Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change thread: tl; dr - We are so screwed

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

WAFFLEHOUND posted:

Good science doesn't need alarmist rhetoric.

Unless you want anyone without a background in the field it addresses to take it seriously.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2011 00:43

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 07:23

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

Desmond posted:

That's the coldest thing I've ever read on these forums. You most likely live in a nation that is contributing the most to CO2 emissions, and you along with millions of others in your comfy nation carry the weight of that burden, but no reason to care about it due to the fact billions nowhere near you could die from its effects? Incredible.

Have you ever talked to anyone in a 1st world country?

# ¿ Dec 19, 2011 22:49

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

deptstoremook posted:

Sorry about misrepresenting you, environmental justice gets me mad as well as all the hand-wringing liberal apologetics around it. The perspective that people need to have fewer kids, as I've argued elsewhere, is very much a first-world liberal (in the bad sense) crypto-racist argument. It assumes that these people secretly want to have fewer kids, that the West can (as usual, again) be the missionaries of an enlightened way of life that we have discovered and wish to spread for the good of the less civilized. Just bein' discursive imperialists, I guess it's what we do best.

The undercurrent of this argument is that poor people in the West and elsewhere will have to pay for our sins. This may be practically true but we can never let ourselves forget that it's our fault that you even need to propose this idea.

I'm more referring to the kind of mealy-mouthed socialism (i.e., capitalism with "safety nets") that seems to be held by liberal environmentalists, at least here in Utah and America.

As FuglyStik implies suburbia is a stand-in but it also illustrates my belief that if nuclear or some ~~magic wand~~future technology allows us to continue our conusmption of and dependence on free and plentiful energy, there will be no motive to do anything differently.

Fossil fuels, anthropogenic global warming, industrial agriculture, the suburbs, and so forth--they're all symptoms, symptoms of a culture, people, and perspective of eternal growth. Eventually this growth won't be possible, that's a simple math equation.

It seems to me that nuclear is a line of advocacy which seeks to obscure this increasingly obvious fact, the focus on "green energy" as a solution to any problems at all is a myopic and desperate fantasy, conjured up by a people for whom the end of growth is the end of life. Nuclear can preserve that growth but will continue to deplete land, freshwater, raw materials, and human lives. Is that the advocacy of a good environmentalist?

Every environmentalist needs to understand that the root cause of environmental destruction is multinational capital, and any policy proposition which preserves even the specter of it is dead in the water. That's the closest thing this movement has to a dogma.

Social Democracy is just a slightly left of centre form of liberalism, it has nothing to do with socialism.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2012 19:37

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

-Troika- posted:

Your own link proves that there is no way to meet the amount of fuel that the EPA wants. They just picked an arbitary number and expected plants to magically pop into existence.

Abundant raw material for its creation and the ability to create it exists, it's just not currently as cost effective as paying the fines, seems like they're too low if anything. It cost approx. $120 a barrel to produce in 2006, and the price will go down faster if we incentivise research right?

Strawman fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Jul 10, 2012

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 12:56

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

-Troika- posted:

"The technology to do this works in labs" is not the same thing as "there are factories built to produce this stuff, and also distribution networks in place to make use of it".

"The technology exists end works in labs and could produce this substance on an industrial scale for $120 a barrel in 2006" is, however, equivalent to "this could be made for significantly less than $120 a barrel if the will to set up the infrastructure and research was there and the fines for non-compliance weren't so pathetically small". There's nothing preventing the airlines setting up manufacturing facilities themselves, and they'd save significant amounts of money by doing so, if they ever thought beyond the next quarter or government bailout.

I'd honestly like to see your explanation of why they didn't just start manufacturing it themselves, if these fines were so absurd and excessive?

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 23:15

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

jrodefeld posted:

That is not my entire argument. The other half of the argument is that the means by which property is allocated and violations of property rights should be adjudicated need to be reformed and strengthened in terms of environmental harm.

But as far as you question is concerned, logic and common sense already lead to the logical conclusion that my argument is right. But we also have the facts that public land is exploited far more than private land. There have been many studies done on this subject.

However, before I bother to list a bunch of links, why don't you think about it logically. 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?

For a logging company, unless it really wants to destroy its business, it will plant as many trees as it chops down so in a year, or couple of years, it can have value in the property to continue to sell lumber.

Of course, no such thing occurs in public land, where there is no owner so the incentive is to exploit as much of the land as possible before someone else does.

That is why property rights are crucial to sustainability.

Does this honestly not make sense to you? I can't see how anyone could honestly dispute this argument.

Making vague references to studies that prove you correct with no citations isn't a very good way to convince anyone of anything except that you're full of poo poo and bad at hiding it, hth.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2012 12:50

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 07:23

Strawman: Feb 9, 2008; Tortuga means turtle, and that's me. I take my time but I always win.

SedanChair posted:

"Even your liberal NATE SILVER said this."

Arkane I don't think you understand how science works.

He's unskewed literally hundreds of climatology papers.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 12:27

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