Most people don’t care much about climate
Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked. You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs.
And you see it in the polling. Reuters did a survey recently that showed 69% of Americans say the United States should take “aggressive” action to combat climate change, but only 34% would be willing to pay $100 more per year in taxes to achieve that goal. A hundred bucks is not a lot of money. People spend that on Halloween decorations. A nice dinner date could cost you more than that. If you’re buying a car, the dealer tries to upsell you on fancy floor mats that cost more than $100.
Years ago, I used to be a real carbon-pricing head. It seemed (and still does) like an elegant, important solution to a major problem. Leftists would yell at me that this was too much of a neoliberal, market-oriented thing. And they’ve completely won the argument over a carbon tax — everyone agrees that imposing a really stiff carbon price is just not in the cards.
There are companies like Project Vesta that accept donations for carbon capture and storage: https://www.projectvesta.org/, but I don't see them overwhelmed with interest. The most popular vehicles sold to individuals in the United States today are pickup trucks. Nuclear energy is spectacular for the climate but politically radioactive. Vegetarianism, or even just meat-consumption reduction, is a very minority pursuit.
It's hard to square many of these facts with true, widespread concern about climate change.
(Note that I'm not arguing that many of the cited trends are good or desirable: but it is important to understand something before critique.)
Although it's possible the people not willing to pay extra taxes might have a different reason. Like maybe they don't trust the government to spend it for the stated purpose, or use it efficiently.
How do you measure how much it works? From 2005-2018, the US, with no carbon pricing, reduced CO2 emissions per GDP by 45% and the Euro Area reduced it by 52%. So is your claim that the 7% percentage points extra over 13 years is what Carbon pricing achieved for the EU? E.g. a gain of 0.5% per year? At this rate, after 100 years you would have achieved a reduction that is 65% better than the what the US would achieve without carbon pricing.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat...
Of course in absolute terms, the US increased efficiency more over the same period (but I think percent change is more relevant, as the US started with a higher base).
At the same time, the EU is facing very high electricity bills, there was a backlash at further increase in gas taxes in France, and the EU is straining to push this agenda further. Meanwhile there are electrical outages in China forcing China to rollback its coal reduction targets.
So what I see is a lot of pain and political capital expended for very small gains in terms of CO2/GDP. If you have a different conclusion, then I'd love to see your methodology and the numbers you are coming up with to measure how effective this is.
There is a set, yearly decreasing amount of emission rights in circulation so it's fairly well quantified.
You can argue that the set rate is too lax, but the current rates are quite steep and it seems obvious that it's having an effect.
If there is no difference in emissions between a nation that has no carbon pricing and a nation that does, then how do you measure the effect of carbon pricing?
If there is only a small difference -- a .5% change per year -- between a nation that has no carbon pricing and one that does -- then how can you argue that the effect of carbon pricing is more than a very slight increase in efficiency?
The central idea of the european carbon pricing system is NOT that we set a price for carbon and hope that it works to decrease emissions.
Instead, we set a certain amount of emissions per year that we allow, and auction the emission rights. And there is a set rate of relative decrease in the annual tonnage of floated emission rights. The annual decrease is currently 2.2%, which is a steepening compared to the pre-2021 1.7%. [1]
So, as long as the mechanism is working (and it is), it makes limited sense to talk about measuring how much emissions happened under the emission trading scheme, since that's a set parameter assigned by political decisionmaking. [2]
But a better critique / caveat about the system is that not everything is covered by the emission trading system. Some big sectors, eg transport, have emission reductions enacted by other mechanisms in more traditional ways.
To tackle your argument of "a lot of pain and political capital expended for very small gains in terms of CO2/GDP" - this is I feel a tangent and feels a bit like moving the goalposts and it would be hard to productively debate this - my opinion is that the gains are big, not only because we've effectively reducing emissions today, but also because we have a robust system for the years to come that we know can cap emissions, steered by the democratic process. You also brought up efficiency in your later comment. My main argument is not really efficiency, although economists do usually tend to think that these kinds of emission auction systems do shine in department too. Efficiency and pain (aka fairness) are often in opposing cups of the scale.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/eu-action/eu-emissions-trading-sy...
[2] Of course there are second order issues, like fraud, etc that merit discussion. But these aren't being ignored either.
No, this is my point.
Look, this is a political process. Just like the law that caps deficits to be less than 3% of GDP, which is ignored when there is some political desire to have bigger deficits.
These are political things that do respond to pressure as to whether they will be enforced. So when the Yellow vests threatened to bring down the French govt, the government backed off, precisely because they weren't prepared to pay the political cost.
So what matters is not the promise to do X, but actually doing X, right? And X is measured in total emissions. There is little benefit in saying "90% of the economy is subject to the system and we exempt the 10% where it would be too painful to meet."
So after all the promises and exemptions, at the end of the day you have some reduction in CO2. If that reduction ends up being not much different than the same reduction in other large industrial economies that didn't go through the whole cap system, then what reasonable claim can you make about the cap system making a difference?
We expect, just with increasing technology, that CO2 efficiency will increase. Just as you go from burning trees for firewood to coal to oil to natural gas to gas combined with hydro, etc, you are switching to more efficient energy sources. But everyone is doing that, because more efficient energy sources are cheaper.
The difference will be when the allotments really start to bite - at which point it will be political pressure, and not the agreement itself, that will decide whether these caps will be respected or whether they will be like the deficit caps. So the only way to determine what difference you are actually making is to look at total economy emissions and compare that to nations like the US that don't bother with any caps. If those situations are indistinguishable in terms of CO2 reductions, then I don't see the benefit of spending all this money in fees for carbon pricing. Do you? Lots of other economies are not spending these fees and they are getting the same reductions.
The reason why I am saying this is that I don't like these types of micro-management free market solutions for a nation's energy policy. People don't care where their electricity comes from. If the government wants clean electricity, they should build 100 nuclear reactors, and have 100% clean electricity. Then they can give choices to people to use electric cars that are basically free to power or gas cars if they really need the gas car. And you can electrify the rail system and public transit, at a subsidy, but then let people fly planes without subsidies if they want to do that as well. This way you are solving the problem directly and giving people more choices and more freedom. You are not pushing the problems of a nation's power sources onto individual businesses or end consumers and then constantly taxing them to use dim light bulbs or whatnot. There are much simpler ways you can accomplish much more. But there is something in the Euro spirit that wants Germany to buy more gas from Russia and shut down its nuclear plant but have lots of little micromanagement of individual consumer choices by slapping surcharges on everything and banning random things. Maybe this is done so end users can feel like they are saving the planet by participating in the struggle, as opposed to having the government provide the entire economy with clean, abundant electricity at very low cost. The whole thing has an air of theater to me.
And like I described in my comment, the reduction rate of was just recently increased in the EU mechanism, but this is not visible in the historical numbers yet.
And re comparing to total economy emissions of the US, let's not forget how much bigger those are in the US than in the EU, more than double. The US has a lot more low hanging fruit to pick.
This also means that development of sustainable alternatives is often slowed, as they will cost more at first, even if they happen to end up being less expensive in the long run (which is unlikely to be true in all cases, but which could potentially be true in a few specific scenarios).
But what are the alternatives? Simply outlawing burning of gasoline effective on some future date will be no more equitable.
Putting a strict quota system on companies would also cause prices to rise and be unequitable to.
I don't see any realistically implementable system that does not potentially cause prices to rise, and obviously rising prices on most goods disproportionately affects lower income people.
I don't think that's true.
> Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked.
I think it has worked. Numbers show overwhelmingly around the world people believe the science (even in extreme denier countries like Indonesia they number under 20%), and as your own quoted numbers show, people do want change.
> You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs.
Most people don't go to "rallies" because they don't see them as having a significant benefit, and they've got other things to do. It doesn't mean they don't support action. Too few people showing up to rallies, or too many "defund the police" signs at them is not the reason really significant action on climate has not happened.
I don't buy the cost argument either -- costly, controversial and unpopular policies and legislation have been implemented in countries around the world with far less support than this. Democratic countries have been dragged into wars of aggression. Banks have been bailed out after causing economic crashes and destroying peoples' housing assets. Immigration policies are widely unpopular among many western countries. The list goes on. The ruling class has not had a problem pushing through their horrendously costly and unpopular agenda before, yet they're telling us the greatest problem facing humanity and their singular most important issue has somehow this one time been derailed by the selfishness of the commoners (or even more hilariously, the boogeyman all-powerful unemployed coal miner in West Virginia who doesn't believe the science and is usually a KKK member, a Nazi, perhaps a Russian agent as well, and is somehow pulling the strings of most politicians from both main political parties)
Garbage. It's their usual lies and divisiveness. Pretend to be battling valiantly and working themselves to the bone to solve this problem that they don't actually want solved, and blame your neighbor for their faux failures.
People need to stop the singular focus on this minority of boogeymen as though they somehow have the power to hold everyone to ransom and the only way to make progress is to reason, plead, or bully them until 100% of them think exactly the same we do. And focus on the real problem which means holding the ruling class to account. And yes, that is likely going to require some very difficult reflection of "your team" and very uncomfortable realization that they have repeatedly promised change and repeatedly failed to deliver it over the decades despite at many times having strong mandates in terms of electoral victories and holding positions of power to make changes if they actually wanted. And make bad, unpopular, and costly changes they did many times, all the while largely ignoring the problem they were repeatedly calling the greatest threat facing humanity.
"believe the science" =/= "a mass social movement to tackle climate change"
>Democratic countries have been dragged into wars of aggression
imminent threat of terrorism is a powerful motivator. abstract threat of lifestyle change in a few decades isn't.
>Banks have been bailed out after causing economic crashes and destroying peoples' housing assets
1. the alternative would be an even worse recession, so it was the lesser of two evils.
2. imminent threat vs abstract future threat (see above)
3. what housing assets were "destroyed"? Did the recession set people's houses on fire? Sure, they caused housing prices to tank, but they were inflated in the first place.
>Immigration policies are widely unpopular among many western countries.
source?
A "social movement", going to "rallies" with the correct signs, is not going to tackle climate change. There is more than enough will for significant political action and has been for a some time. I repeat, the enemy is not your redneck boogyman somehow orchestrating everything you think is going wrong with the world, it is your politicians who have repeatedly promised you just need to elect them to solve your problems while never having the slightest intention of doing so.
> imminent threat of terrorism is a powerful motivator.
There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.
> abstract threat of lifestyle change in a few decades isn't.
Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change. Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?
> 1. the alternative would be an even worse recession, so it was the lesser of two evils.
That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.
And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.
> source?
Well it's common knowledge. Again this is missing the point, don't worry if you don't know the exact details of all the examples or they don't match 100% exactly with climate change. They're just examples of unpoular costly things politicians do all the time. It's not hard to come up with them.
But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google
https://comparativemigrationstudies.springeropen.com/article...
"Over the past three decades, research on immigration policy-making has flourished. To explain why so-called ‘Western liberal democracies’ have liberalized immigration despite popular demands for restriction, scholars have pointed at the democratic character of these states. Freeman (1995) argued that immigration policy-making in democracies follows the pattern of ‘client politics’ because the costs of immigration are diffused among the entire electorate, while benefits are concentrated within a small pool of entrepreneurs."
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publicat...
"To begin with, the very fact of immigration creates a central puzzle for democratic theory: For several decades, most Western countries have had high and rising levels of immigration even though a majority of their populations consistently want immigration to stabilize or decrease. This public sentiment has been apparent since the early 1960s, when survey researchers first began to investigate the question of immigration. " [and actual survey numbers follow in table 1]
I don't buy the argument. When France increased the price of gas, they got nationwide "yellow vest" protests that left 11 people dead. In other words, politicians are stalling on the climate change because actually tackling it is a widely unpopular move.
If people say they want a cleaner Earth, but qualify it with "as long as fuel prices don't rise," then they have made their priorities known. Politicians are merely following it.
Regressive consumer fuel taxes are a terrible way to fight climate change. Fairly obvious that wasn't it. That was a lie they went to to try get these unpopular taxes though because they know climate change is in fact quite a popular cause.
The reality is it's just more of the same governments telling you they're desperately trying to fight climate change and sadly being thwarted at the last minute by these violent racist nazis. You really have to stop believing that claptrap and start holding your failed politicians to account. They are the problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
While some commentators have claimed that the movement was a backlash to policies meant to combat climate change,[115][116] a communique released by the movement calls for a "real ecological policy", including fuel and kerosene taxes for ships and airplanes, but objects to policies like the gas tax that hit the poor and working class most heavily.[117][118]
Why? A fuel tax is not inherently regressive - it gives the correct incentive, because a gallon of gas not burned is a gallon of gas not burned. It's "regressive" in the sense that poor people are hit harder, and I agree that the French government could have handled it better (well, obvious in hindsight), but there are other policies to help the poor while maintaining the fuel tax.
Honestly, I find these "we're actually for the environment" argument suspicious - isn't it rather convenient that the things they want taxed are exactly what they aren't (directly) buying?
As it stands now, addressing the climate will require radical policies. Some of them will hit the rich. Many of them will hit the poor harder, simply because they are the most vulnerable, whenever anything changes. There's no such thing as a painless easy fix, held back by evil politicians.
Look, you can believe the powerful ruling class who have a long and celebrated tradition of implementing terrible, costly, unpopular agenda that helps them and their wealthy owners when they say they can't possibly do anything about climate change because in this one particular instance they suddenly care about the slightest bit of disagreement and oh what a shame the big energy companies won't have to pay for externalities from the product they profit from, this is all the fault of your violent nazi terrorist neighbor go get mad at him.
But that's just denial of evidence and reality on par with denial of climate science, and I assure you that will not help things get done about it.
"Your team" is not acting in your interests. I know this is incredibly difficult to come to terms with and accept. It feels much better to be valiantly side by side with the smooth talkers and celebrities and wonderful people battling the nazi Russians. But that's just not what's really going on here.
Right, but that's going to do far more to signal support than people collectively answering "strongly agree" on surveys. I also think that "aggressive action on climate change" means different things to different people, so 69% answering "yes" doesn't mean there's 69% would support a particular policy. See also: brexit vote.
>There wasn't an imminent threat of terrorism from any of the many recent catastrophic wars and interventions around the middle east and north africa. Fewer people bought that line than want action on climate change.
Whether there was actually an imminent threat is irrelevant, only whether if there were perceived imminent threat. According to wikipedia the afghan was had 88% backing in the US[1] and the iraq war had 59% backing[2].
>Lots of people think we have an imminent threat from climate change.
1. please quantify "lots of people".
2. If al-qaeda pulls off another attack you can easily blame them for it, whereas having one more hurricane in a year is far more ambiguous.
3. a war can plausibly stop the terrorist threat, whereas the same can't be said for implementing climate policies
>Do you have a source for the claim that more people believed the lies that Iraq posed an imminent threat of terrorism?
"This same poll showed that a majority believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but did not expect UN inspectors to find them"[2]
>That was the claim of course by the politicians who are owned by banks (e.g., https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html). Most likely a lie, certainly the actual response implemented was costly unpopular and terrible compared to what could have been done.
It was widely supported by economists: https://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/bailouts-banks-and-automa...
>And I just listed a few examples of cases where politicians have no problems implementing costly unpopular agenda regardless of what the people want. It was not supposed to be a scientific exact same situation, this is missing the point.
unpopular? the bailouts had 57% public support
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2008/09/23/57-of-public...
>Well it's common knowledge.
Sorry but it's impossible to take someone's "common claim" at face value, due to the presence of filter bubbles. Looking at the subsequent paragraphs, it doesn't even look like you had a different idea of "Immigration policies" than I did, so it was a good idea to get clarification before arguing.
>But if you're interested these were among the first 4 links on google
The first article you quoted is just a claim from another paper, which I can't be bothered to retrieve. It also has some case studies, but they were for morocco and tunisia, so applying that to the US is tenuous. The second is much better, so I'll grant that unpopular measures do sometimes get passed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United_S...
The rest of this again is really getting bogged down into details that aren't important. My examples are valid ones of costly and/or unpopular agenda being enacted. Politicians and media/propaganda corporations have a common bully word to attack people who disagree with their bad unpopular agendas - "populist". Surely you've heard that frequently.
Is it that hard to to imagine that most people are much more afraid of terrorists than slowly rising sea levels/temperatures? This isn't supposed to be an argument that terrorists are actually more dangerous than global warming, just that the combination of public fear and/or potential fallout from the refusal to act is far greater.
As for numbers, I'll present the "top issues", from 2002: https://news.gallup.com/poll/6586/issues-2002-election-terro.... In july 30% "terrorism" was the "most important" issue. The month before it was at 46%. Let's see what the voter priorties are like in 2020: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/important-is.... Even though climate change was an "very important" issue to 42% of the people, it's also at the bottom of the list. If we rephrased the question to "what's the most important", I suspect that climate change will be under 10%. I'm going to conclude from this that voters care about climate change far less than terrorism.
>Support for action on climate change is above 60% and you seem to call that unpopular, so I'm not sure what your bar is for it.
We're talking in circles here. You keep on bringing up how many people support it, but fail to address:
* conflating "support" with willing to make sacrifices. Saying you "support" something costs you literally nothing. I'm sure the vast majority of americans also oppose inhumane conditions at animal farms (at least in principle), but how many americans are willing to give up meat, or at least buy free range eggs? Even though they support it, their support is so weak that it evaporates the moment the prospect of costs come up. We see this in the public surveys. Sure, people support doing something about climate change, but what do they want if they think economy is even more important? Will a carbon kill jobs? Will it make it harder for me to make ends meet?
* conflating "support" for something with support for a specific policy proposal. see: brexit where it meant something different to everyone, so if the vote was on a specific proposal it wouldn't have a chance of passing.
>My examples are valid ones of costly and/or unpopular agenda being enacted
The only one you really proved was immigration. The bailouts were widely supported by both economists and the public.
>Politicians and media/propaganda corporations have a common bully word to attack people who disagree with their bad unpopular agendas - "populist".
I'm not sure how this is relevant here. This is literally the first time in the entire thread the word "populist" was brought up.
So you really can't turn around and come up with similar numbers and say those are popular but that climate change action is not.
It comes down to the same thing: your politicians are lying to you. They absolutely can do much more about climate change, and they choose not to. Again, I know it's hard for you to accept you've been had by these smooth talking crooks you voted for, but that's the reality.
They are not being held back by a small minority of the population who don't like it. Continuing to believe this with all the evidence against it is like believing the earth is flat or global warming is a hoax.
>So you really can't turn around and come up with similar numbers and say those are popular but that climate change action is not.
I'm not denying that people actually "support" it (in the boolean sense). I'm just saying that they don't really support it that much. From the polls I've provided last comment, it's clear that terrorism (and therefore the war) was near the top of voter priorities, whereas global warming is at the bottom of the list. Is it that surprising that congress doesn't want to address hard-to-tackle issues that people don't feel too strongly about?
This is such a skewed PoV of the world today. In so many ways the world is the best it's ever been: Poverty, violent crime, etc. (the list really does go on and on). This is especially true if you live in a developed nation. So I'm not really sure what you think a child will have to "endure" aside from all of the great joys life can bring!
We can even just focus on climate change. The "worst case scenario" most scientist project isn't really even that bad. Sure there will be worst weather events etc., but society isn't going to "collapse". And what about you? If society "collapsed' in your lifetime, would you really rather have not lived at all?
I'm not suggesting your anxiety about the current state affairs isn't the motivation for your decision (although it is a convenient scapegoat), rather, that your anxiety may not be all that rational and you may want to revisit your decision from time to time!
Politically, the US seems to be gearing up for civil war. Global warming might rapidly flip to an ice age. International conflicts are warming up, and the saber-rattling between the US, Russia, China, and various parties in the middle east is reaching a tenor that's unprecedented in my lifetime. If we have a chance at reversing the climate disaster, it will take an unprecedented level of international cooperation, and I just don't believe that citizens or politicians are ready to get their collective shit together.
> ... your anxiety may not be all that rational and you may want to revisit your decision from time to time!
The die has been cast. I can no longer procreate. I did revisit my decision, and I'm glad to be a (step) parent. If I want more kids, fostering is an option. You might want to reconsider your optimism from time to time, shit's getting real and we don't have a brake pedal.
In school, my father had to operate his class's Geiger counter while practicing huddling under his desk in fear of a nuclear attack. Then after graduating he got drafted (DRAFTED!!!) into the hell-scape that was Vietnam.
I respect your decision, but you and I? We don't have it so bad.
Still talking past the point, eh? I'm doing fine. I'm concerned about the world that my children, and my grandchildren will live in. I'll be quite old, probably dead, by the time that we're projected to see the collapse of the gulf stream, blue ocean event, +4C, etc, but I'll live to meet the people who will want to survive through those events.
We nailed the Ozone Layer catastrophe. It required worldwide collaboration, but we did it. We're already seeing lethal effects of climate change, and nobody in power seems to give a fuck like they did before.
But yeah, I don't have it so bad. Never said I didn't. I'm thinking about 100-200 years down the line; you keep telling me about how great things are today.
Precisely! My point is that my (or your) grandparents/parents could have held the same sentiments you are holding now. And they would have been wrong.
> I'm thinking about 100-200 years down the line
Your children will not be alive in 100-200 years so your point is also moot.
Unfortunately, I believe you believe what you are saying will come to pass and it will be "society collapsing". I don't. No point in arguing about it any further. Message me in 100-200 years to say "I told you so".
Wow, you really love attacking strawmen don't you? No wonder you're such an optimist.
Are we having the same discussion?
> I did make a deliberate choice to not reproduce specifically because I didn't want to bring a child into an environment that's on the brink of collapse
I suppose I assumed you didn't think "the brink of collapse" would last 100-200 years, rather, that you fear your children would have to (in their lifetime) deal with the fallout from such a "collapse". And that such an event will be so traumatic that it would be better they weren't ever alive to experience it.
I take your pivot towards attacking me as a compliment, and a sure-fire sign you believe your position has weakened. Though I don't care either way. You are free to make whatever decisions you want for whatever reasons you want. I can respect that.
The impetus for my original comment was an "in good faith" attempt to get you to consider (or reconsider) a decision I believed to have been made in ignorance (or at the very least with a healthy dose of hysteria). I have no inclination to change your mind. That's for you to do.
How old are you? Just 30 years ago we were on the brink of nuclear war and had been for ~40 years.
The deterioration of the environment terrifies me. But the sociopolitical situation in the US terrifies me even more, and that disaster is much more imminent.
We're literally watching the world burn around us.
The original paper is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3918955
The survey is specifically about climate change. If I wanted to know why people are fearing having children, i'd do a survey where people rank fears for that so we could see where climate change ranks, say, as compared to economics.
I have friends and family in a number of the countries surveyed in this paper and I rarely hear about climate change as the reason for fearing having children, usually it is economics.
This is not to say climate change isn't a problem, but I dont think this title accurately represents the subject.