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Just so I'm actually contributing and not just throwing shade: everybody in this thread should follow Alex Steffen on Twitter.
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Aug 30, 2016 13:46
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A White Guy posted:I could expand upon the magnitude of our ignorance in regards to the variety of aspects of climate change that are happening right now, but it would be lost on pedants such as yourself. You are a smug moron and if you think having the attitude you have is going to contribute positively towards meaningful action being taken on climate change, you are mistaken.
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Aug 30, 2016 13:51
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Forever_Peace posted:Just so I'm actually contributing and not just throwing shade: everybody in this thread should follow Alex Steffen on Twitter. Nah, I'm fine with your posts within the context of this forum. I mean, a civil tone is great and all, but not nearly as entertaining. Given that A White Guy prefaced his posts with an appeal to his own authority as a person educated in exactly the topic of the thread, I think it's fine that his assertions are challenged above what's usual for a thread like this. That being said, and not to start off a pedantry contest, how screwed do you consider us to be? And how likely do you think mitigating action is to A: be done at all and B: accomplish anything?
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Aug 30, 2016 14:01
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blacksun posted:You are a smug moron and if you think having the attitude you have is going to contribute positively towards meaningful action being taken on climate change, you are mistaken. If you want to critique and be civil, be civil. If you want to be a dick, be a dick, just don't get mad when you don't get taken seriously. I'm interested, Forever Peace, what you think the long term implications are? Also, what's your PHd in?
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Aug 30, 2016 14:06
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The truth lies somewhere in the middle of "We're totally hosed" and "Its going to be bad" So, something like "This is going to hurt. A lot"
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Aug 30, 2016 14:27
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Nice piece of fish posted:That being said, and not to start off a pedantry contest, how screwed do you consider us to be? And how likely do you think mitigating action is to A: be done at all and B: accomplish anything? warning: speculation below. I think the next two decades are pretty critical, on both an environmental and political front. On an environmental front, we've already locked in ~1.5 degrees warming this century (probably raising to about ~3 degrees warming a few centuries from now), which is enough to contribute to mass extinction events (particularly in some ocean ecosystems), a realignment of where the arable land is, severe drought and weather anomalies, and runaway deglaciation and loss of sea ice. Just in the past few years we've already seen food shortages and/or severe drought contribute to unrest in Yemen, Niger, Egypt, and Syria. India is almost definitely hosed, and large parts of China are probably hosed. The 1st world will probably be relatively OK, but one big problem will be an infrastructure that was built for a different world than the one we will actually have. Water will stop being cheap, we will need to overhaul our shipping and farming industries entirely to move them away from fossil fuels (though will still have the costs of maintaining a monstrous road infrastructure), cities will have to retrofit a large number of buildings to cope with severe weather events, and megacities will have to expand for considerably more people than they currently have. Big social programs that aren't fully entrenched within the next 10-20 years or so (e.g. a national child care system) will probably just not happen once the monetary costs of climate change start kicking in. But in general, it will be livable here, for the most part. It's one of the great ironies of climate change: we who have been the most exploitative are currently best prepared to weather the storm. On the political front, I think there is likely to be a moderate realignment of the political "spectrum" to capture a globalist and technocratic elite on the "left" (pro-immigration, pro-UN, pro-trade, consensus-building policy wonks protective of the global financial class), and an antiglobalist/nativist resistance on the "right" (anti-immigrant, anti-trade, skeptical of experts including both scientists and policy-makers, pro-manufacturing). This is already pretty much exactly how Brexit played out (pro-finance London globalists on the left who opposed Brexit, nativist suburban antiglobalists on the right who supported Brexit). It's going to suck for an awful lot of people when Labor and the Black community are displaced by the financial class as the primary constituency of the Left. But climate change is a global problem, and an overtly globalist majority coalition on the left is probably our best chance at a global effort to combat climate change (the whole "green party" thing, which combined environmentalism with social justice, didn't really seem to gain enough traction, tragically). So in a sense, I think the political prospects are better now than they were 10 years ago. It'll just be the less ideal approach: cap & trade, energy incentives, and a reliance technology (possibly even geoengineering). But the realignment actually needs to happen for even that chance at taking steps to combat climate change. Without it, we'll just continue the "go it alone" locally-driven piecemeal approach (see: the Divest campaign and California's new laws etc), which is incredibly important, but insufficient. (note: the "ideal" approach here was an unprecedented transformation of our megacities, emphasizing walkability and public transit and mixed used zoning, massive investments in public energy utilities, and a new model of economic growth that places hard caps on depletion and pollution) quote:I'm interested, Forever Peace, what you think the long term implications are? Also, what's your PHd in? Cognitive Neuroscience. I am not a climate expert. Forever_Peace fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 14:58
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Forever_Peace posted:Follow Alex Steffen on Twitter. Done. Some good stuff there.
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Aug 30, 2016 15:51
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Forever_Peace posted:Cognitive Neuroscience. I am not a climate expert. Oh God, a phenomenologist! I agree with your predictions, though I too do not have a PhD in Mad Max (but I played at it for a while in grad school). I think the problem is in the details of how you manage all the massive changes required to even slightly turn this ship. For instance, getting rid of fossil fuels in agriculture means an entire restructuring of modern industrial agriculture, which requires fossil fuels for fertilizer. That's already hard, couple it with the social cost of convincing people that maybe Erlich was right (or more right than we thought) but just fifty years too soon. India is the biggest case study for this, the dwarf wheat and other green revolution successes have convinced them that they can just farm as aggressively as they can forever because don't worry another incredible advance in fertilizer/water/gene stock is right around the corner. As a result, the knock-on effects as far as water usage and carrying capacity more generally are incredible. It's kind of a water problem, it's kind of a climate problem, but really it's a people problem, and all the divesting and marching in the world has had literally no effect on it. I also think 1.5 degrees is far too optimistic, given that it's been my experience with the literature that Dr. A White Guy is right, we've always been wrong and always on the conservative side of things, and now that the methane grass bubbles in Siberia are starting to appear, I think we should err on the side of making GBS threads our pants rather than hoping for the best.
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Aug 30, 2016 16:29
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TildeATH posted:Oh God, a phenomenologist! Yeah I think ~3-4 degrees C this century is a likely range, but 1.5C is a pretty standard consensus for what is already "locked in" (which is what I wrote) even if we magically went carbon-zero (or negative!) tomorrow. Low-carbon farming is not completely infeasible. Half of all synthetic fertilizer in the US goes towards animal feed - simply limiting the meat industry to grazing capacity would be better for the environment, the animals, and the price of grains (though the methane would still be a problem until gmo cows...). It's also relatively trivial to transition farm machinery to ethanol instead of petrol (where the carbon emissions of biofuels are resequestered in the following year's crop), though we'd want to phase in electric and hydrogen equipment pretty quickly (biofuels are not a sufficient long-term solution). The remaining ~25-40% of emissions would be marginally tougher (which is why I mentioned it as probably our biggest challenge) but not impossible. I don't have any clever solutions to Nitrous Oxide release from fertilizer nitrates but I faintly recall reading about low-NO fertilizers in development that should help. Don't really have any clever solutions about a zero-carbon food transportation network either.
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Aug 30, 2016 16:58
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Forever_Peace posted:The 1st world will probably be relatively OK, but one big problem will be an infrastructure that was built for a different world than the one we will actually have. Water will stop being cheap, we will need to overhaul our shipping and farming industries entirely to move them away from fossil fuels (though will still have the costs of maintaining a monstrous road infrastructure), cities will have to retrofit a large number of buildings to cope with severe weather events, and megacities will have to expand for considerably more people than they currently have. Big social programs that aren't fully entrenched within the next 10-20 years or so (e.g. a national child care system) will probably just not happen once the monetary costs of climate change start kicking in. But in general, it will be livable here, for the most part. It's one of the great ironies of climate change: we who have been the most exploitative are currently best prepared to weather the storm. The issue I sometimes have with this thread (and with D&D's attitude towards climate change in general) is that weathering the storm doesn't mean that people who are alive and posting in this thread won't be meaningfully impacted and hurt by climate change. We almost certainly will be, and our kids will suffer even more. That's not being sadbrains about the problem or preaching doom and gloom, it's just acknowledging that we're likely beyond the point where mitigation without costly sacrifices is possible. And that's assuming that we start really tackling the issue on a wide scale, like, tomorrow. The southeast US, for example, is insanely vulnerable to issues stemming from climate change. It also happens to be home to both some of the poorest regions in the country and some of the fastest growing metropolitan areas. Guess who's going to get hosed when municipal and state governments realize how much money they have to spend on mitigation efforts in order to keep investment from fleeing to less risky regions? And that's without even addressing the fact that some areas will simply stop being tenable economic centers. Sure, it'll be fine in the sense economic and population migration to other areas will eventually balance things out, but it's going to be pretty terrible for the people who are directly affected in the mean time. Some of the responses to Fansy's post about their friend on the last page are a good example. The correct and honest response to that attitude isn't "stop being scared, everything is fine" so much as "stop panicking and acting irrationally just because you're scared." Being scared is totally the correct response no matter where you happen to live, but that doesn't mean you have to start feeling like the world is ending. Either acknowledge that you probably can't do much personally or find a way to turn your fear into constructive action. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 17:45
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Paradoxish posted:Some of the responses to Fansy's post about their friend on the last page are a good example. The correct and honest response to that attitude isn't "stop being scared, everything is fine" so much as "stop panicking and acting irrationally just because you're scared." Being scared is totally the correct response no matter where you happen to live, but that doesn't mean you have to start feeling like the world is ending. Either acknowledge that you probably can't do much personally or find a way to turn your fear into constructive action. On this particular attitude, I went through this exact phase. I had always known, peripherally, that things were bad, but learning just how bad was a major bummer. I noticed that there were three kinds of responses from the people around me (my major wasn't that big, so I kind of got to know everyone) to the barrage of information from credible sources revealing just how bad things are, and just how bad they might get. The first was what Fansy's friend is going through, depressing 'we're doomed' attitude. The second was being energised to action. We have a club for my major and we did all kinds of poo poo, from pulling english ivy up by the root (super big problem in the PNW), going to talks by people, going to yearly conference in Eugene, OR that I can't remember the name of, and we even drove down to SF to participate in the fracking protests two years ago. But the last, and I'd say the biggest response, was apathy. Most people heard about it all day for years, and they just stopped caring. And that's been the public's response.The polls I've seen that showed the public cared about CC when there was a big natural disaster going on. After that, concern dropped off to hovering around the mid-50s. Also, since Trump became candidate, a lot more people have been coming out of the woodwork with this denialists horseshit. So yeah, the ultimate problem is, I think, that people just don't care. I think,ultimately, the environmentalist movement will need to come at climate change by changing the narrative as opposed to warning of impending doom.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:30
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A White Guy posted:But the last, and I'd say the biggest response, was apathy. Most people heard about it all day for years, and they just stopped caring. And that's been the public's response.... I doubt the problem is that the public was so educated about climate change that they stopped caring. Environmentalists are the same dumb dipshits that constantly insisted that letter writing and milquetoast political action could have fixed all this. They won't solve the problem, and frankly they're more to blame because they should actually know what's going on, as opposed to the average voter, who is about as well educated as a whippet when it comes to environmental science.
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Aug 30, 2016 21:50
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Also when doing your calculus realize we are actually taking meaningful if not sufficient steps. In the US, the Clean Power Plan places real climate emissions regulations in place with mechanisms to ratchet those regulations tighter over time. Transportation and ag are both massive areas left unregulated in the US, but when you have fewer than 100 companies responsible for most emissions and less than 10,000 total entities facing regulation, the pressure from the rest of business will start to overwhelm those few with the most to lose in regulation. Insurance and investment firms are already beginning to account for those risks, and smart companies won't be left invested in green house gas emitting industries.
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Aug 30, 2016 22:04
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A White Guy posted:people just don't care. I think,ultimately, the environmentalist movement will need to come at climate change by changing the narrative as opposed to warning of impending doom. Apathy is the result of powerlessness. We are not powerless because the environmental movement warns of doom.
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Aug 30, 2016 22:17
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I feel as if it's more the end result of the five stages of grief than simply apathy.
Mozi fucked around with this message at 00:58 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 23:37
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A White Guy posted:So yeah, the ultimate problem is, I think, that people just don't care. I think,ultimately, the environmentalist movement will need to come at climate change by changing the narrative as opposed to warning of impending doom. As this is what I mean when I told you that you shouldn't make ridiculous claims like that the sea level rise will be 8 times higher than projections this century. Giving any denier grounds to attack the edges of people talking about climate change sows the seeds of doubt. If Arkane was to jump on you for making that assertion and leveraged it to install doubt about the rest of the claims of climate scientists, it only harms the prospects of increasing that amount of people concerned above the mid-50s. EDIT: Yes, projections so far have likely been too conservative. But don't just add on stuff to numbers because you feel like it.
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Aug 31, 2016 01:24
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Are there historical examples of any society seeing these type of events coming and protecting themselves? changing? I get the feeling they all act like we are going to, which is not care about anything beyond ourselves?
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Aug 31, 2016 03:21
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Femur posted:Are there historical examples of any society seeing these type of events coming and protecting themselves? changing? The Bible? 7 years of famine is pretty bad. Tragedies of the commons? Look at the rain forests, look at the rivers, look at the dodo. I mean, they did eventually fire proof the rivers again so it's not all bad. Did we know the Great Barrier Reef was gonna be hosed quite this soon?
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Aug 31, 2016 03:40
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We didn't have good data on global ocean temperature until nasa launched some satellites around 2001 or so, so the extent of ocean warming (especially the Indian Ocean) wasn't really appreciated. Coral are very sensitive to temperature and spikes are what causes the mass bleaching events. It's also why models released more recently have predicted greater temperature increases
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Aug 31, 2016 03:50
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Femur posted:Are there historical examples of any society seeing these type of events coming and protecting themselves? changing? No, there are examples of people dealing with severe environmental degradation, which is the historical equivalent of anthropogenic climate change, as well as non-anthropogenic climate change. Not many, but the problem is we're in a global system, so it doesn't matter if the USA suddenly goes green overnight, unless it's willing to expend military power forcing the rest of the world to do the same. It's not really a tragedy of the commons situation, though, since an elite class has disproportionately benefitted and will continue to do so. Tragedy of the commons comes when co-equal actors allow a shared resource to fail due to lack of stewardship, what we're looking at is classic top-down mercantilism, especially in the latter stages when it grew indisputable.
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Aug 31, 2016 03:58
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Femur posted:Are there historical examples of any society seeing these type of events coming and protecting themselves? changing? There aren't any historical examples of global crises requiring global action at all. Climate change is a legitimately unique event in human history, even if it does essentially boil to a very large scale tragedy of the commons problem.
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Aug 31, 2016 04:29
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Paradoxish posted:There aren't any historical examples of global crises requiring global action at all. Climate change is a legitimately unique event in human history, even if it does essentially boil to a very large scale tragedy of the commons problem.
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Aug 31, 2016 05:07
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Doopliss posted:The ozone crisis from a while back actually saw a massive multilateral effort to cut back on ozone-depleting substances. The treaties are still in effect to this day, and included quite a few economic sacrifices for the countries more dependent on them (with treaty terms to make it easier on them). Naturally it's not nearly as big a dependence as co2-emissions, but it's not unheard of. Back in the olden times when governments were only moderately instead of completely dysfunctional, and when the whole world was still on a postwar "we gotta work together to build a better tomorrow" trip. What I'm saying is we need to start WW3.
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Aug 31, 2016 07:42
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Forever_Peace posted:On the political front, I think there is likely to be a moderate realignment of the political "spectrum" to capture a globalist and technocratic elite on the "left" (pro-immigration, pro-UN, pro-trade, consensus-building policy wonks protective of the global financial class), and an antiglobalist/nativist resistance on the "right" (anti-immigrant, anti-trade, skeptical of experts including both scientists and policy-makers, pro-manufacturing). This is already pretty much exactly how Brexit played out (pro-finance London globalists on the left who opposed Brexit, nativist suburban antiglobalists on the right who supported Brexit). It's going to suck for an awful lot of people when Labor and the Black community are displaced by the financial class as the primary constituency of the Left. But climate change is a global problem, and an overtly globalist majority coalition on the left is probably our best chance at a global effort to combat climate change (the whole "green party" thing, which combined environmentalism with social justice, didn't really seem to gain enough traction, tragically). So in a sense, I think the political prospects are better now than they were 10 years ago. It'll just be the less ideal approach: cap & trade, energy incentives, and a reliance technology (possibly even geoengineering). But the realignment actually needs to happen for even that chance at taking steps to combat climate change. Without it, we'll just continue the "go it alone" locally-driven piecemeal approach (see: the Divest campaign and California's new laws etc), which is incredibly important, but insufficient. (note: the "ideal" approach here was an unprecedented transformation of our megacities, emphasizing walkability and public transit and mixed used zoning, massive investments in public energy utilities, and a new model of economic growth that places hard caps on depletion and pollution All of this happened 25 years ago dude. Unfortunately Goldman Sachs doesn't give a poo poo about climate change, and neither does the parasitical wonk and op-ed writer class that draws their paycheck from them Like if you seriously think the global capitalist elite are going to do anything about this you're one gullible motherfucker. They'll find a way to get rich off starving children in Bangladesh, and Matt Yglesias will be right behind them putting out op-eds trumpeting it as the greatest victory for Progressivism the world has seen since the last factory collapse, and how it's unfortunate that the leftist dead-enders who are pointing this out are insufficiently grateful for the benevolence of their rightful aristocratic overlords icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 07:49
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icantfindaname posted:All of this happened 25 years ago dude. Unfortunately Goldman Sachs doesn't really give a poo poo about climate change, and neither does the parasitical wonk and op-ed writer class that draws their paycheck from them It is only your lack of vision that keeps you from seeing a way to both get rich off more starving children in Bangladesh and also preserve the global power disparity by doing the bare minimum to adapt and mitigate climate change. The 90 major companies that are intrinsically tied to greenhouse gas emissions will be sacrificed on the alter of capitalism to save all the othe rich and powerful fuckers. Goldman Sach, as much as it may shock you, does care about adapting and mitigating climate change because it will make someone oodles of money and it might as well be them.
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Aug 31, 2016 07:56
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Trabisnikof posted:It is only your lack of vision that keeps you from seeing a way to both get rich off more starving children in Bangladesh and also preserve the global power disparity by doing the bare minimum to adapt and mitigate climate change. Goldman Sachs makes oodles of money right now, supporting polluters, and if they would make more money mitigating it they would do that, unfortunately they won't and aren't doing that. The entire concept of the tragedy of the commons is that costs are not priced into the actions of individual actors, in other words no, Goldman has zero incentive to do anything about climate change. That's why the problem exists
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Aug 31, 2016 08:00
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icantfindaname posted:Goldman Sachs makes oodles of money right now, supporting polluters, and if they would make more money mitigating it they would do that, unfortunately they won't and aren't doing that. The entire concept of the tragedy of the commons is that costs are not priced into the actions of individual actors, in other words no, Goldman has zero incentive to do anything about climate change. That's why the problem exists Except there is more money to be made in the future than in the past. Goldman Sachs certainly isn't investing their future in coal. In a world where even the loving Saudi's are trying to cash out of oil, yes the loving writing is on the wall. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, this is a pirate's delimma. Goldman Sachs has no intrinsic association or benefit with carbon fuels. They don't care how they make money and they certainly won't have a problem shorting the gently caress out of the next carbon fuel to die. Edit: technically, Goldman Sachs has done more to fight climate change than any poster here unless you've personally ridden the moon worm or are the ghost of Steve Schneider. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 08:22
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Trabisnikof posted:Except there is more money to be made in the future than in the past. Goldman Sachs certainly isn't investing their future in coal. Continuing to use oil and fossil fuels until they are unprofitable, which is what Goldman Sachs and the rest of the economy will do in the absence of any kind of governmental action, is not mitigating climate change and is what has been happening for the last 150 years. Saudis are trying to get out of oil because if/when it runs out they'll be lynched Like, the almost magical belief in the benevolence and responsibility of huge international corporations on display is some seriously through the looking glass stuff. Do you understand how markets and the tragedy of the commons / externalities actually work? icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 08:29
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Oh dear me posted:Apathy is the result of powerlessness. We are not powerless because the environmental movement warns of doom. It's not hard to feel powerless as an individual, because as an individual faced with climate change you are as close to powerless to make the distinction blurry. Democracy doesn't work well for the kind of unilateral action needed to implement massive programs against climate change and climate change consequences. There's always a good number of self-centered, uneducated people willing to vote against everyone's best interest, and suppression of progressivist voters is down to an art form for the capitalist/political elite these days. What it's gonna take, is a movement. A massive, massive movement, too massive to contain and suppress, too massive to ignore, enough to shift the balance of power away from Our Capitalist Overlords (TM) and that whole club, and into the hands of a batch of new, progessive and dedicated politicians. This will have both practical environmental and political ramifications. So to my mind, I suggest that the response to climate change is to think hard on what kind of social policies is likely to minimize suffering and death from climate change, the meaning and benefit of solidarity, the absolute horror of consumerist, capitalist, neoliberalist ideology and then get involved in cleaner living, social progress and political systemic change. I've come to terms with the fact that individual sacrifice isn't the solution, but if it makes people feel more hope I'm all for every green program, recycling, off-the-grid living etc. that people can do to feel safer and more engaged. It may not impact the greater picture, but it sends a message and is hopefully quite convincing for everybody that there needs to be a paradigm shift in people's thinking about consumption and how to achieve happiness. It also needs to translate into attitudes to take to the ballot box, and failing a global political reform, these changed attitudes need to change into actual, literal, physical revolution. Because quite frankly, hyperbole aside, this: icantfindaname posted:All of this happened 25 years ago dude. Unfortunately Goldman Sachs doesn't give a poo poo about climate change, and neither does the parasitical wonk and op-ed writer class that draws their paycheck from them is what humanity is up against. The worst parts of itself, represented in this case by the psychotic actions and short-term thinking of companies.
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Aug 31, 2016 08:45
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icantfindaname posted:Continuing to use oil and fossil fuels until they are unprofitable, which is what Goldman Sachs and the rest of the economy will do in the absence of any kind of governmental action, is not mitigating climate change and is what has been happening for the last 150 years. Saudis are trying to get out of oil because if/when it runs out they'll be lynched It is, however, correct that most major companies that aren't explicitly fossil fuel companies have no special love of fossil fuels. They merely invest in whatever is most profitable at the moment and want any changes to have minimum impact on profits and growth figures reported during quarterly shareholder meetings.
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Aug 31, 2016 08:50
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icantfindaname posted:Continuing to use oil and fossil fuels until they are unprofitable, which is what Goldman Sachs and the rest of the economy will do in the absence of any kind of governmental action, is not mitigating climate change and is what has been happening for the last 150 years. Saudis are trying to get out of oil because if/when it runs out they'll be lynched You seem to constantly mistake the desire to maintain their own power as benevolence. The investment firms that invest in renewables et al will be the winners and not the ones investing in getting more carbon out of the ground. I'm not saying they'll act in such a way that helps beyond their own self interest, but that you underestimate the ruling class's ability to perceive climate change as a threat to their power. Why let the 90 companies who are getting hosed anyway ruin it for the rest of them? Goldman Sach has done their $37B in clean energy deals not because they love trees but because they love money.
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Aug 31, 2016 08:52
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The Financial Industry cares about climate change. Here is Citigroup, Goldman, Suisse, JP, and HSBC all explicitly detailing how addressing climate change is in their direct financial interest, and those are literally just the first ones I googled. They aren't daft: they all want to be the one to finance the sorts of massive transformations expressed in the paris accords etc, and none want to be left holding the bag on the financial costs of warming. And that's just finance - throw in insurance companies (who are deeply concerned about climate change as an existential threat to their entire business), pension funds, the real estate market, and pretty much all of retail (you think anybody is going to buying Nike shoes or iphones in a 5C scenario?), and you have a stupid amount of money interested in combating climate change. I don't like the financial class. I think they are largely, as Matt Taibi put it, "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." I would strongly prefer (and continue to fight for) the Green-party approach of combining climate policy with social justice. But it should be pretty clear that the financial class has more power, both now and in the near future. The fact that they are all aligned in their own self-interest (i.e. in mitigating climate change) is important, and you can clearly see our politicians responding to this influence. California is a great example: one of the world's biggest economies, massive influence of multinational companies in a government structure strongly dependent on lobbyists and outside experts (the state assembly has a six year term limit, meaning that pretty much nobody in it has a loving clue how to run a legislature until they are required to leave), and one of the strongest and most aggressive climate policies in the world. As I said, "addressing climate change" isn't simply a matter of "if", it's a matter of "how", and the fact that we've ceded influence to the financial class matters in what exactly we're going to do about it. Instead of superblocks, we'll get market solutions: that's why I specifically mentioned cap and trade, energy incentives, and technological solutions. These are the things the financial class wants, because these are the things they can make money from. They don't make money from public green utilities, or public transportation, or overhauled zoning ordinances. But cap and trade, green energy, and mitigation technology is certainly better than nothing. At this point, I'll take that over complete inaction. That's why the globalist financial left is probably currently the most likely way we avoid 5C+ warming scenarios. A popular movement would be better, a green revolution would be better, but dominance by the financial class is more likely.
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Aug 31, 2016 13:01
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Femur posted:Are there historical examples of any society seeing these type of events coming and protecting themselves? changing? Global action, well, aside from the Ozone layer, no. The problem with using the Ozone layer as an example for a global action on climate change is that eliminating CFCs and a variety of other common industrial chemicals dealt with the vast majority of the problem. Dealing with climate change requires us to eliminate emissions from far,far more sources than just the Navy dockyard down at the harbor. It requires a complete change in how humanity deals with a variety of industrial applications, from farming, to manufacture, to transport, to even end-of-life cycling for their goods. As for a historical change, yes actually. Japan, in the late 1500s, collectively realized that the forests were becoming more and more depleted. Eventually, massive population boom (brought on by peace) only increased the scale of this problem. Eventually,careful government reform (top-down) and delegating more local autonomy to people intimately connected with the resource (bottom-up) allowed Japan to become the heavily forested country it is today, even though it's packing This is something that we're going to have to do globally to deal with climate change in any meaningful fashion. Thankfully, deforestation is beginning to slow down somewhat (in some nations, from reform, in others, from resource depletion), but we're going to have reforest the entire planet, which is going to require gargantuan human effort to do properly. Crappily managed forest is almost as bad as no forest at all. A Festivus Miracle fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 13:55
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Elon Musk on climate change He's essentially saying that without a unilateral phasing out of fossil fuels and replacing of fossil fuel reliant infrastructure and a carbon tax that puts a price on emissions, we are screwed. 1 and 2 require communist levels of central planning and 3 would surely trigger a massive depression so yeah we are a bit screwed. Especially since the alternative -- solar radiation management -- is so inexpensive and effective (in the short term). Any country that has a few billion dollars to its name can and will inject enough aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce global temperatures by 1+C for a decade. Why would China and India and Brazil agree to emissions cuts when they can just paper over the problem by spending <1% of their GDP every 10 years? parcs fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Aug 31, 2016 |
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Aug 31, 2016 15:13
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Not saying there aren't concerns about climate change, but dude whose company is literally defined by electric cars and storage might not be the best source to draw from.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:14
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computer parts posted:Not saying there aren't concerns about climate change, but dude whose company is literally defined by electric cars and storage might not be the best source to draw from. That makes no sense.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:21
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parcs posted:That makes no sense. I wouldn't trust T. Boone Pickens trying to sell me on wind power either.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:23
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What evidence is there that a carbon tax would "surely trigger a massive depression"? British Columbia instituted a province-level carbon tax in 2008 and has since reduced emissions at 3 times the rate of the rest of Canada while experiencing more GDP growth than the rest of the country. Sweden has had a carbon tax for 25 years now and they seem to be doing alright.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:34
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parcs posted:That makes no sense. It's me, [Bridge Building man], here to tell you about why bridges are the best thing ever, and why other forms of river crossing are literally hitler.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:43
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computer parts posted:Not saying there aren't concerns about climate change, but dude whose company is literally defined by electric cars and storage might not be the best source to draw from. Are you serious.
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Aug 31, 2016 15:43
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