
As Seas Warm, Galápagos Islands Face a Giant Evolutionary Test - digital55
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/18/climate/galapagos-islands-ocean-warming.html
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torpfactory
Meta-comment: I just wanted to mention how civil and logical debate is in this
thread. I’ve seen discussions of economic systems on HN get way in the weeds
with personal attacks and such. Good job team!

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crispinb
I'm not sure my initial comment quite met that standard, although the
statements were directed at groups rather than HN individuals. That might be
the best I can do on the civility front.

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crispinb
Every day, another sign of collapse. Fluffy-minded business execs, SV
megaconsumers, and economist fairy-people will hardly notice (yet).

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makerofspoons
At what point do we start seriously discussing solutions? We could right now
ground the aircraft, ban meat production, institute a steep tax on gasoline
and electricity, stop the ships, ban deep sea fishing, etc. The problem is
these solutions are political suicide in a democracy and people will never
accept them, but barring magic carbon capture technology that can scale is
there really an alternative besides 'shut it all down' (besides plan on
starving to death or dying in a resource war)?

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newnewpdro
We've been seriously discussing solutions.

The real question is at what point do people start actually applying what they
learn in these serious discussions in how they live their own lives?

I don't think it ever happens on a large enough scale to matter before it's
too late to avert massive loss of life and global conflict.

Things will naturally sort itself out, the population collapses, lots of lives
suffer, but life goes on.

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crispinb
> The real question is at what point do people start actually applying what
> they learn in these serious discussions in how they live their own lives?

But they can't. People live in systems with affordances and restrictions. What
about their lives can a lower-middle-class family living in an outer Sydney
suburb meaningfully change? Little, and only at the margins (a bit of
recycling, some solar panels). Certainly not even approaching the ballpark of
what our situation requires.

Any strategy for change demanding that we should on average become exceptional
is mathematically doomed to failure.

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magwa101
"test" \- crisis"; potato - potahto. The headline screams "but those plucky
animals may just pull it off".

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medlazik
Solutions have been seriously discussed by _real_ socialist politicians for
years. Problem will start seeing actual solutions when people start massively
voting for them.

Current stage of capitalism is strictly incompatible with sustainable
development. It's the root cause, it's almost never discussed here.

[https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/16/the-elephant-in-
the-...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/16/the-elephant-in-the-room-
capitalism-and-sustainable-development/)

~~~
crispinb
That's a hard row to hoe - a civilisation's foundational superstitions are
invisible to most of its members, so a wide-scale questioning of them is
unfathomably difficult to prompt. Think Protestant Reformation as the scale of
the conceptual and emotional shifts needed.

It's too late now, but it would be lovely to go back in time, say 50 years,
and keep plugging away with attempts to undermine the ideologies: there is no
such thing as an 'economy', still less 'economic growth' (and as for
'sustainable' growth ...).

We'd probably still lose though. The winners have already bought up half of
New Zealand to retire to as things go increasingly awry amongst the general
population.

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bulatb
What's your disagreement with the concept of economic growth? You say things
elsewhere in the thread I rarely hear but broadly agree with, if I understand
correctly, so I'm curious about this one.

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NeedMoreTea
GDP is an extremely artificial measure of an economy, and like most overly
simplistic measures, it has lead to gaming the statistic. GDP growth is an
easy headline for politicians. Yet even when our modern understanding of GDP
was invented (by Kuznets, a US economist, during the Great Depression), he
closed the document with several paragraphs criticising and limiting it. The
final sentence of which being "The welfare of a nation can, therefore,
scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above."

In the context of pollution, environment and climate change resources are not
part of GDP until they are used or harvested. A tree has zero value until it
is cut, oil has zero value until it is in a pipeline, a river so polluted it
catches fire is of zero consequence in GDP. Neither does it consider the
health and welfare of a population, quality of life and other non monetary
activity (within a household, community schemes etc). Lastly it does not
account for progress: It is _purely_ a monetary measure. No account is made of
improvements to efficiency or new methods.

We could have negative GDP growth without reducing quality of life, as it's
not all about money. Solar panels, computers etc are getting more capability
for less cost, environmental damage and pollution has monetary costs to
health, perhaps mental wellbeing too.

Thus it tends to promote purely the monetary aspect, and belittle to the point
of insignificance (by calling it an externality) everything else. In short it
doesn't measure anything especially useful.

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crispinb
That's all true, and let's be clear that this problem is fundamental to the
very notion of economics. It is not fixable. An 'economy' doesn't map usefully
to physical realities. Say you wanted to develop a 'real', comprehensive GDP-
alike metric. Even if you could develop measures for all the mutual
interactions between a so-called 'economy' and the ecological system with
which it is enmeshed, the interactions are so manifold & complex, you'd have
to end up with those metrics as parameters in whole-ecology models in any
case.

We live in ecologies, not economies.

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NeedMoreTea
Sadly I tend to agree that it's not fixable, certainly not in the timescales
we seem to have. I suspect a simplistic metric could be achieved to replace
GDP that would have to assign value to _leaving things alone._ The ore or oil
in the ground, and the tree uncut. If nothing else to remove absurdities where
polluting then cleaning up and grassing over is "good" for the economy
(because money was spent, which is GDP positive) is better than leaving some
pristine acres of mature forest (because money is not spent).

I doubt that would be a popular metric with some though as that would imply
far more value to not exploiting than doing so.

That's before you get to the more vague aspects of quality of life that can't
be given spreadsheet space like community, family, friendship, health etc.

> We live in ecologies, not economies.

Too true.

I'm not optimistic for how the next 100 years plays out.

