That's the issue, a lot of people just don't care or refuse to believe it. Questions like the one in the parent comment are starting to seriously annoy me because they're demanding an unachievable level of evidence before doing anything, a level that's never asked for in any other kind of intervention (for example, interest rate hikes).
And practically there's little difference, especially if the former are getting their information from the latter.
If you make something less critical, cheaper, it will be used for more and more ridiculous things.
https://www.greenpeace.org/international/tag/nuclear/
So naturally, people assume anyone fighting against global warming is against nuclear. As far as I can tell, it's also true.
The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.
In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that reliably do more for less and increase the amount of energy people can consume.
Yes and no. I agree that if your approach is to ask people to do this, you aren't going to win the argument.
But instead you can reframe the argument.
Does that $70,000 truck that you have to make payments on while you do back-breaking or soul-crushing work to afford it really make you happy? Do you really get use out of that or are people scamming you with clever marketing?
Do you really enjoy glamping or do you just like the idea and you sit around on your phone posting pictures about how much you like it while not really doing much. Are you honest with yourself?
Etc.
> Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win.
We don't even have trains, let alone cramped trains. This one is funny though because everyone "loves how walkable XYZ area is" but then they get their mind completely wiped once they leave not realizing they can live like that too if they demanded it or if we had a good market mechanic in place that allows for choice.
For some bewildering reason we don't build more of the most loved homes and neighborhoods and transit experience like we do for every single other product.
This is still an adversarial tone which is more likely to create resistance. It comes across as insulting their intelligence.
Convincing people to change is really hard!
It’s hard when you’re trying to trick them. But show someone a genuinely better product and you don’t need to convince them of anything.
Cars, apart from their direct purpose, also serve as status symbol. This might justify the investment.
If they didn't buy those trucks I don't think they would work any less. They would just spend the money on something else.
Why would someone argue with you about what they like? You’re assuming that they are dumb and that you are smart. That’s a bad way to approach persuading people.
I don't actually think it's a fundamental blocker though. People sacraficed quite a bit at home during WWII to support the war effort, we could make similar sacrifices now if we saw our impact on the planet as a similarly existential threat.
To me it seems like the failure is in trying to analyze the problem so specifically that we can define the "right" path then logic people onto it. That will never work, mainly because the problem is so complex that there won't be a complete understanding to share. There will always be assumptions used in modeling and holes in the data allowing for alternative explanations that are then argued over even further.
We all know that using oil at this scale isn't a great idea. And we all know that we could actually use less oil without giving up much at all. If we spent less time arguing over how we got here we could find reasonable next steps that are hard to argue with when it isn't all backed by "science" and "fact" that can be debated endlessly.
Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for climate change. We have more trivial things to worry about.
The various comments here blaming "people" are a mix of victim blaming and cover-up for the well organized forces that have held the democratic will back for decades and despite (or because of?) this, the agents of this tragedy are very popular around these parts.
They really haven't, no. Corporations don't want to take responsibility for their actions, governments don't want to, and big surprise: individuals don't want to either.
Polling shows that US voters favor climate bills – yet assume fellow Americans don’t
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/01/us-vot...
UK:
> The UK has some of the highest levels of concern regarding the climate emergency in the world with 81 per cent of people ‘believing’ in the climate emergency, with over three-quarters (77 per cent) saying we must do ‘everything necessary, urgently as a response’.
https://www.ippr.org/blog/as-some-politicians-seek-to-divide...
They've all had their whole lives to make climate conscious lifestyle decisions, they could all stop eating meat tomorrow, but they ain't done squat. Not as individuals nor as a group. The few who have are weirdos who live at the margins.
This is why so many free-market, minimal-state absolutists are so prone to putting their fingers in their ears and pretending climate change is not a problem, or if it is, that individuals as free agents are responsible for creating it and therefore fixing it. They cannot accept the logical conclusion of the necessity of state action, as it contradicts their core beliefs.
The whole situation is as deterministic as two celestal bodies moving according to Newtonian physics. Technological progress was inevitable, and so was the resulting population bomb in the last century, and so is the nearing Collapse of the civilization in the coming decades, due to ecological overshoot. Read the Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.
What energy
What "tech"?
Tech isn't magic. We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.
> We can't just magically stop the greenhouse effect.
You're absolutely right, that's why tech is the only non-magical solution.
Anyone thinking they can change the behavior of 8 billion people is engaging in magical thinking.
Nuclear is at least a viable shirt term solution. Combine that with reducing our total energy demand and we're at least buying ourselves more time to figure things out, that's a much better sort term path for sure.
We really are screwed off our only hope is blind faith that tech can save us. Technology can help, but we can't abandon the option of decisions that can already be made today.
What you're asking for is a permanent reduction in standards of living. While that might be the right thing to do, it's going to be difficult to convince average people to vote for that. Many of them are barely getting by as it is and don't think they are able to sacrifice more.
Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high.
Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.".
The population may revolt, like they do during famines. But with those oil wells blocked up, they probably wouldn't get what they were looking for.
- did I emit a ton of CO2 when I cut down a tree?
- what happens to the cost of medical plastics, etc? Did you just kill millions in poor countries because the cost of care went up so much?
This stuff is hard. Pretending it is simple stops us from working on the hard parts.
Plastic production is an insanely small part of oil and gas usage, 4%. Anyone bringing up plastic as a reason to not stop using oil isn't being intellectually honest. We could literally decimate the oil industry and still produce way more oil than the plastic industry needs. It's just not a concern.
Recycling can absorb much of that, but medical plastics cannot be made through recycling today.
Considering the price of medical devices in the US, there is certainly room for a few extra cents.
In the US, this cost will get absorbed. But if you are in subsaharan Africa, 6x more expensive IV tubes and syringes is extremely consequential.
That's definitely not a complete solution (if one exists), but that could be implemented over night if we wanted to do it.
And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.
It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2 without paying $1k" are not the way to improve things. The biggest fight in the world today is not for "the climate", but for the freedom to live in a non-autocratic country. We would have to win the second to have the slightest shot at cooperating well enough to have a shot at mitigating the first for those of us in places that will be hit the worst.
Do you think a communist-by-name party of China (or Russian mafia-state) gives a damn about the climate and how it affects people in places like subsaharan Africa, Bangladesh etc? Not in the slightest, but they'll gladly use every bit of it to promote panic and industry killing policies in places like the US, EU while pretending to "be green". If we win the fight not to be ruled by corrupt dictators we can have a shot of improving the lives of people who will suffer due to climate change.
Even if that was true in the short term (and reducing global supply by shutting down oil wells makes ir unlikely) the relative incentive for alternatives created here would lead to global improvements over the medium and longer term.
(That said, the time to apply solutions with medium-to-longer term payoff was 50 years ago.)
We're still far better off decarbonising because (rest of the world CO2 + China CO2) > China CO2.
The problem is that it requires the US to be on board with it. Each one alone couldn't, but the EU and US together would have the economic force required to solve this problem, if they acted with decisiveness.
The EU on the other hand has virtually no ability to produce oil and gas and is dependent on outside suppliers. So of course they have a lot of incentive to move off of it and that’s much easier if everyone else does too.
American hegemony is at stake if oil demand is dramatically reduced quickly. Where as the EU stands to gain influence. So again, why would the USA weaken herself to the benefit of the EU?
Perhaps it would make economic sense to squeeze the market to the last drop? This is also why peak oil is an important concept. The price will certainly increase over the long term and this is a tempting opportunity.
However, this is also how empires fall. There will be technological change, and it will decrease our dependency on oil, not increase it. The economic impetus for this change is clear. Companies resisting change will be irrelevant in the future and the same is true for whole countries. Economies which isn't dominated by oil will be the first to change and master the next economic era. Countries like Russia are not likely to keep up with the technological change, they are much too invested in the old system.
So the answer is that given a long enough outlook, economies gain from this transformation. The US specifically also should have every incentive to keep trade with China under control, given that geopolitical situation. Aligning with the EU would be a strategical move against China, while keeping the European trade partners close. It's a move that would make both economic and political sense.
That's separate from the moral reasons. We know what carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere leads to. Over geological time scales it is abundantly clear. We may not want that for our children, but that's unfortunately too late to change now. Economic and political reasons are what remains.
Tech can't undo the physics of the greenhouse effect. You want a cooler earth, you have to reduce the radiation we receive or increase the radiation that leaves through the atmosphere. For hundreds of years we have been participating in a geoengineering experiment.
Wildly disruptive.
I think that's setting the bar very low, and I don't think it's necessarily true.
Most of us learn how to manage a finite resource (our own income) and how to maximize results within those constraints. This is not some sort of alien situation that humans can't identify with. We face questions like "Do we really need this?" and "Can we afford it right now?" all the time.
We need to get better at organizing ourselves in large groups/structures to do this at the global level, and make people feel equity in the decision-making and that they can afford this equity, and I'm quite optimistic we can in principle get there.
Whether we can do it fast enough is the worrying bit.
What needs to be done is cost the damage from unrestricted emissions. You can't just look at the benefits.
Consider the original Clean Air Act. Economists estimate the value of reducing harmful pollution due to that act exceeded the cost of implementing the reductions by a factor of 40. FORTY! It's like picking up free money. And the same is going to be true of CO2 emissions reduction.
Now, it's not true for those personally benefiting, like oil companies. Well, screw them.
That's unfortunate, since trains would surely be the more efficient form of transportation, at least when dealing with regular commute, like going to work and back. Over here, a train ticket costs a few Euros, you don't have to worry about driving or traffic jams, gas/charging, or parking. Of course, if you need to go to a specific rural area or transport some heavy items, then the equation changes, but that's not the majority of the cases.
I'm actually rather sad that they closed down a train route to a city next to my countryside residence, since buses aren't as comfortable in most cases. Either way, public transportation feels like an obvious necessity to me, though many might disagree.
Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less developed, and exploited) world. The model that all of the richest and most powerful people depend on.
A major economic change sounds impossible, but we've done it in the US at least three times in the last century.
No.
The economic model, monetary policy, and incentives of each system were completely different. We may not have renamed the currency or the country, but that doesn't change the fact that those were major economic shifts.
> Then it's the small task of changing the economic model of the entire developed (and less developed, and exploited) world. The model that all of the richest and most powerful people depend on.
Then yes, you're talking specifically about Capitalism at this point; avgcorrection is saying that we can't make this change because it conflicts with Capitalism.
;) Unless you're trying to imply that Communism is the driving economic force behind the entire developed world, which I'm going to guess is not something you believe.
I do think it's reasonable to ask whether the problem of human exploitation and the tendency for entrenched powers to cement their own power at the expense of the world is perhaps broader than one economic system and whether that harmful instinct might show up in multiple places and systems beyond only Capitalism. One could very reasonably argue (and I would argue) that Capitalism showcases just one manifestation of a human instinct that corrupts multiple economic systems including Communism.
But avgcorrection's criticism (as far as I can tell) was that we can't shift off of fossil fuels because that shift is incompatible with the driving economic model of our time: Capitalism. So I don't think the quote is inappropriate. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the system avgcorrection is referencing (Capitalism) bending in order to prevent that end.
Not sure if there's something I'm missing here, but I don't see a contradiction between "the most powerful forces the world has ever seen will crush you if you change the current system" and "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism." It sounds like you're both saying the same thing.
Again, I think it's reasonable to ask whether other economic systems if they were dominant would act the same way -- but... I mean, we are talking about Capitalism, that is the most dominant and most powerful economic system in the entire world and the status quo that the most powerful forces in the world see as the default system to preserve. And both you and qubex are saying that changing that system appears to be impossible even when faced with a global human catastrophe.
It's easy enough to break the natural environment by very primitive means.
So I agree with your point, it's just not that complex that we can't totally ruin it quite easily.
In urban or suburban housing people don't have enough space or direct sunlight to grow a useful amount of food.
Believe it or not, only a handful of people genuinely care about "GDP growth targets" and they have very little influence on environmental policy. The reason why politicians oppose sweeping regulation to stop climate change is because they'd lose their jobs if they intentionally caused gas prices to rise or cause a recession.
A large number of people with vast influence on all government policy care about the returns of their investments in existing incumbent industries, which in aggregate correlate very strongly with GDP growth, though.
I would rather live in a society with a higher GDP than less (all things considered) and so would most people (as evidenced by population shifts across the world). If the GDP does not grow to at least match the population changes, the society would be poorer and have worse outcomes overall.
that is the foundation of the way economy works. It propagates down to interests and credits and investments and jobs.
Obviously IMO.
Do you have any debt? Or use money? Or pay taxes?do you have a job? Did you know that oil consumption grows at the same rate as GDP? Do you save for retirement, or hold any investments? Do you have a bank account?
It's all directly connected to the economic system, which is driven by the goal of having steady and predictable rate of growth in GDP.
You're right that people are unwilling to make the basic changes that are obviously needed. But we only know precisely that those changes would work to fight against climate change because we are able to say with certainty that those behaviors are contributing factors.
Any suggested actions have to have some level of scientific credibility to be taken seriously. Without it, they are easily dismissed by claiming that the planet is too complex to know if our actions will make a difference.
That, purely by coincidence, I'm sure, has been the exact argument used against making any changes, and against the fact that warming was happening in the first place, and against tobaccos cancer risk, and any other public policy proposal that goes against the interest of those profiting from the status quo.
I'll keep voting against anything that makes me poorer and more miserable.
Some things are in fact worth dying for.
This isn't to say that measures to reduce carbon emissions can't or shouldn't be taken, they can and they should, but with a mind towards exactly what you deride, preventing as many people as possible from falling into draconian economic and social misery. That at least is something we concretely know to be possible if governments adopt the wrong control measures in a heavy handed way. The pandemic showed it clearly and concretely in many forms.
We're not talking here about the impending, concrete impact of a large asteroid, or a super volcano eruption that's definitely imminent, where mass economic sacrifice for the sake of saving humanity would be understandable. Climate change is, despite all the political fanfare, something that has too many variables to clearly define as a cataclysm.
Given that, there is nothing selfish about wanting to avoid misery and "dying" for yourself and your children in the face of ambiguous predictions about future events. If you're so convinced that "some things are worth dying for", what stops you from applying your own advice instead of preaching sanctimoniously to others?
We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution. But there are easy things that can be done if we actually cared to, and we certainly don't need to keep piling on more things that almost certainly make things worse.
Sure, like stopping subsidies to fossil fuel industry but I don't think cutting CO2 emissions is easy as you paint. How would we do that in a short notice? Through government? I'm extremely pessimistic towards "solutions" that require bigger government or new taxes as politicians almost always follow perverse incentives and don't care about long term consequences. My government subsidizes the coal industry using taxpayer money while making it hard for citizens to generate their own clean energy through laws and taxes. Government isn't the savior.
> We won't ever understand the problem space of the entire ecosystem well enough to make a complete solution.
More data and better models does nothing to prevent the planet from warming but help us plan mitigation strategies ahead and give us more confidence towards the efficacy/consequences of interventions. Right now we clearly understand that the planet is warming and that we are somewhat close to a cascading failure but what else? I don't like the prospects of downing living standards to the stone age so we may delay global warming. This isn't a solution and is a big sacrifice.
I could very well be wrong, and if core systems don't break then I do understand the goal of just being less miserable today.
We don't actually know the extent of impacts from either our oil use or potential cuts. We have modeling data that we extrapolate out, the issue I'm raising is that we get stuck in a loop of people debating whether the modeling data is accurate, complete, or predictive.
There are changes we can easily make without knowing those answers. If we can make simple changes that at a minimum wouldn't hurt the planet and almost certainly would help it, why don't we? My read is that we simply must not care. We don't need to buy as many things as we do, or to expert those costs overseas. We don't need to travel the world by plane. We don't need the latest iPhone made on the other side of the planet. We don't need LLMs. We do it because we like convenience and novelty more that we actually care about our impact on the planet. And we avoid implementing real solutions by first demanding that we have a complete understanding of the cause and blame.
Have you tried arguing people against eating meat? If we can't even talk them out of the main individual contributor to climate change, I don't think we have a good chance to make a positive impact on other areas that depend on conscious effort.
Yes, food is a significant portion of energy consumption, but typical transportation and housing (including heat/cool) easily dominate. Going from a daily mixed meat (chicken/fish/beef/eggs) eating diet to a vegan diet saves ~1 ton CO2 per year. Average is about 4-5 tons per year for a person living in a small apartment in temperate climate, who only uses public transportation, doesn't go on vacation, or buy any unnecessary consumer items. A more typical westerner who can afford meat every meal is about 10-20 tons per year.
Now, if you're eating 150g of beef every meal 3x every day, you could double your footprint (+20tons CO2). Eating only chicken, fish, and eggs gets you below 1ton/year for meat in meals. Vegan is about a third of that.
https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/carbon-ecol...
[1]https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/sustainability...
I expect we would have a lot of agreement related to fixing that system to better serve the average person. Even if we have different opinions on exact details, that core principle can go very, very far.
Given our economic dependence, the economic efficiency, and interested resistance, what concrete course of action would achieve this transition?
> We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products.
How? Concretely.
Yes exactly.
You hit on something that I often say, though we come at "solutioning" from opposite angles and, from the sounds of your comment, will find little agreement. What we agree on is that understanding anthropogenic global warming and its causes is important and can inform solutions, but it does not tell us what the "right" solutions are since we have other complicating factors to consider. Such as things like human rights, standards of living, morality and the role+purpose and limitations of government.
For some of us the debate is not over whether AGW is a scientifically understood phenomenon that represents a problem (even a critical problem at that). The debate is over what the solutions ought to be, what tools are the right tools for the job and what course corrections are considerable given factors that we must also contend with that lie outside of our scientific understanding of the problem.
Unfortunately, the dustbins of history are full of civilizations that took disruptive events carefully and with grave dignity and solemnity and respected the rights of powerful stake-holders within their society.
That the people who make such arguments generally live in the places best positioned to weather out the situation, is also unfortunate. While people in well-pr tut about whether it's really proper for a government to take action to avoid calamity from befalling its citizens, other people will be literally dying.
It's a rather crass and callous/indifferent position you've staked out, you're kind of not coming off like a very good person here.
It is, as someone notes upthread, basically the same as masks during COVID. Some people will stroke their chin and pontificate about utilitarianism and the greater good, but that's not really comfort to anyone whose loved one dies from excess pollution.
Pretty much anyone who opens up with "the proper role of government" is guaranteed to using some self-insert version of the founding fathers as a debate-terminating cliche, and it's usually followed by some incredibly crass take like "you're going to have to die so that GDP and consumption can continue growing". Like, it's all just numbers, and it turns out the numbers are a lot more important than the lives of the affected individuals.
Does "I will never mask up, I don't care if a million front-line workers die, reopen the economy and let's get GDP back on track" make you a bad person? Well, it doesn't make you a good one. At best it makes you the edgy kid in your college debate club, but people tend not to like that "abstract, formal" argumentation when it's their lives you're debating.
It's not polite to say it here, of course. But treating a practical issue with real-world consequences as a boring dry debate club to score points over is kind of a shitty approach in general. And nobody else is obligated to play along with that and treat every possible position you might take as having inherent and equal merit, which is really the point of the tone-policing thing.
Taking a position that we should just let climate change happen (TFA announcing yet another "hottest month on record" and "hottest year on record", let's remember) because otherwise it would make your imaginary version of the founding fathers sad is not a position that deserves a whole lot of rhetorical merit or gravity. Of course it is "the role of government" to take action to mitigate dangers to its citizens - whether that's indian attack, or a socialized healthcare system for merchant sailors, or controlling an outbreak of smallpox, or climate change. And it's objectively silly to get hung up on what some 16th-century document thinks about it.
Again, I'm sure you're a great coder, but you certainly are coming off as lacking empathy, and favoring rigid procedure-following over action to control an extigent and escalating situation. The debate-club stuff doesn't really matter, and actually probably is offensive to the people whose lives you are debating. And again, that's an observation you are not really allowed to make here, that maybe this faux-debate-club schtick and enforced politeness around deadly issues isn't really healthy.
Sure, we could just stop using fossil fuels. But something like 50% of the global population would then be starving.
The cure that so often is prescribed is worse than the disease. And people don't seem to realize.
I think your point leads down the path of arguing that we have too many people on the planet though. If we can sustainably feed everyone without causing unknown amounts of damage to the environment, we will eventually hit a wall and run out of ways to dodge that fact.
America loves to gaslit consumers but companies never EVER get the blame, even worse is the CEOs of the companies who make these decisions always get scot free.
Enforcing regulations requires quite a few steps first, from defining the scope and likely granting new authority to regulators to actually drafting regulations that are complete and not full of loop holes.
Your argument is also based on the premise that consumers aren't able to make the best choices for themselves and must be forced into it by regulators. I simply refuse to believe this, what are we even doing here if we think real reform can only come from all powerful authorities forcing it upon us?
There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil fuels if we weren't trying to balance that with an arbitrary GDP growth target. We could stop incentivizing people and companies to consume disposable products. We could stop subsidizing massive industrial farms and instead focus on eating locally and growing some of your own food.
The list goes on, but having spent decades watching people debate passionately over why the planet is warming all while going further down the same path my only conclusion is that we just don't give a damn. When push comes to shove we would rather buy new cloths imported from the other side of the world, throw resources at new construction and gut job renovations, and will happily fly around the world on vacation rather than stay home and enjoy the world around us.
Oh and don't forget about new tech. Machine learning rebranded as AI is so ground breaking that we have no choice but to produce as many GPUs as we can and throw all the power and water needed to run the damn things 24/7.