So sad to see how easily long term catastrophic damage is justified by short term gains.
The current model isn't sustainable. Something *must* change. There can be no actual change without change.
The point is, the economies in question (i.e., the over-contributors) need to change and all we're talking about is getting back to normal. In what reality is a normal that's so deadly so normalized and worshipped?
No, the others can't "continue as they have been" if things change.
Most of those countries "not causing a problem" accept a great deal of food and fuel imports from the "over-contributors", never mind goods, services and financing. They literally cannot support their populations without these imports. If the global economy comes screeching to a halt as major players scale down and just see to their own needs, many of the minor players literally starve in the dark. Just look at the impact of the Ukraine/Russia wheat supply disruption on North Africa/The middle east for a tiny example of what a global disruption would look like.
The current model can be made sustainable with time, proper policy and technological advancement. If for whatever reason we can't manage that, we're screwed.
People say "growth can't continue to infinity", and technically they're right. Problem is we know what no economic growth looks like. It's some form of feudalism, where powerful entities hoard all the wealth and we all rent the rest. The only attempt at something other than that was 20th century communism, and that... didn't work to say the least. So either we make history by creating the first ever successful re-distributive economic system, on a global scale, or we keep doing what we've been doing for centuries and hope technology and enlightened democracy can save the day.
My vote's on the latter, at least it has an overall positive track record.
Powerful entities keep growing and getting a bigger share of the economy so we have to grow it just to not become poorer? Isn't it strange that no growth is considered the same thing as a shrinking standard of living? In any sane theoretical economics model, a lack of growth shouldn't mean a reduction of living standards, it should mean a continuation of our existing very high living standards which also precludes any form of automatic runaway wealth accumulation.
I have read a short anarchist book and I have seen the argument that it is the state that causes the problem but I am not fully convinced that just having a government is the problem but rather something the government does that is invisible to the naked eye. Subsidies are a classic example. Everyone drives because the road is free, nobody wants to pay the fully internalized costs of buses because the subsidy exposure of a car for every potential bus passenger is greater. The bus has to be subsidized to the same degree as the bus to compete! Those subsidies are paid for by taxes which decouples the amount of subsidies received from the amount of effort put in and the amount of labor paid into the system through taxes. This disconnect is most likely the problem when it comes to government activity. You can build a business and receive subsidies proportional to the size of the company while someone else has to pay for the subsidies.
Now, transportation is important but it only serves as an obvious in your face example where the subsidy structure is visible and how competition demands subsidies.
The real question is whether there are state subsidized factors of production. If they exist, then every other industry will have to ask for an equal level of subsidies to continue doing business.
The food industry is a classic industry where doing without a subsidy is unthinkable. The question is, why does food production need a subsidy in the first place? Can't farmers just be obligated to overproduce food on their own and pass this on as higher food prices, why does the government have to pay?
It has most likely to do with land as running a farm is impossible without it. If the land is leased, the farm is under intensive pressure to produce profitable crops rather than a surplus or the farmer won't be able to pay the lease. How is land subsidized? The military complex and police forces are in charge of protecting the country and enforcing property laws. How much can the owner of the land charge to the farmer? At least as high as the subsidy paid on land by providing free protective services plus the quality of the land itself. The latter subsidy might be paid by nature rather than the government but the government could tax this difference and remove the positive externality.
But even if production has succeeded, distribution must still happen and it can only happen through trading via the national money system which is practically speaking a monopoly. If you start out with no money, how do you get more money? By borrowing it for interest. That interest rate forces another profitability pressure on the farmer, he simply cannot produce food for everyone without a subsidy if that interest rate itself originated from a subsidy. Competing borrowers might be borrowing to buy land which receives subsidies thereby outcompeting farmers. There is also the fact that the money system is free but it generates massive amounts of costs for the economy. Printing physical bank notes costs money, providing bank accounts and branches costs money, providing loans costs money and accepting electronic payments require specialized terminals which cost money, opening a shop and providing goods every day aka widespread acceptance also costs money beyond the goods themselves. What this means is that the holders of money get to sleep while everyone else without money must toil and keep moving and stay active. The subsidy isn't paid out in money but in real terms but the lender can now step in and market these subsidies as if he provided them, he can turn them into cold hard cash by charging interest. Thus the lower bound on interest on money that borrowed from another is somewhere between 3%-5% and the only way it is lower in practice is because banks create new money through loans rather than lending on existing deposits via CDs. If interest originates from subsidies then wealth accumulation must be automatic.
Short answer, it's how politicians buy votes. Subsidies get the votes of the farmers. Lower food prices get the votes of the masses.
To your point, if politicans don't have the backbone to reduce such subsidies, and the masses don't have the will to demand it...how are we going to address a problem 100x as big?
Given history, the human psyche, as well as "progress" to date...then I'm betting on the fact that there are better odds of oil and water mixing.
We'd have a better chance 100 or 200 years ago when the masses we comfortable with and embraced sacrifice. Now it's all about comfort sans any sort of sacrifice. In addition, there's a destructive symbiotic relationship with those expectations and how leaders lead and how political parties think (i.e., short term, at best).
Climate change aside, the current model in the USA simply isn't sustainable. Infant mortality rate, obesity, mental health, gun violence, opioids...the list goes on and on. Covid was an opportunity to adjust course. Maybe even pivot. But we didn't have the will and our commitment to "back to normal" (which is corrupt and problematic at best) is stronger than ever.
We can't get off the sofa. How we gonna face climate change?
As far as technology solutions, we're headed for some form of The Matrix. The masses will be comfortable and consumption and pollution will be far less.
That's no accident. It's by intent. Those countries can't develop their own healthy local economies when most everything is shipped in.
Look up clothing donations to Africa. Long to short, there was no way to have say a local cotton + clothing economy when free clothing was been dumped on a given economy.
If you internalize a negative externality everyone will get wealthier simply because people only ruin the environment when it is actually worth it. People always say how fossil fuels were necessary for the industrial revolution but that only means that its benefits exceeded its negative externalities and therefore a pigovian tax would actually help it.
The remained can be covered by already mentioned mechanisms.
Sure a day may come when there's enough solar/wind/nuclear to restrict oil/natural gas to petrochemical production, but until that day green tech, like all others, follows the price of oil. You want to cut oil production now? Say good-bye to the green transition.
Would you like to hear about how some Americans need a truck to do work too? Just go ahead and mention that we should aim to use smaller vehicles.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/is-green-ammonia-fit-to-de...
But since you asked:
1- Freight trucks, for now, will likely be either carbon capture, or a clever EV retrofit like SixWheel. Batteries probably aren’t quite there (in 2022) to go full EV for all applications but the learning curve slope is such that that could conceivably be only 5 years away.
2- Aircraft are most certainly going to be SAF eg a green/renewable fuel until battery tech improves by an order of magnitude (10-20 years?)
3- Similar story for sea vessels on the batteries front, though for those CCS is likely to be the most promising interim solution.
For all of the categories you mentioned there are relatively promising 10-30 year prospects for full electrification and much more short term prospects for emissions mitigation. And these are part of the hardest 20% of emissions.
Long story short the situation is not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
This is a problem that is going to take care of itself. World population is peaking and there's nothing that will get the world back to replacement fertility (2.1 children per woman) in the near term. As the world takes its long gentle slide into depopulation, carbon emissions will taper off. Problem solved.
We should have switched to nuclear decades ago.
Let's not forget that much of the cost of electricity is down to the massive costs involved in its distribution.
We were specifically talking about Europe. And there, lots of people even in relatively wealthy countries like Germany still use gas for heating. The government could definitely be encouraging/subsidizing the use of heat pumps instead.
Obviously the idea is for transitioning where it's economically feasible, not demanding that poor people freeze to death, jesus christ.
and the current price is not the total cost, which should include externalities like this. (yes, electricity generation currently is also mostly a GHG emitting travesty, but not fundamentally, like nat.gas.)
Either folks aren't RTFA or are being willfully ignorant. Over fishing to the tune 1bn crabs when juvenile populations from 2018 and 2019 looked great? No way.
Overfishing: It's not this. A billion crabs is north of 5 billion pounds, in other words on the order of 100x the US crabbing fleet's capability. I would hazard to guess there isn't enough crabbing gear on the planet earth to have achieved that catch.
Foreign fleets: If this is the case, the real bad news is that the Rusky's and/or Chinese have developed cloaking device technology.
Trawling: We're talking about the bottom-scrapers. They're new on the scene relative to the crabbers. Alaska allows 4 1/3 million crabs as bycatch (waste), amounting to ~20 million pounds, which would be a decent annual catch. Even though this is thought to interfere specifically with breeding grounds, it isn't enough to have caused this depopulation event. It's more than enough to piss of the crabbers though, since it actually is unfair.
Disease: Is there a precedent in Earth's natural history of a 90% die-off in two years due to disease? We might have to go back to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Which brings us to:
Climate change: There was a similar depopulation event in the early 80s. 1980 still holds the annual catch record at 200 million pounds (~40 million animals), a sustained harvest without noticeable impact on the stock. The waters warmed, population (and yield) suddenly tanked on a similar scale, and never recovered to anywhere near those levels. The basic ecological dynamic of a fishery is this: deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters are pushed by a current into a steep continental shelf, forcing them toward the surface where it fertilizes plankton, the foundation of sea life. The volcanic Aleutian archipelago is such a place, another notable one is Peru's fishery. A change in sea temperature can effect this dynamic, in addition to the breeding and general survival of crabs.
However long it takes for the stock to recover (probably a long time, even if the environmental conditions do return to favorable), one outcome is almost a foregone conclusion: independent crabbers will have be forced out, and only the larger companies, with deeper pockets and more diversified across fish species, will survive, leading to another round of conglomeration.
Just want to say that my point about sharing the Canadian cod industry collapse was to illustrate the long-term effects - it still hasn't recovered 30 years later. And maybe that dovetails with what you're saying about indie crabbers being driven out, although from what I understand of the Canadian situation there is basically no industry now, indie or otherwise.
Curious: What is your line of work in Alaska?
I'm in PLC/controls, so no expert on commercial fishing. Just hear/saying from those who are.
Cod reach sexual maturity from 2-7 years, crab in 1 year. But Atlantic cod apparently lay 200k-2m eggs, alaskan crab between 50k-500k. Though I can't quite see if the cod number is lifetime or annual.
I seem to recall a huge drop in the Salmon population on the Fraser river back in the early 2000s. Seems the numbers continue to bounce around. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fraser-socke...
Doesn't mean we don't need to know why. It's good that the crab season is cancelled, but I really feel for the crab fishermen. After the last few years, and with inflation, to lose a whole season must be devistating.
On mobile, so I can't provide a link. Look up sea star wasting disease. It's affected several species of sea star from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico. One species, the sunflower star went from being everywhere to a red listed endangered species over just a couple of years.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/07/asia/russia-kamchatka-tox...
With all due respect, fishing many will take out a huge portion of a potential next generation, so it’s not about affecting the population as is.
Canada and NAFO continued to overestimate the abundance of cod in the Atlantic Ocean and therefore continued to set dangerously high [Total Allowable Catches]. This was in large part due to the widespread practice of calculating cod populations from catch rates in the commercial fishery – if fishers filled their quotas with ease, then officials believed the stock size was at adequately high levels. However, fishing technology had become so efficient by the 1970s that commercial catch rates remained high even as the cod population dropped to dangerously low levels. Electronic tracking devices could find fish no matter how small their numbers and trawlers could harvest most species with relative ease. ...
Although overfishing in international waters did tremendous damage to northern cod, Canada also failed to maintain a sustainable fishery within its 200-mile limit. The government ignored warnings from inshore fishers and university scientists that cod stocks were in danger and chose to maintain quotas instead of scaling back the fishery, in large part to prevent economic losses and massive unemployment.
By the early 1990s, after decades of sustained intensive fishing from Canadian and international fleets, the northern cod stocks collapsed. The spawning biomass of northern cod had dropped by about 93 per cent in only 30 years – from 1.6 million tonnes in 1962 to between 72,000 and 110,000 tonnes in 1992. In July of that year, Canada imposed a moratorium on the catching of northern cod and ended an international industry that had endured for close to 500 years.
https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/moratorium.php
They called off the season in 1992 and it never came back. A pillar of the local economy in the Maritimes was wrecked.
As for climate change and its impact on East Coast fishing, I've read that lobster fishing is no longer a viable industry in Long Island and it's declining in southern New England as waters get warmer and the lobsters permanently migrate north.