If the people who advocate addressing climate change actually believed this, they wouldn’t constantly be trying to tie it to other unpopular issues. They’d be willing to compromise on everything else to gather the broadest possible support base for solutions.
I personally think climate change is a lot more important than it’s advocates treat it as, though it’s a stretch to say it’s “the most important” issue. Based on my understanding of “the science” economic development in the third world will still leave those people better off even accounting for climate change impacts.
> If the people who advocate addressing climate change actually believed this, they wouldn’t constantly be trying to tie it to other unpopular issues. They’d be willing to compromise on everything else to gather the broadest possible support base for solutions.
Question of the strawman variety: if a bill comes about that passes meaningful climate change reform but bans abortion (in the united states) altogether, is your position that such a bill should be accepted by the climate change advocacy groups?
Arguably if they are single issue advocacy groups they shouldn’t care about the associated riders (and this would go for the anti abortion side too). But all too often you find that they are NOT actually single issue groups and instead just basically a portion of a political side.
"obviously" no one is really a walking talking voting caricature.
yet still there are big groups that care only about a handful issues meaningfully. eg. they usually don't vote, and very few thinfs might move them to do so. but those who vote usually are already well motivated to care for things the parties carry.
Let's change the scenario to explore the framework of your argument.
Suppose Vladimir Puten says he'll nuke the planet tomorrow unless every Apple employee dances naked outdoors then burns their headquarters to the ground.
Apple does not burn their HQ down and the employees refuse to dance outdoors, naked. Are they "fanatical Apple computer advocates and/ or fanatical prudes?" Or does game theory suggest responding to threats is a bad idea?
Apple won't do it because it believes Russia is bluffing.
If the US did not have nuclear missiles and Russia had nuked countries before for not running outside and dancing naked then yes I would call you a prude if you were willing to risk the lives of 300+ million people to not dance outside naked.
I have no idea what that question has to do with climate change advocacy.
Since you are confused at what I'm getting at, I'll explain.
You seem to think "What if someone feels so strongly about a woman's right to choose they are willing to see the world burn?" is a reasonable way to frame the issue.
So then I presented the same framing scenario involving nudity and you instinctively refused to accept the framing writing "Apple won't do it because it believes Russia is bluffing."
Your framing did not in any way involve what climate change advocates "believe" about their opponents. Considerations of bluffing were not part of your evaluation of choices available to climate change advocates.
When someone presents a hypothetical scenario in a wacky, no relation to the real world matter, sometimes the reasonable thing is to reject the hypothetical. As you just did, when you wrote "Apple won't do it because it believes Russia is bluffing".
There's also the fact that your framing requires us to label Apple employees as fanatics rather than the guy who is planning to nuke the planet unless Apple employees dance around naked, which is very weird.
Economics has a concept called "revealed preferences" which is the idea that you can better understand what someone values by what they do as opposed to what they say.
So in a scenario where someone says "climate change is an existential threat" but then acts like it's just one among many issues they care about reveals what they actually believe about climate change.
The problem with your scenario is doesn't reveal anyone's preferences because the threat isn't believable. However if the threat is believable than that does reveal their preferences about the end of the world vs being naked. And I don't mention Putin fanaticism because the entire scenario is not about Putin, Putin is a device to illustrate a choice Apple and their employees would need to make. Just like how if someone asks about the maintenance schedule of the trolly car in the typical trolly car problem they're missing the point.
It's a reasonable parody of EA-style uniform utilitarians, but has nothing on hedonic/non-uniform utilitarians. I also don't take EA-style uniform utilitarianism seriously (specifically because of the type of thing in that strip - I care more about my family/friends/community than random people I don't know or have any relation to).
That might be true in principle but practically speaking whatever population increase caused by abortion bans in the US is going to be dwarfed by the population boom happening in africa/asia.
You think that “hookup culture” is the reason for the “West’s” low birthrates? This is a well-studied topic and I haven’t heard anyone else making that claim…
Why wouldn't it be related? Women would rather not have kids with random hookups so if they're all having random hookups with everyone on Tinder/Bumble/Whatever then when exactly would they be having kids?
Of course it's related.
Also, look at the levels of estrogen-related compounds in our drinking water due to all of the birth control and think of what effect that might have on male fertility, which we know is the lowest in recorded history...
Wtf?… this is the most alarming statistic I’ve ever heard. Why is their estrogen in our drinking water, why does birth control put estrogen in our drinking water and where the fuck is the other 99% coming from?
Meanwhile, nobody has been able to replicate those results in the 10+ years since then, I wonder why.
>As for "hookup culture" that sounds like something largely made up by conservative pundents and you are describing it as a real thing.
Many liberals don't think glorifying hedonism is a good thing. I guess I'm open to hear the argument though, so what is the advantage for society to promote hook-up culture? What good comes from that vs the alternative?
I noticed you just claimed nobody could replicate the results but provided no evidence for your claim that either 1) estrogen in the water is in unhealthy levels due to birth control or 2) nobody could replicate the results.
I think it's pretty clear you don't care about scientific evidence but think women having consensual, nonreproductive sex is icky, so very much want it to be true that birth control is poison, and don't really care about the truth level of what you are posting as long as it feels true.
As for your other point, I already said there's no such thing as hookup culture, that's just an outlandish stereotype you want to box people into.
I don't know how to explain to you that the meaning of life isn't to make babies, and that it's morally wrong to optimize society for making babies by treating women as chattel, banning birth control, censoring art work, screaming all day about birth control being poison, or whatever it is you think you are fighting for.
Agreed 100%. Consensual sex is awesome (the only good kind!), but we're talking about hook-up culture specifically though.
And I never said anything about banning birth control, there are many different types of birth control. The ones that add estrogen to our water supply are problematic though.[0]
As an aside, what do you think is causing the massive drop in fertility and semen counts in western men?[1] It's one thing to handwave away things you don't like, but we know semen counts have never been this low, so why do you think that is?
I'm still waiting for your evidence that the study I cited above showing estrogen was a minute presence in drinking water was one that nobody could replicate. That seems a lot more on point than something something bass?
If the medical community has no consensus about the cause of semen decline, how the fuck should you or I know the cause? Linking to something about bass doesn't really suggest to me you have a basic understanding of the facts. Did it occur to you bass don't live in the same environments humans do and they may have a few anatomical differences than humans?
I think you would benefit from less original thinking on the matter and more sticking with what experts say on medical matters in general.
Here's a mayo clinic article on low sperm count, for example:
A thorough search will show there are no published studies that reference it and replicate the results. If you seem to think it's been replicated and my queries have missed it, please link the study.
To begin with, you haven't even defined "hookup culture," much less demonstrated that its prevalence is significant enough to influence birth rates or, further, proven that its influence on birth rates would be negative in the first place.
That said, why assume a nebulous concept like "hookup culture" is causing declining birth rates when a simple google search will reveal plenty of well-studied factors with demonstrated influence on fertility (not to mention far more cultural universality). For reference, some examples include: increased educational attainment among women, increased labor-force participation among women, increased urbanization, increased cost-of-living
As a young-er person in the West, I'm well aware of the term's general meaning. The linked article you provide fails to define it in any way that would be empirically meaningful with regard to the study of birth rates. You haven't given us any reason to suspect that American college students, or their European peers, engaging in casual sex (the focus of the linked article) has any impact on birth rates.
Based on the above, as well as your lack of engagement with any of the fertility-related factors I provided, I'm assuming you're more interested in voicing some sort of cultural critique than discussing actual drivers behind trends in birth rates.
I think climate change is a very important problem, too important to be left to “climate activists.” The environmental movement totally screwed us in the 1970s by lashing climate-change activism to anti-nuclear and degrowth. The only politically feasible way of addressing climate change is to grow and engineer our way out of it. Even leaving aside people in the developed world, people in India and China will not accept that the solution for them is to delay or avoid industrialization and remain subsistence farmers.
> if a bill comes about that passes meaningful climate change reform but bans abortion (in the united states) altogether, is your position that such a bill should be accepted by the climate change advocacy groups?
If the world ends tomorrow and the only way to avert it is to ban abortion then almost certainly yes, otherwise the baseline deal ought to be better.
Ultimately, climate change will be a fight for resources. As more people are pushed out of areas that can no longer produce food and safe shelter others will try to stop them. We are seeing that with the influx of migrants into the U.S. and Western Europe. We are headed in to a societal crisis the world has never seen due to climate change. It's started and it will only get worse. Most of the current population will not see its affects but the crisis is real and it will be harsh for future generations. In the past, the way people have dealt with extreme resource scarcity has been war. There's nothing to say that won't happen again.
It really is what should be at the top of people's minds. We need to reduce its affects and get ready for the changes that are coming.
> We are seeing that with the influx of migrants into the U.S. and Western Europe
dont be ridiculous, we are seeing ECONOMIC migrants.
Im not saying we will not see climate/disaster migrants, but the overshadowing majority of migrants are economic opportunists, that are eying the possibility of a better life in Europe/USA. This is why in Europe they overwhelmingly seek to the countries with the largest welfare schemes.
I dont blame them, why wouldnt they do this? but dont fall for the obvious lies about WHY they come.
> If the people who advocate addressing climate change actually believed this, ... They’d be willing to compromise on everything else to gather the broadest possible support base for solutions.
"If anyone believes X is the most important, they must acquiesce to my every demand, otherwise they're lying!"
Seriously, why are we even entertaining this level of discourse?
There's a difference between most important and existential.
If you truly believe the world will end unless you solve a specific problem. You should be highly motivated to solve that problem and willing to make even extreme sacrifices to get that done.
For instance I grew up in the Catholic church and knew plenty of single issue voters. Pro-life voters would vote for anyone, no matter how much they despised them or disagreed with all their other politics, as long as they promised to try to ban abortion.
I don't really see this on the climate change side. They say it's existential threat but they don't act like it.
The pro life folks are a good example. The pro life movement has worked with everyone from free market republicans to labor democrats to black nationalists. Whatever you think of their policy, they believe their cause is existential and they act like it.
Many people believe that climate change can't be "solved" in a vacuum and has to be approached with broad measures to be palatable or even "solvable".
I haven't checked for America, but at least in Germany it's pretty obvious that with the expected transition to electrical vehicles, it will not happen fast enough to reach the climate goals. But at the same time, electric vehicles have significant pollution in the manufacturing stage, so just making them a lot cheaper might not be a solution (and lead to more demand for vehicles, since they're suddenly much cheaper, leading to unintended emission). Additionally vehicles are getting larger (increasing energy usage) and more miles get driven. This means car mobility has to be reduced or at least kept at the same level.
This is certainly not an easy problem and probably has to be associated with vast changes across society, like rezoning, changing work & mobility. And that's just a single example.
It's also pretty obvious (IMHO) that SAF won't available in a large-enough scale to make much of a difference to flying emissions in the next decades. But flights are booming around the world (with a small damper due to covid) and could make up as much as 10% of global warming contribution in 15 years which (IMHO) looking at the benefits is way too much. What do you do there?
Housing is difficult (how do you incentivize moving to efficient heating based on electricity without people dying because they need to save on heating), adoption to climate change is difficult (sorry, you can't live/build new houses here anymore), ... .
How do you avoid that pricing emissions hurts poor people the most and thus discourages/punishes politicians?
These are all topics with no simple answers and possibly unpopular solutions with no great alternatives. But "solving" climate change is a very multidisciplinary problem, with many unpopular issues associated with it.
It's very easy to tie something to climate change, even if it might not make much sense when looking at it in greater detail. But it's also very easy to surface level say "What's that to do with climate change?" even though for almost any measure you can argue for at-least some benefit.
Your 'understanding' is rear-view-mirror/past-performance logic and the whole point of "the science" [1] is to communicate that that WILL NOT HOLD.
A 3.5C world is one in which large portions of the tropics (central america, northern africa, the middle east, india and large parts of china) will simply be depopulated. They can leave as refugees or stay as bodies. At 2.5C thats still largely true but say its only half the populations. Nobody is "better off" living through the droughts, famines, and conflicts that lead to that level of depopulation.
Essentially at 3C and above we're doing an irish-famine/holodomor to somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of humanity. To imply they might be 'better off' for it is so grotesque I'll assume you're not a monster and simply don't grasp the 1.5<->3.5C consequence ranges and timeline.
[1] just as one example here's the 'multi sector risk' indexed by (poor) population: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2018/11/Figu...
Those are the people who are being hit the hardest. Many more good graphs in that report: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/graphics/
Probably most important of all is to really deeply memorize that first one to understand the most important variable in the whole conversation: TIME
I very literally linked to the scientific reports. The explanatory text next the graphic I mentioned explains how the bands between the lines represent the 33rd to 66th% confidence intervals. Its worth noting SR15 is the older report and AR6 has since tightened the bands/confidence-levels. They just didn't redo the graph so I still link to the SR15 one.
Climate panic adherents look to fallible and flawed scientific models for confirmation of their beliefs the same way Judeo-Christians look to the Bible for theirs.
>If the people who advocate addressing climate change actually believed this, they wouldn’t constantly be trying to tie it to other unpopular issues.
Unfortunately, those of us who do believe this are a small minority. That's why it gets tied to other issues: it's coalition-building and the dynamics of advocacy. That's also a big reason why my other favorite cause is election reform, because it can help climate-change targeted reform become less partisan.
>Based on my understanding of “the science” economic development in the third world will still leave those people better off even accounting for climate change impacts.
If we had had economic development to the degree we now think of as "normal" in the third world starting in the 1960s, we would be looking at a very different, less frightening situation. But something went wrong. Currently, and particularly considering the events of this year, we don't seem to have solved geopolitical instability in the general case. Hopefully, the third world keeps developing. I'd still like to have a plan B.
Since when is building a strawman "a balanced comment"?
"the people who advocate addressing climate change" - who?
"constantly be trying to tie it to other unpopular issues" - which?
" lot more important than it’s advocates treat it as"
The commenter builds up a profile of a "foe" to argue against, but it's all broad strokes and intimation.
Each person who holds an opinion about climate change and policy possibilities around it has their own reasons and positions. Lumping them all together and building a strawman out of them doesn't serve any healthy discourse.
The comment author evidently has their own opinions and feels like there is some consensus that leaves them out. They'd be better off making those assumptions about what other people apparently think explicit and their own alternatives explicit as well. Point by point. So they can be reasoned about. Instead generalizations are made so they can "win".
> Each person who holds an opinion about climate change and policy possibilities around it has their own reasons and positions.
I agree, but that’s my point! If the people who support addressing climate change really believed it is an existential issue, that wouldn’t be the case. They wouldn’t be treating it as one bullet point on an overall agenda.
It's worth asking what made issues surrounding climate change so unpopular in the first place. Advocates and activists are working against decades of misinformation from oil execs. Even something as straightforward as replace coal with renewables is deeply unpopular in large parts of the country because there's the stigma of job loss associated with it. While it's easy to take aim at climate advocates, why not take aim at the ones who actively profit off the destruction of the planet?
1. The activists are hypocrites: buying beachfront properties when you think every coast in the world will be swallowed up by 2050 is very telling. Flying around in jets to tell people to stop flying and eating meat is also infuriating and condescending.
2. It's frustrating to live in Canada and be told we're the biggest problem in the world with our 2% of all emissions. All because of our per-capita emissions are high due to a small population and our economy relying on industry everyone else in the world needs. Yet China continues to increase their emissions every year (and plan to till 2030, fat chance, but that's a different discussion) by more than all of Canada's emissions.
Climate activists cannot win with your lot: Al Gore elite types get hate for being hypocrites, hyper-purists like Greta Thunberg get shat on for being shril and unreleasitic.
I'm so done with whining like this. I'm going to keep voting for you to lose, and for your emissions (and Al Gore's and China's and everyone else's) to be regulated. If that means you can't drive your two-ton SUVs and eat burgers for every meal, then so be it.
Now you'll moan about how we're threatening your lifestyle.
> It's frustrating to live in Canada and be told we're the biggest problem in the world with our 2% of all emissions.
It's frustrating to live in china and told we're the biggest problem in the world, even we're responsible for less than 15% of carbon in the atmosphere. Wealthy countries like Canada and the US have profited from blowing carbon in the atmosphere over centuries and got wealthy from it, but now refuse to lower their emissions and blame us for wanting to get rich too.
> Wealthy countries like Canada and the US have profited from blowing carbon in the atmosphere over centuries and got wealthy from it
It was done at the scale of 30m and 300m populations, not a population 1.5b so it's hardly a fair comparison.
We have cleaner methods now, and my province doesn't even have any coal plants left. Our energy costs are through the roof because of that effort to save the planet. Meanwhile China continues to pollute more and more yoy, undoing any progress the rest of the world makes, at a mind boggling scale using outdated technology with no regard for the rest of the world.
> It was done at the scale of 30m and 300m populations, not a population 1.5b so it's hardly a fair comparison.
I think the idea is to compare countries' per-person impact. Otherwise, a country as populous as China is being held to a higher standard. How else should we compare countries?
Per-person statistics mean literally nothing when we're talking about a global problem that doesn't care about man-made boundaries.
edit: to elaborate, if I was allowed to immigrate to China I'd lower my per-capita emissions overnight and be a better citizen in the world. Or if Canada allowed mass immigration and tripled our population our per-capita would drop like a rock. Except I highly doubt it works that way and would solve climate change...
> Per-person statistics mean literally nothing when we're talking about a global problem that doesn't care about man-made boundaries.
As the climate doesn't care about man-made boundaries, isn't that all the more reason gauge emissions on a per-capita basis, without reference to borders?
> to elaborate, if I was allowed to immigrate to China I'd lower my per-capita emissions overnight and be a better citizen in the world. Or if Canada allowed mass immigration and tripled our population our per-capita would drop like a rock. Except I highly doubt it works that way and would solve climate change...
If migration could lower per-capita emissions as you describe, wouldn't that count in favour of that migration? (Of course, we also ought to consider any variation in per-capita emissions both in locations with net immigration and in locations with net emigration.) Maybe economies of scale help explain lower per-capita emissions in some locations (but not necessarily at national level).
> As the climate doesn't care about man-made boundaries, isn't that all the more reason gauge emissions on a per-capita basis, without reference to borders?
How do you do that? Measuring per-capita can't be done without drawing a border somewhere. Split it up by income?
> If migration could lower per-capita emissions as you describe, wouldn't that count in favour of that migration?
I pointed out how absurd that was, not that it was a good idea.
>> As the climate doesn't care about man-made boundaries, isn't that all the more reason gauge emissions on a per-capita basis, without reference to borders?
> How do you do that? Measuring per-capita can't be done without drawing a border somewhere. Split it up by income?
Possibly by income, but there are other options. Other than being impractical (and possibly suggesting individuals are freer to vary their emissions unilaterally than they actually are), we could in theory actually measure individual emissions. How about measuring per-capita emissions regionally, and with regions sub-divided by population density?
> and possibly suggesting individuals are freer to vary their emissions unilaterally than they actually are
This already exists in the form of carbon credits and people/companies spending money elsewhere (like planting trees) to "offset" the pollution they create. The rich are able to absorb the costs of the carbon taxes and will continue to do whatever they want because they're carbon neutral. Carbon neutrality is complete nonsense. This isn't a "calories in, calories out" situation where you can "maintain" if you spit out 100 units of pollution today but buy trees that will suck up that 100 units over 50 years. It's still ending up in the atmosphere and making things worse today.
> How about measuring per-capita emissions regionally, and with regions sub-divided by population density?
Sure, then that way Alberta will be considered an oil producing region and get a pass for their high per-capita emissions just like Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. I made this comment elsewhere and this is exactly why I think it's unfair to point at Canada and the per-capita emissions. Our big industry and small population is the cause of our high per-capita emissions, and we have an enormous amount of clean energy but we never get credit for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32977516
> we're responsible for less than 15% of carbon in the atmosphere.
This isn't true. In 2020, out of 34.81 billion tons of CO2 emitted from fossil fuels, 10.67 billion tons of it came from China. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou... says "Between 65% and 80% of CO2 released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years." So isn't most of the CO2 emitted from so long before China became the world's worst polluter no longer in the atmosphere?
Sure, it’s just a different frame: “you developed doing this thing. Now you’re saying we can’t do that same thing.” Why should The West “get credit” for the ocean’s CO2 dissolution capacity just because they industrialized earlier? Either way, we have to lift everyone out of poverty. Again, just a different way of framing the problem.
They're not doing the same thing though! They're doing it on a massively bigger scale and damaging the planet way more today than developed countries did in the past.
This page has another thing that pisses me off so much about the per-capita emissions and how Canada gets ripped into that so hard. These paragraphs right here:
> The world’s largest per capita CO2 emitters are the major oil producing countries; this is particularly true for those with relatively low population size. Most are in the Middle East: In 2017 Qatar had the highest emissions at 49 tonnes (t) per person, followed by Trinidad and Tobago (30t); Kuwait (25t); United Arab Emirates (25t); Brunei (24t); Bahrain (23t) and Saudi Arabia (19t).
> However, many of the major oil producers have a relatively small population meaning their total annual emissions are low. More populous countries with some of the highest per capita emissions – and therefore high total emissions – are the United States, Australia, and Canada. Australia has an average per capita footprint of 17 tonnes, followed by the US at 16.2 tonnes, and Canada at 15.6 tonnes.
Give me a break! How do Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia get designated as a major oil producing countries but Canada is left out?
I thought "Ok maybe per-capita oil production isn't significant so that's why Canada was lumped in with the US and Australia". Nope! Canada isn't on the same scale as the oil producing countries per-capita for oil, but Canada does better per-capita than Trinidad (who is considered an oil-producing nation), USA, Australia, and China: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-prod-per-capita?time=...
The fact that you believe some minuscule number of hypocritical celebrity activists are representative of the movement as a whole speaks much more of your desire to find an excuse to ignore the problem than of what the climate change activism movement actually looks like.
Ok, what does activism actually look like? All I hear are solutions that punish regular citizens (eat less meat, pay taxes, stop traveling, paper straws) instead of going after the rich and their mega corporations who are the biggest polluters.
Revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend, definitely punishes the rich, poor could end up ahead, and should let the market sort out what to incentivize.
I'm amused that we're in the same thread that started with someone claiming that climate activists dont believe in clmnate change, they just want to help the poor and do left wing things, and now here you are complaining that all their solutions hurt the poor and dont target the big polluting corporations.
> climate activists dont believe in clmnate change, they just want to help the poor and do left wing things
If that argument was made, then I don't agree with the "want to help the poor and do left wing things" part. I agree with the not believing it climate change part though - if they did they wouldn't be buying beachfront properties and flying around in jets while scolding us poor people. They'd be taxing the shit out of themselves and their corporations. They would push for price ceilings so they can't pass the taxes onto poor people.
Yet here they are scolding us for our habits and trying to make the 99% of us change while they make record profits every year. They have no desire to put their money where their mouth is though.
Who actually is "they" to you? Given the accusations you're making, there must be some fairly specific people this applies to.
Who do you see as a "climate activist" who's buying up beachfront property, flying around in a private jet, and making record profits?
And why on Earth would you think that one person or a small group who does those things is in any way representative of the environmentalist movement as a whole? How can you possibly believe that most environmentalists have the money to do those things?
The job loss is real. The increased costs are real.
Retraining is hard and slowing down the economy will damage people, mostly poor and middle class.
There is no way around, hence why climate activists are always saying "it's a price we need to pay". That price to pay is why it's unpopular.
Also, the solution proposed are not the only way forward and the negatives are overblown.
The measures feel like they're done to fulfill the Keynesian politicians' agenda more than actually improve the situation (for that you would need way more global cooperation)
"Advocates and activists are working against decades of misinformation from oil execs"
This is a popular misconception but not really true. Go search for and read stuff that argues against various climatological beliefs and you'll find they're almost all unaffiliated individuals, often retired engineers or researchers of various kinds. Even in the case where they are affiliated with think tanks and the like, that came long after they independently built a name for themselves engaging in skepticism - the funding followed their beliefs, not the other way around.
This does actually matter. I've become a hard climate change skeptic especially in the past few years, and the first step along the road was going looking for these "oil execs" because I thought it'd be funny to laugh at their transparently motivated reasoning. Couldn't find them. The so-called oil companies all reinvented themselves as energy companies a long time ago and have significant non-oil investments now. They're all fully on board with the climate narrative. Instead there's a whole lot of earnest bloggers who make strong points about the robustness and quality of the underlying science. Before COVID I was only marginally receptive to widespread claims of corruption in academic science. Nowadays it's far easier to believe and I'm listening.
"Even something as straightforward as replace coal with renewables is deeply unpopular"
It's unpopular because it's a strategy that doesn't work technologically, that's why Europe now faces an energy crisis, but anyone who pointed out out over the preceding decades was immediately attacked with vicious ad-hominems such as those you're displaying here. "But what about storage?" ... "shut up oil exec who profits off destroying the Earth". That kind of thing will make the people doing it unpopular pretty quickly in any context.
> It's worth asking what made issues surrounding climate change so unpopular in the first place.
They've been unpopular before. "We must abandon capitalism", "We must not eat meat" etc didn't suddenly come up with climate change, they've been here before, and their proponents seem to be using climate change as the train they can attach their issues to.
I like how nobody acknowledges the fact of decades of rampant misinformation from oil companies and blatant climate change denial from right wing media.
How can we fix things if one side doesn't even believe its a problem?
Advocates for and against are equally bought and paid for. Some of the loudest voices warning of climate change are still cruising around in some of the most inefficient, dirtiest vehicles on the planet. Hypocrisy is rife, orgs like the WEF are capitalizing on fear, and an industry around climate change has developed around it to bring in billions.
If you think pointing the finger at one group explains it all, I suggest you haven't looked deep enough. People have done to the noble quest against climate change what they always do to noble movements; it's been co-opted and corrupted.
> "If you think pointing the finger at one group explains it all, I suggest you haven't looked deep enough. People have done to the noble quest against climate change what they always do to noble movements; it's been co-opted and corrupted."
I've long wondered why this oh-so-blatantly-obvious fact is so hard to grasp for so many. Right alongside the oft-ignored fact that your favorite politician couldn't care less about you as an individual, or as a group, except insofar as your existence as a statistic (your vote) gives them access to more power and / or money.
Does it matter? It’s still extraordinarily important, regardless of the virtue of its current political advocates. That they’re aligned with it doesn’t invalidate the underlying cause.
I fail to see how continued economic development in the third world and more material wealth will counteract famine due to reduced global population capacity. It’s a great recipe for massive scale unrest and warfare, which is extremely effective at destroying material wealth. Enlighten me?
Then let the science speak for itself. What annoys me most is the integration of greenwashing into advertising, and people _eat this up up like hotcakes_.
For example, Apple is not a green company by any objective measure. Their manufacturing process is absurdly water and energy intensive, and is based in countries that have some of the highest co2 emissions. They intentionally slow down and disable perfectly fine devices that have a lot of life left in them, encouraging rampart consumerism and ‘electronics as fashion wear’. They intentionally prevent people from repairing perfectly fine devices. Yet in their advertising and corporate culture, they plaster how ‘green’ they are but it reality one of the worst companies for the planet.
> They intentionally slow down and disable perfectly fine devices that have a lot of life left in them
I’m not sure what you’re referring to by disable, but wasn’t the slowing down an effort to make devices continue to behave predictably with degraded batteries? Isn’t this a “green” feature?
(I’m not sure I actually believe this, but I do kinda feel like your list was just a laundry list of stock anti Apple complaints twisted to somehow relate to “green” issues)
My family has five phones, one 13 mini, and the other four were all Sept 2018 releases (iPhone X variants). They all work fine and I’ve been able to easily replace batteries on the four-year old phones, a side button (drop damage) and a screen (drop damage).
None of those repairs were difficult nor expensive (the side button was fiddly to get to, but still easy, just tedious).
I expect we’ll get close to 6 years from the iPhone X’s. That feels like it will be more than competitive with the typical Android phone.
That you're talking about 4 and 6 years as a long time demonstrates just how normalized the horribly wasteful consumer electronics market has become. The receiver I'm listening to music with is three decades old. Car is over a decade, and I don't consider it old. Washer and dryer 10-20? Yes there is progress in technology that makes new things more efficient (a class D amp would be more efficient than AB, heat pumps better than resistive, etc), but the mobile phone market is certainly not the PC market we experienced from 8088->x86_64 either. Most of the "innovation" driving incompatibilities and obsolescence has been basic software churn.
My iPhone is almost five years old and my mom uses my previous one. It‘s still going fast. Certainly the support is far longer than for Android devices.
It's easy to compare with crappy Androids. Try to compare with my 12+-year-old laptop running latest Debian and not showing any sign of stopped updates. Same I expect from GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone).
Thanks for the link. I’m not sure I’d personally make the hardware trade off by using those SoCs but power to anyone who stands by their FOSS convictions by doing so
Unless you do really heavy stuff with your phone (which?), these smartphones are sufficiently powerful for most applications. NoScript in Firefox helps. Sent from my Pinephone.
My Pixel 6 will get five years of official security updates, and if past phones are any indication, it'll get several more years of unofficial ones via custom ROMs like LineageOS after that. Once Apple decides your iPhone is no longer worthy of getting security updates, you're just out of luck, and your choices are add it to our growing e-waste problem or accept a bunch of security vulnerabilities that nobody will ever fix.
> For example, Apple is not a green company by any objective measure.
To provide some additional context, Apple's aim[0] is to be carbon neutral (across its supply chain and products) by 2030. That puts it ahead of about 99% of regions in the world[1]. I don't know how "absurdly water ... intensive" the company is, though, or what environmental damage it might be responsible for in that regard.
Apple plans to reduce emissions by 75% till 2030 and fill the gap with carbon offsets, which unfortunately all-too-often don't mean anything. Reducing their emissions by 75% is an admirable goal, filling the gap with carbon offsets and advertising with them not so much.
That sounds like a great way to get tons of opposition from well resourced individuals, which will ultimately sink the policy proposal. A far more prudent proposal would be to let them fly private jets, but tax their carbon emissions accordingly. If you were previously flying private and the government introduces a carbon tax that makes flying 10% more expensive, you'll likely cough up the money. If they want to ban private flying entirely you'll go on a crusade to prevent that bill from getting passed.
you'll probably go a crusade either way. what a weird focus anyway, feels very "eat the rich" style when the earth doesn't care where the carbon comes from.
banning things is always too messy, too many exceptions, etc. tax the shit out of emissions, and add some credit for things like emergency health-related trips.
When people were not travelling because COVID, airlines were still doing regular empty plane trips to keep the routes. And it was one of the main industries bailed out in the pandemic. Leisure travel does far more damage than private travel, the institutions around it will keep them running till the end of the world.
Until climate change starts affecting our base hierarchy of needs, it's doomed to get more lip service than action. Outside of war efforts, have societies ever made sacrifices for the greater good?
Banning CFCs to fix the ozone hole over Oceania/Antarctica. Scientific consensus was CFCs were directly responsible for the problem, countries around the globe got together and mandated the use of different refrigerants with the Montreal Protocol in 1987. Every single member of the UN ratified the agreement. It's regarded as one of if not the most effective international environmental agreement ever. Potentially saved millions of lives with reduced skin cancer cases.
Banning CFCs were a win/win for industry/environment because industry had alternatives for CFCs that they could charge a premium for. No such option exists for fossil fuels.
that's absolutely not true though. there are countless alternatives from DAC/CCS coupled with anything, endless variations of nuclear (even fusion too), T shaped dams in the sea, wind, solar.
the problem is about collective action, and justice/fairness/negotiation/geopolitics. like the iterated prisoner's dilemma. defectors get cheap energy, but then the next round your exports get a big tariff added, but then defectors of that get cheap shit, the next round they might get tariffs too, but then you hit a ceiling on this.
Sacrifice for the greater good is the wrong way of framing it. It’s not a sacrifice at all. It’s a prudent investment.
If a huge tree next to your house is starting to lean and is in danger of falling and causing tens of thousands worth of damage to your roof and exterior, is paying a few thousand to remove the tree a sacrifice?
Yes we could adapt to climate change but investing now in non-carbon-based technologies would be far cheaper and safer.
This wrong framing is actually the fault of the environmental movement which from the start has framed this like a moral panic and reform crusade. I credit that to the movement emerging from a culture with protestant puritan DNA. We got “forgive me nature for I have sinned” which is bullshit.
George Carlin gave a good retort. “Stop saying save the Earth! The Earth will be fine. We are fucked.”
We are what we are trying to save. “Nature” will be fine.
On who we put the cost of the prudent investment about things we do not have certainty about? I have been hearing bad news about climate change since the 90s and none of those happened.
I think this has a lot more than simple science into it.
I am willing to pay the cost of transition as long as they give me dates and signa a contract saying they will give me my money back if things do not happen as in their calendar with a reasonable amoubt of flexibility.
At the same time, it's interesting to consider whether the CFC ban would have been politically possible today. I honestly don't know, but it seems likely it would have been turned into a bludgeon.
R12 and R22 phaseouts cost money, required some equipment changes, stocking of multiple refrigerants, all of which represent varying levels of sacrifice to solve the problem.
We're not going to see major sacrifices, much to the chagrin of activists that conflate sacrifice with effectiveness, but we are seeing significant improvements from existing climate action already. Most of it doesn't make as much noise as highly visible yet ineffective actions like bans etc. which activists prefer.
I find it impressive that people use CAT to justify a fatalistic attitude.
You can compare the predictions year by year and see the "current policies" values drop every year, from "3.1-3.7" in 2017 to "2.5-2.9" in 2021. Do those also depend on DAC?
Also, as far as I understand, the technology exists (in the sense of "there are plants already running") and scales horizontally, it's just currently too expensive by a factor of around 10 compared to current carbon pricing. Expecting general industrial progress, economies of scale, and an increase in carbon pricing to bring this into alignment doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
> I find it impressive that people use CAT to justify a fatalistic attitude.
I guess looking at that map of the world showing responses ranging from "Insufficient" to "Critically Insufficient" fills you with a warm fuzzy sense of optimism for the future.
When you say "there are plants already running" - you must mean the demonstration projects that produce CO2 for soft drinks (that will go back into the atmosphere)[0]
> There are currently 18 direct air capture plants operating worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year...In the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario, direct air capture is scaled up to capture almost 60 Mt CO2/year by 2030.
So great, we only need to increase by a factor of 6000 in 7 years.
> Plans for a total of eleven DAC facilities are now in advanced development. If all of these planned projects were to go ahead, DAC deployment would reach around 5.5 Mt CO2 by 2030; this is more than 700 times today’s capture rate, but less than 10% of the level of deployment needed to get on track with the Net Zero Scenario.
^This is your optimistic scenario: IFF every single one of these planned facilities are actually built, we'll have 10% of requirements.
Since the human society is better at disaster management than prevention, I would like to read at least one article which provides a solution instead of screaming end of the world.
Given that world temperature would rise by 2C or even 4C by end of the century, I would say more resources should be put towards climate prediction and building infrastructure. But again, I can't make an informed opinion, since all my searches lead me to climate change prevention articles instead of management.
For example, Pakistan might need to build better infrastructure and may also need to switch crops depending on how the rains would be in the future. I would like to see a well researched year by year ( and by region ) prediction if humanity decides not to take any action to prevent climate change.
in the end, failure to mitigate climate change may be the primary factor behind the 'Great Filter' explanation for Fermi's Paradox - sentient species unable to overcome evolved competitive behaviour, and see the big picture in time to cooperate. I hope we can beat the odds
For other types of existential risks we are either in just in along for the ride (wide availability of nuclear weapons) lack data or concrete means of tackling the problem (AI, solar flares and whatnot) or it's something already linked to climate change problem management (decreased resources, overpopulation). The greying of the population is probably the second biggest story other than the climate.
For human rights, as tragic as they are the scale is just tiny in comparison. And the biggest boon for those rights is a functioning and wealthy society. Remove that with climate change and demographic troubles and they will be gone in a puff of smoke.
> For other types of existential risks we are either in just in along for the ride [...]
Isn't this kind of the case for climate change too? I certainly don't feel like I can personally affect it in any way. As a society, we can affect climate change, but so can we affect nuclear weapons etc.
You can't do anything about human rights abuses if you can't grow food to eat. Ultimately climate change has the potential to break down modern human society, at least to an extent. It's also a bit of an exaggeration, the point of the article isn't that we literally should not care about any other issue at all.
> You can't do anything about human rights abuses if you can't grow food to eat.
As a society, we (still) can grow food to eat. You aren't saying we should disregard human rights abuses right now just because we might not be able to grow enough food some time in the future?
Again, I'm not saying to disregard climate change, I just find it very disingenious to say it's the only story that matters: it's not.
I agree. If we have another drought next year across the Western US, China, and Europe I bet the price shocks will hit rich and poor alike as food will become quite scarce.
Coupled with trying to manage surviving the yearly 100 year storms and sea level rise… we’re in for quite a challenge managing to mitigate the climate crisis with feeding ourselves and protecting people from the increase in devastating disasters.
If the way we responded socially and politically to the pandemic is any indication of how we’ll manage this looming monster I suspect it’s going to get really bad.
It doesn’t matter how rich you are. If disaster after disaster year after year wipes out the food production you can’t eat money.
From the point of view of someone living in central Europe, I disagree. The only story that matters right now is Russia waging a war against the Ukraine and preparing to attack Europe once they get a realistic chance. If the US weakens the NATO after the next election, we're f*cked.
Also, I don't buy the "let poor people suffer now to reduce suffering later" narrative. Restricting the access to fossil fuels increases the prices for pretty much everything that's relevant to cover basic needs, especially in less developed countries.
But I'd be very fine with putting a hefty carbon emission based price tag on anything that exceeds covering basic needs - e.g. flying, cruise ships, driving big cars, using more energy to heat a pool than other families need for their whole household,...
A smarter way than manually picking "worthy" and "unworthy" emissions to tax is to tax them all, including basic needs, and distribute the proceeds from that (or a fraction of them) to everyone equally.
Those who consume less will receive back more than they spent on the basic necessities, and you don't get into envy- and activism-based debates where everyone tries to hurt their favorite sinners.
I would agree that there are two stories that matter, the invasion by Russia being the other, in part because we won't have to worry about extinction by climate change if nuclear winter happens before that.
Also unfortunately, as the world becomes more and more scarce with its resources (seafood, freshwater, topsoil, fertilizer, usable sand, etc) we're probably only going to see more of these wars in the next couple of decades, even if this one is resolved without nukes or a World War.
I don't agree with you about not wanting people to suffer now bit, though. Allowing relentless and cheap consumption of resources got us to this place in the first place. There needs to be drastic reduction in consumption of resources happening, and it should have started at least fifty years ago.
It's like asking someone who's had a heart attack to not start getting a handle on their health because you don't want them to suffer any hardships right now.
I'm saying this as someone who is struggling to get my own health back on track myself and had heart attack scares a few times (thankfully not an actual heart attack yet, just very convincing heartburn)...it's definitely difficult, but I can and should be doing more. Like I should be doing more to reduce my consumption of resources as well. I've done some for both, but nowhere near enough or fast enough.
That being said, I don't want people to die from lack of heat or anything either. I also think the governments of the world should be doing a lot to ease the burden without just making fossil fuels cheap again, restructuring our society so we will naturally need to consume less resources (more communal places to stay for the days when it's extremely cold with no stigma attached to it, massive funding projects to convert homes away from natural gas heating, etc).
> I don't agree with you about not wanting people to suffer now bit, though. Allowing relentless and cheap consumption of resources got us to this place in the first place.
I'm fine with "a bit" of suffering or inconvenience. Implementing a carbon tax on anything beyond basic needs in rich countries would be an option for that. Pressuring developing countries to not burn coal without offering providing a better alternative wouldn't. That would be equivalent to "a lot of suffering".
Is Russia really a threat to Europe? From over here, it seems like they're struggling as it is. Or, do you mean after they control all of Ukraine's exports, Europe will buckle?
Currently, it's not an immediate military threat - mainly thanks to deterrence by NATO and the US.
But let's see how the situation develops in the next years. If the US withdraws troups and weakens NATO, e.g. because Trump get reelected, and if political instability increases in Europe because people aren't able make a living anymore, Russia will for sure take advantage of that situation.
Let's look at it from a different angle: climate change situation creates lots of massive business opportunities that are very appealing and actively being taken avantage of, as we speak. While we argue, oil and plastics people get richer and politic is flooded with oil money (our money, from filling our own tanks). Economic AND climate migrants (causes for migration are often intertwined and should be seen as single) are being taken advantage of instead of receiving help where they are, and lots of people are getting rich from that. Then, when sea level rising gets critical, 90% of Earth coastal population will need relocation, and that service will make others rich. These (and others) creates formidable opposing forces to any organized and collective up to bottom type adaptation, which can never be without general consent. Pandemic made sure of that by eroding most trust that remained toward the ruling class worldwide.
We actually live in a world monopolized by the _us against them_ mantra that has for the most part deliberately chosen free market individual solutions to widespread dangers that concern everyone. Because climate change vilain is the guy looking in the mirror and not recognizing himself, while blaming the wallpaper. Commonly political solutions failed in commies countries, and we have not figured out yet how to organized ourselves as a planet since then, other than through free money flow that ruins everything.
While the prevailing ideological landscape leaves us no hope, other than to organize ourselves and end up living in some Mad Max dystopian tyranny, we have to trust and hope for the better. Who knows, maybe we'll grab the olive branch before falling into the abyss.
>””” To stand on the bluffs above the Chukchi Sea, looking down at a series of broken and ruined seawalls that have already failed to hold back the power of the ocean, and to consider that there are politicians in this country who are unwilling to do anything about the climate crisis, or who even deny it exists, is to wish they all could come and stand on these bluffs and look out at the relentless, devouring sea.”””
The politicians know that climate change is real, but many act like they don’t or downplay the severity to get votes. Even many voters recognize that it’s real, but figure that “it won’t affect me in this lifetime” and being extremely selfish, don’t care.
This is such an asinine point of view. It’s like with Covid, how we forgot literally every other risk factor and instead opted to put blinders on and only focus on one thing. This leads to ridiculous outcomes like the BC government officially recommending the use of gloryholes to prevent the spread of Covid (while of course ignoring the risk of stds and everything else).
Saying “zero humans left alive is a likely future” suggests you are basing your perspective based on fear and ideology and not science. Science of course tells us that climate change will risk higher sea levels, increased erratic weather, etc. but this is so far away from your preposterous notion of zero humans left alive. This is the danger of politicizing science.
There are unfortunately few people studying worst case scenarios, but it's not like "science" doesn't consider it possible (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2108146119). This is not likely, but it's hard to quantify how unlikely it is.
Suggesting otherwise is not accurate and downplays the possible tail risks.
the problem with this low probability events far out into the future is if you reduce the chance of one low probability event then you might increase the chance of another low probability event. you may decrease the chance of catastrophic climate change due to global warming but increase the chance of global cooling such that there is no actual change in risk. or you may increase the chance that a large part of humanity is wiped out by an asteroid because you have slowed down industrial progress. or any other weird butterfly effect because you are looking at inherently low probability events and trying to build policy around costing them. how these low probability events end up being handled is just whoever has the most convincing narrative which is not a good way of running policy.
No, it's not--unless you are an adherent to the religion. Titles like this one only reinforce the belief in many people that these beliefs have become religious. Don't be surprised when people react negatively to them as they might to any other religion.
The only constant in nature is change. The climate has always changed. And that humans have an influence on it should not really surprise anyone - after all, humans are an integral part of the ecosystem and the dominant form of life. I do not see this as a valuation, but as a simple fact.
I just don't understand that many people follow this fallacy that humans are responsible for the climate. To me, this is actually colonialist thinking, where Homo Superior takes responsibility for the supposedly "underdeveloped".
The climate does not need protection. From the point of view of the climate, everything is fine.
Only we as humans have a problem: that we do not want to subordinate ourselves and adapt accordingly. But that we think to be able to determine everything.
This is definitely the standard view among a lot of people, though I personally fear we’ll instead be saying “AI is the only story that matters” in 5-10 years if not sooner.
Disclaimer: I believe in climate change but I honestly don't think there'll be any meaningful changes until it's economic to do so. Put another way: things like coal power will be replaced with renewables when it's cheaper. This is one reason why plummetting solar prices are so important and impactful.
But there are two things I hate:
1. Citing any kind of single events (eg Hurricane Fiona in this article) as evidence of anything. They're all anecdotes. You could just as easily point to the low activity of the Atlantic hurricane season in the southern states as a positive for climate change. The whole anecdata thing is silly. Please just stop. I realize part of this is journalists trying to make something personal by focusing on a single event but it honestly doesn't help; and
2. People hijacking climate change to push a particular preconceived agenda. Nuclear power is the obvious example. It's a fine discussion point on its own but the ability people have to ignore negatives when pushing their particular agenda never ceases to amaze and is ultimately unhelpful.
This isn't all doom and gloom either. US emissions depending on which you look at actually peaked decades ago (eg [1][2]). Is it enough? Probably not.
Pretty much all problems that exist in the world can be reduced to being energy problems. Food production now is driven by dumping petroleum products on crops (ie fertilizers). Energy costs are a direct input to food costs. Fossil fuel emissions would go away overnight if something renewable was cheaper than fossil fuels. This may seem trite but what I mean is you could sequester CO2 into hydrocarbons and make those things at worst carbon neutral without, say, having to build out a massive grid for EVs (as one example).
Climate change here isn't really a political fight. It's a fight against capitalism. Capitalism knows no political bounds. It seems unlikely capitalism is going away anytime soon so your next best option is make emissions a byproduct of a capitalist endeavour such as cheaper energy.
Replying to your first point. There is actually a new branch of science called extreme event attribution [1]. Basically all weather events are now analysed to see how much more probable they are due to climate change. You are right one event might be anecdotal and could also have happened without climate change. But looking at the frequency of these events, the probability of extrem weather events has risen. In other words what was a once in a hundred years flood is now a once in ten years flood - keep in mind this is an example and a once in a hundred years flood can of course happen more often.
What I am trying to say is we can attribute the trend of extrem weather events to climate change. So the argument that Fiona is more probable in a world with climate change than in a world without climate change is legit.
I don’t understand framing the evils of the modern world as “capitalism” when every other economic system exhibits the same evils. Like what’s the proposed alternative? Communism? A fascist command economy? Every alternative is measurably worse on even this metric.
The point here is that the US government in particular works at the behest of the capital-owning class and this is not a partisan issue, meaning there is almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Paying outrageous amounts for healthcare is to protect profits. The ultra-wealthy paying very little in tax is protecting the capital-owning class. We topple and isolate governments that push back against economic colonialism (eg Venezuela threatened to nationalize oil producers and oh look, a coup). We are raising interest rates supposedly to fight inflation but really to create unemployment and suppress wages. Why? Wages come at the expense of profits. The recently averted rail strike would've cost 3.5% of profits (not revenue) to provide 125,000 essential rail workers with paid sick leave.
Look at the case of Steven Donziger [1] where Chevron shopped for a sympathetic judge that allowed an oil law firm to criminally prosecute and detain someone for years over a misdemeanour to daring to organize a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron in a completely different country (ie Ecuador). This began under the last administration and the current administration has declined to intervene (which they could) and dismiss the case. Why is it that neither party wants to stand in the way of Chevron being essentially deputized to criminally prosecute people?
Even war can be viewed through the lens of protecting profits. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost an insane amount of money but they generated a massive amount of profits for a whole host of companies. Even the very justifiable material aid we have been giving and continue to give to Ukraine is a huge gain for the military industrial complex who sells those weapons (and, as an aside, the amount of Ukraine aid is eerily similar to the spending that ended by withdrawing from Afghanistan).
Prisons? Cheap labor (eg Angola State Penintentiary in Louisiana [2]). Restrictive immigration? Also cheap labor. Chicken factories and farms rely on undocumented migrants. If they complain you call ICE on them, pay a small fine, rinse and repeat. Why? Profits.
My point is that climate change is no different. If you attempt to fight the system, you're going to lose because profits (particularly short term profits) win. The only path forward is an economic one.
The framing of "capitalism" says more about the person framing it that way than the framing itself. You'll never get an answer to your question because there isn't one. Some people are unhappy that we live in an unjust world in a cold, uncaring universe. Since those things are immutable, they will therefore always be unhappy.
Specifically in regards to climate change, "pure" communism or fascism would probably be less bad, due to their economic failures and thus decreased energy (fossil fuel) usage.
Not a feature unique to "pure" communism, but sure. It reduces emissions, although I wouldn't want to live there (nor would almost anyone else). Looking at other possibilities it might not the best course of action.
Regular people are fed up. If you try and limit their quality of life there will be an escalation of violence. We are already seeing the byproducts of lockdowns.
As a regular citizen seeing people like Bloomberg, Di Caprio and Musk talk and tweet about climate change from their G650ER only makes me want to pollute more just to go against them, because what they preach can't possibly be good for me or society. Their history of sociopathic behavior speaks for itself.
They want to prevent any form of wealth redistribution, so they hope to move the issue from wealth inequality (which would see them as a target) towards something like climate change which is essentially a false flag on a planetary scale to prop up the confidence in our political and business leaders (and thus prevent redistribution of wealth and power). Somethin akin to an alien invasion which would rally people together.
I am not having it, every billionaire is a policy failure. If we cannot even address such policy failures which are relatively easy to solve, then thinking about mitigating , adapting and ultimately solving climate change is pure utopia. Hence it doesn't warrant our attention.
Extreme wealth inequality is much easier to solve than Global Warming. It's a political problem , global warming requires politics + policing + enforcement + technical inventions + technical application.
I'll worry about climate change once extreme wealth inequality has been solved. It's pointless to worry about it beforehand given how they are on a completely different scale of complexity. You gotta crawl before you can walk. If you can't even crawl then there is no point worrying about your gait looks like.
Wealth inequality is very difficult to fix based on historic data: when you bury the productive on taxes they will just stop working or run away. I must say I care about ppl being very poor but not about that obsession about being equal.
We cannot pretend we are all symmetric. We are not. Only under the law. People must hace chances, not inifinite unconditional support because yes.
> when you bury the productive on taxes they will just stop working or run away
Big fortunes in excess of 1B are not made by working or salary. They are made by winning the IPO lottery. Or winning the stock market lottery or the real estate lottery.
Government takes half of the PoweBall which is a relatively minor sum compared to the figures we are talking about when adding up all billionaires worth.
It's only fair that the government also take half of all (and I mean all sorts) of lottery jackpots and for previous winnings everything in excess of one billion.
> Big fortunes in excess of 1B are not made by working or salary. They are made by winning the IPO lottery. Or winning the stock market lottery or the real estate lottery.
And those companies add value, otherwise the stocks value will be zero.
> It's only fair that the government also take half of all (and I mean all sorts) of lottery jackpots and for previous winnings everything in excess of one billion.
No, it is not fair to take money away from people. It is not a matter of poor or rich. In any case you take stolen property or money. Not money they made. That's an entirely different thing.
Via regulations or collusion should be also considered stealing to some extent IMHO.
> And those companies add value, otherwise the stocks value will be zero.
Those riches were made by being the captain of a plane which had an incredible luck to have a once in a lifetime 250mph tailwind. And now people who are idiots think the captain is a God, whereas it's just blind luck and once in a lifetime tailwind.
If you had any other person piloting the plane it would have been the same. That's unjust enrichement and society has always punished that, and it's exemplified by the PowerBall lotter where the Govt. takes half or even more.
If you took all the stock owned by billionaires and transfered them to Pension funds nothing will change. Apple would still make iPhones and Microsoft would still make Windows, Google would still make Android etc.
> Those riches were made by being the captain of a plane which had an incredible luck to have a once in a lifetime 250mph tailwind
Oh, so everyone that gets rich is like this? I see. Curious that you generalize like this. There are many kinds of rich people. I can think of at least 3 or 4 of them that for me have been mostly talent. But our opinions might differ. I do not see as a good thing to extract people what they earnt bc other people wanted to pay for their services in the absence of collusion. Because if they use their services they must have value in the first place.
> If you had any other person piloting the plane it would have been the same.
No way. Many people start with no plane. When they have a plane or two they face the systematic attack of people like you. I am still to see why that happens. Not all rich are good. But not all rich are bad. Same for normal people.
> If you took all the stock owned by billionaires and transfered them to Pension funds nothing will change. Apple would still make iPhones and Microsoft would still make Windows, Google would still make Android etc
So yes, you are right. You are telling me they are capable of creating value and things people are willing to pay for even if they were stolen and you use this sad argument of "they have too much" as an argument for stealing the earnings of people who create value in some way or another, like it or not.
You also say they would get rich again (a proof that what they do is useful to others, they get transfer towards their business bc ppl want to pay!) and what you propose is to keep punishing them bc they created value.
Regarding that you can transfer all <to a cause you see fair> and does not make a difference does not mean it is fair to steal the money to who is making it in absence of coercion, violence or collusion, which are the ways to cheat, as an example, when the state raises you taxes 10% or puts a new tax and you can do nothing.
By that measure of stealing bc some have too much and others too little a homeless could go get your home on the basis that you have one but the homeless does not, to give just an example of inequality and wealth transfer. It is not about the amount but about what you are proposing.
> No way. Many people start with no plane. When they have a plane or two they face the systematic attack of people like you. I am still to see why that happens. Not all rich are good. But not all rich are bad. Same for normal people.
PowerBall winner start with no nothing, it's the same thing.
> So yes, you are right. You are telling me they are capable of creating value and things people are willing to pay for even if they were stolen and you use this sad argument of "they have too much" as an argument for stealing the earnings of people who create value in some way or another, like it or not.
Absolutely not, the Pension funds will install new CEOs which are MBAs who'd be happy with a 15M/yr salary, and of course the company will keep winning and prospering. We have proof of this. Goldman Sachs is not owned by Goldman and Sachs...JPMorgan is not owned by John PierPont Morgan and on and on. The outsted billionaire can now enjoy his retirement with his 999M. Poor thing! The public gets to enjoy the exta trillions of dollars which the measure would inject into pension funds.
It's a free meal , in fact due to the high concentration of wealth nobody would cry for billionaires. If millionaires and non-billionaire rich people are even half as smart as you say they are they are not so crazy to think that them with their net worth of 9-10M can one day become a billionaire and thus be impacted by such measure.
> Regarding that you can transfer all <to a cause you see fair> and does not make a difference does not mean it is fair to steal the money to who is making it in absence of coercion, violence or collusion, which are the ways to cheat, as an example, when the state raises you taxes 10% or puts a new tax and you can do nothing.
Extreme luck has always been punished or halved by taxation, except in modern day America
> PowerBall winner start with no nothing, it's the same thing.
Check how many of those remain rich and you will discover some insights compared to people who make fortune from their own work.
> Absolutely not, the Pension funds will install new CEOs which are MBAs who'd be happy with...
Idk the full story, but putting new CEOs happy with money that most of us cannot get, I do not see the problem. As for how it works, this is how a business works, not how all business work.
> It's a free meal
No, it is not. To reach there you must work for it first unless you were born rich. And if you were born rich, in a couple generations you can leave things bankrupt. Most of the capital generated comes and goes and there is a lot of evidence of this.
> If millionaires and non-billionaire rich people are even half as smart as you say
It is not being smart only. It is a set of habits. The temporal choice , for example, which is sacrificing immediate pleasure for hard work to have a bigger reward in the future is one of the traits that helps. And you do not need to be extremely smart, sometimes it is work attitudes, or how you keep your wealth and reinvest it. I cannot blame people for managing well their resources. In any case I would blame people who cheat to accumulate them.
> Extreme luck has always been punished
Idk whether it has been, but what I am sure of is that I am not willing to punish lucky people or stealing people who make their own wealth in fair ways. The equivalent for me would be cutting a leg to the fast one or smashing the face of a good-looking person. It just makes no sense to me.
Until a new energy technology gains mass adoption (maybe the lawyers will finally let nuclear get away with merely being an order of magnitude safer than coal?) the only story that matters is energy security. There is currently a war in Europe that is threatening to go the wrong sort of nuclear, and it is at best only tangentially related to climate issues even with motivated reasoning. Add in some economic pressure for the energy crisis and roll the dice a few more times and someone is going to press a button that we all regret the pressing of.
There is no climate issue that can't be barrelled through with cheap energy. Even climate stasis cannot be overcome without cheap energy. The only story here is energy until energy is secure. We've already established that countries with large amounts of cheap energy are going to be fine with climate change.
The top issues:
1) We've got weapons that are far too powerful.
2) Overpopulation.
3) Energy security.
If we could torch the environment and solve those 3 then the sane thing to do is torch the environment. It isn't a top 3 priority.
> I can't believe I am even writing something so super trivial.
How much can you write about the role of fossil fuels in the food chain? Because this comment reads to me like you're not totally across how artificial our food production is. Nature does not keep 8 billion humans fed.
I, personally, think we should have built a lot of dodgy nuclear plants 20 years ago, aimed for too cheap to meter with the occasional meltdown, and try to go for hydroponics. It'd be a better strategy IMO than what we have actually done. I can live with it not working, but the fact that the West choked the nuclear industry with excessive regulation upsets me. I want to be investing in nuclear tech, I see real issues here that we could have solved with technology that is 50 years old at this point.
> You can't destroy the underlying ecosystem without killing yourself.
I haven't visited a natural ecosystem in months, I live in a city. Now we can argue about how natural the ecosystem is that my food comes from, but I think it is more likely to weather climate change if we have cheap, cheap electricity and fuels. Hopefully solar can provide that because we now have a lot of eggs riding in that basket.
We feed ourselves with systems that we create using whatever energy we have on hand.
> I, personally, think we should have built a lot of dodgy nuclear plants 20 years ago, aimed for too cheap to meter with the occasional meltdown, and try to go for hydroponics.
Ok? But that isn't what we are talking about now. The cheap energy we have now is fossil fuel.
> [lots of things about food production]
Yea it's obvious you don't know how modern food production works. We are feeding cities by burning various ecosystems. You being ignorant about it doesn't change it.
Draw out the connection a little more. You'll need to write a full paragraph to explain yourself.
Everything I'm exposed to in my daily life is an artificial environment mediated by fossil fuels. All my food comes from an artificial environment mediated by fossil fuels. Running out of fossil fuels would be (will be, really) a catastrophe.
How do you think the environment figures in to this? Or are you using a definition of 'environment' that includes the artificial bits that humans constructed? In which case, sure. Everything is the environment so all problems affect it. But the so-called climate crisis is still not a top priority.
Fishing and farming is the basis of the food web for cities. Cities aren't closed systems plus fossil fuels/electricity. They are super open systems with an enormity of inputs in the form of everything from wheat, to fish, to chickens that have been fed rando fish that humans won't eat, etc. It's all a big extraction machine that is super unsustainable.
> If we could torch the environment and solve those 3 then the sane thing to do is torch the environment.
You do say "if" though. We can't do it that way. The climate crisis will cause forced migration of many people once they can't be fed. That will stimulate both armed conflicts and issues related to overpopulation. It's not helping with energy security either if we need more development or living spaces than we planned for. It's all connected.
The people who approach this from a perspective of "there is a climate crisis" tend to be centralisers at heart though. I think most people agree that to make a market preserve the environment there needs to be a strong central body that forces them to consider it. This is exactly the strategy that promotes energy shortages, because strong central bodies promote wild over- or under-supply.
The right solution is to push for cheap power. The people trying to solve 'the climate crisis' have been fighting against the political lobbies in favour of cheap energy basically forever. That is the entire fight. People who want cheap power vs. people who want to achieve alternative, less useful, objectives.
I invite you to come to Vietnam. I am spanish (not from VN but lived here long time) Today I had dinner at a small seafood place. Go tell that woman: please do not use coal, pay much more for your energy no problem. See if it works.
I would also get some insights about why we should be entitled to force others to these sort of things like telling them what to do. For them it is survival.
Alternatively if you are deeply worried about negative externalities like pollution or climate change, I encourage you to subsidize their energy. Not others, or governments or always others.
We're biological and we depend on having a functional biological ecosystem to breathe, drink, eat. If we "torch the environment", we saw off the branch we stand on. Food doesnt come from heaven.
Besides the should-be-obvious -by-now thing that you ABSOLUTELY cannot disengage human wellbeing from what happens to the ecosystem no matter how much people want to believe so –
"Energy security" is just an euphemism for "I wanna continue my wasteful unsustainable lifestyle". Sure, things like heating can be real problems, but as long as there are thing like hundreds of millions of personal cars driving around every day, talking about energy security is bullshit.
And talking about overpopulation is such a transparent red herring trying to deflect blame and responsibility from the Westerners to brown people in poor countries.
I don't think we are competent to solve climate change, when we have largely rejected the advice of the Creator. I appreciate those who try to control and reduce pollution, and the scientists who are doing their best. At the same time, we can have peace and be OK, and try to practice honesty and the Golden Rule, and seek a good direction in life. More at my web site (in profile), if one clicks on "Things I want to say...", "On peace amid commotion...", then "About the world in commotion generally".
I personally think climate change is a lot more important than it’s advocates treat it as, though it’s a stretch to say it’s “the most important” issue. Based on my understanding of “the science” economic development in the third world will still leave those people better off even accounting for climate change impacts.