jrodefeld posted:

Let's say a company has a permit to chop down wood on property it owns but nowhere else. Or a fishing company can fish in a lake it owns but nowhere else. What economic sense does it make for the company to chop down all the trees or catch all the fish without efforts to replenish the supply for future years?

Papercut posted:

I think it goes beyond even how well-informed the electorate is. When it comes down to imposing austerity measures on yourself to benefit a nebulous other/future, humanity simply isn't emotionally advanced enough to do it. Even if you could educate an entire electorate to understand that they were suffering to preserve the future of their culture, you would have to convince them that not only was the suffering worth it, but suffering even more the following election cycle and then even more the following election cycle (as you impose stricter and stricter emissions limits) and so on would also be worth it. Politicians would be running on the platform of making things even shittier while their opponents promise to ease the suffering. Summed up well by this, which has been posted here before.

Only an autocrat is capable of imposing the long-term austerity needed to address the issue, in my opinion.

Job Truniht posted:

Didn't someone a few pages back post a good paper on why libertarians must reject climate change for ideological reasons? I thought this was a non issue in this thread.

jrodefeld posted:

Now, I understand that many progressives think of regulations as laws and rules that are designed to protect consumers from corporate abuse and misconduct. Therefore, as with the economic crash of 2008, they attribute the unprecedented banking and corporate fraud and abuse to mean that we have less regulations than we did before. The truth is that business interests and corporations actually lobby for more regulations in order to hurt their competitors or grant themselves a monopoly. Therefore a great number of regulations on the books actually protect corporate interests rather than protecting consumers.

jrodefeld posted:

However, the market provides regulations that are usually stricter and more comprehensive than government regulations.

Shai Hulud posted:

And seriously, to second the previously-mentioned point: shut the gently caress up about libertarianism/free market/whatthefuckever. This isn't an economic, philosophic, or political issue. This is a scientific issue.

Guigui posted:

they do make an interesting point in regards to taking personal control, and doing one's part in regards to climate change... I will admit that we are limited in the amount of things we can do - but even little things could have a bigger impact.

Guigui posted:

Much as I disagree with Jrodinfeld's comments, they do make an interesting point in regards to taking personal control, and doing one's part in regards to climate change... I will admit that we are limited in the amount of things we can do - but even little things could have a bigger impact.

Of course, that being said; I wonder what China might look like in 30 years in comparison to the pressures Germany invoked upon England and her allies before the first world war... My fear is that nations that remain stuck using old technology will be faced with two options - either forcibly embrace the old technology to the point of obsolescence, or try as hard as possible to play catch-up.

“When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death.”
― Thomas Hobbes

quote:

• It would be wrong to assume that, in the absence of evidence, rebound effects are so small that they can be disregarded. Under some circumstances (e.g. energy efficient technologies that significantly improve the productivity of energy intensive industries) economy-wide rebound effects may exceed 50% and could potentially increase energy consumption in the long-term. In other circumstances (e.g. energy efficiency improvements in consumer electronic goods) economy-wide rebound effects are likely to be smaller. But in no circumstances are they likely to be zero.

Uranium Phoenix posted:

Austerity isn't the solution. There's trillions of dollars of wealth being hoarded by the capitalist elite and corporations, which if taxed would be more than enough to start rebuilding the infrastructure of the US (and if the policy was expanded to other countries, the world). The massive jobs program that would result would be akin to WW2 spending getting the US out of the Great Depression (without the death and destruction), and allow for a drastic reduction in unemployment while providing well paying jobs--which would effectively end the ongoing economic crisis.

Austerity is a tool of the financial elite to protect their profits. Even the IMF admits it doesn't actually work.

Papercut posted:

That's not the point though. In a carbon-based economy, emissions caps themselves are a form of austerity; reducing emissions by 5% will reduce economic output by some percent (you can quibble about whether it's a similar 5% or some other number). Massive, emissions-producing transition programs needed to move away from a carbon-based economy can counter this effect only up to the point where they themselves run into the emissions cap. In the next election cycle, you get a bunch of candidates who say, "climate change is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, but these emissions reductions are just taking too much of a human toll and need to be lessened". And the voters will be presented with this tantalizing choice at every election cycle for a generation or two.

tatankatonk posted:

For most people in North America and Europe, "carbon austerity" limiting economic outpout and growth as we measure it now isn't automatically a catastrophic proposition if it means a shift to more labor-intensive production, because you've got the potential to shrink the reserve army of the un- and underemployed

tatankatonk posted:

That rather long article by Klain that Uranium Pheonix posted before goes into some detail about a carbon-capped economy is threatening to the capitalist class because it redefines how we measure wealth and growth, and in so do doing, opens the door to class war and redistribution

Uranium Phoenix posted:

You're trying to measure regulations as a quantity, where "more" = "bad" and "less" = "good." That isn't how it works. "Regulations" can either be good or bad. The numerous regulations that were repealed that allowed the financial industry to crash the global economy were good regulations. Regulations that are targeted at destroying small businesses are bad regulations.

Nevvy Z posted:

You've got your math all screwed up. Regulations = bad. No more, no less.

Because regulations Reduce Freedom.

And the Free Market is the Best Market.

And only Private Property Interests can save the world from climate change.

And Private Property Interests cannot be properly expressed in a market that is less than Completely Free.

So really, it's been Big Government Regulation destroying the climate this whole time.

Shai Hulud posted:

Any suggestion that markets are capable of protecting the environment as well as, or better than, government should be tempered by the reality that a capitalist model (of which most sane people, including me, are supporters) will consume a given resource until factors intervene to make it inefficient to do so. The environment is a commons, and it's equally trite and true to trot out the phrase "tragedy of the commons" when explaining why policy is probably a necessary ingredient.

Arkane posted:

Even ceding that you are completely correct here, you face the problem of a policy solution being impossible. China and India (and probably Argentina, Brazil, etc.) are NOT going to agree to any climate compact that would lead to decarbonization any time remotely soon. And China is emitting CO2 at rates higher than the US and higher than the entire continent of Europe. China gives no fucks, and why should they? They have a few hundred million people still living in poverty. You really better hope there are technological solutions if you expect catastrophic warming due to CO2 emissions.

Arkane posted:

Even ceding that you are completely correct here, you face the problem of a policy solution being impossible. China and India (and probably Argentina, Brazil, etc.) are NOT going to agree to any climate compact that would lead to decarbonization any time remotely soon. And China is emitting CO2 at rates higher than the US and higher than the entire continent of Europe. China gives no fucks, and why should they? They have a few hundred million people still living in poverty. You really better hope there are technological solutions if you expect catastrophic warming due to CO2 emissions.

(But as I elucidated earlier, we have no signs in recent data that catastrophic warming is at all imminent, so its perhaps a moot point)

Arkane posted:

Even ceding that you are completely correct here, you face the problem of a policy solution being impossible. China and India (and probably Argentina, Brazil, etc.) are NOT going to agree to any climate compact that would lead to decarbonization any time remotely soon. And China is emitting CO2 at rates higher than the US and higher than the entire continent of Europe. China gives no fucks, and why should they? They have a few hundred million people still living in poverty. You really better hope there are technological solutions if you expect catastrophic warming due to CO2 emissions.

quote:

(But as I elucidated earlier, we have no signs in recent data that catastrophic warming is at all imminent, so its perhaps a moot point)

quote:

The fundamental point I will try and make here is that, given a noisy temperature record, many different statements can be true at the same time, but very few of them are informative about future trends. Thus vehemence of arguments about the past trends is in large part an unacknowledged proxy argument about the future.

So here are a few things that are all equally true, conveniently plotted for your amusement:

The linear trend in HadCRUT4 from August 1997 to August 2012 (181 months) is 0.03ºC/decade (blue) (In GISTEMP it is 0.08ºC/decade, not shown).
The trend from August 1975 to July 1997 is 0.16ºC/dec (green), and the trend to August 2012 is 0.17ºC/dec (red).
The ten years to August 2012 were warmer than the previous 10 years by 0.15ºC, which were warmer than the 10 years before that by 0.17ºC, which were warmer than the 10 years before that by 0.17ºC, and which were warmer than the 10 years before that by 0.17ºC (purple).
The continuation of the linear trend from August 1975 to July 1997 (green dashed), would have predicted a temperature anomaly in August 2012 of 0.524ºC. The actual temperature anomaly in August 2012 was 0.525ºC.

The first point might suggest to someone that the tendency of planet to warm as a function of increases in greenhouse gases has been interrupted. The second point might suggest that warming since 1997 has actually accelerated, the third point suggests that trends are quite stable, and the last point is actually quite astonishing, though fortuitous. Since all of these things (and many others) are equally true (in that their derivation from the underlying dataset is simply a mechanical application of standard routines), it is clear that our expectation for the future shouldn’t be simply based on an extrapolation of any one or two of them.

...if you think that future ‘global warming’ is tied to the underlying long term trend in surface temperatures, there is no evidence from HadCRUT4 to warrant changing expectations (and no physical reasons to either). However, if you think that the best estimate of the future comes from extrapolating the minimum trend that you can find over short time periods in single estimates of surface temperatures, then you are probably going to be wrong."

Paper Mac posted:

Here's a map showing NCAR's predictions for drought (using some fairly conservative assumptions re: emissions) in 2030-2040:

The Oklahoma dustbowl would have shown up as a change of -3 to -5 on that scale. Have a look at the Mississipi basin, and then the drought map.

Uranium Phoenix posted:

Also, as a socialist who would like to see the environmentalists and socialists link up in solidarity, I can say with good confidence that most environmentalists are not socialists, closet Marxists, or anything of that nature.

UP AND ADAM posted:

I couldn't respond to this earlier, but how so? Maybe not consciously; environmentalists I've known are often of the STEM mindset and don't have the background or experience in social sciences, politics, history, etc. And with a STEM education you don't get much policy context to what you learn, unless you take policy classes. But, to me, nearly every environmentalist I knew in college was prone to seeing how socialism fit with their ideas about the future. And more definitively, I think capitalism, consumerism excess, and the founding principle of constant growth were widely identified as the base problem with our environmental stewardship. So I definitely think that these kind of people would be, if not already, open to more central planning. I suppose they would not be very conscious of class struggle or social issues, which is something I have noticed. That comes with the education though, and as long as the costs of our new environmentalist economic paradigm are bore by the transgressing parties, or just plain ol rich people, socialism and environmentalism could be in harmony. Is this what you mean by environmentalists not being socialist?

Thank you for the good posts in this thread, everyone. I liked Cyclopean Horror's, and Arkane had some funny jokes too.

quote:

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.

quote:

WHEREAS: The population of the United States reached about 274 million in 1999 and is growing by approximately three million each year, over 57,000 weekly, the highest population growth rate of the developed countries of the world. Most European countries are at zero or negative population growth.
 
WHEREAS: The population of the U.S .is six percent of the world's population, consuming up to 25 percent of the world's natural resources.
 
WHEREAS: The ability of the United States to support a population within its carrying capacity is now strained because of population growth. Fifty percent of our original wetlands have been drained to accommodate growth. Ninety-five percent of all U.S. old growth forests have been destroyed. It is estimated that we have consumed approximately three-fourths of all our recoverable petroleum, and we now import more than half of the oil we consume in the United States. America's underground aquifers are being drawn down 23 percent more than their natural rates of recharge.
 
WHEREAS: For each person added to the U.S. population, about one acre of open land is lost, causing a total yearly loss of about three million acres. America annually exports $40 Billion in food. If present population trends continue, the U.S. will cease to be a food exporter by about 2030.
 
WHEREAS: The report of the Task Force on Population and Consumption of the President's Council on Sustainable Development (1996) said: "The two most important steps toward sustainability are:
1. to stabilize the population promptly, and
2. to move toward greater material and energy efficiency in all production and use of goods and service." The President's Council said, "...reducing immigration levels is a necessary part of population stabilization and the drive toward sustainability."
 
WHEREAS: Population growth generated by mass immigration to the United States causes increasing pressures on our environment and forces local governments and communities to spend taxpayers dollars for additional schools, health care facilities, water disposal plants, transportation systems, fire protection, water supplies, power generation plants and many other social and environmental costs.
 
WHEREAS: 70 percent of U.S. population growth in the 1990's resulted from mass immigration, comprised of approximately 1.2 million legal immigrants and 300,000 to 400,000 illegal immigrants plus their U.S.- born offspring, annually. If mass immigration continues, the population of the United States is projected to exceed half-a-billion by 2050.
 
WHEREAS: Population growth is unsustainable. With a return to replacement levels of immigration, U.S. population can expect to stabilize in another 40 to 50 years. A temporary, all-inclusive five-year immigration reduction to 100,000 annually, followed by a return to 200,000 annually, will eventually allow the U.S. to stabilize its population, at best at about 325 million, and
 
WHEREAS: A majority of Americans of all ethnic and racial backgrounds favors substantial reduction in legal immigration and a complete halt to illegal immigration, and
 
WHEREAS: The people of the United States and the City of Aspen, Colorado, envision a country with a stable population, material and energy efficiency, a sustainable future, a healthy environment, clean air and water, ample open space, wilderness, abundant wildlife and social and civic cohesion in which the dignity of human life is enhanced and protected.
 
NOW THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED: That the City of Aspen hereby petitions the Congress of the United States and the President to immediately implement with deliberate speed and by means consistent with the Constitution of the United States, the consensus of the American People and the President's Council-legislation appropriate to stabilize the population of the United States and insure sustainability:
 
(1) that will encourage and promote all opportunities toward establishing and maintaining material and energy efficiency, social and environmental responsibility;
 
(2) by a return to traditional replacement levels of legal immigration, approximately 175,000, all-inclusive per year, annually; by
 
(3) requiring equitable wages and benefits for workers and community environmental protections to be part of all free trade agreements; and
 
(4) by mandated enforcement of our immigration laws against illegal immigration, thereby promoting the future well being of all the citizens of this Nation and the City of Aspen.
 

tatankatonk posted:

In short, for many US-American environmentalists, conservation is about protecting a pure and transcendent Nature from the depradations of (the wrong kind of) Man. Nature as an end in itself. This is not a socialist environmentalism, which can involve preservationism but would more involve human beings adapting their environment to human needs, and about adapting human needs to the limitations of the ecosystems in which they live.

khwarezm posted:

Certain environmentalists being ignorant or callous about the reality of class distinctions and privilege is one thing, but "Nature as an end in itself", is this a bad thing? We do not have a good track record over the last 12000 years, its been an ever accelerating loss of biodiversity that's not improving, read Zorak's thread on non-human rights and I think it shows that the creatures under the worst pressure are very close to humans in terms of intelligence and social complexity. Do we have the moral right to consign these animals barely a step below us to the scrapheap if they may get in the way of our prosperity? Does that make me another Aspen environmentalist if I think that preserving them takes precedence over most other concerns?

UP AND ADAM posted:

I couldn't respond to this earlier, but how so? Maybe not consciously; environmentalists I've known are often of the STEM mindset and don't have the background or experience in social sciences, politics, history, etc. And with a STEM education you don't get much policy context to what you learn, unless you take policy classes. But, to me, nearly every environmentalist I knew in college was prone to seeing how socialism fit with their ideas about the future. And more definitively, I think capitalism, consumerism excess, and the founding principle of constant growth were widely identified as the base problem with our environmental stewardship. So I definitely think that these kind of people would be, if not already, open to more central planning. I suppose they would not be very conscious of class struggle or social issues, which is something I have noticed. That comes with the education though, and as long as the costs of our new environmentalist economic paradigm are bore by the transgressing parties, or just plain ol rich people, socialism and environmentalism could be in harmony. Is this what you mean by environmentalists not being socialist?

Uranium Phoenix posted:

I think that good exposure to socialist ideas framed in the right way should indeed convince them, since capitalism is the root of consumer excess and the political and economic policies that have gotten us into this mess. I think socialists and environmentalists should be in harmony since the two ideas mesh extremely well with no contradictions.

tatankatonk posted:

specific instances of habitat destruction and poaching is one thing, but, the implications of AGW for ecosystems worldwide broadly means all the complex nonhuman near-sapient mammals everywhere are probably gonna go extinct. And it makes him sad that all the whales and tigers are gonna be dead.

tatankatonk posted:

For most people in North America and Europe, "carbon austerity" limiting economic outpout and growth as we measure it now isn't automatically a catastrophic proposition if it means a shift to more labor-intensive production, because you've got the potential to shrink the reserve army of the un- and underemployed

tatankatonk posted:

That rather long article by Klain that Uranium Pheonix posted before goes into some detail about a carbon-capped economy is threatening to the capitalist class because it redefines how we measure wealth and growth, and in so do doing, opens the door to class war and redistribution

tatankatonk posted:

There's a guy who I talk to who has a strong third-worldist pragmatic position on conservation, who gets real quiet every now and then because specific instances of habitat destruction and poaching is one thing, but, the implications of AGW for ecosystems worldwide broadly means all the complex nonhuman near-sapient mammals everywhere are probably gonna go extinct. And it makes him sad that all the whales and tigers are gonna be dead.

Uranium Phoenix posted:

Austerity isn't the solution. There's trillions of dollars of wealth being hoarded by the capitalist elite and corporations, which if taxed would be more than enough to start rebuilding the infrastructure of the US (and if the policy was expanded to other countries, the world). The massive jobs program that would result would be akin to WW2 spending getting the US out of the Great Depression (without the death and destruction), and allow for a drastic reduction in unemployment while providing well paying jobs--which would effectively end the ongoing economic crisis.

-Troika- posted:

The government can't even spend the money it has efficiently.

Guigui posted:

One of my friends who worked for the WWF felt this way - but what really seemed to get him down, was the thought that future generations won't care that Tigers, Whales or other large animals are extinct - because they were extinct before these future generations were born.

It's like us and the Haast Eagle, or the Dodo Bird, or the myriad of other species that have gone extinct before we even knew them.

(That being said - an eagle that could prey on children / small adults would be a sight to behold...)

-Troika- posted:

The government can't even spend the money it has efficiently. Why should I expect that if they confiscate most of the private wealth in the nation from people in a certain tax bracket that it will go to anything useful?

Goreld posted:

Do you have any examples for that? The NOAA and NASA have some pretty impressive accomplishments under their belt. "The government never does anything right" is a strawman.

quote:

The first serious signs of trouble in the agency came to light earlier this year when the GSA became embroiled in a controversy over a more than $800,000 Las Vegas conference featuring clowns, a mind reader and a red-carpet party.

jrodefeld posted:

MotoMind posted:

The private market is far more wasteful. It doesn't take much time to look at the amount of wealth destruction that companies engage in through mismanagement and error. People should be outraged about it, because that wealth could generate value for society but instead it is destroyed in things and processes that will never produce any social good. The only reason this is not outrageous is because people believe, mistakenly, that each person has the right to waste things that are "theirs," and furthermore believe that corporations should be held to the same low standards as individuals.

-Troika- posted:

The government can't even spend the money it has efficiently. Why should I expect that if they confiscate most of the private wealth in the nation from people in a certain tax bracket that it will go to anything useful?

Pobama posted:

Oh knock it the gently caress off with "the private market" the government is filled with the exact same laissez faire dick sucking assholes you find in the most cut throat corporation.

Shai Hulud posted:

This. I work in the world of defense, and the DoD regularly holds up China as an example of a country that aligns policy to reality. They're building gigawatts of generation because they have the benefit of short-circuiting the carbon economy.

Arglebargle III posted:

Just want to say that Chinese system is a disaster for the environment, whether or not they have one or two impressive flagship policies. I would be shocked if the extralegal coal industry alone in this country didn't dwarf all next-generation electricity projects in scale.

Pobama posted:

Then we can delve into Solyndra: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-09-18/news/ct-met-kass-0918-20110918_1_solyndra-loan-guarantee-obama-fundraisers-obama-white-house