Taking a massive gamble on injecting huge amounts of energy into a system which looks like it will be destabilized is just..... foolish? stupid? I dunno.
According to the Canadaland podcast there is a recent survey taken during the federal election campaign which suggests that 1 in 4 voters still do not accept anthropogenic climate change as real.
I am baffled.
Most of us would benefit from some sort of Green New Deal with a re-organization of the economy. I can completely understand the top 5 or 10 percent balking at any shake up of the system on purely economic advantage grounds, but what about all the other 85%? And even with a shake-up I find it hard to believe that any productive/active members of the 5 to 10 percent would not thrive relatively in any new situation and indeed be better off than in a severely disrupted environment.
Something other than rationality is going on here.
propaganda has always worked and this specific one is just particularly spectacular because there were so many players involved. They probably weren't coordinated even.
each one was just looking out for themselves but it ended in a global misinformation campaign that's been ongoing for decades now.
And what's even more frustrating is that we've known about these feedbacks for 15-20? years.
I've been reading about climate change and feedbacks for the past decade and I'm just part of the general public.
There's actually a report to Lyndon Johnson in 1965 about the dangers of climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
Maybe what is more common is that people do believe climate change is real, but they also think it doesn't really matter in long run - because of maybe something like a black swan event or something - dont know. So they see all this as just fear mongering.
Also, there's a layered stack of argument underneath outright denial to overcome - Even if climate change is real the climate has changed before, and I can't do anything about it, and <easily adoptable green tech> isn't perfect so why bother, and even if it is real it's not going to happen in my lifetime, and remember <all those predictions that have been wrong>, and so on and so on.
Going to stick my neck out here. IMHO the people overzealously pushing green tech when it isn’t suitable isn’t helping.
It just makes people skeptical when these zealots are the face of green tech. People aren’t stupid, they can see that these zealots are only interested in pushing green tech and don’t really care about their needs and wants.
To some extend this bleeds over and tarnishes the reputation of the climate movement.
We need a realistic view of green tech use - not an evangelical one - where its limitations are acknowledged and taken into account when considering for deployment.
The True Believers try to push a radical/extreme set of changes. These changes have some level of adoption, but not as large as the True Believers want. There's a pushback by the general populace against the change. Moderates in the movement subsequently attempt to push smaller change, but get attacked from both sides: the True Believers for not believing strongly enough, and the populace for being associated with the changes.
I get really frustrated by basically every part of this cycle, especially when I agree the issue needs fixing. I understand _why_ it happens, but I sure wish it didn't.
It's not about predictions of climate change being real or not. It's about predictions what measures contribute to what degree which is questionable.
Society or media is pretty bad at predictions or communicating predictions. In march I saw (worst case) predictions for incidence rate (covid) of 2000 ( university researchers in my city ). What happened instead: incidence rate dropped to 5 before it started climbing again. What I've learned: nobody can predict anything.
The IPCC reports say that if we do little to ameliorate the effects of global warming, in 2100 future generations will have a GDP per capita several times higher than today's, but lower than it would be if actions are taken. That's not an apocalypse. I would worry about other things if I were you.
You are asking old people now to lower their standard of living so that future generations will have a standard of living that goes from "much higher than yours" to "much higher than yours plus x%", while calling them selfish.
Maybe we should consider that you can't buy back the things we'll lose, barring some unexpected developments in large scale geoengineering. How much "GDP" would you trade to live in a world that isn't racked by increasingly powerful storms, unprecedented droughts, loss of unique habitats, mass extinction of various species, and the other dramatic effects of rapid climate shift?
What's your solution to this? Replacing migrant workers with locals by quadrupling the price of fruit? Or allowing more migrants in?
FWIW my family worked as day laborers and it wasn't viewed as exploitation but as a chance to stay in America and become legal. It was better than where they came from. My grandfather ended up becoming a translator and negotiator for the union, but he never had a bad word to say about how America had treated him.
How would it quadruple the price of fruit? Serious question. Prices would go up, but lets say a worker can pick, what 100 lbs of onions per hour. Onions cost between 30c-$1.50 a pound, so lets go low at say $0.50/pound. So in that hour, if they pick 100 pounds, that's around $50 of revenue. If they make, say $5/hour, and we quadruple their pay to $20/hour, if we increase the cost of onions so that one hour's worth of onions (100 lbs) costs $15/hour more, up to $65/hour, that would be $0.65 per onion. Far from quadruple. If we quadruple the cost to $2.00/onion, then that's $200/hour worth of onion revenue, and we could increase the worker wage from $5/hour to $105/hour!
Lots of research seems to back all this up.
https://www.epi.org/blog/how-much-would-it-cost-consumers-to...
I think laborers are simply exploited.
So our onion picker is making $20/hr. The stock boy in the market is still only making $5/hr, but his cost of food goes up by 30%. He's clearly being exploited - he makes less than an onion picker. He needs his pay quadrupled, too. So do the sorters, truckers, the mechanics, fuel attendants, market managers, every person along the way who touches that onion. All those increases get factored in so the final price of an onion will continue to rise, and then have to rise again, because no more value has been produced. When you put your thumb on one end of the scale, the inflation will ripple until that $20/hr will only buy the same number of onions that $5/hr would buy originally. Ultimately, after a period of economic contraction and devaluation of currency - and concomitant loss of personal savings in the bank, which will be soaked up by the financial sector, and those able to speculate against the dollar - everyone will be doing the same job they were doing before to be able to afford the same amount of onions.
I speak about this having lived through two periods of hyperinflation in Argentina. Fixing prices of goods or labor ends up destroying savings, and destroying people's lives. There needs to be a baseline - minimum wage - to prevent a race to the bottom. But when shortsighted people come into power promising to raise that faster than the rate of inflation, look out, because they're inextricably bound, and inflation will quickly catch up to it.
> For one pound of iceberg lettuce, which costs about $1.20 on average, farmers receive 40 cents and farmworkers get 13 of those 40 cents.
An 1.6666666% increase in price would be a 15% increase in salary. (say 1.7%)
>The BLS data show that expenditures by households (referred to in the data as “consumer units”) in 2019 was $320 on fresh fruits and $295 on fresh vegetables, amounting to $615 a year or $11.80 per week. In addition, households spent an additional $110 on processed fruits and $145 on processed vegetables.
$320 fresh fruits + 1.7% = $325.44 per year
$295 fresh vegetables + 1.7% = $300.01 per year
sub-total:
$615 + 1.7% = $625.45 per year
$11.80 + 1.7% = $12 per week
$110 processed fruits + 1.7% = $111.87
$145 processed vegetables + 1.7% = $147.46
$255 + 1.7% = 259.33
Total without extra pay:
$255 + $615 = $870
Total with extra pay:
259.33 + $625.45 = $884.79
The difference is $14.79 !!!
Related, I like how the argument is that the only way our economy will work is if there is a population that works for much less than a living wage. As if a form of near slavery must exist for capitalism to work. It's crazy.
If you want to make the argument that the middle class can afford to pay more for the goods they buy, and that money should find its way to the laborers who produce the goods, I think that's a worthy moral goal. But I think if you look at the price increases and the housing crises going on around the US, it's pretty clear that "livable wages" have aggravated those things rather than make anything more livable. All it's done is essentially made the money the middle class had in the bank less valuable than it was last year. The main beneficiaries of inflation, and the people who have maintained or increased the value of their assets, are landlords and investors. Minimum wage increases and price controls are two sides of the same inflationary coin, and they both serve to funnel value upward to the top 10%.
I accept that the money I get paid for my work is the only true indicator of what my work is worth. Lots of people can say they love my music, or my writing. But if no one buys my albums or my novels, I know they weren't very good albums or novels. I find a lot of peace in this knowledge. I don't have to wonder why the world is against me. I know that my work isn't good enough...and I have to try harder. Making not enough money from a long project is just the world telling me that I need to do better.
The appliances and furnace and so on are part of the solar loan, and so they are effectively free, as the loan payments are lower than the electricity and gas bill.
The solar and new appliances, and the AC, are effectively free, paid for by my ability to sell the energy back into the grid and by the sun.
I know most people can't adopt it yet, or without structural changes to the incentives, but most of my peers and neighbors could but don't. I'm mad at my peers and neighbors (except, obviously, the homes full of young immigrants working hard, and the retirees on fixed incomes and so on).
Also, when I visit my birth place of North Carolina, I get mad at all the people living near the beautiful and fragile barrier islands with their expensive SUVs and trucks and no solar, no electric cars, nothing being done to halt the destruction of such beautiful ecosystems. Not even an idea that the flooding and hurricanes are something they could actually take steps against. I get mad at the elites in these towns that ignore the problem that will end in the destruction of the beautiful islands they are entrusted with the care of.
I'm also a bit mad at my cousins that are resolute anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers.
I feel sorry for kids whose lives are made to feel meaningless and short-changed by this information warfare on both sides. Yes climate change is real and dangerous and yes the world needs to be proactive, and yes quality of life will decline, more in some places than others, and mostly falling on the global poor. Yes children should be educated about it and yes adults need to get ahead of it, including changing systems and practices that there is deep resistance to changing. But panicking the hell out of 14 year olds - or in this case, 50-somethings, that civilization is imminently coming to an end is going to have the terrible consequence of hastening or creating an end through instilling abject despair, rather than cultivating the means and the will to make the necessary changes.
The word "desperately" is doing a lot of work there. The ruling class doesn't seem very desperate at all to me, actually.
Matter of fact they like the climate change problem as far as I can see. It is yet another wedge they use to divide people and make them fight one another, meanwhile they continue to do what they please.
Climate science denialism and conspiracy theorists are not the problem, even in USA which is called a "hotbed" of this thinking, climate deniers are under 20% of the population. It's not the brave and valiant Joe Biden and friends battling against the evil corporations and deniers to tackle the biggest threat facing humanity. It's the rulers pointing out the unemployed coal miner from West Virginia and telling you that he's the reason for all your problems, while at the same time they're pointing you out to him and saying the same thing.
You really think they actually believe < 20% of some of the least educated and most disadvantaged people in the country are responsible for preventing them from addressing the most important issue they have ever faced? Please, they happily go to war and destroy other countries with far higher disapproval ratings than that.
All one has to do is look at the distribution of wealth to see where the money exists to fix this, technologically, policy, or a combination.
This at least is one of the true environmental effects the rich can't easily run from. Go ahead, get your little fortress in New Zealand. Tell yourselves you can hop your private jet.
Global warming will displace a billion people at least. That will make the syrian refugee crisis look like your brother in law crashing in the basement in comparison.
Remember that environmental and resource wars aren't easily recognized as such. Scarcity and strife always break down along ethnic or religious lines and will appear as ethnic wars, like the Sudan which is actually about freshwater.
It is ridiculous that science is held up as some grand conspiracy, a brilliant coordination of millions of dollars of funding to bring down the brave, oppressed, helpless hundred billionaires and their trillionaire corporations.
Why would that be a problem? Everything is impacted by nature, always has been.
> Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent.
Key word is "predicted". Most of the alarmist predictions tend to be exaggerating either the effect itself, or its impact on us.
> My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the selection has gone down in many categories
I think this is your local supermarket's problem. The supermarket I go to has better selection than ever, and prices are not any higher.
If you deny the failures, climate change deniers will have the luxury of being able to easily prove you factually wrong. Don't give them that luxury.
Instead, use the history to argue for action. Why didn't we run out of food? Green revolution. Why didn't the ozone cook us? Montreal protocol -- we switched halocarbons in our air conditioners and now the ozone layer is recovering. Why didn't we run out of oil? Fracking. CO2 is the biggest challenge yet, how do we fight it? Solar, wind, lithium, nuclear. Let's spend the money and make it happen.
Did you factor in the world-wide efforts to eliminate CFC gasses?
Here is an easier one: 'meteorologists predict you will get sunburnt today if you expose your skin to the sun'. So, based on this, you stay indoors most of the day, wear sunscreen, a long shirt, and a hat.
You don't get sunburnt and your rational conclusion is the science is wrong?
SMH
And Ozone depletion we actually came together as a civilization and fixed the issue. That was a good model for what we need to do with respect to carbon burn. Any of these predictions about the future are obviously conditional on "people do X" or "people do Y" or something equally involving predicting what people will do in the future.
Well, he was "right", the WEO (not an anti-capitalist/leftist/ecologist organism by any mean, au contraire) now admit that conventional oil peaked in 2008 in the world. The north sea gas extraction peaked in 2004.
The IPCC reports are quite conservative. The reason the 2021 reports were so dire is because they began including some of the feedback loop modeling the scientists preparing the report have become more confident in. More is in the pipeline.
Somewhere along the line, it got political. Maybe it was always political. Hard to say that society needs to fundamentally change without people feeling it encroaches upon their world view.
You don't have to look very far to see our supply chain impacted by nature. Pandemics such as COVID were and are predicted to become more frequent. My local supermarket doesn't just have higher prices, the selection has gone down in many categories as the droughts and wildfires have impacted production. We are getting a taste of what has been long predicted. Deny all you want. I'm not saying the world will end this year, or next decade, but little by little, all the evidence I'm seeing is pointing towards the science being right. And it ain't pretty.
The level of ambition among our governments is quite low. The people are selfish, more concerned with their property values and if their neighbour mows their bylaw required lawn, than if the next generation will be able to have a similar quality of life. Why wouldn't you be cynical if you were young?
If you are a believer in conspiracies, what seems more likely to you? The climate scientists of the world conspiring to destroy the world economy? Or the powers that already be in this world desperately trying to hold onto their positions? I don't know about you, but I think the latter is far more likely.