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You might not get too much moral support in this thread. The most popularly voiced opinion is "FYGM".
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Jun 24, 2016 22:52
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Rime posted:"FYGM"
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Jun 25, 2016 00:57
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Jevon's Paradox does work for roads in general, though I don't know about upstate New York. If a city has a major traffic problem, people will be disinclined to use a car and more inclined to use a (motor)bike, or to not travel at all. If a city has empty streets, people have no time- or effort-saving incentive to use a bike or public transport. Comparing $0.03 vs $3.00 is more than a bit disingenuous - two orders of magnitude, really? It has been observed that fuel prices influence miles traveled, and discussing $0.03 or $300 per gallon fuel is not a solid basis to refute that. Actually, maybe $300/gallon is a good example, as distance traveled will be reduced by 100x or more at that price.
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Jul 20, 2016 04:10
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computer parts posted:Cities with large roads typically don't have empty streets or public transportation, so it's a foolish comparison. You seem to be confused about causality. Aside from entirely new modern cities, cities are not built with "large roads", but adapt to increasing road use by adding lanes and roads to relieve pressure on existing roads. As suggested, this may increase usage rather than maintaining usage and reducing congestion. quote:You've already admitted that Jevon's Paradox doesn't apply to all situations though, so the only reason to think it would apply in the one being discussed is generic cynicism. The only situation where I have "admitted that Jevon's Paradox doesn't apply to all situations" is your preposterous 100x reduction in fuel price. Taking account of known economic feedbacks in order to determine climate-related policy is wise, not cynical.
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Jul 20, 2016 12:22
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computer parts posted:Most cities in the US do not have public transportation as a meaningful substitute. Ah, I see - so you meant to write "Cities with large roads typically don't have empty streets, or public transportation." In either case, public transport was only one example of alternatives to driving that I listed, so bad local provision of public transport does not eliminate the possibility of using alternate transit or avoiding travel. quote:They're not known, you just said so. Jevon's Paradox, among other feedback mechanisms, is known, and I never said it wasn't??? ? Do you still think that your unrealistic example of $0.03/gallon fuel disproves Jevon's Paradox? I don't think this is a productive course of discussion.
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Jul 20, 2016 15:44
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Trabisnikof posted:The idea that if we increase efficiency in an HVAC system by reducing pipe bends, that instead we'll just run things colder/hotter doesn't actually play out in reality. Otherwise LEED would be impossible. A reduction in feedstock needs reduces the cost of the product, thus the product can be bought by more people or at higher volume by existing buyers. If this demand exceeds existing production capacity, then new production facilities will be built. Even if a company increases efficiency and does not pass savings on to consumers, thus not influencing demand (which is likely to be economically unfavorable, since the value of raw materials is multiplied when they are converted to products, that is, a higher volume of product is generally preferable to a slightly increased margin), then the company will have more capital to spend elsewhere rather than consumers having it. Increasing efficiency is environmentally valuable when consumption or production are limited by policy. Introducing efficient power systems to areas that previously had none at all is not an example where Jevon's Paradox applies, since there is no increase in efficiency.
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Jul 20, 2016 19:28
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eNeMeE posted:The rebound effect is real but the existence of Jevons paradox is not necessarily real. It requires a rebound effect greater than the reduction due to increased efficiency, which is silly for a lot of things (HVAC, anything that's always on, cooking). It can also be mitigated very easily by legislation, like increasing the gas tax as price/distance drops. Like I said in the post above, policy is necessary to guarantee environmental benefits. Whether the effect exists for things like your examples depends on how the energy is paid for and the relationship between energy price and environmental damage done per Joule used.
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Jul 20, 2016 20:43
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Trabisnikof posted:The increase in effieicnt is what enabled those systems to be cheap enough to deploy. Effiency itself is a valuable component, of course it is meaningless alone, but for example marginal improvement in electrical efficiency can decrease peak power consumption. Peak consumption is challenging for low carbon grids to deal with cheaply. The smaller the duck curve due to effiency gains, the cheaper the cost to reduce the carbon impact of the grid. More efficient industrial and commercial processes and devices are made for the financial benefit of industry and consumers, not for easier grid maintenance or reduced overall carbon emissions, except where such parameters are mandated (policy) or made a selling point (i.e. off-peak modes); it's coincidental if improved efficiency smooths the power curve. If a smoothed power curve and reduced overall carbon were the target, then energy sources would be taxed according to how much they pollute, along with incentives to reduce peak loads, and industry and consumers would have incentives to improve efficiency and reduce total consumption. quote:Of course policy is required, but effiency is how you can make those policies cost palatable. We are past "palatable" costs for policies. Consumption is the problem, and improved efficiency is not the solution - reduced consumption is. In other news, the first six months of this year had the record lowest Arctic sea ice extent and July is tracking the record of 2012.  http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
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Jul 20, 2016 21:43
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Evil_Greven posted:Anyway, I want to remind folks of something kind of important: That's pretty pedantic (N.B. I am never pedantic) and NOT important. For every CO2 that enters the reaction, one O2 is emitted - it makes no difference (outside of determining isotope ratios) whether the oxygen atoms come from the H2O or the CO2. Your graphs, as your link states, show a downward trend due to fossil carbon being combined with atmospheric oxygen faster than photosynthesis can convert the CO2 back to O2.
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Jul 23, 2016 01:10
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Evil_Greven posted:Uhh... no? This is why it's important - because you just repeated the wrong thing: I understand that, chemically, the O2 comes from H2O, as I acknowledged in my response (though my last line was self-contradictory), but I had not appreciated that this mechanism may be a significant cause of ocean deoxygenation, which I believed to be caused by eutrophication-like phenomena.
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Jul 23, 2016 02:33
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Rime posted:Venus is actually quite habitable and probably vastly easier to colonize than Mars, at our current level of technology. Almost identical gravity, active magnetic field, able to walk around outside your hab without a spacesuit on, easy to refine elements of life such as water from plentiful atmosphere. Just checking if this is a joke or not. Like, it has a weak magnetic field, air pressure 90 times that of the Earth, and air temperature of 450C+. I just can't spot the sarcasm - help me out.
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Jul 23, 2016 05:35
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Potato Salad posted:CO2 levels - lets add methane from defrosting permafrost - are going to change the world. Societies are going to fall apart and restructure. I can shoot for a low bar here and assume flooding coastal cities counts as a change in society. Don't forget oceanic methane clathrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate quote:This estimate, corresponding to 500-2500 gigatonnes carbon (Gt C), is smaller than the 5000 Gt C estimated for all other geo-organic fuel reserves but substantially larger than the ~230 Gt C estimated for other natural gas sources. The permafrost reservoir has been estimated at about 400 Gt C in the Arctic, but no estimates have been made of possible Antarctic reservoirs. These are large amounts. In comparison, the total carbon in the atmosphere is around 800 gigatons.
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Jul 27, 2016 05:31
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Spangly A posted:there's a british show called Utopia where the attempt to combat climate change is achieved by sterilising most of the human race through food additives. Population control is not a solution for the urgent problems of climate change and environmental degradation. The world average death rate is about 0.8% per year, so that's approximately the upper limit that a worldwide zero birth rate would have in reducing carbon emissions. Population control is an element of a solution for long term problems, provided that appropriate policies are enforced, assuming that a society exists that has the capacity to control its population and enforce environmental policies after the near-mid term catastrophe that approaches.
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Jul 27, 2016 14:01
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Curvature of Earth posted:Since I have nothing better to do in this thread, why don't I crunch some numbers? I'm sure that was fun to calculate, but it's entirely meaningless. If the cost of importing water and any other essential substance to a location becomes greater than the productivity of that place, then people will leave or die. The 600m^3 of water used per person is higher than necessary largely due to inefficient farming methods, so this number could easily be slashed by education and/or mandate, which is not to say that a water disaster is not approaching in India, with the atrocious state of their aquifers.
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Jul 27, 2016 19:43
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Curvature of Earth posted:Population hasn't been tied to "productivity" for a long time. Resources go where people are, and people go where resources are already flowing, in a self-reinforcing cycle. That's why a farm town like Phoenix, Arizona became the sixth-most-populous, and one of the fastest-growing, cities in the US, despite being geographically isolated in the middle of a goddamn desert. It's why Damascus, which is also in a desert and sees barely 5in of annual precipitation, has been continuously inhabited for the last 5,000 years. It's why urbanization is such a powerful force now; industrialization and declining transit costs have made moving around resources vastly easier. Economic collapse due to water shortages would cause, in the short term, the mass-migration of yet more people into cities, and in the medium-term would increase the flow of resources into those cities as governments desperately try to support the population. (This is not to say that individual cities don't collapse anymore. See: Detroit. But they're the exception, not the rule.) One of the only reliable ways to cause a complete population collapse, even within cities, is sustained widespread violence—in other words, war. Which will probably happen, as many of you so eagerly keep predicting. Phoenix generates more value than it costs to sustain itself, whether that value is in food or goods or services. What will happen if the cost of buying water, food, and other essentials becomes too expensive for residents to afford? They will leave. A year's water can never cost ten times the GDP/capita because at less than one times GDP/capita it becomes impossible for the average resident to survive. There may be some locations that are supported externally because of some non-economic value, but that certainly is not the case for the whole of India.
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Jul 27, 2016 22:38
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Curvature of Earth posted:The government steps in to subsidize them. That was easy! Subsidizing water for "A mere order of magnitude higher than their per capita GDP!" will NEVER happen, outside of a space mission. The government of a region - a city, a state or a country - can afford to subsidize old people, poor people and children because that region generates sufficient value to generate sufficient taxes and/or exports to do so. If it suddenly costs a year's average wage to provide water and/or food for each person (never mind an order of magnitude more) in the given region, then this subsidy is not only no longer going to be paid, but it will no longer be possible to pay it. A government cannot infinitely provide resources as you suggest, as energy and raw materials are required to do so, and most governments do not administer regions that contain sufficient energy and raw materials to support their needs (that is, they do not have sovereignty over the required resources), so must trade with other regions. However, trade with other regions is limited when a country prints money, as this devalues its currency, reducing its buying power, thus increasing the cost of everything that's imported. Some countries could sustain a degree of greatly excessive spending, but only until their oil/gold/diamonds run out. India is not going to build "19,000 Carlsbad-scale desalination plants", not only because your imaginary no-water scenario will not happen, but because India cannot support the cost of building and operating anything that costs more than a fraction of its GDP.
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Jul 28, 2016 02:32
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Curvature of Earth posted:And did you actually read my whole post? I already noted the limiters of government spending were inflation and physical resources. Thanks for reminding me of what's already contained in my post? Yeah, I read your post, including where it said "Yet it never goes bankrupt (barring rank incompetence and deliberate sabotage by "fiscal" conservatives)", which is plain false due to inflation, which you acknowledged in the same paragraph to be limiting. You did not need to specify that physical resources were a limit, given that the subject of the discussion is limited physical resources. The tipping point for the whole of India may be far away -- though closer than the total disappearance of native water resources -- but the depopulation of regions of the Earth and the declines of empires due to resources costing more than their productivity has been occurring for thousands of years, is occurring now, and will continue in ever greater areas in the future. This is not a question of robust systems, but of systems that have demands that exceed sustainable magnitudes. Desalination plants will always have demands that far exceed sustainable levels for staple crop farmland, so, lacking an economically plausible source of water or adequate improvement of usage of existing water, the population in water-stressed areas and areas that depend on their food production will fall, whether through migration or death. If a region is suffering from water stress today or in ten years' time, it is not sufficient that "infrastructure will be built up over 50 or 60 years." "Can we what's necessary to survive?" is not actually a question at all, never mind a political or physical question. If you meant "Can we do what's necessary to survive?", then, for the human species, the answer is "yes", but for hundreds of millions of individuals, the answer is "yes, but it's probably not going to happen".
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Jul 28, 2016 03:59
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I think it needs to be clarified that when someone says "You should reduce your consumption", they are not talking about YOU, or to everyone reading this thread, but to everyone. If it were phrased "Consumption should be reduced", then this would not sound so controversial, because we all know that. The consumption of an individual is negligible on its own, but the world is made up of billions of individuals, and each individual reducing consumption leads to reduced global consumption. If someone says "individual consumption doesn't matter", they influence society to consume more or to less reduce their consumption. Why do coal plants exist? Because there's a demand for electricity, whether that's the direct demand of consumers (home power) or indirect (manufacturing of consumer goods, aluminium produced for transport purposes, etc). The best way to close coal power stations is to reduce demand, which comes mostly either directly or indirectly from individuals. Telling people to consume less - tactfully and persuasively if possible, or by appropriate taxation if not - will result in closed coal power stations.
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Jul 29, 2016 19:54
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Fluffy Chainsaw posted:You're still wrong. No amount of 'leading by example' on reducing consumption will come even an iota as close to making an impact on climate as lobbying political representatives to end coal. What I like is how pursuading people, companies and government to reduce consumption, and reducing your own consumption, have no effect, but pursuading government to ban coal is super effective.
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Jul 29, 2016 23:29
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Salt Fish posted:What exactly does that mean? The last election he ran in was 2000 and this came out in 2006. You don't have to be running for office to say something with political intent. If Gore's intent was "political", his intent was to provoke a political reaction, even if it would not promote his own career.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:14
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Trabisnikof posted:Except that only works if the only reason you aren't having kids is climate. If you are single, too poor, too young, too old, etc then there is absolutely no future emissions avoided. Your argument is not logical -- if you can't have children because you are "single, too poor, too young, too old, etc", then the choice to not have children for the sake of the climate does not exist. If someone decides not have children and climate is one of the reasons, then that choice prevents half of the emissions that the child would have made during the lifetime of the would-be-parent (there are two parents [an assumption that was safe to make until two days ago...] so each has responsibility for half of the child's emissions.) And I know that you know as well as anyone else contributing to this thread that children born today are strongly liable to live in a world that is much less pleasant/more unpleasant than the world we live in today; why would you deliberately bring a child into a world where you would bet on them being afflicted by climate catastrophes? If you want to have children, you should adopt. Don't anybody tell me that this will cause single mothers to have more babies to give away, because this is supposed to be a serious thread. Trabisnikof posted:However, if we get to count all future emissions avoided for any reason, then Exxon is probably doing the most for the climate by not exploiting all their proven reserves. Hell, at least the oil Exxon keeps in the ground can't be undone by some horny teenager having an extra kid. Exxon provides goods to hundreds of millions or billions of people, each of whom has the choice to use or not use those goods -- it is the actions of Exxon's customers that determine the contribution of Exxon to climate change. If Exxon does not exploit all their proven reserves, it's because there is not the demand for them to do so or because they foresee the increase in the value of their reserves in the future; if a horny teenager has an extra kid, then Exxon will extract more oil. Exxon is an evil company not because they extract oil from the ground, but because they have and have had policies designed to benefit themselves at greater cost to the environment than is necessary to simply extract and refine resources; their customers could choose not to do business with them if they wished. Trabisnikof posted:On the other hand, actions that reduce the per-capita emissions will reduce emissions now and in the future. Declining birth rates will never address climate change while moving towards a zero carbon-emissions equiv. economy is the long term solution. Declining birth rates are not the whole solution to climate change, but they eliminate a fraction of emissions. Given that a zero-emissions economy is not going to happen in the next century, the choice of declining birth rates or otherwise will affect climate outcomes.
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Sep 29, 2016 02:55
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Trabisnikof posted:Population control only works at a policy level. Some nerd claiming they will totally never have kids, but only for climate and not for any other reason, does a hell of a lot less for the climate than even a freaking Prius. You have to invent strawmen to support your argument -- who is claiming that "they will totally never have kids, but only for climate and not for any other reason"? Even if that were the case, why would not having children exclusively for the benefit of the climate be worse than doing so while also having other reasons? In my previous response to your similar claim, I stated that the decision to have a child when you could opt not to causes a 50% increase in the pollution that you will be responsible for over your lifetime. Since you did not respond to my multi-paragraph rebuttal, I presume that you do not object to this statement. How is a choice that increases a person's lifetime pollution output by 50% (per child) to be justified by someone who claims to care about the environment? Opting out of having children is not an isolated phenomenon that occurs solely in "some nerd", but across the world's population; when people and governments encourage childbirth or belittle people who have made the reasoned decision not to have children (whether that decision is exclusively for the climate or otherwise), this is actively damaging to the environment. What is your interest in encouraging people to have children?
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Sep 30, 2016 06:52
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Trabisnikof posted:Because if someone isn't having kids for non-climate reasons then 0 emissions have been avoided. The idea that not having kids "helps" the climate only works if you stop having kids because of the climate that you would have had otherwise. Read my post again. Here, I'll help: Placid Marmot posted:Even if that were the case, why would not having children exclusively for the benefit of the climate be worse than doing so while also having other reasons? And even if someone were not having children for a non-climate reason, anyone who encourages them to instead have children (see Australia and Italy, among others) is increasing their impact on the environment. Parents-to-be who don't know about the damage caused by having children (if, for example, ignorant people have told them otherwise or tried to hush others), then they are denied the option to not have children for the sake of the environment. You still have not explained your investment in other people having children when they have good reason not to. Trabisnikof posted:Does it work if they have less kids? What about only 2 kids instead of 8? Does that couple "help" more than a couple who has 0 instead of 1? I think I've found the problem -- maybe you object to the argument because you don't understand it. I'll try to make this really simple for you. An average person will produce X environmental damage per year, for the remainder of their lifetime (where X represents greenhouse gas emissions, air, ground and water pollutants, resource depletion, erosion and desertification, plus any others you can think of). When that person dies, some day in the future (we'll say in 50 years to put a number in the equation), let's call the total amount of environmental damage inflicted by all people between now and then Y. The environmental damage caused by the person in question between now and that day will be 50X. If, between now and then, that person decides not to have a child, Y will not change. If that person decides to have a child today, we would expect the child to produce the same average amount of environmental damage per year as the parents. Therefore, on that same day in the future when the person dies, rather than the total amount of environmental damage inflicted by all people between now and then being Y, it will be Y+50X. (I have assumed a zero-length pregnancy for round numbers.) If a couple has two children rather than zero, then, using the same parameters as above, the total environmental damage after fifty years will be +100X. If the couple goes on to have six more children (assuming one year between births [the first two were twins]), the total will be +379X. A couple does not "help" more by having 2 children rather than 8, but their cumulative decisions to have six more children will cause several lifetimes worth of environmental damge, just within their own remaining lifespan. If the couple discovered this after having the twins but still decided to have six more children, they would arguably be acting unethically. Fortunately for them, people like you would hide or play down the damage caused by every new mouth to feed, so they will probably never have that on their conscience.
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Sep 30, 2016 18:36
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm not arguing if having kids is a good thing or not. Even within the framework that kids==bad, I'm arguing some specific things: You still aren't getting this. Drilling an oil well is bad for the environment. Having a child is bad for the environment. Having the option to drill an oil well but deciding not to is environmentally neutral. Having the option to have a child but deciding not to is environmentally neutral. Not having children does not help the environment, but having children is bad for it. quote:2. Even if you are completely above board in the set-asides and there actually is the potential for mitigation of future emissions, outside of a policy framework individual set asides (e.g. no kids til carbon-free or a/e) can be easily overwhelmed by other factors, e.g the horny teens. To extend the oil example, it doesn't matter if I'm not drilling more wells if my neighbors are instead. This makes no sense in either the oil well or the children situation. Assuming that your neighbor cannot access your oil field, you not extracting the oil means that that oil will not leave the ground, no matter what your neighbor does, and you not having a child will not encourage your neighbor to have one. More than that, the more people who decide not to have children, the less the societal pressure will be upon others to have children. quote:3. Other kinds of individual actions, such as pro-climate capital purchases can reduce emissions faster and for more individual (the entire family). Also the models of future emissions for capital are vastly more certain than the models for offspring. The carbon economy is changing so we can't be sure if future emissions will be as significant as emissions now. We can't be sure if emissions per capita will increase or decrease, so we should hedge by having more children. And what kind of pro-climate capital purchase more than makes up for the extra ~25* years of emissions that having a child generates? *~50 years, from my previous post, divided by two parents. quote:4. Finally, effort spent to move population control into the policy realm where it could see meaningful impacts is so challenging that we'd be better spent using those resources elsewhere. We've got a lot of things to tackle and I'd rather we spend effort now reforming *~*car culture*~* rather than *~*child culture*~* Your car will not generate as much emissions in your lifetime as an extra child will, no matter what car you drive. A child that is not conceived cannot drive a car.
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Sep 30, 2016 22:58
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You're moving the goalposts. Your argument a few pages ago (and why I responded to you in the first place) was that deciding not to have children for the sake of the environment is worthless, but now your argument is that it's too hard to implement low birthrate policy (???) and that it's too late to bother anyway.
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Oct 1, 2016 08:51
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Paradoxish posted:I like how almost half of conservative republicans agree that climate scientists should have a major role in policy making, but less than 20% think that climate scientists understand whether climate change is occurring or what its causes are. Also 85% of those conservative republicans who want climate scientists to be involved in policy making also don't trust them to provide full and accurate information? Don't forget how half as many conservatives think the "Earth is warming mostly due to human activity" as think that "Restrictions on power plant carbon emissions can make a big difference to address climate change", along with the rest of the options at the bottom. The worst thing from this poll is that liberal Democrats have such low agreement with the facts, along with the aggregate scores on the right of the chart.
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Oct 5, 2016 00:47
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Banana Man posted:iirc it was sort of discussed a while ago and people were advocating for eating less than a maintenance amount of protein sooo No. Nobody has said that.
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Oct 17, 2016 05:51
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GlyphGryph posted:You still haven't pointed out how [having fewer kids] solves the problem. (Because it doesn't, lol) It was wrong for shrike82 to claim that having fewer kids "solves" the problem, but, as I illustrated a few pages ago, having more children makes most problems worse in the medium and long terms, and worse for more people. NewForumSoftware posted:Go do what you love, go travel the world, learn about whatever you want. Don't waste your time trying to save the planet from climate change or save humans from extinction, it's way too big of a problem for one person to solve (and they can't anyways) and the chance for collective action to save us is already gone. No, don't produce unnecessary environmental degradation. Just because your indivudual action will not "save the planet from climate change or save humans from extinction" does not mean that it is ethical to ignore the negative consequences that your decadent actions will generate. So many people, including so many in this thread, who ought to know better, have a blinkered view of personal responsibility. You as an individual are a randomly sampled representative of all people; your decision to fly around the world or to eat less meat is one that will also be made by millions of other people; if people in general become more selfish or ignorant (perhaps because they listen to people like you) then people will tend to take the first decision rather than the second, and everyone loses. When you make and promote decisions that acknowledge personal responsibility, the damage that humans collectively do to the world and other people is reduced. As I think most of us agree, policy action is required beyond the reduction of collective personal emissions, but the thoughtful actions of the general populace can and must make up a large fraction of the way that we have to go to achieve a non-catastrophic climate/biosphere/resource situation in the near future.
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Oct 17, 2016 18:32
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GlyphGryph posted:Please, illustrate again, I must have missed it. me posted:An average person will produce X environmental damage per year, for the remainder of their lifetime (where X represents greenhouse gas emissions, air, ground and water pollutants, resource depletion, erosion and desertification, plus any others you can think of). NewForumSoftware posted:Well yes, but that's a good idea regardless of whether Climate Change is a thing or not. Most of my statements are directed at people who I would assume actually do care about this poo poo, have already taken the steps to minimize their carbon footprint, etc. I moved to a community that's much more ecologically focused, gave away my car, stopped using air travel, etc. But I mean, there's nothing appreciable for people like me to do other than watch the world burn at this point and try not to let it consume you. The only thing left I could do is agree to not have children and that's just not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. If that's the "unnecessary environmental degradation" we're talking about we're already so hosed that talking about individual action is a comedy. Following from the reasoning above, the decision to have one child will result in an increase in environmental degradation equal to 50% of your personal contribution, over the rest of your lifetime [50% because there will presumably be a second person making the decision to have a child with you]. This is probably more than or at least comparable to the decrease in damage that your positive actions will have relative to an average person, and each additional child adds another 50%. Since you believe that the "world will burn" within the remainder of your lifetime, why would you inflict that on your own child for the whole if it's lifetime? If you care about climate change as much as you claim, you should think about adoption rather than producing more consumers. Last second fake edit: NewForumSoftware posted:Wrong. Magical time travel machines that go back in time 20 years and make that policy action are required. There is literally nothing we can do as a species to stop this now. We lack the ability to collectively organize in the way required to handle this problem, and even if we did have the ability we missed the window of opportunity that included us saving industrialized civilization as we know it. The many feedback loops present on the planet have taken over at this point. The name of the game is adaptation and survival at this point. This guy wants to put more children into this world. Real edit: Not putting his own children into this world is "just not a sacrifice he's willing to make"
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Oct 17, 2016 18:59
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Nocturtle posted:What makes the whole "don't have kids" argument so dumb is there is no way it's ever politically acceptable, it can't be universalized. A few individuals might decide to forego having kids, but unless you can convince the vast majority of humanity to go along (you won't) the reductions are marginal. Individual actions aren't enough on this issue, collective action is required. The number of children that people have is behavioral, based on the social and economic situations of the time and place; when the harm that comes from having ever more consumers is publicized, along with the advantages of having fewer chidren, plus other factors such as women's education, then people's behavior will shift; when people call choosing to have fewer children "dumb", people's behavior will also shift, in the wrong direction. Rather than "a few individuals" deciding to have fewer children, there is an overall change in the fertility level, resulting from the aforementioned factors. Discussing and promoting having fewer children and not flying around the world promotes collective action, even if that action is composed of the actions of millions of individuals who don't necessarily know that their actions contribute to an overall behavioral shift.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:24
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GlyphGryph posted:If you're the sort to teach your children the importance of climate change, than refusing to have children seems like it will only make things worse, since the people who do not care about climate change are obviously going to continue to have children. No, false and stupid. Adding more children is certain to increase environmental degradation, even if the parents are [or rather, claim to be] environmentally conscientious, since nobody improves the environment by existing. Even if we imagine that people exist who produce no environmental degradation, governments are compelled to provide infrastructure and services for them, whether these facilities are used or not. When a child is born, the government plans ahead for the increased schools, housing, roads, hospitals and everything else that will need to exist to cater for this person in the future, even if the parents will keep the child in a treehouse, gathering fallen fruit to survive and using wild mushrooms as medicine. In the short term, reduced fertility will no damage to -- let alone will it "destroy" -- "our economic and industrial base", since A. There is already excess labor, B. There are millions of people who would be happy to migrate to countries with labor deficits and to work with lower pay and poorer conditions than the locals, C. Automation can and would replace labor in the event that immigration did not cover any deficit, D. Reduced population means reduced demand, so less labor and resources are required to sustain the economy.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:18
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Nocturtle posted:Does it really promote collective action? Can you estimate how much carbon emissions have been reduced by "discussing and promoting having fewer children and not flying around the world"? If you can't, then how do you know this discussion is having any effect at all? Yes, changing the behavior of a population both is and results in collective action. There is no discussion of having fewer children, so of course I can't put a figure on any effect that it could have had. On the contrary, increased childbirth is widely promoted, and the sum of "don't fly" versus "just $49 return plus taxes" is heavily weighted toward the promotion of flying. Individual action leading to collective (and consequential) results is easily accomplished by taxing the bad stuff and untaxing or subsidizing the good, but this requires unacceptable political action, just like any "actual solution" you can think of would. China's one child policy had demonstrable results, but required authoritarian action to implement, just as meaningful climate policy and action will. I will note at this point, since it's pertinent, that most environmental degradation is the collective result of individual actions. It's not Exxon that produces 5% of the world's CO2e, but the demand of the 100 million customers that Exxon serves (made up numbers). If the world's consumers reduce their emissions by 10% on average (trivially achieveable, even politically achievable, but also not enough, I know), not only will global emissions fall by close to 10%, but the amount of sequestration and/or geoengineering required will fall by some percentage.
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Oct 17, 2016 20:37
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NewForumSoftware posted:Advocating voluntary depopulation is one of the dumbest ideas you can put forth. Just take a step back and think about what you're saying. I think you might actually be stupid. You'd better not mention to the "eco-friendly community" that you claim to be part of that you don't care about other people, by the way, and I would mark you as a person who positively should NOT have children, regardless of the impact on the climate. Nocturtle posted:If you're using your individual decisions as a means to start a discussion about reducing carbon emissions then you're participating in the political process and at least doing something (FYI the "Don't Have Kids" party is not going to do well at the polls). But there's no point pretending individual choices regarding consumption have any effect when there's literally billions of other consumers out there to average everything out. A collective approach is needed if we're actually going to try limit the damage of climate change, specifically using society's institutions to make carbon emissions expensive or illegal. Individuals make choices regarding consumption as a result of external influences. If someone decides to not fly, for example, it's because they have been influenced to do so by the current social/economic situation, which is not something that affects just that one person, but everyone. Whether social influences result in positive or negative changes depends on what the influences are and how they balance against each other. The social influences that encourage more flying are dominant now, so, on average, people will fly more; if not flying were encouraged more than flying more, then the result, averaged over "literally billions of consumers", will be that people fly less on average. GlyphGryph posted:So long as this statement is true, your argument is worthless. You realize that, right? Who are these magical people that improve the environment by grace of having been born? Your claim was that ecologically minded people not having children "seems like it will only make things worse", so you must believe either that each of their children will take more CO2 from the atmosphere than they produce, and/or that non-eco-friendly people will choose to have extra children to compensate.
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Oct 17, 2016 22:38
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a whole buncha crows posted:We have x years to reduce emissions until we are at the point where catastrophic global climate change will be certain. I think we can all agree that the answer is no. We ought to also agree that we need to do all of the following: Reduce emissions, sequester CO2, mitigate negative effects, and adapt to new conditions, whatever the value of X. Edit: This assumes that we ignore the opinions of people who don't think we should reduce emissions, because such people should not have their opinions humored. Placid Marmot fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Oct 18, 2016 |
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Oct 18, 2016 11:28
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Condiv posted:therein lies the problem with storing nothing but ethanol. other carbon capture ideas involve stuff like making and storing tons of graphite from co2, but of course graphite doesn't store energy, it's only good for removing surplus co2 from the atmosphere. Graphite does store energy - it's impurity-free coal. My personal sci-fi ideas for carbon sequestration are bioengineered phytoplankton that produce specks of graphite or carbonate (like oysters produce pearls), which then either cause the plankton to sink to the sea floor when the specks reach a certain size, or which settle to the sea floor when the plankton die. And fast-growing trees with super dense wood that does not rot, which can grow in salt water, so we could flood sub-sea-level basins (i.e. in the Sahara) using canals and plant the trees there, and the basins would accumulate coal-like deposits of trees. All of these ideas are at least as realistic as sufficiently large-scale industrial carbon sequestration (by whichever method you choose), since they require minimal manufacturing and maintenance, and no energy inputs aside from the sun, make use of otherwise unused areas of the Earth -- open ocean and deserts -- and produce O2 as a bonus.
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Oct 24, 2016 12:18
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NewForumSoftware posted:lol @ the idea that everyone is "hosed" When in human history have hundreds of millions or perhaps a billion people suddenly had to migrate just to survive? When have resources, including water, suddenly become greatly restricted for much of the world? Climate change will kill at least hundreds of millions of people in the coming decades, without even considering antibiotics resistance, resource scarcity and anything else that we are unprepared to face. This would have happened without Trump, but his election will accelerate and worsen the deteriorating conditions that we will face.
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Nov 9, 2016 20:30
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Hello Sailor posted:Yeah, I think he's off the mark. The NSIDC graphs for arctic and antarctic sea ice don't match his at all. The comparable graph on the NSIDC site says its data is from Cryoshpere Today, but their site does not appear to have that chart (though there is one that shows the same data but non-overlaid), and their data seem to stop updating early this year. I can't tell from any of the sites, but it does look like the source of the chart in question uses a different definition of "sea ice extent", such as "25% sea ice" rather than "15% sea ice", for example.
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Nov 14, 2016 11:59
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Rime posted:Right now all I'm seeing is a bunch of the richest and most privileged people who have ever lived in the entirety of human history
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Nov 15, 2016 12:53
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Rime posted:I prefer "gently caress you, start using the time that is given to you productively, you stupid childish fucks." It is not "productive" to actively and vigorously destroy the environment for both current and future generations, as you have repeatedly recommended.
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Nov 15, 2016 17:48
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 21:35 |
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Rime posted:Better to just kill yourself then, dawg, because your comfy first world lifestyle on a daily basis requires both of those to perpetually increase. How many kids died mining cobalt in the Congo so that you could type from that high horse? You eat some tasty imported fruit this week? I don't recall if I specifically have stated this before, but every time someone comes into this thread and says they want to kill themselves, someone will tell them that killing yourself is never the correct answer to depression, anxiety or angst, so here is me making clear my support of this position. It is not any of our faults that we were born into the First World, but it is our responsibility to minimize the damage that we inflict upon other people through our choices. Approximately 0.00X children (probably another few zeros before the X) will die over my lifetime mining the tech metals that I consume, which amounts to a small number of grams per year, and the consumption of which I acknowledge is among the worst choices that I personally make, since I am vegan, don't drive, have not been on a plane for nearly 15 years, don't turn the heating on in winter, and, oh, I don't buy foreign produce, despite having the means to comfortably do all of these things. Being a goody-two-shoes will not "save the planet" in itself, but at least I am causing close to the least environmental degradation that I can as a First-Worlder, rather than promoting the most destructive behavior in a desperation-fuelled hissy fit* *that's what you're doing.
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Nov 15, 2016 19:57
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