And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions. And it’s the largest exhibit that is helping to drive the innovation needed to solve this problem, alongside incredible people from all parts of the globe.
I wish we weren’t dealing with this. I wish there had been a better, more cost effective way to grow. Maybe if you or I hadn’t been born, our emissions might lower enough to make the difference.
But I’d suggest now isn’t the time to count scores. We need to stay focused and continue the work. Despite our flaws we are all worth saving.
>And yet it is the largest economy that is objectively slowing its share of contributed emissions.
These largest economy's also contributed the most over their history, which seems reasonable grounds for contributing more and helping other economies come up to that standard of living w/o making the same contributions
Simultaneously, the developed world should partner with China to stoke uptake of EVs globally, and rapidly destroy the market for fossil powered mobility.
War time manufacturing effort without the war.
While exporting most of that technological development and scientific research to every country too...
Or maybe someone can believe China can make 7nm chips at a fraction of the historical emissions of other countries at 5nm, with no knowledge transfer
Boom, all problems suddenly solved?
You might want to run the numbers on that one some more.
1. What if you are disabled and have no train connectivity?
2. What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?
See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?
Please stop with this zero-order thinking and spend a few seconds thinking of first-order and second-order effects when what you suggest can impact billions of lives.
Pandemic happened -> Europe went to lockdown -> Restaurants, hotels closed, weddings cancelled -> a drop of flower sales -> Kenyan flower growers suddenly find themselves out of work and out of income (plane-loads of flowers get flown everyday from Africa, M. East and S. America to Europe)
Yeah it was probably okay sailing for rich countries that can conjure up debt and give their citizens some relief, but how about for the poorer countries? India had a lockdown and day-wagers had to walk thousands of kilometers home, and the PM's response seemed to be "Not my problem!"
Then
> But yes I do agree about butterfly effects, like in this scenario: https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/made-on-earth/how-the-cov... or https://archive.is/0inYa
> Is the cure really worse than the disease? The health impacts of lockdowns during COVID-19
https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/8/e006653
Rich countries suffered too.
https://edpolicyinca.org/newsroom/california-test-scores-sho...
Ok, then you can have a car. Everyone else still can't.
>What about workers who need to travel by car to build trains? What about support workers who help those workers? And so on?
Company provided shuttle buses.
See what happens if we stop virtue signaling and think for a few more seconds?
See how silly that sounds? These are just two things I thought of quickly. You will end up with ten thousand rules and caveats if we think a bit more. Why wasn't this included in the original comment? If you propose rules, make them at least 50% complete!
> Company provided shuttle buses.
TIL buses are equal to trains and cycles. Also shuttles will pollute more if they are sparsely occupied which is common.
You should read about Mao's idiocy. We shouldn't repeat similar idiocy in 2023.
The rest of your comment is also wrong, and I'm sure you know why if you stop to think about it for 30 seconds.
You likely already have an electric wheelchair or could buy one of the many e-trike or LSV options, and at least the former will benefit greatly from first-class bike infrastructure.
This is such a common concern troll talking point but it ignores the fact that many people have disabilities which prevent them from driving (e.g. blindness or epilepsy) or prevent them from having the kind of income needed to own a car, especially if it needs customization for them to use it. Those people are all better off with reduced car infrastructure: access services don’t get stuck in traffic, transit helps everyone, and all kinds of mobility devices benefit from safe car-free spaces.
Not very useful during winter. There're places with lots of snow (meters) and temp dropping down to -30F and below. Simply can't bike when snow falls heavily. People live in such places. And their almost exclusive options (except air) are:
- cars (unreliable: engine fail or no fuel/battery with hundreds km from the nearest town means death too often when it's -30F)
- and railway (very reliable and cheap).
Remember, nobody is saying that 100% of trips should be on bicycle. We’re saying that we should break the previous century’s default assumption of using a multi-ton vehicle per person for every trip, especially in urban areas where cars make everything worse for everyone including the drivers.
I survived, and traveled to many, many countries without it. ( car, buses )
Now, I live between two continents. Take plane at least once a year or every other one.
I would still be in favor of plane restriction.
It will happen anyway: but by prices purely and the most affluent of us will be the less impacted.
That what I had in mind. It seems more and more costly to extract it.
Then It might just be not cost effective at all to go dig deeper or use more complex process to get it.
How does that works with current recent trends? Globally we consumed more oil in 2023 than 2022 for instance.
If demand plumet somehow … can we still support a extraction industry ? Recently ( pre 2019 ) shale gaz was worth it because of high prices… then it switched again to lower price and extracting it made little sense ( till next time )
During the transition there could be cost spikes at demand levels that are awkward to fill without expensive resources, though.
So we assume that we replace all explosion engine by EV. Correct?
The idea that the simplistic socio-economic models/pathways are in any way right or predictive was just a fantasy.
This is very wishful thinking. It's like a doc telling you your body is collapsing due to lung cancer, you need to stop smoking, and you answering "the future is fundemantally uncertain, I'm sure something will come along and figure out this cancer for me, got a light?"
Wishful thinking is that expensive sacrifices for the far future will be politically feasible while at the same time people need to already mitigate the effects of climate change. There need to be way better policy and technological packages than now.
AFAIK worst case predictions for climate change death aren't above a billion life years.
Your example describes a fantasy.
The vast majority of people do not travel anywhere close to 40km to buy groceries. Even in a car-centric country like America, the average driver travels just 4km.
If someone has to travel 40km or more to get to a grocery store, it's because they live rural. People who travel that far for groceries do not buy 200g of wagyu at a time. They typically only go once or a few times per month and they stock up.
The population of people who live rural is very small. People who live rural are also quite poor.
The carbon emissions, environmental impact, and fuel consumption of this population of people is so unbelievably small, it's irrelevant.
But, you are targeting this small population of poor people. No wonder you get so much pushback, or "extremism". I guess poor people defending their way of life is extreme.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-marc...
The USA is a young country, built from the ground up around the automobile. Undoing that both physically and psychologically is just not possible in my opinion.
People live in communities, cities, towns. You can build a human scale town in Oregon just as well as you can in the UK.
But also not entirely unrealistic, I live in an european city with good public transport, but if I want to buy something special like a good cut of beef, I’ll be doing a 30km round trip by car.
You can keep raising strawmen, but the extremism is going from a suggestion of reduced car traffic and reduced meat consumption, to accusations of not caring about lives and mass murder.
>But also not entirely unrealistic
Well which is it? Hyperbole or not, the intent behind it is the same, which seems to focus the climate change problem on some of the weakest sources of fuel consumption who also happen to be some of the poorest, most vulnerable people.
I think it's a kind of subconscious projection, that the example you've brought to the fore is those poor people driving to buy their groceries, not the industrial behemoths doing the real dirty work.
This is a strawman you introduced into the conversation. This is really about average car driving behaviour, consumption patterns, the system of centralized food distribution through massive supermarket chains. It’s urban planning and public policies, not lords vs servants. Note that I didn’t suggest individuals should stop driving to fight climate change, these changes can only start happening at a much higher level.
Emissions from transportation (that includes the trucks that supply these supermarkets) is responsible for 29% of all pollution [1]. The numbers are similar for most of Central and South America.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate...
People have been screaming "everyone will die!!!" via religious based prophecies for... all of human history. The Cult Of Climate Change is no different: a little bit of truth and a lot of faith in Revelations and the unavoidable apocalypse.
Prophecies like "all the icecaps will be gone by 2020" and "billions will die from starvation" (hint: those forecasts failed)
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-apocal...
This is no different than the people who follow the pastor that's wrong about the date of Jesus' second coming. every year he looks at the numbers and says "next year, on x date". That date comes. and goes. and the faithful see the failed prophecy and he goes "oh look... I was wrong... it's really next year on y date". The faithful see this each year and their faith grows stronger as each failed prophecy means the next one MUST be true.
What do we think will happen? More failed prophecies. The Church of Climate Doom faithful becomes more convinced that theirs is the One True Faith as each prediction continues to prove them right.
But it's a political problem in the end, anyway, not a science one.
No, there are only people taking the worse estimates and using them to support the doom hypothesis.
That's why we call them doomsters.
They are the same people that in the past supported the idea that the World would end on the year 1,000. It was a tiny minority of doomsters, largely over represented in legends and myths. The majority of people did not believe that, just like today only few small groups believe it will actually happen this time.
No scientist has ever claimed that we are facing an existential crisis that could end up with the extinction of the human race.
There is SOME truth. but not all of it.
Just like there is truth in religions - be nice to your neighbors. Do unto others. Truth. surrounded by bullshit (religion, dogma, etc).
There is truth and "actual science"... but there's also half truths, lies, bad prophecies, etc.
"you can cherry pick" likewise, you can cherry pick some facts about carbon... and then ignore stuff like the destruction required to make batteries, the inability to recycle a MASSIVE fuckton of "green" (wind mill blades, batteries, solar panels, etc - all ending up in land fills).
"models" yeah... except that models are limited, have increasing error rates and you end up with the spaghetti modeling with the simple stuff like weather for next week - much less the weather for next year.
Speaking of cherry picking... you'll cherry pick one or two models from a decade ago and ignore the 100+ others that are wrong.
"political not science" it's both. and religious. It's faith in models that have been cherry picked while ignoring inconvenient truths about "green" solutions that are based on bad models that can't be proven and that don't cover all the possibilities.
the problem with your response is your apparent faith in science and, like a Catholic who will downplay problems with priests, you'll ignore the parts you are uncomfortable with.
climate change is real (little c, little c). Has been happening for... all of history.
Climate Change is not (big C, big C). It is a religion.
One is based on facts and science. the other is based on faith.
Wanting to kill people now, to hopefully save the environment in the future.
How this is not a parody is beyond me.
this is drastically wrong and dangerous rhetoric
I recommend the book Seeing Like A State.
I didn't mean to say that it's easy, just that it's simple. Simple things can still be hard to accomplish.
Also “If You Can Keep Your Head When Everybody Round You Is Losing His, Then It Is Very Probable That You Don’t Understand the Situation”
Dropbox wasn't built in a weekend, but it was built.
It’s really not so bad. Not compared to killing millions of people today by increasing the price of energy. Estimates are of a rise of [2-4 degrees centigrade by 2100.](https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/climatechange/science#:~:text=Glob....) This will likely result in an [increase](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/1/014....) of arable land. [As the number of storms are estimated to decrease, the threat vector is slightly increasing storm intensity.](https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurrica....) Humans can handle storms. We can rebuild homes, change where we settle and live, build with better materials and practises, and improve storm infrastructure and protections.
[Approximately 600,000 people die each year from extreme heat, while 4.5 million die from extreme cold.](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...) Let's ignore the ratio for now, because there are second and third order consequences beyond extreme heat like famine to account for. 4.5 million people die each year because of inadequate access to cheaper energy. This is of course linear. Every time energy prices go up, so too do the number of people dying. That is the direct cost of the war on oil, coal, and natural gas, and there are many indirect costs (and lives) which go far beyond this. The intention of climate activists is to make fossil fuels much more expensive, meaning many more deaths.
Of course, maybe the goal here is worth killing 4.5+++ million people per year. There are no perfect solutions; only compromises. Maybe many more will die if we don't act. [The IPCC estimates that an additional 250,000 people per year, between 2030 and 2050, will die from the effects of climate change.](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-cha...) That covers all modes of death, such as famine. For those in the room doing the math, many times more people will die today by making energy more expensive. Activists are asking us to sacrifice millions of lives per year today to save an estimated 250,000 lives per year decades from now.
For this reason, I no longer support making energy more expensive. I support environmental efforts to reduce pollution, but I can no longer justify the high cost of human life associated with taxes on energy. Instead, I really think activists should focus on making energy cheaper. This means working on solutions to make renewable energy and nuclear cheaper per unit of energy than fossil fuels. That's a path to saving lives which I think most people can get on board with.
This is my point. We already have major immigration/refugee issues all over the world. Even if we are 100% certain climate change will result in more farm land for humanity, the issue is where are the people now and where will that farm land be then? Do you think Russia (or any other country) will be happy to take in a billion people from South-East Asia? Legal immigration is an issue now. This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
with no guarantees that it would solve anything?
> This will be a humanitarian catastrophe larger than any war humanity has ever faced by orders of magnitude.
We have literally survived a shrink of 99% of our total population as humans, you are grossly overestimating the effects of what's currently happening.
Overpopulation in Africa is a problem to be solved either way. Ameliorating global warming won’t make any meaningful improvement to that.
I tried to explain to you that overpopulation has almost nothing to do with global warming, and conflating the two diminishes our ability to solve each.
I think there should also be viable paths where increased prices for some energy forms translates to increased demand for cleaner forms instead
A carbon tax matched by a matching carbon dividend could transfer funds to poor people.
A fuel consumption tax can be matched by a matching tax cut on miles driven. Transferring demand from fossil fuel to other transportation means.
There may be loads of pitfalls in those two example of course, they are mostly meant to illustrate the point.
The irony of this comment.
Maybe we can announce a ban on pork, beef, plastics, TVs, consumption, etc but it should not be done overnight for the same reasons.
I say this because what I learned so far is that is people will start being cold and hungry then they will focus on immediate needs and that will make sure that no money will be spent on solving climate change. This is a natural instinct: you cannot think about the future if your current situation is suffering.
Don't own a house, only rent a small apartment in a dense urban setting. Don't own the means to your own transportation, only get by with walking and transit. Price meats so high most people can't afford them regularly.
1. Supply being limited because America outlawed dense urban construction decades ago. Dense cities cannot legally expand to meet demand and building up gets more expensive and unrealistic after a certain number of floors.
2. People in suburbs being further away from lucrative jobs - i.e. proximity to one's work is priced into the cost of the home.
3. Various government subsidies and tax credits that distort the market to produce more resource-intensive suburban housing.
It's not like the government subsidies and tax credits exist even though nobody wants them. They exist because, once again, that's what voters have suggested they want when they go to the polls.
The real winner in this situation is government! (Exclamation mark, but I'm not actually surprised.)
You have to wonder whether this is a self-serving agenda for those who run it.
> The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Meteorological_Organizat...
Ok - so its the UN. The UN is an UNelected body that presents itself as the face of world government.
> The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and serve as a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations
The unprecedented disaster is the increase in global governance!
Yes.
In what world is doing nothing the right choice?
But also, climate change is already making us miserable. I went on vacation and it was impossible to be outside between 12-3, so we had to plan our days around that. It's not a choice between happy and miserable, it's a tradeoff between less than ideal situations.
It's not commuting 40Km by bicycle, it's raising the price of gas to the point that people choose to live at a distance where they can bicycle to work. At the same time you need to build housing and bike infrastructure to make sure everyone can have access to it.
You can do this exactly once. Afterwards the cause will be severely discredited and no candidate doing even moderate climate change policies will be able to be elected.
In short this is stupid.
it actually is and it's really big.
Not to say that we shouldn't reduce our consumerism, but not by lowering our living standards. It would immediately harm if not kill the weakest/poorer segments of every Country's population.
No, it won't as bad.
Doomerism is not a valid rational point of view.
Most of all, floods would happen anyway, so you'll have floods + lower standards of living, including much worse emergency services.
It's relatively simple (though not necessarily easy) to live in a cold area if you have access to furs and fuel. Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees will require reliable air conditioning and working outside will become virtually impossible for humans.
> Edit: on a side note the reason why your proposal will never work is because cutting o. emissions s it's actually easy. For example let's stop keeping let's at home. Pets that usually eat a lot of red meat. It is feasible, won't lower living standards and won't cost much to society. Now convince people that their cat eats more meat in a year than a Chinese average person and that's not sustainable.
That reads as gibberish.
there must be a reason why the coldest areas on the Planet are deserted...
> Trying to survive in an area where the wet bulb temperature is over 35 degrees
And yet ancient Egyptians did it 4 thousands years ago.
> That reads as gibberish
My phone has an Italian dictionary. Fixed it.
Have you any evidence of Egypt having those kinds of wet bulb temperatures back then? It's physically impossible to survive high wet bulb temperatures even with an unlimited supply of water without some other form of cooling (i.e. not based on air movement such as fans) as water/sweat evaporation isn't effective.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature:
> Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F). A reading of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 71 °C (160 °F) – is considered the theoretical human survivability limit for up to six hours of exposure.
The Ancient Egyptian Kingdom covered the north eastern section of the Sahara Desert, one of the driest hottest places in the world.
Summers were hot and long, and the average temperature in June, July and August was 35 degrees. Winters were short and warm and their was little rainfall.
The summer, also known as Shemu, lasted from May to September. This was the period when the level of the Nile was low.
The temperature during Shemu ranged between 86 degrees Fahrenheit and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The north recorded high temperatures swelling to 122 degrees Fahrenheit during the daytime. The nighttime experienced a massive temperature change. It dropped to around 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is basic knowledge we learn in primary school.
You are also wrongly assuming that there will be areas where the temperature will rise to unsustainable bulb temperatures, but what's happening is that the change in temperatures is driving cold winds where there were none before.
Also, to close the argument, even CDC says that cold is the real killer
CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality Database, which is based on death certificates, indicates that twice as many people die of “excessive cold” conditions in a given year than of “excessive heat.” According to a 2014 study by the CDC, approximately 1,300 deaths per year from 2006 to 2010 were coded as resulting from extreme cold exposure, and 670 deaths per year from extreme heat
We are talking about few hubdreds a year, nothing so catastrophic that will eventually wipe out entire civilizations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
> The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked (water at ambient temperature) cloth (a wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed. At 100% relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the air temperature (dry-bulb temperature); at lower humidity the wet-bulb temperature is lower than dry-bulb temperature because of evaporative cooling.
Lower down the doom-splaining, please.
Doomerism is dangerous because makes people believe there's nothing we can do or that we can only take extreme measures or, even worse, that we all are personally responsible.
It is completely false and the only thing this attitude is good for is scare kids on tik tok and get views.
Have you got evidence of climate change causing those kinds of wet bulb temperatures in large populated areas?
> One 2015 study concluded extremes are likely to approach and exceed 35C in the region around the Arabian Gulf towards the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions are not reined in, posing questions for human habitability there.
> In 2020, research found that some coastal subtropical locations have already experienced WBTs of 35C, albeit only for a few hours.
> “Previous studies projected that this would happen several decades from now, but this shows it’s happening right now,” said lead author Colin Raymond, a climate scientist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The times these events last will increase and the areas they affect will grow in direct correlation with global warming.”
> The study also found that globally, the number of times that a WBT of 30C was reached – still considered an extreme humidity and heat event – more than doubled between 1979 and 2017. There were about 1,000 occurrences of a 31C WBT, and about a dozen above 35C, in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Australia.
There's some recent information and investigation here too https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interacti...
But, more importantly,
The oft-cited 35C value comes from a 2010 theoretical study.
Simply put: nobody knows the real threshold and nobody put it to test.
I'm no denier in any way, but doom prophecies are usually wrong, they are used to scare people into action, but are based on the idea that nothing changes.
For example, planting trees is effective against heat waves, it's cheap and it's being done extensively, everywhere you look
China will aim to plant and conserve 70 billion trees by 2030 as part of the global tree movement
I agree about tree planting being a sensible precaution to take - preventing sun from reflecting off tarmac and concrete is going to help at least a bit as well as the other benefits.
2. Crashing the economy may make things worse as people may move to cheaper more polluting options.
3. Also any crashing has to be global if implemented. If the West implements this, will China implement it too? Otherwise, it is useless.
4. We have to get out of the outdated/silly notion that the economy is inversely proportional to a clean planet. E.g., cleaner cars cost more than older polluting cars. So if more cleaner cars are bought, that implies economic growth as well as less pollution. Same for building mass transit. There will be a ton of upfront pollution.
Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net.
Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem?
Can't believe this comment is top rated.
- private cars and their usage are too cheap
- air travel is too cheap
- producing garbage is to cheap
- politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally
Yes, this is a political opinion.
The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational" and sustainable.
Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage.
People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic.
Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.
Yes, I hate cars when being outside them, because they are a major obstruction and source of pollution, noise and overshooting environmental damage. I hate their abundance.
I'm not sure what you are talking about with the hypothetical banana car and why you care about my feelings.
Seems like an ideological argument to me.
Do EVs grow on trees?
I agree that global warming is only the tip of the iceberg of the damage we do.
Perhaps air travel is cheaper. But wages are lower meaning people need to work more hours before they can take a flight.
Nothing prevents climate change unless we get more intentional and scaled investments in renewable energy and circular green economies.
You could go the Soviet route (had 30 cars per 1,000 people, a lot of train, bus and subway), but do you really want that? Of course, you would want to improve it because Soviet economy was hugely wasteful despite all this. Plus, all the apartment blocks are not going to build themselves, and certainly not without carbon emissions.
We need a 1000s of bullets fired at changes to avoid even higher costs of climate change on our current path.
You also should be aware about the amount of coal power plants it runs and keeps building (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal...).
It is a good time to ask ourselves which country contributes the most to emissions and crucial to avoid any mental gymnastics while at that. But unfortunately yes if you dramatically reduce coal usage in China people will die.
But it's still probably better than China where many people are simply not counted in stats (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2990197/ etc). These are also people with least or no access to healthcare and education btw
Why do so many people eat insects or are pure vegetarian in India? Because many are simply too poor to afford meat. You know what's one of the first major things Indians change when their wealth increases? Adding more meat to their diets.
Same. I think it's just helplessness, they feel something bad is coming, and they can't do anything about it, so they try to propose radical solutions that will not fix anything but just make things worse.
This really shouldn’t be the top comment on this thread without some sort of reference to cost/benefit analysis to back it up.
Otherwise this appears to be an overly extreme solution to give climate deniers fuel to not listen to more reasonable solutions.
No kidding.
Maybe because they understand the immediate consequences of such an action and you don't. That's why 0 leaders around the world are proposing that kind of solutions because everyone that knows how world works, how supply chains work and what kind of environment is needed for people to elect leaders like Hitler. You want WWIII? The best way to do it is crashing the world economy.
> I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
Good luck with that, people didn't work so hard in the west to now switching to 3rd world country standards. Climate change is a common knowledge, there are green parties in almost every country, if people really wanted to change their way of living they would vote for them but they don't. Clearly they are waiting for a technical miracle to happen or just don't care.
So what does it mean? It means that winter is coming and you should prepare for it. None of the newest models show that we can avoid first level of catastrophe even if we stop all the emissions. Millions or tens of millions of people will die, hundreds of millions will try to migrate. At this stage it's not a question of if but when. Life is not a Hollywood movie.
And while we have made renewable energy investments to some degree - it’s at a dilettante level for show instead of being serious about it. Renewable infrastructure investments should be made highly favored financial investments to accelerate its manufacture and installation. Even with large government financing it would save money and lives.
And energy production is only a part of it, investments also need to be favored for restructuring our economy to alter high energy habits like individual commutes in cars vs bikes buses and trains.
Now I'm not anti-capitalist, because capitalism is social darwinism and is a description of how resources get distributed under contention due to scarcity. It doesn't need defending. It also can't be stopped. So it doesn't care if you believe in it or not.
But the rampant corruption and crony/late-stage capitalism we live under today has metastasized. And most people don't know it. I'm sure that 50% of the people reading this are just fine with the status quo. They have high incomes and can take care of their families and that's great.
What they probably aren't thinking about on a conscious level is that the median income for individuals globally is right at $10,000 annually. An American making $36,000 is already standing on 3 other people's backs. HN viewers making $100,000-$250,000 are standing on about 10-25 people. A billionaire stands on 100,000 people. Our uber-rich each stand on 10 million people or more.
So what we think of as buying a $30,000 automobile and spending that again on fuel and maintenance steals 6 years of someone's life, not to mention the life lost by the owner working to make payments. A $300,000 home ($600,000 with mortgage interest) steals 60 years of life. A house is someone's lifetime. You can see where I'm going with this.
It's not so much that we can't imagine a life without fossil fuels. That's actually pretty easy: solar panels on our roofs and electric cars, home hydroponic robotic gardens, recycling of all things (even landfills), off-grid living. Solarpunk.
It's that we can't imagine ourselves at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, toiling our lives away so that someone somewhere can be wealthy at our expense, forever separated from financial stability and self-actualization like the 7 billion people propping up the billion people in "developed" countries. So we project our generational trauma onto the people we depend on most.
That's what the Russia-Ukraine war is about. That's why the Middle East can't seem to get left alone. That's why the Global South struggles to eat. That's why we're seeing continuous decline in all things from economics to health to the environment. That's why we won't solve global climate change. And that's why the most likely future currently is a dystopian one.
We can't change the world, but we can change ourselves. As we each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps since the wealthy do nothing about any of this, we begin to manifest a viable future.
Personally I have stopped fantasizing about disruption and winning the internet lottery. Now I meditate on how to bring $10,000 of resources to every single person in the world through automation to free humanity from forced labor and enter the New Age.
Please tear apart this analysis. It's time to get to work to like, save the world and stuff.
Let's call it what it is: feudalism. The active income era of capitalism has largely subsided. When economic growth comes from active income all classes can see their wealth increase. When passive income dominates you get the opposite: certain sections of the owner class with the most powerful monopolies[0] cannibalize everyone else. And while "feudalism" is a historically complicated term, one common feature was economies dominated by passive income. In that era, wealth went to those who owned the land - a natural chokepoint to economic activity. Today the chokepoints are different but the effect is the same.
I would also disagree that half of HN is "just fine with the status quo" given that this community also likes to talk a lot about right to repair, abuse of copyright and patent ownership, DMCA 1201, platform capitalism, etc.
[0] e.g. copyright ownership over culturally relevant creative works, patent ownership over the most economically relevant inventions, etc
If global warming is in fact a conspiracy made up by foreign actors to destabilize the west, man, have they got you.
Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton.
But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use for investment. A stagnant economy is not installing solar panels, replacing ICE cars with electric and installing new charging stations nationwide, or replacing boilers with heat pumps.
And if we want to hasten the changes to renewable energy and electrification, that's what government policy is for -- via subsidies for desired technologies, heavier taxation for undesired ones, and regulation.
"Crashing the economy" to slow down climate change is like cutting university faculty by half in order to combat grade inflation. It doesn't make any sense.
You absolutely still need private investment in a growing economy to produce and invent these technologies.
What the government incentives then can do is speed up their rates of adoption and installation. But you need both sides -- public and private.
The whole history the twentieth century is the evidence that such a system doesn't work. And it especially doesn't work as technology has become increasingly complex.
Markets are vastly better-informed investors than governments can ever be. Which is why it's generally vastly better for governments to skew incentives for private investment to favor a particular area, rather than make investments directly.
The government doesn't need the private sector, it allows the private sector to exist where it's deemed beneficial.
The reason this is not a good trend is that the KIND of R&D businesses do vs government are very different. Government invests in basic research and invention while business invests in innovation.
Less money is going into science and more into squeezing money out of people via innovation. I would argue this is because the sector that makes all the important decisions is now the FIRE sector, which only thinks about the next quarter.
source: https://ncses.nsf.gov/data-collections/national-patterns/202...
You may also ask Argentine.
After living extensively overseas in Latin America & South-east Asia and seeing how its part of everyday life for most people in the rest of the world to openly burn trash, plastics, car tyres.. litter everywhere, cutting the cat converters off their trucks, dumping construction waste straight into rivers.. it's been eye opening. Nobody in Asia is dropping plastic bags or single use plastic straws unless its a cafe for hippy white tourists.
Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.
The truth is 85% of the worlds population just doesn't care enough at all about the environment and no amount of western policy making will fix the problem. And only an ignorant college educated person from the first would assume that their 'solutions' will be exported globally. sorry to break it to you but the rest of the world doesn’t have any interest in that.
The middle/upper class whites you seem to deride so much are actually participating in one of the most eco friendly societies on earth
So either you are a realist about this problem, and you admit that either it’s war with many countries to solve this issue, or it won’t be solved (because they won’t stop economic growth for carbon emissions). Possible alternatives are technology.
But guilt tripping the west and stopping people eating steak will. Not. Make. A. Difference.
In that sense India would need to be 10B+ people to poluate as much as US / west does.
If you've got enough trees per person to offset their carbon use, then it doesn't matter how much co2 they emit.
China now emits more co2 than europe and USA combined. And this is NOT because of exports to the west, those are now also falling yet co2 emissions are still climbing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
This is what I mean. Just these two countries like india and china are emitting so much CO2, that any reduction in emissions by the west by not eating steak just won't matter. Either you stop china doing this (good luck!) or think of another solution.
The moment you think an individual is going to make any sort of a difference through minor changes in behavior, you have already lost the plot.
The fact is "emmisions per capita" is heavily correlated with "gdp per capita": https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-vs-gdp
The "educated people in western countries [who] are incredibly eco-conscious" emit way more co2 than "85% of the worlds population".
> Meanwhile, educated people in western countries are incredibly eco-conscious, have excellent modern waste management, have amazing huge national parks and conservation areas, clean waterways or have nets to prevent plastics entering the oceans.. are 'banning' gasoline cars by 2030.. and the air quality! Amazing.
The commenter appears to say that people in western countries are already doing a good job on climate. Even though those people emit way more than people from other countries.
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2022#emissions_table
Per capita, EU27 is at 6.25 whereas China is at 8.73 whereas the US is at 14.24:
https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/report_2022?vis=pop#emissions...
If you look at consumption-based emissions[0], China is at 7 t per capita, which is 8 t less than the US, 2 t less than Germany and about par with Denmark, Slovakia, and England.
0: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Why shouldn’t the highest emitters not be the ones to reduce most?
I don't understand the "25 smaller Chinas" argument. China sets statewide emissions policies. That's a reason we pay attention to country borders here, rather than considering an undifferentiated mass of humanity as a map scatterplot.
Ultimately, the reason to point out the gap between China and Europe or North America is that if you concentrate climate mitigation strategies on the west, you won't actually do much to solve the crisis. Fair's got nothing to do with it.
1) China needs to cut more emissions in total.
2) The US/West needs to cut more emissions per capita.
But if both groups argue that the other group has to do their part first, or they won't act, then nothing will get done.
Either that or its a flat rate per good which just becomes yet another import tax.
Some trade does need to be shut down, as the externalities aren't being properly handled at the moment.
But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that nobody is prepared to willingly let go of their conveniences. They may say they are but they haven’t seen the real cost to their lifestyle.
The transition is politically impossible. You’ll see some kind of populist revolution happen in Germany, which on paper seems to be the leader in green policies.
There are dozens and dozens of studies all reaching this same conclusion, if the International Energy Agency isn't good enough for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=greenhouse+gas+emissions+by+...
OP's point was that the global rich (most US citizens included) have lifestyles and patterns of consumption which produce an outsized amount of greenhouse gasses, and any attempts to alter those behaviors are routinely met with anger and political backlash
What will we do when these societies who give no fucks about the environment (compared to the west) get wealthier?
White guilt is not going to save anyone
Total mindbender on this is not-West countries are installing renewables at scale, solar is cheaper than any other supply you can think of.
Then we can start talking about "solar isn't enough because unreliable", true.
Then maybe we start talking about how it's racist to prevent people from having unreliable electricity, true, but that's not the proposal on the table.
To avoid those tarpits, I avoid the Woke Left/Woke Right stuff and just say "they're installing solar panels and it's cool if they gotta do coal/tires/etc. while we 10x batteries again like we did last decade" --- this also has the benefit of matching the uncoordinated reality as it stands
You can find some details here https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... I am surprised you didn't know this already.
Here is China https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?location...
It doesn't take into account trends that already exist. In the next decade small reductions to emissions in US transportation per year will be meaningless. Also reducing agricultural emissions which are only 10% of CO2 emissions in the US will have little affect on total global emissions. I'm not sure why there is so much hand waving about the CO2 emissions of China alone.
"This doesn't take into account that countries like the US have already cut emissions and emissions have been declining for years."
> You can find some details here https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... I am surprised you didn't know this already.
This being US / 1st world emissions are decreasing? Thank you for looking that up etc., I appreciate it -- I did know that, and seriously, thank you for taking the time to source it: I'm only saying I knew so you can rest assured at least one other person is up on data. These are strange times and it's hard to get a read on if facts are common knowledge or not, and our estimate of that can cause intense feelings.
Putting my comment more simply and extending it so it doesn't feel like I'm passive-aggressively quoting my comment back at you:
I'm curious why we think the per-capita emissions data "isn't accounting for it decreasing"
Total global emissions are an important factor to consider for the global climate and focusing only on reducing emissions of the US will be meaningless because total global emissions will still continue to go up.
edit: thanks for clarifying btw and here is trends in total global emissions found on the page https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Politician A) The one that promises you more economic comfort in the short term
Politician B) The one that promises you sustainability (i.e.: not necessarily growth)
Most people will vote for Politician A. Because most families in this culture want prosperity so they have more income to have a "better lifestyle" (consume more). The problem is that a better lifestyle means a higher environmental footprint.
That brings us to the realization that at some point in time we became an ecocidal invasive species, and having good historians and a good public relations team won't change that in the actually true and objective historic record: the geological and fossil record, which will be the only one that will remain after we starve ourselves to death. In that record we will see how after the arrival of the behaviorally modern human, especially after the industrial revolution, all species after certain weight started dying.
We look down at tribal peoples with dumb narratives such as "they are not making an efficient use of the land". Well, 200 years after the industrial revolution we are learning that the industrial mindset is collective suicide, and perhaps there was something that the tribal peoples were doing correctly, measured in terms of KPIs such as carbon emissions, topsoil, biodiversity, etc.
And the solution is a) reducing our environmental footprint (which is impossible with a growth-oriented industrial mindset) or b) resist growth or c) reduce our population. b) and c) will never be supported by the population.
We will have to rewrite history and rethink the way we educate people, accepting that the industrial revolution was progress in terms of consumption but it was a massive setback in terms of sustainability. i.e.: it is a progress trap, or in simpler terms, it doesn't fucking work.
We are just immature people playing with a credit card and thinking we can afford everything. But everything you spend you'll have to pay later, and that time is arriving at an increasingly faster rate. We are living lavish lifestyles at the expense of the future generations.
I predict that once AI is here, elites will not have a reason to collaborate and share resources with the masses, and will have no incentive to share political representation. Plus, the agriculture supply chain is highly centralized and corporations can cause a famine any time they want.
That this is the most upvoted comment shows just how far most people wander from reality.
But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony.
No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.
you have proof that it can and will?
this is the same "it's worth anything" arguments where "maybe" is treated as "it will happen" while ignoring the negative aspects (IE: human suffering, facts that poor people are worse for the economy, green tech is made from worse than carbon and is creating megatons of unrecyclable stuff like windmill blades and solar panels, etc.
Nothing like putting the lives of people on the chopping block for an "if" in response to a religious belief that "carbon is evil".
The thing is, we have no reason to believe halting climate will do anything other than boost the economy. The reason for inaction despite the fact that it’ll make tons of new jobs, and remove major consumer costs and widespread reductions to health & quality of life caused by cars, is that certain specific sectors of the economy will shrink. The fossil fuel industry has spent half a century funding science deniers and consolidating their political power to prevent action on climate change or their pollution. They’re not acting on behalf of the entire economy, just their shareholders.
A simple example: beef is a solid order of magnitude worse than other common protein sources (with the possible exception of lamb in some countries). We could see huge reductions in our food-related emissions simply by eating pork or chicken instead, and almost nobody would say that’s an intolerable lifestyle hit but the beef industry isn’t going to let that happen easily because it’s bad for their revenue even if it’d mean most people save money.
There's and easier way
In the US, dogs and cats consume about 19% ± 2% of the amount of dietary energy that humans do (203 ± 15 PJ yr-1 vs. 1051 ± 9 PJ yr-1) and 33% ± 9% of the animal-derived energy (67 ± 17 PJ yr-1 vs. 206 ± 2 PJ yr-1). They produce about 30% ± 13%, by mass, as much feces as Americans
Wetlands are responsible for a third of all the greenhouse gases emitted in the atmosphere, followed by agriculture and livestock (in general) at 25%.
It's absolutely not given that removing beef from our diet would make things much better.
Also considering the fact that billions of people have just entered the club of those who can afford eating red meat and won't stop now.
The most likely scenario is that we will slowly switch to other sources of proteins and they will replace us as meat eaters, basically making no change whatsoever in the output.
It is - the food input & land requirements are less efficient - and it’s absurd to say that eating pork or chicken instead is so miserable that people won’t abide it.
that would be great, if only more than 2.5 billion people did not eat pork for various religious or cultural restrictions.
food restrictions are among some of the most difficult habits to overcome, proven by the fact that they resisted for thousands of years.
we could also eat insects or worms, but we don't it, what makes you think that 1.8 billion Muslims would suddenly start eating pork like it's not a big deal?
In my opinion Paracelsus said it right: it's the dose that makes the poisons.
Americans who eat the most red meat per capita (a lot more than anyone else), could eat less meat in general.
How?
Simple: by making it a lot more expensive.
Between 2020 to 2022, Europeans consumed 32.4 kilos of pork, while the per capita consumption of beef was significantly lower, at 10.3 kilos in total.
How Much Beef Does the Average American Eat? The average U.S. consumer eats 25.9 kilograms (57.1 pounds) of beef per year.
For the last 60 years, U.S. meat consumption has risen steadily. In 1961, the average was 93.7 kilograms (206.5 pounds) of meat per year. By 2020, that number had risen to 126.73 kilograms (279.4 pounds) per year.
The most notable period bucking this trend of growth is from 2008 to 2013, a decrease that likely resulted from the 2008 recession.
proving that the economic angle is effective in reducing the consumption of meat in the US.
I used “other common protein sources” to avoid having to list every single alternative from fish to nuts, and I’d note that the populations for whom that’s true traditionally ate proteins which were not beef because it’s comparatively expensive: chicken, fish, legumes, nuts, cheese (still way less CO2), etc.
That’s the key thing here: we’re not asking people to eat Soylent green or extruded nutrient pellets, or to never eat beef, but simply to restore the range of foods from their own cultural tradition prior to the mid-20th century western promotion of beef as the highest status protein. My grandfather grew up eating beef twice a year (when his cousins dairy culled the herd) and it was fine - I’m sure he’s do it again if it meant his great grandchildren had a better world.
that's my point exactlt.
switching beef with pork wouldn't make a big impact, because
- it's already not the preferred source of protein anywhere
- Americans eat too much meat anyway, regardless of where it comes from.
Reduce is the most important of the 3 Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) but the western World settled on the least important, recycle, because it can be turned into a profitable business, while reduce promotes moderation, which is like swearing in a church for many Americans.
I am Italian and still eat nuts, legumes and eggs for proteins much more than meat, especially beef.
It's the culprit of the Mediterranean diet and it's shared among many other cultures that built their culinary traditions around the same ingredients. Chinese traditional food is much more similar to my own family's traditional food in center Italy than the typical US diet will ever be.
So maybe Americans should simply embrace other, better diets, instead of replacing some type of meat with some other type of meat. intensive farming of pigs it's not much better than beef
The environmental impact of pig farming is mainly driven by the spread of feces and waste to surrounding neighborhoods, polluting air and water with toxic waste particles. Waste from pig farms can carry pathogens, bacteria (often antibiotic resistant), and heavy metals that can be toxic when ingested.
As someone from Bangladesh—average CO2 emissions under 1 ton per person—I can confirm that it sucks and conservation is a stupid way of mitigating climate change.
The anti-development people are just evil. When my dad was a kid in Bangladesh, 1 out of 5 kids died before age 5. Capitalism and development brought us up to similar levels to where the US was in the 1970s in just one generation.
But still you have a partial point: health/life expectancy and happiness have already started to decorrelate with the economy in the US, and US people consume more resources than other western economies with obviously better material outcome but no better quality of life outcome. This point to solutions were conversely it should then be possible to maintain standard of living with a decrease in the energy consumption. Red meat and leisure only air travel are indeed good candidates because you can live a very happy, healthy and fulfilled life without them. Same with cars weighting 1000 pounds less, putting a sweater in winter at home, having denser city centers with public transportation, etc…
This is not about left or right, this is about having an open look at some ideologies with data. It’s always hard to accept when people make economical theories a part of their identity and values, this a religious crisis for them not a simple discussion.
So... we're fucked.
To save humanity we should destroy humanity.
No thanks.
It can't. I did the numbers some time ago [1], and they are bad. If you take electricity as a proxy, western countries consume something like 5 times as much as the global average per capita. So if we are willing to let the poorest to get to the global average while not cutting global consumption at all, the west should reduce their consumption by something like 80%. That's not crashing the economy. Thats... destroying the society most likely.
There are two solutions: 1. We force the global poor to stay poor. 2. We figure out how to make lots more stuff sustainably than we currently do.
Feel free to make your choise. Reducing consumption in the west is not going to make a dent anywhere and should be not on your list of worries if you choose 2.
Edit, add [1]: I don't habe the numbers now but you can replicate it pretty easly by taking population and electricity consumption data by country from wikipedia.
That's because I live in a market economy and I have no desire to live in your planned economy without any democratic process in place to represent me.
> but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change.
"We should make decisions that will kill people and shorten their life expectancy, because I believe there aren't any other compromises that can be made to impact pollution."
Yea.. it's is weird to say, it's also demented and inhumane.
> And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.
And the rest of the world that hasn't developed yet? We still just don't spare any thoughts for them at all.
I don’t think we need to make everyone’s lives worse. It’s not politically viable. We don’t need to give up computers and well insulated homes and medicine. Technology will help us reduce pollution and emissions. It’s just going to take time.
First and foremost, there's no way to transition our complex society through such an energy bottleneck of this nature without massive unrest. You will literally be killing people and causing mass starvation, so the very first thing that happens is everyone who loses someone or otherwise is hurt by the new regime instantly rebels and you have the largest energy war in history.
Seven billion people? That's just an abstract number to you, I suppose, and of course you will be one of the people who figures things out, why you're a "leftist!" as you told us so being on the right side of history will save you :) but in Reallandistan, the amount of human suffering you just released, the amount of ancient ills which we have finally, as a species , put to bed which you casually reawakened instantly flare up. But what are several billion dead people? We're saving the planet here! Do you honestly, really, in the deep quiet parts of your mind, think that it would be better to kill billions than to solve environmental and other problems, as we have been, better and better with technology? I fundamentally disagree with this inhumane approach and want nothing to do with those who might advocate it.
The West has become really good at reducing emissions and environmental impact. Yes, a fair portion of that reduction is consuming CO2 intensive products made in China rather than locally, but even taking that into account the developed world is probably still less CO2 producing than the developing world.
only rich spoiled westerners say these kind of things
Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers.
It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem.
And yes, I don't believe it's only rich people, it's also middle class people who generate a lot of emissions, and I'm a leftist.