I've had the thought for a while now that it might be a good idea to start changing the climate change narrative to a problem of planetary heat engineering, not simply a problem of GHG reduction.
The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed.
But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then it fundamentally changes how we think about it. Removing CO2 (insulation) is one option, but so are projects like solar reflection or some other forms of heat dissipation or heat sinking.
The current green movement narrative is the same it has always been: living within our means. The current fossil fuel driven economy is objectively unsustainable.
Yes, you can geo-engineer your way out of the heat problem, but that doesn’t solve all the other problems resulting from unsustainable growth, and who knows what fresh problems this will create. What the green movement wants and has always wanted is a conservative growth model, where the growth is not based on the depletion of finite resources. It is mostly the promoters of unsustainable growth that twist this into an anti-growth narrative.
Now, techno-optimists say we can solve the problems created by unsustainable growth with more technology, and this may be true. But it is asking everyone to take a pretty large gamble on technology that does not exist yet. The conservative strategy is sustainability, and that goes much wider than just solving climate change.
Eventually, one day, sooner or later a very unsustainable chunk of high speed space rock will hit the planet and wipe us out, or some other completely natural and “green” disaster, like a supervolcanic eruption, as has happened repeatedly in history. The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology to a point to divert the problem or make ourselves sufficiently resilient from the problem. There is no “if” here, it’s statistically guaranteed.
As far as I know, the best way for humanity to advance technology is with growth. More people with a higher standard of living means more teachers, scientists, artists, engineers, and leaders. We need those people because hiding in a cave is exactly the wrong thing to do.
From this point of view, which I certainly share, the responsible thing to do is to grow as fast as humanly possible until we are spread far and wide across the solar system, while also hedging our bets and making an effort to grow in the cleanest way that doesn’t slow us down.
I agree with the main argument, I question the means to get a higher standard of living. ATM it seems like rather than sustaining people we're sustaining their management by and for corporations... it seems like multiple layers and huge inefficiencies to get that QOL you speak of... I mean after all isn't leisure the mother of philosophy ?
We treat time as something we don't have enough of...(not surprising as routines tend to contract the perception of time )
We treat humans as disposable, when they have more knowledge, experiences, social contacts the older they get...
We revere money more than empathy (moreso in Western Europe, some developed countries or among those "who have")
I'd suggest it's all a play by the politicians to remain in power, rather than let people decide (if they weren't working so much to sustain real-estate, rental, health care)
We need to replace them by choosing them at random... I believe the term is Stochocracy
> The only thing that will matter is if we advance our technology
This is your objective to meet your end which is survival. I don't agree with it, but I'll respond as if I took it for a given.
> As far as I know, the best way for humanity to advance technology is with growth.
What you mean by growth here matters. More people with a higher standard of living is two types of growth. One is economic the other is population. But there are other dimensions to grow across.
For example, peacefulness has produced just outstanding yields in many valuable areas such as productivity, research, and ecological protection. But peacefulness did not arise out of nothing. It took lives to create our world which is peaceful for most people. Real people working on arms control agreements and diplomacy.
Improving education is similar. You could argue that education requires resources, and that is true to a point, but we are well, well past that point. North Korea is capable of nuclear weapons and rocketry. Most elementary school programs can get by on $100 worth of reusable books a year and some paper and pens.
Now the green model has some fatal flaws, and there is a reason I'm a Canadian Liberal not a Green, but the core thrust of Green thinking is a good thing in my opinion because I've found that, in general, prevention is more efficient than cure because it's easier to align incentives with prevention.
One of the problems with incentive alignment is that the international system is anarchistic and individual choices are unpredictable and given over to passions that are often unethical. This leads to unavoidable arms races (literal and figurative) across multiple aspects of society and politics.
So, for example, China builds new coal power plants because they're in a power competition with the West and to build wind turbines instead would cost a non-trivial portion of their GDP and institutional focus.
Anyway, in summary, yes with what you outlined as your objective economic growth matters, but so do other forms of growth. I would even include spiritual growth (or decline) matter too. People are acting incredibly sanctimonious and paranoid right now and it isn't helping their more charitable instincts.
I tend to agree with you philosophically, but when it comes to implementation that's where I really struggle. How do you curtail either of the two types of growth? It seems like the only options include authoritarian and borderline human rights violating. A group of progressive countries could band together and try to invade China and force them to slow their growth, but even ignoring the ethicality of forcing our will on others, most people would agree that the death and suffering would be pretty bad.
So far the best form of population control has been prosperity. Birth rates tend to fall as quality of life goes up (not always of course because there are many factors in that). The other option is outlawing reproduction much like China did for a long time. That seems questionable re: human rights also.
I think if you are talking at that time scale, the imperative for humanity in particular to be the one to make that advancement is just anthro vanity. The history of humanity is such a relatively brief thing on the cosmic scale you are talking about, and yet in our brief time we have screwed things up massively for ourselves. But not necessarily for future species and human-like life.
Its ok if we don't make it guys, there was species before us, and there will be some after us. The universe is vast. We are probably not even that special, but we can do our best and enjoy life and try to minimize the suffering that will certainly happen from our mistakes... to want to "win" anything beyond that will just cause more suffering.
Its ok to admit we messed up, we couldn't know at the time that a global capitalism predicated on an unlimited nature would not end up great, the timeline of scientific discovery was not in out favor there. On all accounts we are most likely too late, its not anyone in particulars fault, its ok.
Time is very vast, that can scare you or humble you.
Scientists have done more than enough. The issue now is entrenched interests blocking progress.
We had all the technology we needed to go carbon neutral back in the 1980's. Back then, even the American Petroleum Institute (yes, the planet burners) were raising alarms over CO2 and global warming.
We have many technological doublings ahead of us before technology fails to provide opportunities for growth. That's not the problem.
The problem is that our economic system is terrible at pricing in externalities.
Edit: Come to think of it, the American Petroleum Institute scientists said the exact same thing back then. Skip to the last page:
We may have had the technology in the 80s, but the economics is only just getting close. We could have switched but it would have meant a drastic reduction in quality of life for everyone who wasn't rich. We might still be in 80/90s technology had we done that, because the wealthier we are as a society, the faster we can develop technology.
There are certainly cases where a more holistic view is very important. For example a plan to plant trees in the Sahara desert, irrigated by desalination plants powered by solar, at first glance seems like a "reasonable" plan to sequester carbon. But once you account for the fact that the desert reflects a lot more light then trees do it actually looks like it would accelerate global warming. The plan gets kind of "saved" once you consider the effects of the new forest on weather patterns: the trees cause more clouds to form which are quite reflective and bring the plan back into the green, but not enough to be useful.
So not a great plan, but a great example of how some of the solutions can be a lot more complex than just "remove CO2". At the same time any plan that cools without removing CO2 (e.g. planetary sunshades[1]) have the downside that they don't solve ocean acidification.
I think there are other effects of increased CO2 concentration that are not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification. That actually scares me far more than the heat aspect.
I think we're deep into the territory of "literally anything we choose to do or not do is going to create a never ending game of whack-a-mole unintended consequences".
We own the fate of our civilization and the environment it relies on.
It's time to take ownership and stop cowering in the cave.
> not well understood and could be catastrophic. Like ocean acidification
Look up carbonate compensation depth, your mind will be blown. Yes, researchers understand the effects of climate change because they have been looking at it for 40+ years. Being extra worried about climate change is a lot like climate denial, in that it doesn’t show trust in our scientists. There is no need to invent trouble — the challenges we know we will face are hard enough.
It's also a bit more difficult to diffuse out of classrooms and such with 400+ ppm background vs 300ppm. At what threshold it affects alertness, cognition, or motivation is disputed.
The fixation on GHG reduction is, as a friend of mine puts it, a suicide pact, simply reducing the second derivative. Unfortunately it's easy to understand and discuss, so that's where all the attention goes.
The issue of climate repair (and long term curation, unfortunately) seems to frighten lots of people. There are people working on it, but they are a small community.
Literally “climate repair” and “climate restoration”. Some NGOs to check out include the Centre for Climate Repair at Cambridge and Foundation for Climate restoration.
Human energy utilization is on the order of 20 terawatts, 0.02% of the power the sunlight that hits the atmosphere. Our energy utilization doesn't matter a lot.
I agree, there is a big defeatist and regressive narrative. But some of us do focus on the positive -- we can fix this, and fix a lot of other problems at the same time, and it's not even that costly if we do it right, gradually switching our energy sources over time and gradually changing our living habits where we're willing. People always talk about a carbon tax, because it's a really, really good idea: it is very economically efficient, is targeted like a laser at the real problem, and will have huge benefits even just in terms of reducing premature deaths from particulate pollution.
The reason I think stopping use of fossil fuels is really the only reasonable solution, or is at least a necessary part of any solution, is that anything else is like trying to fix your car accelerating out of control by just driving around with one foot on the brake. Trying to balance the increased greenhouse effect by blocking sunlight might work a bit, but there are all sorts of ways it can go wrong -- it creates a moral hazard where everyone will have less incentive to stop using fossil fuels and thus continue making the root cause of the problem worse, and we have to keep doing it forever -- stopping means a sudden massive amount of climate change that people won't have time to adjust to. There are so many really easy ways that we can cut our emissions massively, with technology we have available today, with virtually no impact on our living standards. The rest will take some time and technological improvements, but it's all doable!
And I've not heard of any sort of heat dissipation geo-engineering ideas -- the only feasible way I know of to get the earth's heat dissipation back to normal is to take off this extra blanket of greenhouse gases we've put on it. Any sort of heat dissipation would have to transfer heat to the upper atmosphere without being absorbed by CO2, and I don't think there's any way we could do that at the scale required to have a noticeable effect.
All the geoengineering we might do is totally unproven and untested. If the alternative is a calamity then yes, of course we'll do it. As things stand, it seems like we should be putting as much effort as we can into the thing we know works (reducing greenhouse gas emissions).
plants are 99.9999% carbon from carbon dioxide, though... what?
edit: i mean of the things in a plant that contain carbon and don't, 99... whatever percent of a plant is atmospheric carbon. all the soil amendments added are to replace stuff like fungus that normally forms a relationship with nearby plants and gives nutrients that plants use to modulate energy production and transpiration (or whatever), similar to how we need all of the "salts" to have a functioning brain. N-P-K lets plants more efficiently turn atmospheric carbon into food than without. Couple this with the fact that humans use nearly all of a plant now, to make cooking oil, fuel oil, and animal feed, there's nothing left after we harvest for the fungus to eat.
I normally would have launched into a diatribe against bayer/monsanto as a reply about stuff like this, but as it stands, i'm fine with careful and scientifically sound application of N-P-K for huge farms. I do, however, have a problem with pesticides and their "inactive" ingredients, not the least of which due to drinking water from an untreated well, myself.
Studies show higher atmospheric carbon means the crops grow faster and have lower micronutrient density than crops grown in lower co2 environments. Our crops grow faster but aren't as healthy for us.
I would like to read those, should you happen to know which ones. It seems counter-intuitive. soil amendments only including N-P-K don't seem like they'd help much with micronutrients anyhow, so ideally "functional local farming" should be considered an imperative, at least for supplementing mass-farmed foods. Like sure, canned and frozen vegetables for 6 meals a week, but one meal should have locally sourced something that hasn't been frozen or otherwise treated.
A properly managed and grown acre of land can provide a quarter ton to a ton of food in a year, but you can't use tractors or anything, it all has to be managed by hand or small machines.
The current narrative is largely defeatist and regressive. It's largely about rolling back growth and the amount of energy civilization has harnessed.
But if the narrative was altered to be a heat engineering problem, then it fundamentally changes how we think about it. Removing CO2 (insulation) is one option, but so are projects like solar reflection or some other forms of heat dissipation or heat sinking.