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Spangly A posted:yeah there is literally no way any western lifestyle is long-term sustainable and without unforseeable technology developments the world's either going to need to re-evaluate it's resources or let poor people starve in their millions, growing eventually to billions I don't believe that's true, but even if it is the burden of the belt-tightening here isn't going to fall on the West, it's going fall on the Global South just like it always does. Probably in the form of mass death. Not a pretty picture.
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Feb 11, 2017 20:01
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Also 75% of greenhouse gas emissions come from countries that aren't EU or America so the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore. Those countries also happen to be the best-equipped to cut emissions, and in fact they already peaked back in 2007. So when people push a belt-tightening line, what they're actually doing is foreclosing on third-world development, whether they realize it or not.
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Feb 11, 2017 20:12
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Helsing posted:Except in many cases those greenhouse gas emissions come from factories that are exporting everything they produce to the west. Not as big a factor as you probably think. China, by far both the biggest emitter and biggest exporter outside the West, embodied about 16% of its emissions in exports. Even if you take the broadest possible definition of the West and measure carbon by consumption rather than emission to account for exports, you're still not going to get a scenario where the West emits a majority of GHG.
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Feb 11, 2017 23:53
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Helsing posted:China and the rest of the third world have significantly more people than the West. Canada, America and Europe combined have a slightly smaller total population than all of China. If we look at carbon emmissions per capita then the US produces just over twice as much as China. Sure, but that's not relevant to what I'm saying given the total level of non-Western emissions, their projected rise over the next half-century, and the point I'm making about them. It's definitely true that the West emits more than its fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions, but at this point it's become a global problem that will be increasingly globalized as development in places like India and Brazil ramps up. Problems like climate change and resource depletion are real, but we've long passed the point where they can simply be reduced to a moral issue of "Western lifestyles".
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Feb 12, 2017 00:36
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Spangly A posted:If India started using the resources per capita that the US did we'd already need to use food far better than we do or literally run out I do think there has to be a rethinking of global resource distribution, but I don't think that's actually the same as environmental or Peak [Whatever] issues. On the former you're going to need a political solution, but on the latter I think you'll have to depend on some manner of technical solutions or essentially condemn the entire world to a level of poverty and competition for resources that essentially forecloses on the political solutions for the former.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:00
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Helsing posted:I guess I'm confused by how you're saying that "the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore" yet you agree that "It's definitely true that the West emits more than it's fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions". You're absolutely right that we can't reduce a complicated like global warming issue to a single cause but that hardly exculpates the west from some very legitimate criticisms about how westerners and especially North Americans are consuming an extremely disproportionate share of the planet's resources. Sure, the West has an additional responsibility to take the lead on climate change and resource depletion. To some extent they're fulfilling it. As I mentioned before OECD emissions peaked in 2007 and have fallen every year since, (I think there were slight increases in 2009 and 2013 but those were offset by greater decreases in the years directly following). And over I expect that because of their immense wealth and technical development these countries are and will be the best equipped to live up to their obligations, even though those obligations are greater. The much harder issue for me, just on a technical level, is how we're going to get billions of Asians, Africans and South Americans access to basic services and general economic security without destroying planet. Getting China to even 1/3 of the US or Europe's level has already made them the largest carbon emitter on earth, so impoverishing or for that matter exterminating Westerners wouldn't be sufficient.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:25
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"Technical solutions to environmental and resource challenges are impossible" is as much an article of faith as assuming technology will solve anything. There's a fairly clear path to keeping the Earth below 2 degrees of warming. It may be possible within the existing mitigation framework adopted in Paris or that agreement may have to be expanded, but it's hardly some fantasy. Resource depletion is more complicated and there's no true answer to the OP's question because we simply can't answer it scientifically yet.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah but it's not "a few more years" like 4 years, it's "a few more years" like "well beyond the rest of our entire lives". And at that point you can still do the whole "everything is finite!" and "it's just faith that technology will change" but there is something absolutely realistic about the idea that a human simply can not talk about what technology will be like a hundred years after their life or whatever. It's just not a meaningful conversation that is possible to have. Hell, you can't realistically predict where technology will be in twenty years, unless you're talking about something like fusion reactors or particle accelerators where there's agreed-up timetables stretching out decades for when facilities of a given development level are going to be built.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:08
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Spangly A posted:This is the greatest threat to the species yet faced; I don't think that's remotely true, thought it might be the greatest threat we've faced since the turn of the 20th century.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:59
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Funky See Funky Do posted:We can't feed 7 billion people without oil. That's not even up for debate. Modern agriculture is completely reliant on having oil. Not just to grow the food but to move it to the population centres which are, these days, almost always nowhere near where the food is grown. A reduction in the availability of oil is also a reduction in the availability of food. It doesn't have to disappear, there just has to be less than we need. Carbon emissions from agricultural transportation makes up a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions, somewhere on the order of 0.001% of total emissions. It's not nearly the factor you imagine. Even were oil essential for agricultural transport, (it isn't, the system is relatively well-prepared for electrification), it doesn't use a significant amount of oil and can be continued more or less indefinitely even if Peak Oil were real.
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Feb 12, 2017 09:53
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