What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.
One might argue we have a failure of brains together to create responsible organizations and frameworks. But here, we have had quite a few struggles between types of organizations, with some winning and some losing. Perhaps the losers might have done better, perhaps not.
It's arguably China and Russia that will come out ahead, with the Arctic Ocean as the new Mediterranean. And maybe the US, after it annexes Canada.
Edit: See https://www.arctictoday.com/chinas-arctic-plans-represent-ne...
We understand that we’re destroying the planet, but we figure, why should I consume less, if others might not limit their consumption the same way? It seems that we’re incapable of making decisions that prioritize the welfare of the human race. I do think that apocalyptic sci-fi is probably right - on the scale of 100s to 1000s of years, we’ll likely drive ourselves to extinction, or something near extinction. The tragedy of the commons seems like an unavoidable consequence of the way we think, and I don’t see us getting past it.
Sure, and people are just collections of molecules. And the structure involved in arranging elements matters.
Further, the problem is hardly that humans are selfish but that we have developed complex structures that allow large scale exploitation of resources (and each other) but which don't allow large-scale protection of resources and situations that we (selfishly) want.
Of course, if we were just random configurations of humans spread-about the landscape doing hunting and gathering, we wouldn't have the ability to burn massive fossil fuel resources to generate climate change, however selfish we might be.
FWIW I think this is a tragedy, but also a likely reality.
We don't have a cognitive failure. We have an institutional failure. The corporate system that drives most of human society today is often unable to deliver long-term projects that benefit society. The tragedy of the commons is a viable business model — the way to compete is to exploit as much of the environment as you can before the other guy does.
I'd love to see money go away as a factor, but I can't see how - especially for projects that require large existing industries (leveraging economies of scale).
Capitalism is a very powerful tool, but we've taken it to the point of religious dogma and its short-comings are very real at the scale of a global economy.
> We have an institutional failure.
> What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.
Those institutions are other humans. Why do we pretend they're not?
Is this more of a social hierarchy thing than biological; i.e. trusting our "superiors" to take take care of it, or basically "not my job."
They are made of humans, but not equivalent to humans.
It's like saying the problem is a failure of neurons. There's nothing in a single neuron that will let you fix this problem. Likewise, I don't think looking in the head of a single human will fix it. It's the organizations that the humans built and they way they interact in them that causes the problems. It's an emergent phenomenon of the aggregation.
Climate change is only one problem, there are so many others that fall under the general outline of "act like an adult and take care of your own problems" that aren't being addressed. Flint, Michigan's water, for example, is the poster child for the fact that across the developed world there has been substantial and persistent under investment in municipal water and sanitation infrastructure. So much of the developed world is coasting along on temporary hacks put in place decades ago that are running on borrowed time. Roads and bridges are also under maintained. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
All of these things, and climate change, are solvable problems, we have the wealth and the technology to tackle these things effectively, we just don't seem to be able to organize the work effectively.
Meanwhile most of the can gets kicked down the road. And the term for a politician, even if it's 8 years, is so short that no single politician gets the blame in 50 years' time.
You're right, I think it's because the consequences are too abstract / too far in the future. I still think it's fair to expect governments to take the lead on this though. Of course, on an individual basis, people can choose to reduce their consumption. But we are social animals and seeing everyone else around you indulging in pleasures while you 'take the high road' just won't work on a societal level.
Governments used to have this kind of authority / determination. What comes to mind is banning lead from gasoline (something which was also met with considerable opposition from industry).
EDIT: Of course having lead in your gasoline won't give anyone much pleasure. We are dealing with a lot harder problem here. Still, many people are yearning for a change in the right direction. It just takes leaders with courage and determination (and a buttload of money presumably).
I think the root cause of our climate change problems (and environmental destruction in general) goes deeper, and though it could be addressed by governments taking firm action, this will not happen: I think our economic systems are failing us, and are the real root cause.
And this is a problem that is still not recognized fully, or actively denied. And it is a problem that governments and politicians are increasingly less able to address, as their power wanes in favour of corporate interests.
For that last point this Guardian article 'The demise of the Nation State' is a revealing and interesting (though disturbing) read:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-n...
I think so too. Just look at carbon capture and storage (CCS). It's proven and mature technology at this point, it's been done at industrial scale and for up to a decade (in the North Sea). The total operating cost is approx. $80/ton and falling for a coal powerplant, meaning that the level of CCS that's projected for the 1.5 degree scenario in 2060 (10 gigatonnes CO2 captured per year) will cost less than $0.8 trillion annually worldwide with today's technology. For comparison, the global electricity market alone, which would be using around half of that CCS capacity, was $3.1 trillion in 2015. This means you could fund all the CCS we need for less than a 13% increase in electricity prices.
But addressing the problem in our economic systems goes much further, and entails foregoing the idea of 'infinite growth' and the overconsumption that comes with it. In terms of climate change it means most focus should go into reduction of the CO2 we produce in the first place.
For power generation, we have basically two solutions for large-scale baseload generation until fusion comes along: nuclear, and coal/gas with CCS. I would prefer we go with nuclear, but environmentalists seem unable to make the right choice between tuberculosis and lung cancer.
On the other hand, I definitely agree that 'infinite growth' is a huge problem. Even 'sustainable growth' is problematic in itself. We need to change to a zero-growth worldwide economy, which has extremely far reaching consequences. For instance, it means we can no longer rely on growth making it easy to pay off debts, neither as people nor as nation states. Interest rates all become a bit weird. It would mean the entire economic system needs to be changed.
you are about a century late, this is a done deal that happened during the 20th century.
IIRC the quote said something like that: the 20th century saw the greatest advance in corporate power and democracy, and corporations used their newly acquired powers to protect themselves from democracy.
For sure. But it's just humans running the government too, with the same short sighted and social biases as the rest of us. Expecting them to overcome our shared human nature might be wishful thinking.
Because human beings don't do that. Period. Coordinating people is a hard problem. Probably the hardest problem of humanity, solving which would solve everything else in time - from war and crime to sickness and death (imagine all our best and brightest focused on R&D instead of chasing grants, citations and lucrative jobs).
Coordination problems are a superset of the tragedy of the commons, the prisoner's dilemma, and other such game-theoretic concepts. They happen when there's a huge gain for everyone that, to be realized, requires everyone to make a small personal sacrifice or take some risk, but the system is set up so that people do not make those sacrifices, do not take those risks. In the tragedy of commons, the first person to defect wins big, so you're the loser for even starting to voluntarily limit your share. In prisoner's dilemma, if you cooperate but the other party doesn't, you lose big.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ is a great discussion of those problems.
If the price for energy from renewables becomes cheaper than the price of energy from these wells, they won't be drilled.
In the long term technological breakthroughs in renewable technology will hopefully bring the cost down.
There is no cheap energy production once you factor in costs that are not money.
Then again it is not a matter of putting cheap batteries in vehicles, it is a matter of not having road vehicles because the issue at hand right now is that we're currently aiming over the threshold where conditions making life possible on earth are going to go away.
Only option is massive reduction of human population and energy use.
(That's one potential outcome. I think it is most likely but I also have high hopes for the tens of thousands of brilliant problem solvers focused on averting catastrophe).
For current governments, it is allegedly optimal to not take immediate action but to announce/commit to actions in the future. Problem is, that for the next government, the same result from the optimization problem arises.
A similar pattern can be found with nuclear waste, a problem that is known since many decades, yet there are very few permanent solutions.
Political system is a strong selection process in itself. It selects for people who can pander to public the best, and make best deals with their colleagues. Any effort spent on making something good happen, or even making good on the promises used to get in, is an effort wasted; it's something the system slowly but surely selects against.
They use tactics similar to those responsible for electing the current president of the United States. The people are not well-informed, they are drowning in misinformation and propaganda.
What about a price on carbon? We should put the most powerful tool created by our civilisation - our free market industrial economy - to work on our biggest challenge / opportunity. Governments need to represent their citizens to the market on this, not the other way around.
Except in one of the worlds largest economies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin..., along with some other advanced economies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol#International_E...
In first world nations it's mostly just the US (and a few other smaller nations) dragging their heels.
And hey, I don't mean to diss Europe. It's just too little, too late. Without the US and China, we're screwed.
https://www.euractiv.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/04/...
China is only partially on board in terms of concerted action, but they are spending the most amount of money of any country on green energy. You could characterize it as accelerating and turning at the same time. In a way, scaling up and cutting the cost of solar and electric vehicles is arguably the most important thing at the moment, because it increases the degree and speed at which they undercut the current technology. We need to push as many boulders over the top of hills over the next 5-10 years, so that big emissions savings can occur through blunt economics even without pricing in carbon.
A lot of the US is also on board, notably California which on its own is one of the worlds largest economies. And on top of that a lot of important institutions, particularly academic. There is enough to be making progress with. Even the parts of the US which actively refuse to do anything will get dragged along when products are made cheaper.
Bottom line, the Mauna Loa CO2 record tells us that not much has changed since 2000.[0] Not even over the past five years.[1] Except for a jump in 2016, anyway. And OK, maybe a hint of a slowdown in the past year.
https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2017/3553/cap-and-trade-021317.pd...
> So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.
By the time that happens, it will be decades too late, and we will be committed to several decades of altered climate. Because the atmospheric halflife of CO2 is ~30 years. And there are likely positive feedbacks.
It's quite astonishing actually when you realize how all of our tiny individual inputs made this massive machinery that individuals physically cannot truly understand the impacts of.
It is not a long term problem either, we're not talking millenia or centuries but decades. And it all started a couple lifetime ago.
The point is to show a few readers that there isn't consensus on the issue and give them a reason to research it themselves. Until I reached a threshold of doubt to do that it just seemed like a safe bet to believe the rhetoric.
https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/jasmin-guenette/al-gores-inconve...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/15/97-an-inconven...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thirty-years-on-how-well-do-glo...
The average person can see that climate alarmism is complete fud, they can probably also see that climate denialists also pedal fud, but it doesn’t matter because climate activists have already done the job of undermining the science for them. If you want more people to take climate change seriously, this is the problem that needs to be addressed. Spending your energy naval gazing wondering “why don’t people have the same views on climate change that I do? It must be because they are not smart enough to understand it on the same level I do...” really just makes it worse. Nobody’s ever been so good at condescension that they managed to change somebody mind.
The underlying science doesn’t even enter the picture for many people. Because if you spend 30 years saying the world is about to end, then people don’t need to know a single thing about the science, because they know for a fact that the world didn’t end.
The articles I've linked show the failings of arguable the two most noteworthy climate change advocates, Al Gore and James Hansen (a real climate scientist). This perfectly illustrates my point that the communication on this topic has been complete bunk. But if you want failings from the UN, you don't have to look very far.
>1990 IPCC
Under the IPCC ‘Business as Usual’ emissions of greenhouse gases the average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century is estimated to be 0.3°C per decade
>Outcome
0.12°C-0.19°C Depending on your source
>1990 IPCC
This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1°C above the present value by 2025
>Outcome
0.31°C to 0.49°C by 2017, depending on your source.
>2007 IPCC
by 2020, between 75 and 250 million of people are projected to be exposed to increased water stress due to climate change
>Outcome
Confidence is low for a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, owing to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and geographical inconsistencies in the trends (Source UN IPCC)
>2007 IPCC
There is a very high likelihood that Himalayan glaciers will disappear by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.
>Outcome
IPCC later outright recanted this prediction saying it was not peer reviewed https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-him...
>2001 IPCC
Fire frequency is expected to increase with human-induced climate change, and that several authors suggest that climate change is likely to increase the number of days with severe burning conditions, prolong the fire season, and increase lightning activity, all of which lead to probable increases in fire frequency and areas burned
>Outcome
Globally, the total acreage burned by fires each year declined by 24 percent between 1998 and 2015 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170629175502.h...
Given how things are going, about 1°C by 2025 is still possible. Also, there was a slowing in temperature increase from 1998 to 2012. But now we're back at the long-term trend. I suspect that Chinese SOx emissions from coal played a role, by increasing cloudiness. Cuts in SOx emissions in the 70s arguably increased the warming rate. And if that's true, the shit will hit the fan as China cuts coal use. Because the residence halflife for SOx is so much lower than that for CO2.
I don't know the water stress stuff. But California has been pretty screwed. Let's see what happens in the US Southwest over the next decade or so.
Maybe we still have Himalayan glaciers, but high-altitude glaciers have generally not fared so well, I think.
You're misusing that data on area burned by fires. The page actually says ...
> The ongoing transition from nomadic cultures to settled lifestyles and intensifying agriculture has led to a steep drop not only in the use of fire on local lands, but in the prevalence of fire worldwide, researchers found.
... and ...
> Across Africa, fires typically burn an area about half the size of the continental United States every year, said Niels Andela, a research scientist at Goddard and lead author on the paper. In traditional savanna cultures with common lands, people often set fires to keep grazing lands productive and free of shrubs. As many of these communities have shifted to cultivate more permanent fields and to build more houses, roads and villages, the use of fire declines. As economic development continues, the landscape becomes more fragmented, communities often enact legislation to control fires and the burned area declines even more.
The recent experience in Russia, northern Europe, California, etc does seem consistent with predictions. But I agree that there's not enough data to be confident yet.
It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything.
Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact.
So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not happen to advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives.
So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.