And this is completely to distract from the reality that only large scale policy is going to have meaningful effect on our climate outcomes. Product and technology leaders like Tesla can help catalyze change, but without meaningful market policy and adjustment in which there will definitely be losers and winners it is all for naught. And the losers are fighting with every weapon at their disposal to prevent being displaced from the status quo, including brainwashing people into believing that if they sort their plastic waste then something will magically happen to help the world.
Individual actions do matter, but not very much, and not usually in the way that people think it does. Individual actions only matter because they affect the future of what policy gets emphasized in governmental decisions.
Not just that, ever since the 90s they have actively (and quite successfully) tried to get everybody to forget or ignore the "reuse" and "reduce" (and "repair"!) parts which, of course, would cut into their profits if people actually started consuming less. Reusability and repairability have both gone way down instead during the past 30 years or so.
In one case you are betting on something that is at best hopefully possible, while in the second case, it is quite clearly possible, it’s just not likely to happen.
At the same time, physical reality doesn’t seem to care much about our opinions, thoughts and feelings about any of this subject. We can continue to live our lives with the hope of technology coming to our rescue, we can go on living the way we do without considering making changes, and the natural world around us will continue down the path that it’s on, utterly unconcerned with our desires.
It’s technical solutions vs social political ones. Not collective vs individual.
If you are trapped in an area with limited oxygen, you should reduce your breathing and activity to a minimum to buy time for rescue. You should not complain about it impacting your lifestyle, blame lack of progress on the rescuers, and go along with life as normal.
How many times in the past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through technology? We already have the technology, we can just build a bunch of nuclear reactors.
Just as management can underestimate how hard solving technology problems, technologists can wildly underestimate how hard it is to solve people problems.
Climate change is hard people problem. The effects are diffuse and far in the future. People are terrible about planning 30-40 years in the future and terrible about making sacrifices to help people they don't know in small ways that are statistical and abstract.
People said the same thing: we couldn't afford clean water, emissions controls or fuel economy systems for cars, ending use of DDT (and that even years after its effectiveness had fallen off of a cliff due to selected immunity), power-efficient appliances, replacing incandescent lightbulbs with those using massively less power, etc.
Each and every time they've been completely wrong, and this will be even more powerfully so because one very consistent finding has been that the costs of not dealing with climate change are MUCH greater than the mitigation measures, especially because they happen at uncontrollable intervals whereas you can make plans around something like the need to buy an EV instead of an ICE car.
Almost all of the things in that list were solved by technological solutions which replaced things people had with better things and made people better off, not by people sacrificing their quality of life.
My main point was that very little of this happened in a vacuum: government policy pushed R&D on most of those technologies, pushed people to adopt them, used taxes to compensate for externalities, etc.
Exactly my concern. The pandering appeals to us not wanting to change.
> How many times in that past 1000 years have we solved large hard problems through a global agreement to make everyone worse off?
That's not what I am suggesting. I'm suggesting we cut the excesses, which there are plenty of. Maybe it's not enough and so we should explore all avenues, for sure.
I often think of the "giant meatball" graphic that visualised all humans on the planet as a giant schmooshed ball sitting in Central Park, New York. To me this is a very powerful visualisation akin to the "pale blue dot" that shows just how few humans are on the planet despite how drastically we are altering it.
I think there are a lot of excesses that we can easily cut. And we should, until we come up with something better that provably will work.
I would like to see our species get off this planet and I hope that we can survive far into the future. I see the first step towards that being us learning how to sustainably live on the planet we have now. It's probably better to scale back our consumption now such that we can have a long time to develop whatever technologies we need instead of going full steam ahead with unsustainable consumption, banking on technological progress bailing us out in some way that we can't possibly count on in a short amount of time.
In one case we are wishing for a solution to fall out of some genuis minds. In the other we are taking responsibility for changing behavior which we have control over.
That’s not optimism, it’s pragmatism.
Okay, propose concrete actions, political, legal even military if needed that you think will help accomplish this and could actually work globally?
In no particular order: institute carbon taxes, tie in climate based criteria for fha loans including weatherization, electrification and neighborhood planning, drive industrial policy towards the expansion of green industries including renewable energy, but also on the demand planning and efficiency side (ex heat pumps in buildings, EVs etc). Shift agricultural policy to focus more heavily on climate impacts and discourage fossil fuel intensive methods. Dramatic shifts in federal fleets away from fossil fuel vehicles, etc.
I’m not an expert on this stuff but these are just obvious things. Actual policy could be crafted to address these things on a number of different levels.
Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility.
The point is we aren’t powerless, we just love acting like we are.
> Calling that wishful is abdicating responsibility.
It is not abdicating responsibly if you think other technological solutions will be more likely to succeed just a difference of opinion. On the contrary, I think people who believe we "just need to do this or that political thing" abdicating responsibility because they have not considered how to do it or why it has not happened yet. They can just hold these "correct" opinions and blame others and absolve themselves of responsibility.
I guess I just don't see how these things can be done without some sort of force. Denying people the choice to begin with is the only way to get people to make choices that will harm their standard of living on average. This would require governments being far more authoritarian than we are used to or will likely accept. Also many of the suggested policy solutions I think are far to tame even, it will take a lot more than that to avoid disaster I think. Literately going back a century or two in standard of living probably at this point.
Why do you believe this to be the case?
It seems like a lot of your pessimism is due to the fact that you think we would have to dramatically cut our standard of living if we don’t find technological solutions. I don’t believe this has basis.
From what I know, we can't release any more carbon and in fact might need to go carbon negative, so to do that we would need to essentially shut down everything that emits carbon... Cars, trucks, cargo ships, trains, airplanes, eliminate animal agriculture, no more steel or concrete production, all coal, gas oil power production and many other industries would need to shut down.
So yes, I think it would have quite a drastic effect on our standard of living. Some of these things in some parts of the world may someday become carbon neutral, but it will take a long time.
Addressing climate change isn’t about being perfect at this point, it’s about averting ever increasing disaster scenarios, especially since the degree of the effects seems to be exponential with the amount of warming we see.
All I see from so many people is the feeling that we might as well not even try/it’s all a waste of time.
The question is, is there inherently a massive trade off between our living standards and addressing climate, given there is no substantial change in our level of technology (you said we’d need to go backwards 2 centuries).
If we “magically” implemented political solutions with proper urgency, does that necessarily entail a massive drop in living standards in your mind?
That might change if things get bad enough, but by then it's probably too late for anything but a technological miracle.
Non-democratic countries (like China and Russia) have a better chance of making the changes because there it truly is the case that a small number of people can bring about change.
No one cares if UPS delivery trucks are electric. Very few people are policy wonks and will pay attention to changes in FHA bureaucracy.
Voters have very limited bandwidth and attention. Most of what the federal government does, it does on its own initiative, with opposition from select special interests.
Another problem is that countries are also in a global economic competition.
The legislative frameworks still do not keep the costs of destroying the planet from being so low that doing so is an economic imperative.
However, that is not a universal obstacle to all policy solutions. Getting people to electrify their homes has minimal impact on global economic competition. Changing urban planning regimes has little (direct) impact on global economic competition.
I’m not trying to imply it is easy. But it is still a choice that we can make is we can coordinate ourselves. I think the biggest challenge is simply the degree to which hyper individualism has taken over American culture and its effect on our collective psyche.
If our lives and cities appeal to people in other countries, they may adopt our technologies, urban designs, and social policies. Part of it is development. Part of it is marketing.
I don't think anybody is very optimistic about our chances on either path.
It's not gambling or a delusion to say we must create new technologies to have a prayer of solving the problem. And of course there's no "magic pill" - we need to innovate in a thousand different ways, simultaneously.
The scale of the problem is hard to truly wrap ones head around, but it's crystal clear that voluntary sacrifice and curtailing consumption as the primary solution is a non-starter. That's not how humans work.
Also, what about developing countries? Are we going to tell them they have to consume less too? Seems unreasonable. So we're going to ask the developed world to consume less, and some of us might reduce a little bit... nowhere near the scale of emissions reductions that are necessary. Seems more like a rounding error than an actual impact.
I don't think we should count on these things such that we don't also take direct steps (cutting consumption where we can) to directly tackle this problem until we have the other options figured out.
People just follow the path of least resistance in a given environment and only an extreme minority are ever going to be persuadable to consciously go against that at all. If we want different behavior, we’d need to bulldoze most of America and start over.
Three step process to get there:
1. Identify the optimal "climate path" for every need- transportation, consumer goods, etc...
2. Disincentivize all other paths via penalties (taxes & regulations)
3. Incentivize the climate path via subsidies
It will take large scale government action first. Technological solutions will come as a result of the new financial rules of the game.
Techno-optimism is saying “don’t worry, we don’t need to change anything, technology will save us!”
People have rarely been presented with any realistic trade offs between the climate and their own consumption. Typically it’s been “become and aesthetic and give up all material goods or it’s pointless”. Large portions of waste and pollution are already accounted for by the time individuals are presented with a choice.
But if your plan is decrease global consumption (not even per capita, just absolute consumption cause the environment doesn't care how many people there are) X% it doesn't even matter what that number is you will fail.
“Decreased consumption” only means less resource utilization in this instance, it doesn’t mean that people are necessarily materially worse off.
An obvious and example would be efforts to expand awareness about the longevity and repairability of consumer electronics. Many people don’t want to continually throw things away when they break.
People could consume more carbon neutral energy than they're consuming carbon-based energy right now.
This is one of those "we've done literally nothing and we're all out of ideas" problems because we refuse to put a finger on the scale and tip the balance economically towards carbon-neutral energy.
The ghost of Adam Smith will apparently punish us in the afterlife if we ever think of doing that.