashes emptied on the world. If the modern lifestyle continues. The first pieces of ash have hit us...
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 09:56#5936490 likes
You have zero reason to doubt climate change, other than the misinformation you've been fed.
6m
I'm not a climate change denier myself but it doesn't seem to enjoy the same level of certainty like, say, the existence of the sun. Nobody denies the latter but a significant number of people, scientists among them, have serious misgivings about the former. The jury's still out, I'm afraid.
Remember (to all members), climate change activists make two claims:
Basically, everything that was predicted by Al Gore’s film Inconvenient Truth in - when was that? 2006? - is happening, but the bad news is, a lot of it is happening faster than was even predicted then.
The scientific principle is exceedingly simple - increasing percentage of CO[sup]2[/sup] in the atmosphere causes it to retain heat more efficiently. It was predicted in the 1960’s - actually there were predictions many years before - and it’s been tracked ever since. 350ppm (parts per million) was a marker that was supposed to be a line in the sand but I think it’s been surpassed already. Sea-level rises, melting of polar ice and glaciers, record-breaking temperatures, enormous wildfires and huge rain events provide abundant testimony of what is happening. It’s one of the reasons that even the climate-change denying Murdoch press in Australia has been forced to change its editorial stance.
I don’t know what ‘the single source of truth’ for climate change is, but there are many authoritative sources such as NASA, the UN, various Climate Councils. But it’s simply bollocks to say that it’s not established or not known, it is beyond reasonable doubt.
for chrissake MF, there is abundant documented evidence with vast scientific consensus. Only a fool would deny it.
I'll only believe in man-induced climate change if the observed global warming (rising temperatures) perfectly matches that predicted based on human-activity-related CO2 emissions.
Evidence: This year, a local supershower of rain stationary felt down in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. These were predicted to occur only in about 20 years!
And look at the floods in the US this year. Or the forrest fires globally.
The polar ice is almost gone.
Average temperature has risen in a short time.
What more do I have to say? Is it just a coincidence?
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 10:28#5936780 likes
Evidence: This year, a local supershower of rain stationary felt down in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. These were predicted to occur only in about 20 years!
And look at the floods in the US this year. Or the forrest fires globally.
The polar ice is almost gone.
Average temperature has risen in a short time.
What more do I have to say? Is it just a coincidence?
I'll only believe in man-induced climate change if the observed global warming (rising temperatures) perfectly matches that predicted based on human-activity-related CO2 emissions.
SoftEdgedWonderSeptember 13, 2021 at 10:33#5936800 likes
I'll only believe in man-induced climate change if the observed global warming (rising temperatures) perfectly matches that predicted based on human-activity-related CO2 emissions.
It doesn't match perfectly. The supershowers were predicted to occur in 20 years. These showers ar people's-activity-induced.
Reply to TheMadFool Does your anus perfectly match predictions made about its throughput, or doesn't it? If if it doesn't, should we believe in your anus?
SoftEdgedWonderSeptember 13, 2021 at 10:37#5936840 likes
Does your anus perfectly match predictions made about its throughput, or doesn't it? If if it doesn't, should we believe in your anus?
Not funny but a good attempt. There's a thread :point: Is Climatology Science? and the condition that I stipulated - the predicted rise in temperatures based off of human-activity-related CO2 emissions should match the observed global warming - is basically a call to climatologists to make their case as scientific as possible, much like how real scientists conduct their business. People can be won over to their side with this simple step and, if they really want to clinch their argument, they should make observable forecasts regarding future temeperatures e.g. they could say, "another x billion metric tons of CO2 will enter the atmosphere from human activity in the next 5 years beginning 2021, expect the global temperature to rise by y degree celsius." We could then ready our thermometers and verify/falsify the claim. Simple.
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 11:04#5936940 likes
Their mistakes can have far-reaching effects, no? Induce mass panic for instance.
That is again simply not true that an error in prediction by a tenth of a degree will have "serious consequences" or "induce mass panic". You're just being silly.
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 12:12#5937070 likes
That is again simply not true that an error in prediction by a tenth of a degree will have "serious consequences" or "induce mass panic". You're just being silly
Straw man. I never mentioned the level of precision although it will matter to the quality of the prediction climatologists make and thus will also decide their credibility.
Come to think of it, I'm fairly confident that scientists should be able to create a CO2-greenhouse effect model in the lab and use it to forecast future global temperature trends. I don't know why they're so reluctant to do so. Smells fishy, don't you think?
I'm fairly confident that scientists should be able to create a CO2-greenhouse effect model in the lab and use it to forecast future global temperature trends. I don't know why they're so reluctant to do so. Smells fishy, don't you think?
But there are dozens such models... What smells fishy to me is that you are not aware of that, and yet you go all judgmental about it... It proves that you do not speak in good faith, that you are lying to yourself. You are trying to find excuses.
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 12:47#5937210 likes
Name some and do they make predictions, have these been verified?
I already 10 years ago, no, even in my teens, made the prediction (like the Hopi) that natural disasters (storms and fires) will increase because of human activity. Reality has confirmed my predictions.
Talk to any gardener. It's in your backyard, if you have one, and if you've paid any attention to it over years.
:100:
As a little boy back in the 60s, I flew at 30k feet. I remember seeing a distinct, bright-line horizon at the edge of the Earth and space. I remember seeing the same thing atop 14ers. No more. Not since the 80s. Not even over the middle of the Pacific. There is a blur, a haze. The horizon is still there, but it's a blur. Now I know the culprit is supposed to be invisible, and it may very well be. But if the visible shit, that light- brown rusty blur, has enveloped the planet, then you can bet the invisible shit has too. The lights at night, from space, are another example. Anyone who thinks the Earth is too big for little old us to trash just doesn't get it.
Aldo Leopold said something to the effect that those with an environmental conscious live in a world of wounds.
We see things. Situational awareness.
TheMadFoolSeptember 13, 2021 at 14:03#5937800 likes
Where's the evidence for climate change? :chin:
— TheMadFool
Talk to any gardener. It's in your backyard, if you have one, and if you've paid any attention to it over years.
I'm not sure how to parse your comment but I know some plant hobbyists, not exactly real gardeners, but I don't recall them complaining about the seasons. I'm curious, what did you have in mind?
But if the visible shit, that light- brown rusty blur, has enveloped the planet, then you can bet the invisible shit has too. The lights at night, from space, are another example. Anyone who thinks the Earth is too big for little old us to trash just doesn't get it.
Very true! How do we convince the powers that are?
James RileySeptember 13, 2021 at 14:10#5937840 likes
You can't fix stupid. You have to wait until Nature fixes it. Like Covid.
I tend to agree. Maybe disaster, natural disaster, has to hit their capital houses firstly. An inconvenient truth (it didn't need a disaster to make the maker of this beautifull and informative documentary see though). Will they ever learn though? Musn't we take the power from them (maybe even gun-wise)?
Deleted UserSeptember 13, 2021 at 14:23#5937930 likes
This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.
James RileySeptember 13, 2021 at 15:01#5938130 likes
Musn't we take the power from them (maybe even gun-wise)?
It might get to that. But we trained up the best on our nickel, and they've gone over to work in the private sector, providing security from the great unwashed. I wonder who will make their shit paper and other things they've grown accustomed to?
James RileySeptember 13, 2021 at 15:02#5938140 likes
I infer that you operate on the basis of out of sight, out of mind, and your eyes are closed. Warmth is moving north and has been for years. Gardeners note earlier planting times and longer growing seasons. Also the northern movement of the limits of the habitats of all kinds of animals and plants. And changes in rainfall. In short, greater and lesser changes in everything. An example, pond hockey through the 1960s, but not now. I'm pretty sure if you took your blinders off, you would astonish yourself at what you've overlooked.
Thanks. I learned something today although I vaguely recall reading it somewhere. :up:
In my defense, the northward migration of plant species only evidences global warming but, climatologists have more work to do, proving that climate change is due to CO2 emissions from human activity. That's why I suggested that they need to do two things:
1. Explain the rise in earth temperatures with the greenhouse effect of (raised) CO2 levels.
2. Make a prediction of how temperatures will rise in (say) the next 10 or 20 years.
James RileySeptember 13, 2021 at 15:27#5938320 likes
What's the best gameplan for us given that we don't know the truth about climate change? Should we assume climate change is real or should we assume it isn't and act accordingly?
We do know the truth about climate change, with as much certainty as we can know about anything. It's now easy to see all around us, and to anyone who can read a graph.
But even if there were a 10% chance of catastrophe, we should still do something about it, yes -- especially given that there's almost no downside.
climatologists have more work to do, proving that climate change is due to CO2 emissions from human activity. That's why I suggested that they need to do two things:
1. Explain the rise in earth temperatures with the greenhouse effect of (raised) CO2 levels.
2. Make a prediction of how temperatures will rise in (say) the next 10 or 20 years.
Unless you've been living in a cave somewhere, this information is readily available. Perhaps you missed the latest IPCC report as well. Made some news a few weeks ago.
CO2 levels and increased average temperature of the earth are very well correlated, with data going back tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Predictions about temperature rise have been made, shown to be accurate, and continue to be made. There are many scenarios taken into account -- business as usual versus a real shift in fossil fuel use, for example.
The evidence is overwhelming. Denial is rampant because it's a difficult thing to accept and because of a massive propaganda campaign from the fossil fuel industry, especially around 2009 -- of which you seem to be a casualty.
James RileySeptember 23, 2021 at 18:22#5994820 likes
Rather than place the burden of proof on climate science, how about we place the burden of proof upon those who do, and propose to do, that which has never been done before? Or post a bond. Or take out insurance. I mean, if you want to pump shit in the air, maybe you first prove there will be no harm?
Furthermore, we apply the experimentally derived decomposition function to a global map of deadwood carbon synthesized from empirical and remote-sensing data, obtaining an estimate of 10.9?±?3.2? petagram of carbon per year released from deadwood globally, with 93?per cent originating from tropical forests. Globally, the net effect of insects may account for 29?per cent of the carbon flux from deadwood, which suggests a functional importance of insects in the decomposition of deadwood and the carbon cycle.
Hi Frank and NOS: Your comments are fundamentally stupid on two counts:
1. The individual human biological contribution of CO2 has been factored into the environmental baseline for 200k years or more (millions of years if you count our predecessors). Thus, there is no new, elective straw being tossed on the camel's back by human exhaust. (Besides, the carbon we exhale is the same carbon that was “inhaled” from the atmosphere by the plants we consume.) Insuring/bonding are for non-baseline activities.
2. Individual action works at cross-purposes. If I save a gallon of gas, I increase supply, lowering price, stimulating demand so NOS can roll coal in his penis truck. The CO2 example works on the same principle. That is why it is necessary for government to regulate everyone under threat of violence.
Now, because I'm magnanimous, and in a tip o' the hat to the Republican misunderstanding of free-market capitalism, I offered the idea of bonding/insuring. You know, so the markets could decide if the industry is FOS when it says their actions are innocuous.
It probably didn't help because you don't know what a non-sequitur is. Government regulating everyone under threat of violence is not a non-sequitur. It's the logical anticipatory argument to the tired libertarian whine about government ultimately relying upon violence or the threat of violence.
You stand corrected. Hope that helps. No? Didn't thinks so. Like I said, frank and your initial comments were fundamentally stupid.
Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is denial, dismissal, or unwarranted doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, or the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions.[3][4][5] Many who deny, dismiss, or hold unwarranted doubt about the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming self-label as "climate change skeptics"] which several scientists have noted is an inaccurate description. Climate change denial can also be implicit when individuals or social groups accept the science but fail to come to terms with it or to translate their acceptance into action. Several social science studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.
James RileySeptember 23, 2021 at 22:34#5995790 likes
One's a climate denier and the other either is one or tries to sound like one. So don't expect too much.
One aids and abets a virus. The other is just your standard, run-of-the-mill, tired old libertarian; you know, the one that sucks down the benefits of society while pretending to be apart from it. I remember some of them in Idaho who made their own license plates and said they were "sovereign." All while driving on our roads we built and paid for. LOL! The cuff links snap the same on all of us.
Unless you've been living in a cave somewhere, this information is readily available. Perhaps you missed the latest IPCC report as well. Made some news a few weeks ago.
CO2 levels and increased average temperature of the earth are very well correlated, with data going back tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Predictions about temperature rise have been made, shown to be accurate, and continue to be made. There are many scenarios taken into account -- business as usual versus a real shift in fossil fuel use, for example.
The evidence is overwhelming. Denial is rampant because it's a difficult thing to accept and because of a massive propaganda campaign from the fossil fuel industry, especially around 2009 -- of which you seem to be a casualty.
I stand corrected then. Nevertheless, in my defense, climatologists, probably because they aren't trained in the scientific method like physicists are, have done a bad job of making their case. Why else is there so much controversy? Compare climate science to physics and consider how the latter has a better reputation than the former.
James RileySeptember 23, 2021 at 23:34#5996100 likes
Climate scientist are as versed in, and likewise use the scientific method just as physicist do. There is very little controversy among the scientists. The controversy surrounds money. Follow the money. You will find Al Gore and Gretta Thunberg have shit for money compared to Exxon, et al. The controversies in physics don't threaten the pocket books of the billionaires.
are, have done a bad job of making their case. Why else is there so much controversy? Compare climate science to physics and consider how the latter has a better reputation than the former.
I mentioned why there’s controversy. The controversy has been manufactured. Just as the “controversy” about smoking and cancer was manufactured by tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies have deliberately created controversy here— and it’s all documented.
I mentioned why there’s controversy. The controversy has been manufactured. Just as the “controversy” about smoking and cancer was manufactured by tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies have deliberately created controversy here— and it’s all documented.
Please don't mention cancer as I (TheMadFool) am a chain smoker. Please don't mention climate change because I (Mother Earth) too am a chain smoker.
Fossil Fuels are basically dead PLANTS & ANIMALS. Hmmm... :chin: Dead plants and animals killing living plants and animals. It's a zombie apocalypse!
China announces no more foreign coal plant building
That doesn't mean the plants will stop burning coal. And of course China is not suspending its own coal plant building program. it is, as you noted, somewhat good news. It might be vanishingly slight good news. Time will tell.
From The NY Times. It’s a list from a number of government departments about ways climate change will threaten the country — from migrations to food shortage to stronger storms. Worth a look.
Until now, human civilization has operated within a narrow, stable band of temperature. Through the burning of fossil fuels, we have now unmoored ourselves from our past, as if we have transplanted ourselves onto another planet. The last time it was hotter than now was at least 125,000 years ago, while the atmosphere has more heat-trapping carbon dioxide in it than any time in the past two million years, perhaps more.
Since 1970, the Earth’s temperature has raced upwards faster than in any comparable period. The oceans have heated up at a rate not seen in at least 11,000 years. “We are conducting an unprecedented experiment with our planet,” said Hayhoe. “The temperature has only moved a few tenths of a degree for us until now, just small wiggles in the road. But now we are hitting a curve we’ve never seen before.”
With photographs and predictions.
People and countries are already affected.
What can be done, if it's not too late ?
Watch programmes - telling us what to buy - electric cars, bamboo toothbrushes, wonky veggies...?
Ah, here we go:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0010k49/shop-well-for-the-planet-series-1-episode-1
Life is busy for mum Alison and dad Alex. They have a packed schedule looking after their two active sons, seven-year-old Arthur and 11-year-old Harrison. With so much going on, trying to go green has never been a priority for them, but the pandemic and lockdown have made them rethink. Now the whole family want to try to help the planet, but they don’t know where to start.
Chris and Jo set up a pop-up shop filled with the family’s main areas of eco-concern and reveal their average carbon footprint. Alison and Alex are shocked to find out how much over the national average they currently are. To turn the family's house green, the team swap their usual cleaning products for homemade versions and eliminate some of their single-use plastic. Jordan and Chris take on committed carnivore Alex and try to convince him that going meat-free a couple of days a week doesn’t have to be painful. Can they turn him around with their simple and quick veg curry?
Melanie and Alison test eco varieties of toilet rolls, but do they stand up next to the regular supermarket options? The great British public put a range of natural deodorants to the test to see if they really do keep you smelling fresh, and another group tickle their tastebuds with Fairtrade chocolate to find out whether price makes a difference when it comes to taste. As a dog owner, Jordan wants to investigate what the impact of our pets is on the planet. He travels to Scotland to meet the owner of an eco-friendly dog food business and find out what his secret ingredient is.
Here's a way out of the climate change - fossil fuel predicament: Invent/develop [math]CO_2[/math] capturing chemical-based devices, attach them to the exhaust pipes and smoke stacks of vehicles and coal plants. That way we can make everyone (Big Oil and climate activists both) happy - we can keep burning oil and coal and there would be no negative effects on the environment/climate.
[quote=www.climate.gov]Human activities have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, amplifying Earth's natural greenhouse effect.[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia]Hypercapnia may happen in the context of an underlying health condition, and symptoms may relate to this condition or directly to the hypercapnia. Specific symptoms attributable to early hypercapnia are dyspnea (breathlessness), headache, confusion and lethargy.[/quote]
Are climate deniers and all others who are in a state of confusion (the whole world basically) suffering from [math]CO_2[/math] poisoning? :chin:
[quote=Wikipedia]The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.[/quote]
ChatteringMonkeyOctober 25, 2021 at 20:34#6117210 likes
Climate projections generally seem to assume the economy, and the rising energy needs that invariably come with that, will just keep on growing... into the 2100 even.
A saving grace - from the perspective of climate change anyway - maybe is that we will probably hit a wall long before that because extracting fossil fuels will become a whole lot more difficult progressively. Carbon emissions will come down, if not because we take the necessary measures, then because of the scarcity of fossil fuels... or because of climate change fueled societal breakdowns.
Either way, society will need to change fundamentally, to adjust to lower energy and resource usage. Renewable energy will never wholly compensate for the loss of the dense and abundant energy fossil fuels provided us... that was a once in an earthlife-time opportunity.
As no (more or less mainstream) political party is even attempting to sell the idea that we will have to do with less, chances are this whole power-down is going to be a messy affair.
I wish nobody harm, but I do welcome this broader societal change even if it's not going to be pretty. Dirt cheap energy did fuel some pretty obscene things, I'm definitely not going to miss those. And if it's inevitable either way, then we can better get it over with.... nothing is more deadening to the spirit than these constant attempts to stitch together and reanimate a diseased and decaying corpse.
COP26 is upcoming, in Glasgow...deserves its own thread, in conjunction with the reconciliation bill.
I like sushiOctober 26, 2021 at 01:42#6118760 likes
@ChatteringMonkey I think the biggest problem is just a simply lack of efficiency. There is too much waste in terms of production and distribution. Sadly these issues are often exacerbated by fears of new technologies. An example of this is the fear of nuclear power (very clean!) that could've already helped to turn the tide a little if nations had started to build next generation reactors a decade ago ... the problem was the cost and public pushback.
Energy use will not decrease (unless poverty increases or population decreases) but efficiency has too either way.
The real hope lies in the scientific models being inaccurate in our favour. It certainly isn't worth gambling with the future and blindly hoping our understanding of how the climate functions is limited enough for us to have made an overestimate when we could just as easily have underestimated the problem.
ChatteringMonkeyOctober 26, 2021 at 06:51#6120160 likes
There's upper physical limits to how much more energy-efficient you can get in the production and distribution of energy. Sure there is still room for improvement there, but not enough I think for renewables to replace fossil fuels entirely. Nuclear power maybe could have gotten us there, but as you said this project should've started decades ago because it takes time.
I used to be more of a techno-optimist, thinking we'll find a way etc... But what I and a lot of people with me didn't and don't really appreciate is how exceptional fossil fuels really were and how much they changed the game. It was literally reserves of stored and compacted solar energy that had been accumulating over millennia, gushing out of the ground... 1 gallon of oil is the energy-equivalent of 5 years of human labor, for a fraction of the price. We were wasteful because we could.
You often hear it's only a matter of political will to convert fully to renewables etc... but has anyone actually seen a plan something other than these high-level abstract calculations that just gloss of particularities of different sectors and industries like say metallurgy, manufacturing etc... How are we generating enough heat with renewables to make steel to name just one thing?
I dunno, I think we won't get there in terms of energy production, if not because of strictly theoretical limitations, then because of practical issues with converting to other energy-sources. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but this seems by far the most likely scenario to me, that we will have to reduce our energy-consumption, which ultimately means a lack of economic growth too because those always have gone together.
The real hope lies in the scientific models being inaccurate in our favour. It certainly isn't worth gambling with the future and blindly hoping our understanding of how the climate functions is limited enough for us to have made an overestimate when we could just as easily have underestimated the problem.
The models are probably pretty accurate in what they do. Problem is that what they do doesn't necessarily tell us a lot about how the real world will evolve. They are basically saying we are just climate scientists, we will bracket/make abstraction of everything other than the physics of climate change... and leave messy and complex things like societal and economic feedbacks to someone else. No way we would have stable societies and growing economies all the way up to some of these projected temperatures.
I like sushiOctober 26, 2021 at 07:17#6120250 likes
There's upper physical limits to how much more energy-efficient you can get in the production and distribution of energy. Sure there is still room for improvement there, but not enough I think for renewables to replace fossil fuels entirely.
I wasn't suggesting replacing all fossil fuels just being more efficient with them. There isn't any realistic scenario (with known tech) atm that would allow every country to stop using fossil fuels. Food production wastes a lot!
Nuclear power maybe could have gotten us there, but as you said this project should've started decades ago because it takes time.
Better late than never. If it turns out the estimates made are more in our favour such actions NOW could actually make a big difference.Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I used to be more of a techno-optimist, thinking we'll find a way etc... But what I and a lot of people with me didn't and don't really appreciate is how exceptional fossil fuels really were and how much they changed the game. It was literally reserves of stored and compacted solar energy that had been accumulating over millennia, gushing out of the ground... 1 gallon of oil is the energy-equivalent of 5 years of human labor, for a fraction of the price. We were wasteful because we could.
Well if we don't look to this as a way to deal with it then we may as well roll over and die. No thanks!
There is a lot to be said for taking advantage of fossil fuels. Mistreat a horse and it dies. Mistreat fossil fuels and it doesn't protest.
You often hear it's only a matter of political will to convert fully to renewables etc... but has anyone actually seen a plan something other than these high-level abstract calculations that just gloss of particularities of different sectors and industries like say metallurgy, manufacturing etc... How are we generating enough heat with renewables to make steel to name just one thing?
I don't think any Western government has the strength to do anything much. China can act instantly due to the political setup whereas Russia appears to be disrupting things as switching to MORE gas is better than using coal - not ideal but 'better'.
I dunno, I think we won't get there in terms of energy production, if not because of strictly theoretical limitations, then because of practical issues with converting to other energy-sources. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but this seems by far the most likely scenario to me, that we will have to reduce our energy-consumption, which ultimately means a lack of economic growth too because those always have gone together.
My point was more or less that if we only used what we really needed (in terms of strict regulations on industry) then we'd use less and growing countries would then adopt these techniques as they'd effectively save them resources. Such things will buy more time if nothing else. In terms of agriculture it would help a huge amount.
More efficiency would probably not translate into a lack of economic growth. I don't see how it would tbh?
The models are probably pretty accurate in what they do. Problem is that what they do doesn't necessarily tell us a lot about how the real world will evolve. They are basically saying we are just climate scientist, we will bracket/make abstraction of everything other than the physics of climate change... and leave messy and complex things like societal and economic feedbacks to someone else. No way we would have stable societies and growing economies all the way up to some of these projected temperatures.
No doubt the models are improving. There are blind spots though in our knowledge and model need constant tweaking. The human factor cannot be factored in. There are many other factors that are uncertain too such as the effect of the Gulf Stream.
I believe there is no reason we cannot. It depends on whether you believe we have decent societies today or not. I don't think so in general but things have turned around a lot over the last century or so. We're still very much in a period of social adjustment.
Note: EU and UK is behind on GM foods still. They are only just starting to ease up on the paranoia. Again, better late than never :)
I like sushiOctober 26, 2021 at 07:20#6120260 likes
I also despair when people belittle what Elon Musk has done and is doing. Pushing scientific knowledge and putting ideas to the test will lead to advances that could help everyone. In terms of research into how to colonize Mars it is obvious that anything we learn do that will help us to manage the situation on Earth (he can do it whereas governments cannot justify such things due to lack of public backing).
ChatteringMonkeyOctober 26, 2021 at 08:00#6120360 likes
My point was more or less that if we only used what we really needed (in terms of strict regulations on industry) then we'd use less and growing countries would then adopt these techniques as they'd effectively save them resources. Such things will buy more time if nothing else. In terms of agriculture it would help a huge amount.
More efficiency would probably not translate into a lack of economic growth. I don't see how it would tbh?
Ok I didn't really get that this was your point. I completely agree with you then, ideally finite fossil fuels that are still left, should be rationed wisely to transition to a post-fossil fuel economy.
More efficient use of fossil fuels itself obviously wouldn't translate into a lack of economic growth, that's right, but more generally the inevitable and gradual depletion of fossil fuels eventually would, it seems to me. A lot of the spectacular economic growth of past centuries was possible only because of abundant and cheap energy.
I'll comment on you latter point in a next post...
ChatteringMonkeyOctober 26, 2021 at 08:45#6120450 likes
I also despair when people belittle what Elon Musk has done and is doing. Pushing scientific knowledge and putting ideas to the test will lead to advances that could help everyone. In terms of research into how to colonize Mars it is obvious that anything we learn do that will help us to manage the situation on Earth (he can do it whereas governments cannot justify such things due to lack of public backing).
How much of it is just dick-measuring and how much of it has any real chance of helping us along is the question here I guess. Sure we probably could do it eventually, colonize Mars, but at what cost right? What's the rationale behind blowing a ton of resources when we could use those same resources with more tangible effects here on earth? Probably prestige is an important factor without which the project wouldn't be done, If I had to guess... then again it's impossible to actually calculate the intangible long-term effects to society at large from projects like these.
Perhaps more fundamentally than some kind of cost-benefit analysis, your deeper ideological convictions will probably determine where you fall on this kind of issue.
Like I said, I used to be more techno-optimist. A historical perspective on energy has really changed this for me because a lot of these ideas of perpetual economic growth, innovation and progress rely heavily on the availability of cheap energy. If you think this is just a short-lived fase in history and not the norm, then how much do these ideas that seem to rely on it still hold up on their own really?
And then there's the more traditional critique of this being the mind-set that got us into trouble in the first place, i.e. humanity standing above and beyond nature and the world, constantly trying to control it. And I think there's something to that critique, in the sense that we do seem to need constant patches upon patches to solve new problems arising from previous solution to older problems etc ad infinitum.
I like sushiOctober 26, 2021 at 08:57#6120470 likes
I completely agree with you then, ideally finite fossil fuels that are still left, should be rationed wisely to transition to a post-fossil fuel economy.
But we cannot expect countries like India to stop using coal (nor will they). This is the big problem.
Sure we probably could do it eventually, colonize Mars, but at what cost right? What's the rationale behind blowing a ton of resources when we could use those same resources with more tangible effects here on earth?
Because the resources are tiny in the bigger picture and the technological advancements could be phenomenal - leading to more applicable ways to combat the problem. Dick measuring or not it doesn't matter if it pushes our limitations in regards to how to survive in hostile environments and figure out a way solutions to dealing with such problems on the way.
And then there's the more traditional critique of this being the mind-set that got us into trouble in the first place, i.e. humanity standing above and beyond nature and the world, constantly trying to control it.
I don't see much distinction between humanity and nature. We've impacted the globe and will continue to do so. That is not 'unnatural' even though some wish to frame this as 'against nature'. We are able to make mistakes and see possible future mistakes (and correct them) whereas other species cannot do this.
We are not going to go extinct nor is it likely human knowledge will just be erased overnight.
No one saw a solution to many problems humanity has faced along the way. That is why they are called problems. Enough people seem to care to make something happen and more are starting to be practical rather than reactionary.
ChatteringMonkeyOctober 26, 2021 at 09:46#6120710 likes
I completely agree with you then, ideally finite fossil fuels that are still left, should be rationed wisely to transition to a post-fossil fuel economy.
— ChatteringMonkey
But we cannot expect countries like India to stop using coal (nor will they). This is the big problem.
Yes if you would look at it historically and from a fairness point of view we would need to almost stop all use of fossil fuels right now to give them some room to grow... this is not going to happen, and so it will be messy.
I don't see much distinction between humanity and nature. We've impacted the globe and will continue to do so. That is not 'unnatural' even though some wish to frame this as 'against nature'. We are able to make mistakes and see possible future mistakes (and correct them) whereas other species cannot do this.
We've impacted the globe disproportionately is the problem. This is hard the look past, humans and domesticated livestock account for 96% of all mammalian biomass nowadays. It creates problems we have to solve ourselves now, problems that 'nature' used to solve by itself.
Prime example is mono-culture agriculture. To get higher yields of a certain crop, mono-culture seemed like a great idea because you can mechanize and automate the whole thing if it is mono and repeatable. But in the process you removed plants :
- that attract predator-species that prey on pests, and you now have to apply pesticides yourself
- that fix and recycle nutrients into the soil, and you now have apply fertilizer yourself
- that retain water, and you now have to irrigate yourself
- that make the whole system resilient, and you lose and have to rebuilt everything if natural disaster strikes
Year after year the land gets worse because ecosystems and soil-life is effectively destroyed because automation (efficiency) demands it, and you progressively need more invested into them to make them suitable for agriculture. All of this is maybe not that big of a problem if you have cheap energy fueled machinery you can keep throwing at the problems as they keep coming.... but as the problems get worse and energy gets more expensive it's doubtful this would be sustainable.
At some point you have to wonder, is this whole way we do things still worth it?
COP26 is upcoming, in Glasgow...deserves its own thread, in conjunction with the reconciliation bill.
Glad you started a separate thread on Cop26.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12028/cop26-in-glasgow-poll
As we all know (I hope), there is a huge conference coming up in Glasgow starting October 31st. This is the most important climate conference since Paris in 2015.
— Xtrix
Unfortunately, not all of us do know.
Here's a go-to guide to see you through COP26, and get you up to speed on what it’s all about and why it’s so important.
TheMadFoolNovember 06, 2021 at 02:50#6174290 likes
The Plant Paradox Of Climate Change
[quote=BBC]Switching to a plant-based diet can help fight climate change, according to a major report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says the West's high consumption of meat and dairy is fuelling global warming.[/quote]
The reason why we're in this mess (climate change) is because we've neglected the plant kingdom (deforestation). One way out of the climate crisis is to eat plants.
:chin:
TheMadFoolNovember 06, 2021 at 03:04#6174300 likes
Human activities have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, amplifying Earth's natural greenhouse effect.
— www.climate.gov
Does hypercapnia (carbon dioxide poisoning) explain the chaos apparent in the world today?
Hypercapnia may happen in the context of an underlying health condition, and symptoms may relate to this condition or directly to the hypercapnia. Specific symptoms attributable to early hypercapnia are dyspnea (breathlessness), headache, confusion and lethargy.
— Wikipedia
Are climate deniers and all others who are in a state of confusion (the whole world basically) suffering from CO2 poisoning? :chin:
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 07:05#6235750 likes
I propose greenification of the Sahara desert (9,200,000 sq. km) and other deserts as an excellent and practical solution to climate change. Build a few irrigation canals, plant trees, and hey presto! Problem solved.
Also, nature seems to be doing exactly that - as global temperatures rise Antarctica, hitherto hostile to plants that make a difference, could become a veritable garden of Eden, covered with lush vegetation stretching for millions of sq. km, enough to offset rising [math]CO_2[/math] levels.
Trust mother nature to solve our/her own problems (for us) is the takeaway.
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 08:02#6235790 likes
When humans and probably other animals fall sick, our body temperature rises aka fever.
Mother nature is sick! She has a fever (global warming)!
Clearly she is a big fan of reproduction, but in all species, not just in one species at the expense of other ones... The key conceptual difference between God and Nature is that the latter is species-neutral while the former is believed to be anthropocentric.
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 09:51#6235920 likes
Clearly she is a big fan of reproduction, but in all species, not just in one species at the expense of other ones... The key conceptual difference between God and Nature is that the latter is species-neutral while the former is believed to be anthropocentric.
[quote=Genesis 1:28] Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and [1]multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.[/quote]
[1] God knew about the exponetial character of population growth!
[quote=Mario Livio]Is God a mathematician?[/quote]
Malthusian Paradox:
[quote=Investopedia]Malthus specifically stated that the human population increases geometrically, while [2]food production increases arithmetically.[/quote]
[2] Food is, at the end of the day, living organisms (wheat, rice, meat, etc.) and all life should be obeying Malthus' exponential law but food increase is an arithmetic progression! :chin:
:chin: The Bitch inexorably breeds and always devours her young (re: Earth's fossil record, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, black holes) – devouring may be the catalyst for breeding – like Medea (cosmic entropy).
The Bitch inexorably breeds and always devours her young (re: Earth's fossil record, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, black holes) – devouring maybe a catalyst for breeding – like Medea (aka "entropy"). Special of the Galactic Day: "The Anthropocene
Interesting! Sad too! :up:
[quote=Neil deGrasse Tyson]The more I look at the universe, just the less convinced I am that something benevolent is going on.[/quote]
I think we need to recalibrate our moral compasses - do away with the notion of good (it's a myth) and just have bad but on a scale. There's no benevolence just different degrees of malevolence and be, well, done with it.
How would mother nature score on such a scale? Did mother nature have a choice?
Reply to TheMadFool Like a cosmic zombie, "Mother Nature" is blind, inexorable and indifferent to Her own regurgitative decomposition; thus, She cannot be either benevolent or malevolent – "morals", after all, are only for us sentient maggots.
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 13:26#6236120 likes
See what I am saying? The Guy used to be pro-human. I wonder if He changed His mind now.
[quote=William Cowper (1773)]God moves in mysterious ways.[/quote]
6 million dead, in the most horrifying of circumstances - starved, experimented on, robbed, worked to death, brutally murdered - and Jews still haven't lost their faith.
What's it gonna take for us to come to our senses?
Like a cosmic zombie, "Mother Nature" is blind and indifferent to Her own regurgitative decomposition; thus, She cannot be either benevolent or malevolent – morals, Fool, are only for (some?) sentient maggots.
Suppose, arguendo, we constitute a committee of experts. We have cracked the problem of artificial consciousness. This committe is tasked with creating a simulation universe for artificial consciousness. We're reasonable people, we are and make only ONE demand - make the simulation universe as good as possible. "Go nuts with everything else," we tell 'em, "just remember to make the universe good."
This is the best of all possible worlds! (Leibniz?)
"Good" for what? "Good" for whom? Other than 'absent negative phenomenologies', does "good" have any objective moral (contra self-serving) meaning? I don't think so.
Good for the resident artificial consciousnesses.
— TheMadFool
How would we (the simulation makers) know that?
If memory serves you did complain, on numerous occasions, about how bad the situation was/is on our beloved planet. You called mother nature a bitch - telling no?
Don't change the subject Answer my last question first.
Not intentional.
Atheists (I'm agnostic) are of the view that there's a problem - the problem of evil - and that, if one extrapolates from there, implies that they've conceived of a better world.
I say I agree - we can, more accurately believe we can, imagine a better world (it goes by many names - heaven, paradise, swarga, a "better" place).
If so, given the above, this is the challenge: Simulate such a world (heaven/paradise/swarga) in cyberspace (we've got a whole bunch of simulated worlds - video games - for helpful hints). My logic is simple: if heaven can be simulated then indeed the problem of evil is legit and on point but if it turns out that paradise simulations always crash and are glitchy, this world we live in is the best of all possible worlds.
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 18:57#6236990 likes
Reply to TheMadFool I'm an (antitheist) atheist and I've made many posts arguing against the PoE. Also, the phrase "this world is the best of all possible worlds" makes no modal sense to me insofar as I'm an actualist (which means I reject 'possibilism' (i.e. possible world semantics) or 'modal realism'). Your 'simulation ad absurdum', Fool, is besides the point, even incoherent as a solution in search of a problem.
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 19:58#6237200 likes
I'm an (antitheist) atheist and I've made many posts arguing against the PoE. Also, the phrase "this world is the best of all possible worlds" makes no modal sense to me insofar as I'm an actualist (which means I reject 'possibilism' (i.e. possible world semantics) or 'modal realism'). Your 'simulation ad absurdum', Fool, is besides the point, even incoherent as a solution in search of a problem
My idea is too simple to be incoherent. My challenge to antitheists/atheists is to get together a team (what kind of experts you pick is at your discretion) and tell 'em to build a virtual universe from scratch that fits the description of heaven/paradise/swarga. Can they do it? Is a simulation of heaven possible? If it is possible then I concede there's a problem of evil but if such isn't possible (say heaven simulations keep crashing i.e. no programming language can support such a world), there is no problem of evil and this world is the best of all possible worlds.
TheMadFoolNovember 24, 2021 at 20:06#6237220 likes
Reply to TheMadFool But i am (we are) not arguing that the PoE is a "problem" (i.e. proof of the nonexistence of g/G), so your "challenge", Fool, is moot. Pay attention:
Pay attention:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/347550 (2 years ago)
If so, will we reach tipping points no matter what policies we enact?
Will we actually turn ourselves into Venus?
If it's not too late, what exactly can we do to contribute to mitigating it?
Is there ANYONE out there who still doesn't consider this the issue of our times?
I think it's too late. Tipping points will (or have been reached) regardless. I don't know about Venus. Maybe not that hot. It is too late, but what we can do is accelerate it to mitigate it. I think that if you bring on the pain, and the end, sooner, there might be something left to work with after the lesson is learned. But the longer the foot-dragging, and the slower the boil, the more we destroy what's left, and the less there will be to work with after the lesson is learned.
The problem is, the pain needs to be felt by those with the power to do something about it. Some people actually need to get Covid, be put on a vent and suffer before they come around. Sometimes they need to see a loved one suffer and die. People are stupid that way. But so long as it affects someone else, Meh. Open up those Arctic shipping lanes so's I can make me some muny!
I consider it the issue of our times for the last 50 years.
Reply to frank Search my post history. I've linked to articles on actualism many times in order to clarify my references in modal-ontology. If as you claim, frank, that actualism entails "hard determinism", then by all means make the case. Assertion alone doesn't says much.
I haven't kept up, so I'm not sure how actualism and determinism relate to climate change.
I read that parts of Europe have an energy problem now, and that all those windmills - predicted to have no more than seven days a year of less than 10% output - have gone 65 days so far.
Where is geothermal? Where is tidal energy? When the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow there's trouble a'brewin.
Where is geothermal? Where is tidal energy? When the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow there's trouble a'brewin.
Geothermal isn't a resource for every place,and so is tidal. They can assist, but basically one has to remember that energy production is and will be determined by demand and supply of today. The fact is that we can have those long term plans, but the economic situation of today has a huge impact of just what actually will happen.
Where are the fossil fuels, you should start with:
The price of coal:
Coal usage has rebounded in the past year, wiping out declines in 2020 and interrupting a decades-long downward trend of use in advanced economies.
The price of oil:
Although for renewables and alternatives it's basically good that fossil fuel prices are high in the long run, what we seem to have is going to be a possible energy crisis. Rolling blackouts in China isn't a great indicator where the energy market is going.
Trying to bounce back from Covid, the world has run headlong into an energy crisis. The last spike of this magnitude popped the 2008 bubble.
Crude oil is up 65% this year to $83 per barrel. Gasoline, above $3 per gallon in most of the country, is more costly than any time since 2014, with inventories at the lowest level in five years.
Meanwhile natural gas, which provides more than 30% of all U.S. electricity and a lot of wintertime heating, has more than doubled this year to $5 per million Btu.
Even coal is exploding, with China and India mining as fast as possible. The price of U.S. coal is up 400% this year to $270 per ton.
The situation is considerably worse in Europe, where electricity prices have quintupled and natgas prices have surged to $30/mm Btu—the energy equivalent of paying $180 for a barrel of oil.
All this is feeding into the inflation loop, pushing up the prices for energy-intensive metals like nickel, steel, silicon. Fertilizer, mostly made from natural gas, has ramped past 2008 record highs to nearly $1,000 a ton, obliterating the $300 to $450/ton range of the past few years. China announced this week it would halt fertilizer exports. Copper, perhaps the most vital raw material in building out a wind and solar industry, is near a record at $4.50 per pound. We’ll have to deal with inflation after surviving the challenge of not freezing to death this winter. “Only some form of government intervention that mandates large-scale power cuts and rationing to certain sectors can curb gas demand and temper gas prices materially this winter,” wrote Amrita Sen of Energy Aspects last week.
Do note that what has happened now has a lot to do with the central banks printing trillions. And that the World has, at least officially, turned away from coal and fossil fuels without thinking where the additional energy needed to replace them will come.
Whom can we blame for this mess? A combination of factors. It starts with central banks persisting with artificially low interest rates and a flood of cheap money despite record levels of consumer spending and a 30% surge in Chinese exports—all of which is straining against pandemic-constricted supply chains. Add to that Russia not flowing nearly as much gas into Europe as expected (perhaps as a passive-aggressive tactic to force approval of Nord Stream 2).
But the roots go deeper. The ESG and carbon divestment craze has so demonized fossil fuels (and nuclear power) that institutional investors and governments have cut them out of portfolios entirely, and have instead been flowing capital to more socially acceptable low-carbon alternatives.
If oil prices go over 100 dollars per barrel, that will put on an handbrake on the global economy and we might be looking at a global economic recession/depression.
TheMadFoolDecember 05, 2021 at 15:41#6280590 likes
Dear ol' Mother Earth aka Gaia is telling us in the sweetest way possible, "help yourself."
[quote=Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)][...]Let’s be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet—or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.[/quote]
Agent SmithDecember 17, 2021 at 14:25#6322030 likes
Are we, by ignoring, glossing over, deprioritizing climate change, committing mass suicide?
Are we, by ignoring, glossing over, deprioritizing climate change, committing mass suicide?
Yes.
unenlightenedDecember 17, 2021 at 17:43#6322550 likes
We found that the mass melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was a major cause of high sea levels during a period known as the Last Interglacial (129,000-116,000 years ago). The extreme ice loss caused more than three metres of average global sea level rise – and worryingly, it took less than 2?C of ocean warming for it to occur..
The Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf is the floating terminus of the Thwaites Glacier, one of the fastest changing glaciers in Antarctica and contributing as much as 4\% of global sea level rise today. This floating ice shelf is stabilized offshore by a marine shoal and acts as a dam to slow the flow of ice off the continent into the ocean. If this floating ice shelf breaks apart, the Thwaites Glacier will accelerate and its contribution to sea level rise will increase by as much as 25\%. Over the last several years, satellite radar imagery shows many new fractures opening up. Similar to a growing crack in the windshield of a car, a slowly growing crack means the windshield is weak and a small bump to the car might cause the windshield to suddenly break apart into hundreds of panes of glass. We have mapped out weaker and stronger areas of the ice shelf and suggest a “zig-zag” pathway the fractures might take through the ice, ultimately leading to break up of the shelf in as little as 5 years, which result in more ice flowing off the continent.
Two near-record melt events occurred in the 2021 melt season for the Greenland Ice Sheet, in late July and in mid-August. During the second event, an unprecedented occurrence of rain at the National Science Foundation’s Summit Station took place, the first to be observed in the satellite era. Overall the melt season was unexceptional, owing to a modest start; however, the mid-August heat wave was both strikingly intense and late in the season by several weeks compared to similar events in the record.
http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/
Most of the sea level rise in recent years is attributed to expansion of seawater due to warming, and small glacier melt. But most of the potential sea level rise (up to 70meters) lie in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. The news is not great.
Back when we were nomadic hunter gatherers, it was easy enough to up sticks and migrate to higher ground. But the logistics of London or NewYork or ... count the number of coastal low-lying Metropoli,... is a lot of sticks to up. Andthen there is all the arable land loss.
There are going to be some climate refugees - and we all hate refugees. There are going to be some food shortages.
This is one factor - sea level. Then there is the heat itself that will make some equatorial regions uninhabitable, the increase in energy in weather systems leading to more extreme events, the inability of vegetation to migrate fast enough to their new preferred climate zone. degradation of ecologies by failure to adapt soil loss to erosion, and there may be some social unrest.
The only truly clean energy of which I'm aware is the passive solar type that is built into my house. Outside ten degrees, inside seventy. Virtually no pollution involved.
The narrative we are being given is that we have a global warming problem and we have to fix that and move on to 2050 and beyond. This narrative is false. We have a constellation of problems and all of them are hitting at the same time and we have to solve them at the same time (as in right now). So yes, it is not likely we will solve all this stuff in time.
1. Fish stocks have collapsed. 1 bn. people in South Asia depend of fish for their livelihood.
2. Agricultural soil is now so depleted there are only 60 harvests left
3. Natural resources are getting scarce
4. Urbanization
5. Pollution
6. etc.
Can we solve all this stuff now before it gets to 1.5 degrees excess warming?
"Tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
In 2019, about 43.1 billion tons of CO2 from human activities were emitted into the atmosphere. This was an all time high, breaking the previous record from 2018. The emissions could form a giant “CO2 cube” measuring 30 km on each side."
Quite a difference.
Look here for the amount thrown in from the start of this year.
It's a fucking fact that the western way has got the globe in a firm grip. And even if all energy that's involved in the mad western way came from the Sun directly and if it was made portable by hydrogen from the sea, and even if all waste would be recycled, the Western Imperative dictates Growth, Progress, and Mastery of Nature. A guaranteed recipe for globally total ellimitative and exterminate annihilation. If we are lucky, a global thermonuclear conflict will come to the rescue. Seems Putin and Biden wanna start the dance. It only takes two to tango!
At least they can use their toys! And as usual, the people and creatures who don't give a damn about the policies of the power get fucked.
As the economy’s energy-starved productive sector atrophied, this corrosive catabolic sector metastasized rapidly. It profits from conflict, crime, and disaster; scarcity, hoarding, and speculation; isolation, desperation, and prejudice; fear, anger, and chaos. We can see catabolism at work in today’s fractured media landscape. Cable and Internet giants manipulate and monetize users. Their algorithms customize and sensationalize content, enticing us to keep clicking and scrolling. Curiosity draws us down rabbit holes that feed our anxieties and prejudices by marketing wild conspiracies, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, crackpot patriotism, and racial hostility. Weapons manufacturers are also well positioned to reap catabolic profits by selling expensive firepower to governments and small arms to terrorists, über patriots, white supremacists, drug gangs, criminals, and a fearful public. The catabolic contractions ahead will drive the demand for their lethal merchandise to record heights.
And on it goes. Now what kind of language is this? Exactly the language George Orwell warned for, in 1946 already, in the context of politics but applicable more than ever: Politics and the English language
‘OK Doomer’ and the Climate Advocates Who Say It’s Not Too Late
A growing chorus of young people is focusing on climate solutions. “‘It’s too late’ means ‘I don’t have to do anything, and the responsibility is off me.’”
Reply to Xtrix I recall us having discussions about whether it would make a relevant difference voting for Trump or Biden. Just wondering, because I'm not taking US laws and politics in this area, has Biden done anything relevant yet?
I mean, honestly, I think it's likely game over. Which does NOT mean that we stop doing something to help alleviate the situation, but the timescale is waaaay too tight compared to the lack of commitment shown by many countries. It's tragic.
Reply to Benkei Biden's tapped the strategic reserve to release a million barrels a day to try and reduce gas prices. We became fracking kings under Obama. The Democrats only pay lip service to environmentalism.
Just wondering, because I'm not taking US laws and politics in this area, has Biden done anything relevant yet?
Think of it this way perhaps. Before Trump, the brakes on fossil fuel had already been tampered with. By the time Biden got in the driving seat, even the steering wheel had been removed.
Think of it this way perhaps. Before Trump, the brakes on fossil fuel had already been tampered with. By the time Biden got in the driving seat, even the steering wheel had been removed.
I've reconciled myself to the fact humans won't prevent the coming climate change. Maybe there'll be a tech miracle that pulls our chestnuts out of the fire, or maybe it won't be as bad as we think it will be.
Reply to RogueAI Thoughts are already turning to the last resort of geoengineering. Putin may save us all with a little timely dose of nuclear winter. :up:
I recall us having discussions about whether it would make a relevant difference voting for Trump or Biden. Just wondering, because I'm not taking US laws and politics in this area, has Biden done anything relevant yet?
Biden has been mostly rhetoric on climate change. But yes, there have been some relevant moves. The appointment of judges is also helpful to climate change.
I still am baffled by the question of whether or not voting against Trump was the right move. I didn't for a moment think that Biden was a good candidate, however, or would do wonders for the climate. He's been about the same as Obama.
But @Xtrix this is not about giving in to despair, per se. It's about looking at the evidence right in front of our face. If the evidence says, we have even less time that previously estimated, and the previous timeline was bad enough, are we just going to lie to ourselves? It's like we have gangrene in our legs, but we won't chop them off because there's still a chance it won't spread or something.
But what I want to stress is that even if we cannot avoid the worse scenario, this doesn't mean we don't try to mitigate the oncoming damages, there has to be stuff we can do to reduce or resist what's coming.
We also have to think, if we do pass the projected deadlines, which seems likely (but not certain - yet), what then? If we give up, despair will creep in. But if we say we've got to keep helping the situation, we'll be called liars for being alarmists.
But what I want to stress is that even if we cannot avoid the worse scenario, this doesn't mean we don't try to mitigate the oncoming damages, there has to be stuff we can do to reduce or resist what's coming.
Despair comes from personal helplessness.
So what we need to be individually is realistic about the possibilities of the whole world coming to its senses and acting cohesively vs the likelihood instead of everything fragmenting and becoming a wretched fight to the last.
The call could go either way, so that is the uncertainty. But we can personally keep our heads up and watching, preparing for the range of most probable outcomes.
In some folk's situations, that might involve joining their countries police/military/security on the assumption that the muscle will look after itself. Or it might involve moving to small and remote communities with the self-sustaining basics and high social capital.
Everyone is capable of making these kinds of calculations of where it is better to be if the worst actually does happen, and where it would also be quite OK to be if it doesn't.
The big mistake is to expect the world at the level of its state political and economic actors not to be doing precisely the same. Everyone will be looking at the charts, weighing up the probabilities, deciding how to position themselves in a complicated game where either we all miraculously cooperate - because that turns out to be easy to do, as with the ozone layer - or we all collapse into a fight over what remains.
Look at the pandemic. Look at the Ukraine. The balance of competition or self-interest vs cooperation or mutual win-win calculations is always going to be in play in how the planet handles its crises.
The Pentagon will be gaming out the scenarios - like whether geoengineering could be a risk worth taking to kick the can down the road a few more decades when fusion power might be a thing.
Or whether a fortress America approach in a rapidly self-depopulating world is the bet to back. Bunker down and let the four horsemen of the Apocalypse take care of the global carbon production problem.
Of course one mustn't over-estimate the capacity of state leaders to see their realities in these kinds of big picture ways. The guys at the top often are quite insulated and emotionally beholden to interest groups - their party, their sponsors, their own rhetoric.
But down among the technocrats, they will be gaming out the scenarios and even making the preparatory moves. That's their job.
Sure. Ukraine might be a little different, but I do think that the global response to the pandemic shows how badly we cooperate with each other. Had we a more rational society, we could have finished with this pandemic in a year or so, not having it still raging on.
But you are correct about having to constantly analyze various complex circumstances changing in real time. As mere individuals, the chances of despair are much, much higher than if decisions are done in a large scale manner, which signals to a bigger "amount" of power that one can use to pressure for some kind of change.
Jesus, I'm fighting my municipality already for 16 weeks to get approval to place solar panels. My house, build in 2012 along with the entire street, is in the zone of historic houses. So they are allowed to limit building permits if required to protect the cultural historic value. But in an exception in the rule, certain streets in the historic centre are exempted due to the year they were build - the 70s. So they employ build year as a proxy for cultural historic value and I thought that would be the end of it. Nevertheless, they refuse a permit. So bloody frustrating.
It will not pass. If Manchin decides to pass something, which has been reported he's interested in doing so piece-meal, it will be devoid of anything meaningful. That's assuming anything passes whatsoever.
Of course, it isn't just Manchin. He's taking the fall on this, and happy to do so, but most of the Democratic party isn't interested in passing anything meaningful for the working/middle class, for the environment, or for really anything that threatens their plutocratic masters' position and power. They made their choice long ago; it was particularly evident in how the DNC effectively, unlike the RNC, beat back the more popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. The rest has mostly been empty lip service and placation to corral his supporters -- and the last year has taken away any doubt whatsoever of this (their vote was against Trump anyway, not for Biden -- which is a crucial distinction).
So the legislation is indeed dead, and the fossil fuel kingpin is largely (but not entirely) to blame. It was already largely watered down, which is what initially made me think that it had a chance of passing (given that the biggest provision was already removed and the price tag came way down). Alas, my own foolishness.
We're wasting with time we don't have, either way. Democrats only nibble around the edges.
I'm thinking now that there are two options before us: (1) the people can give what's called the "extreme" sides of the political spectrum full control over the government -- abolish the filibuster or give supermajorities, etc -- so that we see what truly comes out of either vision (including, unfortunately, the Republican party). This is probably spells doom, and wastes 2-6 years. But at least the citizens will get a real sense of what it looks like, as they do in state governments dominated by one party or the other.
Or (2) is that we wait for a much-needed cultural and economic upheaval. 9/11 obviously didn't cut it. 2008 financial crisis and recession came close, but mostly that just got us Trump. The coronavirus obviously didn't bring anyone together, although it has shifted people around in their jobs, perhaps increased remote work, and apparently has energized, to a degree, the labor movement (Starbucks, Amazon, all the strikes taking place). But none of it is enough. We need a real crash and a real depression. Things need to get far worse, evidently -- because the 80% of the American populace is still convinced that there are "two sides."
What I'm waiting for is the massive crash of the stock market -- which I have little doubt will happen. Watch what the Fed does.
Unfortunately, if this does happen it will most likely bring the Republicans in power -- and possibly Trump again. But perhaps that's what's necessary to awaken the large movement (bordering on revolution if not outright revolution) that's needed, at this point.
Beyond that, I see no way we avoided future catastrophe.
(BTW, I don't want to minimize the huge success of the people organizing in unions and going on strikes, etc. -- the concession of Shultz to freeze $20 billion in stock buybacks is a MAJOR victory for labor, and shouldn't be dismissed.)
Reply to Xtrix People have had 50 years to awaken. It's not going to happen, mate. As I expected when I told you "same difference".
What you need to do, being aware, is starting on that back up plan. Find land at least 30 meters above sea level, make it energy neutral with enough land to grow enough food and enough water nearby or enough rainfall to capture it. Study some agriculture and teach your kids, if you have them. If you don't have them, don't get them unless you know your backup plan is going to work. Preferably do it with a group of people so you can specialise in various skills.
People have had 50 years to awaken. It's not going to happen, mate.
Maybe not. But the way I see it, if that's true -- it's hopeless anyway. But since that's not set in stone, I will keep trying.
By the way, I see it being closer to 40 years, from around the beginning of the Reagan administration. That's still a long time. But many in the 1930s probably felt the same way -- that no one will organize. We face our own set of obstacles now, but it wasn't that long ago that things were better. I think we began to see the end of the neoliberal era in 2008. There are signs of it everywhere. We see it in the shift to "stakeholder capitalism" to the election of several progressives to the widespread labor strikes.
I think it's all becoming a "supersaturated solution." I think the 'awakening' is right in front of our noses. I think Bernie tapped into it.
Reply to Xtrix
To really halt excess CO2 production instead of just slowing it down would require some sort of global covenant: a new global religion, basically.
It could happen, but until then I think you're right that you can help by having faith in mankind. With that faith you influence the world around you in all sorts of small ways. You send out a certain message along the webs of communication extending around the globe.
That's the effect of faith: to "be the change you wish to see in the world".
To really halt excess CO2 production instead of just slowing it down would require some sort of global covenant: a new global religion, basically.
There's truth to this. But I would make two points: (1), I view capitalism as the real religion, and a particular variant of it seems to be dominating the minds of the plutocracy -- whether or not this can change, I don't know. But I wouldn't say it's global. (2) This religious conversion is only necessary if people continue not to organize/act collectively.
On a positive note: climate change has been reported far more than in the past, the country seems to be moving a little in prioritizing it (according to polls), and there's a significant movement compared to even 10 years ago. Plus, younger people seem much more likely to care about this crisis, for good reason. Big business, including fossil fuel companies, have moved from outright denial to admitting we have to do something -- i.e., the delay-as-long-as-possible phase. But that's still movement. Renewable energy and clean technology has advantaged and become much cheaper, etc.
This would all make me very hopeful...if it were 1988. But since we've essentially wasted 34 years, most of the warming is locked in. We have only some idea of how destructive 1.5 to 2.5 degrees warming will be -- but given the level of destruction we've already seen (and are seeing) at just 1.2 C, it's likely to be hellish.
Fires and floods seem to be focusing folk's attention. One might be hopeful.
Yes...and if we had another 20/30 years of runway, this would be good. But much like the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry will fight to the bitter end to burn their products -- and that means the politicians they control and the misinformation they put out (now greenwashing) will continue to lose us time. By the time it becomes a non-partisan issue, there likely won't be time left.
We can put our hopes into carbon-removing technology, but that doesn't seem very promising.
(1), I view capitalism as the real religion, and a particular variant of it seems to be dominating the minds of the plutocracy -- whether or not this can change, I don't know.
It's changing in Russia right now. They're transitioning to a command economy. They will continue to export coal and gas because they're dependent on the proceeds.
Not yet. There's still a huge amount of coal left. It would take America about 200 years to burn all its own coal. That's what we need the Covenant for.
Reply to Xtrix The intransigence of the Liberal government dow nunder is potentially, insipently, leading them to be bypassed. States and electricity companies have been forced to make their own way by a lack of leadership, a lack of direction. Solar panels on roofs are more common than anywhere else on earth, and electricity suppliers have realised that there is no future in coal, closing down generators against the wishes of the government. Those same companies are facing hostile takeover bids from investors with greener ideas.
In this way conservative incompetence has undermined itself. Let us all rejoice in the demise of neoliberalism! Destroyed by the free market!
Maybe there'll be a tech miracle that pulls our chestnuts out of the fire, or maybe it won't be as bad as we think it will be.
The tech miracle would be commercial fusion. With cheap, abundant energy you can do a lot. Such as large-scale carbon capture and desalinization.
As for how bad it will be, the latest IPCC report has us likely averting the worst case emission scenarios, being on pace for somewhere between 2.7 to 4 degrees warming. That's down from previous estimates, so we can likely expect the range to keep falling somewhat as renewables and battery tech continue to improve. The climate scientists I've seen debate online don't think that sort of range is likely to be an existential threat. It will be a serious challenge for global civilization and far from ideal, but not one that will bring it down, unless there are tipping points in those temperature ranges that put us on a hot earth trajectory. Or we have WW3. Which we could still have before then for other reasons. No doubt climate change will strain certain relations.
The tech miracle would be commercial fusion. With cheap, abundant energy you can do a lot. Such as large-scale carbon capture and desalinization.
Too late for that. By the time this is effectively available, we will have breezed past the moment we could've avoided 1.5 degrees.
unenlightenedApril 09, 2022 at 18:48#6797250 likes
So the solution to too much energy in the global climate is a source of abundant cheap energy? Place getting too hot? let's make some tiny little suns to power our air-conditioning. That'll work.
Too late for that. By the time this is effectively available, we will have breezed past the moment we could've avoided 1.5 degrees.
But limited it to say 2 degrees is better than 2.7+ degrees. 1.5 isn't happening. At least not by 2050. Maybe with serious carbon capture and decarbonization by the end of the century.
So the solution to too much energy in the global climate is a source of abundant cheap energy? Place getting too hot? let's make some tiny little suns to power our air-conditioning. That'll work.
Nuclear energy doesn't trap heat in the atmosphere. It's no more of a concern for climate change than putting up a shit ton of solar panels.
unenlightenedApril 09, 2022 at 19:58#6797350 likes
Nuclear energy doesn't trap heat in the atmosphere. It's no more of a concern for climate change than putting up a shit ton of solar panels.
Some more, not no more. Solar panels absorb energy they do not add any energy. Whereas suns, big and little, add energy. They don't add to the greenhouse effect. But the very idea that we can continue our current way of life with such a technological fix is a pernicious lie. We already have millions of climate refugees, and we are already set to lose a great many low-lying cities and a large portion of our arable land. This much is already unavoidable, and dreams of cheap energy are what brought us to this point.
We already have millions of climate refugees, and we are already set to lose a great many low-lying cities and a large portion of our arable land. This much is already unavoidable, and dreams of cheap energy are what brought us to this point.
If we could limit the change to that, it would be a win for humanity. The high projection for change is about 8 degrees.
Another unproven technology. We can certainly hope but it's no replacement for actual policy doing what needs to be done with technologies we currently have and fully understand. If halfway through we are handed a tool that makes it easier, that's great but otherwise it has indeed just been an excuse not to do anything.
Mining uranium is incredibly carbon dioxide intensive. Also another fuel that isn't unlimited as well. Not a definitive solution and avoids the necessity to focus on energy efficiency first and replacing energy generation systems.
What if the climate hasn't changed, but our instruments and our bodies have?
So, the temperature could be actually a comfortable 25[sup]o[/sup] C but it feels like 45[sup]o[/sup] and mercury (the element, not the planet) has become more sensitive to temperature because of which it reads 45[sup]o[/sup] C instead of the real 25[sup]o[/sup]. The same goes for other living organisms and other thermosensitive substances.
Contaminated mercury could result in erroneous thermometer readings, oui? Conspiracy theory! :lol:
unenlightenedApril 10, 2022 at 08:12#6798900 likes
It ain't going to happen. Not soon enough , if ever, and it doesn't address the huge environmental problems at all. I'm unsurprised, but disappointed that the same nonsense is being spouted here as we have been hearing for 40 years or so.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-not-the-main-driver-of-madagascar-food-crisis-scientists-find But it is an additional, back-seat driver. Deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, uncontrolled mining and logging, are all also driving in the same direction, and as people get more desperate, the over-exploitation of whatever resources remain gets worse.
Reply to Benkei Yes. Nuclear is another excuse to do nothing and carry on as before. Personally, I have no wish to go back to the stone age, but that is where current plans would take us if only they would be implemented. As they are not being implemented at all, the 8 degree rise is starting to look more likely.
Covid has demonstrated how easy it is to reduce fuel usage by simply not flying and driving so much. Onshore wind is the cheapest source of energy, can be built locally and supplemented with tidal, solar, river, geothermal, etc depending on local availability.
But agriculture is heavily dependent on energetically produced fertilisers, and becomes more so as intensive farming destroys the soil. We need to eat less meat and dairy to reduce the pressure to deforest to make room for cattle, and allow less intensive methods that allow carbon capture by the soil. But this will not happen by the action of the invisible hand of capitalism. The invisible hand has shown already that it does not in the least mind exploiting resources to the limit of profit and leaving a wasteland. Slash and burn economics is rife.
Global warming is one aspect of a larger man-made environmental catastrophe created by the industrial revolution, because capitalism has never been properly regulated and forced to account for its environmental costs, which have been off-loaded onto 'the commons' in the form of pollution and environment destruction. Let's call this 'freedom', and wave a flag.
Let's get down to the brass tacks, shall we? We know we have a problem (climate change), a huge one as a matter of fact. We know the aetiology ([math]CO_2[/math]) as well! The solution, however, isn't as straight forward as we'd have hoped, oui? We're almost completely dependent on fossil fuel for our energy. So, the hard choice we've got to make: Freeze or Fry! :grin:
It ain't going to happen. Not soon enough , if ever, and it doesn't address the huge environmental problems at all. I'm unsurprised, but disappointed that the same nonsense is being spouted here as we have been hearing for 40 years or so.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-not-the-main-driver-of-madagascar-food-crisis-scientists-find But it is an additional, back-seat driver. Deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, uncontrolled mining and logging, are all also driving in the same direction, and as people get more desperate, the over-exploitation of whatever resources remain gets worse.
Article:These types of tests promise to lead to significant amounts of energy in a few decades since nuclear fusion is so vitally important.
How many is a few? At a minimum 20 years then. Much too late. Climate action needs to happen today and considering the rich west is not willing to give up its way of life, they will continue to squabble about how to account for carbondioxide and make sure there are enough loopholes that on paper they reach their target but in reality don't do anything.
Because that's the foreseeable future, agreement on an accounting method in the next 2—3 years and then another 5 years to conclude the rules aren't working (which is false, they will do exactly what they want then to do, allow them to continue to do what they want). It's the biggest greenwashing scam to come.
How many is a few? At a minimum 20 years then. Much too late. Climate action needs to happen today and considering the rich west is not willing to give up its way of life, they will continue to squabble about how to account for carbondioxide and make sure there are enough loopholes that on paper they reach their target but in reality don't do anything.
I agree it's too late to aim for zero anthropogenic global warming. I mentioned before that a significant chunk of accessible hydrocarbons have yet to be burned, and per David Archer, a long range climate modeler, it's what we do with those reserves that decides how bad it will be over the course of the next 10,000 years.
My focus is more on how that will play out. The course of the next few centuries is already set.
My focus is more on how that will play out. The course of the next few centuries is already set.
The way things are going and how the US and Europe are preparing for the next round of bipolar struggle everything might be moot. But Kudos for looking even further, I don't plan beyond my kids' expected death, somewhere around 2100.
Let's get down to the brass tacks, shall we? We know we have a problem (climate change), a huge one as a matter of fact. We know the aetiology (CO2
C
O
2
) as well! The solution, however, isn't as straight forward as we'd have hoped, oui? We're almost completely dependent on fossil fuel for our energy. So, the hard choice we've got to make: Freeze or Fry! :grin:
And people, groups, nations, world haggle with that.
The way things are going and how the US and Europe are preparing for the next round of bipolar struggle everything might be moot. But Kudos for looking even further, I don't plan beyond my kids' expected death, somewhere around 2100.
I've been interested in futurology for a while. In a way it's related to trying to understand history. :nerd:
"Carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before—this is not new," said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory - a research organization for international climate scientists providing data for policymakers attempting to address the causes and impacts of climate change. "We have known about this for half a century, and have failed to do anything meaningful about it. What's it going to take for us to wake up?"
https://apple.news/AkyZDh_aSSBWPbTZv37pusQ
With the war in Ukraine as cover, the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration are pumping more than ever. It’s almost certain that this month, June, there will be a major Supreme Court decision limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 in West Virginia v. EPA. Lastly, nothing has or will happen in congress, thanks largely to one guy with the most funding from big oil.
All this despite the latest IPCC report, global awareness and desire for action (according to polls, including the US), and evidence all around us — from increased wildfires and draughts to floods, melting icecaps, and rising sea levels.
So, since a minority rules the US, and since they use the idea of “states rights” as cover to legally dismantle any action on a national level (including abortion) through the Supreme Court and have all but incapacitated congress, perhaps this is even more the time to realize that politics is indeed local. That not only is there little we can do about national politics, but that focusing on your state and local level is the way to go and always has been anyway.
I wonder if we see more grassroots participation in this decade?
I was talking to an ancient old woman, and I was asking how they dealt with heat in the summer when she was young. She first said it's hotter now than it was. That's actually not true where she lives. The globe has gotten hotter in the last 100 years, but her area hasn't tracked that change.
But then she said that nobody thought much about it. She said if you get used to heat and humidity, you don't notice it as much. She said people use air conditioning because they don't get used to it, so they think they need the cooler temperature. But also, they had shade trees over their houses and that keeps the inside of the house cooler.
I asked if her mother ever complained about the heat, and she chuckled and said her mother never complained about anything.
So that's one facet of the lifestyle many of us have now. We think we need air conditioning. Another issue is food. If you walk through a grocery store in the US, you'll see a totally unnecessary food extravaganza. The quantity of extruded carbohydrates people eat promotes obesity and diabetes. They eat it because it's easy to get and again, they think they need it.
In the wild, humans don't have to eat everyday. You can go a few days without food, and if you do, you'll notice the hunger goes away on the third day. This is normal. Eating giant amounts of calories constantly is not.
Another factor is travel. Cities are laid out to accommodate cars, so people really can't do their thing on a bike.
I mention these things just to call attention to the hidden dimension of CO² emissions: the wildly extravagant lives we lead, thinking all the while that this is just average.
mention these things just to call attention to the hidden dimension of CO² emissions: the wildly extravagant lives we lead, thinking all the while that this is just average.
Yes, the United States is the leader of emissions and is absurd on waste. They’re also the most powerful force against climate action.
Ridiculously stupid— but that’s the state of the world.
Reply to Tate I'm probably not as ancient as your old woman, but when I was growing up (memories from the early 1950s) we did not have air conditioning or even window fans. We were not wretched from heat. Maybe it wasn't as hot back then. There were lots of shade trees in the small town.
We went swimming in a meandering stream which was shared by cattle. Not very clean. We didn't get sick.
They don't have to eat every day, but I bet we have preferred to eat every day for a very long time.
No doubt about it, though, most people in the industrialized world are eating too much of the wrong kind of food. A supermarket is a smorgasbord of not very healthy food. Why? Because food manufacturers are not public health agencies. Besides, a lot of people like the crap that is on offer. The crap also comes in interesting novel forms which people also like. There are one or two items of crap that I like to eat--crunchy, chewy, salty, spicy, greasy, sweet creations from the laboratories of Conagra and Multifoods. Carrots and cabbage are healthier than Doritos and Hagen Daz, but one can stand only so much whole grain, NGO, organic, high-fructose-free minimally processed whole earth clunky goodness. .
I'm probably not as ancient as your old woman, but when I was growing up (memories from the early 1950s) we did not have air conditioning or even window fans. We were not wretched from heat. Maybe it wasn't as hot back then. There were lots of shade trees in the small town.
We went swimming in a meandering stream which was shared by cattle. Not very clean. We didn't get sick.
Do older people have a harder time dealing with heat? Just wondering.
I think we would all adapt pretty quickly if air conditioning disappeared. It's just that no one is going to give it up until they have to.
We need a new energy source. That's the only solution from where we are now. Do you agree?
Do older people have a harder time dealing with heat? Just wondering.
In general, yes. We don't respond as quickly to sudden changes in temperature as younger people. Medicines and medical conditions may make it more difficult for agéd bodies to lose heat. Cognitive decline can interfere with an individual's taking care of themselves, so that they may not be able to execute a cooling strategy.
A fan in a hot apartment won't cool a person very much. If humidity and temperature are high enough, (90º - 95º F, with very high humidity) sweating no longer works as a cooling mechanism and heat stroke and death may follow. (This is true for everyone, not just old people)
Yes, people have gotten along without air conditioning in very hot conditions. This is especially true where temperatures are high while humidity is low. Sweating in hot - arid environments works quite well. Urban environments present extra problems. Apartment buildings without AC can turn into solar ovens, and the surrounding paved environment aggravates the problem.
Minnesota had a severe hot drought in the summer of 1988. During some nights the temperature remained in the upper 90s. Because of the drought, the hot air was very dry and thus the heat was much more tolerable. I was doing street outreach in Minneapolis at that time, and spent a lot of time on bicycle, without suffering. The nights, on the other hand, were wonderful -- warm, dry, bug free, clear skies. It was hell for agriculture but great for some of us.
During the 2003 heatwave in Europe, nearly 70,000 people died from heat, many of them elderly Many of the elderly's families were away on vacation, and no one was doing wellness checks on the old folks. Most of the dead lived in apartments without AC. American cities have also seen spikes in heat related deaths.
The solution isn't to put AC in every apartment. Most heat-waves are of relatively short duration. Rather, the solution is to make sure vulnerable people have a way of getting to cooling centers so their core temperatures don't reach fatal levels.
The US is the largest threat to human existence on the planet at this point. Nothing about Russia or China or Iran or Iraq or all of them combined even comes close. The entire country is "conservatives" right now, every single last one of them.
I saw this coming back in November. So I’m not at all surprised. All the more reason to fight back in the same way the right has for the last few decades: state and local level politics. We’ve largely lost National power for a while now.
The Supreme Court has said it requires Congress to speak clearly in the interest of democratic accountability. In the climate decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the people’s elected representatives should make decisions where the consequences are enormous.
“A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body,” he wrote.
But the net effect of that approach was to enhance the Supreme Court’s own authority.
“They’re saying that they’re doing it for democracy purposes, but the fact is that they’re increasing their own power,” Professor Lazarus said.
Were democracy working, Professor Huber said, there would be new federal legislation to address the threat to the planet.
“If we had a Congress that at all reflected what the median American voter wanted,” he said, “we’d have relatively aggressive climate action.”
Exactly. This goes back, once again, to how important the (original) 350 billion reconciliation bill was last year. Despite having both chambers of congress and the executive, nothing has happened on climate change. The reactionary court knows this quite well, and so like the excuse of “sending it back to states,” sending it back to Congress and the “representatives of the people” is a complete joke. Just the same old delay, delay, delay tactics of these corporate shills.
The strategy of delay: Pass it on to state legislatures, because they’re dominated mostly by corporate-stocked conservatives; kick it all back up congress, because you know the house is gerrymandered in favor of conservatives and the Senate disproportionately favors conservatives (plus it’s minority rule anyway thanks to the filibuster). This way it looks like you’re operating on principles and not nihilistic greed, Christian nationalism, and science denial.
So I know we can’t blame only one person, but at the end of the day the actions of one guy from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, has literally been the roadblock to the changes that are needed. Blocked the reconciliation bill, and refused to abolish filibuster. No winning. Where are the people going to THAT guy’s house and protesting? Now’s the time.
Between the Supreme Court, appellate courts, Congress, state legislatures, governorships, think tanks, corporate lobbying groups, and a mass of enthusiastic consumers of Fox News type propaganda — the conservatives have already won.
Turns out the 2020 election only stopped the train from going backwards, delayed the inevitable and, at best, nibbled around the edges of progress. So once again if the voters show up, it’ll have to be because they’re motivated by the horrors inflicted by the party technically not in power. Not an easy feat. And unlikely.
Which means the climate-denying, election fraud-believing, Trump-worshipping, spineless corporate servants take back Congress —and nearly nothing gets done until 2024, when things could go even worse.
Sad that the SCOTUS has been infected by politicians with vested interests. Just shows how weak American democracy is. This corruption will have severe long-term consequences for the US and the world.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Wol was explaining to Piglet all about iron flow batteries to make large scale energy storage much cheaper while also using less rare metals and stuff:
Interesting. There's a lot of things going on technologically that is hopeful. The question -- as always -- is whether we get there in time, and just how much damage has to occur beforehand.
I think we all agree as human beings, with few exceptions, that it would be nice if the species survived and that our kids and grandkids had a habitable world. We also agree that there's a lot of people in the world, that there will be even more in the future, and that we have finite resources -- metals, oil, gas, etc. Only so much land, so much potable water, so many trees, etc.
Given that simple commonality, we can achieve a lot. We have the solutions, too. They're right there. We don't even have to sacrifice all that much. Public transportation, electric cars, heat pumps, electric lawnmowers, solar panels, less meat consumption, etc. etc. A more sustainable world is possible.
So what is getting in the way? There are no simple answers, but there are a range possibilities which vary in importance and explanatory power.
One is cost. Another is feasibility of scale. A big one is the profit-motive, and the fact that those in power want to keep their power (and status). Another is a failure of vision and values, a kind of nihilism and short-term thinking that's infected the minds of those in power -- both in business and in government. Yet another is the force of habit, the "This is how it's always been done" syndrome. Lastly, and not exhaustively, is the melding of governments with corporations to the point where you cannot distinguish one from the other.
So depending on how we prioritize these obstacles, we can formulate where we want to direct our civic energies. For me, it's the state and local level in the US. Not simply changing my own lifestyle, as has been promulgated by the fossil fuel industry, but building solidarity and community. I include in this, of course, unionizing. Which seems far removed from climate change, but it isn't. If more workers are unionized, they can create a crisis both for the employers and for the politicians. Strong unions are what tilted the scales in the 1930s, and it has that potential to do so again. It's one of the most powerful weapons the majority of Americans (who are wage-workers, blue or white collar; working or middle class) -- the bottom 80 or 90% -- have to truly fight back against the corporate takeover of government. Not simply protesting -- although that's important. Not voting -- although that's important. Not even mobilizing.
But true organization. And that can only happen on the ground at the local level. Our obsession with the national news drama distracts us from this, because there's little we can do about it besides vote every 2-4 years. If that's all we do it's exactly like the "solutions" presented to climate change: change your lightbulbs and recycle. In other words, complete nonsense. All while the rich get richer and the planet continues to burn (and people die of opiates, and kids become increasingly obese, and education is de-funded in favor of privatization, etc etc.).
So that's a rant, but it's worth talking about the entirety of this problem and the solutions that are staring us in the faces.
Public transportation, electric cars, heat pumps, electric lawnmowers, solar panels, less meat consumption, etc. etc. A more sustainable world is possible.
Somewhere around 60 percent of electrical energy in the US comes from coal and natural gas.
Reply to Agent Smith This is the same question you asked with respect to the theory of evolution yesterday. Are you not aware of falsefiable predictions or do you think there aren't any?
This is the same question you asked with respect to the theory of evolution yesterday. Are you not aware of falsefiable predictions or do you think there aren't any?
The only prediction I'm aware of that climate change makes is extreme weather and, as far as I can tell, that's too vague; almost as if they had an [s]astronomer[/s] astrologer on the team. Edify me/us please!
That's not a requirement. We know stars go supernova and haven't tested that under laboratory conditions. Maybe Chalmers' "What is this thing called science?" is a good read for you.
The only prediction I'm aware of that climate change makes is extreme weather and, as far as I can tell, that's too vague; almost as if they had an astronomer astrologer on the team. Edify me/us please!
This is lazy and the same reason I didn't answer the other question.
That's not a requirement. We know stars go supernova and haven't tested that under laboratory conditions. Maybe Chalmers' "What is this thing called science?" is a good read for you.
True, for some branches of science, astronomy being one, experiments are technologically impossible. However this doesn't imply that the scientists in such sciences don't want to do experiments. The same goes for evolutionary biologists, oui monsieur? At the very least, I expect the proponents of evolution to describe only, an experiment in as much detail as possible to test Darwin's theory.
Google is your friend. I'm here for discussion not to educate you on things that can easily be found online.
Merci for reminding me I can google this stuff. I did and all I found were rather simplistic experiments involving lab jars, some CO[sub]2[/sub], sunlight and a thermometer. To be fair, such experiments do demonstrate the heating effect of CO[sub]2[/sub].
However, I'm more interested in real world experiments - done out in the field as it were and not in cozy labs. Climate change is a claim about the earth itself, I expect the predictions to be at the same scale and they must be observable to ensure the hypothesis is falsifiable. The only prediction climate scientists have made is extreme weather, but what exactly does this mean? It's so vague, like Barnum statements found in horoscopes, that they're utterly useless - Too hot? Climate change! Too cold? Climate change? Drought? Climate change! Downpours? Climate change! :brow:
Reply to Agent Smith Falsifiability isn't about experiments but about observations and it only needs to be falsifiable in principle to qualify as a falsifiable hypothesis.
Reply to Benkei Now we're talking! So expect, on average, global temperatures to soar, in keeping with climate change'a alias global warming, That's a prediction that can be tested, has been tested? Unprecedented heat waves across Europe, China, South Asia as per the media. Temperature measurements - they're the experiment.
Extreme weather, on the other hand, includes temperatures in free fall.
Sure. Here's a brief overview I wrote not long ago:
In explaining climate change, for people who are truly interested in learning about it, I always like to start with an easy experiment: you can take two glass containers -- one with room air and one with more CO2 added, and put it in the sun, seeing which one heats up the fastest. Easy, simple. In fact, Eunice Foote did exactly this experiment in 1856:
Then we can ask: How much CO2 is in our atmosphere? Since trees take in CO2 and most living organisms let off CO2, there's always fluctuations. So the next thing would be to look at the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, measured all over the Earth -- starting in the Mauna Loa Volcanic Observatory in 1958 and expanding from there.
What do we see? Concentrations go up and down a little, naturally, every year, because there are more leaves on trees in summer in the Northern Hemisphere than in winter. Yet the average rises every year, leading to the famous Keeling Curve:
That's just from 1958 to the present. When you look at the concentrations over the last 800 thousand years, an even more interesting trend emerges:
That's 412 parts per million currently, and the last highest level was about 350 thousand years ago at 300 ppm, before modern humans were even around.
So we know (1) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and (2) that there is a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere now than in the last 800,000 years.
One would think the planet would be warming, giving these two facts. So now we'd have to look to see how temperatures have fluctuated over time, and if increases in temperature correlates in any way with increases in CO2. Is there a correlation?
Turns out there is.
Over 100 years:
And over 800 thousand years:
Then the question becomes: why is this happening? Where is all of this extra CO2 coming from -- and in such a relatively short period of time?
The answer to that question is because of human activity, especially since the industrial revolution. As world population increases, and more trees are cut down (for fuel, houses, and to make room for raising livestock), there is less of a carbon "sponge."
But on top of this, we're also burning things. Burning wood puts CO2 into the atmosphere. Cows and other livestock also release a lot of methane, another greenhouse gas.
But of course it's not only wood and not only livestock. The main culprit, it turns out -- and why the industrial revolution was mentioned -- is fossil fuel: coal, oil, and natural gas. These are carbon-dense objects, and when burned release a huge amount of CO2. Multiply this burning by an increasing population, year after year for over 150 years, and it becomes very clear where the excess CO2 is coming from.
So human activity is the driver of rapid global warming.
Lastly, so what? What's the big deal about increasing the global temperature by just a few degrees?
I think the answer to this is obvious once you realize how only a few fractions of a degrees has large effects over time, which we're already beginning to see. The melting of the ice caps, sea level rise, an increase in draughts and wildfires -- all happening before our eyes, as every year we break more heat records.
In my opinion, I think it's undeniable that this is the issue of our time and those of us who aren't in denial should at least put it in their top 3 political priorities and act accordingly.
Reply to Xtrix The issue of our time will be biodiversity collapse. We can adapt to global warming and rising water levels even if it would destroy countries but not us as a race. Biodiversity collapse will potentially wipe us from the earth as well.
Biodiversity collapse is exacerbated by climate change, as you know. Whether it occurs without a rapidly changing climate -- probably, but certainly not to the degree it is. So I'd still place the greater emphasis on lowering emissions, as that will benefit biodiversity collapse greatly. Other solutions to the biodiversity issue are more than welcome.
Reply to Xtrix The temperature data fits the climate change hypothesis alright, but what/where are the other hypotheses? There should be at least one other which then gets ruled out (falsified) by making an incorrect prediction. This - formulating more than 1 hypothesis - is routine in science I was told.
Anyway, muchas gracias for such an informative reply.
The temperature data fits the climate change hypothesis alright, but what/where are the other hypotheses?
Early on there were many hypotheses — natural cycles, water vapor, and a host of others. These hypotheses have been abandoned.
Also the predictions made over several decades have now become true— in fact the effects have taken place quicker than expected, for example in the melting of the ice caps and severity of draughts.
This is why the idea is so widely accepted. But now it’s completely obvious to the point where even fossil fuel companies acknowledge it publicly. All one has to do is check the global temperature averages which break records year after year.
Just another reason why the US shouldn't be the leader of the free world. And hopefully they won't be, as other countries start to realize how broken of a nation it's become.
Have to wonder how much fossil fuel has been transformed since the industrialization (and before), say, by decade, and how much is left to transform.
Don't think I've seen the two numbers plotted on one graph going centuries back; would be interesting though. Anyone know/have?
Then there's deforestation, pollution, roads, cities, farms, nature/wildlife displacement, all that. Humans + "footprints" + remains are all over (bombing too for that matter).
A global scale thing. Anthropogenic effects are noticeable. Global scale responses seem called for.
Yeah it was clear last year that Manchin was aiming for nothing whatsoever. I imagine nothing passes this time too. And there goes the next 10+ more years of inaction. Combined with the 30-40 years of courts acting against any action whatsoever.
Leaves little option but to unionize workplaces and start striking, and shift to the state and local level.
And there goes the next 10+ more years of inaction. Combined with the 30-40 years of courts acting against any action whatsoever.
And China along with Europe will most definitely overtake the US in the green tech revolution since the US is incapable of getting it's act together on just about anything.
And China along with Europe will most definitely overtake the US in the green tech revolution since the US is incapable of getting it's act together on just about anything.
I wouldn't underestimate the ability of the USA to become a frontrunner because a lot of people do see the problem. Just because politics is filled with dinosaurs, doesn't mean the citizenry is.
So you see all of this as inevitable? Better to just get away from it?
I hope you’re wrong, if that’s the case.
Unfortunately yes. I see no awareness with most people in power. Still fucking around with more immediate crises, which will always pop up. While Sunak wants to tackle inflation again and Biden is writing a cheque for 50 billion the world is burning.
Sure but there is only so much that can be done the local level. In spite of being the world's biggest emitter the Chinese have invested more in renewables than any other country by far, and that will likely continue as they wish to dominate the world economy. As an authoritarian government they can pretty much allocate as many resources as they want towards this end.
Meanwhile the US is barely capable of operating either because of corruption or tribalism. Simply put, they're incapable of meeting the moment.
WASHINGTON — President Biden bowed to political reality on Friday, conceding that he had been unable to persuade a holdout coal-state Democrat, or any Republicans in the Senate, to back legislation that had been his greatest hope to confront the climate crisis.
Ending more than a year of fruitless negotiations over a proposal to push the nation’s electricity and transportation sectors away from fossil fuels, Mr. Biden said Friday he was instead prepared to “take strong executive action to meet this moment.”
Even for a president who has prided himself on compromise and the art of the possible, it was a marked retreat, one driven by the economic and political challenges of rampant inflation.
In hindsight, about ten years from now, this will be recognised as one of those watershed moments when the battle was lost.
It sucks but it really wasn't that much money last I checked. $300 billion over 10 years is like 15% the cost of Afghanistan. The US spends twice that much a year annually on the military.
The US just overwhelmingly endorsed $40 billion in spending for Ukraine (I suppose inflation didn't matter there) and the budget for that war in the end of it all will probably dwarf the costs of this bill, so you're not wrong on that one.
Well on the bright side Europe is probably gonna be forced to taking the transition more seriously this time now that they are effectively at war with Russia.
Well on the bright side Europe is probably gonna be forced to taking the transition more seriously this time now that they are effectively at war with Russia.
Put aside the hypocrisy of European leaders all of a sudden wanting actual clean energy to "save Ukraine" and "show Putin" ... yet somehow the entire world and most things that dwell upon the world wasn't good enough all these years?!
Cutting ties with Russia simply forces a return to coal and dirtier fuels.
For large electricity grid based economies, until (1) renewable energy storage is economic and (2) there's enough over-capacity of renewable energy to fill up said storage, then natural gas is required to develop the renewable energy system to accomplish both 1 and 2.
It just so happens that coal and nuclear cannot adjust their output rapidly to compensate fluctuations in renewable energy output. The larger the renewable energy capacity the larger the fluctuations can be, and therefore the larger the online capacity of a auxiliary power source is needed.
Just so happens that basically only natural gas and hydro have this characteristic (that output can be scaled up or down rapidly).
The gas deals and gas infrastructure with Russia was part of a coherent plan to develop renewable energy in Germany and friends. For, if you actually want to go towards 100% renewable, then you need very large natural gas capacity (both power plants and storage of natural gas) to cover a large majority of the grid for when both solar and wind output is minimal (which does happen; the truism that it is either sunny or windy is a "usually" kind of thing, but it can be both cloudy and not-windy).
But far more important than that, European elites have essentially thrown away all their political capital and economic clout in which to influence world policies.
The Ukraine crisis and cold-war "the reboot" effectively removes Europe as a player on the world stage.
We will need now to be relying now on the US, China and India, Russia Brazil et. al. to lead the way in environmental policies.
In short, Europe only had influence as a major economy within the globalised system; destroy that system by doing nothing to use said economic influence to avoid a disastrous European war, and Europe becomes completely irrelevant to global affairs.
US has "asserted its dominance" over its subordinates--what it wanted--but a gang leader that stays at the top by undermining the psychology, material wellbeing and dispossessing his underlings ... well, let's just say it's a double edged shiv.
(As a little footnote, burning biological material for electricity is just stupid and totally meaningless at the scales of concern.)
This is the kind of nonsense narrative being spewed to millions of Americans:
Temperatures in Texas climbed into the triple digits this week but this isn’t unusual. The problem is that wind power faltered, as it often does during hot spells.
From the WSJ.
Unprecedented heatwaves and wildfires: not unusual. Definitely not climate change related.
The problem? Renewable energy. So let’s dig for even MORE oil and gas and coal, and guarantee these scenarios continue and the world burns to the ground.
For those interested, the reason the problem of renewables and backup capacity isn't talked about much is, to make a long story short, the media is dumb.
When renewable energy was in development stage, the media would report cost-per-watt figures of each project, leaving the reader with the strong impression that once solar and/or wind achieved cost-parity with fossils ... we win! Hurrah! Climate change solved.
The problem with this vapid analysis is two fold.
First, cost parity is a stupid metric in the context of fossil fuels being both directly subsidised, indirectly subsidised (such as a giant war machine required to protect shipping lanes and oil-despots--the "friendly" one's ... and also attack the "mean" oil despots), while not internalising the real costs. Using this as a metric is essentially buying into the fossil lobbies "frame" (aka. being their bitch without any capacity for independent thought) as conservative red pillers would say.
However, worse, even if we accept this framework, and just not question fossil fuels getting all these subsidies (let's say for the sake of argument we're morons), then, even so, cost parity with fossil's isn't a good metric.
The grid as designed pre-renewables, already required some level of rapid response in the event a power station went offline all-of-a-sudden the rest of the grid should rapidly compensate. However, this rapid response level, pre-renewables, is generally about 10 to 15% of the whole grid capacity.
So, the first renewable projects can be easily hooked up to the grid no problem as there's already a system to deal with small levels of variability.
However, let's say the grid stays the same and more renewable capacity is added, as this 10-15% level is approached already now there's the risk that the renewable power generation collapses and some other power plant goes offline unexpectedly at the same time ... so already this isn't good.
Push above this buffer zone and collapse of renewable power can collapse the whole grid, or then rolling blackouts are needed to reduce consumption.
Circling back to "grid parity" these added costs need to be included in the cost of solar / wind which, when done honestly, demonstrate the immense scale of our predicament. Energy storage on a large scale is a very large infrastructure project that requires decades to build even if the technologies required were cost-competitive with subsidised fossil. Add in some disruption to the global system as resource competition heats up, a few material bottle necks ... and ... its gone.
OP on how Joe Manchin has single-handedly torpedoed Biden's attempts to tackle climate change.
Over the past year, Mr. Manchin has taken more money from the oil and gas industry than any other member of Congress — including every Republican — according to federal filings. A Times investigation found that he also personally profited from coal, making roughly $5 million between 2010 and 2020 — about three times his Senate salary. Coal has made Mr. Manchin a millionaire, even as it has poisoned the air his own constituents in West Virginia breathe.
As Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Circling back to "grid parity" these added costs need to be included in the cost of solar / wind which, when done honestly, demonstrate the immense scale of our predicament. Energy storage on a large scale is a very large infrastructure project that requires decades to build even if the technologies required were cost-competitive with subsidised fossil. Add in some disruption to the global system as resource competition heats up, a few material bottle necks ... and ... its gone
:up: Says it in a nutshell. Things Greta Thunberg didn't think of when she became aware of the problem at the age of eight.
We will need now to be relying now on the US, China and India, Russia Brazil et. al. to lead the way in environmental policies.
Well Russia isn't exactly keen on stopping climate change (in large part due to it's reliance on it's gas), Brazil is currently run by a man who seems fine with letting the Amazon burn (at least hopefully until October), China is the world's biggest emitter currently, India isn't really that far off from China, and the US... well enough has already been said about that.
Pretty dark times indeed. Do you see any possible solution to this mess or has humanity royally screwed itself over for the foreseeable future?
Wow, I was just about to make a joke about how the right was gonna blame wind energy again for failing in the heat instead of the cold. Now I just feel unoriginal.
None of these changes has nearly the impact that federal action would. But smaller changes can still add up — and even foster broader changes. Consider the vehicle market: By mandating electric vehicles, California and other states will lead automakers to build many more of them, likely spurring innovations and economies of scale that will reduce costs for everybody and thereby increase their use around the country.
It’s a reminder that climate change is one of those issues on which activists may be able to make more progress by focusing on grass-roots organizing than top-down change from Washington, especially in the current era of polarization. Locally, the politics of climate change can sometimes be less partisan than they are nationally, as Maggie Astor, a climate reporter at The Times, has written.
This is what I’ve been saying for several months now: local and state action.
The republicans — representing not only a small minority generally but a minority of voters — have managed to block every federal avenue for change on this issue, a particularly deadly one.
They have the judiciary and the congress. Whatever executive actions the president may take, it’s fairly short term and can be overridden.
They also have, since 2010, most state legislatures and have gerrymandered their way to keeping them for another 10 years at least (another huge story of the 2020 election that barely got coverage, but the results of which are now being felt— so much for focusing solely on national politics). They have the Majority of governorships.
So given this scenario, what else CAN be done other than work locally, within your state? New York and California are major players. Illinois, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico— all blue states, all can be pushed farther. Ditto the East cost, where I live: New England can do more. Massachusetts, yes — but also and particularly New Hampshire, the only “swing” state in the region.
There’s town councils, city councils, and a range of commissions that can be appealed to or taken over. There are plenty of groups to join, protests to be made, direct actions to take— hopefully with help from the local media. Disruption and crisis needs to be created for them before they start listening.
Lastly, the labor movement needs to continue making gains and forming unions that are strike-ready. I would love to see more strikes for climate — not for wages or conditions, which are important too, but for climate action.
A lot of this, once narrowed down from the overwhelming and vague level of national drama, can be done.
Bone-chilling headline from the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
The West’s Climate Policy Debacle
Utopian energy dreams are doing great economic and security damage.
"These are some of the unfolding results in the last year caused by the West’s utopian dream to punish fossil fuels and sprint to a world driven solely by renewable energy. It’s time for political leaders to recognize this manifest debacle and admit that, short of a technological breakthrough, the world will need an ample supply of carbon fuel for decades to remain prosperous and free."
Reply to Xtrix, the usual "disconnect" is seen... :/ Of course economies, politics, etc, matter as well, yet nature doesn't care about our talking — without action, our environment will just go on its course — and that part ought to be part of the economical talk as well.
Reply to Tate No, it isn't. Even with a profound technological shift we are depleting the earth. We need to use less. Estimates are average lifestyle of the 60s in Europe, which probably will be a little higher due to technological advances. But anything more isn't really sustainable.
The whole idea of battling climate change while attempting to maintain levels of prosperity is totally misguided and doomed for failure.
Reply to Tate not sure how to understand that comment. Are you referring to circularity? Because that only takes us so far. With continued growth the earth's capacity to replenish resources will not keep up nor will recycling. If I make 100 phones each year but only 50 are recycled, I still need resources for 50 phones. It's an important step to sustainability but degrowth is absolutely necessary.
Reply to Tate It does. As natural resources are more difficult to mine, you need to spend more energy to get to it, which increases fossil fuel usage. But even if it didn't, the point really is that only focusing on energy use while not aiming at degrowth is a recipe for disaster all the same.
Reply to Benkei
Running out of precious metals to make phones doesn't affect the climate. Burning any fossil fuels at all does. We either need to come up with a good way to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, or stop burning fossil fuels all together.
Reply to Tate, sorry, no offense intended. Deforestation, pollution, nature/wildlife displacement, population growth, renewability, ..., all related. Just thought I'd make sure comments are on the same page.
Running out of precious metals to make phones doesn't affect the climate.
Yes it does.
It’s not just cell phones. If we delete the supply of metals, we’re in serious trouble. Especially when do much green technology rests on these commodities.
Yet another good summary from the New York Times’ Krugman:
There’s an obvious parallel between the politics of green energy and the politics of Covid-19. Many people chafed at the restrictions imposed to limit the pandemic’s spread; even mask requirements involve a bit of inconvenience. But vaccination seemed to offer a win-win solution, letting Americans protect themselves as well as others. Who could possibly object?
The answer was, much of the G.O.P. Vaccination became and remains an intensely partisan issue, with deadly consequences: Death rates since vaccines became widely available have been far higher in strongly Republican areas than in Democratic areas.
The fact is that one of America’s two major political parties appears to be viscerally opposed to any policy that seems to serve the public good. Overwhelming scientific consensus in favor of such policies doesn’t help — if anything, it hurts, because the modern G.O.P. is hostile to science and scientists.
And that hostility, rather than the personal quirks of one small-state senator, is the fundamental reason we appear set to do nothing while the planet burns.
Well Russia isn't exactly keen on stopping climate change (in large part due to it's reliance on it's gas), Brazil is currently run by a man who seems fine with letting the Amazon burn (at least hopefully until October), China is the world's biggest emitter currently, India isn't really that far off from China, and the US... well enough has already been said about that.
Exactly, why destroying Europe as a relevant political actor on the world stage is ... wait, pretty great from fossil fuel exporters who deny the reality of climate change (or already bought their bunkers, and deny the stupidity of such a plan) point of view.
Pretty dark times indeed. Do you see any possible solution to this mess or has humanity royally screwed itself over for the foreseeable future?
The reason cynicism tends to increase in the environmental movement with age is because the goal posts keep moving. First generation of environmentalists were concerned about humans causing the extinction of single species (carrier pigeon and dodo) and failing to preserve those species was viewed as "losing".
After the environmental movement failed (or society failed the environmental movement, I would say is more accurate) to create policies to preserve single species, the goal posts moved to entire ecosystems.
Where we are in that task is:
- Livestock account for 0.1 Gigatons of biomass
- Humans account for 0.06 Gigatons of biomass
- Wild mammals 0.007 Gigatons of biomass
- Wild birds 0.002 Gigatons of biomass
This shift from wild biomass to livestock represents about an 80% loss of biodiversity, in terms of genetic variation losses in damaged / collapsed populations.
"Conservation" has resulted in a lot of species not going entirely extinct that otherwise would, however, conservation simply delays the inevitable if the whole earth system is damaged to an extent to change things like ... climate comes to mind, thus wiping out even the small pockets of "conserved" nature. If the whole earth system is not cared for, these pockets of conservation can not be sustained over the long term as larger environmental changes.
Which is the general theme of the environmental movement of one faustian bargain after the next.
In short, the ecological apocalypse has already happened.
Now, the goal posts are moved to just basic survival of humans and earth as a going concern.
This is still achievable from an engineering point of view, and even on an apocalyptic landscape with 50-90% of the currently inhabitable earth no longer liveable, humans can likely survive on the poles. There are pathways to full extinction but these seem unlikely edge cases in terms of environmental collapse (such as oxygen depletion or turning the atmosphere toxic).
More damage to earth life and ecosystems is guaranteed, the question is how much more and how many more people will die in horrible ways.
Since the processes of discombobulation are unpredictable and chaotic, even relatively small things done now can have a large effect on where we end up on the biodiversity-loss-dystopian-collapse spectrum.
In terms of engineering and earth stewardship, multiple WWII scale efforts started now would have a decent change of more-or-less stabilising the climate and biodiversity.
Unfortunately, as we enter the "bill's come due" phase of our ecological destruction to fuel hedonistic thoughtless life styles, this destabilises political systems making coordinated action harder.
The last window to act in a "politically feasible way" was the 90s.
This is still achievable from an engineering point of view, and even on an apocalyptic landscape with 50-90% of the currently inhabitable earth no longer liveable, humans can likely survive on the poles. There are pathways to full extinction but these seem unlikely edge cases in terms of environmental collapse (such as oxygen depletion or turning the atmosphere toxic).
Oh I have no doubt that humans will survive this in some form. They will start taking climate change seriously when it becomes an immediate concern (one can argue that it really is in some cases). Unfortunately it'd be too late in large part to stop the damage. In addition the failure to act will open up a whole host of other issues on which society will divide itself such as fights over natural resources, migration, and more pandemics (and judging by the way COVID was handled, it's not looking very good).
It's safe to say that this year has pretty much made me lose faith in humanity altogether. With all the recent events going on now, it's hard to be optimistic. Human nature is just inherently flawed and we probably deserve whatever is gonna come our way.
In addition the failure to act will open up a whole host of other issues on which society will divide itself such as fights over natural resources, migration, and more pandemics (and judging by the way COVID was handled, it's not looking very good).
The window of political feasible solutions closes before, potentially a lot before, the window of strictly physically feasible solutions.
This was a big point of particular emphasis 20 years ago in the community of collapse analysts), that the time to act is when the system is stable and not unstable due to the consequences of the bill coming due.
Of course we can debate human nature, but I think we would agree that we are now experiencing the consequences of our actions.
We are certainly experiencing the consequences of some people's actions. Yes it does seem futile; yes it is hard to be optimistic; yes some people have lost faith in humanity.
But look: there are 7+ billion pretty much powerless consumers in the world. We tend to blame ourselves for the climate disaster. Maybe we are all complicit, but none of us are guilty of being prime movers in energy production, manufacturing or consumption. We are small cogs in a great wheel, but we do not turn the wheel. We do not grind; we are ground up.
There are guilty parties--the several million rich, powerful people who have steered the economy of waste in both energy and materiel; who have worked over the last century to put us all in private cars; who have always chosen the long term environmental loss over short term profitgain; who have always opted to keep most workers' heads just above water.
You - bricklayer; you - librarian; you - farmer; you - janitor; you - mechanic; you - teacher; you - factory worker; you - accountant; you - grocery store clerk; you - nurse; you - teacher... None of you were ever in a position to steer steer the economy, for better or worse. You are not to take the blame: you are the victim.
But look: there are 7+ billion pretty much powerless consumers in the world. We tend to blame ourselves for the climate disaster. Maybe we are all complicit, but none of us are guilty of being prime movers in energy production, manufacturing or consumption. We are small cogs in a great wheel, but we do not turn the wheel. We do not grind; we are ground up.
Sure you can say we're not the primary cause of alot of our problems, but we aren't entirely blameless. Alot of the corrupt politicians are there because we are duped into voting for them and against our own interests. In addition, the people who do want to do something are successfully demonized into obscurity by the media. We can easily topple over the oligarchs if we actually unite together, but instead we're more interested in fighting amongst ourselves. Alot of people are actually celebrating the death of the US climate bill right now, primarily because the issue has been so politicized.
Alot of the corrupt politicians are there because we are duped into voting for them and against our own interests.
Whether the politicians are corrupt or not, whether we voted them in or they just muscled their way
in, may not matter that much. The State has interests that are pursued using the procedures and personnel available to it. (On the one hand, the State is an abstraction; on the other hand, the State has authorizing legislation, a permanent government, courts, and interested parties to make sure things run "the right way".)
Our country was set up to be the kind of country it was / is. The rights of property were / are paramount. "Nature" and the original inhabitants of the American land were of little interest to the State. "Individualism" might have been important, but most run-of-the-mill "individuals" (lacking wealth) were of little importance.
We can easily topple over the oligarchs if we actually unite together, but instead we're more interested in fighting amongst ourselves.
The individuals who did matter, and who in various ways animated the State to begin with, were the oligarchs. The oligarchs and the States have a close relationship, and overturning one will require overturning both. That is a tall order, even for 7 billion people. Not impossible, but very difficult. Why? for the simple reason that most people are decent folk who are not made of the abrasive, corroding stuff that oligarchs and crooked senators are made of.
Plus, the state knows how to use violence in its self-defense, and the state have a lot of violence at their disposal. Gunning down the rioting masses (or gassing them) won't bother the oligarchs. To quote one oligarch "If the masses want to die, then they should get on with it."
All of this is to say, again, the 7 billion are not to blame.
Sure you can say we're not the primary cause of alot of our problems, but we aren't entirely blameless. Alot of the corrupt politicians are there because we are duped into voting for them and against our own interests. We can easily topple over the oligarchs if we actually unite together, but instead we're more interested in fighting amongst ourselves. Alot of people are actually celebrating the death of the US climate bill right now, primarily because the issue has been so politicized
Everything you mention is true, and also designed/engineered. By whom?
By a class of people -- the wealthy, the plutocracy -- who buy or appropriate academics, clergy, politicians, and journalists. They establish and fund think tanks, own and control mass media companies, infiltrate colleges and universities, and deliberately use all of it as a means of control by sowing discord and confusion among the employees, among the poor, working and middle classes.
The plutocracy have also undermined, weakened, polarized, or destroyed social and civic institutions; most importantly, labor unions. That was one of the first things to wage harsh war against and to stamp out as best as possible. A very smart, strategic move on their part. But it reveals how much of a threat and a nuisance to their power labor unions were (and are). Education, access to knowledge and information, was also a threat and still is -- but it can be owned, censored, filtered, skewed.
The point being that yes, we can indeed topple them -- and they know it. The power always lies in the hands of those with greater number...and there's simply more of us than them. Look all around the world, currently and historically, for examples of people rising up and taking over. This is a great fear of any ruling class, and it's a great fear of the plutocracy. So they do everything they can to divide, polarize, distract, deflect, etc. -- all that you mentioned. Are the people to blame for this? The power imbalance corresponds to level of responsibility, in my view -- and the imbalance is very, very skewed towards the wealthy.
We have to fight it through love and empathy and listening. Because they've won over too many people -- and if we all dig in our heals, and no one breaks the ice (or tries), then we're doomed.
Indeed, the oligarchs know that when the people unite against them they can't win, which is why they try to break people apart whenever they can by sowing discord. In fact, I think that that is part of the reason why today's politics is so divisive.
But the fact that people can be so easily manipulated like this is also part of reason why I said I've lost faith in humanity. The rise of Nazi Germany has shown us all that people can be duped into hating and committing heinous atrocities against one another with just the right amount of persuasion, and the fact that people can just let someone like Hitler come into power terrifies the hell out of me. Hitler may be gone, but what made him so powerful in the first place is still with us, likely leading to the rise of similar figures.
I mean, out of all of the problems humanity is facing right now, it seems like people are more interested in talking about culture war nonsense than anything else, all while the wealthy make off. Some billionaire just bought one of the biggest social media websites out there (well not anymore) and people actually celebrated.
But the fact that people can be so easily manipulated like this is also part of reason why I said I've lost faith in humanity. The rise of Nazi Germany has shown us all that people can be duped into hating and committing heinous atrocities against one another with just the right amount of persuasion, and the fact that people can just let someone like Hitler come into power terrifies the hell out of me.
I wouldn’t lose faith. I’d be on the right side of history and do all we can to fight it. Hitler eventually got his ass kicked— and was persuasive, yes, but only because the German people were desperate and angry, and not enough stood up to the rise of nazism.
History repeats itself. I see us as coming out of the new gilded age, or perhaps the 1920s. The result will depend on us: do we fall into authoritarianism, like Germany did, or do we go the way of trust-busting and the New Deal — or even the movements of the 30s and 60s.
I’ve been learning more about the labor movement of the 1930s lately. Fascinating and little-known history there. So much attention is given to the 60s (not unjustifiably), but the 30s set the stage for those movements in many ways, with oppressed people (workers) joining together and causing real pressure on those with their hands on the levers of power.
We’ll have to do this again. It involves solidarity, unions, strikes— which means overcoming differences and (gasp) practicing love and empathy and understanding— which, as we know from psychotherapy — are the key conditions that facilitate change and growth.
What is needed is a bloody technological revolution! Can we do it? Necessity is the mother of invention.
Yes, let's not do what needs to be done and wait for the invention and implementation of things currently not existing!
I wish people would stop pretending science will solve everything, which is something other people do, after all, so they have an excuse not to make the necessary sacrifices themselves, which we're all going to have to do.
We are certainly experiencing the consequences of some people's actions. Yes it does seem futile; yes it is hard to be optimistic; yes some people have lost faith in humanity.
Are the people to blame for this? The power imbalance corresponds to level of responsibility, in my view -- and the imbalance is very, very skewed towards the wealthy.
I agree with these statements.
I'm not sure if Reply to Mr Bee and I are saying exactly the same thing, but I believe so.
Our point of view here is considering humanity as a whole including its elites, just as anthropologists do the same for past society's. Nearly all societies have hierarchy and elites, more or less inequality (from brutal slaving to mostly symbolic differences in wealth and power).
When anthropologists consider the reasons for a society's "success" or "failure", be it defined as basic survival or then imposing or resisting hegemonic power, the elites are simply one component in the analysis. Certainly they are "more to blame" than the less powerful individually, but if we agree the less powerful could easily unite and topple the elites at any moment ... then collectively the less powerful have more responsibility.
However, in terms of simply evaluating prospects of a society, the blame game is irrelevant to that. If a society fails, who's to blame is a followup question to how and why the society failed (certainly elites are an important factor, but not the only one).
To summarise, and this is where perhaps I diverge with Reply to Mr Bee in terms of assigning things to human nature, by faith in humanity, at least speaking for myself, I must be honest and recognise my faith in my youth was in this particular humanity, elites and all, overcoming our differences and failings at least enough to avoid a climate disaster.
I truly had in my mind the "we did it" moment. Truly believed the elites were genuinely divided on this question of the destruction of the planet and enough elites and enough of everyone else could and would band together for what no one can deny: the destruction of the planet's living systems is not a good thing and we should avoid it.
And, perhaps, if we simply had more time (and, hopefully, we do have more time than it appears now) the "day, indeed, would come".
But today, it at least feels, time has run out on this humanity.
Perhaps there will be other humanities in the future, who learn from our mistakes and misdeeds and indifference, and truly cherish and care for the crumbs of life; that fall from our table of plenty.
And the bodies are already starting to pile up, even if we consider only humans and ignore the 85% loss in wild animal biomass.
Perhaps the most succinct way to express my point of view here, is my contention is that to that to say there's still hope to avoid disaster is to say the pile of bodies we already have doesn't count, and we'll start counting later for some reason.
Of course, I would agree we must do our best regardless of the likely outcome.
A moral imperative does not conveniently go away simply because the goal is unlikely to be achieved.
But in terms of evaluating prospects, certainly seems to me now that we'd need a miracle to preserve anything remotely resembling "normal" and our precious "civilisation".
to say there's still hope to avoid disaster is to say the pile of bodies we already have doesn't count, and we'll start counting later for some reason.
Another tactic that gets deliberately perpetuated is the sense of hopelessness and helplessness. "I can't do anything; It's too big; nothing will change anyway; it's already over." This is true not only of climate change but of many other issues; it was true for women's rights and civil rights and gay rights.
When we start seeing things as hopeless, and then start attributing the causes to "human nature," as if this were an inevitable outgrowth of genetics, we conveniently remove ourselves from doing anything about it -- things that involve interacting with others, things that are hard.
Joe Manchin sinking this legislation is a big blow, but not unexpected. On October 15th, 2021, it was already over. That's when he gutted the CEPP. It was clear then to me it was over -- I wrote about it on this forum. It should have been clear sooner -- for example, when the Exxon executive all but said Manchin is "our guy" and nothing will happen, in the spring of 2021.
So this isn't a huge shock. There's ways around all of this -- around the Supreme Court, around Congress. The solutions are not only technological -- which is happening slowly (the cost of renewables, the rise of EVs, etc) -- but also involves the labor movement. We see unionizations and strikes happening all over the place, for the last several years in fact. We've lowered our potential outcomes from 3.0-4.0 degree C to between 2.0-2.7 degree C. Not great, but a real improvement. We have younger people coming into power who are very aware of the stakes (even to the point of "climate anxiety"), out there protesting in the streets.
Nothing ever comes as gifts from above. Ever. When our institutions and our leaders fail, we work harder to circumvent them and create a crisis for them. I don't see any alternative beyond giving up and guaranteeing the worst case happens.
Nothing ever comes as gifts from above. Ever. When our institutions and our leaders fail, we work harder to circumvent them and create a crisis for them. I don't see any alternative beyond giving up and guaranteeing the worst case happens.
Once the number of Homo sapiens on the planet is severely reduced due to the consequences of climate change -- as is bound to happen in the coming decades or at best centuries -- the forces driving CC will then progressively abate. It may take a few thousand years for the climate to cool down though. There are no short term solution that I can see.
Once the number of Homo sapiens on the planet is severely reduced due to the consequences of climate change -- as is bound to happen in the coming decades or at best centuries -- the forces driving CC will then progressively abate.
There are plenty of solutions, and people working very hard at those solutions -- and making progress. All while being told that there "are not solutions," that we're already doomed, that there's nothing we can do except continue with the status quo because leaders won't listen and corporations are too powerful, etc. The typical defeatist, hopelessness-encouraging bullshit you can see daily in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.
So sure, we can go with your narrative and thus justify doing nothing. I'm sure people argued the exact same way when it came to slavery, child labor, the oppression of women, the rise of Nazism, etc. That's a choice. The alternative is to do hard work, in the tradition of the movements I mentioned above -- workers rights, civil rights, women's rights, etc. -- and shift the direction we're going in, and rapidly. There's no reason it can't happen -- none.
There are plenty of solutions, and people working very hard at those solutions -- and making progress. All while being told that there "are not solutions," that we're already doomed, that there's nothing we can do except continue with the status quo because leaders won't listen and corporations are too powerful, etc. The typical defeatist, hopelessness-encouraging bullshit you can see daily in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.
So sure, we can go with your narrative and thus justify doing nothing.
I'm not trying to "justify doing nothing". I'm just realizing that there is a fairly high chance our civilization will fall, whatever we do at this stage. It's more a question of when and how.
If we had acted decisively two or three decades ago, i.e. if the US had not fought tooth and nail against Kyoto and other agreements (including of course the WSJ), then maybe we would have had some chance of averting the worse global effects.
A miracle may still happen, I guess. But at this stage, to prepare for the worst is perfectly rational. While still hoping for the best of course, and still trying to avert the worst.
[I]Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre ni de réussir pour persévérer.[/i]
Comments (3959)
Democrats have a year to save the planet.
Not really a joke...or an exaggeration.
I suspect it might be if one thinks of significantly slowing the process. I don't see the nations of Earth coming together in a meaningful way, but I could be wrong. Even were they to do so it might be best to prepare for change wherever possible.
I was a meteorologist many, many years ago. Too long ago to be of any use.
Quoting Xtrix
"The earth may be parched and sweltering, but all is not lost, for Americans finally got in the game."
What a joke.
Except these guys maybe:
I'm usually an optimist but my gut feel is that democracies will reject any government that makes meaningful commitments. Rather, 'normal' will just be adjusted ever downwards until you're barbecuing your own son in a cave in a mile-high trash pile wondering if this is really what God intended.
Since I’m not big on defeatism: Too late relative to what? Too late for us to live as we’ve so far lived in relation to the climate? But of course it is! (At the very least, we should have taken the Kyoto Protocol a bit more seriously, but its too late for that now.) Is it too late for future generations to not have it as bad as it would be were humanity to go about its business as usual. Nope, not at all. One interesting fact I’ve so far learned in life, no matter how bad things get, things can always get worse.*
This however pivots on how much most of us care about future generations. At the very least the kids we're related to.
Quoting Xtrix
Yes. Most of the people I’m surrounded by, for starters. Then there is a fair sum of the same in government. Also in the media …
---------
* Doctor calls up a guy saying, “Your tests are in. I’ve got bad news and worse news. Which do you want to hear first?” Guy replies, “The bad news”. Doc: “The tests are conclusive in you having only 24 hours left to live.” Guy: “What the hell can possibly be worse?” Doc: “I forgot to tell you yesterday.”
… kind of thing.
Kinda hard to say since no-one knows what the tipping points are exactly, but I think it's unlikely enough will be done to avoid very serious climate changes.
Quoting Xtrix
That seems rather unlikely. The planet has seen runaway greenhouse effects before.
Quoting Xtrix
The best way is probably to organise and join in mass protests. No individual consumer level decisions are likely to be very effective. Or rather the effective decisions are very impractical and so unlikely to be adopted by enough people to make a difference.
Quoting Xtrix
There are probably more people emotionally invested in the outcome of the next big soccer match than in climate change.
Climate change is not a disease, it's a symptom. I know quite a few doctors and they all say, while relieving the symptom has its merits, treating the disease is the primary goal!
What, in your opinion, is the disease?
No, the sun will not kill all life on this planet for some 5 billion years or so. The future after that is bleak for life on our planet.
Quoting Xtrix
First you should define just what is the tipping point you refer to. Or what you have in mind with climate change.
Quoting Xtrix
No. If people take your question literally and not as a figure of speech. (Do you know the environment in Venus?)
Quoting Xtrix
A lot of things. Radical changes, not so radical changes and everything between. Unfortunately there the actual policy actions, the scientific socio-economic policy discourse, and the politicized agenda-driven public debate have veered all into different realms.
But we can have an effect on our environment. Even if I'm not so sure that with the current numbers of nuclear weapons detonating all of them would actually cause a nuclear winter. A super-volcano eruption would make global warming not the climate change we are worried about.
What would be the object of these protests if the changes required are considered too impractical to be adopted? Presumably, living in a democracy, such changes are going to be ephemeral at best, window-dressing at worst if the population hasn't the stomach to adopt them.
Well, stuff that is impractical for the individual might not be if it was coordinated by the community. A simple example is avoiding to drive the car - impractical if you need to regularly travel longer distances without access to public transport. But can be solved communally.
It's run by a guy and a team of volunteers who made a career out of reading academic/sciency papers so they put this blog together to fact check scary end of the world scenarios, climate change included. No, they definitely aren't climate deniers , more like climate realists and they seem pessimistic/optimistic depending on the scenario. The news really likes to amp up "tipping points" and "earth will be venus" crap but these scenarios are usually cherry picked or blown way out of proportion. Hell, the IPCC doesn't even think "collapse of civilization" is on the trajectory despite what the Guardian articles make you think
In fact, their debunk here on the "Venus Earth" scenario really soothed a lot of my fears
https://debunkingdoomsday.quora.com/Not-as-scary-as-it-seems-Planet-at-risk-of-heading-towards-Hothouse-Earth-state
No Venus.
I get the theory, but doesn't it leave a rather unconvincing model of a governing system that somehow has no way of determining what services are required other than by waiting for the information to be painted onto a placard?
If people are willing to travel long distances without their cars, as in the example you give, but can't simply decide as an individual to do so, are you suggesting that information wouldn't come to light without a protest?
We don't have a governing system whose goal is to determine what services are required though. LIke yeah it would be cool if we could simply expect the leaders we put in power (or that we are not willing or able to dislodge) to make the best decisions on the available evidence, but that isn't the case, is it?
Quoting Isaac
No, I'm suggesting that the only way to get the powers that be to move is to properly scare them.
No, but I didn't refer to the services that were 'required'. I was talking about the services that are [I]desired[/i]. So...
Quoting Echarmion
Why would they need to be scared into providing a really popular and sought after solution?
Why wouldn't they be? Is your impression that current governments around the world are on average very good at dealing with medium to long term crisis? If your answer is "no", I don't understand the point of this line of questioning.
Presumably we're both aware of the basic reasons behind why many reasonable and scientifically well supported policies aren't enacted by governments around the world, democratic or otherwise, in fields like environmental protection, consumer protection, healthcare etc.
Well there's really no alternative I can see -- so you're either wrong or we're dead. What we feel about this shouldn't really matter -- rather, what is the evidence? There's little reason to believe it can't be done, in fact we know it can be. So what's the real problem? That people like you and I and others aren't pushing hard enough for it.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
As I said to Jgill above, it's not really about gut feelings. This isn't a problem we can be optimistic or pessimistic about -- I don't think that applies. We're either going to make it happen or we're dead. I do like that cartoon though.
Quoting javra
Exactly.
Quoting javra
Well I meant less about climate deniers and more about people who accept the science and still place it low on their priorities.
Quoting Echarmion
We do know what the tipping points are. If you're looking for something like exact numbers, you won't find it, but we have very good idea about what will trigger an irreversible spiraling.
Tim Lenton has done a lot of work on this.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-nine-tipping-points-that-could-be-triggered-by-climate-change
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03595-0
You think it's unlikely that anything gets done. So essentially we're doomed, in your eyes. Interesting perspective.
Quoting Echarmion
I agree.
Quoting TheMadFool
Depends on the level of analysis. But on the whole, aspects of human nature -- in the case, greed -- that have been magnified by a system that prioritizes private power -- namely, capitalism.
Quoting ssu
There are multiple potential tipping points. See above for some links, or you can Google "climate tipping points."
Climate change in this context refers to a rapid change in the Earth's climate driven by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
If what this comment really implies, however, is something like "the climate always changes," then there's no sense in continuing. That's just the latest line for climate change denial, and I have no interest.
What "cherry picking" are you referring to?
https://news.mongabay.com/2021/01/were-approaching-critical-climate-tipping-points-qa-with-tim-lenton/
Also, you may want to take a look at what the IPCC is saying about tipping points:
https://grist.org/science/leaked-un-report-warns-of-climate-tipping-points/
True, they haven't mentioned the "end of civilization," but they include various scenarios that certainly lead to that. But even if it's not the end, it would be a hell on earth. People would probably survive a nuclear war, too...should we therefore not be concerned? Is that really an argument?
Quoting Albero
This website is kind of a joke.
The Venus question is not meant literally.
We can nit-pick about "collapse of civilization" or anything else if we want to, but it's simply another form of denial. If you're happier because you found a website that "debunks" the "doomsday" scenarios that those awful "climate alarmists" talk about, you're welcome to. But I suggest balancing that with questions for actual climatologists, someone like Dr. Lenton (linked above) -- who has quite a different view.
The fact remains that we're already seeing signs all around us of a rapidly warming planet, and its effects are also all around us -- right now. Not off in the future -- not according to some model. There are such things as tipping points, and there is a real chance we can make the Earth a nearly-unlivable hellhole (true, maybe not exactly Venus, and people may still survive).
This "debunking" website seems to be obsessed with the fact that it may not happen for a long time to come -- centuries, even. But even there they're likely wrong, given the increase in global temperature, droughts, wildfires, floods, etc., that we're already experiencing -- and giving what scientists are warning us about, including the IPCC.
As the CO2 keeps rising (somewhere near 400 ppm), we'll see more and more warming. That's locked in for decades. We can all push to do something about it, or we can pacify ourselves by reading only what makes us feel better, and thus helping the worst outcome come true. Not a hard decision, in my view, but to each his own.
Quoting Kasperanza
So that makes a total of 2 or 3 climate deniers so far. My advice: go back to your echo chamber. You won't learn anything here, since you don't care to in the first place.
An interesting point. Notice that polls of younger people (including those identifying as Republicans) show that they are much more concerned about climate change. We're also seeing movements across the globe -- Greta Thunberg, the Sunrise Movement, etc. All youth-led. That gives me great hope and is very inspiring -- but also pretty embarrassing, given that the adults have failed them so much that they have to pick up the slack.
I hope you're right, and that it takes only one generation. We'll see. I just hope that it's not too late by then in terms of salvaging a relatively decent existence.
Don't you realize that you're guilty of what you just criticized me of?
You're ignoring someone who disagrees with you and only choosing to talk to people that fundamentally agree with you. So much for not living in an echo chamber. I don't get the feeling that you have anything to learn from me.
Also, I'm NOT denying climate change. I'm saying that we shouldn't fight climate change. Burning more, not less, fossil fuels will improve our lives. As I said. Fossil fuels allow for electricity, air conditioning, and water irrigation.
People who are opposed to fossil fuels, are against a cheap, reliable, and powerful source of energy. If you take away fossil fuels it will hurt everyone economically, and essentially decrease everyone's quality of life.
Freedom and free-minds are our best bet towards a bright and positive future, not government policies or restrictions.
No, not with me, with the overwhelming scientific consensus and the undeniable evidence. You choose to ignore all of that -- that's fine. People believe in a flat earth and deny the holocaust -- I have no interest in engaging with them either. At least not on this thread.
Oh my. I can be wrong and we all will still die. But not all from climate change.
Quoting Xtrix
I could push every minute of every day, along with everyone else, but that's probably not enough to keep those gulf streams warming Europe in place. London and Dublin are further north than Calgary, Canada, and are roughly the same latitude as southern Alaska. Get your woolies out, mates!
Climate change is happening. So what? I'm not denying that. I'm saying we should burn more fossil fuels anyway. We should not enforce government policies; we should let free people decide for themselves. That's what I'm saying. I'm not denying the science.
:chin:
Yeah, and I'm not denying that smoking causes cancer. I just think we should all smoke as much as possible. Because I'm smart.
It's climate CHANGE not climate destruction.
Quoting Kasperanza
Then you really don't know what you're talking about, and I suggest taking literally 10 minutes, type in "climate change" in Google, pick one result -- whether from NASA or NOAA or the Royal Academy or MIT or anything you like -- and read about it. Because you're making an utter buffoon of yourself.
When you get hot, what do you do? Turn up the air conditioning or try to stop summer from happening?
I might be wrong on this, and may I be corrected if I am, but I think you’re missing @Kasperanza's crucial background issue of us not being deprived of our freedoms on account of mitigating a global calamity. Like one’s freedom to benefit from all that society has provided without the taxing requirement that one contributes back to it in return. Or maybe the freedom to grab vaginas non-consensually as one pleases on account of it being empowering, with recently elected presidents as our role model in so doing. To keep this short, last but not least, our right to freedom from the despotism of nature, be this from the evils of a corporeal death, from the tyranny of gravity in not allowing us to spontaneously fly by sheer will, or, most importantly to this discussion, our freedom from nature’s absurd injunction that we need a sustainable environment in order to continue living. We are free in our isolationist individualism to not give a damn about the rest of humankind; their present or future plight is their problem, not ours, and our helping them out in their plight as best we can is our own self-enslavement. As I said, I might be wrong about this, but the concern of losing freedoms in the name of mitigating global warming has been brought up more than once. And I deem it to be a widespread concern.
It’s like parents losing their lifelong freedoms once the kids are birthed. Its not just! So, to hell with the kids’ well-being; our freedoms to do as we please come first.
Thinking of Johnathan Swift, this is my little "modest proposal" for the day.
Indeed, and yet above we were talking about 'popular and sought after' policies, not 'reasonable and scientifically well supported' ones. That the two are not the same is the crux of the problem.
A government has three main priorities - to remain in power, to benefit from the privileges that being in power bring, and to make necessary decisions about the running of the country (I think it would be excessively cynical not to at least include that last, but let's not pretend it's a priority). So what of those three does a protest scare them into thinking is at risk? Remain in power? Well, unless the various jugglers and street performers of the protest movements swap their batons and guitars for Kalashnikovs, I don't think their power (mandated by a very specific demographic of swing voter) is a risk. Benefit from privileges? Obviously not. Make decisions about the running of he country? Well, here the one thing we don't want them to do is listen to the hysterics of the latest fad, so why would we encourage such a course of action?
Protests need to properly threaten the group they are protesting against, otherwise they're nothing more than virtue signalling. Governments have some quite well-developed means of gauging the mood in their key demographics - sophisticated multi-metric tools. Do you think they're going to throw those away because they see a few hundred hipsters having a street party?
The "It's not practical to make the necessary changes" excuse is a fairly limp one. That there are limits to what can be done by individual choice is incontestable, but equally incontestable is the fact that most people are absolutely nowhere near those limits, sending the various governments a very clear message indeed that issues like climate change score slightly below issues like who's going to make it to the next round of the FA cup (swap in your sport/cultural event of choice).
So the question should not be "how do we make governments listen to the scientists?" - that's a cause we lost four hundred years ago, governments listen to the people (or at least a key sub-section of them). we quite deliberately designed the system that way. The question should be "Why, when faced with such an obvious prospect of harm to the next generation, do people still consider their replacement Disney-themed electric toothpaste dispenser to be more important?" That's not even a political question, and I suspect it has more to do with the very same reason why people join protests than it is actually opposed by protest.
Why pit one against the other? Last I checked economy is dependent upon resources. When resources vanish, economy plummets. Our economy is now global. Individual nations won't be able to [s]adapt[/s] acclimate economically when our resources become unsustainable due to lack of mitigation. To address this in only economic terms.
A couple of statements that one might (might've) encounter(ed) in one's life.
1. It was completely out of character for him to have done that.
2. It's not in his nature to talk like that. Something's wrong!
Statement 1 is comforting. We're not slaves to human nature - we can put up a fight against it and, on occasion, hopefully these being critical to our welfare, win!
Statement 2 also suggests if not demonstrates that we have, loosely speaking, free will - a silver lining on the edges of an ominous dark cloud (human nature). What dampens my spirits is that when people behave atypicially, the immediate reaction is, "something's wrong!" As if we expect ourselves to be in line with our nature, deviations are perceived as wrong instead of right. It's almost like, may be is, taking offense, being deeply distressed, by free will. Odd that! On the one hand, we've built our civilization around free will and when someone does display it, we're taken aback, even suspicious (something's wrong!). A paradox in its own right!
How does climate change fit into all that I've said? All I can say is, it's totally in charater, typical! Of humans. If we're to do anything about it, we need to offend, surprise, shock even, as many people as possible, make them utter, "it's not in faer nature to think/say/do like that!" but the follow up statement should be not, "something's wrong!" but "something's right!" As you might've noticed, "something's right!" is harder to say than "something's wrong!" - it just doesn't sound right, it feels like a mistake. Thereby hangs a tale...
It looks like, taking climate change as the holotype of all of our problems, the world's problems by extension, it's ultimately about free will! Choices! We must convert must (necessity/no free will) into may (possibility/yes free will).
And when the fossil fuels run out?
What do you mean? Of course corporations know they could never be held liable.
Well Things are already being done. Just not nearly enough things, though we're slowly getting better as the catastrophes are becoming more obvious.
Extrapolating from the CoViD response, it seems likely to me that drastic action will only occur once it's undeniably obvious that a lot of people are dieing, and a lot more people will die in the short term (and if we're being realistic it probably helps if they're white or chinese). Something like a major food shortage that is felt even in European stores
Are we doomed at that point? We've certainly doomed a lot of species on our planet. Unlike most, we have a lot more capacity to adapt though. Apart from recognising the stakes, I prefer to be optimistic about our ability to throw resources (and we do have access to tremendous amounts) at the problem until we stabilise. I don't think there's much use in fatalism either way.
Quoting Kasperanza
Yes, it does. Though it's not so much the direction of the change as the rate of change that is the problem.
Quoting Isaac
I didn't really talk about what's popular. I only said that individual consumer level actions are unlikely to be adopted by enough people on their own initiative to make a difference. You could take that to mean such measures aren't popular enough.
As for measures in general, I think it's pretty hard to establish how popular exactly they are. There are broad majorities for robust action on climate change in many democracies, but I suspect most people don't have anything very specific in mind.
Quoting Isaac
I think you're discounting the psychological effects that very visible movements have. The first goal would of course be to get enough critical mass going that the protests shift the general mood of the electorate. This has already happened with e.g. Fridays for Future. Of course a backlash is also possible, but I think would be unlikely.
A large part of the reason why there isn't more electoral push towards dealing with climate change is that people are constantly being distracted by other, seemingly more immediate, issues.
Quoting Isaac
I agree with you here, but I guess my question would be how you would address that if not by mass protest?
Quoting Isaac
I don't think that's a very accurate analysis of current democratic systems. Noone designed those systems to deal with Billionaires running influence campaigns on Facebook.
Quoting Isaac
Don't we know the answer to that? I thought the psychology behind that was pretty clear, and it is your field.
That long-winded rant was really good. 10/10
Quoting javra
You can't have economics if you take away people's freedom.
We have centuries before fossil fuels run out. I'm sure we'll come up with reliable green energy by then.
Quoting Echarmion
I mean how fast is too fast? Why not just burn more fossil fuels? Oh, things are too hot? Blast the air conditioning. Things are too cold? Turn up the heat. I don't really see why it matters what the climate does. As long as we have technology and fossil fuels, let the climate do what it wants.
And where are you going to get food? We do not have replicators running on gasoline yet.
Well this is why I asked if all climate change is all bad. I imagine that colder climates that didn't allow crops, would allow crops. When some opportunities go away, new ones come up.
And that would generally be true, if the rate of change is slow enough to allow ecosystems to adapt. But imagine what happens if 90% of all remaining fish in the oceans die off within a couple of years. Sure new fish will eventually repopulate the oceans, but that will take hundreds of years. Meanwhile millions of people rely on daily catches of fish to survive.
That's right. It's kind of where I was going. If the measures necessary are not popular enough, then protesting to persuade a democratic government to adopt them is self-defeating, especially given the recent rise in populism, but even without it...
The government already know that a vocal minority are willing to shout about climate change, they also know their key demographic are unwilling to adopt the measures necessary to combat it, so 'awareness' - the metric protestors are so enamored with raising - is not what's lacking, willingness is.
Protest would, therefore, only be useful if it were to raise willingness. So...
Quoting Echarmion
... We'd need to look closely at those effects. Studies on the effect of protest give mixed results. The key takeaway seems to be that some protests work and others don't, but that very few change people's minds simply by virtue of the awareness raised. The best study I've seen recently was this one https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13457753/TeaParty_Protests.pdf?sequence=1 which undermines Lohmann's informational idea of protest effectiveness in favour of a more social group theory (which, full disclosure, is my specialism, so I'm going to be a bit biased). So the issue then with any protest is the effect it has on local social groups, particularly on criteria for membership (what one has to do to be accepted as a member). There's a good study here https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(18)30017-2, though I think it might be paywalled for most, which goes through some of the ideas.
Briefly, membership criteria are signalled by the protest group and when this is something like attending political rallies, voting, or (especially) hustling others to do so, one cannot gain membership without actually taking part, non-members are freely encouraged to join by the very token of membership.
Contrastingly, movements which identify an outside actor whose actions they seek to alter, whose membership criteria and hierarchy are measured by the degree to which one is willing to take that actor to task, create barriers to entry, and very little normative pressure to join (so long as you're not personally that outside actor, membership seems entirely optional). High entry barrier and little reason to join. Not an appealing recipe for attracting members.
Hence the appeal of the Disney-themed toothpaste dispenser - high membership reward, little expense in joining. The expense in joining bit is insurmountable - what we want to achieve with something like climate change is going to require sacrifice - whether that's in terms of reduced consumption or in spending to fund community solutions. So social pressure to become a member needs to be higher. What we see in protest movements around climate change is the exact opposite. Basically, unless you're a government minister or the CEO of BP, you're not the target and so membership is optional. Middle class householders only need to take one glance at the giant leap they'd need to take feel members of the circus troop protesting outside their window, realise that non-membership will have no impact on their lives at all, to sit comfortably and watch the show.
What we're seeing at the moment, is high risk - high reward membership (arrests, violence, etc) where the high risk membership criteria are unrelated to the sacrifice the cause actually requires (reduced consumption, increased community spending) or low risk - low reward membership (so called clicktavism) where membership is easy but membership is disconnected from the actual cause. These are basically useless as engines of social change.
Both are, however, extremely useful engines of consumer management...
China.
Most people will do a great deal to avoid discomfort and a reduction in lifestyle. Combine that with a pronounced level of laziness and poof! A great deal of no change is the result.
Now if we eliminated people...likely things would rebalance after a century or so. However, from a planet history perspective, the earth has undergone repeated heating and cooling cycles. Vast mostly desert regions to vast mostly green verdant forests and vegetation. Likely humans have increased the rate of change of this process, for a little while. Once we are gone the world will spin onwards and move into the next cycle. We may or may not be around, and outside of our opinion, does that matter?
The dinosaurs had a good run and now we use them to fuel our cars. What will the bulk of humanity's remains be used for in 250,000 years. Likely, nothing. But hey, you never know.
So what passes for modern parenting for most of those under 50. Yeah!
'Climate emergency' is not political rhetoric, it describes exactly what is happening.
Quoting Book273
Lazy :point: Global Energy Consumption. We're lazy more or less and so we use machines. Machines consume energy and the earth is more active than ever. Human laziness manifests as global activeness.
Discomfort, via our instincts to relieve it, maybe either a contributory factor or an independent alternative pathway to skyrocketing global energy consumption.
Deadly duo! Double trouble! Twin Threats!
I say we stop using fossil fuels altogether - and drill for magma heat energy, near to magma chambers and subduction zones in the earth's crust. We line the bore holes with pipes - and pump water through to produce superheated steam, to drive turbines - to produce limitless quantities of clean electrical power.
I believe this form of energy is more than sufficient to meet the world's current energy demand, and the surplus could be used to capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle - so that it would not be necessary for you to 'pay more and have less' to save the world, or feel guilty every time you turn on a light!
The name of nowhere is "Brownfield land".
Climate change, though has already baked in sea level rise; the current rate is about 3cm per decade, and the seas continue to warm and the land ice continues to melt even if we stop burning fossil fuels today. The best agricultural land is low-lying flood plains. This will not be affecting us drastically for probably a hundred years; people will starve and drown in Bangladesh as they always do, but in larger numbers, St Louis will become more dangerous. The frog will slowly boil, but not notice.
Weather becomes more violent and unpredictable - we adapt. Trees do not. A hundred years is a very short time in forest migration, but a very long time in deforestation.
The question being asked by most people is entirely human centred; will we survive, will we lose our freedom, will we suffer? Meanwhile, the frog is boiling. I mention, not really for discussion, but for consideration, a strand of environmentalism that actively welcomes the climate apocalypse as the cure for the disease that is humanity en-mass. Top predators need to be few in number for a balanced environment. But the question for philosophy is not, is it happening or is it going to be bad, but how do we need to reimagine ourselves and our societies to include our dependencies on environment? The top of the tree must feed the roots.
The irony that the main concern is to find 'alternative' sources of energy to solve a problem of excess energy is amusing and pathetic. The conversation is more than 50 years old already, and it might be worth folk's while to catch up a little with what has already been discussed.
Having lived through the northern heatwave just now of 40+C temperatures, pretty much yeah. Most conversation isn't even about stopping climate change altogether but adapting and mitigating it. The ship has already sailed, and humanity is gonna feel some pain these coming years even if they do eventually get it together.
Depends on what tipping points you're talking about. There's a 1.5C limit and the 2C limit according to the Paris Accord, but things could get much more worse if we don't do anything right now. Even if climate change is already here I'm firmly against defeatist attitudes and frankly find them irrational. Action is important as it's always been, since it will allow us to get this under control.
Plenty of things, though I'm pretty sure you're aware of some of it. Switching to renewables, adopting EVs, planting trees, building carbon capture plants, building more climate resilient infrastructure, getting off meat, reducing methane producing waste, etc.
There's also geoengineering, which I fear will be the political right's "easy" response to the crisis once they can no longer ignore the asteroid that they've been downplaying for decades, but I don't think we're at that phase yet for them.
See above.
That is a country.
Quoting counterpunch
I'm all for clean, green, and hip energy if it can be sustained under capitalism and not through government intervention.
That’s because you’re completely ignorant about this topic. If you continue to choose not to take 10 minutes to read about it, please stop trolling this thread.
“We were doing very good work at Exxon. We had eight scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, including a prediction of how much global warming from carbon dioxide buildup 40 years later. We made a prediction in 1980 of what the atmospheric warming would be from fossil fuel burning in 2020. We predicted that it would be about one degree celsius. And it is about one degree celsius.
It never actually occurred to me that this was going to become a political problem. I thought: “We’ll do the analyses, we’ll write reports, the politicians of the world will see the reports and they’ll make the appropriate changes and transform our energy system somehow.” I’m a research scientist. In my field, if you discover something and it turns out to be valid, you’re a hero. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to convince people, even when they saw objective evidence of this happening.”
https://apple.news/A2Kt3kfswQ6WuG3CulrN58Q
And this is only one part of the world. We simultaneously have a drought going on here in New England, and one of the hottest Junes on record.
Climate is not weather, but it disrupts the weather. We’re seeing it happen before our eyes. The pattern is obvious, provided we can read a graph.
Exactly right.
Quoting Mr Bee
Unfortunately I agree with you, although I’m still hopeful that the carbon removal technology can ramp up quickly. Bill Gates is on the job, after all.
Quoting Kasperanza
So sayeth the church of neoliberalism. Glad to see someone still parrots the bullshit of Ayn Rand.
Capitalism wouldn’t last one second without “government intervention,” which is obvious to anyone who doesn’t live in Friedman and Rand’s dreamworld.
I agree. Most of the human race should revert to a Stone Age level.
The small number who hold onto the progress we've made will eventually leave earth and have fun abroad.
The rest can enjoy the earthly sunsets and die early, in pain, in the dirt. :up:
I agree. You are silly.
Or their kids' kids?
Climate impact, pollution, increasing extinctions, ...
Perhaps now is a good time to consider the longer term.
At least try to avoid some future suffering?
There's an ethical thing going on here.
But of course anyone is free to have no such considerations, to not care.
Interesting information, thanks.
So is there something in the research that tells us how we increase pressure to become a member?
No one is- or ever has - said this is what’s necessary. This is yet another common strawman used by science deniers. It’s either catastrophe or Stone Age, according to you. Must take real effort to remain so ignorant.
You should have quoted H G Wells and agreed with him, instead of quoting me and agreeing with yourself. Even quite smart people have to respond to your post, not your thoughts.
I was agreeing with you that the whole species doesn't need to discover new energy sources, just the part that wants to remain hi-tech.
Everyone resume defensive postures.
Furthermore, expressing it as "back to the stone age" is hyperbolic scaremongering. No, we don't have to give up modern medicine and dentistry, modern communications, modern housing, clean water and sewage treatment, a varied diet, and so on. We might have to give up petrol engined cars, eat less meat, stop flying as routine, work a bit harder at recycling, use public transport and stay at home more, stop buying fashion clothes like they're going out of fashion. We need to give up some of the crap we have been persuaded to want that we would lose nothing by doing without.
But we might lose them if we let runaway global warming destroy our societies.
I really didn't mean it that way. I have recent ancestors who had stone age technology. Maybe that's why it doesn't scare me?
Returning to that life would just mean letting go of grand dreams of what we could be.
If climate conditions became similar to PETM conditions, we might have no choice.
Quoting unenlightened
We would need a new energy source for all that.
Interestingly, population growth rates are turning downward in core nations due to education and opportunities for women. That will help.
Well, carbon capture is also an option for the right (and oil companies) to run on too since it doesn't require a big change in the current status quo. That is probably where I imagine the lines will be drawn politically in the future. Not ideal, but frankly that would be much better than where we are now with one side accepting the problem and the other thinking that it doesn't even exist.
Quite a lot, yeah. Most popular theories are based on the social capital costs of available identities (after Henri Tajfel) - polarise the range of available social identities such that fewer intermediary positions are available. People will be pulled to one or the other. Personally, I look more at narratives than social identity, but it's not the most popular position. Like Tajfel, I agree that in times of social stress options become polarised, but I think support for any 'identity' theory is sketchy (and that's me being polite about it), rather we take part in narratives which become available as part of our cultural milieu, it's these which become polarised such that we face a choice of becoming part of a narrative that's a little outside of our comfort zone, or being without a culturally available narrative to locate our behaviour in, and most people find the latter position quite uncomfortable.
I'd recommend having a look at the work of Shelly Grabe, she's extensively studied women's empowerment movements in Nicaragua from a social narrative perspective and gives a really good account of how the approach works using a concrete example.
Most accounts, however, muddy the distinction between being part of a protest movement and making sacrifices (which is why I like Grabe's work). The reasons people join social change movements where there's little risk to their own social status in doing so will be quite different from the reasons people join groups where the risk is higher.
One of the areas that's of interest now is the effect of mass social media on social group membership A few interesting studies have shown how the ability of social media to build opinion-based social groups very quickly (way beyond what was previously possible) can lead to these ephemeral motivators for action which don't have long-term robustness because the opinion-based social group dissipates as rapidly as it was formed. In a kind of 'perfect storm', opinion-based social groups are also far more strongly associated with political action than class or functional groups (see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.334). The result, so the theory goes, is that we have a load of flash-in-the-pan mass protests which achieve virtually nothing long-term because no-one involved had a strong social identity to motivate their actions (or a distinct narrative, as I would prefer to see it).
The upshot is that in the modern age, polarising available narratives might be just too easy and so not really apply the pressure they used to. It's just too easy to find a group to join these days so little pressure to join one slightly outside of your comfort zone. so we need more real-life social groups rather than virtual ones as they are less flexible, and so more able to pull in the direction of social change. Can't see it happening though...
Not if the government is right-wing. Recently in Slovenia, a right-wing government politician called the protesters "rabble" and another such politician called them "pigs".
With the popularization of right-wing politics, joining a group that isn't in line with the right-wing government might just be the right kind of pressure and might make people take such group membership seriously. But because the real-world consequences of such membership are likely going to be severe (e.g. losing your job), fewer people are likely to go through with it.
I don't think that's true. There's not one thing to make happen. There are lots of apocalyptic scenarios, but also lots of survivalist scenarios. Even some of the apocalyptic ones are quite optimistic: we might wipe ourselves out, maybe take a lot of species with is, but leave a living planet that obtains some kind of harmony. That's not necessarily a bad outcome. The survival outcomes could be anything from ideal (complete reversal of manmade climate change in the nick of time) to abject (a minority survive but resort to cannibalism) via horrifying (we survive as cyborgs). It's not a coin toss. Options on the table today may not be on the table tomorrow, but there'll be other, less good ones.
They change behaviour as well. Online everyone's an individualist at the centre of their own virtual world. Real groups have real group dynamics.
For most people, this is too abstract. It seems to me that unless people experience climate change directly, in a way that doesn't depend on trusting others, they can't really relate to it.
For example, those who have had a garden for at least 20 years, and, of course, crop farmers know climate change first hand. But how are city people supposed to relate to it?
We've had a considerable garden for 40+ years and we try to grow at least the seasonal vegetables for ourselves. Up until some 30 years ago, it was barely ever necessary to water the plants, there was enough and evenly distributed rain. Now, it's impossible to grow anything by relying solely on rain. Also, most of the rain now is torrential, making erosion a major problem, so we had to build terraces and frame all the allotments. In the past, torrential rain was so rare that it was possible to maintain a classical garden on steep terrain. We also need to use ground covers, we had to adapt in terms of choice of varieties, and so on.
Bu that's just it: If he read about it, it would be yet another thing he read. And as such, easily dismissable.
Have you read the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels by Alex Epstein?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6b7K1hjZk4
Then the solution is simply to create a cheaper energy resource that burning fossil fuels. Even in aircraft design they are looking for using other fuels.
But I guess the perspective still is on our own asses, because life on Earth will surely adapt to situations where the polar caps have melted etc. We humans on the other hand might have huge problems.
Global temperatures, historical:
And a bit more perspective to those changes:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Perhaps one philosophical question (as this is a Philosophy Forum) is the following: Do we look at ourselves as being part of the fauna on Earth or do we have the somewhat Christian view that this is a garden that has been given us to keep and make the separation with nature and us. Some might say that this is totally unimportant, but actually it's very important.
As never in the timeline of life on Earth has one single species been so dominant and abundant, it's not surprising that it can teeter on a collapse based on it's own existence. The whole advanced economy (that we call globalization) is needed to sustain such large populations. But at least I'm an optimist. We have already seen Peak-conventional-Oil (production). And we are living during one of the worst pandemics in history.
Still life is quite good and I can discuss this issue with people I don't personally know that are on other continents.
(Some other species have difficulties, when humans have introduced them to habitats without enough predators...building more advanced societies would help.)
Your point is well taken. This is why I'm hopeful but not pushing too hard for this -- I know it can be "appropriated" by those who want to see nothing happen whatsoever.
Quoting frank
Lol -- how pathetic. Can the moderators please boot this guy -- at least from this thread? He's contributing nothing, resorts to name-calling, and apparently plagiarizes without citation. Just a thought. I flagged it as well, so take a look.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It's amazing that people continue on like this.
Yes, a nuclear war would probably not wipe out everyone as well. Would you want to live in that world, however? Probably not. Likewise for climate change -- if we do nothing, we're dead. Period. If we do little, there's a chance we survive in a hellish world. It does seem like the latter is a real possibility, yes.
And I never said "one thing" needs to happen. This is going to take many different changes in many different fields, involving many different countries.
Quoting baker
Yes indeed. But the ozone was a bit abstract too, in a way. Easier to picture, because it was a "hole" and there was a lot of talk about it. But the other difference was that there wasn't as much of a pushback from powerful capitalist industries.
What's happening with climate denial is more on par with what Big Tobacco did when it became clear that smoking causes lung cancer: major pushback, sow doubt, undermine the science, associate it with communism or socialism, make it a matter of "freedom," etc. Some of the same lawyers who represented tobacco companies also represent Exxon, Chevron, etc.
I think that's the real culprit here. We forget that not long ago, George HW Bush, Newt Gingrich, W Bush, and John McCain would openly talk about climate change and the need to do something about it. That was up to about 13 or so years ago. The push came especially from the Koch network. This has been well documented, in fact. That's where I place the majority of blame.
Quoting Kasperanza
You mean the non-scientist/climate denier/Ayn Rand cultist who was destroyed in debate by Bill McKibben years ago? Regardless, I'm not watching a single thing you suggest until you've shown you've done the minimal amount of reading required to even be taken seriously on this topic. You remind me of a person who, because he's watched a few videos on quantum mechanics on YouTube, feels confident enough to walk into an MIT physics class and lecture the professor. Grow up.
Quoting NOS4A2
:yawn:
Shocker that this tired, stupid line gets regurgitated by you.
That's sarcasm -- not shocked at all. In case that was unclear.
In case others are reading (not you -- go back to sleep):
The latest bullshit from climate deniers is the phrase "the climate is ALWAYS changing." This way they can appear to agree when asked "do you believe in climate change?" An old and rather obvious tactic, straight from the lawyers.
But no, the climate has not "always changed." Not like this, and not since we've been around. There's a mountain of evidence that shows why it's dangerous, and why the scientists are warning us about it. They're being ignored, largely due to propaganda (in my view). Same as all the people who were duped, by tobacco companies, into believing that cigarettes were harmless -- the science wasn't "settled," after all. Exactly the same tactics, almost exactly the same people involved (see above).
NOS is right in the meaty part of the curve for Trump-voting right-wingers. Nothing shocking there, but a good example of what I was saying above about the effectiveness of propaganda.
Next up: "CO2 is good for the planet!" or "It's the sun!" or "It's water vapor!" or "It's all funded by George Soros!" etc. etc.
Wow, you're a really closed-minded person. I'm not expecting you to agree, but it would be nice if you could understand some of the points that Alex Epstein makes. I don't think he's some lunatic. He provides something genuine to the discussion – something that you rarely hear regarding climate change. With your insults and intimidation, I doubt you do any justice for your cause. Which is good. If you alienate enough people they won't take you seriously.
Well yes, of course. That's all I'm talking about, although a lot of people here are taking a much broader view. But I don't care as much about whether other life exists, necessarily. I care about human existence. I assumed we all do. Some like to posture about this, of course, but appearing to be above it all often leaves me with two reactions: the person is silly or sick.
I'm talking about human life, not general biological life. So in case that wasn't clear, there you go. Yes, bacteria will probably go on without us. That's little consolation to me, my grandkids, or my great-great grandkids.
Quoting ssu
That doesn't provide perspective at all, really. Not if we're talking about human life. Because, if you notice, we haven't been around that long. Behaviorally modern humans, maybe 200 or so thousand years. Better to look at that record. Also best to take a look at what scientists say about this and why it's important.
I'm very familiar with Alex Epstein. I'm also familiar with other very famous climate "skeptics" -- Marc Morano. James Inhofe. Myron Ebell. Bjorn Lomborg. Fred Singer. Roy Spencer. (These latter two are especially prominent in online circulation.) None of them are "lunatics" (well, perhaps Inhofe). Some are scientists (in other fields), some are politicians, some are complete industry-funded charlatans who don't believe a word of what they're saying, and some are (I imagine) pretty nice guys who are sincere in their beliefs.
Sure, you can stick exclusively with those guys if you'd like. I've been discussing this issue with their followers for years. They, much like you, don't seem to have the slightest interest in consulting any climatologist, academy, or institution that represents the vast consensus. Won't spend 10 minutes on anything by NASA, by the Royal Academy, by Nature or Science magazine or any other research journal, by the IPCC, by NOAA, American Institute of Physics, National Center for Atmospheric Research, American Meteorological Society, Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS), etc. etc. etc.
I suppose that's -- what -- "open minded"?
I mean I grew up the American education system. I was fed your perspective my entire life and I believed it for most of my life.
I just wonder what your solution is to climate change. Is it enforced public transportation? Limited electricity use? More solar energy? My opinion is that free minds in a free market will come up with a faster and more powerful solution than government programs and eco-fascistic institutions. I mean what if your solution is wrong, and you will be punishing people who don't want to follow a wrong solution? Think about all the power grabs politicians can use with climate change. Climate change is a great excuse to subsidize a company that promotes "clean energy" when really the company is NOT even helping the economy or the environment.
I mean yeah there's all this science, but what are we supposed to do about it? Just cut out fossil fuels without a real replacement? To me that's scary. Epstein's point is that fossil fuels protect and enhance people's lives. Fossil fuels protect people from heat waves. And yet the environmentalists want to limit them. I find it to be worrisome.
Sigh.
Believed what? Going solely on what you've said thus far, it seems very obvious to me that you really haven't taken the time to understand the (now) other point of view -- which happens to be the overwhelming consensus amongst people who have dedicated their lives to the field -- climatologists, oceanographers, geophysicists, astrophysicists, etc.
The climate is changing rapidly. We're already seeing some of the results, as was predicted years ago. This was known way back in the 50s, in fact. Exxon scientists noted it in the 70s and 80s. It's long been known that burning fossil fuels, along with agricultural practices and deforestation, will lead to a build-up in greenhouse gases -- CO2, methane, etc.
The higher these concentrations, the warmer the planet. This is what we're seeing. It seems like a small change, but it is having (and will continue to have) a very large effect on the planet. It's true that it's been much warmer in the past, and that CO2 has (in conjunction) been much higher as well -- during the time of the dinosaurs, for example. But humans weren't around then. That was a much different world with a different biosphere.
Since the industrial revolution, we've pumped tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and, as isn't a surprise, the global temperature average has increased. There are graphs available that show this correlation very clearly if you're more visual (like me).
So the greenhouse gases are climbing rapidly and the climate is changing rapidly. More so than in the last 100,000 years -- and we have CO2 measurements/temperature measurements from that far too (ice core samples, etc). That's really dangerous for life on Earth, because it will effect many things -- leaving even tipping points aside.
It'll effect where we live, as sea level rise will impact coastal communities. It'll effect agriculture -- so the global food supply, due to droughts and desertification. That will be devastating. It will effect fishing. It will effect water supply (as the mountain ice caps disappear, as they're already doing, and rivers dry up due to increase heat, as is already happening). There will be massive movements of people from one area to another -- much larger than anything in human history (think Bangladesh alone, which is increasingly becoming more and more inundated with water). That's millions of refugees -- not thousands. I could go on and on. Much of this is already happening, as you know.
I write all this out in case you're really curious. I would much prefer you read some of the links I've provided, but so be it.
Quoting Kasperanza
There are many solutions. The IPCC provides some, but I like Robert Pollin's ideas myself (he's an economist, not a climatologist -- but he starts with the premise that climate change is real and something needs to be done econimically). He outlines a plan that would require about 3% of GDP annually to enact. A smooth transition.
The solutions are already known. A magic bullet isn't necessary. No miracles, no totalitarianism, no radical/shocking upheaval of human life: investments in clean energy and research, a shift in subsidies, carbon taxes (proposed by many Republicans), a shift in investments to cleaner industries (which the major asset managers are already doing), divestment from fossil fuels, retrofitting buildings, infrastructure -- including high-speed rail and the public transportation systems, higher efficiency standards, better regulations, and so on.
Plenty of solutions, plenty of plans. Nothing extremist. It can easily happen, provided there's political will. But there hasn't been any, and for obvious reasons. The people of this country (and around the world) are in favor of it, and those numbers will continue to rise as things get worse. The IPCC and others have given us maybe 10 or 20 years to really get moving on this, and we have to start right away. There are some bright spots, but still a lot more needs to be done.
It's a big moment -- right now in congress there's a chance for the use of a reconciliation bill to fund much of this stuff, which would be a good start. Republicans are trying to block it all, and some moderate democrats are also standing in the way. It seems like an absurd scenario, but that's what "capitalism" does. When congress is bought by special interests who don't want anything done, usually nothing gets done. Not until it's too late or enormous damage has been done -- which is already true.
There are no such thing as "free markets." I know Ayn Rand talks about this a lot -- but it's a fantasy. She ignores a lot of history. If you want someone a little more tricky, try Milton Friedman. He's had a much bigger impact than Rand, and has a better understanding of history. His thesis is equally flawed, though. There are no "free markets" in the world. There's only state-capitalism, which is what we have here in the US. Major intervention in markets by the state. So if an industry is largely the cause of a problem -- whether lung cancer or climate change -- and have benefited from state subsidies for decades, then the state can intervene in the opposite direction as well.
Hmm.. aren't greenhouses good for the environment? It is a "green" gas. That's good for nature. Having a hot climate like a the dinosaurs did sounds great! Maybe our climate can change to a more dino-like biosphere.
And how do you know this is all due to CO2? What if the planet is going through a generational shift, or getting solar flares from the sun? And do you really think the climate would stop changing if we stopped releasing CO2 in the air? Would it slow it down enough to stop climate change? Why limit fossil fuels if climate change is inevitable?
Quoting Xtrix
These are pretty vague and without focus. Better regulations? That sounds so empty. To me that just sounds like more laws and less productivity
And considering the doom and gloom many environmentalists associate the future with, I think we will need a totalitarian dictatorship to save the planet. Public transportation still puts CO2 in the air, and by the looks of the science, I doubt the climate will stop changing.
Also, I'm not a republican. I don't like republicans or democrats.
Quoting Xtrix
Which is why I think environmentalism will lead to a fascist dictatorship. Under capitalism, people wouldn't be waiting around for the government to fix the issue, individuals with their free minds would take their own actions to fix the climate, if they even see it as a threat. The government doesn't get things done. PEOPLE get things done. Policies don't save the planet. Businesses, products, and fossil fuels save the planet. Innovators and entrepreneurs save the planet with their ideas. People need to be FREE to test out their ideas.
Quoting Xtrix
I mean yeah it will effect us, but I don't see any impending doom. You talk like humans won't be handle this. When problems arise, people adapt. Also, fossil fuels are the greatest defense against these issues. Fossil fuels can help us grow more food, irrigate water, build new and exciting cities. Capitalism can innovate to build walls, or island cities or whatever solutions people come up with.
Haha wow, fishing will be affected. Okay so fishing affected? So what all the fish die. People can find food elsewhere.
When some lands become dry and barren, new lands will open up. Maybe Canada and Russia will become much warmer and inhabitable.
If the sea levels rise, just move. It's great there will be mass movements of people. Immigration is good.
https://youtu.be/0_a9RP0J7PA at 16:55
If no one is dying, what are we so worried about? Why would we take away fossil fuels, when fossil fuels are preventing deaths and increasing people's quality of life?
It makes zero sense to me.
Thanks. So no corrections to what I posted, then?
Quoting Kasperanza
To my mind already answered this aptly. My post on freedom which you gave 10 out of 10 to ought to have indicated via its satire that freedom, while being an all-around feel-good term, is not a good thing in all conceivable cases. The freedom to pursue happiness via the mass murder of others is an example most take to be a bad freedom. Going by this example, a proposed truism: freedom is good only in so far as it doesn’t unfairly harm others.
Do you agree with this premise? If not, on what grounds should a person’s freedom to pursue happiness via mass murder be prohibited by others? Or should it not be?
If you do agree, then by what consistent reasoning should freedom to devastate the world and the humans that inhabit it in the name of personal happiness not be prohibited?
Please note, I ask from a philosophical perspective in respect to the generalized notion of freedom. Whether or not global warming is real, is human caused, is a means of devastating the world, etc., is not the issue I’m presently addressing here.
Possibly true. You should read Grabe, I think she'd be right up your street.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
True, that anonymity of online discourse also allows multiple personalities, so they're not just one individual, but several. I actually think this might be a good thing for adolescents, but coming into the adult world needs to have the reality of a groups you can't so easily re-form. Oddly (or perhaps obviously) it ties in with your line of thought about hunter-gatherer moral and economic decision-making. The less flexible and easily replaceable the social group around you is, the more effort it is advisable to but into social relations and proportionately less into individual self-construction. Social media seems to be the pinnacle of a move away from focus on the network links and more toward the nodes.
Anyone not addressing the relationship between the shift in social dynamics and the failure to tackle issues with socially-owned resources is just pissing in the wind as far as I'm concerned, but then I'd be naive to think they were doing so out of a strong desire to solve the problem.
Better than building rabbit-proof fences, yeah. This mentality is what I was thinking of btw:
Quoting Kasperanza
This is very typical in my experience. It'd be like trying to ban guns in the US, people would just lose their minds.
Meeting the climate challenge without constant and crushing interventions in the market is precisely the point. Magma energy can sustain capitalism - and so maintain the personal and political freedoms capitalism allows for.
I’m just stating what I believe on a popular topic, and the only effect I’ve had is your weird, baffled rage. I assure you, though, I’m not some nefarious figure in your little propaganda fantasy. I don’t care enough about what people believe to even bother. I just despise the conformity and invariable statism your kind of proselytizing demands. It doesn’t seek to change minds; it seeks control, and I will dissent from it every time. That’s all.
Dissent for the sake of dissent? Orr is there a principle behind choosing freedom over the collective good?
Why would I bother to correct a straw man of my argument?
Quoting javra
I'm not surprised that you find one-word answers suitable.
Quoting javra
i was talking about economic freedom, a freedom that is sustained with individual rights. Why would I advocate for a freedom in which murder is legal?
Quoting javra
The world, environment, or nature is not the standard of value. Human beings are the standard of value. Individual rights allow for a rational freedom.
Just how old are you?
Quoting Kasperanza
We know because we know the physical properties of CO2.
Quoting Kasperanza
Death is inevitable, yet we don't drive without seatbelts or brakes.
Quoting Kasperanza
Does the government not consist of people?
Quoting Kasperanza
You complained above about a statement being "vague and without focus". This here is certainly vague and without focus. Just a collection of nice sounding words.
Quoting Kasperanza
Do you care about people dieing preventable deaths?
Quoting Kasperanza
Because you're apparently completely unwilling to consider future consequences.
Quoting Kasperanza
Where is the line between murder and getting people killed via economic policy?
Quoting Kasperanza
So freedom is whatever is best for human beings?
It’s comments like this that make it obvious you don’t have a clue. Excess amount of greenhouse gases produces a greater greenhouse effect. That’s not good for human beings or nature as we know it. If we have a climate like the dinosaurs, we’re toast as a a species. Which you’d know if you deign to read anything about this topic outside denialist propaganda.
Quoting Kasperanza
It’s not all due to CO2, but that’s the main driver. Methane and other gases also contribute.
It’s not solar flares or generational shifts— believe it or not, this has been considered by climate scientists. What we see is outside of natural variation. But feel free to believe that because you’ve watched a YouTube video by a well known climate denier, you’ve cracked the case. Maybe a lecture from you on why quantum mechanics is “stupid”?
Yes, stopping burning fossil fuels will have an effect on the earth’s global temperature average, which is the goal.
Quoting Kasperanza
“Under capitalism”?
The capitalism you’re talking about — Rand’s version— doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy. Try looking at the real world instead.
There’s no reason to believe our government can’t solve this issue, and rather easily. What’s in the way is what you’d call “capitalism”: greedy, profit-driven industries who buy off politicians and lobby for what they want. Pretty obvious.
Quoting Kasperanza
No, they’re the cause of the problem. They and the privileging of profit over people. You’re simply deluded.
You don’t see impending doom? Oh good. Your expert opinion gives me solace.
Quoting Kasperanza
Is this a joke? Or are you a joke?
I’ll go with the latter. Oh well.
Not enraged, and certainly not baffled. Not by you anyway.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yeah, you’re a hero. How brave.
And because he apparently doesn’t read anything outside climate denial— and maybe not even that, given that the only reference given thus far has been to a YouTube video.
Just some kid doing his impression of Ayn Rand. I don’t see much point in continuing.
B.C. heat wave saw 719 people die in one week, says B.C. coroner
Where?
Oh, wait, all those people in those hot African countries, India, and so on, they should just move elsewhere.
Actually, I think people like him have it really good in life. So often, ignorance in fact is bliss.
Yeah, the real world sucks because people don't know what real freedom is.
I've lost my faith in government, especially after COVID. The government passes laws, in other words, restrictions. Restrictions take away freedom. People need freedom to be happy and flourish. Really basic concept.
If we have any hope of dealing with climate change, it's allowing capitalism to come up with solutions with competition and innovation, not the government controlling people like animals. And depriving them of fossil fuels, which is our only means of survival from the climate.
Quoting Xtrix
You realize that's a contradiction? When people make a profit, it's because they've provided value to the economy, people are benefitting from the product.
Quoting Xtrix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElP6Xq7BHpc
Nailed it.
So laws are "restrictions," in Ayn Rand's eyes (sorry, I mean "your" eyes), and thus restrict freedom. How quaint.
By this I gather you exempt the laws ("restrictions") that keep the wealthy in their positions of powers, like the corporation as a person (a gift from the state), patent laws, copyright laws, private property laws, etc. To say nothing of roads, bridges, police, military, subsidies, tax breaks, and bailouts when they fail. All from the government. That's all fine, I assume.
Traffic laws should probably go, though. So should laws against malpractice. That's not cancer you're dying from -- it's "real freedom."
Laughable if it wasn't so sad that people really think like this.
Quoting baker
Yeah, another kid who thinks he has it all figured out because he's discovered some Ayn Rand or Thomas Sowell (the latest "libertarian" darling) videos on YouTube. I can see that. They speak with authority, are well educated, and aren't completely insane. Some things of theirs I even agree with. But when I see how their followers apply their thinking to issues like climate change or corporate malfeasance, it's fairly obvious that something's gone wrong.
Quoting Kasperanza
I've asked you to take ten minutes to read about climate change, and you've refused. Eventually I'll just ignore you. But since 10 minutes may be a long time to some, here's literally 60 seconds worth:
You keep repeating this, and you're confused. So I'll repeat: there is no "capitalism." I don't know what you're referring to when you say that. So either explain what you mean or stop embarrassing yourself by mindlessly repeating slogans.
Second, fossil fuels (and the greed of the industry, driven by profits at the cost of society -- what some would call "capitalism") are the cause of this crisis. Using more of them is literally the opposite of what needs to happen. Do you see that or not? Clearly you don't. Which, again, is why I would recommend learning about this topic.
Lastly, you likewise keep repeating that fossil fuels are the "only means of survival from the climate." Based on what you've previously said, you mean air conditioning and electricity and things like that, which is mind-boggling. The more we use fossil fuels, the worse the situation will get. Period. So yes, we need electricity for heat and air conditioning, and we need transportation. This can all be done with renewable energy -- nuclear energy, wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. That's what needs to happen. That's what we're transitioning to.
Your position is literally: "Wow, it's getting really hot out -- who cares? As long as we can stay cool inside, with our air conditioners, what difference does it make what happens 'out there'?"
You're the embodiment of science illiteracy.
Here are some resources to ignore:
https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/
https://www.ipcc.ch
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/
And once more, for good measure:
Quoting Xtrix
This new energy is expensive and difficult to come by. It's absolutely 100% not true that fossil fuels make things worse.
The more we use fossil fuels, the easier it is to manipulate our surroundings to make life on Earth comfortable. Fossil fuels are not the enemy. Fossil fuels are a reliable, cheap, and plentiful source of energy.
I don't give a squawk what the climate does, I'm not departing from fossil fuels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Re2WKKasI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2J5aiSHCj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulg_R3L9Z_U
:lol:
Just as I thought. Stick with your dogma and be happy. The world is transitioning away from fossil fuels, which are 100% contributing to the climate crisis (despite your delusions), whether you like it or not. Sorry!
Whether it happens quickly enough, I don’t know.
Quoting Kasperanza
That’s because you’re scientifically illiterate. But I don’t care if you don’t care— by all means troll somewhere else and be happy with your Ayn Rand/capitalism worship. This happens to be titled “climate change.” If you don’t care about it, next time don’t comment.
https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/
https://www.ipcc.ch
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/
Ayn Rand makes me happy; I think she's a beautiful thinker. So I'll stick to it.
Good for you! It’s clearly doing wonders.
I missed this one. :lol:
So take SARS-CoV-2 to court.
Some people really are able to think and live in cutthroat terms, though. They don't have humanist sensitivities. For them, it's perfectly normal that species, including humans become extinct -- nothing to make a fuss about. They can be quite careless about their own death as well.
If one finds epic poignancy in contemplating the demise of our species, that's love. It means all the cynicism and religious based self hatred has dropped away.
Not everyone can handle experiencing that love. Some can't stop hating humanity because they can't stop hating themselves. These are the people who can't think rationally about climate change. All they can do is rage like toddlers as if that will make any difference.
[quote=] According to new analysis from the Center for American Progress, there are still 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress, including 109 representatives and 30 senators, who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. All 139 of these climate-denying elected officials have made recent statements casting doubt on the clear, established scientific consensus that the world is warming—and that human activity is to blame. These same 139 climate-denying members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil, and gas industries.
While the number of climate deniers has shrunk by 11 members (from 150 to 139) since the CAP Action Fund’s analysis of the 116th Congress—largely in the face of growing and overwhelming public support for action on climate—their numbers still include the majority of the congressional Republican caucus.* These climate deniers comprise 52 percent of House Republicans; 60 percent of Senate Republicans; and more than one-quarter of the total number of elected officials in Congress. Furthermore, despite the decline in total overall deniers in Congress, a new concerning trend has emerged: Of the 69 freshmen representatives and senators elected to their respective offices in 2020, one-third deny the science of climate change, including 20 new House Republicans and three-of-four new Republican senators. Of note, no currently serving Democratic or independent elected officials have engaged in explicit climate denial by this analysis’ definition. [/quote]
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2021/03/30/497685/climate-deniers-117th-congress/
It says it's not as bad as the media make it out to be because it's nit-picking. Playing semantic games at a moment like this, when scientists around the world are alarmed and telling us how catastrophic this can be if we don't do something very quickly, is just irresponsible and feeds right into climate denialism, or at best climate apathy. It's "not as bad" because some people make the (potentially) erroneous claim that not all humans will survive, or it won't occur for another 100 or so years -- and by then we'll know how to solve the problem. This is the logic. If you don't see why this is misguided, you haven't been listening to the vast majority of climatologists.
Quoting Albero
I don't think you're an idiot, and I don't think we're fucked if we act on this issue right now. As I said many times, there are sensible solutions. It's right there. It just takes pressuring of these so-called leaders of ours.
What I disagree with is when people -- like you -- choose to give far more attention and weight to a small minority of people (usually not climatologists) who claim that either nothing is happening or, in your case, that it's happening but it won't be as bad as the most extreme claims and so we don't need to worry as much about it. That's not delusional, it's dangerous.
Quoting Albero
It's worth paying attention when 97% + scientists, around the world, are telling us we have about 12 years to get a move on things. It's also worth opening your eyes to what's happening right now. If you want more literature or references, I'll be happy to give them.
Quoting Albero
Where?
Quoting Albero
When did I say that governments aren't doing anything? Like you say, they are -- but not nearly enough. Especially the US and China.
Illuminati confirmed, Exxonmobil lobbying against climate science to terraform dinosaurs back to life.
Here is a paper published and peer reviewed by several sociologists who specialize in human geography, climate change and public policy who disagree with the 12 year deadline idea. https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41558-019-0543-4
And here is Michael Mann talking about doomism and its dangers:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-deniers-shift-tactics-to-inactivism/
You have a right to feel urgency about it, but all I'm saying is that the science shows the most extreme and out there scenarios aren't even on the table anymore thanks to the pledges. A 4 degree rise was once a possibility, but the current rise is projected to be 2.5 degrees by 2050 and is expected to lower even more as pledges ramp up in the coming years (sadly the consensus is that we will probably not get to 1.5 degrees though). Even Mann agrees that corporations are largely to blame for this, and blaming people for their lifestyle isn't the root of the issue (not that you've indicated that, but some here were suggesting market only solutions)
Yeah this isn't fear mongering being used to grab political power.
First of all, you're making things up. No one is saying we have "12 years to save the world." Absolutely no one. No one serious anyway. That you reflexively mischaracterize it this way already exposes your warped perspective.
Secondly, it is absolutely coming from climate scientists, not from journalists. The journalists have reported on it. If some have stated we have "12 years to save the world," they're probably from Fox News. From other media, it's usually straightforward. It comes from an IPCC report, which you can read here.
What it states, as I stated, is that we have 12 years (less now), or until about 2030 to really get a move on things. The year 2050 is the more important (and more realistic) target -- but it becomes increasingly unlikely if we don't start working towards more immediate goals as a foundation.
Quoting Albero
No, they disagree with how the 12-year IPCC recommendation is being interpreted, and how that can be dangerous. That's a reasonable issue, but completely separate from what actually is recommended by the IPCC, which is exactly as I mentioned: we have until 2030 to get things moving. That doesn't mean the world will end. The danger with giving any kind of "deadline" like that, as the paper mentions, is that it becomes a political weapon.
Quoting Albero
Michael Mann, from the interview:
"You say that fossil fuel interests are not just fighting against renewable energy. They are also pushing the idea that it is too late—that climate change cannot be stopped, and it is pointless to try to do so at this stage.
MM: Conservative media are promoting people such as Guy McPherson, who says that we have 10 years left before exponential climate change literally extinguishes life on Earth and that we should somehow find a way to cope with our imminent demise. I call it “climate doom porn.” It’s very popular, it really sells magazines, but it’s incredibly disabling. If you believe that we have no agency, then why take any action? I’m not saying that fossil fuel companies are funding people like McPherson; I have no evidence of that. But when you look at who is actually pushing this message, it’s the conservative media networks that air his interviews."
I agree wholeheartedly. But again, no scientists are saying "we're doomed," and neither am I. Neither is the IPCC. What they're saying is that we need to do something quickly, and they lay out a plan. The only ones who want to twist it as "forget it, we're already doomed, so don't bother" or mischaracterize it as "we only have 10 years left or the world will explode!" are conservative media and fossil fuel propaganda. That's not what the scientists are saying.
To invoke Michael Mann in relation to the original article you quoted is strange -- because it's exactly that attitude that he's fighting against, even in the very article you cite (if you read it in its entirety).
Quoting Albero
Again, I have to ask for references here. I think there's still very much a good possibility we get to 4 degrees or more. I'd love to believe the opposite, so I'm happy to take a look.
I wonder if you have noticed that even if it is fear mongering being used to grab political power, that does not render it false.
It's that logic thing again. Annoyingly difficulty for you, I know, but it comes with the territory.
Quoting Xtrix
Not once did I say we’re doomed. Yes, if we do nothing — we’re dead. “If.” That’s not hard to understand, and that’s not saying “we’re doomed.” The choice is ours — it’s not foregone.
So those are the choices: we make it happen or we don’t. If we don’t, we’re dead. That’s obvious, and that’s why scientists are saying we need to ACT. The fact that you equate this with “we’re doomed” says a decent amount about your reading comprehension.
But nice try.
Dead, but not doomed. Nice epitaph. :rofl:
Doomed implies it’s inevitable. Which justifies doing nothing, since we’re doomed anyway.
Here’s a cartoon version. An asteroid is approaching Earth. Scientist A: “We’re doomed.” Scientist B: “If we don’t act, we’re all gonna die.” Most will see the difference here.
I don’t expect you to understand the difference, so just go back to sleep.
https://www.nytimes.com/article/climate-change-global-warming-faq.html?name=styln-climate®ion=TOP_BANNER&block=storyline_menu_recirc&action=click&pgtype=Article&variant=show&is_new=false#link-2bcb067a
https://apple.news/APFr19IAmTXOlAZrxQ-840w
Renewables the cheapest form of energy last year.
Hmmm…
I don't know of any legit scientists who say we're doomed either way.
But you realize that this is a long-term problem?
Broaden your temporal horizon and take in more of the situation.
Imagine that 200 short years from now humans decide to release all the CO2 they can get their hands on. This means all the North American coal, which is humongous.
The climate will be altered pretty drastically for a couple thousand years. In about 10,000 years, things will be be getting closer to baseline. In 100,000 years, the CO2 level will be back to preindustrial levels
So we'll have a couple of jolts for life on earth to deal with. Humans will be fine. Primates evolved in the PETM, so there's no reason to think we'll face anything we can't handle. Civilization us a different question.
So if we succeed in completely transitioning off fossil fuels now, that doesn't solve any problems. It's just one hurdle. The problem will still exist for our descendants.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but this issue comes up in any freshman class in climate change: the fact that we have no experience dealing with long range problems. Doesn't mean we couldn't develop the ability, but we haven't even begun to speculate how.
Quoting Xtrix
I actually was asleep. Unusually rough day at work yesterday.
Well, then we should not say that the goal is to save the World, but just to say to help us and the few next generations of humans after us.
Quoting Xtrix
A holistic view is sometimes quite important. You see, if you start from thinking about yourself and then come to conclusions to what to do, you might not think about the broader effects your actions do.
Understanding that we are a part of nature too, helps think of the situation better in my view.
@Kasperanza
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sometimes it's hard to even face the facts how these things work. Like a Democrat administration banning guns in the current political environment wouldn't do wonders to the already vitriolic political environment. The same problems are when we let's say talk about replacing fossil fuels. The way things work in our global economy is that you would have the cheaper alternative energy resource. Even that still would leave the plethora of uses that for example oil has, which shouldn't be forgotten.
And perhaps there is the distinction of whom we want to listen. We will listen to the scientist and to the activist we agree with. Yet many would be hesitant to listening to economists or people from the corporate sector who basically are in charge of these issues (as we don't trust them). Yet the issue isn't just environmental, it is economic, logistical and political. All those issues have to be tackled before we have the true environmental solution. Otherwise the politicians will just fool us with grand promises of getting solutions in a decade or two that will not become reality.
No one is saying we’re doomed.
If we continue business as usual? Yes, then we’re dead. There’s a chance, of course, that we survive— just as there’s a chance that we survive nuclear war. We can focus on that chance if we like. Doesn’t change what scientists are saying.
Quoting frank
Yes, one that we need to act on very quickly — in the short term. If we listen to scientists, of course. I choose to listen to them. I recommend others do too.
Quoting ssu
I don’t think I said anything about saving the world— but if I did, yes I meant human beings. This should be fairly obvious.
No. You've got a truckload of self-righteous anger, but few facts. Whether you correct that or not depends on how much you are actually interested in the topic
:lol:
:up:
Human extinction due to AGW? Who said that?
I take from your answer that your statement that any science points to human extinction as a result of AGW is as ridiculous as it sounded.
The issue, at least as some of us see it, is the degree of suffering experienced by us and other humans - including that which is to be experienced by future generations - while alive.
And, while others will speak for themselves, I for one don't find overall positions such as that of @Xtrix's in any way discordant to the issue I've just addressed.
Human extinction as a result of AGW? Who says that?
No, the given is not extinction. But that all humans are mortal, with or without extinction.
My point, again, is that the issue is not death, but suffering in life (much including the suffering caused by the death of loved ones, and the like).
You may be right about that. :up:
Quoting javra
Or do you find no correlation between increased global warming and increased human suffering?
Hard to say. The human psyche is tricksy.
Finally, an element of intelligence in this conversation, rather than hysteria. Then one gets into the nitty gritty of degrees of suffering and how to possibly mitigate some of that.
I think that might have been sexist.
Oh oh. I apologize to Ms Xtrix. :worry:
Thank you.
You haven't read David Archer -- who's a serious person and a climate scientist.
As I've said before, there is very good reason to believe it could wipe us out completely. That's one scenario. I view it as the most likely IF we don't take significant actions.
True, there's a chance it may not wipe us out if we continue business as usual. There's a chance nuclear war won't wipe us out either. That seems to be comforting enough for you.
Quoting frank
Climate scientists. What you don't seem to understand, but which I'll repeat again, is that this assumes "business as usual," which is what I (and Tim) mentioned. There are feedback loops and tipping points that can be reached -- it's called the "hothouse earth" scenario, and many climatologists take it quite seriously. Not surprising that you've completely missed all the literature on this.
Here's a good starter:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_90dc2a2637f348edae45943a88da04d4.pdf
“...attention has been given to a ‘hothouse Earth’ scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining. This ‘hothouse Earth’ planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower."
[...]
From an interview about the above:
“Our argument is in essence that on the present path, including the commitments in Paris, warming will be three or three and a bit degrees. If you include climate cycle feedbacks, which are not included in the IPCC analysis, it’ll be effectively higher.” For both those claims, there’s significant published science backing him. Then he gets to the controversial bit: “Three degrees may end our civilization.”
For that claim, he cites climate scientist John Schellnhuber, who said in an interview early this year, “if we get it wrong, do the wrong things ... then I think there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation,” and UN Secretary General António Guterres, who has said “The problem is that the status quo is a suicide.”
--Here
Again -- these arguments could be wrong. The arguments about whether a nuclear holocaust would truly wipe out every human being could be wrong too. But I see no reason not to take them seriously, and absolutely no reason to dismiss or ignore them outright (a line that you've apparently taken, for whatever reason).
"A doomsday future is not inevitable! But without immediate drastic action our prospects are poor. We must act collectively. We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind."
That climate change, like nuclear war, is an existential threat? Good. When I say this, I'm repeating what I've read from scientists, not the media.
People don't like hearing this, of course. That's the real issue. So maybe it's better to pretend these scenarios don't exist -- I don't know, I'm not a politician or pundit. But even if they aren't true, and humans will go on living -- I don't think anyone would want to live in that world, or have their grandkids live in it.
Those who dismiss it all as "alarmism" simply represent another variant of climate denialism.
You have to be aware that these positions even exist, and Frank has done his best to avoid them because it doesn't feel good.
If the Hothouse Earth Hypothesis is correct, then stabilising at or above 2°C would lead to a gradual but inevitable drift up to 4°C by say the year ~3000 (because of the tipping points i think) making the 2-4°C range impossible to remain stable in on long timescales. But as you can read here, a lot of scientists are unsure if it would really trigger past 2 degrees:
https://climatetippingpoints.info/2019/10/14/fact-check-will-2c-of-global-warming-trigger-rapid-runaway-feedbacks/
I actually read most of the articles and papers linked too here, and if anything a lot of scientists seem agree that climate change is very unlikely to be an existential risk. It's for the most part politicians and policy advisors that seem to be overstating the scientific case, I would presume because they think that is needed to inspire political action.
And while I do think climate change is a serious problem that needs to be resolved, I don't think this kind of rhetoric serves that cause really. I think it damages their credibility, handing out free ammunition to climate deniers... and maybe more importantly accurate assessment of risks is important to determine what kinds of drastic solutions we need to consider to solve the problem.
What could potentially be an existential risk, and typically not included in these risk-analysis, are the social and political problems we cause as a reaction to the effects of climate change. The last thing we need it is more oil on the fire of an already overheated debate (pun intended!).
That's just nonsense. Climate change is an existential risk -- there's little doubt about that. What you -- and others -- want to do here is split hairs: "Well, it's not really existential because some humans may survive" or "We'll probably get enough things done, so it's not very likely," etc. You have no idea what you're talking about, I'm afraid.
I'll repeat a thousand times: if we keep business as usual -- which means the pace we're going, pumping more and more CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere -- we're dead. Yes, the IPCC doesn't put it quite like that, but they have to be balanced. This latest leak shows how alarmed they're getting.
Between the IPCC and climate denial there's another large group: those who believe we're under-estimating the effects of climate change. If you pay attention to the news lately, again and again you read of how scientists have underestimated how quickly these negative effects would happen, whether it be the ice caps melting or whatever else. That doesn't seem to get much attention from the major media.
So yes, we should be much more alarmed than we are right now. Much more. In the same way we would be if an asteroid were approaching Earth. In that scenario, I'm sure there'd be people who claim it's "asteroid alarmism." but that's not really worth much attention.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
What kind of rhetoric? The truth?
If by "rhetoric" you mean claiming that "we're doomed," then yes -- that's stupid, does no good, and isn't true. That's not what I'm saying, nor what climate scientists are saying.
If that's difficult, I'll put it this way: an asteroid is heading to earth. (1) If we do nothing -- what happens? We're dead. (2) If we act, we'll survive. Suppose someone starts saying, "We're doomed." What does this imply exactly? It seems to exclude (2), and thus no matter what we do we're dead.
So no, we're not doomed. But we need to start being far less nonchalant about this, and start taking it much more seriously. I see it in this very forum. Not outright denial, but not nearly alarmed enough. I chalk it up to not paying attention.
If we hit 4 degrees Celsius by 2050, we can wave goodbye to human life as we know it. If you think that's somehow not "really possible," then you're resigned to our probable demise. That's fine. But in that case, one would think you'd be on the front lines of this issue rather than pacifying yourself with articles about how these scientists are "probably" wrong about the effects and are being a bit too pessimistic.
Quoting Albero
What?
It's not inevitable, and it's not about 2 degrees C. It's about whether we trigger various tipping points which speeds up the effects. That's very possible even at 2C, but not inevitable. I also don't know where exactly you get the year 3000 -- but it seems to me there's a lot of talk about how "far away" the effects of climate change are, which makes me rather suspicious.
"The year 3000? Eh, we'll have it figured out by then." So now we can all continue on with our lives. Meanwhile, every year is breaking temperature records and there's major wildfires, heat waves and draughts as we speak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQAGr1s1XFc
If you're convinced by this, that's your own issue.
I'm splitting hairs when that's how the term is used in the article you linked to and literally the conclusion of the article?
Quoting article
And apparently it's not even close to an existential risk, even in worst case scenario's:
Quoting article
Quoting Xtrix
Poltical rethoric from climate activists and the like... Of course there is rethoric from both sides, that is what happens in politics, only scientists are after the truth.
Quoting Xtrix
See that is exactly not what this problem is, and only further proves the point I was trying to make. Climate change is a slow building problem and can have varying effects on a wide spectrum over centuries and millenia depending on how much greenhouse gasses will be pumped into the atmosphere. It's nothing like an astroid hitting the earth where we either prevent the impact or die immediately.... The analogy is only good if you want to scare people into action, it's rethoric.
I've said this before, I'm not an American, I'm not invested in republic-democratic politics either way. I fully expected some cherry-picking of scientific findings at best and outright distortion of the science more probably... to suit his political agenda. He's a politician afterall, that's what I expect.
But I have to say the claims he's making in this particular video concerning the impact of climate change don't even seem to be all that outrageous (i'm not talking about the particular policies he proposes, which I generally don't agree with). And sure he leaves out a whole lot, but science does seem to support the things that he does say. Democrats are making it easy for him to sound somewhat reasonably on these points because they are overstating the scientific case.
It's not an existential threat, not even close. Calling attempts to clarify or nuance what is meant by existential threat "hair-splitting" is a bit disingenuous. Given the gravity of the claim and the consequences thereof, it would seem especially important to be clear about what kind of threats we should be expecting.
There's lots of possibilities in between we all take drastic action right now or the human race is doomed in a few decades. Maybe civilization manages to adapt. Maybe new technology helps mitigate the worst of the changes. Maybe the doomsday scenarios are worst-case, lower probability outcomes. Maybe all we need is moderate changes to cleaner energy and slightly less consumption with tax incentives in place over the next couple decades, plus some tree planting campaigns and what not.
Maybe trying to push for drastic changes right now is counter productive. For one thing, it's likely to face political backlash and the politicians supporting those changes getting voted out of office in the next election cycle. Even if governments and corporations embraced more radical changes that the public were willing to endure, maybe that would retard technological progress into finding better solutions.
We are talking about predicting how humanity reacts to the climate warming up, not the climate models themselves. That's a whole different ball of wax.
Based on what we understand now, this is true.
How would you reframe the issue to give it a little punch?
I'm not great at punchy lines but.... We're degrading the earth at the expense of current and future generations? Probably not punchy enough?
The longer version is that greenhouse gasses warm the earth which will cause a number of problems, for us, and for the rest of biological life and ecosystems which will in turn have effects on us. More floods and heat waves, food and water shortages, more extreme weather, disturbed ecosystems, new pandemics etc etc... This is very unlikely to kill us all or even most of us, but a number of people will die because of it and it will make things generally worse for most.
And this are only the direct consequences of climate change. Imagine what kind of immigration problems Europe will have when it gets really bad in sub-Saharan Africa with its massively rising population. It's already a major political and social problem now, and that could be dwarfed by climate refugees to come. The real danger is that societies that are already under tension now, will collapse under the strains of climate change. And when tensions get high that also increases the chances of wars between nations for resources that have become more scarce. If you lose control over that, the problems could compound...
Greenhouse gasses stay a long time in the atmosphere and are hard to remove, even with foreseeable future technologies. This means that if we don't do enough now and in the coming decades we are essentially condemning future generations to put massive amounts of effort in dealing with it... we're restricting their potential to flourish.
I look at it this way Frank, after a long history of human struggle we are on the verge of finally pulling our shit together somewhat. Coming technological advances, in bio-tech, genetics, AI and what have you, have the potential to define the future course of humanity. If we mess up with how we deal with those we could have some real nasty dystopias on the horizon... I think, especially now, it is of prime importance that we keep our sanity as societies, because the state of our societies will determine how we will handle those. Climate change, if not dealt with properly, has the potential to become a problem we definitely could do without.
I thought nothing of it until now.
My question: So, those who claim that global warming/climate change is a fact are claiming if it suddenly starts snowing all over the world, temperatures drop below freezing, rivers and lakes in the tropics freeze over, it's all caused by global "warming"? :chin:
Are you serious? The climate is not the weather. It's about the average global temperature over longer periods, not local temperatures on a certain day. The fact that is snows somewhere, some day doesn't mean anything for climate change. Average global temperatures rising is what is meant with global warming.
Quoting TheMadFool
It could locally and temporarily manifest as unusual cold weather, because of the effects of global warming on phenomena like the gulf stream which gives Northern America and Europa a warmer climate then you would expect based solely on latitude.
I was talking about the climate, not the weather - global cooling in the form of worldwide snow, freezing temperatures in (say) the Sahara, and so on. Remember climate change is about extremes - that cuts both ways (h9t or cold). Ergo, global warming can lead to global cooling. Paradox or climate change is a hoax, a well-orchestrated one.
No it couldn't lead to global cooling, then it would be global cooling instant of global warming.
Extremes are possible, temporarily, but then that's not climate, or locally, but then that's not global.
Why not? All climate-change-is-real believers (what do you call 'em?) talk about is extreme weather. Ergo, if it snowed heavily (6 - 10 ft) all day for a month (that would be weather) all over the earth, it would be because of global warming but such an event will cause long-term global cooling, no? Ice, snow, cools, right?
Sufficient clean energy is available from the molten interior of the earth; that we could decide and agree to solve this problem, and we could solve it. It must be possible to extract energy from magma heated rock given the sophistication of drilling technologies developed by the fossil fuel industry; and assuming so - there is the potential to meet and exceed global energy demand in short order, from a vast, clean, constant source of base load power.
Producing electrical power converted to hydrogen via electrolysis, and compressed; liquified hydrogen contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum, and when burnt produces only water vapour. Shipping liquified hydrogen fuel in tanker ships; to be burnt in existing power stations would produce and distribute clean electricity via exiting grids - and so would work with the larger part of existing energy infrastructures.
Given an effectively limitless surplus of energy to power carbon capture and storage, desalination and irrigation, and recycling, there's no scientific or technological reason why we could not meet and overcome the climate challenge, and secure a sustainable balance between human welfare and a viable ecosystem going forward.
It's just a matter of looking at the science and technology first, and the solution is fairly obvious, and could sustain continued economic growth going forward, such that it does not require action in direct opposition to natural human motives and ideological interests to address. It seems improbable precisely because we are limited by our ideological horizons, forced into a bottleneck of ever tighter regulation and taxation without end or hope! But just beyond, there is a viable solution, and beyond that - a hopeful future!
Extreme weather in the form of cold, for a month, 'globally' probably is very unlikely in a global warming scenario.
And even then it does not cause climate cooling. Climate is an average over years. One month would have an impact on that number sure, a month is a fraction of years after all, but not significantly.
Come on, put in some effort please. Existential threat is defined as a threat to all human life. It's right there in the article Xtrix linked to. I'm well aware that people will die because of climate change, and that we need to do something about it, I've said so multiple times already in this thread alone.
I agree. I spent a while immersed in the Bronze Age collapse, which was probably a result of natural disasters, war, and civil unrest.
In a short amount of time, two cultures just disappeared. No one factor would have brought the bronze age down. It was the combination of forces.
So the troubled times ahead will have climate change amplifying whatever stresses are native to the situation.
How do you know that? A lot of that liquid water, a predicted outcome of global warming, means more clouds, more clouds means less sun, less sun means (more) cooling. As a case in point, it's early July, peak summer, where I am and I picked up a cool idiom a coupla months ago - "it'll be a cold day in July when x happens" - and it feels like mid-September, coldish. Who's to blame? Thick cloud cover over the week with mild rain. Global warming is going to, heat up the oceans, and all that water will eventually end up as a vast blanket of clouds covering the skies from pole to pole. No prizes for guessing what happens next.
Greenhouse gasses trap heat, and causes global warming. This is well documented, from the geological record, and follows from the physics of how light and heat radiation interacts with greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
As for the cloud scenario, Venus is covered in a thick blanket of clouds... should be freezing cold over there then, right?
That's a non sequitur - Venus is Venus, Earth is Earth. Also, look up Year Without A Summer - volcanic ash clouds over the entire earth caused global temperatures to nosedive to winter levels. Global "warming" is going to blot out the sun with clouds at an even grander scale. Earth cooling down is what I think'll happen.
This is a non sequitur, volcanic ash is volcanic ash and not clouds and a lot of greenhouse gasses.
Anyway, read up on some science TheMadFool, you seem to be missing the basics.
Yet the Bronze Age collapse didn't mean that humans became extinct. The wording which many here use of an "existential" threat in my view shouldn't taken literally as an extinction event of the human race. Earth has had mass extinction events and some say that the change that now species are dying at such rate that one can say that this is a mass extinction event. However the collapse of our present way of life is something totally different from the extinction of the human race. There never has been such an adaptive animal as us, so the idea that climate change will doom us is in my view an exaggeration.
What happens to our current society is another thing. Yet even if that "collapses", it really doesn't mean an existential danger to the human race.
And to make this point, notice that we are living through one of the worst pandemics which was just a few years ago a hypothetical scenario, and we have adapted.
Ash/clouds, the effect is the same - no sunshine! Venus is closer to the sun by the way, that must surely mean something.
Anyway, read up on some science TheMadFool, you seem to be missing the basics.[/quote]
Good advice. Thanks a million!
It matters what kind of molecules the stuff in the atmosphere is made of. They don't all have the same effect on light coming in and energy radiating out. Some reflect light coming in, like volcanic ash, some trap infrared energy bouncing back from the earth, like greenhouse gasses...
The difference in distance between the earth and Venus matters, but doesn't account for the almost 500 degrees Celsius difference.
Volcanic ash cloud -> Cold (1815 - 1816)
Overcast skies -> Cold
:chin:
It turns out to be really difficult to get that message across, though.
Quoting ssu
High speed dying doesn't make a mass extinction, though. Some essential part of the Earth's ecosystems has to break down for that. Extinction events are also usually cold, due to vulcanism or depressed greenhouse effect.
Quoting ssu
Definitely. But we'll have to transition to another energy source sooner or later. There's a limited amount of hydrocarbons to burn.
Tbf an infrastructural collapse would be somewhat more impactful. I agree, it wouldn't likely wipe out every human. We're omnivores: even if the bees die out, we'll find something to eat and we'll have a lot more time to fuck when there's no on-demand TV. I think the fear is more end-of-civilisation.
Although there will be ample beef in the early days. If we stockpile on pinto beans, rice, salsa verde and Monterey Jack cheese we'll have some good living for a few years before the cannibal apocalypse I reckon.
Then you simply aren't paying attention.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It's very much like an asteroid hurling towards earth. Not the same, of course. But regardless, you completely missed the point. The point was that no one, including myself, is saying we're doomed.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It is an existential threat, not simply "close."
You can go on comforting yourself with the idea that tipping points and feedback loops are improbable, or whatever else you'd like. But it's pure irrationality, honestly. If the chances of an existential threat were 0.1%, it'd still be absurd to not take that seriously.
Again, it's worth reading about this. Tell these authors that it's "not even close."
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/148cb0_a1406e0143ac4c469196d3003bc1e687.pdf
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252
Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
Scientists Warn Humanity in Denial of Looming 'Collapse of Civilization as We Know It'
Top scientists warn of 'ghastly future of mass extinction' and climate disruption
[quote=] The 17 experts, including Prof Paul Ehrlich from Stanford University, author of The Population Bomb, and scientists from Mexico, Australia and the US, say the planet is in a much worse state than most people – even scientists – understood.
“The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts,” they write in a report in Frontiers in Conservation Science which references more than 150 studies detailing the world’s major environmental challenges. [/quote]
Pretty thorough interview with Will Steffen: here.
If you're really going solely by whether it wipes out every last human on the face of the planet, then I suppose nuclear weapons aren't an existential threat either. Perhaps the aforementioned asteroid (depending on the size) isn't an existential threat.
So it'll only be a radically changed, hell-like earth. But we'll survive in some capacity -- so we can't call it "existential." If you're somehow comforted by that, you're welcome.
Quoting frank
You don't know what you're talking about. It's "true" in the sense that you simply refuse to read anything about it. I've provided plenty of sources. The rest is your business.
Very true.
Quoting TheMadFool
When the climate changes this rapidly (and the issue is the rate of change), it disrupts all kinds of cycles we've been used to for thousands of years. This means disruptions in the weather, as well -- more extreme swings in rainfall, for example. So we can have flooding and drought happen at the same time within the same country. Likewise, it can impact how cold it gets in winter. We saw Texas freeze over this year, for example. Some of that is related to the changing climate, yes. That doesn't mean we're heading for an ice age. We're heading in the opposite direction.
Quoting TheMadFool
While extreme cold events may take place as part of an overall disruption, the direction we're going is warming, not cooling. That's why the global temperature average keeps increasing, not decreasing.
Is the "climate change is a hoax" a joke?
Good point.
If we're going to split hairs about the word "existential," then how about instead of meaning the "human species" we mean the people of Bangladesh? What about them? Or India? Or some of the Polynesian islands? Tell those people it's not "existential."
Okay, so no need to answer my question above -- apparently it wasn't a joke.
So the earth will cool down is what you "think", eh? Guess we can tell those idiots who've studied this carefully all their lives that they're wasting their time -- some guy on the Internet has figured it out from perusing the literature and using his keen philosophical powers.
Guess what happens if the AMOC shuts down.
Yes, and you've definitely shown yourself to be someone who can tell us.
For those interested in the actual science:
"In climate model simulations of future climate change, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is projected to decline. However, the impacts of this decline, relative to other changes, remain to be identified. Here we address this problem by analyzing 30 idealized abrupt-4xCO2 climate model simulations. We find that in models with larger AMOC decline, there is a minimum warming in the North Atlantic, a southward displacement of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, and a poleward shift of the mid-latitude jet. The changes in the models with smaller AMOC decline are drastically different: there is a relatively larger warming in the North Atlantic, the precipitation response exhibits a wet-get-wetter, dry-get-drier pattern, and there are smaller displacements of the mid-latitude jet. Our study indicates that the AMOC is a major source of inter-model uncertainty, and continued observational efforts are needed to constrain the AMOC response in future climate change."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24015-w
How odd that it's not as simplistic as Frank would like to believe.
Look up Younger Dryas. That's what happened the last time it stopped.
It's kind of obvious that you don't know much about this and other features of climate change. If you can manage to get your ego under control, we'll all forgive that. We don't care. If you continue, you're just making a fool of yourself. Just a heads up.
Limited yes, but never forget the price mechanism: with higher price, more costly production methods and resources become profitable. And here is where the "feelgood" narrative of wishful high minded thinking stumbles upon ignorance of the actual reality. It is far too easy for the high minded to simply declare that we have to consume less.
The best example in my view are the hostile attitudes towards nuclear energy, a zero emissions energy resource. Countries that have made decisions either to go off or radically reduce nuclear energy have either simply not kept their promises (Sweden) or then built coal plants (Japan) or resorted to export energy typically from coal plants (Germany). Japan, where nobody did die in the Fukushima accident (but many thousands in the actual Tsunami in 2011) just shows how illogical energy policy can be:
Electricity production by fossil fuels has increased in Japan:
:rofl: I was only trying to explore alternative pathways to how global warming could eventually pan out. Cooling seemed plausible.
:lol: Truly out of Trump’s playbook: look like a complete buffoon, then simply pretend like you’re a very stable genius. Well done. You’re right: you’ve shown multiple times just how knowledgeable you are about climate science.
Whatever I know about climate change, this much I’m clear on: I know more about it than you. Can’t speak for others.
Quoting frank
Which is so idiotic I didn’t think it was serious. That’s my fault for thinking you were making more sense than you were. I’ll work on that.
As the IPCC says— which, given your climate expertise you must know— there’s almost no chance that there’s a complete shutdown. Even if there were, we don’t know what would happen.
But please keep lecturing— so far you’ve earned that right.
I think they just say "unlikely” in the near future. It's on the table because the conditions for it are developing now.
It wouldn't kill off our species, but that kind of double shock would make maintaining civilization tricky. As soon as people adapted to the cold NH, it would reverse and get hotter than before. It would cause mass migrations not once, but twice in a relatively short time.
I'd be curious to know what kind of debate there was in Japan before they decided to build a bunch of coal burning plants.
I think most people are ok with that.
Quoting Xtrix
You keep saying I want to comfort myself by not calling it an existential threat, but that was never my intention. At every opportunity I said it was going to be very bad... but not an existential threat. I agree that we shouldn't be comforting ourselves by underestimating the risk or ignoring small risks with grave consequences, but at the same time we shouldn't overstate how bad it's going to be either, because really it's bad enough as it is.
Anyway I think we actually agree for the most part, just not on the way we want to communicate the issue. I think you lose credibility by overstating the case and people get desensitized by continual doomsaying (i.e. the boy cried wolf), while you seem to think we need to spur people into action by putting it into the strongest of terms. Maybe this is a result of you living in the US and me being in Europe. Most here, except maybe for that stubborn minority that you'll never reach anyway, seem well aware of the dangers of climate change, while in the US there's probably more ignorance and apathy about the issue still.
And I think accurate assessment of risks matters, for the kind of measures we are willing to take. If it really were an impending existential threat or even "just" a civilization collapsing threat, a la a large asteroid about to impact, we should we willing to contemplate the most drastic of measure, like shutting down all fossil fuels and slaughtering all livestock overnight, pumping aerosols into the atmosphere, declaring war on nations that aren't complying with zero-emissions etc... Some measure would be more or less disruptive for our societies. That's the question for me.... not should we do something about it, but how far and how fast should we be willing to go? How much disruption to current societies do the risks warrant?
Actually now they are coming to grasp how utterly stupid this is.
So just several coal plants are under construction. But they do also have two nuclear power plant under construction. Here's how nuclear energy is being built (stats by IAEA):
Country Number of Reactors_____ Total Net Electrical Capacity [MW]
ARGENTINA 1 ________________ 25
BANGLADESH 2 ________________ 2160
BELARUS 1 ________________ 1110
BRAZIL 1 ________________ 1340
CHINA 13 ________________ 12565
FINLAND 1 ________________ 1600
FRANCE 1 ________________ 1630
INDIA 6 ________________ 4194
IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF 1 ___ 974
JAPAN 2 ________________ 2653
KOREA, REPUBLIC OF 4 __________ 5360
PAKISTAN 1 ________________ 1014
RUSSIA 3 ________________ 3459
SLOVAKIA 2 ________________ 880
TURKEY 3 ________________ 3342
UKRAINE 2 ________________ 2070
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES 3 _______ 4035
UNITED KINGDOM 2 ________ 3260
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 2___ 2234
With that, let's compare that above to coal plants being under construction.
So just five Asian countries are building over 600 coal plants with over 300 gigawats (300 000 MW), while only 51 nuclear power plants are built producing under 54 gigawats of power.
Anyway, there is an very interesting and eye opening Global Coal Plant Tracker , which I advise to people to look at. A lot of info on coal plants!
(Here's what it looks like:)
This make no sense at all, why are they doing this? Even if they don't give a damn about effects on climate change, you'd think they choose the cheaper option.
Quoting ssu
Nice.
I couldn't quite get a clear reason why they'd go with coal over renewables, but
- Economic growth of 6% a year is still far and above the prime directive
- Those decisions apparently depend on decentralized authorities for a large part and/or the central party isn't all that serious about cutting emissions
- Coal magnates have a lot of influence
- There are some practical/technical reason renewables can't supply their demand for energy?
- They want to use it as leverage in geopolitical negotiations (really?)
Anyway, the official line is that they will keep ramping it up until somewhere in the beginning of the 2030, and then reduce it slowly it to reach neutrality in 2060. If that's the official line, one should what... take the square root of that to gauge their real intentions?
This really won't do it, will it, considering they are good for a third of global emissions?
Have it your way. So any time I say "existential" just translate that as "very, very bad." Still, even if there's a small chance that it's existential -- as you said, we should be taking that very seriously. That was my only point. I can't see how that doesn't motivate people more, unless it gets interpreted as "we're all doomed," which isn't the case.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
You could be right in the way it's communicated -- I have no way of knowing. But I do think the hothouse earth scenarios are not talked about nearly enough. Will Steffen's version, not the media saying the world's going to end in 10 years or something ridiculous. That indeed is foolish, not because it's too shocking but because it isn't true.
That we could reach tipping points that run out of control is a possibility, and a serious one which we should consider.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
If people understood the risks, I think we should be disrupting the world much more than the pandemic did. But even if we shut things down, as the pandemic did, or something on that level, I think that would probably be more than enough to solve this issue. We don't even need that extreme level, though -- there are sensible solutions which we have right now. The problem is political will -- which isn't coming from the population, unfortunately. That's a failure in education, a success for propaganda, a failure of the media, and a major failure of corporate America, who'd rather sell the future than do anything right now about this issue.
I've thinking about it some more, and perhaps I've been understating the importance of the US reducing its emissions a bit.
The US is still the most powerful country in the world. Even aside from its own contribution to emissions, it gives a signal to the rest of the world.... you can't really go demanding other nations to reduce their emissions if you have among the highest emissions per capita.
Edit: I accidentally messed up this post by editing it instead of replying in a new one, ooh well...
Cheaper to whom? Likely sooner or later the iron laws of free market capitalism will take charge, but the transit isn't usually so quick.
I assume that once they have a large coal power plant infrastructure and companies building the power plants, things go with the already input motion. And then there's the political aspects: Trump isn't the politician that wooed and will woo areas where coal mining is important.
Remember? Trump digs coal. Many other politicians do like the votes from coal producing areas too.
Turning around energy policy is easier said than done. And those countries that produce coal will surely look at it also as a security issue in times of war or sanctions etc. If you have domestic resources, they are better than resources that have to be bought on the global market.
Of course the writing is on the wall already. From this chart below the number of jobs in the coal mining sector has halved to 44 000 jobs. So no wonder those areas would be desperate for politicians promising a change.
Yes ok, that's along the lines of what I'd expect is happening. You've got the knowledge, the technology and the logistics already figured out and fine-tuned, the labour-force already trained, the connections for investments established etc etc... Renewables are maybe "cheaper" now in the abstract, if you'd have to start from nothing, but we're never actually starting from nothing.
Yet that is the very promising aspect of this technological development: alternative renewables have come down dramatically in price. I think the reason is that enough players do notice the writing on the wall and understand that the dominance of the fossil fuels is going to diminish, hence there is a real competition for the new market shares.
Offshore wind turbines are huge, btw. And out of sight of the NIMBY types.
True, but there's no one to pressure the US, and it's not headed toward limiting emissions in any sort of meaningful way. The Democratic party is weak and the Republicans have become the alternate reality party. The US is going to be exporting stupid and crazy for the foreseeable future, until we have a system reset.
A disinterested view of the science seems to recommend we harness the massive heat energy of magma to produce limitless electrical power - to sustain civilisations carbon free, and to capture carbon, produce hydrogen fuel, desalinate and irrigate, and recycle!
Or we can continue to presume sustainability requires sacrifice - apply wholly inadequate technological solutions disguised as a 'diverse energy mix' - carbon tax this, stop that, have less and pay more, guilt trip the consumer, tax businesses into bankruptcy, and still not save the world!
I'm for the former!
From an energy theoretical point of view that might be true, but I suspect there are practical and technological reasons why it isn't used more as of now. I don't know enough about the technology to judge it myself, but I do know one of the research centres of my county has been trying to develop this for years now, with only moderate success. For instance they had some serious setback because drilling apparently caused seismic activity in the region. So sure, by all means why not use a virtually unlimited pool of energy, but you do have to have the technology working first.
That's a pity, because I really do think this is the most effective way to turn this around... if we had some of the world players committed to and actively pushing for reduction of emissions, the rest of the world could fall in line pretty quick.
But even if that happened, things could easily return to present level emissions in the next generation.
Short term doesn't mean much, does it?
Changing your energy supply systems is not that easy, as is illustrated by China building more coal plants despite renewable energy being cheaper than ever... So presumably once you have made the switch to reduce emissions, there'd be some inherent resistance to switching back to fossil fuels too. And I'd think some of the whole earth ecology point of view will stick in the consciousness of next generations, we just know more now about it than we used to... you typically don't unlearn these kind of things.
Unlearning happens. All it takes is a global crisis.
This is one option which has been used for years—nothing new. But we need more than geothermal. You have to have the right conditions for it to be viable. It may work well in Iceland or Hawaii, but it can’t work everywhere.
Wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear are all going to be necessary. Becoming dogmatic about one option, or treating it as a silver bullet, isn’t helpful.
In my view, geothermal has been used quite a long time in places with volcanic activity. How about in Finland, where there is a solid bedrock of stone with only ancient traces of past volcanic activity?
Quoting Xtrix
Quoting ssu
Those are reasonable concerns I'm in no position to refute empirically, but nonetheless, I think otherwise. The word 'geothermal' covers a lot of ground - pun intended. A wide range of technologies that draw heat from the ground, are described as geothermal. I prefer to use the term magma energy to describe a form of geothermal a little closer to the bone.
I think vast quantities of 'recoverable' geothermal heat can be harnessed by drilling close to magma chambers and subduction zones in the earth's crust. There must necessarily be mile after cubic mile of rock heated to hundreds of degrees centigrade, we could drill into, or through. I imagine two technologies:
drill a hole and insert a probe directly into the rock with pipes carrying water in and out;
or drill right through, line the borehole with pipes and pump water through.
In this way, produce steam to drive turbines, for endless quantities of carbon free electricity.
Of course, it will be difficult to do - a complex engineering challenge, but it is at least conceivably feasible. There is a vast source of energy there; large enough to make sense of our response to climate change. We need that energy. Are you saying it is technologically impossible to harness the heat energy of the planet on a large scale? I think otherwise.
Sums up your position pretty well. No empirical support whatsoever but repeating the same messianic sermon at every opportunity with a faux shock that anyone could be so crazy as to think otherwise.
It's not an unreasonable question to ask - if it is possible that humankind might survive? Turns out it is possible - and here's how! What's messianic about that?
Quoting counterpunch
Yet what energy policies we choose on this planet is the aggregate sum of the various energy policies the nations states choose and what competition on the free market gives us. The fact is that energy production is such an existential question for our societies that it will be a question of national security to every country. They won't give up the independence to choose their energy production (they are called sovereigns for a reason).
There simply isn't one "logical" answer to this. "Science" doesn't give us one answer. As everybody has noticed, we here on this Planet do not decide these questions as one entity (or have them decided for us by one entity).
If there will be the technology that gives us cheaper geothermal energy anywhere, even in Finland, than by any other production means and this technology is available to everybody, then geothermal will surely dominate.
It's a similar question like if we get low price and highly efficient fusion power online, it will be the answer to a lot of our current problems. But there's that if: if it's price competitive.
I don't see it that way. I'm pointing toward a scientific understanding of reality as a trustworthy rationale for the application of technology - not to myself. I invite you to conclude that it is possible for humankind to survive - and then there will be two of us!
Exactly! The problem lives in the real world. Energy policies are fashioned by sovereign nation states in service to their interests, and the sum of all national energy policies does not add up to a global energy policy rational to the climate change threat. Hence, we need a global approach to climate change.
Quoting ssu
That wouldn't be necessary. Imagine a global effort to develop magma energy technology, and that energy applied initially to carbon capture and storage and desalination and irrigation - thus, mitigating climate change directly, and adapting to climate change due to occur. Energy generating capacity could be developed without disrupting energy markets - and used directly to achieve environmental benefits without imposition upon anyone.
Quoting ssu
Unless you ask - is there a simple logical answer to this? And as it turns out, yes, there is! Assuming magma energy is there, and can be extracted - hydrogen fuel has 2.5 times more energy than petroleum per kilo. Shipping it around the world is already 2.5 times more efficient than shipping petroleum!
What you or I believe is possible is of no relevance or consequence. Geothermal energy is an existent facet of energy science and engineering. There are already thousands of experts in the field. It's what they believe that is of relevance.
I could simply believe that CO2 emissions do not cause global climate change and so maintain the hope that we'll be fine without having to do anything at all. Such a belief would be irrelevant if the actual scientists studying the matter disagreed.
There's a famous saying that fusion has been 5 years away for the past 30 years. And that was 20 years ago. It's still five years away. I'm not optimistic. Drilling for magma energy seems a lot more certain, and a less complicated source of energy.
Speak for yourself. Or what you say has a relevance and consequence for me - and is therefore paradoxical. It's simple logic.
Quoting Isaac
That's what I am saying though.
Quoting Isaac
Could you? I could not simply believe that, because I don't believe it.
Nobody's been working on it.
Quoting counterpunch
I think the drill bits will melt before you get to the mantle.
Hence?
A global approach that is the sum of the most important nation states, perhaps 20 or so of the largest energy producers, that in aggregate tackles the crisis is what we should aim for. Actually what you said is the real answer: the sum of the largest national energy policies that does add up to tackle the climate change threat. And still those national energy policies will differ...as countries are in different environments. What works for Iceland might not exactly work for Finland. It's not realistic to think that somehow everybody will morph to being Borgs and get to the same conclusion as you have. And why cannot there be a multitude energy resources?
Quoting counterpunch
I lost your logic here... Can you explain this better?
Quoting counterpunch
There simply is no simple logical answer as this isn't just a "logical" question! Societies that have formed independent nation states is the reality that we live in. To assume it's "logical" to just rule them out not looking at the energy question from their own view isn't realistic. There's no golden bullet. That's just how we operate.
Quoting ssu
I can maybe understand why you say so, but I think it would be better to develop magma energy as the global energy commons precisely because it would ultimately provide limitless clean energy. It would not do so immediately, but the potential is there, and quite that large. It would be better to develop that potential as a global response to climate change; to capture and store carbon, and desalinate and irrigate, and so mitigate and adapt to climate change, building capacity toward an eventual transition. This approach would be far less disruptive to energy markets; than the current approach which requires huge market disruption to achieve environmental benefits. With magma energy, that kind of up front sacrifice is not necessary, and I hope, that's what makes it possible.
We do need that energy. But it won’t work everywhere, and the technology isn’t advanced yet. I’d love to see it work, and it’s important to talk about. We should be spending a good deal of money researching and developing this option.
But again—this is one option. It’s not a panacea.
Exactly right. I was thinking along similar lines.
Quoting counterpunch
Yes but you have no empirical basis for this. If it’s simply a gut feeling— who cares?
If you’re going to advocate as strongly as you have been for it, I’d expect you to know more about it and tell us where the research is at. You yourself admit that you haven’t really done that.
So what all this talk amounts to is strongly advocating for something you FEEL is potentially a great solution. Others may sincerely feel it’s nuclear energy. Or wind. Or solar. Or geoengineering.
Not very interesting or informative, unfortunately.
Well then present what they say.
Quoting counterpunch
It was rhetorical. The point is that, as far as publicly debatable issues are concerned, unless we're going to have good ground for believing what we believe then there's no point in talking about it. It is the grounds we have for believing that are the substance of the discussion. If you just 'believe' that geothermal energy can support our current levels of material consumption then that's of no interest to a discussion community unless you have some ground to believe it which you can present.
Honestly, this seems like such a simple thing and yet absent in some substantial proportion of all the posts (across the forum, not just this thread). It's probably just me being old fashioned, but I'm not interested in what you believe, I'm interested in why you believe it.
1. We care about our children (fact)
2. If we care about our children then we care about climate change (obvious)
3. We care about climate change (1, 2 MP)
4. We don't care about climate change (fact)
5. We care about climate change and we don't care about climate change (3, 4 Conj) [Contradiction: Paradox]
Ergo,
6. Either we don't care about our children or we care about climate change
Indeed.
I care! To some extent that is.
In fact many renewables could make the claim to handle all our energy needs "if only" enough should be invested in them and the technology would be improved. But it simply won't happen like that: energy production methods will compete against each other on the market and the price mechanism will select the ones which will dominate the energy sector. And even if for a long time, basically from the time humans had the ability to burn wood, fossil fuels have dominated energy production as it has been the cheapest way to produce energy, it hasn't been that people have used only fossil fuels.
There simply are various ways to produce energy and they simply won't go away. I suspect you don't have anything against hydropower? Those dams already built will likely to be used in the future too.
Oldest hydroelectric powerplant was built in 1882 in Fox River, Wisconsin. Yet the first water wheels go back to Antiquity (just as the idea of windmills).
Model of a Persian Windmill. Note that the Panemone windmill has a vertical axis rotating a millstone:
You just said:
Quoting Isaac
For you, it's rhetorical. I express opinions that are justified with reference to research, and obviously so - but what I don't have is tens of billions in folding cash and a great big drill, or I'd prove my point empirically.
Quoting Isaac
If you believe wind and solar can support our current levels of material consumption then you haven't done any research, or indeed, applied much in the way of reason. The UK alone would need something like 15,000 windmills, costing £250m each, producing 7 MW each, and even then, would have to store that energy or back it up with a fossil fuel generating capacity for when the wind stops blowing. Maintaining all those windmills - presumably at sea, is no small or inexpensive feat; and replacing them in 25 years at similar cost, does not constitute a cost effective means of producing an adequate amount of clean energy.
There are very good reasons to look for more substantial clean energy technologies; and magma is there - a huge source of clean energy seemingly within reach. I'm at a loss to understand your fierce opposition to that proposal. Can you see a reason it's impossible? Is the world not a big ball of molten rock?
I didn't express my opinion on fusion. Not really. I said I'm not optimistic, but actually, I think it won't work, not profitably anyway. My hunch is that the enormous gravity of the sun overcomes the Exclusion Principle, allowing fusion to occur, and that a sustained, profitable fusion reaction cannot be maintained in earth gravity. The input of energy, to simulate that gravitational pressure - and to contain the superheated plasma, will always be greater than the energy produced. IMO.
Quoting ssu
We are threatened with a global scale catastrophe, and that's a problem we cannot solve doing business as usual. Applying technologies for power and profit brings us to this impasse. We need to look beyond ourselves, and apply the right technology for the right reasons - and that's science, and magma energy technology.
Magma energy is the only very large source of constant, high grade renewable energy that can be rapidly and safely developed, and has the potential to replace fossil fuels entirely. I don't particularly enjoy attacking other forms of renewables, but I don't see any other technology doing more than take the edge off fossil fuel use and GHG emissions.
Societies will function as they do. Don't think you can change them.
We are living now through a time of a global pandemic. We got many vaccines in break neck speed that usually have taken many years to develop. The implemented policies have been quite out of the normal and rapid. Yet the society has functioned as before. Markets have worked, it has been "business as usual" even if it has been totally out of the usual.
Hence this issue has to be dealt realistically, not to assume something that won't happen.
Quoting counterpunch
Science is a method of study.
What you are referring to is policy, which a totally different animal.
Science is also a body of knowledge; a worldview, to contrast with an ideological worldview.
Applying technology in accord with an ideological worldview is the cause of climate change. That's how we come within sight of species extinction; and it's why we have the knowledge and technology to solve climate change, but don't apply it.
Applying technology in accord with a scientific understanding of reality is the answer to climate change.
Well good, but the rest of us aren't going to just take it on faith are we. Let's have links to the research which says that sufficient clean energy can be obtained from magma to supply our current energy requirements.
Quoting counterpunch
I don't.
Quoting counterpunch
I presume people far more knowledgable than me have looked into it already. It's not the strategy I'm fiercely opposed to, it's the maniacal advocation of it without a shred of supporting evidence.
Quoting counterpunch
Why would I? I'm not a geothermal engineer. I don't expect to be able to have a 'bit of a think about it' from my armchair and deduce all the problems that might arise. I'm sure it's a very complex field which requires thousands of hours training to understand.
More of a view of Scientism than actual science.
If you refuse to value the opinion of someone who is clearly interested in, and knowledgeable about a subject then that's your too bad. I could, I suppose - produce a list of links you wouldn't even click on, never mind read - and allow you put me to work merely for your amusement. But I don't think so. I haven't seen any substance to your weirdly fierce opposition.
Quoting Isaac
You presume? Why not produce evidence? You demand evidence from me, while allowing yourself license to presume someone has already looked into it? With regard to magma energy, the basic technologies exist. The energy is there. The middle of the bridge is yet to be constructed, but I think it is possible.
It would certainly require specialist knowledge; for example, the question of how big a hole to drill is immensely complicated. Have you ever heard of Poiseuille’s Law? The materials science of pipes able to conduct heat, and withstand huge pressure is another area where specialist knowledge is indispensable. Dozens of other fields of specialist knowledge would need to be brought to bear - but the basic idea of harnessing the heat energy of the earth, at high temperatures and on a very large scale, is kinda obvious - and that's where I shine! Big ball of molten rock, d'uh!
I don't wish to take on all the baggage of scientism, but but on this one key issue - science offers an objective rationale for the application of technologies, it is necessary to apply if humankind wishes to continue to exist, or at least keep that option open. In face of the threat of climate and ecological catastrophe there are things we need to do to survive, and magma energy is necessary to any conceivable future. At the very least, we need that energy to power carbon capture and storage, desalination and irrigation and recycling.
One day magma energy would replace fossil fuels, but that need not be immediately, and so huge socially transformative infrastructure costs would not be pre-requisite to; and standing in the way of environmental benefits. If the world got together and developed this technology as a global good, we could carry on much as we are, and attack the problem from the supply side - offsetting carbon produced today by investing in the capacity to sequester it tomorrow.
It makes sense on more levels than merely the scientific, even if it is necessary to look first to a scientific understanding of reality to see the real world possibility, beyond the ideological battlements.
You given nothing to indicate the underlined. Everything you say might be nonsense for all we know because you refuse to cite anything.
Quoting counterpunch
What makes you think we'd be a) interested enough that your posts are worth your while writing yet b) not interested enough to read papers on the subject. You must have a very high opinion of yourself to consider you might hold our attention in a way no other source could.
Quoting counterpunch
Because its a reasonable assumption. I really shouldn't have to explain this. To posit a world where no one but you has thought of a brilliant solution to global energy supply is a fantastic claim, definitely requires support. To assume a world in which at least one of the many thousands if scientists whose job it is to look into these prospects has, in fact, done just that, is not a particularly fantastic claim and needs reason to doubt it, not to hold it.
Quoting counterpunch
Then why do you think none of the scientists whose job it is to look into this sort of thing have arrived at the same conclusion you have?
What I propose hasn't been done. As far as I'm aware, the research doesn't exist. There is other research that is relevant in some respect, a piece of technology here, a geological fact there, but as far as I'm aware, there are no significant plans to plug into the planet at scale.
In any case, my contribution to the subject is not engineering expertise. It's philosophical. It's about the rightfulness and trustworthiness of science as a rationale for the application of technology - as demonstrated by the possibility of a prosperous sustainable future, against the likelihood of a grim march upon authoritarianism, poverty and oblivion.
Quoting Isaac
I hope I'm saying something others are not; something interesting and worthwhile thinking about. That's the best I can do. How long you can manage to focus is entirely your affair!
Quoting Isaac
So you are allowed reasonable assumptions, and I have to prove the earth is a big ball of molten rock?
Quoting Isaac
That's not what I'm saying though. I'm saying, using existing technologies it's possible for humankind to survive - and prosper. The future need not be a Malthusian nightmare. Because resources are ultimately a function of the energy available to create them, we could transcend limits to resources if we applied the right technologies, and could do so if we recognised a need to apply technology in relation to a scientific understanding of reality.
But you've yet to demonstrate this. That you think it's possible without any expertise in the matter at all, is utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is, in fact, possible.
Quoting counterpunch
Why? What's special about your guesswork that makes it worth thinking about?
Quoting counterpunch
No, you have to prove that it's technologically feasible to extract that heat without insurmountable consequential factors.
Quoting counterpunch
No, you're just declaring it to be the case without any evidence presented whatsoever. I don't think anyone has ruled out the mere possibility, so you declaring it is of no consequence at all. It's the likelihood relative to other options we're all concerned about, not the mere possibility.
Quoting counterpunch
We could, yes. Or we could not. Which it is will depend on the actual facts of the matter regarding the extent to which technologies can extract sufficient energy to combat the consequences of doing so.
As an illustration, let me ask you this. You seem opposed to solar power, yes? The sun provides 37 Petawatts of energy, our global needs only amount to about 4, so there's plenty of energy there to provide all our needs. so why oppose solar? Your oppose it on the grounds of the limitations of current technology, yet when it comes to your pet theory, you ignore limits of current technology and assume we'll find a way.
First, I said I'd demonstrated the rightfulness and trustworthiness of science as a rationale for the application of technology - not demonstrated that the extraction of heat energy from magma is possible. Second, if we only ever commented on things we were experts in, you'd be unable to speak at all, unless someone wanted advice on being insufferable!
Quoting Isaac
Many things, but if there were one indicator I'd point to, it's that I explain the problem and the solution in the same terms. That's when I really knew I was onto something.
Quoting Isaac
At some stage, sure. But I don't see that happening here and now.
Quoting Isaac
I haven't presented evidence to you, no. I don't intend to. I've told you that. People like you get a kick out of making other people jump through hoops, and I'm not here for your entertainment. So pour your incredible toxic scorn, but it remains, the earth is a big ball of molten rock, and we need that energy to tackle climate change. Wind and solar are weak and inconstant, while magma energy can give us vast, constant base load power.
Quoting Isaac
I suppose I am opposed to solar, yes! But not for the reasons you might imagine. It's a matter of entrenching an approach to sustainability I don't believe can work. This is the dominant narrative in the field; the pessimistic Malthusian, limits to resources approach to sustainability. I think it's wrong, and can only lead to disaster.
We need more energy - not less; less reliable and more expensive energy. We need lots of reliable clean energy and magma is potentially, a high grade source of limitless base load power. We need that amount of energy to spend to attack the climate and ecological crisis from the supply side, and sustain capitalist growth - accounting for the externalities of capitalism by internalising them with magma energy, carbon capture, desalination, irrigation, recycling - rather than internalising them to the economy.
That so, solar is not the right technology. I have a solar powered calculator! I don't hate solar. But gathering a weak and inconstant form of energy from 225,000 square miles - just to meet current global energy demand; the staggering ongoing costs of constructing and maintaining such an array, and the question of recycling and replacing those panels after 25 years, to say nothing of the facilities required to store that energy, we be locked in and bankrupted, and have no more energy to spend than before. We need a way forward, and potentially, magma energy offers a better future.
Yes, and that’s pretty suspicious to me. It doesn’t take long to provide some links or references. So far it’s been nothing but gut feelings, which is of no value whatsoever.
Okay— then why go around repeating this dream over and over again? Are you an engineer? Or geologist? Or geophysicist? No? Then enough already. No one is interested in your delusions of grandeur.
I could “propose” something too— so what? I can propose we geoengineer the planet to cool it down. I’ll go around preaching this, offer no evidence or references about it, and then act surprised when people ignore me.
Quoting counterpunch
No, solar and wind are cheaper than fossil fuels now. You haven’t been paying attention. They pay for themselves within a few years. But most importantly, they’re green. Any issue with them — replacement, etc — pales in comparison to fossil fuels and the magma technology which you propose— which would currently be hugely expensive. But since you provide no numbers, we can only guess. Since it’s not being done, we can assume why.
True, we can think some internet guy has figured it all out and that actual experts have overlooked this amazing discovery— but forgive me if I don’t bet on that.
No, it can’t. I’ll present just as much evidence to support this claim as you have with yours: my gut feelings.
Just stop already. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You offer no evidence. You have no expertise. You admit there’s no research on this yet. So why continue on? The fact that you think you’re “really on to something” just sounds embarrassing.
I’m sure your heart is in the right place, but now you’re just sounding ridiculous. Your point has been made— move on.
Is it that - having me point out a possible, but seemingly unlikely means of securing a sustainable future implies horrors too terrible to contemplate? Because, if that's why you would rather not hear from me - I'd counter that's exactly why you need to listen. Sustainability is the biggest philosophical question we have ever faced, and your cowardly viciousness doesn't alter the fact I've been thinking about this, reading about it, and worrying for over 25 years. I know what I think about the most important philosophical question of our time, and what I think is at least interesting, but if you're not interested please feel free to go fuck yourself elsewhere!
So is absolutely any source whatsoever according to your current usage of 'potentially', which seems to include anything anyone reckons.
Quoting counterpunch
Why?
Quoting counterpunch
And the equivalent costs for geothermal are...? Let me guess, you just reckon they'd be less.
You're transparent. Ideological opposition to left wing politics (and therefore existing renewables by association) supported post hoc by a shambolic edifice of speculation.
No. What you reckon is specifically excluded.
Quoting Isaac
For all sorts of reasons; where to begin. Capitalism works. Capitalism has the knowledge, technology and skills to develop and apply the technology. It is the prevailing economic paradigm, upon which billions of people depend for their supper! What do you mean, why?
Quoting Isaac
Infrastructure costs associated with a facility, drawing on magma heat energy to produce electricity are likely to be heavy up front, falling almost to zero thereafter. Once constructed - it would not cost much to run, and would outlast wind and solar, which needs replacing after 25 years. So, yes, it would be less expensive than solar. That said, I'm loathe to put a figure on how much energy can be extracted from magma, and so cannot give you an ROI or £/Kwh figure. I expect that would vary for each specific location this technology could be deployed, and relate to what heat could be reached at what depth, and so on. But I think it would be a better investment in the long term.
Quoting Isaac
I am transparently opposed to a left wing approach to sustainability, you're right. I make no secret of that fact. I told you so in the previous post. I argue for an approach that can sustain capitalism going forward; an approach that does not imply an ongoing anti-capitalist stranglehold on civilisation, to no tangible or quantifiable end.
Albeit I argue for an approach based in science, that applies the necessary technologies first, because the physics cannot change - nonetheless, via the mechanisms, and in support of the prevailing capitalist economic system. We have to get there from here - not throw some huge ideological obstacle; i.e. tearing down capitalism, in the way of a sustainable future.
I wasn't closely following the debate with the crackpot, but these numbers jumped out at me.If our energy needs were on the order of 10% of all solar energy that reaches the surface, that would be a shockingly huge amount! But I think you made a mistake somewhere, perhaps conflating yearly and hourly rates or something like that. This wiki page gives a handy comparison table: Solar energy
Yearly solar fluxes & human consumption
Solar 3,850,000
Wind 2,250
Biomass potential ~200
Primary energy use 539
Electricity ~67
Energy given in Exajoule (EJ) = 10[sup]18[/sup] J = 278 TWh
Then let me bring you up to speed. I'm saying a left wing anti-capitalist green commie approach to sustainability is wrong, because the root problem is a mistaken relationship to science, and the consequent misapplication of technology. Applying the right technologies; starting with magma energy technology we could sustain capitalist growth going forward, and would not need to crush the poor with taxes - the rich will hardly notice. I'm actually quite surprised the left could advocate such a policy approach!
Yeah, it does look crazy the way I've written it! The figures I quoted were from memory from a paper out of the Max Plank Institute from several years back. If I recall, the 37PW was available solar energy, so would be the equivalent of about the 174PW in the Wikipedia article minus the amounts returned to the atmosphere and in water vapour latent heat (89 absorbed-12-40=37). The total power figure was for all energy, including agriculture and I think included ecosystem services too (hence much higher than our actual electricity consumption - which is only about 15TW I think). It was about sustaining the human population rather than supplying our electricity. I'm afraid the paper is so old that I actually read the literal paper copy and I can't recall the title, otherwise I'd recommend it, it was very interesting. The main point was, that we can't just use up all the solar energy because most of it is busy doing stuff - like driving the climate and ecosystems etc. Apologies for the confusion, but in my defence, clarity wasn't my top priority!
No, it's you who need to listen. I didn't say a word of that. You've put those words in my mouth.
I'll repeat: you preach about something you don't understand. You offer to evidence, no research, and refuse even to provide a single link. Later, you admit there *is* no research, and that you're essentially going on your gut. This is why no one is interested. Otherwise, I'm all for magma energy -- and I hope I'm completely wrong and you turn out to be completely right -- I would love nothing more. But anyone can go around claiming they have the silver bullet. Anyone. Without evidence, it's just a claim by a non-expert on the internet. My claim for geo-engineering (as an example) is just as relevant, in that case.
Quoting counterpunch
The fact that you're this defensive, and apparently too blind to see what others are trying to show you here, tells me that this really isn't about sustainability at all. It's about you wanting to believe you've found something other people (including thousands of experts) have somehow ignored. That's your own issue.
So you've been "thinking about, reading about, and worrying about" this for 25 years, yet provide no references whatsoever? Interesting.
Quoting Isaac
100% correct. The difference? This happens to be something he's staked his identity on. Good to know, so I can ignore him easily in future conversations. Just placate him and maybe he'll go away.
The fact that anyone can delude themselves into believing they've got an answer to a global crisis is astounding enough. But then to demonstrate no expertise whatsoever, and no references, is beyond the pale.
Quoting counterpunch
Ah, the picture becomes clearer now.
Capitalism has the knowledge and skills. Good ol' capitalism. Such a fine head on his shoulders.
Quoting counterpunch
No, it isn't. Because capitalism doesn't exist anywhere. What we have is a state-capitalist system, with massive state intervention on all levels. Subsidies, bailouts, a central bank, etc. etc. We have what boils down to a corporate welfare/socialist system. It's easy to see, when you look around.
Quoting SophistiCat
I laughed at this.
Quoting counterpunch
:rofl:
Hard to believe I took you seriously early on. Silly me.
Evidence, to show what? What exactly is it that you want me to prove? What is it that you can't google for yourself?
Quoting Xtrix
If I recommended a book, what are you going to do? Run out and buy it? Read it so we can discuss it? What the point?
Quoting Xtrix
All economies are mixed economies to a greater or lesser degree. That's true, but is that relevant to the question of whether we approach climate change back peddling, having less and paying more, and taxing the poor to supress demand, and failing to secure the future anyway, or by harnessing massive clean energy from magma and continuing to prosper?
The left have dominated environmentalism for decades; while admittedly, the right have buried their head in the sand, allowing a limits to resources, anti-capitalist narrative to go unchallenged. Everyone just assumes sustainability implies huge, across the board anti-capitalist sacrifice. I don't believe that's true; scientifically and technologically, it is not necessarily so. Besides, Malthus was wrong. We invented tractors and fertilizers, and food production hugely outpaced population growth. Climate change is the same sort of panic, but there is a glaring technological solution - if the technology to harness magma energy can be developed and applied we can transcend limits to growth. And we should.
Quoting counterpunch
Lol. So confused! What is this "reference" you ask for?! I'm a wealth of information about this subject, having read and worried about it for years, but there's no need to point to a single source about the topic when you can Google it all yourself! True, I'm the one making the claims and in fact raising this subject in the first place, but never mind that -- take me on faith, and don't expect me to provide YOU with anything of substance. I'm not your secretary.
Etc.
You have no idea what you're talking about, pal. So don't worry your little head about references or evidence for your crackpot ramblings. Just be happy with knowing that you've cracked the climate crisis -- and I hope humanity starts listening to your extraordinary solution! Well done!
Thanks. But credit should really go to Wilson Clark - who wrote an encyclopaedia of potential energy technologies published in 1972, entitled Energy for Survival - the alternative to extinction!
:lol:
Any of these would force an honest assessment of the science out into the daylight of the market where people would put up or shut up.
But this whole open conspiracy where we agree to do what we think might be wrong simply because we don't want others to tell us to stop what we are doing is just BS. It's gambling with our children's future and in the end we all get to say "oops! Sorry!" DOH!
Such trenchant critique! Clearly you are an intellectual!
Put up or shut up on the question of whether to continue to use fossil fuels, or stop suddenly with no back up plan in place? That's not a choice. If the question, rather, were for science to put up or shut up on a viable alternative to fossil fuels, that might offer people a choice.
Magma energy is one potential, and I think promising source of high grade clean energy, in theory, more than adequate to replace fossil fuels. But even then, it wouldn't be either/or. Developing magma energy; it would take time to build capacity, and that might more be more possible, politically - if the energy produced were dedicated initially to carbon capture, desalination and irrigation, recycling.
You didn't read. I said we'd continue on our merry way, not "stop suddenly."
But even if we did stop suddenly, that is a choice. History is replete with examples of sudden, uncontrollable change that we responded to. In fact, some of our best work comes out of exigency. Time-shmime. Cut off the petroleum tit and see how fast your magma or whatever the hell else gets done.
Regardless, that was not my proposal.
There's exigency aplenty to come if we don't develop an adequate alternative to fossil fuels, you can bet your bottom dollar on that! Just been looking at a world temperature map. A million football fields...or whatever, in the US northwest and Canada on fire. Tip of what's left of the iceberg!
You are correct, and I would bet my bottom dollar on that. I wish "the other side" would bet their bottom dollar on their position. But they won't be forced to do so. They will just shrug, and say "oops!" And future generations will forgive them, saying "Well, they didn't know any better back then." Thus, they have no incentive to change their minds. And I'm not talking about the big exec. I'm talking about the knuckle-dragging muscle truck moron rolling coal.
On the point of "knowing better", while I haven't vetted this, check it out, from 1912: https://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-in-1912-linked-coal-to-climate-change-2018-8
It's strange how age imparts credibility. Supercomputer generated climate models are a dime a dozen, but if the 1912 editor of the Commonwealth of Columbia Cryer said it, it must be true!
It is, he was right, but even so - there has to be a viable alternative. You can't blame people for operating rationally within the reality presented to them. Not even the:
Quoting James Riley
A viable alternative needs to be an attractive offer; it needs to solve problems, not create them - whereas, currently, everyone seems to believe sustainability necessarily implies huge social political and economic disruption. I don't believe that need be the case. Magma energy could be developed in parallel to fossil fuels, and be applied initially to carbon capture, desalination and irrigation, recycling - doing environmental good while building capacity to replace fossil fuels entirely. All smooth and orderly like; no pain, no blame!
Not strange at all. The "I told you so" aspect of it refutes the open conspiracy of ignorance and forgiveness. I think it's important for future generation to know we were lying sacks of shit when we pretended that we didn't know better. And when we pretended we were doing it "all for the children" (when we were really doing it for our own selfish selves, that next man-toy, vacation, McMansion, etc.).
Quoting counterpunch
See, you are already making excuses for us. I can blame us for operating irrationally with the reality presented to us 100 year ago and every day since the 1960s. You see, it shouldn't take your johnny-come-lately computer models and science to make us do the right thing. Had we just been required to post a bond with our personal property, we wouldn't be here in a "too-late" status quo.
Quoting counterpunch
No, it does not need to be attractive. It needs to work. If that's magma, fine. I've got no truck with your magma gospel. Get out there and get it done. But in the mean time, people should be forced to own up to what they are doing.
Imagine if Big Tabaco had just been required to put up or shut up. All the champions of free market capitalism need to be forced to abide their own rules and quit socializing their costs. Want to pump a billion tons of shit in the air? Okay, pay everyone what they demand for their air in a negotiation. (I'm not selling.) Either that or keep your poison on your own property. And if we all agree to "look the other way" in an open conspiracy, because we all want to drive cars, then pay true cost of doing so. We are going to do that. And so are our kids.
My assumptions are that we have to be right in relation to reality to survive and prosper. The best knowledge of reality we have is science. And if we acted rightly with regard to the science, we could overcome the climate and ecological crisis, survive and prosper long term.
The fear is that science as truth would be dictatorial; that because, and insofar as science is true it cannot be disagreed with. And therein lies an end to freedom. But I don't think that follows - because Hume was wrong. Reconciling the is and the ought is exactly what people do - what they're meant to do, such that the ideal human, if you like, is one that knows what's scientifically true and does what's morally right in terms of what's true.
That's not who we are by a long chalk; but we could acknowledge the principle, and on that basis, in face of a challenge the like of which we've never known - do the one thing that science says is absolutely necessary, and our generation will have done our job. We don't need to change everything, but we do need abundant clean energy to power carbon capture, and desalination and irrigation, just to get through the next decades of the coming century.
Quoting James Riley
I get that you're angry, but it's not about blame for me. It's about the least disruptive adequate solution. It is about doing the right thing - and knowing it's the right thing, with the future of the species on the line. Fearless in establishing what's true; in practice, I'm not out looking for toes to step on. Developing magma energy on a monolithic scale may sound disruptive, but actually, it is a far less disruptive and more hopeful approach than windmills, brownouts, carbon taxes and the stranglehold of ongoing green regulation.
Right on. Unfortunately we're dealing with an utter crackpot and science ignoramus, so all that will get done is more trolling on the internet.
Unlike , I do have truck with your Magma energy proposal.
There's a basic physical problem called the "recharge" rate, which reduces to simple geometry. To extract energy efficiently from rock, we don't dig down and then install a big metal plate as a single surface heat exchanger. Rather, we dig a bunch of tubes over a volume or then use natural occurring tubes of water in fissures and cracks that's is already down there.
Point is, this volume of rock will only heat back up as if it had a big surface plate heat exchanger below it. In terms of "renewable" it's this recharge rate below the volume of rock that matters, which is very low per square meter. The earth is efficient at trapping heat, that's why it's hot down there, but it doesn't produce much heat. This is the general problem of geothermal energy.
Now, exceptions like volcanoes, where energy gets out more efficiently and look more impressive, still have the basic problem of being recharged in energy and pressure overtime. In addition, volcanoes are in inconvenient locations, so even if the recharge rate was better than elsewhere, there's a large added cost of transporting the energy.
For instance, Iceland is a place where you can get a lot of geothermal energy, and they do make a lot pretty cheaply; so much that they have a big aluminum industry as processing aluminium takes a lot of electricity. However, they don't have so much that they could power all of Europe.
In general, Geothermal is, along with tidal, bio-energy, hydro, an energy source that is not globally applicable, there's just some impressive "sweet spots" (some bays, big forests, large rivers, Iceland). Those sweet spots aren't so great that you could transport energy all over the globe.
The globally applicable renewable energy source is the sun, with it's first derivative wind power (2% of sun energy is converted to wind energy ... but even then it's still localized in a "sweet spot" of higher latitudes, due to the Coriolis affect, and so, we only think of it as "on par" with solar energy because there's a lot of rich countries North, where there's lot's of clouds and good wind; and rich countries determine research and investment dollars). Point is, "recharge" rate of the sun is way higher than geothermal and there's no surface area to volume problem.
Quoting James Riley
20 years ago, leading up to the "Kyoto Protocol" I would say there was actually more concern and less denialism then there is now.
I would say "more concern" because there was simply less "big issues" back in the 90s to compete, such as the "big existential" of terrorism, new cold war, financial collapse, China, Trump, of course coronavirus today, and, ironically, weather catastrophes I would argue also take up this discursive concern space (the awareness climate change is a problem may increase, but the actual time and energy spent on climate change is still displaced by discussing the catastrophe in question, be it hurricane or wildfires or drought, and of course money on the symptom and not the cause).
The denialism industry back then was less robust than it is now. Back in the 90s, denialists still at least pretended to be "doing science", and they then they lost the scientific debate. "Pretending to do science" at least focuses on what the scientific issues are and people can decide what case is more credible. Likewise, "science based denialism" of the 90s still implicitly accepted the basic framework that if there was a problem, we'd have a moral onus to do something about it ... just, there isn't a problem. Since then, denialism has shifted to what I would call "moral denialism" which is far more effective. Moral denialism simply refutes, one way or another, the basic premise that "we should do something", even if there is a problem, which there isn't (and no moral onus to back that up, one has a right to believe anything) ... but even if there was a problem, we shouldn't do anything about it. True believers are beyond the reach of critical and factual debate, and, more importantly, these doctrines tip people in the middle towards apathy. I.e. it both fuels an insane cult while creating a powerful apologetics for the lazy moderates (who would otherwise want something to be done, maybe over a long period of time with little personal cost, but at least something that would actually work; such as had the movement in the 90s achieved something significant, instead of the weakly worded "suggestion" of the Kyoto protocol).
For instance, when I started to get environmentally aware and talk about issues, my father's extended family and acquaintances etc., all left or far left on social issues, would always joke "I'll be dead by then!" and then laugh about it, whenever the subject of climate change was brought up, by me or anyone. The moral denialism of moderates, fueled by a total misunderstanding of what exponential rise in fossil consumption means and the risks of that, was already germinating.
Denialists in the 90s at least pretended to be working in a sane intellectual framework, just claiming "the facts" aren't in yet (taking advantage of the general public's lack of risk analysis skills, in an otherwise coherent debate where arguing on the facts did move people's opinions).
The 90s itself, was an echo of the 70s, where the same environmentalism debate also occurred, due to the oil shocks and discovering how poisonous pesticides and the like are.
Anyways, just my perspective supporting your basic point that we did know, did nothing, and future generations will view the Westerners that caused this as worse than the Nazi's (who only tried to illegitimate a few group in one species, in a mad lust for power and greed, and not destroy most species, in a mad lust for power and greed).
Weather catastrophes are leading people, who live through them, to regret the inaction of the last 40 years, but I think we are definitely in the "too little too late" phase and the large scale catastrophe is now "baked in". Though this was obvious to me 15 years ago (after the "environmental movement" declared biofuels a success), and, looking at the computer models that were still pretty good back then for decision making purposes, looked at where on the globe would become uncomfortably hot and where would stay ok (both in terms of environment and political stability) for a long time. I couldn't afford to move to New Zealand, so I moved to Northern Europe. If you're going to be a climate refugee, I highly recommend doing so at least a decade in advance. What does my old network say now: "it's really hot".
Although I would agree climate change, in itself, isn't an existential threat to humans, it is through interaction with nuclear war systems and, now, also killer AI systems (assuming they get good enough that, if set to "kill all enemies" (if friend and enemy is even a stable definition to these machines through time), and then those people who pressed that button die, they would simply track down and kill everyone using the most creative, ingenious, and patient means possible, essentially guaranteed to succeed against dispersed populations regressing in technological capacity).
I was going to step in and make this point, you beat my to it.
We could easily produce sufficient energy from solar power and solar generation plants are being built, but probably not fast enough. Although it’s probably to late anyway, as the tipping points are already being triggered. Even if we do manage to reduce emissions significantly, the damage is already sufficient for civilisation collapse, as we have discussed before.
We definitely agree on this.
Of course, from a purely engineering point of view, things could be radically changed and the result (still a pretty big catastrophe by any standard) still a lot better than otherwise.
However, the environmental movement of the "large scale" essentially doesn't exist anymore. The denialist industry won with the moral delialism in the exterior, as I explain at some length in my post above, but this geothermal debate is the denialism industry winning from within the climate movement
Promoting "niche" energy sources that have no global relevance consumes research, development and installation capital, while solving nothing. Environmentalists that don't bother with basic engineering principles, then spend time arguing about which of the irrelevant nice ideas (always in the future) are best, and declaring "small victories" along the way that are actually counter productive (and generate subsidies for the oil industry who own and promote these "clean" niches; subsidies that finance more denialism), while everyone else sees that "renewable energy" doesn't really work (doesn't actually displace fossil on a large scale).
It is also not just a question of energy source, but of organizing society to use those energy sources efficiently. Trying to keep a system (such as highways and personal vehicles) going that doesn't even use fossil fuels efficiently (but was invented precisely because fossil fuels starts in a super abundance and needs to be wasted on a large scale to profit), is just pure intellectual insanity.
Yet, decades after the "biofuels" revolution proved to be a total lure (which was obvious at the time to even the most cursory scrutiny), what's all the rage? Electric cars!!
I'm looking to drill through rock at temperatures of 700'C - close to magma chambers and subduction zones, line the bore holes with pipes and pump water through - producing contained superheated steam. The volume and temperature of the rock suggests there would be no recharge rate issue.
Quoting boethius
I plan to convert electrical energy into liquified hydrogen fuel for transport. Liquified hydrogen gas contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per kilo - and we ship petroleum around the world.
Quoting boethius
It's difficult to generalise about geothermal energy because every geothermal energy source has different characteristics. Current extraction techniques are sub-optimal. The particular design, I've described here many times - was created with these problems in mind. There are over 500 volcanoes in the Pacific Ring of Fire alone, and 1500 globally, plus subduction zones - where large volumes of rock heated to very high temperatures, are within reach of modern drilling technologies.
Solar energy is weak and diffuse; it must be gathered from a large area and concentrated. An area of 225,000 square miles would need to be covered to meet current global energy demand from solar. Then, the same transport problem arises. How do you get that energy to where it is needed? Solar energy must be stored, for when the sun doesn't shine, which is around half the time. All sorts of toxic metals are used in production, to make solar panels, and after 25 years, solar needs replacing at similar cost, plus the cost of recycling.
700 C rock isn't all that much energy; it sounds more impressive than it is. Heat capacity of rock isn't so high, and if we're talking super heated steam at 400 C, then there's only 300 C difference to work with.
To power a whole major country we're talking massive amount of rock, that costs money to put pipes through. If the heat extracted is equal to the recharge rate, no problem. However, even in incredibly convenient places for this technology, like iceland, the idea of powering a substantial part of Europe is just not remotely feasible.
Drilling pipe and circulating water is simply not all that hard, if this massive energy source was there, we'd be tapping it on a significant, and not niche, scale.
It's basic thermodynamics, very well understood, extremely low room for improvement of our heat engines (as you mention, steam is still a pretty solid choice of working fluid ... which is what was used at the very beginning of the aptly called steam age). This isn't something like nuclear fusion where we can always spectacular a breakthrough is possible.
Compared to our advancements in computing, heat engines have basically not advanced in a hundred years.
Quoting counterpunch
The problem this plan is:
- hydrogen is so small it seeps through materials, causing micro cracks; this isn't a problem if you need hydrogen and just a) tolerate leakage since the amount isn't a danger nor relevant economic loss b) replace the equipment when you need to, but is a problem if you want to build out a massive complex infrastructure of tanks, pipes, valves, gauges, etc. with high efficiency and low maintenance and few explosions.
- Even with the technical challenges resolved, the infrastructure involved is so massive that it would take decades to actually build.
- The only point of hydrogen infrastructure is to power personal vehicles and trucks ... but trains exist and can be built and powered by electricity far cheaper. I.e. even if it was doable, the basic justification doesn't exist, outside some niche applications that have no relevant to climate change.
Quoting counterpunch
Volcanoes are impressive as they release stored energy in a short amount of time. To power anything significant, we're talking about a massive continuous volcanic eruption; the earth doesn't recharge the magma chambers fast enough. Magma moves pretty slowly, significant pressure can be stored up over time, but release that pressure and it doesn't just flow out like a tap. The exceptions of super active volcanoes, are not impressive but really small, not regular Mount Saint Helen eruptions (which is impressive in terms of energy).
Quoting counterpunch
Incorrect. Geothermal has a transport problem because the "sweet spots" where it's economic are concentrated in very few locations (such as the 500 active volcanoes you mention), so, the energy is far from where people live and you'd need a massive and costly transport infrastructure even if the energy was there (which it isn't).
Solar, on the other hand, is diffuse but not in a bad way, it lands where people live.
Imagine you had the following:
- garden (powered by sunlight)
- energy (powered by sunlight)
- wood or bamboo construction material (powered by sunlight)
- ceramics (powered by sunlight)
- basic tool and machine shop, both in hour home and short distance in the community (powered by sunlight)
- the ability to recycle metals (powered by sunlight)
Then, ask yourself how much personal transport you would need.
Then ask yourself how much high volume transport infrastructure you would need. Certainly some inputs and trade are still needed for this local economic system to work ... but 10, 20, even 1 lane highways? Would they be needed?
If you actually calculate out how much energy is required to run this techno-peasant system, it's a small fraction of what is anyways required to grow food and materials. We grow food and materials (we mostly waste) in this way now, and with a lot of transport, mono-crop and rotting inefficiencies (with lot's of good land occupied by suburban sprawl accomplishing noting food wise), so, basically by definition, if you matched people to where food is currently grown, then matched solar technology (mainly solar thermal technology is needed in this system) to the enclosure of inefficiencies in the current system (roads, mono-crops, suburbia), etc. problem solved.
People can easily live in this semi-autonomous way right now, growing most of their food and making most of their capital equipment themselves, imagine if a large system to make it easy and efficient was in place? (a network of drones delivering materials and small things that do need a factory (like computer chips), local blacksmiths, and elevated bike and small vehicle paths connecting everywhere, and the Uber of helicopters if you need to go somewhere quickly, like to a hospital). Infrastructure that still enables high mobility and trade of dense quality (metals that can be recycled, "clean-room" electronics, medicines, machine tooling, and, of course, spice) could be insanely light compared to today's infrastructure, if bulky things (like food, wood, other plant fibers, and clay) are derived locally, and energy input (the sun) also derived locally.
If you've ever encountered this homesteading life, it's actually pretty lazy compared to most jobs in the capitalist system (especially low-paying jobs), and far more fulfilling. The homesteaders that work hard is because they make a point to do even more for themselves than is economically efficient in their system (to make a political point that it is possible to do it locally, leading by example, even if, right now, it would take less effort to trade for it), but even these hard working hippies would work a lot less hard if they had a network of craft-people and a light infrastructure of the kind I describe (to enable ethical and sustainable trade).
Why doesn't this happen if it's so lazy? Lot's of poor people try, but they can't buy the land necessary.
Why is land expensive? Because the private control of land is the foundation of capitalism. Had land remained a communal resource, where, of course, you just put a poor person in a "cottage" and at least they'll make enough food for themselves, maybe produce a soldier or two.
Not feasible, why? You're not suggesting are you, that the energy is not there? There is an unimaginably massive amount of energy in the earth's interior. That so, it's a matter of the right technological approach to extracting that energy; and I agree that existing technological approaches are sub-optimal.
Geothermal refers to a great many technologies, and recharge rate refers to a form of geothermal wherein heat energy is harnessed from an underground body of hot water fed by convection. Only so much energy can be drawn; against the time it takes convection to heat the body of water. The technology I envisage is not remotely like that.
A cubic kilometer of rock heated to 700'C contains something like 420000000000 joules; a reservoir of energy fed by conduction from liquid magma at a higher temperature. Through this rock would be cut (perhaps) one meter diameter bore holes, containing pipes, containing water - which would be raised to the ambient temperature of the surroundings. Any replacement rate deficit of the environment surrounding the pipe would be immediately compensated for via conduction from an adjacent higher temperature energy source. The replacement rate issue refers to another form of geothermal; which is why I prefer the term magma energy.
Quoting boethius
You mean, like the transport infrastructure for coal, oil and gas? We manage to get that from A to B somehow, and I explained how I intend to distribute magma energy in the previous post. I said:
Quoting counterpunch
Why make the same point again?
It's not about "sub optimal", it's about needing to drill a lot of pipe, and then cooling that volume of rock, which doesn't recharge at the same rate of depletion, requiring more drilling.
These processes are pretty close to optimal. There are basic physical limits to the efficiency of cleaving and lifting rock out of the ground, of heat engines. There's not some "drilling breakthrough" anyone is proposing to happen ... except for Elon Musk but that was walked back to "it's cheaper to drill smaller diameters! so we'll do that".
Quoting counterpunch
We manage to get that from A to B by burning a lot of coal, oil and gas in both building up massive infrastructures and also to run them.
Quoting counterpunch
Your point of shipping around petroleum (using petroleum) is not analogous to shipping around hydrogen.
First, technically, hydrogen is a lot more challenging (need to compress and freeze it, and much more difficult to store even compared other gases).
More importantly, hydrogen is not a cheap source of energy like petroleum (insofar as it's still in easy accessible locations in forms easy to process). Petroleum pays the energy cost itself to transport it as well as build the infrastructure. If you have a bunch of petroleum, you can always "get it somewhere" on the globe to sell it (the only wrinkle is if plenty other people have plenty petroleum too, so the margins are thin; solution: promote an insanely inefficient economy that wastes energy wantonly and also make both implicit and explicit cartels to control the price; both to extract profit sometimes with high prices as well as disrupt competing industries with super low prices sometimes).
Hydrogen needs to be made, which costs energy, as it's not a source, and that energy cost and the cost of infrastructure can easily exceed the costs of other sources of energy that are available at the location you want to sell in (like the sun shining there, or the wind blowing there, and just way cheaper than buying magma-to-hydrogen energy ). Hydrogen doesn't "pay" the energy cost to make and move it. Why your system doesn't exist, but solar and wind systems do; but they are most efficient locally, as, if you don't need to move energy, there's only an energy cost to doing so with no benefit (distributed system also has less, or no, systemic failure points, could be robust against Carington events, etc. etc.).
I understand the principle; but it doesn't apply. Underground water sources fed by convection can hold a limited amount of energy and take time to heat up; whereas conduction from a higher temperature energy source is a constant and vast pressure that would immediately compensate for the escape of heat via a bore hole.
Quoting boethius
What processes? In what way optimal? I also said previously, geothermal refers to a great many technologies. You've taken a problem with one form of geothermal and applied it incorrectly to the technology I propose, so that's just wrong.
Quoting boethius
When energy is converted from one form to another, it costs energy. That's correct. Hydrogen is not a source of energy, no. Hydrogen is a fuel; a means to store and transport energy. Less than 100% of the magma heat energy extracted will be stored as hydrogen. These are true physical facts. I know of, and account for these facts.
Hydrogen fuel is clean and versatile, and contains 2.5 times the energy of petroleum per kilo. There are very well understood issues with hydrogen embrittlement; hardly worth mentioning. And I'm not sure you get the point that shipping hydrogen would be 2.5 times more efficient, simply by weight.
Quoting boethius
Petroleum is a refined product. It does not come out of the ground. Oil comes out of the ground, which then needs to be transported to where it is refined, and refined, before being distributed again as petroleum. All these processes imply energy costs. These are physical facts, but are not valid criticisms of hydrogen if fossil fuels are even less efficient by the same measure.
The problems I describe are inherent to the geothermal energy source, they apply to all implementations of geothermal energy.
For instance, all solar energy technologies won't work in a dark cave, for reasons to do with the characteristics of solar energy source, not the technology.
Quoting counterpunch
Really?
Quoting counterpunch
Yes, my point is that petroleum pays that energy cost. So, if it is "on hand" (such as high quality, close to the surface, oil fields), then it easily pays the energy cost of it's transport.
Hydrogen is never "on hand" in a similar way, and so the situation is no analogous.
I saw that too. Order is a phase in Chaos. Next up, the sun will now show us what it can really do! WTF?
I'm disappointed to discover that Google Images found NOT ONE photo of Terry Jones tucking into an Anglican cathedral. :rage:
Whether you are right, (you are not right) or wrong - we are close to an impasse of direct and repeated contradiction. I can't explain why again, because I tried twice. Then again, they say third time's a charm.
Imagine a fire, and on that fire there's a pan containing water, and you dip your pipe in that water, and pass water through the pipe to extract energy from the body of water which consequently cools down. It takes time to heat up. And this is the replacement rate. It applies to hydrothermal energy.
Now imagine a pipe containing water inside the fire box of a steam engine. It is incidental to the heat of the fire how much water you pass through the pipe. No amount of water passed through the pipe will diminish the heat of the fire.
The same physics is obliquely relevant in calculating how much water, at what rate would pass through a pipe of what diameter for optimal steam pressure, to drive turbines, to generate electricity. But rock heated to 700'C by proximity to magma would not become depleted in the way a subterranean body of water does, and so replacement rate does not apply.
If you still don't get it, there's no need to contradict me again. Just say good chat, and I'll know what you mean!
Drilling 10,000 m deep geothermal wells
15 September 2010
It may be possible to collect geothermal energy from depths down to 10,000 m, according to Norwegian researchers.
Commonly used geothermal energy comes from a depth of 150-200 m where temperatures are around 6-8°C. Researchers at NTNU, University of Bergen, the Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) and SINTEF believe it is possible to drill down to 10,000 m where temperatures can reach at least 374°C and the water has a pressure of at least 220 bars.
“If we manage to produce this kind of energy it would clearly be a ‘moon landing’. This is one of the few sources of energy that we really have enough of. The only thing that we need is the technology to harvest it,” says Researchers at SINTEF Materials and Chemistry, Odd-Geir Lademo.
http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/12469/drilling-10-000-m-deep-geothermal-wells/
I have been reading these sorts of press releases for over 20 years.
"Moon landing" and "we just need to technology to harvest it".
People have even literally made press releases of harvesting the moon's orbital energy, and of course mining it for stuff ... if we only had the technology.
There's actually plenty of energy sources "we really have enough of": Quasars, stars in general, zero point energy.
The point of these press releases is to get some grants. Scientists are always like "peer review, evidence, skepticism" ... except when it comes to grant applications and the press releases that provide plausible reasoning (on part with any creationist) for spending public money on their project.
Meanwhile, solar energy, the energy source humanity has mostly used for it's entire history (to grow crops, trees, grow plankton for fish, and also heat most buildings most of the year), and has been pointed to as the obvious better source of energy than fossil with easily demonstrated calculations that don't change, has proven itself cost-effective (even against fossil fuels with subsidies and basically no "polluter pays" principles), and it wouldn't be all that complicated to replace fossil with solar energy on a global scale (indeed, the savings would be enormous, as all the various costs of the pollution are very real and paid somewhere, sometime, by somebody; indeed, all of us), not "if only we had the technology to harvest it"; we have the technology now.
The problem is not now, nor has ever been, a technological one. Had the "polluter pays" principle as has been referring to, been implemented; our climate change problem would not exist, and, by definition, it would not have cost us any money (as what the polluter is paying are real costs to the economy; so, making the polluter pay, by definition, doesn't harm the economy: just moves it in a more efficient direction of technologies with low real-costs, rather than simply low production production costs).
:100: Ten ring!
Every time I hear someone whining about the price of a gallon of gas I think about how shocked they'd be if true cost were charged. We are all subsidized by the Earth, future generations, people with asthma, and the list goes on and on.
Even if we all agree to this open conspiracy so we can drive, etc. you'd think the purveyors wouldn't balk at paying a modicum of taxes on their gargantuan profits so we could offset a fraction of the costs they socialize onto the backs of innocent third parties and the Earth. But no. They instead lobby for and receive additional subsidy from Uncle Sugar.
Quoting boethius
There really isn't though, and herein lies the point. We'd have to cover an area of 225,000 square miles with solar panels to meet current global energy demand. Sunlight is spread over a large area, and we cannot physically gather energy from the entire surface of the earth. But we could extract enough magma energy to meet and exceed current global energy demand because magma is a concentrated, high grade source of clean energy, and there's a lot of it.
We should not gather it all up when nature is doing it for us for free. She's been doing exactly that for millions of years. All that sun gathered up for photosynthesis, converted to protein steaks so we can sit around, burp, fart, fuck, craft, laugh, dance, science, innovate, and generally enjoy a garden Eden paradise. We have the technology now to make everyone live like kings, without all the negatives of tooth and claw that our forefathers had to deal with. The problem is, too many of us. That's on us. Everything we want is there for the asking. We are not as bright as we think we are when we think that we must continue to do what got us where we are because it worked so far.
Edjumacations is what we need. Fewer, smarter, wiser people.
Over-population is not a thing. The misapplication of technology is a thing. If we applied the right technologies the world could easily sustain 8 billion people. We are 8 billion people. Thus, we need to apply the technologies necessary to sustain such numbers. Simple logic!
UN mid range projections suggest global population will level out at around 10-12 bn people by the end of the century; and those numbers can be sustained if we harness massive clean energy from magma - to capture carbon, desalinate, irrigate, recycle etc. We should do that. The alternatives are too terrible to contemplate.
You are wrong. Over-population is a thing. We are already (and have been for a long, long time) way past sustainability. Simple logic: We can no longer sustain hunting or gathering. We can no longer go down to the local river and drink long and deep. We can no longer trek for miles across untracked wilderness without trespass. We can no longer breath pure air.
We have to pay for everything. The world has been clear-cut, strip-mined, subdivided, paved, fenced, dammed, domesticated and lit up like a god dam Christmas tree so most people have never seen the stars at night.
I remember about forty years ago some idiot said the entire population of the world would fit in the state of Texas at a population density of New York City. He said, ergo, we had plenty of room left. But people like this fail to account for the giant sucking sound of resources being ripped from the rest of the planet into Texas just to sustain that throbbing pustule; not to mention the untold waste generated therefrom. People like this think food comes from the grocery store and heat comes from the radiator.
These are the same idiots who drive for miles down roads lined with trees and think they see a forest, so all must be well. These people have never heard of "view sheds." When they drive through Iowa, or fly over the fly-over country, they see vast farm fields and think they are looking at wilderness because they don't know what the fuck they are talking about. They see a deer in somebody's yard and consider it wildlife. They've never seen a wolf, except on T.V. They don't know what diversity is.
People are so fucked up they actually think sustainability is the ability to sustain people. What an ignorant, arrogant, simple definition of sustainability. Sustainability has left the building. The base line was what we started with, not what have left. If we want sustainability then we can't squeeze more out the Earth for people; rather, we have to get rid of people and re-wild the Earth.
Simple logic. As a little boy I remember the Fish and Game guy coming to our school and explaining the food pyramid, apex predators, and how all that worked. And how to fuck it up. We now have an upside down pyramid with seven billion apex predators at the top, trying to figure out how to drain what's under them so they can put even more up there. We should put the pyramid back right side up and have about 500k to 1m people on the planet at the top, at our current rate of individual first world consumption. The planet *might* be able to sustain that.
No, it's really not a thing. Resources are ultimately a function of the energy available to create them. It's morally repugnant to consider people surplus; particularly given that, scientifically and technologically speaking, no-one need have a carbon footprint. Given a scientifically advised application of technology, starting with magma energy technology, to power carbon capture, desalination, irrigation and recycling, 10bn people can live well, and sustainably.
Over population is a real and horrible thing. It is morally repugnant and patently arrogant to think otherwise. All the clap-trap about what could be, but is not, is the proof of it. It's just more humanity spouting shit into the wind as part of an open conspiracy against the Earth and ourselves. We should really put up or shut up. Don't talk. Make it work, now.
"anyway i think an apt way to think about climate change is that there are 'no non-radical futures.' either we change everything or the earth changes everything for us. anyone selling you 'realistic' incremental change is performing the work of charlatans and denialists." roshan
As for me, what I want is already gone because our population is not and has not been sustainable. Over population and surplus people are the reason.
I want to commend you for an excellent post, and very informative. Nice to have someone who knows what they're talking about. Good luck getting through to the buffoon, but thank you for the reasoned responses for the rest of us.
Are you a geologist?
Oh good, the crackpot is explaining something:
Quoting counterpunch
lol. Yes, because of the two of you, it's definitely he who "doesn't get it."
And getting worse. But really because of the greed of only a few countries. Otherwise we could sustain our population for a while.
Still, to outright say "it's not a thing" is just more buffoonery. Much like the super-discovery of magma energy by an internet troll.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521
Cool, but if you break it down by country, you can see fertility rate vs CO2 footprint.
https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/guide/bipolar-disorder-lithium
Completely irrelevant. I was discussing overpopulation, not climate change.
Quoting Xtrix
I'm seeing an article on bipolar disorder. Is my brain falling apart?
I don’t want to be part of a pile on, only to point out the flaw in this argument( although James Riley has already laid out the reality).
What do those 8 billion people do when the sea level has risen by 30 metres, do they all move uphill a little?
And what about the people already inhabiting the higher land, do they have a say. I would hazard a guess that at least 2-3billion live below 30m altitude, many of the worlds largest cities are below this level and a lot of fertile farmland would be lost.
Not to mention societal collapse and despotic rule, which hasn’t been mentioned yet. Our world would soon become dystopian, making the degrees of cooperation required for your scenario to work, impossible.
I’ll leave it there, for now.
You want to murder most of the population of earth and you call me unrealistic because I want to drill to harness magma energy? I asked how you plan to accomplish this mega-genocide, and you've got nothing. People won't just sit around and be killed you know. WWII - the economies of nations were turned to the purposes of mass murder, and they hardly killed 100 million people.
Quoting James Riley
Limitless clean energy from magma is a radical future; and one that offers hope.
Idiots are often easily confused, and I'm wondering if that might be the problem.
You keep repeating this number as if it's some sort of problem for solar energy.
Your 225 000 square miles is about 580 000 square kilometres.
Surface area of earth is 510 000 000 square kilometres.
Assuming your value is correct, it is not really a problem; it is a thousand times less than the surface of the earth. We occupy (and degrade) far more land with mono-crop agriculture than we would need with solar energy.
Solar energy devices can be placed on roofs, over roads (or replace roads that we no longer need), placed over plants that require shade, and other duel use purposes, and so the "land cost" can be close to zero in this regard.
Furthermore, by reducing and reversing large scale infrastructure (that not only occupies a lot of land in itself, such as those 20 lane highways, but also divides the ecosystem making it less efficient), would actually be a net-positive in terms of land bio efficiency (the ecosystems being the primary value of land).
Quoting counterpunch
Do some calculations then, of the volume of rock/magma you need at 700 C to power the world.
I can assure you it's a huge volume of rock, and, once it's cooled (the energy extracted from it) it will recharge very slowly, either through the heat diffusion from below or the slow recharge of magma chambers. The volcanoes we have aren't taps that can be opened to release indefinite magma flows.
This the basic problem of all sources of geothermal energy.
There are "sweet spots" where the recharge rate is pretty good, like iceland, but it is no where good enough to power all of the UK, not to mention Europe.
I guess I must be. There's no other reasonable explanation. I must be too stupid to understand why a big ball of molten rock - 4000 miles deep and 26,000 miles around, isn't a viable source of energy for those living on the surface, particularly given the nature and scale of the threat from climate change. I'm such an idiot, it just seems obvious to me we'd want to tap into that energy, and I get frustrated that I cannot understand why no-one else wants that.
Quoting Benkei
It is kind of frustrating though, after repeatedly talking about drilling "close to magma chambers and subduction zones" to have you say I propose drilling into a magma chamber under pressure. Also, the melting point of carbon steel drilling equipment is around 1500 degrees centigrade; so drilling rock at 700'C is not going to melt the drill.
It's just to give an idea of how much solar you're talking about. And the sheer size of the thing is just the start of your problems. Solar only produces energy half the time, at best, and so that energy needs to be stored. Storage is expensive, both in terms of the infrastructure, and the energy cost of translating one form of energy into another. Transmitting energy from one place to another requires high voltages, and solar is low voltage - which is another huge energy cost. Solar panels are expensive, they last 20 years tops, and they're difficult or impossible to recycle because they contain toxic metals. Metals that have to be mined prior to manufacture.
Quoting boethius
You think we're going to rip up highways? How would your huge solar panel manufacturing plant get raw materials without roads? How will they distribute the finished product? Off road horse and cart? You cannot change everything, and you can't kill everyone. You want the least disruptive, most effective adequate intervention; and the most bang for your buck is magma energy.
As I've pointed out it's silly to call it magma energy for obvious reasons. It's geothermal energy. But it's nice to see how you've not done any research on how drilling works. It's not about the melting point of carbon steel but making sure your equipment doesn't break. Here's 157 degrees celsius, our current record for drilling at high temperatures: https://www.hartenergy.com/ep/exclusives/high-temperature-drilling-pushes-limits-176820
Drills need lubricants. Oops.
And yeah, great fucking idea to drill close to areas proven to be under pressure (there are volcanoes) and fuck around with the structural integrity of the rock above it. And while we're at it, let's add water! That will definitely go well.
That's not a record temperature.
World's hottest borehole nearly complete
By Rebecca Morelle
Science Correspondent, BBC News, Iceland
Published 14 December 2016
Geologists say they are close to creating the hottest borehole in the world. They are drilling into the heart of a volcano in the south-west of Iceland. They have told the BBC that they should reach 5km down, where temperatures are expected to exceed 500C (932F), in the next couple of weeks.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38296251
Quoting Benkei
Isn't it though!
I'm beginning to see why people think you are flakey. I didn't say anything about murder. I didn't say you were unrealistic. I don't want to engage with you any more.
Quoting counterpunch
I'm sorry, but I missed where you asked me that question. Cite?
Quoting counterpunch
If you are here on the internet telling us about it instead of getting out there and making it happen then it's just more noise. I don't know shit about magma and I've got no truck with it, like I said. But apparently others here who are smarter than me think you of full of it. I'm not taking sides on that. I'm just saying "go to work and good luck."
It might be more accurate to put it this way. Climate change is a symptom of "the issue" of our times, our relationship with knowledge.
To illustrate, imagine that we somehow fixed climate change completely right now, and also developed a new method of totally free unlimited clean energy.
That fixes climate change, but the price tag would be that the economy would take off like a rocket and so we'd been burning through non-renewable resources at a faster pace, civilization expansion would accelerate leading to quicker species extinction and so on etc.
In other words, fixing climate change would just move the problem from one category to another.
Climate change is a product of the primitive relationship with knowledge which characterized the 19th century industrial revolution. Full speed ahead at all costs, more is always better, don't bother to worry about the consequences etc. We're still doing that with the current emerging technologies like AI, genetic engineering.
Until we can wrap our minds around a more mature relationship with knowledge, we're going to keep creating more and bigger problems at an accelerating rate. Take climate change off the table, something else replaces it.
Indeed. Despite it being explained to you over and over again.
I guess some people just need to believe they have a secret that solves the world's problems, despite knowing next to nothing about it. Oh well.
Despite what being explained to me over and over?
The key difference between us is, I hope humankind survives and prospers. And far from keeping it a secret - I seek to communicate my ideas.
I do believe magma energy is viable, and the only source of clean energy, large, high grade and close enough to meet and exceed global energy demand.
We need this energy if future generations are to have any chance at all of striking a balance between human and environmental welfare. I hope they can - but people like you, I can only conclude you want to see the world burn.
You should work out the numbers boethius has asked for. How much square meters of rock do you need and what will be the recharge rate. Then you also need to prove it's an economical viable option aside from some obvious engineering challenges of operating equipment under high pressure and high temperatures with moving parts. Generally, engineers aren't happy with both high pressure and high temperature.
I thoroughly endorse your plan of not talking to me anymore. But before you go, please explain how you would go about de-populating the planet:
Quoting James Riley
...without murdering anyone?
Quoting James Riley
Unless you have wishes left over, you are clearly suggesting mass murder.
I'm only going to say this one more time before I get very pissed off. Recharge rate applies to hydrothermal - a form of geothermal that draws heat from underground water. Water is a poor conductor of heat. It takes time to heat up - so there's only so much energy that can be drawn from it, over time.
Recharge rate is not an issue where there is conduction through rock, from a higher temperature energy source. Rock is a good conductor of heat. Any energy you take out of heated rock will immediately be replaced from the higher temperature region adjacent. It's the second law of thermodynamics. Heat always moves from hotter to cooler regions, and passes easily through stone. This is why magma energy is a better term than geothermal.
It's not possible to work out the numbers boethius demanded without doing physical research at a specific location, but clearly, drilling at high temperatures and pressures is possible, and there are millions of cubic meters of rock heated to 700'C. This temperature is desirable because it allows for dry superheated steam - making the most of the thermal expansion properties of water, so to create greater pressure to drive turbines.
Thermal conductivity depends on the composition of rocks.
Quoting Labus
Near volcanoes it will therefore be high because that's igneous rock. Let's assume there's no temperature drop, how much rock do you need to power a city like New York? How many holes?
How about the engineering part? What existing machines come close and how are you going to make them suitable for those environments? How much is it going to cost? Is it economically viable? How does it compare to other renewable energy sources?
And finally, are there any long term risks? Let's say we only use geothermal energy, how much faster will the core cool? Are we sure that's neglible? If people think "unlimited energy" how will energy usage develop differently?
This is simply not true. On the scale of literal insulation being a good insulator and a heat pipe being a good heat conductor, rock is closer the insulation side. Energy flows from hot to cold, but it takes time.
Indeed, the reason you need to drill to the depths you're talking about it because the rock is insulating pretty well. If you drill to those depths and extract heat from a small volume, it will indeed recharge pretty fast, but the larger the volume the slower it will recharge.
The volume of rock you need to power something significant (like a continent) is completely massive. To justify the capital equipment of the power station, not to mention the hydrogen production and storage and transport terminals you've been talking about, the amount of power needs to be "worth it".
Which is why, as has posted, many wells fail even in super sweet spot regions such as Geysers that is "the most developed", 15 wells produce 725 MW. An average of 49 MW per well.
That's just not a lot of energy. If heat just "instantly" recharged the rock at 700 C, you wouldn't limit your generation capacity to 49MW per well, you'd just "let her rip" and have nuclear gigawatt power station sized pipes. The reason, once you have a well, you can't just circulate as much water as you want to get as much energy as you want with the rock heat recovering "instantly", is because it's not instant. You're energy extraction must be equal to the recharge rate of the rock volume you're extracting energy from, otherwise the heat source cools to a point you can no longer generate power. Indeed, many geothermal stations end up running at a fraction of their original design capacity, because the recharge calculations were wrong.
The volume of rock will cool as energy is extracted from it, but will only heat up proportional to the surface area below (and to the sides somewhat, but doesn't change the proportionality here).
When you have these sorts of volume to surface area proportionality constraints, the solution is to have a small volume to keep that proportion low; hence stations are in the single or double digit MW range and not the GW range.
Another way to look at it is the heat gradient from the core to the surface. The earth is efficient at trapping all that heat: i.e. the opposite of being efficient at bringing it to the surface; we can make it more efficient by drilling down there and circulating water, but once we do that for a large volume we are constrained again by general heat gradient context of the surrounding rock.
Solar energy does not have this problem, but the energy extraction is a surface area (PV or hot water panels, mirror for solar concentrates, or just windows to heat buildings) and the "recharge" rate is proportional to the surface.
That the energy is spread out over the globe just means it's its own distribution network and we don't need that capital cost.
However, I am not arguing that solar energy will prevent the the climate change catastrophe. I am arguing that it could have, if fossil costs were internalized in the 70s - 80s - 90s, but now it is too late to avoid major tipping points.
The Amazon being a carbon source now, instead of a carbon sink, is a major such tipping points (I remember being discussed literally decades ago as a "oh shit moment" we should try to avoid). Likewise, that temperature records have been recently broken by several degrees, is also evidence of the climate breaking out of the meta-stable Holocene epoch, but the entire Quaternary geologic period, and is currently in an unstable region that will move rapidly towards a new metastable point several degrees hotter than present.
The IPPC models are wrong, on the conservative side, but it was known that they were wrong on the conservative side. The "surprise" is only that the wishful thinking that making conservative models provides a sense of security, turns out to be completely stupid.
However, decades ago to the present some climate modelers worked on realistic models (sometimes the same modelers that work on IPPC models too, and pointed out the things missing that make them conservative), which have always been terrifying in terms of the risk indication (numerical models of complex systems and things that haven't happened yet, only inform risk, never actually predict what will happen).
So, I'm not arguing solar energy can now arrest or reverse the climate crisis, only that it could have easily do so in an economically feasible way if the costs of fossil were internalized (whereas your magma technology could not have done likewise), and, even today, a massive proliferation of solar technology (and adapting society to use solar energy efficiently) would mitigate the crisis, but that is a political problem that is less and less feasible as the world is disrupted more and more by climate change and derivative affects.
So yes, billions of people are likely to perish, and it is definitely murder by the West in both a collective sense of apathy and specific sense on the part of the denialist industry, but that is not a "solution" proposed by us environmentalists pointing it out, it's just largely inevitable at this point.
Certainly, if you could prove magma energy to work, or even be "worth a shot", some billions should be spent finding that out and then a few 10s of trillion building your system if you turn out to be right.
Likewise, some billions should be spent on solar energy to discover the same, and some 10s of trillions spent converting the world to solar (in both installation of solar energy, and converting infrastructure to efficiently use it, with more local production using local energy, removing the large energy costs of both transport and large transport infrastructure).
Neither of these scenarios are happening, and spending trillions on bailing out the banks (i.e. corruption) from the consequences of their own corruption, in combination with the costs of more bailouts of the system in general due to the pandemic, and costs bailing out the system due to the affects of climate change, will likely lead to the kinds of economic dislocations that make large scale global investments no longer possible.
But the reason no alternative to fossil is being developed in a serious way (a way that would actually reverse carbon emissions) is political, not technological nor economic (we have the technology, and, as the world is discovering, eating the costs of climate change head on is not "economic bravery and realism" but complete idiocy).
As a note, water is an excellent mover of heat via convection, and if heat conduction to rock was instant as you say, then it would efficiently re-heat any hot water that's down there.
You can also look at the physics and economics of heat storage for power. They exist (such as for solar thermal energy), but for relatively short periods of time, because the material volumes required are simply massive. You'll also note that things like molten salt are used that efficiently transfer heat by convection, and if you work out just having a big cube of rock heated from below, it's not an efficient system (which would be analogous to having a a large cube of rock below the surface heated from further below that).
As an aside, the solution to the intermittence of solar energy is to simply match energy consumption to the energy availability as much as possible, which brings the problem down to a manageable level.
An analogy would be if an engineer on the Titanic pointed out the risk of hitting an iceburg in a couple of days to a few days, and people dismissed this as alarmism.
Then, the next day pointed out the same as a big risk tomorrow, and then people not only dismissed this as alarmism but ridiculed it as the exact same alarmism said yesterday and it didn't happen!!
Then with the iceburg literally approaching a day and a few hours later, people laughing at how the prediction didn't come true, as a couple days already passed!
Finally, after the iceburg is hit and the ship is obviously sinking, people say "idiot! we'll just innovate out of this problem; how'd we build the ship in the first place and make it go super fast if not for innovation".
That's pretty much the climate debate since decades.
Sad but true. 36 years ago, when I was 7, my father worked for Shell. When he was again working late and my mom complained I said "he's inventing things for a better environment". There was awareness then and even a kid understood it.
Like the expertise certainly!
But what are you actually saying about what the models predict?
The non conservative models show stable states and tipping points, the holocene stable state we are leaving, and a new one we're heading to, several degrees higher (the anthropocene stable state let's say)?
- It to late now to stay in the holocene, because even if we cut emissions entirely (which won't happen anyway in the near future), having crossed tipping point will carry us further to the anthropocene?
- Is the implication then not that only reducing greenhouse gas-levels on a large scale, to maybe get back to holocene stable state, would have a tangible effect on climate, because anything less will just end us in the anthropocene stable state anyway?
Is that about right?
Yeah. :roll: You're an idiot. If someone with a brain wants to discuss it, I will. But it's been discussed before.
Edited to add:
I’m letting my frustration with stupidity get the better of me. I banned TMF because he was saying that what I said implied something that was not implied by what I said. I’m beginning to think that saying someone is implying something might be a common method of engagement. I might end up banning everyone from my engagement if I were to do that.
So, I got to thinking about a few things. Since people seem to be incapable of just asking (like you finally did in your last post; you could lead with that), and they would rather just say the other person must be saying something they did not say, maybe there was a teachable moment in each such case.
In reading the other thread on “A new theory of proof” and your own statement about either/or and wishes on the murder question, I thought I’d try a new angle:
Let’s see if you, counterpunch, have the intellectual horsepower, or imagination, to think of some other way to reduce population to, say, a million people, without having to engage in murder. Let’s see if you can make my best case for me. You know, without sounding like an idiot. Really put yourself in a position of advocacy for population reduction and see if you can’t come up with at least of a few of the many alternatives to murder that others have already posited and would result in population reduction. As I said, this has been discussed by many people before but I want to see if you are capable of thinking, and thinking beyond the simple-minded “either/or”. Go ahead, stretch your brain. See what you can do. Show us all you what you are capable of.
Or you can just stick with telling other people what it is that they must mean. Or you could just ask instead.
I have a fairly good idea of my own intellectual abilities, and I'm far from idiocy. For example, I know there isn't time to reduce population by means other than murder within the timeframe climate change allows for. So it would be pretty fucking stupid of me to suggest population reduction as a solution. And then worse if I got all pissy about it!
Well, numerical models of complex systems don't really make "predictions" in the usual scientific sense (such as predicting the position of a star behind the sun during an eclipse is a "prediction", falsefying the theory if it doesn't happen).
Numerical models of complex systems basically inform us about risk.
For instance, that the earth will warm if we emit green house gases, is a prediction, made over hundred and twenty years ago using pretty basic analytical (in the math sense of on paper solutions) methods, following experiments on gases to understand their basic atmospheric properties.
However, having zero clue how this would impact the earth's ecological system, the discover of the global warming theory concluded this warming would actually be a good thing, helping pants grow and boost agriculture.
Had the globe not actually warmed, then this would have refuted the theory.
Numerical models come in to inform risk, but, even then, they are viewed as inferior to extrapolation from retrospective geological data. As soon as there is retrospective data, for instance data about galaxy types and sizes, the modelers can't be trusted anyways, as they obviously tweak their models to show what we see.
In other words, the models of relevance are simply basic extrapolation of climate history.
Where numerical models come in is informing more detailed risk analysis. For instance, there's no geological data on how past climate change affects city infrastructure, because cities didn't exist back then, so, you can (and people do) build models to try to evaluate infrastructure risks (like the recent damn and levy busting in Germany).
However, we don't actually need these models to know the risks are ridiculously high and we shouldn't change the climate. The basic thing is climate sensitivity, which we already know because of the ice ages: that very subtle changes caused by very slowly changing orbital characteristics (with basically no material being added or taken away from the earths surface bio-physical systems) can bring and take away massive glaciers kilometres thick over a significant area of the globe.
So, if slow and subtle orbital changes can cause such a big change, the risk that a really massive and sudden change (adding billions of tons of material to the earth's surface processes, every year! for over a century!!!) is simply extreme madness.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Yes, basically this is correct. The earth has two meta-stable climate regimes, climatologists call the "hot-box" and the "cold-box". The cold box has ice at both polls and wild swings in ice-cover due to orbital changes. The "hot box" doesn't have ice at both polls and is much hotter. This is driven by the physics of snow, that it melts quickly passed a threshold (the aptly names melting point); i.e. the difference between rain and snow can be a few degrees, not some linear proportional change, such as at 20 C we get 90% rain and 10% now, at 0% we get a 50-50 mix, and then at -20 C we get 90% snow and 10% rain.
If there was land at both polls, we'd be essentially locked into a cold box state, very difficult to break out of.
If there were free oceans at both polls, we'd be for sure in a hot box state.
With land at one poll, and a constrained ocean surrounded by land at the other poll (making heat exchange with warmer oceans not so efficient), gives us the recent cold-box, but only insofar as an ice cap covers the North poll. It's "pretty stable", lasting millions of years, but it's no where near as stable compared to a situation where land simply covered the whole North poll connecting Canada to Russia.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
If you're going to jump out of a building, it's still better to jump from a lower floor.
So the answer is "no." You don't have the intellectual horsepower to come up with something other than murder. Instead, you put a qualifier of "time" on the ability to effectively do so. Time might be the same factor that you seem to allow yourself on the magma deal. Hmmm. Sounds like you might be an idiot after all.
Quoting James Riley
It's your idea; you suggested population reduction - it's for you to say how you intend to achieve that. I said over-population isn't the problem. The misapplication of technology is the problem. Applying the right technologies 8-10bn people could survive and prosper long term - with very few government interventions in the market or civil sphere.
Not if the lower floor is insignificant relative the height you are jumping from... dead is dead.
But thank you for the info, I'm trying to get a handle on the science of climate change, the risks and possible consequences etc... without the political biases weaven through, which is not allways easy.
And had you lead with that, I might have deigned to entertain you. But instead, you pretended to tell me what my position was. So, I figure if you know so much about my position (instead of asking), I'd just have you explain population reduction protocols that I have overlooked in my trek toward murder. You know, since your such a prescient genius about my position.
Quoting counterpunch
And who misapplies technology? People? If there were fewer of them, would the misapplication matter as much? I mean sure, a nuke by one person could wreck havoc, but a million people driving cars? Probably not.
Quoting counterpunch
First of all, fuck 8-10 billion people. It's not all about people. But second (and back on track), applying the time constraints that you placed on me, how quickly do you think you can get this done? And, more importantly (here is why your telling me what my position must be is so fundamentally fucking stupid), how would your time frame for tech to save us compare with the time frames for various population reduction avenues that you can't fathom? I guess you don't know what you don't know, so why should I waste my time engaging with you?
Well, it's never a guarantee, less fast you're going the more likely to survive.
However, in this analogy, the height is not yet guaranteed to be fatal. Right now it's comparable to just likely breaking a bone, nothing too "serious" (if we did everything we could do engineering wise to stop green house emissions, stop burning the Aamazon etc.).
However, although catastrophe is already "baked in", as I've mentioned by any standard of "catastrophe", there's really big variations. There's also natural variations that can work in our favour or not.
However, the biggest thing is that implementing the best sustainable system we can, sooner rather than later, stabilizes global society, making nuclear wars and AI warfare less likely.
For instance, converting all our mono-crop land to forest gardens would increase food yield but also be far more resilient, as trees are not only more resilient to droughts but protect the soil with shade and transpire more water into the atmosphere (making rain more likely) (and of course diverse plants are less risk than a single plant; basic "risk management" economists happily apply to investing ... but somehow a single plant species, and not only a single species but genetic copies, on huge areas is "economic").
However, it takes some decades to grow trees, decades we currently have. So, if we did that, we'd still have a lot of disruptions, but things would probably be "ok" (of course, there's still risk of the tipping points being severe anyways, but it's no a guarantee, so lowering the risk is still the coherent choice).
If forest gardens are so efficient, why don't we currently do so to make money?
Because they are efficient at making food in terms of energy input, but are not profitable in terms of labour input (low skilled labour to pick fruit from mono-crop orchards is high ... so imagine the cost of high skilled labour to manage a little ecosystems). Forest gardens do not "drive profits", through unsustainable extraction of soil wealth (it is more profitable to run machines over mono-crops while degrading the land ... then just move to other land using those profits, than make a sustainable system). However, if one says "hmm, well, maybe if we want a sustainable system we don't actually want unsustainable mono-crop plantations, with unsustainable mineral and fossil inputs (something like 9 calories of fossil energy are required to grow 1 calorie of food in the current system)", then the analysis changes, and highly skilled labour is not "profitable" but is super energy efficient, if those people happen to live there and like living in a forest garden and doing high skilled work over long periods of time because it's their home and source of food. Such people would still need energy of course, but solar technology solves that.
This is the sort of system that is "efficient", but it basically means ending capitalism as is currently practiced, in which the purpose is the running of personal vehicles.
But purely based on those models we're going from on stable state to another right? That's what crossing those tipping points does, even if we stop emmissions, temperature keeps rising. So then where do the variations come in is what I don't understand. Is it just a matter of slightly delaying the increase of temperature then, to buy more time until you get to the next stable state?
We have very different perspectives. I care about sustainability, but not because I conceive of nature as some romantic ideal - I put before human interests. Sure, after applying magma energy technology, I'd suggest desalinating water to irrigate and develop wastelands; rather than burn the forests and deplete natural water sources, but that's because forests are necessary to a sustainable biosphere. Not because I hate humanity, yet get all weepy about trees. I'm trying to describe ways to secure a decent future with minimal disruption, and you want to send out murder squads! Sad thing is, your plan is more likely than mine!
The funny thing is, your myopic, human-centered BS is precisely what put us the position we are in. Had our dumb asses conceived of nature as some romantic ideal then we wouldn't be having this conversation. But with your either/or mentality, it has to be bunny-hugging, or press on with tech. Murder or magma. Doh!
Nevertheless, unless you have wishes left over for your time line, you are clearly suggesting we fiddle while the planet burns.
Quoting counterpunch
Too late for minimal disruption. You're foot-dragging has fucked us.
Quoting counterpunch
LOL! You're an idiot.[
There's lot of variations possible, it's not an inevitable process from one point to another.
For instance, a lot of ice melting is driven by black particles from burning fossil fuels. So, if we stopped burning fossil fuels and made sure what we do burn is done super cleanly, then maybe Greenland doesn't melt, antarctic doesn't melt, there's still snow in the arctic in winter.
In other words, ice-free summer arctic ocean may have a lot of snow covering meta-stable states associated with it. For, once we get an ice-free arctic ocean summer ... there's no more summer arctic ocean ice to melt, so that particular feedback process stops.
The arctic is currently in a climate regime transition to an summer-ocean-ice-free state, but this does not inevitably trigger all the other tipping points possible (this has little to do with the Amazon right now). Meta-stable transition is one subsystem at a time; some subsystems maybe strongly or weakly coupled, and we don't really know, and it could even be going from one climate subsystem transition to the next always requires human help of more emissions.
For example, another big tipping point would be shutting down the thermohaline current, which has been proven to be slowing, but, as far as I know, still seems unlikely in more scenarios ... but not impossible. The process that drives slowing down this current is fresh water melting into the arctic (that is not salty and so doesn't do the haline part of the process). So, the more we slow down ice melt, the less likely we are to hit this tipping point (which maybe difficult to trigger anyways, and really needs a "good go" at it to have a good chance).
Turning the Amazon into a carbon source rather than carbon sink (bad for the climate for obvious reasons), seems more to do with just normal capitalism driven deforestation, and not a climate change effect (such as snow melting at the poles; though, climate change doesn't help the Amazon). Snow-less ecosystems in the tropics could be not so affected by climate change, if we stopped destroying them directly and severely weakening them: as it stands, our direct destruction of these ecosystems in conjunction with a bit of climate change can tip them into transitioning to savanna type ecosystems.
In short, currently, we are going towards a snow-less summer arctic ocean; changes in ocean snow cover is the most rapid systems change (as warm water melts ice quickly). As far as I know, climate change could be more-or-less stabilized around this new meta-stable state (if we did massive, global action now). Other tipping points are not "inevitably" triggered by a ice-free arctic ocean summer.
There's also geo-engineering. Maybe with human intervention, we could "seed back" arctic winter ice that then survives summer. However, all such schemes only make sense if we actually stop the cause of more warming, otherwise it's a massive cost that doesn't actually solve anything (adds a tiny bit of delay, but not really, as more warming will eventually melt that "human caused ice" anyways; it's only useful if more warming actually stops, and "nudging" things back towards more ice therefore long term trend setting, not the fashion of the week).
On-land ice melt is a lot longer process, and preventing Greenland and the Antarctic from significant melting, would be a big difference. We know from the geologic record that glaciers can experience catastrophic melting, but it's not known the exact details; so again, less heating, less likely we are to trigger such events (even if it's already "likely", there's always a chance that action in combination of the luck of natural cycles still achieves a less likely result; however, especially with the antarctic, it's unlikely we could actually melt it all, only some parts that actually sit below the water line are at good chance of melting, and so more heating can make a big difference of what actually melts, and how fast; likewise for Greenland, if we stopped black particles and more heating, maybe it's melt rate stabilizes).
Land-ice, the shear volume of the ocean and time to heat it up, ecosystems that have not yet been completely destroyed for cattle and palm oil, etc. are all buffers in the system that have longer response times than ocean-ice.
The sooner we arrest green-house emissions, the less likely we are to saturate these buffers, the more time we have to try to get carbon out of the atmosphere and promote ice forming and staying over winter (in a slow and stable way, instead of some last-ditch effort fast and reckless way such as pumping reflecting aerosols into the stratosphere), and the more stable our ecosystems are throughout the changes, meaning less likely wars and so on will intervene to make things even more chaotic.
However, this is no longer the 90s. Severely problematic ocean rise is going to happen, severe climate disruptions are already happening and will get worse, crop failures, large scale famines. We do, however, currently have a choice of "how bad". "Survival" could mean 100 000 people in small communities around the poles, or, something more-or-less similar to our current civilization (based on solar energy, distributed, very different, but something we can "imagine" as "pretty good transformation" of current lifestyles around the world) and a world with more-or-less the current ecosystems (rather than basically the apocalypse with a totally unrecognizable world for those 100 000 survivors).
We've established that. What we haven't established is how you intend to reduce human population to under 1 million in time to save the planet. If that's not a viable option - and clearly it isn't, then we have to do something else. Like, what I was talking about before you so rudely interrupted me to advocate genocide.
These kind of long term, high impact/uncertain probability risks are difficult to sell politically I suppose, because you do know the impact of the policy measures on your constituency typically. Things do seem to be picking up traction now, technologically, economically and politically.
I'd say that I have established it (I have) and you have not, but since you know what I'm thinking, then you must have established it too, right? But then I guess you proved you don't know what I'm thinking because you think I'm thinking murder. This proves that you don't know what you don't know. Teachable moment: From now on, don't tell other people what they are thinking. Ask instead. Doh!
Quoting counterpunch
But if you don't know what you don't know then you don't know that.
Quoting counterpunch
But we haven't done it. We've talked shit about magma and shit. And even if that were viable, you haven't shown how it could be done in time or any faster than the options you don't know.
Quoting counterpunch
It's my understanding, from others on this thread, you are talking out your ass. I've yet to see you refute their rebuttals to your magma idea. Maybe you've got something. I don't know. I don't pretend to know what I don't know, or what you haven't told us; like how your magma idea overcomes the rebuttals. Normally I focus on what was said and not who said it, but your telling me what I think leads me to believe the others on this thread are right and you are an idiot.
In my fantasy world you would admit you were wrong to tell me I was advocating murder and genocide. You would apologize. You would then re-ask your belated question about how I would go about reducing population, and then we could discuss the merits of those ideas and the relative time lines between my ideas and yours. But you be you.
To hell with my fantasy. I'm done with you regardless. There are many proposals out there for population reduction scenarios. If you really cared, you can go educate yourself about what you don't know. Suffice it to say, all your ideas involve incentives. Follow the money.
Synthesis, check;
3017amen, check;
Apollodorus, check;
TheMadFool, check;
Counterpunch, check.
I have no idea what you're thinking, but I get a mental image of a dead cat in a tumble dryer.
Quoting James Riley
And you're not? Okay then, for the last time of asking, how do you propose to reduce population from 8 billion to under 1 million?
Remember that I was talking about magma energy as a solution to climate change - and you suggested population reduction instead, so the time limit was always implied. There is no way to do that without committing genocide.
Quoting James Riley
I've asked several times, and you have still not given an answer. That's because you don't have one. Just admit that your post was an unreasoning expression of hate.
Yes, even before computer models were even possible, it had already been worked out that the earth would warm due to the amounts of pollution involved, and that even 1 degree of warming would be significant risk.
Computer models don't inform much more than this baseline analytic result worked out in the 70s.
They confirm this analytic result in demonstrating all sorts of catastrophic scenarios, but it's more of narrative than decision making value. In the 70s, the scientists that worked out the 1 degree of warming risk threshold, maybe couldn't tell a story about it other than they didn't know what would happen but the risk of experimenting on the entire globe isn't reasonable to take.
Computer models can provide stories ... but there are lot's of models, each model can be run thousands of times with different results, so it's still the same conclusion that the risk of running to the experiment to confirm which computer model got it "best" isn't reasonable to take.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
This is correct for most politicians, at any given time.
But the real question is why there isn't wide spread awareness and powerful movements, or then why the movements that do exist have so far failed. The denialist industry was and still is well funded, but it's not really a given they would win, and they've only really "won" in the US; here in Europe there's not really much climate denialism, but the policies are weak sauce; the "concerned" politicians of Europe never get together and do anything of significance.
I'm honestly not sure; it's not like the information is in secret books that an institution will systematically burn both the books and anyone possessing them. "Truth" seems to have gotten out far worse obstacles.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Although I hope so, and I've been working in the field for 20 years, I am more pessimistic as you may have gotten.
It's been long predicted (by the people that do objective analysis) that once we start to feel the problems, it maybe too late.
First, 20 years of further warming is always inevitable, even if emissions suddenly stopped (which they obviously won't); so, even if we stopped now it would get worse for 20 years before stabilizing.
Second, actually "stopping" actually means stopping: no net emissions from mankind. A lot of journalists put the goal posts at stopping growth in emissions as what we need to do, and so write articles about not growing emissions "as much as expected" as some sort of victory and that with all the solar and wind and stuff we're getting close to zero growth (leading the reader to believe that's the goal, if we're getting close to it in an optimistic sense and the article doesn't mention any other metric).
However, all human caused net emission adds carbon to the atmosphere and increases warming. To actually stop warming we need to get net emissions to zero.
The size of this task is absolutely massive.
Therefore, all honest analysis I have seen by people (whatever their background) who have "gone deep" into the issue and clearly understand the subject matter and make coherent arguments, have all, over decades, come to the conclusion that business as usual until the affects are clearly felt, is basically too late. If we started feeling the affects and we were already down to 5% current levels of emissions, that would be one thing, but if we haven't even reversed growth in emissions, we are so far from the target it's simply not fathomable such a large change could happen in a decade or two.
These large infrastructure changes are 50 to 100 year time scales ... so, had we started in the 70s in a serious way we'd be probably net zero emissions by now, and had we started "more seriously" in the 90s, we'd be feeling some of the affects as we currently are, but less, and we'd be "on our way" to avoiding total catastrophe.
Not only are we now basically "screwed", as the infrastructure changes we need simply can't happen over night, but, an easy corollary of this prediction is that once we start feeling the affects, it disrupts economic systems taking away capital and "social energy" that could otherwise be directed towards the problem. Supply chains, financial systems, political tensions, all become disrupted, leading to a less stable world, less able to deal with the underlying problem.
An easy example is trains. A very large portion of transport (car, truck and plane) can be moved onto trains and trams, running on electricity, which, even powered by fossil fuels, is still far more energy efficient and can be burned far cleaner (it's much easier to control particle and other emissions from a power plant than millions of cars).
In terms of blank-page engineering, it's really easy to design an efficient train-tram-metro transportation based system that can displace a significant amount of emissions, even if still powered by fossil!
But it's a 2 birds with 1 stone situation, because transitioning an electric train based system powered by fossil fuels to being powered by sustainable electricity requires no changes to the transportation system. So, emissions for the transport are already lower, and it's easy to transition the system to low emissions by simply adding low-emissions electricity to the grid.
However, if you take such a blank-page engineering design and then overlay it on the current transport system and work out the costs and time to go from one to the other, the values are very large.
Assuming politics is not an issue, that there's "the will", it still involves a decade of simply planning and then multiple decades of building such a system and then a solid decade to transition to using the new system efficiently, for a country like the US (all while needing to maintain the previous system in the interim). Countries with truly robust rail networks have literally 2 centuries of continuous rail development, not only of the rail but also of organizing society in a way that's efficient for rail (many Europeans don't have a car; because they can easily move to places where they don't need a car, because things have been designed over centuries for people without cars), and it's actually ambitious to try to do likewise in a half century, with few technically possible ways of going much faster.
Hence, the electric car! Which still takes a lot of energy to make, needs new infrastructure ... and doesn't solve the truck or plane problem at all (whereas trains can move containers, and high-speed trains can also move people far faster than cars and so realistically compete with plane journeys in terms of time, especially when airports are outside of the city center and boarding times are long and weight restrictions exist and so on, and there's more space on the train, and it's much cheaper, especially if the plane's needed to internalize the real costs of the pollution).
Therefore, if we reach a point where infrastructure cannot be realistically changed, it won't be changed, but if it is not sustainable, neither will it be sustained.
Thanks very much for the detailed analysis. It's horrifying.
It's also quite distressing not knowing too well when a point of "no matter what we do, we are 100% fu*ked" will come. But it's likely sooner rather than later.
We've kind of reached the peak at which a typical species goes extinct, right? Something like 100,000 years or so. But taking most of life with you consciously, is a new phenomena...
People tend to be myopic, it's hard motivate them with something that is gradual and in the longterm. If some accident happens they typically do want to jump into action.
There's the denialists definitely, but not so much in Europe indeed. I also do think green parties, and the left in general, have been bad strategically in selling their ideas to the public... to much finger pointing blame game, and to little constructive motivating vision put forward.
The real problem I think, at least in Europe, is just a general lack of agency in politics which goes a lot further than just the climate change-issue. They seem to have simply forgotten the art of coming together, making a deal and organizing their party and society to execute it... you know what politician are supposed to do. Its all just skin-deep, marketing games to attract voters for the next election it seems.
Quoting boethius
I'm kind of oscillating back and forth the more I get into it, but I do see reasons to be somewhat optimistic.
It has been dragging for a long time, and for someone invested in the topic as long as you have been I get that this doesn't exactly fill you with optimism, but I think once things start moving, they might move a lot faster than one thinks. I don't think the conversion to renewables is a linear process. A lot of resistance need to be overwon at all fronts initially. But once the technology is sufficiently improved, the prices start dropping, the science is more clear, there are some nasty events clearly linked to global warming (floods in Europe now, heat wave in Canada) etc etc... people start seeing the urgency of it and politicians and business see the writing on the wall. It all kind of reinforces eachother and gets accelerated.
The EU have announced climate measures this week I think, which one would call, for any other issue, 'unprecedented and draconian'.
China's climate commitments seem less ambitious at first glance, they are still building coal plants and didn't commit to start actually reducing emissions until 2030. But, so I've gathered, they would rather undercommit to a target and seem to usually overshoot their targets when it comes to renewables. They seem to be ramping up production of solarpanels on a scale hard to imagine.
And in the US at least Trump is gone, so there's certainly that.
The surest sign that things are moving though, is that even some of the fossil fuel companies seem to be convinced that they need to exit fossil fuels ASAP or perish.
What I'm more pessimistic about is that reduction of emissions does get harder to more you get to zero. We may have the political will to reduce to relatively low emissions, but what do those bottom percentages entail in terms of measures?
And yes, more importantly, it is/may already be to late to avoid some of the consequence of climate change. If those consequences are bad enough, the real danger is that it will disrupt societies to the extend that they can't do it anymore or that it causes all sorts of knee-jerk our-own-people-first kind of reactions.
Good question. I don't know, but I do know there is sufficient magma energy to power New York City, and every other city for that matter. An answer would depend on the efficiency of the technology, and that remains a question.
Quoting Benkei
With regard to the engineering, I think exploiting each geothermal energy source will present a specific engineering challenge, and that practice makes perfect. General principles and techniques will emerge from, and guide the practice, and the energy developed can be applied to carbon capture and desalination while capacity is built to take over from fossil fuels.
Two or three times current global energy demand cannot put a dent in the heat energy of the planet, because the energy emitted by the earth every day is many, many times greater. Assuming we soon developed the technology to harness an effectively limitless quantity of energy, I imagine we'd achieve post materiality hundreds of years hence. Ultimately, resources are a function of the energy available to create them. But surely that's a better problem to be faced with than starving in the ruins of civilisation.
Point is, you can't expect others to take this seriously until you manage to conclusively answer at least some of my previous questions in detail.
Quoting Benkei
I'm not sure that's what I have at all. To my mind, I have a problem, and a likely solution. It's not a vague solution; technical detail is lacking, but it's a specific idea, likely adequate to the problem, and if so, the least disruptive solution, with maximum benefit at least cost.
I have my limitations, but politically, it is the right answer - because, otherwise huge sacrifices in diametric opposition to the natural interests of people and capitalist democracies, are required in advance of - in order to achieve environmental benefits. That's not a road we want to go down. It leads nowhere.
This is about more than how to solve climate change, but about how not to go about it - and that's a matter of political philosophy, surprisingly! Can you provide any insight into the question, of to what degree the overwhelming left wing bias on this forum, or rather - my intention to solve climate change in a manner that doesn't require smashing capitalism first, has contributed to the generally negative reception for what seems to me a pretty darn good and right-minded idea?
There is an angle I have been thinking about here. We are not going from one stable state to another in the short term. We may reach a stable state again in the future, but the instability in the meantime will be unpredictable, have numerous unforeseen effects and last what to us is a long time perhaps 10,000yrs, perhaps a couple of million years, we just don’t know.
The stable state we evolved in might have taken a long time to settle out, also, we don’t know what unsettled states are like. Already we are seeing torrential rainfall events, as in Germany last week, or unprecedented heatwaves near the artic circle as has been experienced all around the arctic circle during the last month. Irregular desertification, the irregular distribution of tornado alleys and high humidity, high temperature regions in the tropics in which humans cannot survive without air conditioning.
We don’t know if the rapid changes going on will affect seismic, or volcanic activity. Or have unforeseen effects in the oceans. Tsunami’s could become commonplace in some areas, along with earthquakes.
In short we are in for a rollercoaster ride for some time to come.
God intended nothing other than survival, maintenance, and contingent harms along the way. You’re on your own for entertainment.
1) I blame the media.
The journalists pick up the most damning forecast (from a variety) and run with the worst possible early outcome. Some scientists are perfectly fine to go with this in order to "wake up" the people, so they go with the worst earliest hypothetical outcome. And once that worst hypothetical outcome didn't happen twenty years ago, people can come skeptical about the alarmists.
Just to name a few, in the 1960's it was the population explosion that would lead to severe famines even in the West. Then the possible torching of the Kuwaiti oil fields would lead to something like the nuclear winter. And the list of these alarmist forecasts with dates that have long gone are there. I know that referring to them will make many people extremely angry. That the forecast didn't hold seems to be totally irrelevant, as the cause is beneficial.
2) Then I blame that some issues have been overcome. DDT has been banned. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has been working: Since the ban on halocarbons, the ozone layer has slowly been recovering and the data shows a trend in decreasing area of the ozone hole – subject to annual variations. It has even closed sometime. We have already hit peak conventional oil production and oil production hasn't grown for some time.
3) And finally, I think that the society can cope with even more problems. We can have this economy limping with the pandemic limitations for years. We can not travel as much as before. Tens of millions of jobs have been lost in the tourism sector and flights have basically halved. We can change our behavior and never ever shake each others hands. Who needs so much travel? The fact is that our societies can endure radical changes. Thanks to the pandemic, carbon emissions have fallen at the most rapid rate since WW2. Primary energy consumption fell by 4.5% in 2020, the largest decline since 1945, yet solar Wind, solar and hydroelectricity all grew despite of this plummeting demand.
Above all, in 2020 we saw the lowest population growth in the World since at least 1950 with 1,05%. Just in 2012 the growth rate was 1,2%. It may be that some of us (those younger) will witness peak human population.
It's vague idea. You have no clue about its technical or economic viability. You don't even have a proof of concept at this point.
Then I suspect God, as Woody Allen once said, is an underachiever.
Very well, I accept your characterisation of my state of knowledge. You're right, but nonetheless, those were not my approaches to these conclusions. I don't pretend to be a geophysical engineer, or an economist. I am a philosopher addressing the question of whether a sustainable future is possible; and if so, how.
I have identified a series of technologies that would reasonably provide for sustainability in order to answer that question, and this raised the question of our current approach; the ubiquitous left wing limits to resources presumption that sustainability requires sacrifice via regulation and taxation. Scientifically and technologically speaking, that's not only untrue, but fatal. Resources are a function of the energy available to create them, and so we need more energy; not less - to balance human welfare and environmental sustainability in our favour. This in turn suggests a supply side approach that preserves freedom, by internalising the externalities of capitalism with a virtually limitless source of energy, rather than internalising them to the economy.
With regard to proof of concept, I can't help thinking of the Wright Brother's plane - because if that plane constitutes proof of concept, and I think, quintessentially, it does - then there's sufficient proof there's large amounts of energy underground we can harness for our benefit. I'm betting it could be done better.
Wild, unfounded assumption that's just necessary to prop up your capitalist ideology. I don't share it nor the idea capitalism is a good system.
Anyhoo, back to your idea. If you're convinced, stop trying to convince people here and do the leg work to answer those questions and start a company or something. I did once and even though it failed, it was a fun ride and I learned a lot.
Really? How astonishing! I would have thought it were obvious capitalism is a good system, and the question therefore, is how it can be sustained? Would you rather be forced backward down a bottleneck of equalitarian poverty - because that's what a green windmill powered future looks like to me, based on the presumption of limits to resources. It's just not true. Look at Malthus, and how the invention of tractors and fertilizers allowed food production to far outpace population growth. Malthus was demonstrably wrong, and yet his argument continues to inform a left wing narrative, and it is so ubiquitous an assumption I fear it is leading to a further, and fatal misapplication of technology, in that a left wing approach to climate change will undermine capitalism such as to forgoe the opportunity that exists in the knowledge skills and industrial capacities capitalism currently commands - to transcend limits to growth via the application of technology.
But he, and he alone, has the solution. No clue about what he's talking about, or about pesky technical details, but he's got the solution. A solution overlooked by the thousands of actually qualified people working on this important issue.
Talk about delusions of grandeur. Leave the little crackpot to his illusions.
Quoting counterpunch
:rofl:
Cringe-inducing. No self-awareness whatsoever.
Quoting counterpunch
That's because you're an embarrassingly simpleminded individual who is too busy with his own delusions to hear a word anyone else says.
Quoting counterpunch
Since capitalism is the cause of this mess, one would hope it's not only undermined but destroyed completely.
This happens. I've been in this situation and it ended up stranding on investment negotiations and it being a very complex market where most players were banking on lobbying for another solution.
It could be a solution but he doesn't have one yet and appears to be not interested in actually doing the leg work to prove it. In the time he's been talking about it here and the years he claims he's spend on it I had attracted two partners, wrote a patent, and spoken with five different potential investors and 7 potential clients in three different countries. I think he actually knows what he has is a shit idea, good ideas generate money.
True in a sense, and, in a general sense as well the fundamental cause of the problem of climate change (or any human caused problem) is "human weaknesses" of one sort or another.
At the same time, it's not inevitable. People can be lazy, but can also be disciplined; society's as well. Indeed, in a longer view, many societies seem to be very far sighted, building large defensive structures that might see use in the next centuries.
It's easy to link social problems to social vices, just as for the individual, but this simply begs the question of why such vices developed in the first place.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I completely agree here. Why the movement doesn't have "more and better people" is one question (that may not have any definitive answer, just more and more historical context further and further back in time). However, what is clear is that the movement that does exist makes terrible decisions and is ineffective, even with the resources they have.
Though I agree with you point here in one sense, I think the fundamental (at least intellectual) problem is the exact opposite and not enough "finger pointing" to avoid (uncomfortable) critical debate around ethical and political theory questions.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I also had this theory while starting 20 years ago, and I do still believe the transition can be very rapid. However, it's too late to prevent catastrophe's, which are already happening.
For instance, 20 years ago, mass coral bleaching of, in particular, the great barrier reef but also reefs in general, was one of those unthinkable, terrible "apocalyptic signs" that we want to work hard to avoid.
The apocalypse comes and goes.
So yes, for exactly the reasons you describe, that were true 20 years ago in the 90s, and, as @Benkei points out, obviously true even for a 7 year old in the 80s, and also true in the 70s and 60s to all those dirty hippies, we can avoid "worse outcomes". However, the current outcome is already pretty bad, the climate catastrophe is already triggered, it's simply a question of how bad it will get.
Since effects are baked in 20 years (overcoming the ocean thermal buffer) after actually getting to 0 emissions, the affects are already bad now, we are no where close to zero emissions, therefore, the effects are going to get a lot worse before they get better.
And even the IPPC now concludes climate change is irreversible. So we are going "somewhere" new, and the nature of a system as complex as the whole world is that no one can know exactly where.
That the effects could be extremely bad -- that hitting a tipping point in arctic ocean ice, which may trigger tipping points with permafrost, forest ecocystems, land-based ice, and the system can accelerate and dominate human emissions (i.e. further human emissions become irrelevant) etc. -- is the reason to not run this experiment in the first place.
That maybe things aren't so bad, or then we should do our best for the survivors anyways (preserve as many seeds, and knowledge, and minimize our damage on the way out; i.e. clean up a bit when our party ends, before leaving unceremoniously), are all reasons to do what is morally justified, regardless of one's level of optimism or pessimism on the eventual outcome. That there is a chance of extinction means, by definition, there is also a chance of not-extinction.
I wouldn't say this is true. Also, if we're blaming the journalists, journalist in turn blame the collapse of paid journalism due to the internet (and no policies put in place for value-extraction of search engines and aggregators to pay for what they're using to make profits).
In the 90s, before the media collapse, I think communication was pretty good, and there was lot's of discussion and "in depth" reporting, denialists existed but were easily defeated (as they new forms of media entirely dedicated to propaganda, such as Fox News, didn't exist yet), and all this culminated in the Kyoto Protocol, which was supposed to be the "Montreal Protocol" protocol moment for the climate, and was sold as such.
Quoting ssu
As mentioned above, Kyoto Protocol could have actually worked (been made better to begin with, or then actually followed), but it wasn't. So, although I agree we definitely can make these international agreements that effectively deal with pollution, so far we haven't for green house gases.
Yes, we've peaked in conventional "sweet" crude, but we've gone all in for things like tar sands and fracking and haven't even phased out coal globally. The Amazon turning from a sink to a source of greenhouse gas emissions also means that we need to cut the difference to be at the same "spot" of net-emission when the Amazon was still a sink.
We are starting to saturate other buffers as well (a cold ocean can dissolve CO2 pretty well, but a warmer ocean may start to emit the CO2 it previously absorbed).
Quoting ssu
Sure, if you're arguing we can do something, no objections from me. The question is are we doing something, and fast enough.
Once systems get overwhelmed, they collapse. Has happened to previous civilizations, can happen to ours.
I don't think population matters much.
Of course, it's easiest to imagine just having less people would lower our impact, than to imagine some actually sustainable system.
However, in the equation of Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence; it's the technology and affluence that can be changed significantly in relatively short periods of time (without the catastrophe we are trying to avoid).
Sorry, what's that?
Quoting Xtrix
Yeah, that would be nice, thanks! You are dismissed!
Quoting Xtrix
Who you on about now?
Quoting Xtrix
That's incorrect. Capitalism is not to blame. The root cause of climate change is the misapplication of technology, based in turn on a disregard for a scientific understanding of reality in favour of ideological worldviews, dating back to the trial of Galileo in 1634.
As a philosopher, I have the luxury of looking beyond our ideological borders - and that's where the solution lies, in an alternate reality in which ideally, the Church greeted Galileo with open arms - as discovering the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation. In this reality, science was pursued and integrated into politics and society on an ongoing basis, as an authoritative truth - over 400 years, and technology was applied with regard to a scientific understanding of reality.
Capitalism isn't a problem in this reality, thus capitalism isn't the fundamental nature of the problem. It's the ideological context within which capitalism operates. Capitalism could operate fine within a context of science based regulation - so long as everyone were prohibited from dumping their waste in the river, there would be no economic incentive for a race to the bottom, and given limitless clean energy, to power a logical series of technologies, no limit to resources.
I accept, that's not where we are, but thinking in these terms identifies the possibility, and given the scale and nature of the threat; an objective rationale for the application of the technologies necessary to survival is worth thinking about - if technologically speaking, it is possible to sustain capitalism, we should. I think it is. I'm over-reaching slightly on my knowledge of drilling technology, but there is sufficient energy in the interior of the earth.
Yes, it is. Short term profits, all else is externality. That’s the only reason we’re here right now.
You’re not a philosopher, and you have no solutions — because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
I know what I'm talking about. I accept no responsibility for the fact you still don't know what I'm talking about. I've been sufficiently clear that someone who wanted to understand my perspective, could do. Or is it that you understand it, but don't want to accept it; unable counter it - hence the abuse?
I'm sure you must be emotionally invested in making capitalism the villain of the piece, but it's just not true. It's a shallow, kneejerk, left wing analysis - proven wrong by the capitalist defeat of the Malthusian threat. Climate change is essentially the same problem; and similarly, capitalism can be sustained if politics can find an agreeable rationale for the application of the right technologies; limits to resources can be transcended via the application of technology.
Magma energy could be developed as a global public good; and used initially to sequester carbon, desalinate and irrigate - so to mitigate and adapt to climate change while building the capacity to take over from fossil fuels. It is a minimally disruptive approach to do this in support of capitalism; as capitalism is the prevailing economic paradigm, and so much nicer than slavery - to have some degree of personal and political freedom. Also, magma energy as a global good sidesteps all sorts of direct conflicts of interest in this issue, geopolitical, politics and business, politics and the consumer, environment versus human interest, so I think it's pretty well crafted. Sad you cannot appreciate it.
Capitalism is the reason for climate change. That’s a fact. Holding your hand to help you understand it isn’t of interest to me. When a system values short term profits, and anything else is considered an externality, this is what happens. Seen clearly in the Exxon memos.
Take your capitalist/magma wet dreams elsewhere.
False dichotomy.
:up:
No it doesn’t. Not on this level.
That certainly lets the USSR and the CCP off the hook. Marxists thank you! :smile:
They’re state capitalist systems as well.
These tipping points are already breached. We’ve recently had 30+ centigrade heatwaves in all permafrost regions. They are melting rapidly, there is enough methane there to accelerate climate change beyond what we can mitigate. Even if we had zero carbon production now this methane would more than compensate for the reduction. It’s acceleration and a rollercoaster ride from now on, whatever we do.
It’s no accident that the super rich are using deregulated capitalism to extract as much wealth out of vulnerable countries as they can before economies start to collapse. They will be looking for hiding holes in remote places, like New Zealand right now for their bunkers.
This is definitely being close to being the case, and maybe the tipping points are breached and a "runaway" process that is unstoppable is already underway.
However, I'm not completely certain. The scenarios I'm contrasting is zero emissions today.
Without further carbon dioxide, methane and black particles from humans, maybe the North stabilizes, and not all the permafrost melts.
Of course, zero emissions today is not happening, but the basic point I'm making is that from one tipping point to the next maybe further human emissions is required to get things "over the edge", or, then, maybe, and once we tip one (like ocean ice in the arctic) all the others will fall like dominoes.
My overall point is that we'er not certain, but we can be pretty certain that continued emissions will make things worse, ensure tipping over more dominoes and also driving the system even hotter even after all the dominoes are tipped (as there's still more green house gases at the end of the process).
If things are already dire, then we'd be working to make things "a bit less bad" for survivors.
If things aren't so dire right now (many tipping points could be avoided if we stopped emissions now), then there's even more to save in terms of people and ecosystems.
For, it does take time for ice to melt, especially Greenland and antarctic, and the thermal inertia of the oceans that buffers a bit, and there's also (if emissions are brought to zero) geo-engineering that could work in that context.
Though I'm sure you agree, a point I'd like to emphasize as much as possible, that Geoengineering only makes sense after zero emissions.
You seed some ice now, it will have a bit of a cooling effect, but if we continue to warm the planet anyways, it will just melt anyways accomplishing nothing.
Grow a bunch of forests now, it will sequester some carbon and make those ecosystems more resilient (if we're talking actual forest and not mono-crops) ... but, they'll just burn anyways, sooner or later, if we keep warming the planet releasing all that CO2 back.
Adding reflective aerosols to the atmosphere doesn't stop ocean acidification and other problems (even if it "worked no issues", which it won't, continuing business as usual we'd just consume other non-renewable resources and collapse our civilization another way, as mentions) and needs to be continuous and more and more extreme intervention the more we continue to add green house gases (making a chaotic climate changes anyways, leading to crop failures that way). And, as soon as civilization is disrupted enough to stop the program, by wars or what-have-you, then all that warming is going to happen even faster and even more disruptively.
However, if we actually stopped emissions, then growing large amount of forests wouldn't all burn, and so sequester carbon and attract rain to those areas, both things making those ecosystems more resilient.
Likewise, seeding ice or building a ship drone network to keep ice in the arctic can help stabilize or even reverse the libido losses (submersible drones that attach to icebergs and deploy sea anchors, or the attach to real anchors with chains brought relatively close to the surface for this purpose, which could be then attached horizontally to each other, forming a large chain network all the way around the arctic that drones can go around attaching ice too). A lot of ice is lost due to floating south. Of course, if we warm the arctic enough that ice doesn't stay anyways, just melts in situ, there's no point of my immensely cool drone chain network.
Maybe some very short term, localized and strategic uses of reflective aerosols could stop catastrophic melting scenarios (those 30C over Greenland days).
So, there is still uncertainty and also geoengineering options, which are total insanity as a way to compensate emissions, but we may have time to deploy, considering the inertia of the system, and in the context of getting to zero emissions, I think it stands to reason cautious geoengineering could stop those other tipping points.
The root cause of climate change is the ideological context within which capitalism operates; the overlapping religious, political and economic ideological architectures of societies, that for all sorts of historical and philosophical reasons, undervalue and exclude science as an understanding of reality.
When politics makes a law; i.e. no dumping waste in the river, and that law applies equally to everyone, there's no economic incentive to dump waste in the river. The cost of disposing of waste properly is absorbed into the costs of production and passed on to the consumer in similar proportion by all producers, so there's no competitive disadvantage. However if there's no law on dumping waste in the river, and my main competitor dumps their waste in the river, I could not unilaterally stop doing so - even if I wanted to.
So you see, it's not capitalism per se, but the ideological context within which capitalism operates. And thus, it's necessary to look beyond those ideological borders to a scientific understanding of reality, to justify the application of technology necessary to solve climate change. Queue magma energy wet dream sequence!
— counterpunch
Quoting Benkei
I don't see it. A left wing approach to sustainability, based on Malthusian pessimism and limits to resources, dates back to an era when communism was still a thing. Communism is no longer a thing; yet a left wing approach to sustainability remains violently anti-capitalist.
Ostensibly concerned with sustainability, the left haven't even considered whether capitalism might be sustained, because of their political interest in promoting communism. In the 1960's and 70's maybe, that was a justifiable political position, but it's not anymore.
Perhaps I'm being slightly bullish in drawing a direct parallel between communism and slavery, but communism does not allow for the kind of personal and political freedom capitalism allows for. And it would clearly be less disruptive to sustain capitalism, than force a failed economic ideology on capitalist societies under the guise of sustainability.
Scientifically and technologically, I believe it's possible to sustain capitalism. There's limitless amounts of clean energy available in the molten interior of the earth, we could use to meet all our energy needs plus capture carbon, desalinate and irrigate, produce hydrogen fuel, and recycle. This would internalise the externalities of capitalism without internalising them to the economy.
Quoting counterpunch
Capitalism is an ideology. It’s the religious belief in the free market and the primacy of profit— all else is externality. Capitalism doesn’t exclude science at all.
It's not either capitalism or communism and there's a lot of different "types" of capitalism too. One of the worse developments was that of limited liability, for profit corporations and that has exactly zero to do with capitalism. So corporate capitalism is something you can be opposed to, without being a communist for instance.
So yes, false dichotomies all over the place I'm afraid. And capitalism creates its own oppression, which has been so often in the news you must've been living under a rock if you think you can maintain "capitalism = freedom". Sooner the inverse.
I also don't share your optimism where it concerns science. There have been plenty of technologies that were superior to others and failed due to political or sociological circumstances or because of a bad advertisement campaign. Lots of ideas don't see the light of day because they don't attract investors, or fail because poor, unconnected people have to pay a premium to get a loan in the first place because of worse credit ratings. The system doesn't favour smart solutions, it favours the status quo, which is why unexpected circumstances cause market shocks, recessions and depressions.
Finally, "sustaining capitalism" is an utter shit goal. It is and always has been about people, not some system or ideology. People first, system second. Whatever system creates the best world for people is the one we should implement. It isn't capitalism despite the many good things it has brought when the excesses it's been causing since the 90s wasn't a problem yet.
:100: :up: It is anti-capitalism.
Quoting Xtrix
The length of the post necessary to explain your confusion would be prohibitive. I might have induced myself to write it for a willing audience, but I'm sure you couldn't be bothered to read it. I'll keep it short. You say what you see, and so insist you're right, but you don't get to the root of the problem - and that's why you cannot solve it.
The root cause of climate change is our mistaken relation to science; a disregard for science as an understanding of reality, externalised by religious and political conceptions of reality. i.e. the context within which capitalism operates. We need to look beyond the ideological battlements, to a scientific understanding of reality for a solution; i.e. magma energy - and that so, capitalism would be sustainable.
I know you belieeeve in limits to growth, but scientifically speaking, it's not a valid theory. It's a physical fact that resources are a function of the energy available to create them. We would need to look beyond our traditional ideological worldviews to apply the technology to harness that energy, but in scientific terms, the energy we need is there - and technologically, it seems quite possible to harness it.
Surely, you would concede, that's a better approach to sustainability than a slow strangling to death of capitalist enterprise, and a low energy, poverty stricken, authoritarian green commie hell forever after. We must transcend limits to growth.
Quoting Benkei
I think that's called "the old bait and switch!"
The aim isn't sustaining capitalism per se. The aim is to secure a sustainable future with minimal disruption; and that's because, disruption causes people to suffer.
Quoting Benkei
Capitalism is the prevailing economic system the world over, and if you cared about people and sustainability - more than you do about promoting communism, you'd accept that - and seek minimally disruptive solutions to climate change.
Quoting Benkei
Optimism is irrelevant. It's a matter of fact that the earth is a big ball of molten rock, containing a truly massive amount of energy - more than adequate to meet and exceed current global energy demand, into the indefinite future.
I see you like to read extra things into what I say. Let me clarify. I'm against the current type of capitalism, I think it's implementation, especially when the corporation was introduced, has and will lead to untold misery. I'm not against "free" markets as we understand them in mixed economies but against the idiotic laissez-faire nonsense. I am against societies that are diminishing people, resources and everything else into their monetary value. I'm against the concentration of power that comes along with it, I'm against the asymmetry that arises from all these effects resulting in a split between "capitalists" and "labourers" and rich vs. poor.
The "goodwill" of a company is generated by its labourers so I believe one solution could be (if we must have corporations) is to introduce a dynamic equity system where labourers, over time, become majority shareholders as opposed to those providing capital. And that's logical because if labourers wouldn't add more value than capital, shareholders would be losing money.
But hey, yeah, I totally played into your unnecessary juxtaposition!
Quoting counterpunch
So the French revolution was a bad thing? Your posts involve way too many absolutes, too many assumptions and too little examination.
Quoting counterpunch
That capitalism is the prevailing economic system is no argument for it to remain so. Where have I promoted communism? I have always maintained Marx' Kapital is one of the better critiques of capitalism. Thanks to Piketty, we have an additional one.
Quoting counterpunch
So would zero-point energy. This doesn't mean it's a viable option. For someone banging on about science, you sure like to spend very little time on the actual science of the problem. Those questions you need to answer are still unanswered. Until then we'll go with the science that actually is clear, proven to work and feasible, such as wind, water and photo-voltaic renewable energy.
Murdering commie! . . . :wink:
No, it isn’t. Assert it a million times— doesn’t make it so.
Science grew up with capitalism, and has been appropriated for profit, usually at the expense of the public (eg computers, the internet, pharmaceuticals, etc).
As usual, you have no idea what you’re talking about— and I have no interest in explaining it to you. You wouldn’t hear it anyway. Just be happy with your delusions of solving the world’s problem by fiat.
This is well said— and wasted on the utter buffoon you’re talking to. Still I applaud you.
You’re forgetting a simple principle: capitalism is anything that’s worked and led to benefits, and anything that doesn’t— is not capitalism.
It’s a religious belief in capitalism as a magic system that cures all, provided we do it correctly, that lies at the heart of people like magma man. Unshakable belief.
Reasonable enough concerns; entirely unreasonable solution.
Quoting Benkei
It's basically the centre-piece of Corbyn's 2019 manifesto. It's been offered to, and rejected by the British public. Just as Kinnock's left of Clause IV platform saw him rejected by the British public three times. And obversely, Blair dropped Clause IV, and won three elections for Labour. When will the left learn they are there to represent working class people's interests, not prosecute their own ideological prejudices?
Just on the surface of things, why would someone start a business, risk their capital, invest their time, effort and ingenuity - knowing they are required to give that company away to factory floor workers whose sole contribution is their labour power? Business could not operate under those conditions; and then you really would see suffering. Immediately there'd be capital flight, mass unemployment, the value of the currency would tank, while interests rates would skyrocket.
Quoting Benkei
Arguably, the revolution was a disaster for France that still echoes today in the all too frequent strikes, often turning into riots. A romantic desire to tear down the system, as if to birth the next republic - encourages social protest to become disproportionate.
Quoting Benkei
Let's take Pikkety's critique, and respond, so what?
"The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to increase in the future."
Wealth inequality is good. Inequality means that people have been able to develop their talents, and use those talents to create social good, for a profit. Talent is unequally distributed by nature. Equality of opportunity, sure - I'm with Rawl's on equality of opportunity, but denying people the right to profit from their talents, for sake of equality of outcome with the talentless, is profoundly unjust and dysfunctional.
Quoting Benkei
That's crazy; zero point energy is not a form of energy outside of cartoons. It refers to the lowest energy state of a quantum system - even at absolute zero, there's a residual energy. That's zero point energy. Magma is a real source of huge amounts of clean energy we need, like yesterday. It cannot be developed quite that quickly, but doesn't have to be - assuming ultimately, it would be more than adequate, we can redress the damage in due course.
Quoting Benkei
Your unanswered questions are not due to a lack of scientific rigour, but that they could only be answered after conducting physical research. I'm not currently in a position to hire those specialist skills. Give me the money, and I'll start making calls - and get you your answers. But until then, it's just not possible to answer the questions you've asked. You can keep implying this constitutes some sort of deficiency on my part, but I can only do so much - and I'm doing what I'm qualified to do, and that is to speak on the philosophy, political theory and economics of the whole thing.
Wind and solar are sub-optimal at best. They will never meet our energy needs - and so will entrench fossil fuel dependence. They are inconstant sources of energy, and so that energy must be stored - meaning you don't just need to build windmills and solar panels, but energy storage facilities - and still maintain a fossil fuel generating capacity. Windmills cost about £250m each to manufacture and erect, and last around 25 years, after which time they need replacing at similar cost. And all this to barely take the edge off carbon emissions.
In order to make wind and solar make sense - living standards will have to fall dramatically. This means old people afraid to put the fire on in winter; the price of food, travel, everything that costs energy costing much more - to reduce demand, to address climate change. It's cruel and unnecessary, and leads nowhere good. We need to apply technologies that produce massive amounts of clean energy to balance human welfare and environmental sustainability in our favour.
You missed Pikkety's point. The point is that those with capital will only get richer, while others who do produce get poorer in relation. Investors don't develop their talents to create something, they only invest to get more money back. This incentivizes rent-seeking behaviour which makes the economy actually worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
The problem is not with the free-market mechanism as such, markets are good at producing, distributing and pricing goods etc... The problem is that they have 'forgotten' their role and have over the years essentially taken over the state by lobbying and by playing states against eachother after globalization. They have turned a means into the goal.
Thanks again for your abusive, ill informed, half assed, hateful opinion!
Scientific method emerged 100 years before the industrial revolution; and in effect, was condemned as heretical. It was this religiously motivated philosophical position that rendered science a mere tool to be used by capitalism and government.
Science is not just a tool, but is also an understanding of reality to contrast with an ideological description of the world. To maintain that religious, political and economic ideological description of the world - a scientific understanding of reality was ignored, downplayed, undermined - over hundreds of years. That's the context within which capitalism operates, and it's a mistake. You want to blame capitalism, and I'm not suggesting capitalism is entirely innocent, but it's not the problem.
Having established that - then we return to the real world, where things are not ideal, but nonetheless, thinking in these terms creates a rationale to apply the technologies necessary to sustainability - and in that course, magma energy is the most likely adequate technological solution - a solution that sovereign nations states in economic and political competition, would not naturally arrive at. But it's there, and our best bet, because as a matter of fact - resources are function of the energy available to create them. Ask a physicist!
The only appropriate response to a deluded individual who listens to no one and has no ideas.
Quoting counterpunch
You don't know what you're talking about. But it's nice to see you fit right in with the typical behavior of most ignoramuses -- always speaking with utmost assurance in their own (believed) acumen.
The scientific method doesn't exist. That's a fairy tale. But even if it did, it didn't "emerge" at a date, and certainly not "100 years before the industrial revolution," which is itself difficult to date. Some estimate around 1750, which would make your bogus date 1650, which is completely arbitrary. Galileo was already dead by that point -- to take one example.
I don't even know why I'm bothering, to be honest. But almost everything you say is so stupid I feel compelled to respond. It's too easy a target.
Quoting counterpunch
:yawn:
OK Richard Dawkins. What a boring analysis. Also has the benefit of being completely wrong.
But you're welcome to keep believing it. In your world, the problem is the ignoring of science and the solution to the climate crisis is magma energy. Got it. Everyone is riveted. Now go away.
I shouldn't have been required to answer to Pikkety's point. I'm not advocating capitalism per se; capitalism is the prevailing economic system, and imperfect as it may be, has the knowledge, skills and resources to apply the technology to prevent an imminent catastrophe. Your determination to put ideology ahead of the practicalities of sustainability is absurd. You would use sustainability as an anti-capitalist battering ram, to force your ideology on the majority. Pikkety should be required to answer to my proof that's unnecessary.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
So, not real poverty then - but new all times highs in left wing envy? So what? The rich pay most of the taxes. Do you suppose they think that's fair? We can all complain about how unfair everything is, but it's just not about that for me. It's about finding a way to apply the technology necessary to sustainability - and I don't see that happening by making an enemy of government, wealth and industry. I want a solution that suits them - and counter intuitive blue sky thinking though it may be, magma energy ticks a lot of boxes.
Capitalism has personal traits now -- like knowledge and skill.
I love how there's nothing you cannot misunderstand somehow!
Yeah, that's what's happening.
You weigh in by telling me I misunderstand Pikkety - then forgive me for considering you an advocate of his position, and tailoring my remarks accordingly. I cannot comprehend how inequality of wealth is relevant to my proposal - even if I thought it were a problem, which I don't. I'm happy to see someone doing well for themselves - good on 'em! The question is about approaches to climate change, and frankly, the left wing limits to resources approach is factually wrong and requires great suffering to an intangible ideal - and the reply is, "Ah yes, but - if we sustain capitalism, some people will get very rich!" How awful!
So your thought is that geothermal energy will solve the coming energy crisis. Could be.
Good god you're an imbecile.
I weighed in because you misunderstood Pikkety, which... you know, seems fair game on a philosophy forum.
And it's not only about inequality of wealth, even if you are not left politically, the system isn't working properly, by it's own standards.
Personally I don't think limiting energy is needed to solve this problem long term because renewables, solar in the first place, will be cheap enough to provide the energy... short term it could certainly help to be more energy-conserving though.
But climate change and energy-supply is not the only issue, there will eventually, sooner for some, be problems with other resources that are not renewable.
Either way, a model that relies on perpetual growth isn't sustainable I think, because at some point we will hit a wall of diminishing returns on possible innovations, which is what ultimately drives growth.
And that's only tackling the question of the feasibility, i.e. can or could we do it? The real question - and beyond the scope of this thread - is do we really want this?
Wind and solar cannot possibly solve climate change. These technologies will never even meet current energy demand, less yet provide surplus energy to capture carbon, desalinate, irrigate and recycle. They'll cost a fortune to build, produce a trickle of energy, only slightly reduce total GHG emissions, and be impossible to recycle in 25 years time, when they'd need replacing at similar cost.
The technology is simply not adequate to the problem, and consequently, other forms of sacrifice will be necessary - an endless series of government interventions in the market and society to tax this and stop that, in hopes of eeking out our existence!
There is a viable source of energy, and it's massive beyond imagining. It's constant high grade clean energy, and there's a limitless amount of it. Harnessing this energy we would not need to impose upon people and business to secure a sustainable future. It's the difference between stopping flying and inventing a hydrogen powered jet engine. And you say let's stop flying? Then I think you're nuts!
If you have a sources for these claims, I'm willing to look at it... if not, I disagree.
East Anglia One is a wind farm offshore of the British Isles. It's 102 turbines produce enough energy to power 600,000 homes. There are approximately 35 million households in the UK. By dint of a back of the envelope calculation; saying nothing of the governments intention to phase out petrol powered cars in favour of electric vehicles from 2030, you'd need roughly 10,000 windmills to meet current energy demand. Maybe 15,000 once you source transport energy from the national grid. The 102 turbines cost about £2.5bn to build, which is to say, 15,000 windmills would cost.... oh no, my calculator has run out of zeros! So that's not going to happen, is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Anglia_Array
:up: And where one technology (especially an unknown and unproven one) is given the grace of time to develop and improve, I would think the same courtesy should be extended to others; and those which are extant, with a head start, would be favored, I would think. It's my understanding windmills just keep getting better. Compare what they started with to where they are today. Solar panels, likewise. I've even heard you could make roads out of and drive on them. Just imagine if all oil subsidy were ripped away (including the use of public lands) and diverted to alternatives.
Oh, sorry! You mean like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
or like this:
Gwent Levels: 'Wales' Amazon in danger from energy developments'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57174252
???
"The first three months of 2019 (January, February and March) showed good progression, topping all previous monthly data, but in April the plant was shut down because the project's sole buyer, NV Energy, terminated the Power Purchase Agreement for failure to produce the contracted power production. The power generated also cost NV Energy about $135 per megawatt-hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh available from a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm."
They shut it down because other solar technology was cheaper? Anyway, it's not representative for all solar energy, it's a specific technology being tested because it is more effective at storing energy.
Quoting counterpunch
This is not about the viability of solar, but about specific placement of it.
None of this supports your claim that solar wouldn't be viable
Yeah, energy-efficiency is getting better and better. And there are enough ways to get around the irregular supply of energy, if you have enough of it. Most of it could also be recycled eventually...
The idea seems to be that, solar and wind, and sure if present other renewables, could get us there. No idea why he's so hung up on geothermal energy specifically.
The potential is not there. Wind and solar cannot produce enough energy, cannot produce energy reliably, don't last long enough, cost a fortune to build, and are impossible to recycle. If all those problems were solved, we'd still need an unfeasibly large number of solar panels and/or windmills to meet current energy demand. We will always be behind the eight ball on climate change if we apply inadequate technologies to merely mitigate emissions. Magma energy, by contrast - has the potential to defeat climate change and transcend limits to resources.
We need sources that back up these claims Counterpunch... just stating it won't do.
Really? After everything I've said you've still no idea why magma? That's an extraordinary admission.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I have no obligation to provide you with sources on demand if you still don't know why magma; you're not taking anything in.
No that's right, and I have no obligation to take your word on it.
You claim without evidence that solar power can solve climate change; and you demand I produce evidence to prove it cannot? Isn't it your obligation to prove it can? I'm not interested in solar. I'm interested in magma. You're interested in solar? You prove it! And while you're at it, can you explain to the people of Gwent why they ought to pave over 'the welsh amazon' with solar panels!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-wales-57179848
When faced with a complex problem, should one just decide that because a solution works in one place it will work everywhere, or should one try a range of solutions, and choose the best one for each situation? We have abundant sunshine in Australia, but the magma is unusually deep because of the age of the continent.
Assuming that your solution is the right one for everyone is imperialism.
Basically, it's not rational.
We all know the ball of heat that is the Earth’s magma is freaking tiny compared to the ball of heat that is the sun. However, the magma is a lot freaking closer. Then again, there is quite the crust between us and it, while there is mere empty space between us and the sun. We have to work to get to the magma up, whereas the sun pours down whether we want it or not. Both have to be captured. Balancing it all out, which one is “more”, which one is less subject to man’s fucking it up, and which one is easier?
Which one is proven? Which one has been ignored by real scientists? Asking for myself.
On the "fucking it up" question, I find myself in that odd place of feelingstupidly ridiculous to think we could ever jeopardize the earth by tapping it’s inner heat. I mean, it’s so large and endless. It’s not like we could ever mess up the dynamo. Like the five billion carrier pigeons; there is no way a bunch of idiots with black powder muzzle-loaders could ever possibly wipe them out. There is no way humans could ever possibly affect the climate. It’s just too damn big. There is no way we could ever trash outer space. Talk about endless cubic miles! Oh, wait.
The sunlight is on my roof.
So, no, it isn't.
The mantle has hot spots in it. Continents (or sea floor) will bulge and buckle as they pass over hot spots. This causes island chains like Hawaii, strings of volcanoes, or continental rifts.
Not immediately, but there's more than adequate energy to meet and exceed current global energy demand in the molten interior of the earth. It would take time to develop that capacity, but eventually I expect it would succeed fossil fuels, and is sufficient to be the sole source of energy we rely on. That would be the ultimate aim, but I don't envisage it being developed and employed in the way you suggest.
I haven't talked about this often, because it's way beyond my pay grade, but the potential of the technology - the sheer volume of energy that could ultimately become available, allows for considerable discretion going forward, in how soon we'd need to replace critical and expensive parts of the infrastructure. There would be the potential to offset carbon produced today, in the capacity to sequester it tomorrow - in turn suggesting this technology be developed a global good, and when it does eventually enter the market, perhaps a sectoral approach might be possible, where high energy industries are transferred to renewable energy. There's no need to compete directly with fossil fuels right away, and thus - it's false charge you lay at my feet. What's tedious is your refusal to understand.
Quoting Banno
Australia exports about 350 million tonnes of coal per year to Asia - so yeah, you've got lot's of sunshine you! You've got so much sunshine you're bursting into flames!
Quoting Banno
It's not an assumption; it's a consequence of the nature of the threat we face, and what I believe is the only adequate solution. Magma energy can solve climate change, and thereafter, could succeed fossil fuels, and ultimately, we could transcend limits to resources. It's that possibility that makes it the right answer for everyone, eventually - not because 'one size fits all' is my rule of thumb!
Let me slow it down for you:
"We all know the ball of heat that is the Earth’s magma is freaking tiny compared to the [i]ball of heat that is the sun[/i]. However, the magma is a lot freaking closer. [It is. WAY closer. Like 94.5m miles closer] Then again, there is quite the crust between us and it, while there is mere empty space between us and the sun. We have to work to get to the magma up, whereas the sun pours down [Doh!] . . ."
:razz:
True but irrelevant.
The critique I offered is based on the logic of your proposal: that one solution will work for all. It's wrong.
It's entirely relevant. Asia will build more coal fired power stations to support growing prosperity, but is unlikely to apply the technology to produce clean energy. Large parts of the planet simply can't afford it. Developing magma energy as a global good would allow us to attack climate change directly, and sequester carbon - building capacity to take over from fossil fuels eventually.
A coal fired power station does not require a huge amount of modification to burn hydrogen instead. Energy is transmitted using the existing energy infrastructure. So - in theory, magma energy would allow for the largest populations on earth, India and China, and poorer parts of the world to "go green" without massive and costly infrastructure changes. If then you said - Australia has loads of sunshine, then yeah, sure! As you prefer.
And when this is pointed out, you have doubled down.
You don't see this as a problem. I'm worried for you.
I'm touched, and curious as to what these other solutions are, that may work as well or better!
See if you can list them for yourself. Consider it a first step towards your redemption.
Be your own devil's advocate.
Terrible coincidence -- I hadn't even seen your post. Apologies.
I'm wondering if you are happy with Counterpunch obsessing on your thread - it keeps it on the top of the discussions list, after all - or if you would prefer a different discussion.
Okay. We could capture an asteroid with a high copper content, and build a huge copper ring in space, and set it spinning within the magnetic fields of the earth to generate current. It's an idea I came up with in relation to the perpetual motion machine challenge - which, arguably, I won. Point being, if you think I haven't considered it, you're probably wrong, and after all due consideration I think magma - hydrogen is the best bet.
Really? Hadn't noticed. :roll:
When faced with a complex problem the rational thing to do is to try a range of solutions, and choose the best one for each situation.
Let a thousand flowers bloom.
Great. Let's leave it there. Thanks for the discussion.
I hope that you can.
I don't consider this my thread, in this case. Just a general discussion. If he wants to make a fool of himself, that's his business.
And the civilizations you are referring to? Seems to me the civilizations in history were far more fragile to collapse.
Quoting boethius
I disagree.
Population growth is the natural reason for economic growth and demand growth. If populations are stable or decreasing, that is a huge issue on this issue. You don't have only decrease in use because of technological advancement, but also due to demand decrease. That is a huge issue. Besides, earlier population growth was seen as the primary reason for doom, starting from Malthus, which isn't something unimportant now.
Japan has a decreasing population. Notice what has happened to it's need of energy:
Quoting boethius
Technology has always been the real factor that the doomsayers have gotten wrong. The typical disaster-in-the-near-future predictions have simply ignored how technology can change the situation and also how markets adapt. And affluence? This isn't a simple thing. The naive idea would be to think that a more affluent economy would have a bigger impact. This actually doesn't go that way: the more affluent society can take into consideration environmental issues and ecological issues far better than a poorer one. Just compare West European policies and practices to let's say those in poorer countries. I think it was Jared Diamond who noticed that the biggest environmental crisis tend to happen in the poorest countries.
Aldo zero point energy is real just as real as geothermal. NASA had been working on a quantum vacuum fluctuation engine and published their results. It works. Breaks some fundamental physical laws but quantum effects have been known to screw with that before.
Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
Quoting Benkei
It's not a source of energy. It's a means to produce thrust without propellant.
"According to the team, the electromagnetic drive, or EmDrive, converts electricity into thrust simply by bouncing around microwaves in a closed cavity. In theory, such a lightweight engine could one day send a spacecraft to Mars in just 70 days."
It is still necessary to produce the electricity; and almost certainly, the whole things is less thermodynamically efficient than a steam train. i.e. costs of lot of energy, to produce a tiny amount of thrust. Probably in the region of 1.2 millinewtons per kilowatt of energy! It's great for space travel. Mini nuke generators can produce plenty of energy, spent through such an engine - you can have thrust without lugging around tons of propellant. That's a huge advantage, but it's not a source of energy, and not relevant to solving climate change.
Quoting Benkei
Okay, but the nature of capitalism has changed fundamentally, since around 1900 - when they introduced things like pensions and unemployment insurance, while at the same time industry began to produce consumer goods. If you don't like it, blame Marx' critique - to which capitalism responded by creating an interest in people's general prosperity, and we now have consumer capitalism. Just off the top of my head, it would seem to me consumer capitalism multiplies exponentially the liabilities to which shareholders might become subject through investment; so there's no valid inference from the fact LLC's only existed for occasional and philanthropic purposes way back when.
Quoting Benkei
Corporate law is a huge and complex area of specialist knowledge; why would I happen know about it? If you know something interesting about it; more interesting than the fact that at some unspecified time in the past there were no LLC's - do share, but don't hold my feet to your fire!
Quoting Benkei
This position?
Quoting Benkei
Or when you said:
Quoting Benkei
Or, was it when you said:
Quoting Benkei
Because these are three different positions. Or one lying ass commie!
p.s. Where's Aldo?
You don't, because...
Quoting Benkei
...you always assume some sort of deficit on my part rather than assume I have reasons to say what I'm saying!
If that's your go to response, and based on this thread - it very much is, then I'm outa here for while!
Seeya later!
The deficit is apparent when you keep imputing "communism" on the criticisms I leveled at the current way capitalism is pursued but my comments are still entirely within keeping with capitalism as understood by Smith.
Quoting counterpunch
One can hope.
One has to assume deficits when one keeps saying the stupidest things imaginable, all with the utmost confidence.
This is off-side. Read back on this thread, and you've attacked my intelligence, sanity, called me obsessive, and called me ignorant - over and over, page after page - and I'm asking you to stop it.
When I click on the notification, and find some shitty one liner reply to a post I poured heart and soul into - it negatively effects my emotional state. It's not a comment here or there, it's repeated abuse from a mob of bullies.
100 days until COP 26 - and I'd rather withdraw from this forum than place my argument in a prominent spot, with this kind of vicious ad hominem abuse going on. I'm not willing to tolerate this - so knock it off or I'm gone.
So, fuck you snowflake.
You're even too stupid to see that you leaving is a desirable outcome.
Take your inflated ego, your magma pipe-dreams, your capitalism worship, and your utter idiocy somewhere else.
Then like everywhere else on the net - you left wing bullies have driven out alternate opinion, and the kicker is that your idea of sustainability really is a pipe dream. On your head be it.
But your opinion is still here is it not? Very much in print and in its full 'alternate' majesty. Do you notice any deletions? Nothing of alternate opinion has been lost just by you ceasing to repeat it.
This is, unfortunately, essentially the same crap I have heard all my life. You are using the "Magma" energy source, while the fossil fuel folks touted their crap, all the while spewing the "clean it up later" line of garbage. In this instance, "redress the damage in due course." Right. Except that it flat out never happens. EVER.
I am sitting in Alberta, home of thousands of orphan wells all built on the "clean it up later" bullshit. No one ever wants to clean it up. So, moving forward, if you have no way to accomplish something without making a mess you can't clean up, you have no way to accomplish something. END OF STORY.
No one wants to clean up the mess. They are unemployed up here, sitting around doing jack shit and still don't want to consider cleaning it up. It took a federal mandate to even make the provincial government look at it as a possible option. Never mind that it has been staring them in the face for decades.
Clean it up later is a game plan for children.
:100: And my mother always said, "If you borrow something, put it back the way and where you found it."
I usually leave people like you in the rear-view mirror. But I see here a teachable moment, and hope you can be taught. I’ve been banned from more internet discussion forums than I can shake a stick at. In fact, just yesterday, while I was not banned from LinkedIn as a site, I was banned from a conversation thereon. 98% of the time where I’ve been banned, it was conservative cancel culture. It was never due to my having conducted myself as you have here. It was always due to me giving as good as I got, logically or otherwise, in playing by the same rules as those with whom I was engaged.
I’ve seen more conservative gadflies buzzing around liberal sites than you would ever see if the roles were reversed. It has only been within the last few years that I’ve seen liberal-oriented discussion forums start to ban conservative gadflies. And that was simply in a tit-for-tat fit of frustration. There might also have been an acknowledgement of how well echo-chambers and confirmation bias and cancel culture seemed to be working for conservatives, and so the push-back was on. In other words, conservatives had brought it on themselves and now they are reaping what they sew.
But this place has not banned you, to my knowledge. In fact, where I envision a gadfly as somewhat of a loner, you are no gadfly here. This place has its fair share of conservatives. They just don’t act like petulant little children. If they do, I just ban them from my engagement and don’t rely upon the forum to do it for me. Besides, the forum's tolerance is higher than mine. Anyway, I digress. Let me get to my point. Here’s the lesson:
Next time you feel the urge to “ASSume”, or to say what it is that others must, in your mind, be saying, or before you arrive at a conclusion, do this: Ask a question. But first, ask yourself: Is this an honest question and is it founded in sincere intellectual curiosity? Or is it just a rhetorical device to gain points in a debate? But try to avoid straw men and telling people what it is that they think, or that the only logical conclusion is X. Ask instead. You might learn something you did not know.
As you may remember with me, you could have simply asked how I intended to accomplish my goal. But just as you have done to so many others on this thread, you did not ask. And you were not willing to take the steps to redeem yourself. Why, pray tell, should I continue to engage one who doesn’t even know what he did wrong, is in denial, or is afraid to admit it? Having been down this road before, I’ve found the perpetrator just continues with his transgressions. I can’t argue with such a person. (Much respect to those who have beat their head against the brick wall that you have become.)
P.S. I did not even know you were conservative until you just called out the site. As I’ve said before, I don’t know shit about magma and thought your interest in it was better than the denial of doubling down on big oil, like a true conservative would do. I thought you might just be a different left lane. But apparently not.
Anyway, back to the rearview mirror with you. If you have anything worth while in rebuttal on the magma science, I look forward to reading it.
The misunderstood genius with the magic (capitalist) solution to climate change, who goes around calling people "commies," is now leaving the discussion. Boo hoo. What a loss.
Everyone here, including myself, tried engaging you politely initially. When you prove yourself an imbecile over and over again, there's really no other way to respond -- unless you're the Dalai Lama.
Good luck with your magma dreams, of which you have no clue what you're talking about.
My opinion is not explored, because it is not understood - even if it is understood, I am faced with a constant barrage of incomprehension, misinterpretation, and abuse. These subjects are hard enough as it is. Do you imagine they haven't taken a toll? So to be attacked, mob handed, on the theme of mental competence is just too much. Every post for the last few pages has been met with aspersions insanity, and this has gone too far. A remark here or there is one thing. Developing a theme and inviting friends to join in is another. So, I'm outa here - and I'll leave you with this. If you are not aiming to transcend limits to resources you are aiming to fail. Best of luck!
The natural reason for more (energy) production is population growth. Yet population growth is decreasing globally and likely will in the future make the global population hit a peak and from there on the population will get smaller. With advances in technology that would sound at first an environment where we can tackle our present problems.
Yet the problem is that our society is built on growth. Our system to finance those technological innovations and advances are built on a growth model. The debt-based monetary system needs economic growth. The social welfare models we use need growth to pay for them. With decreasing populations you might have a perpetual economic bust where not much improvements and advances will happen. The technology might be there, but it wouldn't be implemented. Fossil fuels might be used, because there's no money to build new alternatives because of the economic slump. Decreasing populations might sound like a good thing, but it might wreck havoc with our great plans to change the society from a carbon based to renewable energy based society.
Has any thought been given how to tackle this issue? What do people think here?
I think the plan is to bungle through and learn as we go.
Yet smart people can anticipate those future disasters.
You see, it's not utterly crazy to think that the present financial system can collapse. It has already been close to collapsing, but has been sustained. Such events can ruin our present plans quite quickly. Or at least hinder them dramatically. Just to give one example.
No real answer but my gut feeling: I think mostly it will be about doing more with less and technologies that will support that will continue to be implemented. I see a high risk that capital distributions will be locked in for a very long time with very little change as a result of less economic activity and mobility, which will likely lead to inescapable socio-economic classes.
:up:
Thank you for your actual contribution. People listen to the Dutch. They are part of the smart guys in the room.
Quoting Benkei
That is a well thought answer, Benkei.
If capital investments to technology will happen at good pace, then we can solve the problem where the decrease of the population will naturally decrease the size of the economy. And of course, we have two very advanced societies that are going to tackle this problem:
And other like China will face it in the future. Yet even if Japan hasn't gone off a cliff with very small economic growth, the "Japan disease" might be our future.
I myself see huge political difficulties in adapting to the new environment. Once people have benefits, they will fight for those benefits and hence transfer payments will likely win over investments to technology. Now investments in technology have been partly helped by the global financial-casino, which, we have to admit, has also given funding to smart tech research. The rapid decline in costs for renewable energy is a prime example for that.
Exactly. It's myopic to think of climate change just from our own perspective. That's like a flea assessing an elephant.
The old saying "The bigger they are, the harder they fall" applies here, I think. The bigger our population gets and the longer we delay, the more catastrophic the inevitable fall. As opined by frank, though, the plan is no plan. We have and will continue to just muddle through in an open conspiracy to look the other way because we mistakenly think it will be too hard to bite the bullet. It's just going to get harder and, eventually Mother Earth will do what the stock market refers to as "a correction."
We think that just because we've pulled ourselves along, we always will. Because we are in the air, we are air borne. We fly. The sky's not a limit; space is next. We and our technology will save us. No one stops to think that we might be falling and just haven't hit yet. With our mere 200k years we have no context.
If no human being was born from today forward, then we'd be at about 2 to 4 billion in 30 years. Far from ideal, but way more sustainable. We don't need continuing innovation but there is no reason why we can't have it. We need to grow, but grow smaller; grow, but grow smarter. We have several hundred thousand years of experience and a wonderful solar power plant that has been working for long before we came along (photosynthesis). We can, but don't have to rest on our laurels.
All we have to do is what Aldo Leopold recommended so long ago: Make a virtue of necessity. What this means is, change what we now deem to be good to what we know would be better. If we exalt greed, then that is what we will get. If we exalt humble gratitude, grace and giving, then those who epitomize that will become the heroes, the leaders, the people we will endeavor to emulate.
Sorry, but I don't want to hear a bunch of "Yeah, but . . ." followed by a parade of horribles. As one recent meme I saw said: "The question isn't if we can afford to change; the answer is that we cannot afford not to." The money involved and the damage done by continuing on our current path far exceeds any cost created by an entire collapse of our current way of life and being tossed back into a cave. But we don't have to do that any more than we have to murder people.
What we need to do is to do to those who run the show what they have done to us: We need to harness them like work horses and put them to work for us. Subject them to the "human resources department" like they have done to us. Milk them for all they are worth. Trickle up, not trickle down. Stimulate those who actually do all the work and who will actually spend the stimulus stimulating. If those at the top want it to trickle up, then they can work for it. And work hard and smart for it. Working for the people, instead of the other way around. Pay a god damn tax for crying out loud.
So here's the sum and substance in anticipatory response to the inevitable "yeah, but . . ." BS that I am about to hear: Tough. Too late. We had our chance to reign ourselves in and unfuck this mess by executing a gradual turn of the ship. We were warned, in plenty of time, long ago. So now is the time to pay the piper. Crash this motherfucker now. And if we can be nimble on our feet with our tech and innovation, which we think we are so good at, then let's see what we got. Put up or shut up. NOW! Let's see what we got.
I don't want to hear a bunch of counterpunchian BS about trying to not upset the apple cart. The whole conservative attraction to Trump was about having lost patience with the foot-dragging, inside-the-belt-way, bureaucratic, deep-state dominant paradigm. They'd lost patience and wanted to risk it all. Okay, I'm calling their bluff. I'm calling humanities bluff.
Never mind. Let nature take it's course. Sorry, kids. We knew better but, we're only human.
P.S. There are many different theories on population reduction out there, for those who want to look into it. Fair warning: look out for nationalist/border groups; they come up with a lot of the same search terms but their goals aren't really concerned with humanity at large.
End rant. I have to go for several weeks. While I can read remotely I don't think I can contribute much, if at all.
6th — Anthropogenic influence on extreme precipitation over global land areas seen in multiple observational datasets
8th — NASA's AIRS Tracks Record-Breaking Heat Wave in Pacific Northwest
9th — We need a carbon-removal industry – should polluting companies pay for it?
13th — ESA and NASA join forces to understand climate change
16th — Dr James Hansen on climate: June 2021 global temperature update
18th — Germany knew the floods were coming, but the warnings didn’t work
I've noticed this too: weather forecast have become really accurate. They don't make mistakes on what is going to happen in the near future. A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. Regional forecasts for tomorrow (24h) are usually dead on. Wasn't like that only a decade or two ago.
Thanks to that rainfall in Central Europe, it has been nearly a drought here in Northern Europe.
So (if you still have the time to respond, or respond later) just what are you just exactly implying? More transfer payments in taxes? To whom are where? Just who works for whom?
I think we will find ways of managing economies based more on sustainable models through having to deal with a succession of crises. The free market capitalism model was useful for a period of technological growth during the 20th century. But is now proving to destructive, a beast with an ever growing appetite.
We are dealing with such a crisis now, something more sustainable might come out of it. For example, a way of printing money which doesn’t result in the usual negative effects. Don’t ask me how this might work, but I think such solutions are possible.
Well, Soviet-style central planning was even more destructive, but I do get your point.
Quoting Punshhh
I've been hoping that someone would explain and basically defend modern monetary theory, because it goes over my head even with having had university-level studies in economics and economic history.
I don't understand why decrease in economic growth would be a problem if it is caused by population decrease. Doesn't population decrease also imply that we need less goods and services because there are less people?
In fact, in looking for a definition it seems that economic growth is often defined in terms of per capita:
A definition that can be found in so many publications that I don’t know which one to quote is that economic growth is “an increase in the amount of goods and services produced per head of the population over a period of time.”
This would make sense because it seems to me that per capita goods and services is ultimately what we would be interested in. Increase only in GDP doesn't mean much if the population would grow quicker then GDP for instance...
I could see decline in population being a problem for goods and services per capita because you typically get an aging population in the short term, which means less economically active and so less production relatively. Or maybe you get less benefit from economies of scale, as your population is smaller... But other then that, i don't see the necessary connection?
Think about the debt based monetary system of ours. Basically there has to be economic growth for the interest to be paid. Then think about the "pay-as-you-go" system of pensions (and basically health care system, as old people use it far more than the young).
Both are designed for a World were there are more younger generations than older. As I said, Japan is the case example of what is going to happen. It may not be a dramatic collapse, but Japan has serious problems. It is already in a situation where it cannot raise interest rates (as then too much of the government income would go to pay the interest). If you in this situation take more debt (as Japan has done year after year), what will you think the outcome will be?
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It's not an aging population for the short term, it is basically permanently before some equilibrium is reached on some lower level. And that can take a long, long time.
Imagine a World the machines are as old as B-52s are now, which the youngest bombers are 58 years old. One hundred or two hundred year old power plants. A World where your fathers computer from two or three decades ago are as fast and capable of running the current programs as a new computer you can buy from the store. Great! We don't need new stuff you might think, until you notice that those old power plants are coal plants...
Yeah I'm not sure I get it either. But the basic idea seems to be that countries don't seem to get financed by tax-money, as economists thought, but rather countries can just print money which only is a problem if it would create to much inflation (and we seemed to have had very little of that from the seventies onwards). The mistake was in thinking that they are regular economic entities that need to balance their books, as they can't default and print money as needed... they aren't subject to standard economic theories, but rather subject to monetary theory which comes with it's own particular set of regularities.
If true, it essentially flips things on it's head. Deficit spending is not the problem, it in fact stimulates the economy. Even moderate amounts of inflation is good because it reduces debt over time. One just has to avoid snowball inflation.
You print money? ;-)
But, sure I get that a top-heavy demographic pyramid would cause problems for systems that were not designed with that in mind, but then you change the way you finance them?
The only "fundamental" problem it seems to me, is keeping your productivity up. You can try to increase economically active population by say increasing the pension age... or you can increase productivity by innovating production-processes. It think it would need to be a mix of both, but the latter seems promising with AI and robotization.
Quoting ssu
I can imagine it, but I don't see why the has to follow from population decline. Has innovation slowed down in Japan? I wouldn't know exactly, but they seem relatively up to par with the rest of the world technologically.
EDIT: You think this has to follow because less growth means less money you have to invest in innovation, right?
That's the alarming issue here. There are enough smart people on the PF that at least someone ought to have understood it and be a firm believer in it...if it was an economic school of thought with genuinely valid ideas. Once there is nobody defending a position, then that position might not be so strong in the first place.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don't think that the MMT disagrees with the thought that printing too much money will create inflation and finally a total loss of trust in the currency (which basically is what hyperinflation is). There argument is basically that the US is different.
And I can understand this...partly: The global monetary system is based on the US dollar so much that other countries and market agents have let the US to take as much as debt it wants (which has basically been the reason why it has had the ability to be the sole Superpower in the world). Besides, their first worry would be if the dollar collapsed (would devaluate to other currencies) what will happen to their exports.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
That's the name of the game now.
But somehow it doesn't feel like a sustainable answer. So when would you be worried about the value of the currency? When the debt-to-GDP ratio is 10 000%? When the central bank has to double it's balance sheet in six months? Or every month? Or in a week? Inflation rates in the US are creeping up now...
All this comes to mind as yesterday the richest man in the World mimicked Alan Shepard's first space flight (but not Yuri's). When the internet billionaires can do things like that, some clever things towards replacing fossil fuels can be and are done also. But what happens when those financial cornucopias suddenly dry out? Suddenly the belief in tech saving us gets a whack by an anvil in the back.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Basically the thing is that the so-called "smart money" uses the low interest rates in Japan and then uses the debt to invest in some other country (usually in China and in Asian countries).
Hence the net investments in Japan have dramatically declined from earlier times:
Well maybe there aren't that many that have a firm grip on economy, I know I don't... it's no surprise I don't understand it.
And I take it that monetary theory is a different beast altogether, so maybe only the real specialists get it?
Quoting ssu
Yes the US dollar is the reserve currency, the standard.
We haven't seen much inflation for a long time though, save for some South-American countries that did their very best to hyperinflate... so maybe it's not that big of a problem?
From what I've gathered it's not only that other countries have to let the US take debt, it's also that the world economy needs some countries to take debt, and import, to let other countries like Germany and China run an export-economy. It functions as a whole, not in isolation...
Quoting ssu
Maybe, don't know enough to comment with much insight here unfortunately.
Quoting ssu
Yeah but isn't this more a function of high living standards and costs in Japan, rather than a decline in population. You see this race to the bottom everywhere.... That's another way globalization needs to be corrected I think, by taking into account social costs or lack thereof in cross-country trade-prices.
Population growth is the normal way for an economy to grow. Just think when people buy the most in their life: when they start a family. They likely move then to a new home, get a mortgage, buy a lot of stuff for the children etc. Afterwards the typical person doesn't do anymore such large investments like buying a home. And do note how positive this is for any economy: houses aren't built by robots in China, but by local people. So also is with the teachers that will teach the new children: again not robots in China. When the fertility rate of women is over 2, then the population is growing, hence there is a natural need for the economy to grow. Once it's less than 2 and there is no net immigration, you have a problem.
And when it comes to Japan, let's remember that there is nonexistent immigration to the country. Immigrants usually are people that want start their lives in a new country, hence they are also optimal individuals for that economic growth.
(Btw. a crazy sidenote: the dip in the Japanese fertility rate in 1966 was because of superstition about the Fire Horse)
https://www.thebalance.com/japan-s-economy-recession-effect-on-u-s-and-world-3306007
But ok, you do make a good case for why decline in population, wouldn't only effect absolute growth, but also growth in terms of per capita, which I'd think is the more important number.
Then we are in a bid of a bind if we think population decline is necessary to solve a lot of our long term problems, climate change chief among them.
If we don't solve them, this will eventually have an negative impact on economy as well.
If we do want to try to solve them by lowering population among other things, we - if we assume it necessarily leads to less economic growth - will have to do with less. The total pie that can be distributed will be smaller... Best case scenario then is that we manage to spend those funds smarter and allocate them to the things that are more important. Worst case scenario, and probably more likely given how things usually go, is that the bill will have to be paid by the less affluent in the fist place... and that inequality only gets bigger.
The system of stock market has been about bringing borrowers and lenders together and easing the transfer of rights related to such loans.
Where the combination went off kilter is mostly the possibility for a corporation to exist in perpetuity.
A typical bond has a maturity (there are exceptions, perpetual bonds but these were still intended to be paid off put the moment of repayment wasn't enforceable). A loan has a maturity. A mortgage has a maturity. But stock doesn't. But it doesn't fulfill an essential different role than other loan instruments but it does give a right to profit in perpetuity. And this is weird, why should a shareholder who invested 100 guilders in 1910 in Shell stock still receive dividends for Shell's activities today?
The other point is that goodwill and market value increases due to the added value of labour and nothing else (ignoring financial industry for a moment which can passively generate profit). If I put 1 million into a company it's not going to magically increase in worth, if I buy capital goods (buildings, machinery, tools) it's not going to increase in worth. If I hire people to utilise capital goods for a specific purpose, there's a likelihood something will happen with the market value of the company.
And it's clear that companies like Shell, Google, Amazon etc. are worth a multitude of the paid up capital but we insist only those that originally provided capital and any persons subsequently buying the rights related to that initial capital investment (e.g. stock) are owners of the total worth of the company and the only ones with a right to profit. Whereas if I had funded this with a loan, after say, 5 years the loan was paid off, the interest received, everything else would be owned by other people.
My point is, that at some point capital investment is not responsible for the value of a company and the relationship between profit and initial capital investment is negligible. If this is the case, I don't see an ethical reason why a shareholder should continue to receive benefits from that initial investment.
My proposed solution would involve a dynamic equity system where the initial capital investor starts out with a 100% right to the profit but as the company grows in value and this added value is the result of labour activity, additional shares are issued diluting the share value of the company. These shares will go to employees and as long as they continue to work there, they receive more shares. If they move to another company, they too will see their shares dilute over time but will build up capital in another company.
What would have to be worked out is at what rate initial capital investments should dilute. We do have a lot of bond pricing that we can use as a benchmark.
I'd also get rid of all intellectual property rights except the obligation of attribution. But different story.
Btw, a consol bond is a perpetual bond without any maturity date. Hence they are considered equity rather than debt. Basically what is so wrong with equity? People have owned things, real estate and businesses and they have been inherited by their children for a long time in history. Family businesses have actually been quite persistent in history, even if sometimes there comes the generation that ruins the business (or spends the wealth away). With stocks that ownership can just be divided and easily bought and sold. I'm not so sure what is so wrong with that.
Besides, saving is actually important. And many people save not only to spend later, but to have something for the "rainy day" that might never come and to give to their children when they die. If inheritance would be illegal, I guess many would simply donate part of their wealth to their children.
Family businesses worked in their businesses too.
Quoting ssu
I'm not against stock. Additional stock is issued and given to employees but can still be traded.
Ok, but then our insurance system and also pension system uses these corporations too. The non-human "legal person" owner if equity is a reality. Lot of things would have to be restructured then.
In my view the problem often is about leadership of corporations, not the existence of corporations themselves. Modern corporative structure has create a class of executive level workers who sometimes can manage the corporations wealth differently then let's say a family owned business would do: squeeze everything out and throw it away, go on some self-gratifying empire building or simply not care so much as someone who has family bonds to the enterprise. The boards are made of similar executive workers. The entrepreneur-founder CEO (Gates, Jobs etc.) is very rare occurrence. Global competition creates markets ruled by oligopolies: ten or so large companies dominate the field and then there are small local niche producers.
Of course mismanagement can happen in other business structures as co-operatives. Once a cooperative grows big enough there is the possibility of the "owners" becoming a rubber stamp and then when you have bad leadership, everything goes astray. (Reminds me of the Finnish Communist Party going bankrupt and losing a considerable fortune when cooperatives close to the party went bankrupt after a speculative market bubble burst. The few times I was genuinely spiteful. Communists as businessmen...HA!!!)
Ok maybe that's how it was originally intended, I don't know the history of it, but that doesn't mean that it has to stay that way. Things morph and get used in other ways/get other functions over time, and in principle that perfectly fine.
Limiting liability seems necessary to incentivise any type of investment in larger companies. Typically the amount of money any one person has is insignificant in relation to the amounts of money circulating in the books of any decent sized company. If you wouldn't limit liability, a company of any decent size failing, would typically mean the investors would be in debt for the rest of their lives. So even if there were only a small chance of failing, nobody would want to take that chance because very few things are worth the risk of being financially crippled for the rest of your life.
Quoting Benkei
Isn't the issue just ownership, property here? A share is a piece of ownership right? Suppose there were no shares, everything would stay with the founder/owner of the company and you'd have essentially the same problem of a person getting a return on his initial investment in perpetuity.
Quoting Benkei
This seems a bit oversimplified, and may in the future even not be the case anymore as labour could presumably be a thing for automation... but ok I'll follow along.
Quoting Benkei
You want to distribute added value to everybody that has contributed to it, and not only to the owners. I can get behind that goal certainly. And the idea of giving out shares which dilute over time seems like a clever way to do that. No sure how it would work out in practice, but at least it's a concrete idea to try to solve the issue, got to give you props for that!
Limiting liability was indeed necessary to incentivize investment in undertakings that wouldn't yield profit. Adding the possibility to corporations to make profit could've been incentive enough (partnerships don't have limited liability either) but politics resulted in profit and limited liability. I think that was a mistake. Limited liability externalises the costs of damages caused by the corporation to wider society, which is a reasonable exchange if the corporate activity is performed for a goal benefiting wider society but not if it's only for private gain. In that case, if you have all the profits, you should also bear all the responsibility.
In my ideal world, we would see non-profit pharmaceutical companies developing the "riskiest" treatments with limited liability and for-profit pharmaceutical companies but with normal liability that would automatically go for simpler products.
An alternative effect could also be that much of the useless day trading resulting in value extraction from the real economy and rent seeking could be entirely avoided if limited liability would be repealed for every corporation. You can also get rid of IFRS and GAAP accounting principles at the same time as no investor is going to touch a stock without having the necessary information to ensure they're duly informed about the risks of their investments if they would be liable for losses.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
That's how it was defined. It could also have been structured as a piece of a loan and related interest, pretty much like a variable interest rate bond, possibly collateralised but not necessarily involving ownership in property of the corporation directly. I do think that now that it is considered "property" there's a lot more resistance to making changes to how corporations are set up.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Thanks. Glad it's not served off as evil communism from the get-go!
I don't think profit alone would be enough, as the upside of profit for someone who already has enough money (which are typically the ones to invest), isn't worth the risk of being in debt for the rest of your life. Maybe it works for smaller business where the stakes are not that high, but otherwise it seems that removing limited liability would lead to less investment and less incentive to grow into larger corporations. And you know, there may be something to that, one of the problems is that we have these mega multi-national corporations that float somewhere over and between countries in a globalised world... they do have to much power.
Maybe one should pay a tax or something like that, for limiting liability, to pay for the externalised costs of potential damages caused by the corporation... like an insurance-fee where the fee is calculated based on the risks and the amount that is insured. Come to think about it, that's what it is now essentially, a free insurance against the averse consequences of failing that is paid by society, or by the creditors more specifically.
So maybe that's how it would go if you'd remove the limited liability granted by law, they would look for an insurance-type deal in the market to mitigate the risk. Then they have to pay a fee that covers the costs. And where the risks and fee-costs would be to high, government could always intervene for essential goods and services...
Quoting Benkei
Sure you could set up shares in another way for the purpose of attracting investment, but then you still have the issue of the owner raking in all the profit indefinitely no? Someone has to set-up the corporation initially and owns it, or how would that work otherwise?
Rather what I see is the super rich hoarding as much wealth as they can, by unscrupulous means sometimes. Also powerful people might prefer to live in a dystopian world, than a progressive sustainable world.Because of this fear of sharing that will be required and to continue exploitation and profiteering.
In any situation those that have power will not want to lose their power, hence societal change is always difficult, no matter what the situation is. And do notice that not in all societies it's just a extremely rich who have the power, in many places there is a small cabal of career political people who are in charge and who aren't exactly super rich. Thinking that in every country the rich control everything is an exaggeration.
And if you go for the wealth of the rich, the next in line all the way down to the middle class will be worried when you will go after their wealth too. Killing the rich, a genocide by class, has been several tries been done or attempted and the outcome hasn't been a rosy one, but a huge tragedy.
The most important issue is to have social cohesion and make sure that doesn't vanish. Then changes, even radical ones, are possible. Without social cohesion the society simply doesn't work.
Here in the U.K. we have a distinct privileged class. An overthrow of our class system. These people are dead against any kind of levelling up, or Universal basic income. It suits them fine for the status quo to continue, by propping up a Tory government. This is entrenched, because they only have to think about the alternative and they are horrified, this prejudice is more than financial, or economic. It’s social and cultural too. Personally I trace it right back to the Norman conquest and our country being ruled over for centuries by French overlords. Johnson has stepped into that role, groomed by Eton college and Oxford.
Quoting Punshhh
Yet you have universal health care and the Labour party. Something which actually the US doesn't have.
Quoting Punshhh
And just like the Labour Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Harold Wilson and Clement Attlee who also graduated from Oxford. And btw, Keir Starmer, the present leader of the Labour party and the opposition leader has also graduated from Oxford. You see societies that function basically as meritocracies do not erase classes. Those who get to the top universities will make the future elite, independently of what their political views are. France is another example of this.
It’s difficult to provide proofs for things like global tipping points. The signs are there and arguably the tipping point is reached somewhere we are not aware of at a time we are not aware of.
There is no doubt that the permafrost is melting all around the northern hemisphere as is documented in this article.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00659-y
This was published before the record heatwaves in those areas just a few weeks ago. I don’t have figures for how much methane will be released. It won’t require much though to nullify all our efforts to reach carbon zero, as methane is at least 25 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
This combined with our lethargy in reaching carbon zero and the continued cutting down of forest(which is still increasing). Is a clear enough sign for me.
I definitely agree in a formal sense of "proof". However, tipping points are a general characteristic of complex systems we can pretty much always safely infer will be present in any such system.
There is mathematical work on this I saw a few years ago, I'll try to find, trying to quantify mathematically what is meant by tipping point and what conditions are necessary for tipping points to exist.
One interesting result of this work is that in systems with internal variables (things as they are) and external variables (things we can observe) tipping points can be triggered without any way to know based on the external variables (there is nothing that can track the actual tipping point, but it will only be inferrable in the future, that it happened at some point, in retrospect).
And this aligns well with our intuition. For instance, if we take people as complex systems, they do unpredictable things all the time (or then expected actions but at unpredictable times) and presumably hit tipping points that lead to such actions, but we can't really tell when exactly tipping points were. For instance, we may know someone unhappy at their work and expect them to quit at some point, and maybe many times something happens that seems "the last straw" but it isn't, but finally there is a last straw, that we didn't even see happening, and the person quits. An even more stark example is someone who is unhappy at their work, but is not expressive about it, and we don't suspect a thing, but someday they quit, and we can, in retrospect, assume some tipping point was reached that lead to the "radical simplification" of the work situation (at least temporarily).
But basically, all complex systems (we tend to encounter) respond to too much stress by simplifying (not getting more complex; a bit of stress may do that, but at some point there is a threshold that leads to simplification).
All this to say, and I'm sure you agree, that it's best not to push towards such thresholds on a global scale to see what happens.
What we can be relatively certain is that "pushing harder" on the climate isn't going to paradoxically make things better in any scenario, but we should stop pushing, hope for the best, and plan for both "radical simplification" as well as "keeping it together somewhat".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk1pIKI72jg
It's basically a debate around the question "Is the end of capitalism the answer to climate change?" One of the speakers argues for and the another against... Both present arguments worth looking into IMO.
The speaker on the side of 'capitalism is the problem' sets the stage by claiming there are inherent tendencies in capitalism that make a solution to the problem difficult and yes that capitalism has in part been the cause of the problem :
- Growth is inherent in capitalism. And so more of everything is needed, not in the least energy, so to reduce carbon emissions we have to swim upstream if our economy relies on growth.
- Money can buy anything in the natural world.
- The promise that everybody will have more luxuries. A world wherein everybody lives in luxury is not feasible and incompatible with avoiding climate change.
On the side of 'climate change can be solved within capitalism' the speaker makes a reasonable argument I think that we have dealt with some environmental and pollution issues in the past in capitalist countries, and so solving a similar problem is in principle feasible in a capitalist system... by passing legislation that takes into account environmental costs or legislation that just forbids certain things. The counter being given to this argument is that we have known about climate change for a long time now and still haven't really made any progress... part of the problem in capitalism is that money translates into political power (lobbying) and that this has prevented adequate legislation that might address the issue.
Another point worth mentioning on the pro-capitalism side is that the promise capitalism makes of luxury is a just another way of framing a basic human desire for prosperity, flourishing, and not really something unique to capitalism. And so doing away with capitalism won't actually do away with this desire, and would in any case be hard to sell to the public. Interesting points are being made that GDP is not the same as human flourishing etc..
Asked for an alternative to capitalism, the speaker on the side of 'capitalism is the problem' points to a system of commons which he think can fulfill the desire for prosperity by better and more shared commons, in stead of it being fulfilled by private property. Counter to this is that we don't have any idea how and if this would work on the larger scales that we would need it to work on given current world population.
My own assessment of the debate is that while there is more than grain of truth in the statement that capitalism has caused climate change and makes it more difficult to solve it because of perpetual growth, I don't really see a clear alternative. Maybe it's possible to eventually radically change our system, I just don't see it happening fast enough. It's not like we have a another couple of decades to sort this out first. The political will doesn't seem to be there for this kind of change, at this moment anyway, and even if the will would be there these kind of changes typically don't come without massive societal upheaval. How are we going to find the persistent agency to rapidly change our energy system into renewals in this kind of turmoil?
In principle growth doesn't seems necessarily tied to increase in emissions. You need energy yes, but that need not be based on carbon emissions. Long term growth and therefor capitalism is not sustainable I think because of other reasons, but that's another discussion. Also the argument that capitalism skews political decision-making and makes a solution more difficult is not lost on me either, but I think it's more likely that we find ways to deal with that, than it is to change the whole system and hope that we can do that fast enough and end up with a system that can deal with the issue adequately (which is not a given either).
If you have to manipulate your customers to want the luxury in the first place, and the means by which organisations do this are varied, sly and grim, then this doesn't really hold up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdjLK4Qm86I
Basically to much and to little has been made of the 2030 'deadline' in the IPCC report on climate change.
To much in the sense that it is not supposed to be a hard "dead"-line... the world is not going to end in 2030. It was meant more as a deadline for societal change, i.e. if we want to get to carbon-neutrality in 2050, we should be well on our way in 2030 otherwise it's only going to get progressively difficult. Transition takes time...
And to little in the sense that despite the promises no a whole lot has happened in the meanwhile. Essentially the problem is that politicians aren't willing to move unless there is enough public support, so the question ends up being how do you get public support? There's some interesting discussion and different viewpoints on how to get that public support and best ways to communicate about the issue.
Also some info on the uncertain science behind tipping-points...
There are further episodes in this series which is on the whole excellent I think.
Yes I agree for the most part. Human flourishing, or even simply prosperity, is something else than what we have been sold in capitalism. But so while this is true, part of the point that we still would need a system that could provide "prosperity/flourishing" stands I think.
I dunno. Maybe because now we're anchored to the myth of sustainable growth, it might be difficult to sell real sustainability. But again I feel that this is something that's been indoctrinated rather than meeting some demand. There is a very powerful (I can't say "good") capitalist reason to compel earners to exchange their salaries for luxuries, so if you live in a capitalist democracy, no one's going to allow the electorate to labour under the belief that keeping more of their earnings for the future is a good idea. But we used to do just that. Saving and thrift were virtues once.
I'm not talking about luxuries, but about needs. Part of it is indoctrination yes, or just plain advertising I guess. And so I agree with you as far as western countries go, in principle we have more than enough to fulfill our needs. This is not the case in developing countries I don't think... real sustainability would probably require some increase in "general wealth". As their population has boomed it's hard to see how one would return to small scale sustainability. Those countries also happen to be the real problem for reducing carbon emissions going forward.
And yet the more people, the less of a share of the Earth's resources they should have. But yeah I understand your point about poorer countries levelling up, and this only reinforces the need for richer countries to recede. The growing emissions of the third world are principally a problem while the first world is already unsustainably over-emitting. If we drop back, there's wiggle room to approach equilibrium.
Yes, we certainly bear a historic and moral responsibility, though there isn't much wiggle room even if we'd cut emissions entirely, if we want to reach emission targets that is. The best hope for getting there is that we develop green alternatives and that developing countries can 'leapfrog' to those technology by learning from us and directly implementing them. But this brings me back to the point of why we may need at least some of the production capacity capitalism has provided us, to be able to build these green alternatives on a large enough, and therefor cheap enough, scale.
Sun was red. Like a friggin omen.
If the choice was between destroying capitalism or destroying earth, given the time frame we’d have no shot. Capitalism — the form we have — will stay around a while longer, and so there has to be alternatives.
And there are. The push by investors like BlackRock — and the endorsement of the Business Roundtable—towards “stakeholder capitalism” and ESGs, the acknowledgment if Exxon, Shell, etc, that something needs to be done about climate, the mobilization of young people, and (depressingly the most important) the immediate effects before our eyes— are all signs that things are shifting.
The Republican Party mainly stands in the way. The Democratic Party aren’t that far behind — they’d prefer nice words and to throw essentially crumbs at the issue, but at least there’s an acknowledgement of reality.
If voters keep turning up to elect these assholes, or too many dems stay home, we’re toast. But I can’t believe this will happen, and we should all try our best to make the opposite happen.
You maybe confusing the sum total of our institutions with "capitalism". For instance, democratic institutions are not really "capitalism". You can have democratically elected politicians that implement a state or otherwise socialists economy. Indeed, you can have a nominal "communist party" that oversees a capitalists economy, as we have in China.
So, although I agree we cannot overhaul the entire political and economic system, a real solution to the climate crisis is now simply impossible through any semblance of the free market "acting by itself". It requires massive government intervention, which pro-capitalists, will cry "socialism" about (unless it benefits them of course, then they say it's just common sense).
Western society is a mix of capitalism and socialist / collectivist institutions.
Although I would agree that our capitalist components dominate our socialist components (socialist institutions, including elected political bodies, de facto serve at the leisure of our oligarchs, and only insofar as it is good for capitalism ... and the "really important things" like central banks and multi-national corporations are kept in direct oligarchal control, far from the dirty, filthy, putrid, weak and pathetic hands of elected representatives).
Though I cannot speak for @ChatteringMonkey, the concept that capitalism must be overthrown to solve the climate crisis, I would agree with, but not mean to say literally all our institutions (including the market) must be rebuilt from scratch, but rather our oligarchs must be deposed by democracy.
This may require a Nuremberg style trial and hanging of our oligarchs, which may seem fantasy now, but as the damage and pains become greater and larger, accountability for ecocide on par with the accountability (no sane person argues against) for the Nazi genocide, is entirely reasonable, and a an important expression of the intrinsic violent nature of politics, in order to move with de facto new institutions of power that can credibly say they are now in some sort of real control, and not the oligarchs (because they've been publicly hanged).
Obviously, this foundational aspect of our political institutions can go to far, such as the Terror of the French revolution, but I think Nuremberg was a reasonable thing; as the bodies pile up, I predict more and more people will agree with this sentiment.
Now, hanging our oligarchs would clearly be seen as a deep transition of power, but does not mean getting rid of all our institutions.
What matters is who controls our institutions.
Capitalism is an ideology which explicitly wants the rich to run the show. For instance, "how to prevent poor people from making laws", is the central question of the founding fathers of the United States. Democracy was needed to take power from the King of England (and pay less taxes and become more rich), since a revolution for a new American King simply would simply make no sense (and, the oligarchs would not have been able to agree on a new King even if they wanted to). Democracy was a very conscious compromise, carefully crafted to ensure poor people and slaves had no effective power. Of course, it was not fated to remain that way, and America has seen periods of effective democracy (certainly more effective than previous times or then today), but that is the ideology of capitalism.
The idea that democratic institutions should effectively "flex" control over the market (force internalization of costs), effectively stop the transformation of control of capital into political power (whether through a long list of laws interfering with money in politics, or just preventing too much capital accumulation in the first place and appropriating the capital of anyone that "succeeds" in that quest regardless), effectively provide critical goods and services to society through "collectivist" institutions where the market clearly fails to do so, as well as simply not allow poverty, are all in clear contradiction to capitalist ideology.
"Capitalists" who take credit for the success of "collectivist institutions" as capitalism "working", while simultaneously claiming "taxes are theft", and the creation of more such institutions is socialism, blah, blah, blah, are just idiotic hypocrites.
The central features (i.e. the dominant features that actually decide how our societies are organized) are that people can accumulate unlimited amounts of capital and this control of capital can be effectively be transformed into political power (the places where this is not the case, are small political islands with essentially no influence over global affairs).
Where this accumulation of, and transformation of capital to political power is "without friction", the system is fully "capitalist", and where there is a lot of friction to this process (such as Scandinavia), then democratic institutions start to dominate the organization of society (using markets insofar as they produce, at least perceived, "good" for most people, using the socialism of free money and services when the market clearly doesn't provide the goods, and constraining the market when it can work fine, but with a bunch of rules to discourage negative forms of competition, such as damaging externalities), are socialist ideas, of one brand or another (and "capitalists" do not hesitate to identify those ideas as socialism; there's no good counter argument to such accusations, because it's true; it's socialists and communists and anarchists that proposed and fought for things like free education, minimum wages, free health care, safe working conditions, and so on, not "capitalists"; for capitalists to take credit for such socialists victories to make the argument it's capitalism and the market that has provided all good things anywhere, is just stupid).
The 90s saw the environmental movement make the faustian bargain with our oligarchs, based on the idea of "fix the climate within capitalism; because overthrowing the oligarchs seems, so, so hard, and it's so, so much easier to take oligarch money and such oligarch dick; and they seem like such nice people too!". Oligarchs did feign sympathy and did provide money (strings attached of course), but what are they doing now? Trying to go to space and look out for number 1, as they always can be counted on to do.
For, it was believed that even the oligarchs needed a planet and would agree with evidence and rational based reasoning of how to prevent planetary catastrophe, and would accept some loss of capital and power, to themselves or fellow oligarchs. Two decades later the oligarchs have literally popped out of their yachts, bunkers and New Zealand compounds (they were hiding in to avoid Corona), yelled "wrong, bitches!" and blasted off to space (what they called space anyways; certainly, a good first step to becoming swashbuckling, intrepid galactic explorers), to thunderous applause in the media no less.
Getting rid of the oligarchs -- which may require a good perfectly fair and legal Nuremburg style hanging -- is the key issue. Doing so does not mean a radically different society; if you go to countries with little oligarchic control, they do not look so different in terms of the nominal names of the institutions they have, but they are very different.
Doing things like changing the global climate makes our civilization far, far more fragile.
Other civilizations always had the chance to at least move somewhere else. For instance, Roman civilization did effectively move to Byzantine and survived for another 1000 years.
We have no where to go.
(Oligarchs are trying to change that, but I don't think on behalf of "we".)
Also, I don't get how this view squares with your view that population is the problem. If we're not fragile, why would population be a problem?
Quoting ssu
I disagree with your disagreement.
As I explained, I am not arguing a large population is not a pre-condition for our currently large resource consumption.
If there was only 1 person on earth, our present environmental problems would not be here.
Neither am I arguing that simply depopulating the world wouldn't solve the environmental crisis. If however many people are needed, volunteered themselves for extermination: problem solved!
The problem is that people don't volunteer (even those advocating depopulation, I never see volunteer for it).
It's easy to accomplish depopulation through environmental collapse, massive droughts and crop failures, but environmental collapse is what we are trying to avoid.
In other-words, depopulation is simply not realistic.
Depopulation through lowing the birth rate is not a solution. We need to solve our environmental problems in the coming decades, but it would be centuries to lower substantially the population through birth rates.
You are arguing in a hypothetical realm divorced from reality. If we actually lived in this hypothetical realm where the consequences were centuries out, then just lowering the birth rate would be an option worth discussing.
On the time scales imposed by the actual reality we live in, depopulation would be required in the next couple of decades; and the only feasible way to do that is through environmental collapse: the problem we are trying to avoid. Otherwise, people try to survive and try to help other people survive, no one volunteers themselves for depopulation.
However, our technological systems and infrastructure and level of affluence can be radically changed in mere decades. It requires high level of effort, but it is feasible.
Depopulation is a mental crutch of the apathetic. It's a way of both simultaneously viewing oneself as a "tough realist" while accomplishing nothing at all and denying reality.
The tough realist position (that includes effective actions) is not depopulation, but radical transformation of our political system (which, as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs) to implement feasible solutions to our problems, on the span of decades and not whimsical imaginings of centuries that have no relevance to the present.
Moving is a bad term here.
Understanding the difficulties of reigning such a vast landmass, the Empire was divided peacefully to two parts. Eastern part, which we call "Byzantium" after the fall of West Rome (and they themselves called the Roman Empire) as you said, survived for a thousand year afterwards. It's not that West Romans moved to East Rome, it is simply the question that having a city of million people in Antique Times, you need a huge landmass and functioning shipping routes to feed those million people. This was possible when Rome was basically fed with grain coming from North Africa and in the case of Byzantium and Constantinople, when they had the fertile Nile delta to grow food for the huge city. When West Rome lost North Africa to the Vandals and Byzantium lost Egypt, then where people moved was the countryside. Feudalism and Dark Ages was basically an issue of de-globalization.
Quoting boethius
What I'm arguing is that to solve these problems take more than 20 years and yes, long term changes in population growth do matter. They simply are so subtle that those focusing just on the present day don't notice their effects. And it's not just technological advancement, but also the market mechanism which also is an important factor here.
Quoting boethius
So in your view in 20 years there is a catastrophy, a collapse?
Quoting boethiusFirst, actual global population growth to be negative will take a long, long time. It possibly can happen in the next Century, which is quite a way off. Second, it's not the kind of "depopulation" some antinatalists think about. It's simply what is already happening in Japan and in many countries all around the world.
Quoting boethius
Democracy has it's faults, but it's still the thing I believe in. It has some safety valves built into it, if only the citizens would apply them. The alternatives usually don't have them. Radical technological transformation, yes. Radical political transformation, be careful just what you wish for.
It's a perfectly good term, and makes the point that if the entire climate isn't destabilized, and there's "elsewhere" to go to, then previous civilizations have not been fragile in this sense, which seems to me pretty major.
It also seems to me pretty trivial that moving one's civilization somewhere else will require conquering that place first. It's only us that calls the Byzantine empire by that name, they called themselves Roman.
Feudalism I would argue was not "moving Roman civilization" to the country side, but the collapse of the Western Roman civilization.
For instance, most of the written classics of the Roman, and the preceding Greek, civilization that we now have, were preserved by Muslims, and then re-introduced to Europe. The monastic tradition I would argue is people trying to preserve what they can from a collapsed civilization. To argue feudalism was Roman civilization "moving" to the countryside is nonsensical. Feudalism was a response of people to the collapse of Roman civilization.
Otherwise, I don't really see what your arguing ... other than running out of grain and so on precipitated the collapse of the Western Roman empire, which I think historians would agree played a part.
Quoting ssu
Then maybe read up on the topic. The carbon budgets we have to work with (to avoid civilization ending climate "discontinuities", as they are called) are on decade time scales, in which de-population via falling birth rates has no meaningful consequence.
Quoting ssu
What's subtle about the world going from 1 billion to 8 billion in a single human life time?
I have no idea what you're talking about i terms of technology advance and market mechanism in this context.
Quoting ssu
The carbon budgets we have to work with, to stay under 2 degrees Celsius (and not a guarantee, just a reasonable chance) are exhausted in about 20 years at present consumption rate.
[quote=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_budget;Caption from the wikipedia page on carbon budgets]Emission budget and necessary emission reduction pathways to meet the two-degree target agreed in Paris Agreement without negative emissions, depending on the emission peak[/quote]
Now, if we started really major actions now, and overran the carbon budget on our way to zero emissions (but we do make it there), then another major effort could be spent growing massive amounts of trees every year and sequester that carbon back underground, as well as other geoengineering schemes to "nudge" systems a bit -- in a race against the lag time of the climate system. (This is by no means a "clever risk" to take; it is far less riskier and far less costly to not emit the carbon in the first place: for, even if we emit less there's the risk the carbon budget was miscalculated and it's still not enough, so we need to do the geoengineering and we'll thank our lucky stars we played it as safe as we did; and 2, it's simply expensive and causes more ecologic damage to sequester compared to reasonable short-term actions to decarbonize, as well as stop deforesting the amazon, stop over fishing, stop so much meat eating, etc..)
So, I would agree there is some flexibility, but only if we were actually on track to zero emissions; currently we are not, not even close to being on track. Just pie in the sky denialist thinking.
Continuing business as usual and just blowing by the carbon budgets (just as we simply blew by the Kyoto targets), will be a state of inevitable collapse.
Collapse won't happen in 20 years "to the day", but would be a process of unrelenting droughts, floods, fires, leading to crop failures, political upheaval, and both civil and inter-nation wars.
It is this next 20 years where we can have the biggest impact on how events unfold and preserve our civilization and most people alive today with a ok probability. Just like the last 20 years would have been even easier ... and 20 years before that when we actually first understood this problem in all the essential aspects.
Our global society seems pretty stable, but only because we currently have enough to eat for everyone ... that matters politically (the people we don't give enough to eat, but could, such as those starving in Yemen, don't matter to our global political system, otherwise they could use that leverage to get more food; but that's far from being everyone in the Yemenize category).
Once food goes from "enough" to "not-enough" on a global scale, and even once many people die, and the warming and droughts and fires don't stop, so it just happens again and again to those left over each time, both coherent global action and maintaining our present infrastructure will be more and more difficult.
There is only so much disruption and challenges our system (as with previous systems) can take. Critical supply chains (such as your Egyptian grain example) start to unravel and our technological infrastructure will start to be defunct.
Armies (running out of food) won't simply sit around and starve to death, so the habitable places that remain will face relentless invasion and piracy with dwindling weapons systems that can no longer be renewed without the present global technological manufacturing platform. What happens to these people is anyone's guess, but I'm very certain they would view our current civilization as "collapsed" and "in ruins".
This is the basic process of collapse.
It is avoidable with radical actions now, not "subtle changes to population growth" over a century or two.
Quoting ssu
You obviously didn't read my previous post which I literally say "as I explain in my previous post, I define as effectively arresting control of our institutions from our sociopathic oligarchs" is effective democracy.
Here's a presentation by a credible scientist on the issue of collapse and climate change:
Then just what historical study shows a huge migration of people from the Western parts moving to East Rome that you are talking about. Seriously, I've not heard about it so inform me.
Quoting boethius
Then I wrote it badly. Feudalism was an answer to deal with the collapse. So I think we agree here.
Quoting boethius
It was a response to this:
Quoting boethius
That radical technological change needs also the market mechanism. Competition is a way to make things efficient.
I'll respond to you later about the last part of your post.
In the meantime, here is another interview with a credible scientist.
Saying all the same points.
Also, if anyone on the forum has pre-ripped genes ... you're fucking terrible people.
The problem is capitalists setting societies goals, yes, but democracy let that happen or made that possible even. The idea of democracy rests on the assumption that the people are knowledgeable, responsible and independent enough to recognize what is in their and societies best interest.... a kind of free will if you will. But Google, Youtube and Facebook know people can be manipulated, and so did the church and rulers in the past.
Isn't it telling that after all these years people still can't be moved to vote for parties that want to solve the problem, given that this one of the most important challenges we face in the 21th century, and perhaps ever?
There will always be factions like business vying for control of the institutions that make the decisions. If a system can't deal with that, that would be a (fatal?) flaw in said system it seems to me.
Like all life on earth we want to survive and reproduce, and we need energy for that. Normally a species only fills certain evolutionary niches, and is kept in check by the niche getting saturated or other species adapting to it.
But evolution has given us a combination of traits that enable us to transmit complex information almost instantly, making us very adaptable and overpowered. In the game of genetic evolution, cultural evolution is broken. If it takes a species millennia to evolve a new trait like a claw or a tooth, we can develop a gun in a couple of generations...
Our fatal flaw is that we are to successful, ultimately leaving us in the predicament that we have to devise a culture that goes against some of our nature.
Now that the effects of climate change are writ large we may have rapid political change in favour of Green party’s. Industry will adapt quickly as they prioritise providing what the market demands. The worry is groups or nations who turn against this imperative and exploit warfare to resist. Or become failed states in which there is no effective power structure, or capital to instigate the required change.
I am quite confident that China, EU, US and other Western developed countries will successfully adapt. South America is a worry along with India, the Middle East and other populous Asian countries. Smaller failed states are not so significant because as they fail their carbon foot print will fall. Although if they have forests, these will be cut down for fuel.Which is the problem with South America, the Amazon basin is already seeing climate collapse, which could turn the forest into desert.
And yet we lived for 192,000 years with virtually no measurable impact on the climate or global ecosystem, and in the last few thousand are in a position to make the earth uninhabitable.
If your computer worked without fault for 192 years and then in the last year started to go wrong are you seriously telling me your first port of call for blame would be that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way the computer was made and not "oh no, I must have picked up a virus, or dropped it, or something"?
I'd argue failed States are already insignificant where it concerns carbon footprints.
192.000 years is a very precise number.... when human culture evolution really started is a bit in contention I'd say. Either way the point at which we started spreading across the globe, a lot of megafauna did become extinct, and we did reshape whole ecosystems as we progressed into agriculture, domesticated species etc etc...
And obviously this is not a linear process, it had to get some traction first. The rate of cultural Innovation is a function of population size and density... and innovations in turn have a positive reinforcing effect on those. In the video Boethius linked to, Dr Suzuki compares economic growth with bacteria in a test tube that grow exponentially every minute. If at minute 60 the tube would be saturated with bacteria, at minute 59 it would only be half that, and at minute 58 only a quarter etc etc... At minute 50 or so you would hardly notice them, yet the fact that they are an entity that doubles every minute is the cause of the tube being saturated. This just to say that the larger part of our history being relatively non-impactfull doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.
That it started some huge multiple of 2000 years is not 'in contention', it's a fact. The contention is only over the exactness of that multiple. That we lived without noticeably impacting the global ecosystem for the overwhelming majority of our existence is just not a thing you can reasonably question.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Indeed. And it applies admirably to economic growth. The imact we had on the global ecosystem as a species is not exponential. It was practically zero for hundreds of thousands of years and then grew exponentially from the birth of agriculture, ramping up a significant notch after the industrial revolution. There's been nothing remotely steady or progressive about it, it's been clearly triggered by significant changes in technology.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
The megafauna issue is contested (funny how you so easily raise the uncertainty of something opposing your view yet treat speculative theories as fact when they support it). Notwithstanding, the progress to agriculture is exactly what I'm talking about. It happened about 200,000 years into our existence as a species, prior to which no appreciable effect on the global ecosystem was detectable, rendering your "we're naturally inclined this way" theory complete nonsense.
What you're left with is a society that rumbles along with barely a chance to steer it in another direction simply because of its size and complexity and people incapable of making moral decisions most of the time and it's not even their fault.
I think that's very true. Like the fox in the hen house, it never evolved an off switch because it never faced a room full of trapped prey, it never needed one.
The point I was trying to make is that whilst this makes us vulnerable, it does not, in theory, prevent there from being a set of circumstances which suit our nature sufficiently to prevent such catastrophic failures to adapt.
I'm generally distrustful of any evolutionary psychology, we're really quite a malleable species in terms of our cultural adaptation to new circumstances, but that doesn't mean we don't have our limits, nor that solutions which work with those tendencies won't work a good deal better than those trying to work against them.
What I find unhelpful about any "it's in our nature" type of arguments is the defeatism which inevitably plays into the hands of those who prefer to maintain the status quo.
So yeah, I agree - "we're not very well adapted psychologically to handle the technology" is a much better way of talking about the role of 'human nature' than to resign on the clichéd "'twas ever thus". It clearly wasn't.
Quoting Benkei
This is a very interesting take, one I've not heard before. It seems related to Millgram's work on social roles (his work on obedience gets all the limelight, but in my opinion his work on social roles is much better). He talks about the psychological limits of being part of a large system (such as a corporation) and how we responded to that by limiting the nodes in our 'Markov Blanket' of knowledge about the system. We know what our boss wants us to do, we know what we want our staff to do, but we neither know nor understand what our boss's boss wants, nor what our staff's staff should do. It seems as though you're saying a similar thing could happen with spending. We cannot manage the chain of consequences more than a few steps so we end consideration there. Or have I misunderstood completely, perhaps?
There's some always something arbitrary about where we draw the boundaries around a species or not, and it's not as if we know exactly what subtle evolutionary changes in behavior or the brain may have happened between say 600.000 and 60.000 years ago... we have some semi-informed guesses.
But this is all a bit besides the point, as soon as the ice-age came to pass and conditions were such that we could have enough population and density, cultural evolution took off all across the world in multiply isolated locations, and the rest is history.
We want to survive and reproduce like any form of life, and because of the particular abilities we have we are very successful at it... which is part of the reason why we are where we are now. If you want to call this complete nonsense, fine.
Aah right, you are generally distrustful of people making an argument about human nature, promoting a defeatist attitude, put me in that box and thought I deserved a good beat-down.
While I agree with all of this, we do find ourselves in a situation we are not especially equipped to deal with, we wouldn't find ourselves in this situation if we weren't with this many people to begin with. It all starts there, we have made major advances in medicine, food production, have no real predatory species left in nature that concern us etc etc... all of which made it possible for our population to grow as it has. However one wants to slice it, this is a major part of the problem.
That's about the size of it, yep.
If you want to draw conclusions about human nature and prehistory, I suggest doing some research on the matter might be a good start.
This...
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
...for example, is hopelessly wrong.
Yes it's not only wrong, it's hopelessly wrong, you just had to get that adjective in there didn't you... just in case it's wasn't abundantly clear how ignorant i am.
Why don't you take a less adversarial approach to debates on this forum? Surely you don't expect us to all be scientific scholars on every subject and post on a science journal level or shut up? If you think it's wrong, just say why and leave out this demeaning BS please.
Expanding on this point, I think it's not only our moral intuitions that fails us at this point, but also our cognition in general. The way we abstract the world, via language, cutting it in small bits, is ill-suited to deal with complex problems that would be better served with a more holistic approach. Measuring everything against something like money is an example of this, but any criterium or set of criteria small enough so that an average human being can deal with is, probably leaves out a lot of complexity.
Well I sort of do, yeah, insofar as one is interested enough to post about it on a public forum I think the least prerequisite effort should be to familiarise oneself with the basic facts about which one is theorising. There are a number of very approachable books on the subject - I recommended Clive Finlayson's work on early humans - which requires very little 'scholarly' prior knowledge. Jared Diamond's work is pretty famous now, also Alice Roberts (off of the telly!) has written a really nice summary called 'The Incredible Human Journey'. Failing that, there's Wikipedia, which should take no more than half an hour to read through the pertinent links.
I think it's very likely that we will have some countries collapsing to civil war especially in the Sahel region, that already is hit the most. For example the hunger index shows on map quite well what the areas are were conflict can happen and is happening:
Global Hunger Index by severity:
The inter-nation wars isn't necessary going to happen and those can be limited as, obviously there are two or more established sides that can cut their losses and control their forces (as they control their militaries). The societal collapse to civil war is the problem, that we've seen in many places (Somalia, South Sudan, Libya, etc) is the real danger. For example Yemen is as bad as it is thanks to the Saudi coalition intervention.
Yet let's look at were we stand. So perhaps you would anticipate a turn to the 1960's and 1970's?
And then the stats of people dying at famines:
Yet will this happen in Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, Japan, South Korea? Just going to the situation of early 20th Century or 19th Century would be bad, but did that collapse our global society?
The fact is that there has been a lot more famine, wars and unruly places in history than now and still the human society has prevailed.
Quoting boethius
This isn't at all realistic.
Armies don't run out of food and then roam around as an army. Armies "collapse" simply when the pay doesn't come in. Functioning and lethal armed forces are actually very fragile and need huge resources and support. If the pay doesn't come, cracks appear immediately. Hence they either a) are cut in size and manpower by the government, b) go home if they aren't paid or c) stage a coup to get their pay. This happens far earlier than the issue becomes food. You shouldn't forget what Napoleon said about warfighting and armies: "You need money, money, money". To give an example: Iraq still had a huge army when Dubya Bush invaded. Saddam's army simply started to melt away with soldiers and officers taking off their uniforms, but a lot of units were still quite intact. Then the Americans had the great idea to just let them go. First they (the ex-armed forces) demonstrated for getting pay, then they went home and some started the insurgency in small uncoordinated groups. These uncoordinated group won't invade any country with a standing army, but the sure can start a low intensity guerilla conflict... or a civil war.
Quoting boethius
On the contrary.
If that arresting control "from our sociopathic oligarchs" would happen through the ballot box, that is great! Unfortunately in the World we live in people who want to "arrest control" mean they literally go and arrest people without giving a damn about the institutions as they are "corrupt and in control of the sociopathic oligarchs" in the first place. That was what I meant. Hence democracy and the necessary institutions are sidelined, which freaks out everybody. Then likely we get true sociopaths or even bloodthirsty psychopaths competing for power. Democracies are saved with guns only if an outside aggressor attacks them. There are far and few examples when guns have overthrown dictatorships and replaced them with democracy. Portugal and their Carnation Revolution is for example an exception.
I have read more about paleontology, pre-history, evolution etc... than you think.
You came in here mis-interpreting what I said as some 'human nature'-type justification for defeatism concerning climate change and immediately went in the offence. That was never my intention, which should be clear from my other posts in this thread.
What I said in defense of my posts also wasn't meant as some scientifically accurate or nuanced description, just some broad strokes that I think would suffice in support of my claims.
I'm not even sure what you disagree with, as it's almost a truism what I said.
Wow, that's an impressive speed of repair to the self-esteem. Two posts have taken you from "I'm no scholar" to "Everything I say is irrefutable"
Always great to see the Republican Party trying their best to not only destroy the planet, but preventing even minor efforts to save it. That’s commitment— they take death pacts seriously.
Can't have the state restricting free competition for energy now can we? 19 states apparently have passed such legislation... insane.
I do wonder as a non-american, what is their thinking? Is it just only short-sighted protection of their interests, without much consideration for anything else? Do they realize what is at stake, or have they actually managed to convince themselves that the whole climate change thing is a hoax propagated by their political adversaries? I mean, how do you justify something like that to yourself?
Yes.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
In many ways. First and foremost: “I’m just following orders.” They’re doing what comes “naturally” within a capitalist system: make profits, raise stock prices, post huge quarterly earnings, repeat. Or you’re out. All else is an externality, including climate change.
“It’s a job for Congress.” That’s another one. Knowing full well Congress is dysfunctional, and that they will lobby against any changes.
I don't think people have understood yet the full implications of golbal warming and the response this will require.
On the other hand at a practical level it seems incredibly easy. Just direct, say, 3 trillion dollars every year toward geo-engineering and research, as well as producing good policy, mass-transit etc.
What is Mass-transit?
If someone who do not commute tell other people how to commute, that is not necessarily a good thing. I'm not saying you do, but that is a possibility in discussions like this. A lot of people do, for instance blame "capitalism" for causing problem when they themselves get the pleasure of not having to do a daytime job thanks to a social position guaranteed by some grandparent who made money enough to let relatives become scientists, artists or musicians, having the cultural capital to do that. One has to be very careful in discussions like this, not to talk about what "we" have to do when it is in fact "they" who will pay the price. You didnt, which is good.
That said, Geo-Engineering is a viable way to reduce impact of global warming, or rather, reduce global warming but I doubt that that will actually happen. But again, one never knows.
Well I feel like that covers only a small range of people, those who proscribe things that they themselves wouldn't have to do because they are shielded by money in one way or another.
Global warming is like a guest at a dinner party who embarrasses everyone, doesn't respect the rules of polite conversation, mentions the elephant in the room etc.
We could spend trillions on geo-engineering but we don't. We don't because rich people have all the money and states work for them. The logical conclusion is to get rid of rich people, but that's awkward because for many decades rich people have made us believe that they are gods.
What to do in such situation?
That like the trillion dollar question and the right one. What to do?
In a situation where right wingers like me (in Scandinavia which is probably midway btw Democrats and Republicans in the US) tend to try to say that global warming isn't happening. But, being anti-activist-as-a-lifestyle I still would say that IF global warming was not probable you would have seen big studies by relevant institutions saying so. The economic backup for such studies should be no problems... but we do not see such studies, just odd scientist having doubt. So - as far as I am concerned - and, unlike some activists who probably sees fighting the global warming as a "goal in life" and in line with their red-green agenda, I sadly must believe the global warming is happening and that it will have consequences.
And it seems like most western countries are at that place. I do not see the situation is "something our lifestyle" has produced, capitalism or whatever. I come from a poor family, most scandinavians were around 1900, and the society has given my family a much better life, which I cannot for my life see as a bad thing. I would say that people being angry on "capitalism", should do some genealogy.
But, the problem is that our good efforts, to make life better, do cost a lot of energy, and that energy mainly comes from burning of fossil fuel.
Unless you start discussions from another standpoint I think you will be unsuccessful. You will only make the majority of people angry, and the majority will decide in some way. True, governments and big companies have agendas to make money but at the end of the day its about people.
And I think what is actually done, Windmills, solar power and - yes - nuclear power do work, energy is produced. And I think the psychological effect of that is good. As well as practical stuff people can do in societies where a lot of energy is consumed, eating less red meat, recycling, drive cars that have low emissions. That is important, to get people in favor of getting things done.
Then, bigger measurements are needed, maybe geo-engineering, maybe restrictions - including ALL energy consuming countries. It's not like Canada and Sweden that emit the most. But the world must be in a Corona state of mind to get things done. Sadly, Corona impact was very visible and very fast. Global warming is not.
What I wish is that people like my Countrywoman Greta Thunberg would try to side up with people having a good reputation even among "right wingers" of the world, like maybe Bill Gates, to de-activistify the question. It is much too important to become a flower power romance ingredient for children from academical families looking for "things to do with their lives". Which is, imho and to a large extent, how certain protests, and sadly also warnings by scientists(very seldom coming from a daytime worker background), are perceived by the people of the world not being left wing, daytime workers, and which will only do bad for getting things actually done.
How does this make any sense?
What has produced the pollution, if not capitalism (as is practiced today and since the industrial revolution)? and if not the lifestyles industrial capitalist growth has enabled?
Where is the cause, if not these things?
Quoting Ansiktsburk
Yes, capitalism creates winners and losers, and the winners tend to like their winnings.
However, regardless of social issues related to your statement, if the system isn't sustainable then who cares about standards of living meanwhile. It's like a captain that doesn't prepare a voyage where resources run out half way through and everyone starves to death, does it matter if the passengers were comfortable for the first part of the journey; does that excuse the second half of the journey being a tortuous hell?
And that, a tortuous hell, is what most passengers on earth are going to experience if today's capitalist system (whatever version of capitalism you want to call it) continues unsustainably.
If billions or more people starve to death (what necessarily goes with a globally unsustainable system), are you really willing to say "well, me and my Scandinavian family have had it pretty darn good; so, I think it was a good system that brought us here".
Of course, you can argue that the system is sustainable, that the climate and other biodiversity alarmists are wrong, but you recognize yourself that argument doesn't really work.
So, that being the case, you are basically saying "yes, the system isn't sustainable and we are moving towards the disasters all major credible environmental institutions are predicting ... but, it was good for my family for a bit, so I can't put the that into question".
It seems to me your family is a pretty small subset of the entire planet with all its inhabitants and life forms.
What I don't like about this attack on capitalism is that it seems to imply that a leftist approach to life would have been carbon neutral.
Capitalism is a tool like a hammer.
It would not. But a leftist approach government is democracy, which would be responsive to people's actual interests, like, you know, having a future.
Instead, we have the government of capitalism: oligarchy, serving only money and the monied.
Then what's the point in criticizing capitalism if the alternative is assumed to be no better regarding CO2 emissions?
It just reduces to criticizing contemporary humanity.
From the pov of your binary universe, where the alternative is either carbon neutral or no better than the current, your point is irrefutable.
Ah, good. I like to be maximally irrefutable.
Though from the pov of the real world, you are just dense.
Like a one tree forest. Still utterly irrefutable.
But if capitalism is "a tool like a hammer" like you say, then it is the wielder who really matters. There is no 'written in the stars' or totally worked-out blueprint for a post-capitalist society. The point is for men and women to have complete democratic mastery over the economy and all spheres of life, so that society only goes where its constituents will that it should go. In such a self-conscious society, the issue of global warming could be solved very simply. Nobody knows precisely how, but it is not superstition to suggest that with enough resources and a united planet, the conditions for technological mastery over the biosphere would be possible.
I assume you mean by working with nature as opposed to trying to supersede it?
Think of it like this. If you terraformed a barren planet, you would not be saying 'work with nature', you would be saying 'how can we artificially produce a society out of the bare bones elements we find on, say, Mars or Europa?' Here 'nature' as you are conceiving it (i.e. biological life) is non-existent, the only way to conquer these barren planets are pure artificial human productive processes, converting different elements, combining them, dragging ice asteroids into the atmosphere, digging boreholes or whatever.
This is exactly how we should think of Earth's biosphere. We are already 'mastering' this, but it is of course unplanned, chaotic, self-defeating etc. (i.e. global warming). Forget all that sentimentality about 'disturbing nature', we are already doing it, it is inevitable that there will be mass-extinctions and so on. The point is to 'disturb nature' in such a way that you have self-conscious and rational technological mastery over these processes. I am thinking of, why not, the rings in the video-game 'Halo', or the transformation of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
But let's go even further. Once we rid ourselves of this religious-like superstition about 'not messing with nature (a nature which doesn't even exist the way most people conceive of it), why not go to the end? The human body, that fragile meat sack which gets cancer and so on, let's get rid of it. Why not upload our subjectivities into an artificial technological infrastructure? I claim this would be the result of a self-conscious societies' drive toward immortality, the end of ageing, disease etc.
It's not about 'superceding' nature, of course everything outside of human subjectivity does exist and you cannot exist outside of this material. It's about ending arbitrary processes like freak weather, ageing, even death.
Of course we do not know if this is even a possibility, maybe subjectivity and meaning is inseparably linked with that fragile meat-sack. I mean, what's the point of thinking, a subjectivity, if you don't have some needy mortal body to keep alive... just computation for more computation sake until the heat dead of the universe? That doesn't sound very appealing to me.
As far as concerns 'whats the point of thinking if you don't have a body?' I know what you mean but isn't it the case that in all ways that matter, you really do think without a body. Think about thinking, when you are thinking, are you really concerened/aware that you have a body? Is not the act of thinking itself it's own proof that we are not our bodies? When you are deep in thought, you are working on some ideas or whatever, it doesn't matter to you, you lose awareness even that you have a body.
Also why would this be an issue? Surely inter-subjectivity (in whatever form) would survive this 'upload'? I cannot imagine that we would all become totally insular self-referential computers, not at all. Surely human society would continue, simply that human beings become physically what they were spiritually all along, pure subjectivity. This is not about 'computation for computation's sake', I am not suggesting that we degrade the idea by associating this with meagre computing power (whatever that means). This would be society, but in a higher form.
Doesn't sound appealing? Well it doesn't sound appealing to me either! I am not suggesting this as an action taken tomorrow, but as one of the possible points a socially self-conscious (let me cut the BS here, I mean a communist) society would approach, long into the future, as contingent impediments to humanities' conquering of the galaxy and mortality are overcome. This is deep future, don't worry I will not now force you to climb into a USB stick or whatever.
As for the heat death of the universe, I don't see this as likely. More likely to me is that the universe is infinite. But even if entropy is real, I have faith (ok I know I sound insane) that man can conquer this entropy as well.
Aren't we a product of that chaos, catastrophe, and meaninglessness?
Quoting Jingo7
I think human motivations (bodily) are behind the intellectual problems we work out. The process of thinking itself maybe isn't influence by it, but the initial motivation for it seems to be.
My reasoning here is that the physical, biological forms came first, and then we evolved thinking brains because it increased survival chances of some biological forms. So to me that is the reason d'etre of thinking... i'm not sure what to do with the idea of just taking that away, what would be the point of any of it?
Quoting Jingo7
Sure, I just wanted to voice some concerns with the idea of uploading digitally, which many futurist seem to take for granted.
Quoting Jingo7
Yeah betting against entropy is insane ;-). But you know, all of this is far from settled, just the best guess we have based on current understanding.
Here of course I agree with you. But think, what really does a human being (as animal) need to survive? On pure subsistence, we need a little water, some food, a little exercise etc. And yet most of the articles of consumption are not for pure bodily subsistence. Our mind needs diversion, conversation, love, pleasurable sensation, diverse diet, meaningful work etc. None of this is simple subsistence, in fact if any of us were to eat porridge oats every meal (like one of our cabinet ministers here in the UK suggested that those on welfare should do to save money), we would go crazy, feel completely undignified, spiritually destroyed and so on.
On your second point, of course I cannot answer that immortal question, 'why/when did human consciousness emerge?' But I can answer the implications you draw from it. Human thought is no longer 'tethered' to biological considerations. That is, those processes that were once regulated by the biological order, have come to be fully regulated by that wholly distinct and higher order of being, the social order. You can also call this the 'symbolic' order or in Marxian terms, the moment when human society must be actively (consciously) reproduced by man himself, as opposed to the 'just being' of animals. That means that the human mind is forever separated from nature. We can only know that we were once 'natural' because we became (for whatever reason) separated from this nature. We can only see this point of departure after it has already gone forever. We can only 'see' at all, because we took this point of departure from nature. Now that we have the social order, biology doesn't enter into it. Our brains are exacctly the same as the brains of the ancient Greeks, and yet conceptually we are leaps and bounds ahead of them. If human thought was even remotely regulated biologically, this would be an impossibility. How can biology act upon 'you' if you can already, in thought, abstract yourself as a self? That is, if you can abstract an element from the chaos of nature in thought, you are already unbound by that chaos, that undifferentiated 'thing-in-itself that is nature (which doesn't really exist).
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
You know, I really find technology boring to be honest, and I am not familiar with futurist writings. Do you have any good reccomendations? My thrust is always first and foremost philosophical, but I try to take things to the end, and I see uploading as a nescessary possibility in any future society who's drive will consist in the conflict between the world of man (society) and non-human nature.
As for the link with what we have been saying and climate change, I hope it is evident that it is relevant. The way we ideologically conceive of climate change is most often by attributing to nature this 'humbling' power, as something that punishes the hubris of man. I hope I demonstrate here that I find this view revolting. I will write more on it later.
Sure there's of course other variables then mere survival to the evolution-equation, like procreation which has given life all kinds of exuberant stuff like the tails of peacocks... but I think all of this can ultimately still be tied back to the biological.
Quoting Jingo7
I'm not sure I follow here... I think we are only ahead of the Greeks in scientific knowledge and technology. Because we can record that knowledge in writing and pass it on to next generations there's a progression to it, sure, but I'm not sure it follows that we have departed from nature or our biology. We use cellphones and the internet for instance to do what we essentially always did, communicate with each other, just faster and on a larger scale. This in particular I don't get:
Quoting Jingo7
It's not that I have read that many futurist per se, I mostly picked that up in the media I tend to follow... but Yuval Harari has a couple of books that you might call futurist, and he's generally a clear thinker. And then there's Nick Boström who deals with possible future scenario's, mostly from the point of view of existential risk, and those who work with him at the same institute.
Quoting Jingo7
Yes I do kind of agree with this, especially if this comes from some kind of dogmatic religious inspired point of view. But at the same there is a kernel of truth to this accusation of hubris I think. I've said something earlier along those lines. The way our cognition works is by abstracting away from the world, by cutting things up into little bits via language... which is essentially simplifying things so we can get our head around it. If we are dealing with complex systems like the biosphere this kind of simplified thinking can cause all kinds of trouble, especially if we have to much faith in our ideas... And there's some 'intelligence' to nature too, because it has been a process of trial and error that has been running for billions of years, evolving and adapting too 'itself'. Compared to that our trials and errors are still relatively shallow, so you know, maybe there is reason to not be too confident that we can do it better.
Capitalism has made few far more richer than others, but it also has improved our prosperity far more than central planning of socialism ever did. Worth mentioning that socialism was (is) far more disastrous for the environment. Environmental factors simply weren't thought of.
If we look at where we have been successful, we have the case of handling the ozone layer hole, which at the largest was in the Antarctic in 1994 and now is estimated to shrink in size to what it was in 1980. Let's look at just why we were successful:
- the problem was easily noticed and measurable.
- CFC gasses being the culprit was identified (as early as 1974).
- CFC gasses were used mainly by rich countries.
- there was will to take action on the problem (Montreal accord in 1987, Kyoto in 1997).
- replacing CFC gasses was totally possible and the development continues.
The rich countries reduced their use of ozone depleting substances by 99,2% where the developing countries reduced only by 72,5%. What can we learn from this?
The fact is that prosperous wealthy countries can adapt and change their production and set new rigorous standards were the poorest countries poorer countries aren't able to. This is important to understand when the issue is something like deforestation, which happens basically in poorer countries.
We can cope with the problems when more countries are like the Netherlands, less are like the DRC. It may sound paradoxical, but the truth is that more development will be the solution. We will have more awareness of the problems and more ability to cope with the problems, to change our ways. Yet if we have more failed states, more poverty, then less will be done.
Then there is the question of China. Again a non-democratic country where environmental issues aren't as important as in the West thanks to it's socialism (or fascism). To show how important China is when it comes to CO2 emissions, here's a telling video showing the total CO2 emission by country from the 1960s onwards. Notice what happens with China on this 2000s.
What China does is really the crucial issue.
Comparing absolute emissions and relative rise in emissions isn't really telling us much, China has 3 times the population of the US and was a developing country. The US, the beacon of capitalism, still has double the emissions per capita of China.
Quoting ssu
Yes, and while it certainly looks bad in absolute numbers (which does matter for the physics of climate change), I have more confidence in their ability to turn it around faster than Western countries. Apparently they tend to underpromise and overshoot on declared reduction-targets, unlike the west.
When it comes to the actual climate change, it's absolute emissions that ACTUALLY DO MATTER, as you said later. Otherwise Qatar would be far more important than the US or China.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
And it also has the ability to decrease it's emissions, which it actually has. And likely can take the example from some states that have been more successful than others. The frightening aspect is WHEN China get more and more wealthier. There's a lot of more potential demand both in China and India than there is in the US, hence those countries are crucial here.
Again, the most important issue is to deal where the growth is. Not where positive reductions are taking place, even if continuing that trend is important.
Why more confidence?
So the fact that China's kicking our ass in growth means what exactly? That's not central planning? Or is that not socialism? We don't have "central planning" in the US? On the contrary, there is massive state intervention and direction in the economy, at all levels -- from the Fed on down.
Give me a break.
It means that they changed their socialism to controlled capitalism, basically fascism, and then they got their take off. The Great Leap or the Cultural Revolution didn't bring more prosperity and economic growth. Even India got it's rapid growth when it left socialist programs out.
Socialist central planning is literally doing away with the market mechanism. It doesn't work. It's totally different from having let's say "an industrial policy" as many capitalist countries have had. South Korea, Taiwan are great examples how industrial policies have been successful transforming a poor country to a wealthy one.
Hence the real question is, how awesome would China be if it had similar economic growth as Taiwan has had?
Quoting ssu
Well yes absolute emissions matter for climate change, and so everybody will have to reduce its emissions.
India and China are crucial just because they have the largest populations by far. That's why growth there is such a big issue.
Reduction in emissions have been meager in the US and in Europe. This has been the result of some 'low-hanging-fruit' policies that didn't have to hurt. The question is will they continue to find democratic support for more drastic measures?
China may be more resolute and effective in implementing the energy-transition because of it's governance-structure, it doesn't need democratic support. And India, yeah, don't know about them.
This may sound a bit unfounded because the numbers aren't there yet... but they are on the rise, they seem to have the confidence and will to get things done as a society right now.
The west on the other hand? Well we all know the story, a lot of political and societal uncertainty... can we still muster the political will to get projects on such scale done?
When we do muster the political will, the standard response is that it isn't enough. We sideline positive news. Our critical media is showing us where we fail. In China that critical media isn't tolerated. Needless to say, for example the smog problem is far more difficult in China than in let's say West European large cities or even New York. London doesn't have the famous smog as it had earlier. There is pervasive bias that shows in the ecological reporting from a totalitarian country and a Western democracy.
For example the air quality in New York is multiple times better than in Chinese Mega-cities. Just think how American media would treat politicians if it would be the other way around.
The Soviet Union and Communist China have literally pillaged their environment and environmental issue were not all important under Marxism-Leninism. The problem is that there were none of those safety-valves that a democracy has. There are no watch-groups or simply private landowners to make notice. When everything is owned by the state, who cares what happens?
(A smelter surrounded by an ecological disaster zone in Norilsk.)
Environmental protection isn't at all anywhere in large Asian countries as China (and India) where it is in the West. Just to give an example, think about the large river systems:
Despite the fact Madrid is the second city of the world with the most trees planted, I am happy our Mayor is motivated to keep planting more than 100.000 of many species. I guess it is important not only because our health and living but to show how a developed European capital city should look like.
I really want to see more green in this picture of my city!
(How about that waste management? Street in Lagos after rains)
One shouldn't forget that China is relatively late to the industrialization-party. Of course they are worse at dealing with it if you only take a snapshot of where we are today, they have had far less experience with it than we have.
Anyway I would even agree with the statement that communism isn't any better, or maybe even worse, at dealing with environmental problems. People get antsy very fast if they are confronted with environmental problems in their backyard, there I would agree that democratic societies are more responsive in solving those issues. But climate change isn't just any environmental problem. What sets it apart is precisely that we don't experience any direct adverse effects from it, and that it requires some foresight, some vision to deal with it.
Because I've been immersing myself in this issue a lot lately, I've been harassing people with it, maybe a bit to much... . Usually their response is essentially that they won't do anything about it if it costs them anything. They are waiting for the government to take action, to take some policy-measure to support renewables or some other government incentive that addresses the issue... but the government generally won't do anything if it isn't something that would be supported by a large part of the population, which is only democratic I suppose. But then you end up with a catch 22 where no one will take initiative to solve the issue if it "costs" something.
So here is the nub of the matter, things like overall change of the climate aren't valued in our system because it only has indirect, long term effects on us. Of course that's not to say communism is necessarily any better in dealing with it, it's not. They value mostly in the same way we do, as they too are bound by the same world-economy logic for the most part. What is different is that China at least have the capability of a longer term vision because they aren't bound to a 4 or 5 year democratic election cycle... and in a system that allows for longer term vision there is at least the possibility that climate change is something that can be valued. The CCP knows climate change will come back to haunt them because they think they will still be in power when the effects become apparent... A Trump or a Biden on the other hand don't really care because it probably won't matter one iota to them.
Yes, there is something positive about the NIMBY.
Now the socialist system did have a lot of committees and so on, yet what was lacking was the huge thing that turns people to behave differently: when they are landowners. Might sound funny, but there's a big truth to this. Let's say a person is working in a student body as a student. He or she has then some incentive as a student on what the body does. Now put him or her to be a landowner and the issue about the use of his or her land. Likely he or she won't take it so lightly. Socialism needed for people to be as devoted to the "common thing", the country, as an individual landowner can be to his or her land. That is a big thing to ask from people and that's why some refer to what the Soviet Union did to it's environment as Ecocide.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
The basic problem is that people are OK with restrictions, limitations or fees when they aren't personally affected. Yet they can and will go with draconian measures if everybody goes with them. The pandemic response has been a good example of this. My best friend died last year (not of Covid) and in his funeral there was only the priest, his mother and father and one uncle. He had more friends than me and more relatives. Now to argue that the government here could decide that more than five people cannot meet would have sounded quite incredible few years ago. But here there were no complaints about it, perhaps in all two or three small demonstrations have happened in the whole country.
Yet for draconian measures, you need a big catastrophy.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I think it matters at least to the Democrats. Let's not forget Al Gore and his favorite subject.
Yet notice that a lot in the environmental standards and environmental protection happens in the US in the state level with California having a big role. If California sets some standards, manufacturers apply to them. You could argue that on the federal level there for example hasn't been a true energy policy or industrial policy, yet the US can do a lot even without the White House getting involved. Don't think that one person, the US President, actually can do much. A lot happens without him too.
Yes, the CCP has had quite successful 5-year plans and has long term plans. But note that such have been there with other capitalist countries, that have been quite successful.
In all, we need cooperation, yet as this is a case of "learning-while-doing", it can be also good that countries adapt various policies as then we can see what have been the best ones. There is no silver bullet: our climate is such a complex maze that we will be learning new things and lessons as we go. Many things that we now look to be good ideas might later be showed to have been disasters.
The standard line of most people still stuck in capitalist propaganda. So it has to mean that. Why? Because socialism "never works." End of discussion.
They are ruled by the communist party. But magically, the gains they've achieved is "capitalism"?
China, like the United States -- but more so -- directs and intervenes in their economy. Without state intervention, there would be no "capitalism."
There’s plenty of literature on the true history of development: Ha-Joon Chang, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, many others. The fact that from England, to the US, to Europe and Japan and the recent Asian “tigers,” large-scale state intervention and radical interference with markets has been a leading factor in economic development. In the US it’s so extreme that it’s laughable.
Quoting ssu
China massively interferes with markets. As does the United States. The former has a communist government, the latter a republican government. China is outpacing the US in GDP, by far -- so that must be capitalism. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.
As I'll say a thousand times: free markets are fantasies. They don't exist. You're simply doing what all capitalist apologists do: when something succeeds, call it capitalism. When it fails, call it socialism. No matter the context or details or history.
What next? Pointing to Venezuela as an example of a "socialist nightmare"? I can hear the same thing on Fox News.
The official line is that they have 21st Century Marxism and it works just well as they aren't fixated to dogmatic principles or take Marxism as a religion. Others would say that it is government controlled capitalism as they do use the market mechanism and there is private property.
Yes. China opening up was important. Starting from the Shenzen area opposite to Hong Kong. Actually it was the typical rags to riches story that has happened in many countries.
With socialism, they got their atomic bomb and intercontinental missile, yet then there was the possibility of famine still. Today this isn't so.
Yes, marxism-leninism, stalinism or maoism didn't work so well. They really genuinely sucked. You have even two countries with similar culture, heritage and history that were divided with one part being capitalist and the other socialist. These examples leave nothing in doubt.
Property works yes, but it's not the only thing that can get people to care about something, and it need not be on the level of the individual either. You'd be surprised what sportsfans would do for 'their team', yet there's no property-relation of any kind... there just needs to be some identification. That's maybe easier said than done, sure, but it's possible to have this kind of relation without property.
I'd certainly agree Sovjet-communism didn't get there, there was a sense of everybody knowing that everybody knew that it was a bit of a farce. And I think this applies to some extend to governments of western societies too at this moment. Kings and statesmen of old maybe still had some sense of the country being 'their country', a sense of ownership and the responsibility that comes with that... Now most politicians seem predominately careerists and are mostly only concerned with that.
Quoting ssu
It depends on the particular culture I suppose. Fins probably are more reasonable then most. In the US for instance there was more resistance to relatively non-intrusive measures like wearing a face-mask.
Quoting ssu
It became his favorite subject after his career as a politician was basically done, is my reading of it.
Quoting ssu
Sure states can do a lot, but California probably isn't all that representative for the states of the US, as they have an atypical demographic and culture. But okay maybe we can get there if general culture everywhere shifts along the same lines... it's kind of crossing our fingers though and hoping that we will get there in time.
Quoting ssu
I will say sometimes you just got to push something through. The writing of renewables is on the wall, some sectors and political factions are just holding onto something that had its time. It's like the coal-mines in the seventies or eighties that were struggling to survive in my country. We pumped in tons of money in an effort to preserve the industry and the jobs it provided, only to have to shut them down anyway a decade later. If they had the vision to transition earlier by investing in other industries, it would have been better for everybody involved.
There maybe is no one silver-bullet, but there are some no-brainers like transitioning the energy-sector to renewables as fast as possible. I would bet money on countries transitioning early being better off in the long-run.
Of course not!
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Being a fan of a sports team is something that can bind the rich man and the poor man. These kind of issues that both the poor and the rich can both support are unfortunately quite rare. Yet they are extremely essential. One thing that usually works, is patriotism. Assuming the whole country doesn't work at all and simply sucks. Even Stalin as a shrewd politician understood this an made the fight against the Nazi "the Great Patriotic War" for those who ought to have been globalists at heart.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
A good reference would be then to look at what Texas is doing. If things there change, that is important.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
That is the real obstacles for the change needed. People that worry that they will become paupers, that everything will stop and die where they live. The fear for example in the rust belt in the US is real and that fear basically gave us Trump. I think this political clash will obviously grow larger in the future.
For the industry I think reality has dawned on them. Just like BP preaches to it's workers that it now stands for "Beyond Petroleum" the writing is on the wall. Hence the desperation in the old coal mining areas is real and hence the voters there will give their votes to any Trump there is that promises them help.
It's a similar fear of the people who get their income farming in Brazil in the new areas claimed from the forest. They see the outside pressure as literally something stealing their livelyhood. Hence for a populist like Bolsonaro it's easy to choose what strings to pull.
Hence articles which depict the situation in Brazil are like this:
So does the media report on the things in Brazil. Yet what are the feelings in Brazil among those who support Bolsonaro?
"Government controlled capitalism." That's state-capitalism, which is the only capitalism that exists. It's what exists in the United States as well. Government direction and interference on every level. No "free market" fantasies. So to attribute China's gains to "capitalism," despite their government being communist, is saying exactly nothing.
Quoting ssu
Actually they worked just fine, by many metrics. They also had plenty of problems -- major ones. The United States has plenty of problems, too.
The most vicious, most brutal, and most lethal of all, of course -- if this is the game we're going to play -- has to be capitalism, by far. So perhaps include that on your list of things that "haven't worked so well."
Quoting ssu
I agree. Capitalism really, genuinely sucks too -- and in many ways is far worse.
Quoting ssu
They leave plenty to doubt -- about your depth of analysis.
Again, way not just point to "Venezuela"? Nice and easy, and no need to think. Throwing around terms like "capitalism" and "socialism," when you have no idea what they mean, is pointless. All that has existed is state capitalism, and there are many measures of what's considered successful or not, and many reasons for the successes or failures. If pointing to East/West Germany, calling one capitalist and the other socialist, really settles it for you -- then you're welcome to that.
Life thrives in warm water. Which is going to increase with climate change.
The fish shall inherit the earth. Dolphins will evolve thumbs and be the dominant intelligent lifeform in the future on waterworld.
The government doesn't interfere all the time and everywhere. Housing prices, the prices of taxi cabs and many other prices are usually left alone. The vast majority of companies and corporations are privately owned. The Western Mixed-Capitalism model is really different from China.
There is a difference when you compare China to other countries:
For example in the UK, you do have the occasional partly-owned BP, but otherwise...
Quoting Xtrix
Let's start with the famines in the US. How many have there been thanks to US economic policy been inflicted to the American people?
That's like saying the law doesn't interfere all the time and everywhere. That doesn't mean we're lawless. Likewise, if one can point to instances where markets are somehow not influenced by government, that doesn't mean we have "free markets."
Quoting ssu
Sure, and we're "left alone" sometimes too. When driving, and there's no police around -- for example.
Furthermore, there are some instances of "free markets" throughout the world and throughout history. Maybe Egypt or Greece? Even there it's dubious.
When it comes to countries and their governments, however, the state is always involved -- on every level. I can't think of a time in modern history where that isn't true. If you know of one, I'll be happy to look at it.
Take your housing example. The government doesn't "usually" interfere? What's "usually"? Of course they do -- nearly all the time. How? Through the control of interest rates and money supply. Whether and how banks are regulated matters a great deal. Look no further than 2008, not that long ago. Yes, the corporate world -- specifically the financial sector -- had a big responsibility themselves (perhaps a taste a "free markets"?). But it wouldn't have happened without government essentially allowing it.
Regardless, whether housing prices are up or down is very much a matter of fiscal and monetary policy.
Quoting ssu
Different, not "really different." There's massive state influence here, there's massive state influence there. Both can be "capitalist" or "socialist," depending on what you want to believe.
Quoting ssu
Or we could start with slavery in the US. As capitalist as it gets. Or the huge income inequality. Millions of Americans are in poverty, homeless, hungry or food-insecure (around 35 million). As far as economic growth, China beats us by far in GDP.
It's convenient to highlight the flaws, mistakes, and failures of other countries and ignore our own. To attribute the great Chinese famine to "socialism," but not slavery to capitalism, is an interesting trick -- but not worth taking too seriously.
There's massive state intervention in all "capitalist" societies, and nothing like the free market fantasies that ideologues have dreamt up. Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, usually, but is unique in its employer-employee relationship -- which is a better definition of it. Socialism, likewise, can mean state ownership of production. That's one strand, and one definition. A better one, in my view, is simply democracy at the workplace, where there's no employer-employee dynamic, and where the employees own and run the company democratically, as many co-op models demonstrate. Neither China nor the US has a system which is predominantly socialist, then. What actually exists is state-capitalism -- which is really just capitalists (employers, owners, especially organized in the form of the multinational corporation) more or less controlling the state. In China, one could argue the state has more power than the corporate sector, but the influences are there as well. They're just as capitalist as America, in this respect -- the difference being that the state runs things rather than the multinationals.
Hardly socialism. Or "pure" laissez faire capitalism.
The big IPCC report— pretty sobering.
Looks like warming is already locked in and there’s no time to waste to prevent even worse effects.
We’re not alarmed nearly enough.
There is a perfect example of this from my own country. The government brought in price controls in the 1970's which basically crushed the rental market and basically made a structural over demand for rental homes. My great aunt remembered being as a land-lord that people were so desperate that they even sent the first monthly payment through mail. In the 1990's if you put an announcement in the paper, you would start getting phone calls right from the morning with 40 to 100 calls daily. The demand was far more than the demand and public housing was only for the most poor or unemployed and basically didn't do anything to counter the demand.
Then the government deregulated the market. No caps for prices, total freedom in the writing of rental agreements. And what happened? Companies sprang up that rented flats and a lot of supply for rental homes appeared. Now if you put an announcement up, you'll get a couple of inquiries. And unlike with the housing prices, the rental prices have gone up only modestly basically with inflation. Suddenly a supply has emerged that wasn't there before. And this is what many don't understand at all from the importance of a market mechanism.
Quoting Xtrix
Actually, modern Egypt is the perfect example why people are poor and stay poor in Third World countries: when a normal working family cannot get a loan to buy a house, no wealth is created when they have rent all their life a home. And once when people are poor and stay poor, there isn't that important domestic demand that would create jobs and growth.
Quoting Xtrix
And the US got rid of it in the 19th Century. Obviously not an inherent part of capitalism.
Last famines in Western Europe were in Ireland and Finland, actually, in the 19th Century. Yet the Chinese and Russians saw famines in the 20th Century directly because of the implemented socialist programs. The famine because of the Great Leap Forward killed an estimated 30 to 55 million people. North Korea has seen famine in our lifetime in the 1990's and likely even in this Century. What is common to all is the implementation of socialist central planning that really didn't work. Even North Korea has had to veer of from strict socialism. So it's a bit different, really.
Quoting Xtrix
When you start from far poorer state, naturally growth is far more rapid. Let's remember that the US nominal GDP is larger than China's GDP, even if China has three times more population.
Living basically as north as Alaska is, the collapse of the Gulf stream would have an effect here. "Nicest" outcome would be just hotter summers and colder winters. Oh well, Anchorage isn't so bad.
Quoting ssu
Quoting ssu
Quoting ssu
This is completely irrelevant. It's also anecdotal.
So I'll repeat: government interferes all the time, on every level. There's no denying this. Whether this interference works out well or not is another question.
The "market mechanism" you refer to is more free market fantasy. So while you attribute the so-called successes of deregulation on the housing market, you apparently ignore another rather better example of deregulation: the crash of 2008. Deregulation caused the crash (small government), and then the companies that caused the crisis were bailed out (by big government). That's exactly the point, too. An excellent example of the results of neoliberal policies -- and the false consciousness of those who promote them.
Quoting ssu
Given the reference to "throughout history," it should be fairly obvious I'm referring to antiquity. Modern Egypt and modern Greece are a different story.
Quoting ssu
Yes, and ask why they're poor in the first place, when they were a very wealthy country around the turn of 20th. Because textbook "capitalist" principles were forced upon them. So it's funny you should bring that up.
Quoting ssu
And China is no longer in famine, and are currently dominating us in growth. Obviously not inherently part of communism.
Quoting ssu
It's as much attributable to socialism as it is to capitalism, if one is so inclined to define things that way. China and Russia also had very significant successes, which you will undoubtably ignore -- or will attribute to "capitalism," I suppose.
I'm not interested in defending the policies of China -- but I'm also not inclined to ignore the facts: they have a communist government that controls the market on levels even greater than the United States, and they're dominating us. So much for "communism" leading to nothing but famine and disaster. So then you try to either minimize these facts or else attempt to attribute them to "capitalism" -- which is completely absurd, on every level, even if you don't mean "free market capitalism" (which doesn't exist).
If China is beating us in growth -- shouldn't that mean they're MORE capitalist? Would anyone argue this? Quite a neat trick to pull.
Quoting ssu
China is not poor. They're the second biggest economy in the world. Their growth of 6% a year is more than the 2-3% for the US.
But I see where this is going with you: whatever happens that's good is capitalism, whatever happens that's negative is communism. Or else highlight the failures of the latter while ignoring the successes. So there's no reason in pretending to have a rational discussion. Stick with your dogma.
Yeah, I guess we can all believe what we want to believe. Personally I'd rather listen to the people who know what they're talking about. But that's me.
Hardly. Price fixing simply doesn't work. What else is central planning that replaces the market mechanism?
Quoting Xtrix
If you assume that having rules and legislation is "inteference", then I guess your idea that governments interfere all the time on every level is true.
Yet how typically people understand government interference, there is a huge difference between classic socialist countries and modern mixed economies.
Quoting Xtrix
Communism hasn't simply not worked. Marxism-Leninism didn't work. Maoism didn't work. Juche-ideology still doesn't work.
Besides, when you disregard the most successful and most popular branch of leftist thought (which is SO typical nowdays), then this is quite irrefutable.
Simply repeating "market mechanism" ad nauseam means absolutely nothing.
Lots of things replace the "market mechanism," as I've stated several times, if by "market mechanism" we essentially mean free markets. The Federal Reserve is the most "central planning" you can get. What they do effects the entire economy in extreme ways. What China does is also "central planning" -- massive involvement in the economy.
Mixed economies is what we have. No free market fantasies.
Quoting ssu
It's not simply regulations, laws, or rules. Although that's significant enough. It's subsidies, tax incentives, tax breaks, government contracts, and bailouts. It's also, of course, monetary policy -- of which the "central" bank is in charge. Where is this elusive "free market" system in this scenario?
Quoting ssu
"How typically people understand"? Well then typically people are completely misunderstanding.
Quoting ssu
Capitalism hasn't simply not worked. Neoliberalism doesn't work. Keynesianism hasn't worked. Etc.
(And to emphasize this air-tight argument, I can point to slavery, frequent economic crashes -- some devastating, income inequality, monopoly, the government bailouts, too big to fail, financialization, outsourcing, worker layoffs, shutting down plants, union busting, hundreds of legal violations and criminal convictions, ...and on and on -- all while ignoring the good that's come of a mixed economic system. Not a great way to argue, but I'll simply continue to mirror what you're doing until you come to understand its absurdity.)
Quoting ssu
It's so typical these days that people ignore the most successful/popular branch of leftist thought -- which is what, exactly? By ignoring this leftist thought, it makes the statement "Communism has never worked" irrefutable?
I have no idea what you're talking about here.
And if you don't understand how socialism worked in Soviet Union or China...
Quoting Xtrix
Seems so. And that's why you use socialism and communism as synonyms.
What is this branch? Where can I get me some? Sounds successful and popular.
What am I supposed to do with freezer burnt, year old meat that is raw and I don't have a willing human to consume it.
BUT....I was told NOT to just throw it away but absolutely make use of the energy of the meat and not just waste it.
Waste the meat?
Waste the energy contained within the meat?
Waste the means to cook the meat?
I know this sounds absurd on a great deal of levels in my mind but these younger people, who also share the ranch with us are SERIOUS!
I had to talk them back from tossing it out into the desert because it draws more than seed eaters which are all I would really like attract since we have animals as pets.
Suggestions on how to achieve what they are shooting for?
Yeah, no. Our animals are on food that keeps their insides stable.
Any other ideas?
I haven't made any claims about how "socialism" worked in either, because it's a ridiculous notion. Completely meaningless until we say what we mean by "socialism." Turns out what you mean by it is very strange indeed, at least for anyone who's familiar with the intellectual tradition, if you equate socialism with the USSR or China.
So (1) what is meant by "socialism," and (2) if socialism is "central planning," then where does socialism end and capitalism begin in China? (Likewise for the United States -- who are in many ways a socialist country as well -- but socialist for the wealthy. for multinational corporations, and for the finance sector.)
Quoting ssu
No, it has nothing to do with either. A fatuous remark.
I have no idea what you're talking about because it's poorly written. If you wrote better, then I would understand what you mean. Unlike you, who apparently values feigning understanding for some reason, I will admit when I have no idea what you're saying. But I deeply suspect, given this interchange, that the fault is with you. I'm happy to be proven wrong. A comment like the above isn't leading me to lean that way.
Actually too successful for many eager leftists.
You don't know them?
Have ruled Sweden forever, basically. Our prime minister here belongs to this movement. The parties of the rose.
Have you heard about AOC?
Those leftists.
Wow.
Who would equate socialism with the USSR and Communist China (or Cuba, Venezuela or North Korea)? :roll:
As I said: those who know very little about the socialist tradition. Kind of like modern usage of “conservative”, or “libertarian.”
If socialism is central planning, then the US has major elements of that— look at the central bank, for example. (To say nothing of fiscal policy, which also interferes on a massive scale.)
China’s GDP growth is far more than ours. Yet your strategy is to either dismiss that or attribute it to capitalism (by which you apparently mean free markets).
This alone should tell you that your concepts aren’t serving you well. In my view, you’re yet another victim of years of indoctrination on this matter. So much so that it seems ludicrous to suggest the USSR and China aren’t in line with mainstream socialist thinking at all (which is true). National socialism had the word right in it— are we convinced that was socialism?
It helps to know the tradition and the varying strands that developed. First and foremost, of course, is to actually read Marx. But then Rocker, Bakunin, Luxemburg, etc. Otherwise — begging your pardon— your understanding of these matters is very superficial.
I think you are living proof of how shallow and nonexistent historical knowledge is and how people pick just what they want to hear. Because I don't think you are trolling. Oh yes, USSR and Communist China weren't mainstream socialist thinking!
That is hilariously funny.
Quoting Xtrix
Let's do that!
Here's Rosa on the Soviet Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks:
Soo... tells us that USSR was "non-mainstream socialism" and we (or I) should read, among others, Rosa Luxembourg. Well, after reading that praise of Lenin and the bolsheviks above from Rosa Luxembourg herself, I think it's obvious that one of us doesn't know history, or what people actually wrote, and in this case it isn't me.
You can contradict this with her conclusion to the text if you like, but can't you just let the council communists have their venerable Rosa Luxembourg?
I have no problem with that. Besides, people contradicting themselves isn't anything new.
Yet if people start saying that Marxism-Leninism wasn't socialism or mainstream socialism, then I oppose that argument. That is the worst kind of rewriting of history. The next phase would be to argue that the USSR was actually capitalist. And noboby, NOBODY, has tried to implement true Marxist theories into reality.
Of course, with mainstream socialism (in the West) one could argue to be talking about social democracy, not communism. That would have a point. But I don't think that people here are making that argument.
Yeah, that's what I just said about you. Good response, Donald Trump.
To demonstrate how accurate my statement is:
Quoting ssu
Right -- it's hilariously funny for those with a shallow understanding of the socialist tradition and who apparently have never read a word of Marx.
But Chomsky speaks about it more succinctly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsC0q3CO6lM
Quoting ssu
You should read Rosa Luxemburg. You haven't so far, and I urge you to.
Apparently you don't understand even what you quoted. You also fail to cite the source (relevant, given the very fluid circumstances of the revolution) -- which is from 1918. Not once is "mainstream socialism" (which is my wording) mentioned -- so that remark is irrelevant, but yes there is a spirit of solidarity -- of course. Lenin endorsed many aspects of mainstream socialism at first-- and that almost immediately changed. (Trump talked a populist game -- so what?)
Where, for example, is the mention of a "labor army" in Luxemburg? What happened to worker control over production? Luxemburg criticized Lenin for this, and the "opportunistic vanguardism" as Chomsky mentions above, and Lenin himself justified his policies as only "temporarily necessary" as a holding action until the real revolution happened in Germany.
But I'm sure you know all that, given your very nuanced views.
Quoting ssu
No -- it's exactly that.
Leninism, Stalinism, and Maoism, were not in the mainstream socialist tradition. The mainstream socialists/Marxists advocated for worker control over production. There's none of that in the above mentioned policies.
So I repeat: your view of socialism is a weird one. But very much in line with pop culture and average, mainstream opinion -- which is very superficial, and which is a result of indoctrination in the educational and media systems. Sorry! That's ultimately no real fault of your own, in my view.
No, I'm talking about 19th century socialist and Marxist thought, which advocated worker control. Not top-down state control, not socially beneficial state legislation, and certainly not autocratic rule. There were socialists that were statist and anti-statist, for example.
That workers control the factories they work in goes way back. Being their own board of directors. Basically eliminating "owners" and employers. That's the mainstream socialism in the 19th century. I didn't say that was mainstream today. If what's mainstream today is "democratic socialism," then that's a different story.
What does this have to do with what the USSR and China? They can call themselves "socialist" or "communist," and maybe they represent some deviation of the mainstream thought, or maybe it's a pretense. But it doesn't matter much when you look at how they run their societies.
I hear what you're saying and have even authored a post on it myself, which also devolved unto a debate about Rosa Luxembourg, but you do as a certain disservice when you fail to recognize the distinctions between what I guess that I'll call the "authoritarian" and "libertarian" Left. There's a long and troubled political history of collaboration, persecution, betrayals, conversions, generalized avoidance, and animosity between us. Plenty of people within the libertarian Left have plenty of ideas as to what to do about them, but, I am of a rather exclusive position within the libertarian Left, which is often mistaken for so-called "sectarianism", a very serious problem within the Left that has little to nothing to do with being wholly unwilling to either collaborate or associate with Marxist-Leninists and the like.
Actually I was taught Marxist economics in the University. Along with mainstream economics, perhaps I should add.
But I guess you never did visited East Germany or the Soviet Union. I had opportunity to do so, even lived for a short time with a Russian family in Moscow during the Gorbachev era. Pretty interesting to compare that experience to the few years I was in the US as a child.
Be just in your fantasies about what "true socialism" is and rewrite history to what you want it to be.
They had you read Marx in university? I know you're not in the US, but I can guarantee you didn't go to an American university. Glad to hear.
Quoting ssu
I did not. I never visited the Moon, either. But I can still understand it.
Quoting ssu
I'm sure Russia was a shithole and the US was much nicer. That would be my guess.
The fact that you think this proves something is exactly what I'm driving at when I mention your indoctrination. But again, indoctrination doesn't mean you're a bad human being, in my view. You're just mistaken. I would fault you for being unwilling to learn and listen, however.
Actually, there is a "libertarian" left. They are the social democrats, parties like the Labour party in the UK. And they have been very successful politically, opposed to the communists in Western democracies.
Perhaps it's one thing to have an academic or philosophical debate about socialism and then have the situation were people actually implement it in reality. Then the question really is, are they OK with any of the "Old" institutions, or is everything out and in with the new. If so, that everything old has to go, what then to do with those who oppose such reform. I think there goes the real divide: not in words, but in actions by with we should make the difference between "authoritarian" and "libertarian".
Boring.
So you're unable to defend yourself, I take it.
Of course. Something as important as Marxism ought to be naturally taught in an university. And the assistant professor was a Marxist, actually. He made his best effort to teach just what Marx had in his mind. Far better than the brief introduction I got in philosophy at the gymnasium.
Quoting Xtrix
It wasn't a shithole. Russians as people are really great and friendly. When they have a guest, they really treat you very well. Here people try to be "decent" and just give you something modest in order not to "show off". But they, the Russians, didn't believe at all in the system. I remember that I wanted to go a Lenin museum we walked by in the City Center. I remember the expression of the girl from the family and her reply: "Uuuhh...OK, let's go". Even if she was a pioneer (or something) and could then visit my country.
On the other hand, Seattle was nice in the start of the 1980's.
Quoting Xtrix
Personally I'd hold such views to the math & logic section in PF. There it can be so.
Let's get back to the topic.
I understand that you have a preference for Social Democracy, which I think is just fine, but you are kind of dismissing distinctions that have been made throughout our political history.
In order to take over the International Workingman's Association, Karl Marx waged a slew of polemical diatribes against the anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin. Such partial demagogy became fully pronounced by one, Vladimir Lenin, in his various diatribes against more or less any of his political opponents, particularly, in this case, the left-wing communists. There was considerable initial support for the so-called "Russian Revolution" on the part of the libertarian Left, but they did, by and large, end up fighting against the Bolsheviks during the latter half of the Russian Civil War. That resulted in their near complete and total elimination from Soviet society during the early stages of the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin, as well as considerable condemnation from various factions of the libertarian Left abroad. There was the lengthy intellectual dispute, of which France was the center, beginning, perhaps, with Socialism ou Barbarie, a notably anti-Leninist and libertarian socialist organization, and subsuquent quote unquote third camp political philosophies to emerge, all of which contributed to the culmination of the protests in France in May of 1968. Within the former Czechslovakia, there was "Socialism with a Human Face" and Prague Spring. Within the United States, there's a clear history of Anarchist movements, most notably, perhaps, the International Workers of the World. A lot of Anarchists came out against Stalin from the immediate outset. It's not like every faction of the libertarian Left took the long course away from Marxism-Leninism like the French Communist Party.
There are plenty are critiques to make of the libertarian Left, a failure to cope with the history of Marxism-Leninism being one of them, of which the notion that the Soviet Union was "state capitalist" you have cited, but, to simply essentialize all of Anarchism, Socialism, and Communism as necessarily resulting in totalitarianism is fairly unfair. There was the Paris Commune, Republican Spain, and a few libertarian Left communities to have arisen throughout all of human history, and, so, we do kind of get of being perpetrators of humanitarian catastrophes purely by only ever having waged failed revolutions, but there is not a historical instance of humanitarian catastrophe that anywhere near approaches that of other political philosophies.
I was still typing. I don't feel a need to keep debating this, but, that may or may not be possible as @Xtrix's solution to the ecological crisis, like mine, though I'm willing to exit this thread, as they have taken a disliking to me, may involve some sort of alternative to Liberal democracy.
If we want to continue, then I guess another thread may be more correct. Still climate change is worth a thread...even if one has said everything there is to say (at least by one's own thinking).
I'll guess I'll end my remarks with this:
Good summary. But notice that it follows a very distinct line. Because the line is about more like different groups among the communists and the anarchists. I'm not an ardent supporter of social democracy, but I think it has had more impact on our lives than Marxism. Why?
Because there are things like workers rights and the building of the welfare state, like with the government of Clement Attlee creating an extensive system of social welfare (including a National Health Service). Or the Fabian Society in UK. Or the SPD in Germany. Francois Miterrand in France.
That kind of socialism, the social democratic type and not the revolutionary type has had an effect in our own societies.
Arguing about whose political system is more responsible, and what it should be called, and not even addressing the issue is a very clear demonstration of how all your politics have failed and all your philosophies likewise.
That's only because you fail to see how nonviolent gradualist Anarchism, blind faith in Noam Chomsky, or Social Democracy are all actual solutions to the ecological crisis.
I think it can extend to history and economics as well, but…
Quoting ssu
Agreed.
It’s a disliking with your ideas, perhaps. No one knows each other here. We’re all using screen names after all.
Depends on what you mean by liberal democracy. I’ll be clear as to what I want: democracy though and though, including within corporate governance. As it stands now, we have very limited democracy in the political sphere (structurally and through legislation and court decisions— and continually right up to the present), and when it comes to how corporations are organized and run, literally zero.
I think this is related to climate change, but it’s several steps removed from the more immediate solutions available and so perhaps a stretch to argue it should continue on this thread.
Right, like, some form of economic democracy, probably somehow coupled with some form of participatory democracy, which it doesn't necessarily have to be, but probably is, all of which, I have no qualms with, but would be a solution beyond Liberal democracy, which is effectively representative democracy.
I think that only gradualist nonviolent Anarchism, a unanimous support the better of the green movements, or both can even completely resolve the ecological crisis. You, I suspect, have a similar postulate.
It's your thread, though, and there is plenty that can be done now, and, so, we don't have to continue to debate this, as it is kind of off-topic.
I agree with everything you said except this. I don’t consider it “mine” — someone had to start a thread on climate change and it happened to be me. But it’s a general repository for discussions.
Sure, everyone can participate in the thread however, but it is your prompt that everyone responds to. Most people probably just read your original post and then a few on the last few pages. Most of my threads usually devolve unto debates about Anarchism, which I generally agree to, but do kind of feel like people should stay somehow on topic. I'm pretty open to whatever discourse as well, though.
France on the other hand doesn't have much to worry about and exports it's power to the EU.
Oil and gas effectively killed nuclear with hype and batshittery in the US with fear and paranoia.
I sure do hope molten salt new nuclear reactors or Thorium reactors make a comeback, because I don't see hydrogen replacing petroleum or solar satisfying demand in the near future.
Oh, yeah, fusion is always 50 years away, blah blah blah.
Molten salt reactors and Thorium reactors are both still preferable to the nuclear reactors that we have now, particularly because of the decrease in waste and difficulties that arise in producing nuclear bombs from them, but, I kind of feel like, should they have been put into effect, it should have happened in the 1950s.
It seems to me that abandoning nuclear power altogether and investing in greener technologies is the only real way forward.
That's not how it works out in practice in my opinion. 'Green' technology simply cannot compete with nuclear in certain domains that are essential to shifting from fossil fuels. Nuclear pretty much beats green technology on levelized cost of exploitation. A multi-gigawatt nuclear power station will last some 50+ years and requires little maintenance rather than fuel exchange.
Wind is pretty significant in my opinion, yet, still nuclear wins out most of the time.
Try and build a gigawatt solar farm for example or a gigawatt wind farm.
It says in the "100% renewable energy" article on Wikipedia that "supporters of 100% renewable energy do not consider nuclear power as renewable or sustainable due to perceived risks of disasters and high-level waste management, ignoring scientific consensus about these risks being both manageable and comparable with risks from renewable energy sources, and consider carbon capture and storage to have limited safe storage potential", the citation for said consensus being this document, and, so, I don't really know who to trust. I watched Into Eternity awhile ago and that didn't make it seem like nuclear energy wasn't dangerous.
Yeah, we went a certain direction with nuclear in the 50's, and this was a conscious choice for the attainment of weapons grade material. Whilst there are already demonstrated molten salt reactors with a 0% chance of meltdown... It's literally melted down, get it? Bad'tish.
And then there is the chance event of nuclear fuel escaping a nuclear power plant seems so farfetched, yet is taken sooooo seriously, that essentially you negate a positive future for hundreds of millions of people by fear alone.
Go figure.
Batshittery I tell ya.
Well, the proponents of molten salt and Thorium claim that there is no possibility of creating nuclear weapons due to the reactors, but, it is actually just very difficult to. I'm kind of thinking that, where there's a will, there's a way, y'know what I mean?
Being said, what'll probably happen is that we'll transition to nuclear power for electricity, whilst continuing to develop other clean and renewable energy sources. That's, of course, assuming that even those things happen. If they do, molten salt and Thorium reactors would be preferable.
I still think that we ought to be developing technologies currently and seek to move beyond nuclear power eventually, though.
With regards to this thought, we are desperately in need of alternate sources for base power that can substitute for existing gas and oil power plants. Wind is a contender; but, the US spends a miniscule amount on wind as it is, while the EU went solidly with wind.
The real contender is fusion, but it's still a far away goal as it is. The only substitute that doesn't need huge investment in storing electricity is still nuclear. For some reason this doesn't get mentioned enough that power actually needs to be replaced, not created out of thin air. Bad'tch, another wind power reference
I tend to be on your side in terms of nuclear. While I appreciate arguments against nuclear power, like the fact that they occasionally explode, like the problems of extracting uranium (or whatever), and the problems of storage -- it's still clean energy in terms of carbon emissions. It should therefore be a big component of future targets. But that'll require, above all, rehabilitating its reputation.
Quoting Xtrix
It only took Chernobyl (actually exploded), Three Mile Island, and Fukushima to do it. I tell you there's something psychological about nuclear that commands human irrationality...
But, when you do the research, how many people have actually died from nuclear power?
Right. It's extremely rare. But people don't want it in their back yard. I think that's the problem. Understandable, but ultimately mistaken -- when you have a far greater chance of dying in a car accident or in your tub.
Well, the opposition to nuclear power was born out of the anti-nuclear movement, originally set forth in favor of disarmament and later led to the creation of a number of environmentalist movements, and, so, you're asking the environmentalist movement to change a basic assumption concerning its original basis. There was Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and it was also quite easy to associate nuclear power with the atomic bomb, which is even still kind of a concern.
* A huge fire in Siberia is casting out smoke for 3,000 miles.
* Greece – burning.
* California – burning.
* Oregon – burning.
* Historic flooding in Germany and Belgium.
* Italy just experienced the hottest European day ever.
* July 2021 is the hottest month ever recorded.
* Drought and extreme weather disturbances are cutting food production, increasing hunger and raising food prices worldwide.
* Rising sea levels threaten Miami, New York, Charleston and countless coastal cities around the world in the not-to-distant future.
The above is from a Bernie tweet, but it's a good synopsis. This isn't the world I remember from the 80s and 90s, or even the 2000s. We've wasted 30 years thanks to the same stall tactics the tobacco industry used and which the fossil fuel lobby is now using.
Krugman has two very good articles in the Times worth a read as well:
Who Created the Renewable Energy Miracle?
The Bad Economics of Fossil Fuel Defenders
[quote=Paul Krugman]Of course, these facts won’t change Republican minds. It’s painfully obvious that politicians opposing climate action aren’t arguing in good faith; they’ve effectively decided to block any and all measures to ward off disaster and will use whatever excuses they can find to justify their position.
Why has the G.O.P. become the party of pollution? I used to think that it was mainly about money; in the 2020 election cycle Republicans received 84 percent of political contributions from the oil and gas industry and 96 percent of contributions from coal mining.
And money is surely part of the story. But I now think there’s more to it than that. Like pandemic policy, where the G.O.P. has effectively allied itself with the coronavirus, climate policy has become a front in the culture war; there’s a sense on the right that real men disdain renewable energy and love burning fossil fuels. Look at the dishonest attempts to blame wind farms for Texas blackouts actually caused by freezing pipelines.
In any case, what you need to know is that claims that taking on climate change would be an economic disaster are as much at odds with the evidence as claims that the climate isn’t changing. [/quote]
What is your meaning of Creation? Because deserting or flooding the most part of the world because of pollution and bad decisions does not seem to be a Creation significant to me but the contrary, we are literally destroying instead of building...
12.000 years ago there was an ice age, it has been warming since that time in history!
The purpose of political parties and religion is to divide people, create fear of the other group,
and fundraise.
Quoting Rxspence
Interesting that my post would elicit a political response, given by two "recent" members.
Yes, climate is an element of creation. Nuclear weapons are elements of creation. Should we not be cautious about them? Should we not understand the science beyond them, and the severity of the consequences if left unchecked?
The issue is not the change, but the rate of change. Yes, the climate has changed throughout a long history -- 4 billion years or so. But modern human beings have only been around about 200,000. In that time, but especially the last 12,000 years since the invention of farming, CO2 and warming haven't occurred to this degree. When you flash forward a few millennia to when scientific instruments were used deliberately to measure CO2, in the late 1800s, you have a very definite trend. Easy to see:
I am neither political or a new member.
Your misdirection of the discussion in an effort to continue a fear based non argument
could have only one purpose. Focus tax dollars on research.
There are many scientists that do not agree and denial of funding is the main reason
they are not herd.
Are you aware of the tons of carbon dioxide we produce daily and ship to
food processors, scientists, and others. Nurseries produce co2 to help plants grow.
CLIMATE CHANGE is not an answer to a problem, it is an invitation to divide people
so that you can call the other side STUPID!
For all of the years that we used the word Pollution no one argued that there is no pollution!
In 1984 "GLOBAL WARMING" 15 years to live if we don't change!!
In 1994 "GLOBAL WARMING" 10 years an we will be beyond hope!!!
In 2004 "CLIMATE CHANGE" 10 years and it's too late!!!!
In 2014 "CLIMATE CHANGE" Yada Yada 10 years..beyond hope.
In 2016 "OBAMA BUYS 38 MILLION HOUSE AT SEA LEVEL"
In 2020 "GLOBAL WARMING" Greta says it's been 2 years and you haven't done anything!!
I'm not taking either side, I'm saying you don't want to solve the problem,
you just want to divide people and take their money!!
You are being political. Climate denial is political. Much like the tobacco industry propaganda, the fossil fuel industry has used social issues to associate with the science in an attempt to discredit it. But the science is clear.
Your denial is political, ultimately, even if you are not a political person. I don't expect you to acknowledge this or agree with it, but it's true.
Quoting Rxspence
Actually, climate deniers are better funded that most climatologists, and are heard far more than the vast consensus. This is one of the byproducts of "equal time" and "both-sides" that we often hear.
Scientists who "do not agree" are a minority, but are disproportionately heard and funded -- why? Because fossil fuel companies seek them out. They're usually not climate scientists, either. Plenty of good studies about this.
Quoting Rxspence
Have you done any reading on this topic at all? I ask seriously. If not, I have a question: are you willing to learn about it? If not, there's no sense in continuing.
What newspaper? No scientific journal was saying an ice age was coming. This claim has been debunked for years.
Quoting Rxspence
No one said this in 1984. Literally no one. You're making this up.
Quoting Rxspence
No one said this in 1994. You're making this up.
Quoting Rxspence
There are not two sides. There's the fact of climate change, and there's denial. If denial is a "side," then you have clearly chosen that side -- based solely on what you've said so far. It appears you've been exposed almost exclusively to denialist media, my guess being conservative media.
Quoting Rxspence
You don't know anything about me. Making a claim like this is absurd.
I have no desire to divide people, and in fact the opposite: we need everyone to solve this problem. Repeating slogans about "taking people's money" does you no credit.
It's not a misdirection at all. It's exactly the point: CO2 has increased to levels not seen in 800,000 years. Temperatures have risen accordingly. The effects are already being seen, as has been predicted for years now. What they are finding out is that the predications were far too optimistic.
It's a hard thing to face, but putting our heads in the sand will do nothing. This problem can be solved, and we have the tools to solve them. Like with the coronavirus, we have solutions. It's up to people and the people they elect to face reality, follow science, and make the right decisions. If the science is rejected in favor of conspiracies and misinformation -- for political reasons -- then this only exacerbates the problem.
No one disputes climate change!
It is only anthropomorphic that they challenge.
Roy Spencer who designed and launched the equipment for NASA disputes many of the claims.
His equipment could not support these conclusions.
I am 64 and was in college when the articles I quoted came out.
You are an open book, you have no desire to bring people together by insulting them.
And both parties have had 29 years to solve the problem
I ran a Nursery from 2000 to 2006
Do you ever read what you post?
At first I thought you were a shill
Now I'm wondering what grade you are in.
Sorry for coming down to your level!
No one disputes this either. In the same way no one disputes that the Earth is round.
Quoting Rxspence
A very famous climate denier and fraud, unfortunately. As has been well documented. So is this the major source of your information about the topic?
Quoting Rxspence
I haven't insulted you.
Quoting Rxspence
There are no such articles. Your memory is incorrect. What you're citing is a myth often repeated in right-wing media and elsewhere, claiming that scientists in the 70s were warning about a coming ice age. This has been debunked many times. Also, no one was claiming there were only a "12 years" left to solve the climate crisis in the 1980s. Absolutely no one. It was only beginning to be widely understood at a high degree of certainty at that point.
Which is why you can't cite any of the sources.
Quoting Rxspence
Okay, but that answers neither of my questions. One can run a nursery, or even be a botanist, and still know next to nothing about quantum mechanics, or in this case climate science. So far you've repeated a number of denialist slogans and referred to a well-known climate denier, Roy Spencer. That doesn't tell me you've read much on this topic from the overwhelming majority of climatologists who have studied this all their lives. It's at least worth a minute to see what they have to say, rather than exclusively trust and listen to what you would call "skeptics" (and I would call denialists).
If the person (Roy Spencer) who designed, launched, and calibrated the equipment used to
prove Anthropomorphic Climate Change says your conclusions are faulty, you calling him a fraud
is a double edged sword.
PLEASE stop embarrassing yourself.
Perhaps take your own advice. Roy Spencer, like yourself, is a climate denier— and has also taken money from fossil fuel companies.
There were plenty of scientists who were bought by big tobacco too. This is nothing new. You’re welcome to continue on with your denial if you wish, given your lack of answer to my question generally means you’re unwilling to learn about this topic. So be it.
I think it is both. But one of the things that tears me off is the fact of how some persons can be so evil. They burn down all the forest and vegetation in a period of year where there is a lot heat and lack or rain. Obviously, the fire spreads so quickly around all the Mediterranean making a completely catastrophe.
What I want to share here is the worrying of notice the existe of such bad persons without ethics and moral. I can't even understand what they see as "fun" burning down trees and destroying the environment. I wish if they are catched by police officers they would receive a heavy sentence.
More worrying is the trend of climate change itself and the lack of action to stop it:
- At 1.3 C rise in temperature we are allready experiencing serious adverse effects all over the world.
- The Paris accord has some loose references to 1.5, but really it aims for 2 C maximum rise.
- 2 C maximum rise can only be attained if countries decarbonise rather quickly
- what countries have committed to amounts to nowhere near what is needed to stay under that 2 C
- and even then it's worse because typically countries don't deliver on these commitments and numbers are generally made to look better than they are through some bureaucratic hocuspocus
So if nothing really drastically changes, we are heading over 2 C easily.
The thing that most people don't fully appreciate I think, and I didn't too until recently, is that such a "small" rise in global average temperature is already really bad for a lot of things.
If it was only so. Still, nuclear power is a totally reasonable alternative. What's so bad in France using a lot less fossil fuel based energy production than other countries of it's size. All thanks to an investment in nuclear power.
The likely outcome is that if you ban nuclear power, you will get a lot of promises of investing in greener tech, but actually you have to resort to fossil fuels or otherwise start facing rolling blackouts.
Quoting Xtrix
Have to say what a meteorologist said about this. He firmly believed that an an ice age is coming and climate change (global warming or the greenhouse effect) is coming too. The first one in perhaps 50 000 to 500 000 years and the other one is happening just now.
While it's true that the risks with nuclear power are not that great if we can assume a stable society and when they are treated with care. But they do need some continuous care and aftercare even after shutdown. Problem is that if society would break down, terrorism or war would become a thing again, this isn't longer all that evident... and the consequences are immense if something does go wrong, unlike with other power sources.
The claims about a coming ice age have been debunked, as I mentioned. This article is a good summary.
We're presently in an interglacial period of an ice age. The glaciers will come back eventually. They're due to start coming back in the next 500-1000 years, but we'll probably miss the trigger this time. They'll be back in about 40,000 years or so.
Df. reduce the inflated reputation of (someone), especially by ridicule.
Not proven incorrectt
Option one: the most talked about. Cut emissions, transition to renewable clean energy. There seems to be a race on towards fusion power for obvious reasons - harnessing the power of the sun on our planet will revolutionise the accessibility and abundance of power available to us as a species and its byproduct is helium and other inert and harmless compounds.
Option two: divide and conquer. Outsource to other planets. This is a bit of a “cop-out to me” as it’s more “dilutional” than “solution” based. Simply carry on activity as is but in new domains where resources are available.
Option three: cut demand. Birth control and population decline. Less people less demand. This involves bringing all countries to a first world parity where self actualisation takes precedent over reproduction and large families.
Option four: adapt. This to me is the most likely scenario. If there’s anything humans are good at it is innovating and adapting when our hand is forced and there is simply no other choice than to deal with our problems head on. This doesn’t mean climate change is avoided but rather our culture lifestyle and socioeconomic activity is slowly altered to sustain a quality of life in a changing world.
Option five: do nothing. Ignore the signs and see what happens.
Right now we’re essentially option 4. That’s the problem.
Preparation for more frequent disasters is barely beginning. Every year will see more of these wildfires and extreme temperatures from this point on, until it gets to the point where everyone has to wake up or die.
Rock bottom.
But by that point, we may not have time to turn it around. It may already be too late if we started tomorrow. That’s a hard fact to face, but it’s true. I really wish we weren’t gambling about this.
The coronavirus is an excellent parallel. The distrust in government has spread everywhere: the church, science, journalism, the media, teachers, education generally, advertising and business. They’re all treated with an equally skeptical eye, and that’s a mistake.
A particular consequence is manifested in widespread misinformation about the vaccines, a distrust of vaccinations, the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and even doctors.
What would you expect the outcome to be? Exactly what we’re seeing. Now what if COVID were more deadly? Then that mistrust will not only get them killed, which is sad enough, but many others as well who they infect. That’s happening now, but at a small scale. I can’t imagine what a larger one would look like. But that’s probably coming.
Climate change is slower and even less visible, and yet has the potential to be far more deadly. Far less media coverage, too. We’re gambling with this as well.
Absolutely. But the when actual alternative is energy production THAT KILLS PEOPLE ALL THE TIME EVERY DAY, it's a no brainer.
Let's take an example. Yes, for ages people and especially women cooked food with open fires and that smell of burning wood is at least to me very nice and calming. For a Finn immediately comes to mind that someone is warming a sauna, which is nice. Yet to cook with an open fire and inhale that smoke daily, many times during the day is simply a health hazard. Far more dangerous one fallout from a Chernobyl accident that happened over 1000km or more away from you.
I remember very well when Chernobyl happened. Just before it happened on Sunday there was a very small demonstration against nuclear power in front of our Parliament, but as nothing happens here actually, the main TV channel news was covering the demonstration. Even the activists were wavering in the effectiveness of their cause.
And then a warning came on the radio and TV. The Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) that supervises radiation and nuclear safety in Finland announced that the radiation levels had risen, yet the level wasn't yet so dangerous to active safety precautions (like shelter inside). Only after that came the announcement that there had been a nuclear accident in Ukraine. Then for the next two weeks, the radiation levels went lower day after day.
And that summer there were far less butterflies than before. Only now (thanks to global warming) there are again a lot of butterflies. This of course isn't a scientific conclusion about the butterflies.
But that's it. The world worst nuclear accident, that put radiation into the atmosphere far more than all the nuclear test done above aground (which is equivalent of Pakistan and India having an all out nuclear war). That's nuclear energy at it's worst. A proper question would be, how many people has nuclear energy killed compared to coal energy?
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Yeah well, notice just what you are referring to. Starting from the fact that I wouldn't be communicating with you @ChatteringMonkey, I guess it wouldn't be our biggest concern then.
I'm certainly not prima facie or ideologically against nuclear power,... under stable conditions it does have somewhat of an overblown bad rep because of the few accidents, it's actually reasonably safe it seems.
I think it should be considered as a replacement for fossil fuels, certainly because carbon is the biggest problem right now. Nuclear waste would become a problem long term eventually, but short term that could be managed.
What does give me pause is that nuclear power only has been used in the relatively stable post WWII-period. That kind of stability is historically far from a given. And I think given climate change and other technological and societal challenges that are coming, things could get rough for a while. The numbers for death rate per watts don't capture that eventuality.
The question is do we really want to rely on something that potentially has disastrous consequences if things do go south? Maybe it's still better then the alternative, but it's something to consider I think.
There are about 60 nuclear power plants within 1000km from where I live, so you know, if any of them would meltdown, it probably would be quite bad.
By the way, in 1986 I was teaching Exploring Technology and 1996 Science.
This was part of the curriculum and we discussed scientific articles in Class.
I'm sorry, but I didn't think I was implying anything. I thought I spelled it out pretty clearly.
Let's just think here just why nuclear energy is seen as so dangerous while as coal is simply forgotten. If you say that far more, many multiple times more people die because of coal, people just shrug. Why so?
- When people think about nuclear energy, nuclear weapons and Hiroshima and Nagasaki come to mind. With coal or burning wood such thoughts don't come into mind.
- Radiation doesn't smell and cannot be fealt. People usually don't have any idea of what is a dangerous amount of radiation.
- People don't know that there is totally normal radiation in our environment. For example here in the Finnish capital there is so much radioactive Radon gas in the ground that special notice has to be taken in venting underground cellars and storage spaces.
- People can understand that inhaling smoke isn't good. If you inhale too much smoke, you will die. However, we have burnt wood and used coal for example for a really, really, long time.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Actual alternatives and actual effects have to be what we base our decisions. Not lofty promises.
Running down or banning nuclear power is stupid if and unfortunately when it leaves to more use of fossil fuels. Only in the last years I think finally have renewables become competitive alternatives as the prices have come down.
I agree keeping nuclear power is probably necessary now because we can't transition to carbonfree energy fast enough as it is.
That's a good and simple way to put it.
Another example both of how capitalism encourages short-term thinking and lethal stupidity when it comes to climate change.
No reason this can't happen elsewhere.
Pope, along with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, all put out this statement. That's a big deal.
Some other interesting current reading:
Climate Change Is The Greatest Threat To Public Health, Top Medical Journals Warn
Weather Disasters Have Become 5 Times As Common, Thanks In Part To Climate Change
Climate change should be the top story, daily, in every newspaper in the world.
Finally the Murdoch media outlets in Australia have been directed to change their editorial tune, which has been vehemently denialist for decades. Scientists welcome the change, but say it’s too little, too late.
On a more positive note, read about the proof-of-concept factory in Iceland built to sponge CO[sup]2[/sup] from the atmosphere. Long way to go, but it’s a start.
Yes. Also, some more good news: Harvard University, after 9 years of student activism, has finally divested their 42 billion dollar endowment from fossil fuels.
https://www.npr.org/2021/09/10/1035901596/harvard-university-end-investment-fossil-fuel-industry-climate-change-activism
Adam McKay tackles climate change. Looks like a decent cast.
Global Warming was definitely a part of the discussions.
Artificial photosynthesis
Let's say climate activists haven't been able to make the case for global warming. Basically, we don't know if climate change is real/not.
Humans pride themselves as great strategists, we've even established a discipline that studies strategizing (game theory) and let's not forget to mention how much we praise good planning whether in the civilian or military sector.
What's the best gameplan for us given that we don't know the truth about climate change? Should we assume climate change is real or should we assume it isn't and act accordingly?
It seems that the whole issue of climate change is a problem in game theory. Go figure.
???? It's VERY real!
I have my doubts. Firstly, is it real? Secondly, have we found its cause, are humans to blame?
That said, my point is, let's give the naysayers their due and meet them halfway by admitting we aren't sure but then they'll have to come up with a strategem to deal with this unknown. Which is the best course of action - assume climate change is real or assume climate change isn't real? Game theoretically speaking.
oh please. We haven't discovered America yet. We don't know how to kindle fires yet. We don't know if germs cause disease yet.
Yes.
Yes.
You have zero reason to doubt climate change, other than the misinformation you've been fed.
:up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Olivier5
I'm not a climate change denier myself but it doesn't seem to enjoy the same level of certainty like, say, the existence of the sun. Nobody denies the latter but a significant number of people, scientists among them, have serious misgivings about the former. The jury's still out, I'm afraid.
Remember (to all members), climate change activists make two claims:
1. There's climate change (global warming + extreme weather).
2. Human activity is causing this.
Those are extraordinary claims. How can one species have an impact on such scales? The Sagan standard applies.
Bollocks.
:lol: Where's the evidence for climate change? :chin:
The scientific principle is exceedingly simple - increasing percentage of CO[sup]2[/sup] in the atmosphere causes it to retain heat more efficiently. It was predicted in the 1960’s - actually there were predictions many years before - and it’s been tracked ever since. 350ppm (parts per million) was a marker that was supposed to be a line in the sand but I think it’s been surpassed already. Sea-level rises, melting of polar ice and glaciers, record-breaking temperatures, enormous wildfires and huge rain events provide abundant testimony of what is happening. It’s one of the reasons that even the climate-change denying Murdoch press in Australia has been forced to change its editorial stance.
I don’t know what ‘the single source of truth’ for climate change is, but there are many authoritative sources such as NASA, the UN, various Climate Councils. But it’s simply bollocks to say that it’s not established or not known, it is beyond reasonable doubt.
That is a lie you've been told. There are no serious, qualified scientist with 'misgivings' about climate change.
I'll only believe in man-induced climate change if the observed global warming (rising temperatures) perfectly matches that predicted based on human-activity-related CO2 emissions.
https://www.csiro.au/en/research/environmental-impacts/climate-change/climate-change-qa/information
The IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is listed there, is probably the most authoritative source.
Evidence: This year, a local supershower of rain stationary felt down in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. These were predicted to occur only in about 20 years!
And look at the floods in the US this year. Or the forrest fires globally.
The polar ice is almost gone.
Average temperature has risen in a short time.
What more do I have to say? Is it just a coincidence?
Quoting TheMadFool
It doesn't match perfectly. The supershowers were predicted to occur in 20 years. These showers ar people's-activity-induced.
:rofl:
Not funny but a good attempt. There's a thread :point: Is Climatology Science? and the condition that I stipulated - the predicted rise in temperatures based off of human-activity-related CO2 emissions should match the observed global warming - is basically a call to climatologists to make their case as scientific as possible, much like how real scientists conduct their business. People can be won over to their side with this simple step and, if they really want to clinch their argument, they should make observable forecasts regarding future temeperatures e.g. they could say, "another x billion metric tons of CO2 will enter the atmosphere from human activity in the next 5 years beginning 2021, expect the global temperature to rise by y degree celsius." We could then ready our thermometers and verify/falsify the claim. Simple.
I rest my case.
I would hope not. Their mistakes can have far-reaching effects, no? Induce mass panic for instance.
That is again simply not true that an error in prediction by a tenth of a degree will have "serious consequences" or "induce mass panic". You're just being silly.
Straw man. I never mentioned the level of precision although it will matter to the quality of the prediction climatologists make and thus will also decide their credibility.
Come to think of it, I'm fairly confident that scientists should be able to create a CO2-greenhouse effect model in the lab and use it to forecast future global temperature trends. I don't know why they're so reluctant to do so. Smells fishy, don't you think?
True.
But there are dozens such models... What smells fishy to me is that you are not aware of that, and yet you go all judgmental about it... It proves that you do not speak in good faith, that you are lying to yourself. You are trying to find excuses.
Name some and do they make predictions, have these been verified?
I already 10 years ago, no, even in my teens, made the prediction (like the Hopi) that natural disasters (storms and fires) will increase because of human activity. Reality has confirmed my predictions.
:100:
As a little boy back in the 60s, I flew at 30k feet. I remember seeing a distinct, bright-line horizon at the edge of the Earth and space. I remember seeing the same thing atop 14ers. No more. Not since the 80s. Not even over the middle of the Pacific. There is a blur, a haze. The horizon is still there, but it's a blur. Now I know the culprit is supposed to be invisible, and it may very well be. But if the visible shit, that light- brown rusty blur, has enveloped the planet, then you can bet the invisible shit has too. The lights at night, from space, are another example. Anyone who thinks the Earth is too big for little old us to trash just doesn't get it.
Aldo Leopold said something to the effect that those with an environmental conscious live in a world of wounds.
We see things. Situational awareness.
I'm not sure how to parse your comment but I know some plant hobbyists, not exactly real gardeners, but I don't recall them complaining about the seasons. I'm curious, what did you have in mind?
Quoting Olivier5
:monkey:
Very true! How do we convince the powers that are?
You can't fix stupid. You have to wait until Nature fixes it. Like Covid.
I tend to agree. Maybe disaster, natural disaster, has to hit their capital houses firstly. An inconvenient truth (it didn't need a disaster to make the maker of this beautifull and informative documentary see though). Will they ever learn though? Musn't we take the power from them (maybe even gun-wise)?
It might get to that. But we trained up the best on our nickel, and they've gone over to work in the private sector, providing security from the great unwashed. I wonder who will make their shit paper and other things they've grown accustomed to?
:100:
Well, some of them are, but I was referring to the plutocracy protecting themselves from the peasants.
Thanks. I learned something today although I vaguely recall reading it somewhere. :up:
In my defense, the northward migration of plant species only evidences global warming but, climatologists have more work to do, proving that climate change is due to CO2 emissions from human activity. That's why I suggested that they need to do two things:
1. Explain the rise in earth temperatures with the greenhouse effect of (raised) CO2 levels.
2. Make a prediction of how temperatures will rise in (say) the next 10 or 20 years.
No, I think there are more than one.
Quoting SoftEdgedWonder
Plutocracy is shorter.
Not in the format I gave, no.
In what format you do?
Graph from the latest IPCC report (2021).
We do know the truth about climate change, with as much certainty as we can know about anything. It's now easy to see all around us, and to anyone who can read a graph.
But even if there were a 10% chance of catastrophe, we should still do something about it, yes -- especially given that there's almost no downside.
Unless you've been living in a cave somewhere, this information is readily available. Perhaps you missed the latest IPCC report as well. Made some news a few weeks ago.
CO2 levels and increased average temperature of the earth are very well correlated, with data going back tens and hundreds of thousands of years.
Predictions about temperature rise have been made, shown to be accurate, and continue to be made. There are many scenarios taken into account -- business as usual versus a real shift in fossil fuel use, for example.
The evidence is overwhelming. Denial is rampant because it's a difficult thing to accept and because of a massive propaganda campaign from the fossil fuel industry, especially around 2009 -- of which you seem to be a casualty.
I'm going to have to ask you to stop exhaling CO2 until you can prove it isn't dangerous (also all that hot air).
We should stop dead trees from decaying, too.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03740-8
A petagram is a billion metric tons.
Hi Frank and NOS: Your comments are fundamentally stupid on two counts:
1. The individual human biological contribution of CO2 has been factored into the environmental baseline for 200k years or more (millions of years if you count our predecessors). Thus, there is no new, elective straw being tossed on the camel's back by human exhaust. (Besides, the carbon we exhale is the same carbon that was “inhaled” from the atmosphere by the plants we consume.) Insuring/bonding are for non-baseline activities.
2. Individual action works at cross-purposes. If I save a gallon of gas, I increase supply, lowering price, stimulating demand so NOS can roll coal in his penis truck. The CO2 example works on the same principle. That is why it is necessary for government to regulate everyone under threat of violence.
Now, because I'm magnanimous, and in a tip o' the hat to the Republican misunderstanding of free-market capitalism, I offered the idea of bonding/insuring. You know, so the markets could decide if the industry is FOS when it says their actions are innocuous.
Hope that helps.
All that for a non-sequitur? Didn’t help at all.
It probably didn't help because you don't know what a non-sequitur is. Government regulating everyone under threat of violence is not a non-sequitur. It's the logical anticipatory argument to the tired libertarian whine about government ultimately relying upon violence or the threat of violence.
You stand corrected. Hope that helps. No? Didn't thinks so. Like I said, frank and your initial comments were fundamentally stupid.
One's a climate denier and the other either is one or tries to sound like one. So don't expect too much.
One aids and abets a virus. The other is just your standard, run-of-the-mill, tired old libertarian; you know, the one that sucks down the benefits of society while pretending to be apart from it. I remember some of them in Idaho who made their own license plates and said they were "sovereign." All while driving on our roads we built and paid for. LOL! The cuff links snap the same on all of us.
You two are just fun to pick on. Be well.
I stand corrected then. Nevertheless, in my defense, climatologists, probably because they aren't trained in the scientific method like physicists are, have done a bad job of making their case. Why else is there so much controversy? Compare climate science to physics and consider how the latter has a better reputation than the former.
https://twitter.com/AssaadRazzouk/status/1333221973237886978/photo/1
:ok:
Right, that’s what’s happening. :lol:
I mentioned why there’s controversy. The controversy has been manufactured. Just as the “controversy” about smoking and cancer was manufactured by tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies have deliberately created controversy here— and it’s all documented.
Quoting James Riley
The evidence in physics doesn’t, yes. The evidence of climate change does, just like the evidence for evolution threatens Biblical literalists.
Please don't mention cancer as I (TheMadFool) am a chain smoker. Please don't mention climate change because I (Mother Earth) too am a chain smoker.
Fossil Fuels are basically dead PLANTS & ANIMALS. Hmmm... :chin: Dead plants and animals killing living plants and animals. It's a zombie apocalypse!
EPA will finalize rules to faze out HFCs.
Couple pieces of somewhat good news.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/world/asia/china-coal.amp.html
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/573522-epa-finalizes-rule-cutting-use-of-potent-greenhouse-gas-used-in%3famp
That doesn't mean the plants will stop burning coal. And of course China is not suspending its own coal plant building program. it is, as you noted, somewhat good news. It might be vanishingly slight good news. Time will tell.
All true. Still, given how much China is investing in foreign infrastructure, that’s a significant reduction.
Why are you never funny?
One of my many flaws, apologies!
No problem. Just one man’s opinion anyway.
From The NY Times. It’s a list from a number of government departments about ways climate change will threaten the country — from migrations to food shortage to stronger storms. Worth a look.
The death knell for the species.
It’s surreal that it’s happening right in front of us, and no one notices.
Oh they will.
When there's no food to eat or when they have to move to another country - if they even can.
Quoting Guardian - Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this disaster from getting worse?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/oct/14/climate-change-happening-now-stats-graphs-maps-cop26
With photographs and predictions.
People and countries are already affected.
What can be done, if it's not too late ?
Watch programmes - telling us what to buy - electric cars, bamboo toothbrushes, wonky veggies...?
Ah, here we go:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0010k49/shop-well-for-the-planet-series-1-episode-1
Life is busy for mum Alison and dad Alex. They have a packed schedule looking after their two active sons, seven-year-old Arthur and 11-year-old Harrison. With so much going on, trying to go green has never been a priority for them, but the pandemic and lockdown have made them rethink. Now the whole family want to try to help the planet, but they don’t know where to start.
Chris and Jo set up a pop-up shop filled with the family’s main areas of eco-concern and reveal their average carbon footprint. Alison and Alex are shocked to find out how much over the national average they currently are. To turn the family's house green, the team swap their usual cleaning products for homemade versions and eliminate some of their single-use plastic. Jordan and Chris take on committed carnivore Alex and try to convince him that going meat-free a couple of days a week doesn’t have to be painful. Can they turn him around with their simple and quick veg curry?
Melanie and Alison test eco varieties of toilet rolls, but do they stand up next to the regular supermarket options? The great British public put a range of natural deodorants to the test to see if they really do keep you smelling fresh, and another group tickle their tastebuds with Fairtrade chocolate to find out whether price makes a difference when it comes to taste. As a dog owner, Jordan wants to investigate what the impact of our pets is on the planet. He travels to Scotland to meet the owner of an eco-friendly dog food business and find out what his secret ingredient is.
Does hypercapnia (carbon dioxide poisoning) explain the chaos apparent in the world today?
[quote=Wikipedia]Hypercapnia may happen in the context of an underlying health condition, and symptoms may relate to this condition or directly to the hypercapnia. Specific symptoms attributable to early hypercapnia are dyspnea (breathlessness), headache, confusion and lethargy.[/quote]
Are climate deniers and all others who are in a state of confusion (the whole world basically) suffering from [math]CO_2[/math] poisoning? :chin:
No, their indignation makes them hyperventilate.
[quote=Wikipedia]The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death.[/quote]
A saving grace - from the perspective of climate change anyway - maybe is that we will probably hit a wall long before that because extracting fossil fuels will become a whole lot more difficult progressively. Carbon emissions will come down, if not because we take the necessary measures, then because of the scarcity of fossil fuels... or because of climate change fueled societal breakdowns.
Either way, society will need to change fundamentally, to adjust to lower energy and resource usage. Renewable energy will never wholly compensate for the loss of the dense and abundant energy fossil fuels provided us... that was a once in an earthlife-time opportunity.
As no (more or less mainstream) political party is even attempting to sell the idea that we will have to do with less, chances are this whole power-down is going to be a messy affair.
I wish nobody harm, but I do welcome this broader societal change even if it's not going to be pretty. Dirt cheap energy did fuel some pretty obscene things, I'm definitely not going to miss those. And if it's inevitable either way, then we can better get it over with.... nothing is more deadening to the spirit than these constant attempts to stitch together and reanimate a diseased and decaying corpse.
Here, from NY Times -- "There Has Been Progress, But Not Nearly Enough."
From Wall Street Journal: "What Will This Climate Plan Cost and Who Will Pay?"
Worth reading.
COP26 is upcoming, in Glasgow...deserves its own thread, in conjunction with the reconciliation bill.
Energy use will not decrease (unless poverty increases or population decreases) but efficiency has too either way.
The real hope lies in the scientific models being inaccurate in our favour. It certainly isn't worth gambling with the future and blindly hoping our understanding of how the climate functions is limited enough for us to have made an overestimate when we could just as easily have underestimated the problem.
There's upper physical limits to how much more energy-efficient you can get in the production and distribution of energy. Sure there is still room for improvement there, but not enough I think for renewables to replace fossil fuels entirely. Nuclear power maybe could have gotten us there, but as you said this project should've started decades ago because it takes time.
I used to be more of a techno-optimist, thinking we'll find a way etc... But what I and a lot of people with me didn't and don't really appreciate is how exceptional fossil fuels really were and how much they changed the game. It was literally reserves of stored and compacted solar energy that had been accumulating over millennia, gushing out of the ground... 1 gallon of oil is the energy-equivalent of 5 years of human labor, for a fraction of the price. We were wasteful because we could.
You often hear it's only a matter of political will to convert fully to renewables etc... but has anyone actually seen a plan something other than these high-level abstract calculations that just gloss of particularities of different sectors and industries like say metallurgy, manufacturing etc... How are we generating enough heat with renewables to make steel to name just one thing?
I dunno, I think we won't get there in terms of energy production, if not because of strictly theoretical limitations, then because of practical issues with converting to other energy-sources. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but this seems by far the most likely scenario to me, that we will have to reduce our energy-consumption, which ultimately means a lack of economic growth too because those always have gone together.
Quoting I like sushi
The models are probably pretty accurate in what they do. Problem is that what they do doesn't necessarily tell us a lot about how the real world will evolve. They are basically saying we are just climate scientists, we will bracket/make abstraction of everything other than the physics of climate change... and leave messy and complex things like societal and economic feedbacks to someone else. No way we would have stable societies and growing economies all the way up to some of these projected temperatures.
I wasn't suggesting replacing all fossil fuels just being more efficient with them. There isn't any realistic scenario (with known tech) atm that would allow every country to stop using fossil fuels. Food production wastes a lot!
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Better late than never. If it turns out the estimates made are more in our favour such actions NOW could actually make a big difference.Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Well if we don't look to this as a way to deal with it then we may as well roll over and die. No thanks!
There is a lot to be said for taking advantage of fossil fuels. Mistreat a horse and it dies. Mistreat fossil fuels and it doesn't protest.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don't think any Western government has the strength to do anything much. China can act instantly due to the political setup whereas Russia appears to be disrupting things as switching to MORE gas is better than using coal - not ideal but 'better'.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
My point was more or less that if we only used what we really needed (in terms of strict regulations on industry) then we'd use less and growing countries would then adopt these techniques as they'd effectively save them resources. Such things will buy more time if nothing else. In terms of agriculture it would help a huge amount.
More efficiency would probably not translate into a lack of economic growth. I don't see how it would tbh?
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
No doubt the models are improving. There are blind spots though in our knowledge and model need constant tweaking. The human factor cannot be factored in. There are many other factors that are uncertain too such as the effect of the Gulf Stream.
I believe there is no reason we cannot. It depends on whether you believe we have decent societies today or not. I don't think so in general but things have turned around a lot over the last century or so. We're still very much in a period of social adjustment.
Note: EU and UK is behind on GM foods still. They are only just starting to ease up on the paranoia. Again, better late than never :)
Ok I didn't really get that this was your point. I completely agree with you then, ideally finite fossil fuels that are still left, should be rationed wisely to transition to a post-fossil fuel economy.
More efficient use of fossil fuels itself obviously wouldn't translate into a lack of economic growth, that's right, but more generally the inevitable and gradual depletion of fossil fuels eventually would, it seems to me. A lot of the spectacular economic growth of past centuries was possible only because of abundant and cheap energy.
I'll comment on you latter point in a next post...
Quoting I like sushi
How much of it is just dick-measuring and how much of it has any real chance of helping us along is the question here I guess. Sure we probably could do it eventually, colonize Mars, but at what cost right? What's the rationale behind blowing a ton of resources when we could use those same resources with more tangible effects here on earth? Probably prestige is an important factor without which the project wouldn't be done, If I had to guess... then again it's impossible to actually calculate the intangible long-term effects to society at large from projects like these.
Perhaps more fundamentally than some kind of cost-benefit analysis, your deeper ideological convictions will probably determine where you fall on this kind of issue.
Like I said, I used to be more techno-optimist. A historical perspective on energy has really changed this for me because a lot of these ideas of perpetual economic growth, innovation and progress rely heavily on the availability of cheap energy. If you think this is just a short-lived fase in history and not the norm, then how much do these ideas that seem to rely on it still hold up on their own really?
And then there's the more traditional critique of this being the mind-set that got us into trouble in the first place, i.e. humanity standing above and beyond nature and the world, constantly trying to control it. And I think there's something to that critique, in the sense that we do seem to need constant patches upon patches to solve new problems arising from previous solution to older problems etc ad infinitum.
But we cannot expect countries like India to stop using coal (nor will they). This is the big problem.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Because the resources are tiny in the bigger picture and the technological advancements could be phenomenal - leading to more applicable ways to combat the problem. Dick measuring or not it doesn't matter if it pushes our limitations in regards to how to survive in hostile environments and figure out a way solutions to dealing with such problems on the way.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Of course. But we know such projects can and have bore fruits. Going to the Moon and creating weaponry for WW2.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don't see much distinction between humanity and nature. We've impacted the globe and will continue to do so. That is not 'unnatural' even though some wish to frame this as 'against nature'. We are able to make mistakes and see possible future mistakes (and correct them) whereas other species cannot do this.
We are not going to go extinct nor is it likely human knowledge will just be erased overnight.
No one saw a solution to many problems humanity has faced along the way. That is why they are called problems. Enough people seem to care to make something happen and more are starting to be practical rather than reactionary.
Yes if you would look at it historically and from a fairness point of view we would need to almost stop all use of fossil fuels right now to give them some room to grow... this is not going to happen, and so it will be messy.
Quoting I like sushi
In a fossil fueled growth economy they did, there's no guarantee this will continue to be the case.
Quoting I like sushi
We've impacted the globe disproportionately is the problem. This is hard the look past, humans and domesticated livestock account for 96% of all mammalian biomass nowadays. It creates problems we have to solve ourselves now, problems that 'nature' used to solve by itself.
Prime example is mono-culture agriculture. To get higher yields of a certain crop, mono-culture seemed like a great idea because you can mechanize and automate the whole thing if it is mono and repeatable. But in the process you removed plants :
- that attract predator-species that prey on pests, and you now have to apply pesticides yourself
- that fix and recycle nutrients into the soil, and you now have apply fertilizer yourself
- that retain water, and you now have to irrigate yourself
- that make the whole system resilient, and you lose and have to rebuilt everything if natural disaster strikes
Year after year the land gets worse because ecosystems and soil-life is effectively destroyed because automation (efficiency) demands it, and you progressively need more invested into them to make them suitable for agriculture. All of this is maybe not that big of a problem if you have cheap energy fueled machinery you can keep throwing at the problems as they keep coming.... but as the problems get worse and energy gets more expensive it's doubtful this would be sustainable.
At some point you have to wonder, is this whole way we do things still worth it?
Glad you started a separate thread on Cop26.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/12028/cop26-in-glasgow-poll
As we all know (I hope), there is a huge conference coming up in Glasgow starting October 31st. This is the most important climate conference since Paris in 2015.
— Xtrix
Unfortunately, not all of us do know.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/cop26-explained/
[quote=BBC]Switching to a plant-based diet can help fight climate change, according to a major report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says the West's high consumption of meat and dairy is fuelling global warming.[/quote]
The reason why we're in this mess (climate change) is because we've neglected the plant kingdom (deforestation). One way out of the climate crisis is to eat plants.
:chin:
Cave Of Dogs
Also, nature seems to be doing exactly that - as global temperatures rise Antarctica, hitherto hostile to plants that make a difference, could become a veritable garden of Eden, covered with lush vegetation stretching for millions of sq. km, enough to offset rising [math]CO_2[/math] levels.
Trust mother nature to solve our/her own problems (for us) is the takeaway.
Mother nature is sick! She has a fever (global warming)!
The way I see it, we're the problem. Nature will 'solve' us soon enough.
I don't think mother nature's antinatalistic.
[quote=180 Proof]You don't destroy the village to save the village.[/quote]
@180 Proof
Clearly she is a big fan of reproduction, but in all species, not just in one species at the expense of other ones... The key conceptual difference between God and Nature is that the latter is species-neutral while the former is believed to be anthropocentric.
[quote=Genesis 1:28] Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and [1]multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.[/quote]
[1] God knew about the exponetial character of population growth!
[quote=Mario Livio]Is God a mathematician?[/quote]
Malthusian Paradox:
[quote=Investopedia]Malthus specifically stated that the human population increases geometrically, while [2]food production increases arithmetically.[/quote]
[2] Food is, at the end of the day, living organisms (wheat, rice, meat, etc.) and all life should be obeying Malthus' exponential law but food increase is an arithmetic progression! :chin:
See what I am saying? The Guy used to be pro-human. I wonder if He changed His mind now.
Quoting TheMadFool
:chin: The Bitch inexorably breeds and always devours her young (re: Earth's fossil record, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, black holes) – devouring may be the catalyst for breeding – like Medea (cosmic entropy).
Catch of the Galactic Day: "The Anthropocene".
Interesting! Sad too! :up:
[quote=Neil deGrasse Tyson]The more I look at the universe, just the less convinced I am that something benevolent is going on.[/quote]
I think we need to recalibrate our moral compasses - do away with the notion of good (it's a myth) and just have bad but on a scale. There's no benevolence just different degrees of malevolence and be, well, done with it.
How would mother nature score on such a scale? Did mother nature have a choice?
[quote=William Cowper (1773)]God moves in mysterious ways.[/quote]
6 million dead, in the most horrifying of circumstances - starved, experimented on, robbed, worked to death, brutally murdered - and Jews still haven't lost their faith.
What's it gonna take for us to come to our senses?
Suppose, arguendo, we constitute a committee of experts. We have cracked the problem of artificial consciousness. This committe is tasked with creating a simulation universe for artificial consciousness. We're reasonable people, we are and make only ONE demand - make the simulation universe as good as possible. "Go nuts with everything else," we tell 'em, "just remember to make the universe good."
This is the best of all possible worlds! (Leibniz?)
"Good" for what? "Good" for whom? Other than 'absent negative phenomenologies', does "good" have any objective moral (contra self-serving) meaning? I don't think so.
Some Jews have kept their faith; others lost it.
God bless everyone! Good day.
Good for the resident artificial consciousnesses.
How would we (the simulation makers) know that?
If memory serves you did complain, on numerous occasions, about how bad the situation was/is on our beloved planet. You called mother nature a bitch - telling no?
Not intentional.
Atheists (I'm agnostic) are of the view that there's a problem - the problem of evil - and that, if one extrapolates from there, implies that they've conceived of a better world.
I say I agree - we can, more accurately believe we can, imagine a better world (it goes by many names - heaven, paradise, swarga, a "better" place).
If so, given the above, this is the challenge: Simulate such a world (heaven/paradise/swarga) in cyberspace (we've got a whole bunch of simulated worlds - video games - for helpful hints). My logic is simple: if heaven can be simulated then indeed the problem of evil is legit and on point but if it turns out that paradise simulations always crash and are glitchy, this world we live in is the best of all possible worlds.
:up:
Simplistic. :roll:
Simplistic? How would you have it be then?
My idea is too simple to be incoherent. My challenge to antitheists/atheists is to get together a team (what kind of experts you pick is at your discretion) and tell 'em to build a virtual universe from scratch that fits the description of heaven/paradise/swarga. Can they do it? Is a simulation of heaven possible? If it is possible then I concede there's a problem of evil but if such isn't possible (say heaven simulations keep crashing i.e. no programming language can support such a world), there is no problem of evil and this world is the best of all possible worlds.
:up: :chin:
That just means you're a determinist.
Actualism is going to be determinism.
This isn't my stroke of genius, man. Actualism is a form of hard determinism.
You may be making up your own private actualism, in which case you should probably call it something else.
I think it's too late. Tipping points will (or have been reached) regardless. I don't know about Venus. Maybe not that hot. It is too late, but what we can do is accelerate it to mitigate it. I think that if you bring on the pain, and the end, sooner, there might be something left to work with after the lesson is learned. But the longer the foot-dragging, and the slower the boil, the more we destroy what's left, and the less there will be to work with after the lesson is learned.
The problem is, the pain needs to be felt by those with the power to do something about it. Some people actually need to get Covid, be put on a vent and suffer before they come around. Sometimes they need to see a loved one suffer and die. People are stupid that way. But so long as it affects someone else, Meh. Open up those Arctic shipping lanes so's I can make me some muny!
I consider it the issue of our times for the last 50 years.
Ok fine my bad.
I read that parts of Europe have an energy problem now, and that all those windmills - predicted to have no more than seven days a year of less than 10% output - have gone 65 days so far.
Where is geothermal? Where is tidal energy? When the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow there's trouble a'brewin.
Geothermal isn't a resource for every place,and so is tidal. They can assist, but basically one has to remember that energy production is and will be determined by demand and supply of today. The fact is that we can have those long term plans, but the economic situation of today has a huge impact of just what actually will happen.
Where are the fossil fuels, you should start with:
The price of coal:
The price of oil:
Although for renewables and alternatives it's basically good that fossil fuel prices are high in the long run, what we seem to have is going to be a possible energy crisis. Rolling blackouts in China isn't a great indicator where the energy market is going.
Do note that what has happened now has a lot to do with the central banks printing trillions. And that the World has, at least officially, turned away from coal and fossil fuels without thinking where the additional energy needed to replace them will come.
If oil prices go over 100 dollars per barrel, that will put on an handbrake on the global economy and we might be looking at a global economic recession/depression.
Wow!
[quote=Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)][...]Let’s be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven’t got the power to destroy the planet—or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves.[/quote]
[math]CO_2[/math] is a poison, you know.
I know I'm feeding the trolls, but still, you need a certain amount of CO2 because your body uses it to maintain the pH of your blood.
To make sure you maintain a baseline level, your body will shut off blood flow to your brain to make you stop hyperventilating.
So if your body is willing to knock your ass out to get CO2, it's definitely not a poison.
troll. :starstruck:
Yes.
https://theconversation.com/ancient-antarctic-ice-melt-caused-extreme-sea-level-rise-129-000-years-ago-and-it-could-happen-again-131495
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm21/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/978762
http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/
Most of the sea level rise in recent years is attributed to expansion of seawater due to warming, and small glacier melt. But most of the potential sea level rise (up to 70meters) lie in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. The news is not great.
Back when we were nomadic hunter gatherers, it was easy enough to up sticks and migrate to higher ground. But the logistics of London or NewYork or ... count the number of coastal low-lying Metropoli,... is a lot of sticks to up. Andthen there is all the arable land loss.
There are going to be some climate refugees - and we all hate refugees. There are going to be some food shortages.
This is one factor - sea level. Then there is the heat itself that will make some equatorial regions uninhabitable, the increase in energy in weather systems leading to more extreme events, the inability of vegetation to migrate fast enough to their new preferred climate zone. degradation of ecologies by failure to adapt soil loss to erosion, and there may be some social unrest.
I'm guessing global systemic breakdown at some point.
Cold when the sun goes down.
The narrative we are being given is that we have a global warming problem and we have to fix that and move on to 2050 and beyond. This narrative is false. We have a constellation of problems and all of them are hitting at the same time and we have to solve them at the same time (as in right now). So yes, it is not likely we will solve all this stuff in time.
1. Fish stocks have collapsed. 1 bn. people in South Asia depend of fish for their livelihood.
2. Agricultural soil is now so depleted there are only 60 harvests left
3. Natural resources are getting scarce
4. Urbanization
5. Pollution
6. etc.
Can we solve all this stuff now before it gets to 1.5 degrees excess warming?
If not there's Catabolic Capitalism.
We'll be able to print meat eventually. We just need free energy.
1 human produces around 2 tons of CO[sub]2[/sub] per year.
In terms of CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions there are an additional [math]\frac{34 \times 10^9}{2} = 17 \times 10^9[/math] humans (17 billion humans)
World population (in terms of individual humans): 7,000,000,0000 or thereabouts. (7 billion).
Actual world population (in terms of CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions): 17,000,000,000 + 7,000,000,000 = 24,000,000,000 (24 billion).
This Person does not Exist!
That's 14 billion per year.
I read this though:
"Tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere.
In 2019, about 43.1 billion tons of CO2 from human activities were emitted into the atmosphere. This was an all time high, breaking the previous record from 2018. The emissions could form a giant “CO2 cube” measuring 30 km on each side."
Quite a difference.
Look here for the amount thrown in from the start of this year.
It's a fucking fact that the western way has got the globe in a firm grip. And even if all energy that's involved in the mad western way came from the Sun directly and if it was made portable by hydrogen from the sea, and even if all waste would be recycled, the Western Imperative dictates Growth, Progress, and Mastery of Nature. A guaranteed recipe for globally total ellimitative and exterminate annihilation. If we are lucky, a global thermonuclear conflict will come to the rescue. Seems Putin and Biden wanna start the dance. It only takes two to tango!
At least they can use their toys! And as usual, the people and creatures who don't give a damn about the policies of the power get fucked.
From the article:
And on it goes. Now what kind of language is this? Exactly the language George Orwell warned for, in 1946 already, in the context of politics but applicable more than ever: Politics and the English language
Maybe the language of subjective undoing, instead of objective doing, can save the planet. Imagine that language is taught to the children.
(Time is running out to avert disaster, according to IPCC.)
Adjacent story:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/us/politics/supreme-court-climate-change.html?smid=url-share
Supreme Court considers limiting EPA’s ability to address climate change.
Worth watching for the climate change piece alone. Valuable. I still have a deep respect for Sagan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/climate/climate-change-ok-doomer.html?action=click&module=card&pageType=theWeekenderLink
‘Now or never’ to avoid climate catastrophe: UN
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/4/now-or-never-to-avoid-climate-catastrophe-un
I mean, honestly, I think it's likely game over. Which does NOT mean that we stop doing something to help alleviate the situation, but the timescale is waaaay too tight compared to the lack of commitment shown by many countries. It's tragic.
Think of it this way perhaps. Before Trump, the brakes on fossil fuel had already been tampered with. By the time Biden got in the driving seat, even the steering wheel had been removed.
I've reconciled myself to the fact humans won't prevent the coming climate change. Maybe there'll be a tech miracle that pulls our chestnuts out of the fire, or maybe it won't be as bad as we think it will be.
Or maybe it will be worse.
Biden has been mostly rhetoric on climate change. But yes, there have been some relevant moves. The appointment of judges is also helpful to climate change.
I still am baffled by the question of whether or not voting against Trump was the right move. I didn't for a moment think that Biden was a good candidate, however, or would do wonders for the climate. He's been about the same as Obama.
The article I posted above deals with this kind of despair. If we all lose heart, we guarantee the worst.
But @Xtrix this is not about giving in to despair, per se. It's about looking at the evidence right in front of our face. If the evidence says, we have even less time that previously estimated, and the previous timeline was bad enough, are we just going to lie to ourselves? It's like we have gangrene in our legs, but we won't chop them off because there's still a chance it won't spread or something.
But what I want to stress is that even if we cannot avoid the worse scenario, this doesn't mean we don't try to mitigate the oncoming damages, there has to be stuff we can do to reduce or resist what's coming.
We also have to think, if we do pass the projected deadlines, which seems likely (but not certain - yet), what then? If we give up, despair will creep in. But if we say we've got to keep helping the situation, we'll be called liars for being alarmists.
So it's not easy in any situation.
Quoting Manuel
Despair comes from personal helplessness.
So what we need to be individually is realistic about the possibilities of the whole world coming to its senses and acting cohesively vs the likelihood instead of everything fragmenting and becoming a wretched fight to the last.
The call could go either way, so that is the uncertainty. But we can personally keep our heads up and watching, preparing for the range of most probable outcomes.
In some folk's situations, that might involve joining their countries police/military/security on the assumption that the muscle will look after itself. Or it might involve moving to small and remote communities with the self-sustaining basics and high social capital.
Everyone is capable of making these kinds of calculations of where it is better to be if the worst actually does happen, and where it would also be quite OK to be if it doesn't.
The big mistake is to expect the world at the level of its state political and economic actors not to be doing precisely the same. Everyone will be looking at the charts, weighing up the probabilities, deciding how to position themselves in a complicated game where either we all miraculously cooperate - because that turns out to be easy to do, as with the ozone layer - or we all collapse into a fight over what remains.
Look at the pandemic. Look at the Ukraine. The balance of competition or self-interest vs cooperation or mutual win-win calculations is always going to be in play in how the planet handles its crises.
The Pentagon will be gaming out the scenarios - like whether geoengineering could be a risk worth taking to kick the can down the road a few more decades when fusion power might be a thing.
Or whether a fortress America approach in a rapidly self-depopulating world is the bet to back. Bunker down and let the four horsemen of the Apocalypse take care of the global carbon production problem.
Of course one mustn't over-estimate the capacity of state leaders to see their realities in these kinds of big picture ways. The guys at the top often are quite insulated and emotionally beholden to interest groups - their party, their sponsors, their own rhetoric.
But down among the technocrats, they will be gaming out the scenarios and even making the preparatory moves. That's their job.
Sure. Ukraine might be a little different, but I do think that the global response to the pandemic shows how badly we cooperate with each other. Had we a more rational society, we could have finished with this pandemic in a year or so, not having it still raging on.
But you are correct about having to constantly analyze various complex circumstances changing in real time. As mere individuals, the chances of despair are much, much higher than if decisions are done in a large scale manner, which signals to a bigger "amount" of power that one can use to pressure for some kind of change.
23 april, make it or break it I guess.
It will not pass. If Manchin decides to pass something, which has been reported he's interested in doing so piece-meal, it will be devoid of anything meaningful. That's assuming anything passes whatsoever.
Of course, it isn't just Manchin. He's taking the fall on this, and happy to do so, but most of the Democratic party isn't interested in passing anything meaningful for the working/middle class, for the environment, or for really anything that threatens their plutocratic masters' position and power. They made their choice long ago; it was particularly evident in how the DNC effectively, unlike the RNC, beat back the more popular candidate, Bernie Sanders. The rest has mostly been empty lip service and placation to corral his supporters -- and the last year has taken away any doubt whatsoever of this (their vote was against Trump anyway, not for Biden -- which is a crucial distinction).
So the legislation is indeed dead, and the fossil fuel kingpin is largely (but not entirely) to blame. It was already largely watered down, which is what initially made me think that it had a chance of passing (given that the biggest provision was already removed and the price tag came way down). Alas, my own foolishness.
We're wasting with time we don't have, either way. Democrats only nibble around the edges.
I'm thinking now that there are two options before us: (1) the people can give what's called the "extreme" sides of the political spectrum full control over the government -- abolish the filibuster or give supermajorities, etc -- so that we see what truly comes out of either vision (including, unfortunately, the Republican party). This is probably spells doom, and wastes 2-6 years. But at least the citizens will get a real sense of what it looks like, as they do in state governments dominated by one party or the other.
Or (2) is that we wait for a much-needed cultural and economic upheaval. 9/11 obviously didn't cut it. 2008 financial crisis and recession came close, but mostly that just got us Trump. The coronavirus obviously didn't bring anyone together, although it has shifted people around in their jobs, perhaps increased remote work, and apparently has energized, to a degree, the labor movement (Starbucks, Amazon, all the strikes taking place). But none of it is enough. We need a real crash and a real depression. Things need to get far worse, evidently -- because the 80% of the American populace is still convinced that there are "two sides."
What I'm waiting for is the massive crash of the stock market -- which I have little doubt will happen. Watch what the Fed does.
Unfortunately, if this does happen it will most likely bring the Republicans in power -- and possibly Trump again. But perhaps that's what's necessary to awaken the large movement (bordering on revolution if not outright revolution) that's needed, at this point.
Beyond that, I see no way we avoided future catastrophe.
(BTW, I don't want to minimize the huge success of the people organizing in unions and going on strikes, etc. -- the concession of Shultz to freeze $20 billion in stock buybacks is a MAJOR victory for labor, and shouldn't be dismissed.)
What you need to do, being aware, is starting on that back up plan. Find land at least 30 meters above sea level, make it energy neutral with enough land to grow enough food and enough water nearby or enough rainfall to capture it. Study some agriculture and teach your kids, if you have them. If you don't have them, don't get them unless you know your backup plan is going to work. Preferably do it with a group of people so you can specialise in various skills.
Maybe not. But the way I see it, if that's true -- it's hopeless anyway. But since that's not set in stone, I will keep trying.
By the way, I see it being closer to 40 years, from around the beginning of the Reagan administration. That's still a long time. But many in the 1930s probably felt the same way -- that no one will organize. We face our own set of obstacles now, but it wasn't that long ago that things were better. I think we began to see the end of the neoliberal era in 2008. There are signs of it everywhere. We see it in the shift to "stakeholder capitalism" to the election of several progressives to the widespread labor strikes.
I think it's all becoming a "supersaturated solution." I think the 'awakening' is right in front of our noses. I think Bernie tapped into it.
Fires and floods seem to be focusing folk's attention. One might be hopeful.
To really halt excess CO2 production instead of just slowing it down would require some sort of global covenant: a new global religion, basically.
It could happen, but until then I think you're right that you can help by having faith in mankind. With that faith you influence the world around you in all sorts of small ways. You send out a certain message along the webs of communication extending around the globe.
That's the effect of faith: to "be the change you wish to see in the world".
There's truth to this. But I would make two points: (1), I view capitalism as the real religion, and a particular variant of it seems to be dominating the minds of the plutocracy -- whether or not this can change, I don't know. But I wouldn't say it's global. (2) This religious conversion is only necessary if people continue not to organize/act collectively.
On a positive note: climate change has been reported far more than in the past, the country seems to be moving a little in prioritizing it (according to polls), and there's a significant movement compared to even 10 years ago. Plus, younger people seem much more likely to care about this crisis, for good reason. Big business, including fossil fuel companies, have moved from outright denial to admitting we have to do something -- i.e., the delay-as-long-as-possible phase. But that's still movement. Renewable energy and clean technology has advantaged and become much cheaper, etc.
This would all make me very hopeful...if it were 1988. But since we've essentially wasted 34 years, most of the warming is locked in. We have only some idea of how destructive 1.5 to 2.5 degrees warming will be -- but given the level of destruction we've already seen (and are seeing) at just 1.2 C, it's likely to be hellish.
Yes...and if we had another 20/30 years of runway, this would be good. But much like the tobacco industry, the fossil fuel industry will fight to the bitter end to burn their products -- and that means the politicians they control and the misinformation they put out (now greenwashing) will continue to lose us time. By the time it becomes a non-partisan issue, there likely won't be time left.
We can put our hopes into carbon-removing technology, but that doesn't seem very promising.
It's changing in Russia right now. They're transitioning to a command economy. They will continue to export coal and gas because they're dependent on the proceeds.
Quoting Xtrix
Not yet. There's still a huge amount of coal left. It would take America about 200 years to burn all its own coal. That's what we need the Covenant for.
In this way conservative incompetence has undermined itself. Let us all rejoice in the demise of neoliberalism! Destroyed by the free market!
The tech miracle would be commercial fusion. With cheap, abundant energy you can do a lot. Such as large-scale carbon capture and desalinization.
As for how bad it will be, the latest IPCC report has us likely averting the worst case emission scenarios, being on pace for somewhere between 2.7 to 4 degrees warming. That's down from previous estimates, so we can likely expect the range to keep falling somewhat as renewables and battery tech continue to improve. The climate scientists I've seen debate online don't think that sort of range is likely to be an existential threat. It will be a serious challenge for global civilization and far from ideal, but not one that will bring it down, unless there are tipping points in those temperature ranges that put us on a hot earth trajectory. Or we have WW3. Which we could still have before then for other reasons. No doubt climate change will strain certain relations.
:up:
Quoting Marchesk
They only look out about a century, right?
Too late for that. By the time this is effectively available, we will have breezed past the moment we could've avoided 1.5 degrees.
Yeah, are you worried about next century?
But limited it to say 2 degrees is better than 2.7+ degrees. 1.5 isn't happening. At least not by 2050. Maybe with serious carbon capture and decarbonization by the end of the century.
Nuclear energy doesn't trap heat in the atmosphere. It's no more of a concern for climate change than putting up a shit ton of solar panels.
Some more, not no more. Solar panels absorb energy they do not add any energy. Whereas suns, big and little, add energy. They don't add to the greenhouse effect. But the very idea that we can continue our current way of life with such a technological fix is a pernicious lie. We already have millions of climate refugees, and we are already set to lose a great many low-lying cities and a large portion of our arable land. This much is already unavoidable, and dreams of cheap energy are what brought us to this point.
No, but a happy outlook for next century is dubious since there's a delay between CO2 emission and the associated effect.
If we could limit the change to that, it would be a win for humanity. The high projection for change is about 8 degrees.
One way to avoid that would be fusion.
Another unproven technology. We can certainly hope but it's no replacement for actual policy doing what needs to be done with technologies we currently have and fully understand. If halfway through we are handed a tool that makes it easier, that's great but otherwise it has indeed just been an excuse not to do anything.
Mining uranium is incredibly carbon dioxide intensive. Also another fuel that isn't unlimited as well. Not a definitive solution and avoids the necessity to focus on energy efficiency first and replacing energy generation systems.
Unfortunately it couldn’t be commercialised in time….
So, the temperature could be actually a comfortable 25[sup]o[/sup] C but it feels like 45[sup]o[/sup] and mercury (the element, not the planet) has become more sensitive to temperature because of which it reads 45[sup]o[/sup] C instead of the real 25[sup]o[/sup]. The same goes for other living organisms and other thermosensitive substances.
Contaminated mercury could result in erroneous thermometer readings, oui? Conspiracy theory! :lol:
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
It ain't going to happen. Not soon enough , if ever, and it doesn't address the huge environmental problems at all. I'm unsurprised, but disappointed that the same nonsense is being spouted here as we have been hearing for 40 years or so.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/climate-change-not-the-main-driver-of-madagascar-food-crisis-scientists-find But it is an additional, back-seat driver. Deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, uncontrolled mining and logging, are all also driving in the same direction, and as people get more desperate, the over-exploitation of whatever resources remain gets worse.
Yes. Nuclear is another excuse to do nothing and carry on as before. Personally, I have no wish to go back to the stone age, but that is where current plans would take us if only they would be implemented. As they are not being implemented at all, the 8 degree rise is starting to look more likely.
Covid has demonstrated how easy it is to reduce fuel usage by simply not flying and driving so much. Onshore wind is the cheapest source of energy, can be built locally and supplemented with tidal, solar, river, geothermal, etc depending on local availability.
But agriculture is heavily dependent on energetically produced fertilisers, and becomes more so as intensive farming destroys the soil. We need to eat less meat and dairy to reduce the pressure to deforest to make room for cattle, and allow less intensive methods that allow carbon capture by the soil. But this will not happen by the action of the invisible hand of capitalism. The invisible hand has shown already that it does not in the least mind exploiting resources to the limit of profit and leaving a wasteland. Slash and burn economics is rife.
Global warming is one aspect of a larger man-made environmental catastrophe created by the industrial revolution, because capitalism has never been properly regulated and forced to account for its environmental costs, which have been off-loaded onto 'the commons' in the form of pollution and environment destruction. Let's call this 'freedom', and wave a flag.
:lol:
Quoting unenlightened
:lol: Fart is cheap!
Quoting unenlightened
Yep, we have a lot of that (shit)! :grin:
Quoting unenlightened
:chin: You mean invisible man! Bang on!
Let's get down to the brass tacks, shall we? We know we have a problem (climate change), a huge one as a matter of fact. We know the aetiology ([math]CO_2[/math]) as well! The solution, however, isn't as straight forward as we'd have hoped, oui? We're almost completely dependent on fossil fuel for our energy. So, the hard choice we've got to make: Freeze or Fry! :grin:
That's an odd attitude. The Chinese are getting there. .
The rest of the world will catch up. Have a little faith, Peter.
How many is a few? At a minimum 20 years then. Much too late. Climate action needs to happen today and considering the rich west is not willing to give up its way of life, they will continue to squabble about how to account for carbondioxide and make sure there are enough loopholes that on paper they reach their target but in reality don't do anything.
Because that's the foreseeable future, agreement on an accounting method in the next 2—3 years and then another 5 years to conclude the rules aren't working (which is false, they will do exactly what they want then to do, allow them to continue to do what they want). It's the biggest greenwashing scam to come.
I agree it's too late to aim for zero anthropogenic global warming. I mentioned before that a significant chunk of accessible hydrocarbons have yet to be burned, and per David Archer, a long range climate modeler, it's what we do with those reserves that decides how bad it will be over the course of the next 10,000 years.
My focus is more on how that will play out. The course of the next few centuries is already set.
The way things are going and how the US and Europe are preparing for the next round of bipolar struggle everything might be moot. But Kudos for looking even further, I don't plan beyond my kids' expected death, somewhere around 2100.
And people, groups, nations, world haggle with that.
I've been interested in futurology for a while. In a way it's related to trying to understand history. :nerd:
Interesting stuff.
https://apple.news/AkyZDh_aSSBWPbTZv37pusQ
With the war in Ukraine as cover, the fossil fuel industry and the Biden administration are pumping more than ever. It’s almost certain that this month, June, there will be a major Supreme Court decision limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate CO2 in West Virginia v. EPA. Lastly, nothing has or will happen in congress, thanks largely to one guy with the most funding from big oil.
All this despite the latest IPCC report, global awareness and desire for action (according to polls, including the US), and evidence all around us — from increased wildfires and draughts to floods, melting icecaps, and rising sea levels.
So, since a minority rules the US, and since they use the idea of “states rights” as cover to legally dismantle any action on a national level (including abortion) through the Supreme Court and have all but incapacitated congress, perhaps this is even more the time to realize that politics is indeed local. That not only is there little we can do about national politics, but that focusing on your state and local level is the way to go and always has been anyway.
I wonder if we see more grassroots participation in this decade?
But then she said that nobody thought much about it. She said if you get used to heat and humidity, you don't notice it as much. She said people use air conditioning because they don't get used to it, so they think they need the cooler temperature. But also, they had shade trees over their houses and that keeps the inside of the house cooler.
I asked if her mother ever complained about the heat, and she chuckled and said her mother never complained about anything.
So that's one facet of the lifestyle many of us have now. We think we need air conditioning. Another issue is food. If you walk through a grocery store in the US, you'll see a totally unnecessary food extravaganza. The quantity of extruded carbohydrates people eat promotes obesity and diabetes. They eat it because it's easy to get and again, they think they need it.
In the wild, humans don't have to eat everyday. You can go a few days without food, and if you do, you'll notice the hunger goes away on the third day. This is normal. Eating giant amounts of calories constantly is not.
Another factor is travel. Cities are laid out to accommodate cars, so people really can't do their thing on a bike.
I mention these things just to call attention to the hidden dimension of CO² emissions: the wildly extravagant lives we lead, thinking all the while that this is just average.
Yes, the United States is the leader of emissions and is absurd on waste. They’re also the most powerful force against climate action.
Ridiculously stupid— but that’s the state of the world.
We went swimming in a meandering stream which was shared by cattle. Not very clean. We didn't get sick.
Quoting Tate
They don't have to eat every day, but I bet we have preferred to eat every day for a very long time.
No doubt about it, though, most people in the industrialized world are eating too much of the wrong kind of food. A supermarket is a smorgasbord of not very healthy food. Why? Because food manufacturers are not public health agencies. Besides, a lot of people like the crap that is on offer. The crap also comes in interesting novel forms which people also like. There are one or two items of crap that I like to eat--crunchy, chewy, salty, spicy, greasy, sweet creations from the laboratories of Conagra and Multifoods. Carrots and cabbage are healthier than Doritos and Hagen Daz, but one can stand only so much whole grain, NGO, organic, high-fructose-free minimally processed whole earth clunky goodness. .
Do older people have a harder time dealing with heat? Just wondering.
I think we would all adapt pretty quickly if air conditioning disappeared. It's just that no one is going to give it up until they have to.
We need a new energy source. That's the only solution from where we are now. Do you agree?
In general, yes. We don't respond as quickly to sudden changes in temperature as younger people. Medicines and medical conditions may make it more difficult for agéd bodies to lose heat. Cognitive decline can interfere with an individual's taking care of themselves, so that they may not be able to execute a cooling strategy.
A fan in a hot apartment won't cool a person very much. If humidity and temperature are high enough, (90º - 95º F, with very high humidity) sweating no longer works as a cooling mechanism and heat stroke and death may follow. (This is true for everyone, not just old people)
Yes, people have gotten along without air conditioning in very hot conditions. This is especially true where temperatures are high while humidity is low. Sweating in hot - arid environments works quite well. Urban environments present extra problems. Apartment buildings without AC can turn into solar ovens, and the surrounding paved environment aggravates the problem.
Minnesota had a severe hot drought in the summer of 1988. During some nights the temperature remained in the upper 90s. Because of the drought, the hot air was very dry and thus the heat was much more tolerable. I was doing street outreach in Minneapolis at that time, and spent a lot of time on bicycle, without suffering. The nights, on the other hand, were wonderful -- warm, dry, bug free, clear skies. It was hell for agriculture but great for some of us.
During the 2003 heatwave in Europe, nearly 70,000 people died from heat, many of them elderly Many of the elderly's families were away on vacation, and no one was doing wellness checks on the old folks. Most of the dead lived in apartments without AC. American cities have also seen spikes in heat related deaths.
The solution isn't to put AC in every apartment. Most heat-waves are of relatively short duration. Rather, the solution is to make sure vulnerable people have a way of getting to cooling centers so their core temperatures don't reach fatal levels.
I see. Being less dependent on AC would require more social integration, or socialized medicine.
This doesn't exactly address climate change because it just means a heavier load on the grid.
I does centralize the CO² output, though. That means when the grid is powered by fusion, say, cars will also be powered with it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-limits-environmental-protection-agencys-authority-11656598034?mod=hp_lead_pos1
Fuck conservatives.
I saw this coming back in November. So I’m not at all surprised. All the more reason to fight back in the same way the right has for the last few decades: state and local level politics. We’ve largely lost National power for a while now.
Exactly. This goes back, once again, to how important the (original) 350 billion reconciliation bill was last year. Despite having both chambers of congress and the executive, nothing has happened on climate change. The reactionary court knows this quite well, and so like the excuse of “sending it back to states,” sending it back to Congress and the “representatives of the people” is a complete joke. Just the same old delay, delay, delay tactics of these corporate shills.
The strategy of delay: Pass it on to state legislatures, because they’re dominated mostly by corporate-stocked conservatives; kick it all back up congress, because you know the house is gerrymandered in favor of conservatives and the Senate disproportionately favors conservatives (plus it’s minority rule anyway thanks to the filibuster). This way it looks like you’re operating on principles and not nihilistic greed, Christian nationalism, and science denial.
So I know we can’t blame only one person, but at the end of the day the actions of one guy from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, has literally been the roadblock to the changes that are needed. Blocked the reconciliation bill, and refused to abolish filibuster. No winning. Where are the people going to THAT guy’s house and protesting? Now’s the time.
Between the Supreme Court, appellate courts, Congress, state legislatures, governorships, think tanks, corporate lobbying groups, and a mass of enthusiastic consumers of Fox News type propaganda — the conservatives have already won.
Turns out the 2020 election only stopped the train from going backwards, delayed the inevitable and, at best, nibbled around the edges of progress. So once again if the voters show up, it’ll have to be because they’re motivated by the horrors inflicted by the party technically not in power. Not an easy feat. And unlikely.
Which means the climate-denying, election fraud-believing, Trump-worshipping, spineless corporate servants take back Congress —and nearly nothing gets done until 2024, when things could go even worse.
All the more reason you take things local.
Reference: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/supreme-court-s-e-p-a-ruling-shifts-more-power-away-from-congress/ar-AAZ7iOq
That's the idea!
Good one! :up:
:snicker:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1046365/grid-storage-iron-batteries-technology/
Interesting. There's a lot of things going on technologically that is hopeful. The question -- as always -- is whether we get there in time, and just how much damage has to occur beforehand.
Given that simple commonality, we can achieve a lot. We have the solutions, too. They're right there. We don't even have to sacrifice all that much. Public transportation, electric cars, heat pumps, electric lawnmowers, solar panels, less meat consumption, etc. etc. A more sustainable world is possible.
So what is getting in the way? There are no simple answers, but there are a range possibilities which vary in importance and explanatory power.
One is cost. Another is feasibility of scale. A big one is the profit-motive, and the fact that those in power want to keep their power (and status). Another is a failure of vision and values, a kind of nihilism and short-term thinking that's infected the minds of those in power -- both in business and in government. Yet another is the force of habit, the "This is how it's always been done" syndrome. Lastly, and not exhaustively, is the melding of governments with corporations to the point where you cannot distinguish one from the other.
So depending on how we prioritize these obstacles, we can formulate where we want to direct our civic energies. For me, it's the state and local level in the US. Not simply changing my own lifestyle, as has been promulgated by the fossil fuel industry, but building solidarity and community. I include in this, of course, unionizing. Which seems far removed from climate change, but it isn't. If more workers are unionized, they can create a crisis both for the employers and for the politicians. Strong unions are what tilted the scales in the 1930s, and it has that potential to do so again. It's one of the most powerful weapons the majority of Americans (who are wage-workers, blue or white collar; working or middle class) -- the bottom 80 or 90% -- have to truly fight back against the corporate takeover of government. Not simply protesting -- although that's important. Not voting -- although that's important. Not even mobilizing.
But true organization. And that can only happen on the ground at the local level. Our obsession with the national news drama distracts us from this, because there's little we can do about it besides vote every 2-4 years. If that's all we do it's exactly like the "solutions" presented to climate change: change your lightbulbs and recycle. In other words, complete nonsense. All while the rich get richer and the planet continues to burn (and people die of opiates, and kids become increasingly obese, and education is de-funded in favor of privatization, etc etc.).
So that's a rant, but it's worth talking about the entirety of this problem and the solutions that are staring us in the faces.
Somewhere around 60 percent of electrical energy in the US comes from coal and natural gas.
What predictions have been made by climate scientists in re climate change? "Extreme weather" is just too vague for me and others too I presume.
Yes.
Quoting Agent Smith
Lots.
Quoting Agent Smith
Climate isn’t weather.
If you’re truly curious, there’s thousands of options to study it and mountains of evidence.
The only prediction I'm aware of that climate change makes is extreme weather and, as far as I can tell, that's too vague; almost as if they had an [s]astronomer[/s] astrologer on the team. Edify me/us please!
Oh! And where are the experiments?
That's not a requirement. We know stars go supernova and haven't tested that under laboratory conditions. Maybe Chalmers' "What is this thing called science?" is a good read for you.
Quoting Agent Smith
This is lazy and the same reason I didn't answer the other question.
True, for some branches of science, astronomy being one, experiments are technologically impossible. However this doesn't imply that the scientists in such sciences don't want to do experiments. The same goes for evolutionary biologists, oui monsieur? At the very least, I expect the proponents of evolution to describe only, an experiment in as much detail as possible to test Darwin's theory.
Quoting Benkei
Yes, some scientists are lazy and hence my query.
Oops! Got my wires crossed! :snicker:
Describe only an experiment to test the climate change hypothesis!
Merci for reminding me I can google this stuff. I did and all I found were rather simplistic experiments involving lab jars, some CO[sub]2[/sub], sunlight and a thermometer. To be fair, such experiments do demonstrate the heating effect of CO[sub]2[/sub].
However, I'm more interested in real world experiments - done out in the field as it were and not in cozy labs. Climate change is a claim about the earth itself, I expect the predictions to be at the same scale and they must be observable to ensure the hypothesis is falsifiable. The only prediction climate scientists have made is extreme weather, but what exactly does this mean? It's so vague, like Barnum statements found in horoscopes, that they're utterly useless - Too hot? Climate change! Too cold? Climate change? Drought? Climate change! Downpours? Climate change! :brow:
Quoting Agent Smith
This is simply wrong.
Extreme weather, on the other hand, includes temperatures in free fall.
Sure. Here's a brief overview I wrote not long ago:
In explaining climate change, for people who are truly interested in learning about it, I always like to start with an easy experiment: you can take two glass containers -- one with room air and one with more CO2 added, and put it in the sun, seeing which one heats up the fastest. Easy, simple. In fact, Eunice Foote did exactly this experiment in 1856:
Then we can ask: How much CO2 is in our atmosphere? Since trees take in CO2 and most living organisms let off CO2, there's always fluctuations. So the next thing would be to look at the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, measured all over the Earth -- starting in the Mauna Loa Volcanic Observatory in 1958 and expanding from there.
What do we see? Concentrations go up and down a little, naturally, every year, because there are more leaves on trees in summer in the Northern Hemisphere than in winter. Yet the average rises every year, leading to the famous Keeling Curve:
That's just from 1958 to the present. When you look at the concentrations over the last 800 thousand years, an even more interesting trend emerges:
https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-relentless-rise-of-carbon-dioxide/
That's 412 parts per million currently, and the last highest level was about 350 thousand years ago at 300 ppm, before modern humans were even around.
So we know (1) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and (2) that there is a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere now than in the last 800,000 years.
One would think the planet would be warming, giving these two facts. So now we'd have to look to see how temperatures have fluctuated over time, and if increases in temperature correlates in any way with increases in CO2. Is there a correlation?
Turns out there is.
Over 100 years:
And over 800 thousand years:
Then the question becomes: why is this happening? Where is all of this extra CO2 coming from -- and in such a relatively short period of time?
The answer to that question is because of human activity, especially since the industrial revolution. As world population increases, and more trees are cut down (for fuel, houses, and to make room for raising livestock), there is less of a carbon "sponge."
But on top of this, we're also burning things. Burning wood puts CO2 into the atmosphere. Cows and other livestock also release a lot of methane, another greenhouse gas.
But of course it's not only wood and not only livestock. The main culprit, it turns out -- and why the industrial revolution was mentioned -- is fossil fuel: coal, oil, and natural gas. These are carbon-dense objects, and when burned release a huge amount of CO2. Multiply this burning by an increasing population, year after year for over 150 years, and it becomes very clear where the excess CO2 is coming from.
So human activity is the driver of rapid global warming.
Lastly, so what? What's the big deal about increasing the global temperature by just a few degrees?
I think the answer to this is obvious once you realize how only a few fractions of a degrees has large effects over time, which we're already beginning to see. The melting of the ice caps, sea level rise, an increase in draughts and wildfires -- all happening before our eyes, as every year we break more heat records.
In my opinion, I think it's undeniable that this is the issue of our time and those of us who aren't in denial should at least put it in their top 3 political priorities and act accordingly.
Biodiversity collapse is exacerbated by climate change, as you know. Whether it occurs without a rapidly changing climate -- probably, but certainly not to the degree it is. So I'd still place the greater emphasis on lowering emissions, as that will benefit biodiversity collapse greatly. Other solutions to the biodiversity issue are more than welcome.
Anyway, muchas gracias for such an informative reply.
Early on there were many hypotheses — natural cycles, water vapor, and a host of others. These hypotheses have been abandoned.
Also the predictions made over several decades have now become true— in fact the effects have taken place quicker than expected, for example in the melting of the ice caps and severity of draughts.
This is why the idea is so widely accepted. But now it’s completely obvious to the point where even fossil fuel companies acknowledge it publicly. All one has to do is check the global temperature averages which break records year after year.
Just another reason why the US shouldn't be the leader of the free world. And hopefully they won't be, as other countries start to realize how broken of a nation it's become.
Don't think I've seen the two numbers plotted on one graph going centuries back; would be interesting though. Anyone know/have?
Then there's deforestation, pollution, roads, cities, farms, nature/wildlife displacement, all that. Humans + "footprints" + remains are all over (bombing too for that matter).
A global scale thing. Anthropogenic effects are noticeable. Global scale responses seem called for.
Yeah it was clear last year that Manchin was aiming for nothing whatsoever. I imagine nothing passes this time too. And there goes the next 10+ more years of inaction. Combined with the 30-40 years of courts acting against any action whatsoever.
Leaves little option but to unionize workplaces and start striking, and shift to the state and local level.
I bought this in the meantime:
And looking into building this in France:
And China along with Europe will most definitely overtake the US in the green tech revolution since the US is incapable of getting it's act together on just about anything.
Quoting Xtrix
Well, might as well leave this here, since I don't want to end this on a down note:
[tweet]https://twitter.com/DavidPomerantz/status/1541377407558590467[/tweet]
That’s pretty cool.
So you see all of this as inevitable? Better to just get away from it?
I hope you’re wrong, if that’s the case.
Pomerantz has the right idea.
I wouldn't underestimate the ability of the USA to become a frontrunner because a lot of people do see the problem. Just because politics is filled with dinosaurs, doesn't mean the citizenry is.
Unfortunately yes. I see no awareness with most people in power. Still fucking around with more immediate crises, which will always pop up. While Sunak wants to tackle inflation again and Biden is writing a cheque for 50 billion the world is burning.
Absolutely, But according to that graphic, CO2 level and temperature are cyclical covariates steady over the past 800,000 years
Sure but there is only so much that can be done the local level. In spite of being the world's biggest emitter the Chinese have invested more in renewables than any other country by far, and that will likely continue as they wish to dominate the world economy. As an authoritarian government they can pretty much allocate as many resources as they want towards this end.
Meanwhile the US is barely capable of operating either because of corruption or tribalism. Simply put, they're incapable of meeting the moment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/climate/biden-inflation-climate-manchin.html
In hindsight, about ten years from now, this will be recognised as one of those watershed moments when the battle was lost.
It’s not lost by a long shot.
It sucks but it really wasn't that much money last I checked. $300 billion over 10 years is like 15% the cost of Afghanistan. The US spends twice that much a year annually on the military.
The US just overwhelmingly endorsed $40 billion in spending for Ukraine (I suppose inflation didn't matter there) and the budget for that war in the end of it all will probably dwarf the costs of this bill, so you're not wrong on that one.
Well on the bright side Europe is probably gonna be forced to taking the transition more seriously this time now that they are effectively at war with Russia.
Put aside the hypocrisy of European leaders all of a sudden wanting actual clean energy to "save Ukraine" and "show Putin" ... yet somehow the entire world and most things that dwell upon the world wasn't good enough all these years?!
Cutting ties with Russia simply forces a return to coal and dirtier fuels.
For large electricity grid based economies, until (1) renewable energy storage is economic and (2) there's enough over-capacity of renewable energy to fill up said storage, then natural gas is required to develop the renewable energy system to accomplish both 1 and 2.
It just so happens that coal and nuclear cannot adjust their output rapidly to compensate fluctuations in renewable energy output. The larger the renewable energy capacity the larger the fluctuations can be, and therefore the larger the online capacity of a auxiliary power source is needed.
Just so happens that basically only natural gas and hydro have this characteristic (that output can be scaled up or down rapidly).
The gas deals and gas infrastructure with Russia was part of a coherent plan to develop renewable energy in Germany and friends. For, if you actually want to go towards 100% renewable, then you need very large natural gas capacity (both power plants and storage of natural gas) to cover a large majority of the grid for when both solar and wind output is minimal (which does happen; the truism that it is either sunny or windy is a "usually" kind of thing, but it can be both cloudy and not-windy).
But far more important than that, European elites have essentially thrown away all their political capital and economic clout in which to influence world policies.
The Ukraine crisis and cold-war "the reboot" effectively removes Europe as a player on the world stage.
We will need now to be relying now on the US, China and India, Russia Brazil et. al. to lead the way in environmental policies.
In short, Europe only had influence as a major economy within the globalised system; destroy that system by doing nothing to use said economic influence to avoid a disastrous European war, and Europe becomes completely irrelevant to global affairs.
US has "asserted its dominance" over its subordinates--what it wanted--but a gang leader that stays at the top by undermining the psychology, material wellbeing and dispossessing his underlings ... well, let's just say it's a double edged shiv.
(As a little footnote, burning biological material for electricity is just stupid and totally meaningless at the scales of concern.)
From the WSJ.
Unprecedented heatwaves and wildfires: not unusual. Definitely not climate change related.
The problem? Renewable energy. So let’s dig for even MORE oil and gas and coal, and guarantee these scenarios continue and the world burns to the ground.
What's even the proposed connection between "faltering" wind power and a heat wave?
Or do they have problems with their "freedom" grid again?
When renewable energy was in development stage, the media would report cost-per-watt figures of each project, leaving the reader with the strong impression that once solar and/or wind achieved cost-parity with fossils ... we win! Hurrah! Climate change solved.
The problem with this vapid analysis is two fold.
First, cost parity is a stupid metric in the context of fossil fuels being both directly subsidised, indirectly subsidised (such as a giant war machine required to protect shipping lanes and oil-despots--the "friendly" one's ... and also attack the "mean" oil despots), while not internalising the real costs. Using this as a metric is essentially buying into the fossil lobbies "frame" (aka. being their bitch without any capacity for independent thought) as conservative red pillers would say.
However, worse, even if we accept this framework, and just not question fossil fuels getting all these subsidies (let's say for the sake of argument we're morons), then, even so, cost parity with fossil's isn't a good metric.
The grid as designed pre-renewables, already required some level of rapid response in the event a power station went offline all-of-a-sudden the rest of the grid should rapidly compensate. However, this rapid response level, pre-renewables, is generally about 10 to 15% of the whole grid capacity.
So, the first renewable projects can be easily hooked up to the grid no problem as there's already a system to deal with small levels of variability.
However, let's say the grid stays the same and more renewable capacity is added, as this 10-15% level is approached already now there's the risk that the renewable power generation collapses and some other power plant goes offline unexpectedly at the same time ... so already this isn't good.
Push above this buffer zone and collapse of renewable power can collapse the whole grid, or then rolling blackouts are needed to reduce consumption.
Circling back to "grid parity" these added costs need to be included in the cost of solar / wind which, when done honestly, demonstrate the immense scale of our predicament. Energy storage on a large scale is a very large infrastructure project that requires decades to build even if the technologies required were cost-competitive with subsidised fossil. Add in some disruption to the global system as resource competition heats up, a few material bottle necks ... and ... its gone.
NY Times
:up: Says it in a nutshell. Things Greta Thunberg didn't think of when she became aware of the problem at the age of eight.
Well Russia isn't exactly keen on stopping climate change (in large part due to it's reliance on it's gas), Brazil is currently run by a man who seems fine with letting the Amazon burn (at least hopefully until October), China is the world's biggest emitter currently, India isn't really that far off from China, and the US... well enough has already been said about that.
Pretty dark times indeed. Do you see any possible solution to this mess or has humanity royally screwed itself over for the foreseeable future?
Wow, I was just about to make a joke about how the right was gonna blame wind energy again for failing in the heat instead of the cold. Now I just feel unoriginal.
The claim is that renewables are bringing down the grid because they’re failing and putting pressure on the rest, which also fail.
They blamed the freeze last winter on renewables too, when it was actually refineries.
Just more fossil fuel propaganda, as usual.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/18/briefing/extreme-heat-climate-fight-us-government.html
This is what I’ve been saying for several months now: local and state action.
The republicans — representing not only a small minority generally but a minority of voters — have managed to block every federal avenue for change on this issue, a particularly deadly one.
They have the judiciary and the congress. Whatever executive actions the president may take, it’s fairly short term and can be overridden.
They also have, since 2010, most state legislatures and have gerrymandered their way to keeping them for another 10 years at least (another huge story of the 2020 election that barely got coverage, but the results of which are now being felt— so much for focusing solely on national politics). They have the Majority of governorships.
So given this scenario, what else CAN be done other than work locally, within your state? New York and California are major players. Illinois, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, New Mexico— all blue states, all can be pushed farther. Ditto the East cost, where I live: New England can do more. Massachusetts, yes — but also and particularly New Hampshire, the only “swing” state in the region.
There’s town councils, city councils, and a range of commissions that can be appealed to or taken over. There are plenty of groups to join, protests to be made, direct actions to take— hopefully with help from the local media. Disruption and crisis needs to be created for them before they start listening.
Lastly, the labor movement needs to continue making gains and forming unions that are strike-ready. I would love to see more strikes for climate — not for wages or conditions, which are important too, but for climate action.
A lot of this, once narrowed down from the overwhelming and vague level of national drama, can be done.
The West’s Climate Policy Debacle
Utopian energy dreams are doing great economic and security damage.
"These are some of the unfolding results in the last year caused by the West’s utopian dream to punish fossil fuels and sprint to a world driven solely by renewable energy. It’s time for political leaders to recognize this manifest debacle and admit that, short of a technological breakthrough, the world will need an ample supply of carbon fuel for decades to remain prosperous and free."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wests-climate-policy-debacle-global-warming-energy-putin-russia-fossil-fuel-power-summer-heat-11658084481?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
One has no words.
Talk about religious fanaticism...
Paywall. Could you summarize?
Essentially, because of the energy crisis, the West should basically keep drilling and forget about green technology.
Only doing more digging and drilling will make the economy better.
I see. Withdrawing from drugs can be fatal, so an addict probably should take drugs to avoid death. Same thing:
If we try to abruptly withdraw from fossil fuels use, people will die from that, so we should withdraw more slowly.
We will need a transition, of course we cannot one month to another, or a year, stop all consumption of fossil fuels. Agreed.
But to say we need *more* fossil fuels, not less, is a recipe for certain destruction.
The solution is a profound technological shift.
The whole idea of battling climate change while attempting to maintain levels of prosperity is totally misguided and doomed for failure.
That’s exactly the one I was talking about here. Terrifying.
There really isn't anywhere for it to go. It all just goes round and round.
F**king lunatics.
True. That doesn't affect the climate, though.
Running out of precious metals to make phones doesn't affect the climate. Burning any fossil fuels at all does. We either need to come up with a good way to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, or stop burning fossil fuels all together.
:lol:
That's what trees have been doing for...some time...sort of.
[sup](? simplified, but probably good enough here)[/sup]
I guess it's not just a matter of inventing a cool CO[sub]2[/sub] vacuum cleaner.
Of course. Why would you think I don't know that?
Population growth is around zero in Europe, China, and the US. It's actually threatening to start going negative. Why do you think that is?
Yes it does.
It’s not just cell phones. If we delete the supply of metals, we’re in serious trouble. Especially when do much green technology rests on these commodities.
On precious metals? Like what?
And from the UN:
“Humanity faces ‘collective suicide’ over climate crisis, warns UN chief“
However, when we get down to specifics, we hit a wall - our technology, the engine of the global economy, is 100% carbon-based.
This, in my humble opinion, is the Gordian knot humanity is faced with!
What is needed is a bloody technological revolution! Can we do it? Necessity is the mother of invention.
It may not be necessary or even possible to give up carbon; we could at least try to reduce our carbon footprint to manageable levels ad interim.
Exactly, why destroying Europe as a relevant political actor on the world stage is ... wait, pretty great from fossil fuel exporters who deny the reality of climate change (or already bought their bunkers, and deny the stupidity of such a plan) point of view.
Quoting Mr Bee
The reason cynicism tends to increase in the environmental movement with age is because the goal posts keep moving. First generation of environmentalists were concerned about humans causing the extinction of single species (carrier pigeon and dodo) and failing to preserve those species was viewed as "losing".
After the environmental movement failed (or society failed the environmental movement, I would say is more accurate) to create policies to preserve single species, the goal posts moved to entire ecosystems.
Where we are in that task is:
- Livestock account for 0.1 Gigatons of biomass
- Humans account for 0.06 Gigatons of biomass
- Wild mammals 0.007 Gigatons of biomass
- Wild birds 0.002 Gigatons of biomass
This shift from wild biomass to livestock represents about an 80% loss of biodiversity, in terms of genetic variation losses in damaged / collapsed populations.
"Conservation" has resulted in a lot of species not going entirely extinct that otherwise would, however, conservation simply delays the inevitable if the whole earth system is damaged to an extent to change things like ... climate comes to mind, thus wiping out even the small pockets of "conserved" nature. If the whole earth system is not cared for, these pockets of conservation can not be sustained over the long term as larger environmental changes.
Which is the general theme of the environmental movement of one faustian bargain after the next.
In short, the ecological apocalypse has already happened.
Now, the goal posts are moved to just basic survival of humans and earth as a going concern.
This is still achievable from an engineering point of view, and even on an apocalyptic landscape with 50-90% of the currently inhabitable earth no longer liveable, humans can likely survive on the poles. There are pathways to full extinction but these seem unlikely edge cases in terms of environmental collapse (such as oxygen depletion or turning the atmosphere toxic).
More damage to earth life and ecosystems is guaranteed, the question is how much more and how many more people will die in horrible ways.
Since the processes of discombobulation are unpredictable and chaotic, even relatively small things done now can have a large effect on where we end up on the biodiversity-loss-dystopian-collapse spectrum.
In terms of engineering and earth stewardship, multiple WWII scale efforts started now would have a decent change of more-or-less stabilising the climate and biodiversity.
Unfortunately, as we enter the "bill's come due" phase of our ecological destruction to fuel hedonistic thoughtless life styles, this destabilises political systems making coordinated action harder.
The last window to act in a "politically feasible way" was the 90s.
Hence all the buildup and focus on Kyoto.
Total fail.
Oh I have no doubt that humans will survive this in some form. They will start taking climate change seriously when it becomes an immediate concern (one can argue that it really is in some cases). Unfortunately it'd be too late in large part to stop the damage. In addition the failure to act will open up a whole host of other issues on which society will divide itself such as fights over natural resources, migration, and more pandemics (and judging by the way COVID was handled, it's not looking very good).
It's safe to say that this year has pretty much made me lose faith in humanity altogether. With all the recent events going on now, it's hard to be optimistic. Human nature is just inherently flawed and we probably deserve whatever is gonna come our way.
Yes, question is how much damage.
Quoting Mr Bee
The window of political feasible solutions closes before, potentially a lot before, the window of strictly physically feasible solutions.
This was a big point of particular emphasis 20 years ago in the community of collapse analysts), that the time to act is when the system is stable and not unstable due to the consequences of the bill coming due.
Quoting Mr Bee
Same.
I suppose it is necessary to try nonetheless, but it does feel more and more futile.
Quoting Mr Bee
Agreed.
Quoting Mr Bee
Of course we can debate human nature, but I think we would agree that we are now experiencing the consequences of our actions.
Quoting boethius
We are certainly experiencing the consequences of some people's actions. Yes it does seem futile; yes it is hard to be optimistic; yes some people have lost faith in humanity.
But look: there are 7+ billion pretty much powerless consumers in the world. We tend to blame ourselves for the climate disaster. Maybe we are all complicit, but none of us are guilty of being prime movers in energy production, manufacturing or consumption. We are small cogs in a great wheel, but we do not turn the wheel. We do not grind; we are ground up.
There are guilty parties--the several million rich, powerful people who have steered the economy of waste in both energy and materiel; who have worked over the last century to put us all in private cars; who have always chosen the long term environmental loss over short term profitgain; who have always opted to keep most workers' heads just above water.
You - bricklayer; you - librarian; you - farmer; you - janitor; you - mechanic; you - teacher; you - factory worker; you - accountant; you - grocery store clerk; you - nurse; you - teacher... None of you were ever in a position to steer steer the economy, for better or worse. You are not to take the blame: you are the victim.
:100:
Sure you can say we're not the primary cause of alot of our problems, but we aren't entirely blameless. Alot of the corrupt politicians are there because we are duped into voting for them and against our own interests. In addition, the people who do want to do something are successfully demonized into obscurity by the media. We can easily topple over the oligarchs if we actually unite together, but instead we're more interested in fighting amongst ourselves. Alot of people are actually celebrating the death of the US climate bill right now, primarily because the issue has been so politicized.
Whether the politicians are corrupt or not, whether we voted them in or they just muscled their way
in, may not matter that much. The State has interests that are pursued using the procedures and personnel available to it. (On the one hand, the State is an abstraction; on the other hand, the State has authorizing legislation, a permanent government, courts, and interested parties to make sure things run "the right way".)
Our country was set up to be the kind of country it was / is. The rights of property were / are paramount. "Nature" and the original inhabitants of the American land were of little interest to the State. "Individualism" might have been important, but most run-of-the-mill "individuals" (lacking wealth) were of little importance.
Quoting Mr Bee
The individuals who did matter, and who in various ways animated the State to begin with, were the oligarchs. The oligarchs and the States have a close relationship, and overturning one will require overturning both. That is a tall order, even for 7 billion people. Not impossible, but very difficult. Why? for the simple reason that most people are decent folk who are not made of the abrasive, corroding stuff that oligarchs and crooked senators are made of.
Plus, the state knows how to use violence in its self-defense, and the state have a lot of violence at their disposal. Gunning down the rioting masses (or gassing them) won't bother the oligarchs. To quote one oligarch "If the masses want to die, then they should get on with it."
All of this is to say, again, the 7 billion are not to blame.
The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution is now reaping the whirlwind.
Everything you mention is true, and also designed/engineered. By whom?
By a class of people -- the wealthy, the plutocracy -- who buy or appropriate academics, clergy, politicians, and journalists. They establish and fund think tanks, own and control mass media companies, infiltrate colleges and universities, and deliberately use all of it as a means of control by sowing discord and confusion among the employees, among the poor, working and middle classes.
The plutocracy have also undermined, weakened, polarized, or destroyed social and civic institutions; most importantly, labor unions. That was one of the first things to wage harsh war against and to stamp out as best as possible. A very smart, strategic move on their part. But it reveals how much of a threat and a nuisance to their power labor unions were (and are). Education, access to knowledge and information, was also a threat and still is -- but it can be owned, censored, filtered, skewed.
The point being that yes, we can indeed topple them -- and they know it. The power always lies in the hands of those with greater number...and there's simply more of us than them. Look all around the world, currently and historically, for examples of people rising up and taking over. This is a great fear of any ruling class, and it's a great fear of the plutocracy. So they do everything they can to divide, polarize, distract, deflect, etc. -- all that you mentioned. Are the people to blame for this? The power imbalance corresponds to level of responsibility, in my view -- and the imbalance is very, very skewed towards the wealthy.
We have to fight it through love and empathy and listening. Because they've won over too many people -- and if we all dig in our heals, and no one breaks the ice (or tries), then we're doomed.
Indeed, the oligarchs know that when the people unite against them they can't win, which is why they try to break people apart whenever they can by sowing discord. In fact, I think that that is part of the reason why today's politics is so divisive.
But the fact that people can be so easily manipulated like this is also part of reason why I said I've lost faith in humanity. The rise of Nazi Germany has shown us all that people can be duped into hating and committing heinous atrocities against one another with just the right amount of persuasion, and the fact that people can just let someone like Hitler come into power terrifies the hell out of me. Hitler may be gone, but what made him so powerful in the first place is still with us, likely leading to the rise of similar figures.
I mean, out of all of the problems humanity is facing right now, it seems like people are more interested in talking about culture war nonsense than anything else, all while the wealthy make off. Some billionaire just bought one of the biggest social media websites out there (well not anymore) and people actually celebrated.
I wouldn’t lose faith. I’d be on the right side of history and do all we can to fight it. Hitler eventually got his ass kicked— and was persuasive, yes, but only because the German people were desperate and angry, and not enough stood up to the rise of nazism.
History repeats itself. I see us as coming out of the new gilded age, or perhaps the 1920s. The result will depend on us: do we fall into authoritarianism, like Germany did, or do we go the way of trust-busting and the New Deal — or even the movements of the 30s and 60s.
I’ve been learning more about the labor movement of the 1930s lately. Fascinating and little-known history there. So much attention is given to the 60s (not unjustifiably), but the 30s set the stage for those movements in many ways, with oppressed people (workers) joining together and causing real pressure on those with their hands on the levers of power.
We’ll have to do this again. It involves solidarity, unions, strikes— which means overcoming differences and (gasp) practicing love and empathy and understanding— which, as we know from psychotherapy — are the key conditions that facilitate change and growth.
Yes, let's not do what needs to be done and wait for the invention and implementation of things currently not existing!
I wish people would stop pretending science will solve everything, which is something other people do, after all, so they have an excuse not to make the necessary sacrifices themselves, which we're all going to have to do.
It seems we're getting ever closer to the real cause of all our problems viz. ourselves; some call it human nature I believe.
The key to our salvation then is the clichéd judicious use of carbon-fuelled machines!
Copy that! Merci!
Quoting Xtrix
I agree with these statements.
I'm not sure if and I are saying exactly the same thing, but I believe so.
Our point of view here is considering humanity as a whole including its elites, just as anthropologists do the same for past society's. Nearly all societies have hierarchy and elites, more or less inequality (from brutal slaving to mostly symbolic differences in wealth and power).
When anthropologists consider the reasons for a society's "success" or "failure", be it defined as basic survival or then imposing or resisting hegemonic power, the elites are simply one component in the analysis. Certainly they are "more to blame" than the less powerful individually, but if we agree the less powerful could easily unite and topple the elites at any moment ... then collectively the less powerful have more responsibility.
However, in terms of simply evaluating prospects of a society, the blame game is irrelevant to that. If a society fails, who's to blame is a followup question to how and why the society failed (certainly elites are an important factor, but not the only one).
To summarise, and this is where perhaps I diverge with in terms of assigning things to human nature, by faith in humanity, at least speaking for myself, I must be honest and recognise my faith in my youth was in this particular humanity, elites and all, overcoming our differences and failings at least enough to avoid a climate disaster.
I truly had in my mind the "we did it" moment. Truly believed the elites were genuinely divided on this question of the destruction of the planet and enough elites and enough of everyone else could and would band together for what no one can deny: the destruction of the planet's living systems is not a good thing and we should avoid it.
And, perhaps, if we simply had more time (and, hopefully, we do have more time than it appears now) the "day, indeed, would come".
But today, it at least feels, time has run out on this humanity.
Perhaps there will be other humanities in the future, who learn from our mistakes and misdeeds and indifference, and truly cherish and care for the crumbs of life; that fall from our table of plenty.
Perhaps the most succinct way to express my point of view here, is my contention is that to that to say there's still hope to avoid disaster is to say the pile of bodies we already have doesn't count, and we'll start counting later for some reason.
Of course, I would agree we must do our best regardless of the likely outcome.
A moral imperative does not conveniently go away simply because the goal is unlikely to be achieved.
But in terms of evaluating prospects, certainly seems to me now that we'd need a miracle to preserve anything remotely resembling "normal" and our precious "civilisation".
Quoting boethius
Quoting boethius
Quoting boethius
Quoting Benkei
Another tactic that gets deliberately perpetuated is the sense of hopelessness and helplessness. "I can't do anything; It's too big; nothing will change anyway; it's already over." This is true not only of climate change but of many other issues; it was true for women's rights and civil rights and gay rights.
When we start seeing things as hopeless, and then start attributing the causes to "human nature," as if this were an inevitable outgrowth of genetics, we conveniently remove ourselves from doing anything about it -- things that involve interacting with others, things that are hard.
Joe Manchin sinking this legislation is a big blow, but not unexpected. On October 15th, 2021, it was already over. That's when he gutted the CEPP. It was clear then to me it was over -- I wrote about it on this forum. It should have been clear sooner -- for example, when the Exxon executive all but said Manchin is "our guy" and nothing will happen, in the spring of 2021.
So this isn't a huge shock. There's ways around all of this -- around the Supreme Court, around Congress. The solutions are not only technological -- which is happening slowly (the cost of renewables, the rise of EVs, etc) -- but also involves the labor movement. We see unionizations and strikes happening all over the place, for the last several years in fact. We've lowered our potential outcomes from 3.0-4.0 degree C to between 2.0-2.7 degree C. Not great, but a real improvement. We have younger people coming into power who are very aware of the stakes (even to the point of "climate anxiety"), out there protesting in the streets.
Nothing ever comes as gifts from above. Ever. When our institutions and our leaders fail, we work harder to circumvent them and create a crisis for them. I don't see any alternative beyond giving up and guaranteeing the worst case happens.
Once the number of Homo sapiens on the planet is severely reduced due to the consequences of climate change -- as is bound to happen in the coming decades or at best centuries -- the forces driving CC will then progressively abate. It may take a few thousand years for the climate to cool down though. There are no short term solution that I can see.
Quoting Olivier5
There are plenty of solutions, and people working very hard at those solutions -- and making progress. All while being told that there "are not solutions," that we're already doomed, that there's nothing we can do except continue with the status quo because leaders won't listen and corporations are too powerful, etc. The typical defeatist, hopelessness-encouraging bullshit you can see daily in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.
So sure, we can go with your narrative and thus justify doing nothing. I'm sure people argued the exact same way when it came to slavery, child labor, the oppression of women, the rise of Nazism, etc. That's a choice. The alternative is to do hard work, in the tradition of the movements I mentioned above -- workers rights, civil rights, women's rights, etc. -- and shift the direction we're going in, and rapidly. There's no reason it can't happen -- none.
I'm not trying to "justify doing nothing". I'm just realizing that there is a fairly high chance our civilization will fall, whatever we do at this stage. It's more a question of when and how.
If we had acted decisively two or three decades ago, i.e. if the US had not fought tooth and nail against Kyoto and other agreements (including of course the WSJ), then maybe we would have had some chance of averting the worse global effects.
A miracle may still happen, I guess. But at this stage, to prepare for the worst is perfectly rational. While still hoping for the best of course, and still trying to avert the worst.
[I]Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre ni de réussir pour persévérer.[/i]