It seems naively optimistic to think we will be able to geoengineer altruistically or with the general good in mind. Even the concept of an 'average good' for the earth is a little morally problematic if some nations benefit and others are hurt. When a nation acquires the ability to affect climate at a large scale, it seems likely that it will be used for political ends as much as for net positive outcomes.

Additionaly - developing countries are developing because they started to polute later. They are now punished again by being prohibited from abusing einvironment the same (cheap) way that developed countries did before.

That means rich countries will remain richer than poor countries because they can afford massive investment into infrastructure to switch to cleaner alternatives, while poor countries will need to adjust by using less power, producing less goods etc.

You basically ask poor countries to be poorer to stop effect that doesn't matter to many of them (or even could be positive).

Without artifical incentives it will be VERY hard sell. And right now the only incentives proposed are negative (tax on CO2 emmision).

What if developed countries PAID poor countries that would benefit from global warming to switch to cleaner energy sources? But that's taboo as well.

Netherlands has cities multiple meters below sea level. The western major coastal cities can be shielded from a few meters of sea level increase - it would cost immense (but still realistic) amounts of money, but the heavily inhabited coastal regions of poor countries will simply drown and cause many millions of displaced poor people.

The effects matter to the poor countries more than everybody else. I'd say there are two reasons why they're not doing anything to stop it - first is the tragedy of commons, as it makes no sense for, say, Bangladesh (probably risking the worst effects from global warming) to stop emissions if China isn't doing the same; and second is simply that they can't afford to pay today for a larger benefit tomorrow; in the same manner as poor people often simply can't pay $10 now to prevent a certain $50 loss in a month.

Because when I look at the green movement, my mind very quickly feels the need to point out that for the green movement to do any good at all with their pushing of nature, nature would have to be good. Nature is not good, nor is it evil, but let me point out that with very, very few exceptions murderers are not evil either (the large majority are furthering their own ends, not killing for fun or morals).

Any significant changes to the natural features in random direction should be expected to be harmful for us - we can be rather sure that moving 10 steps in direction A is expected to be worse than moving 1 step in direction B even if we don't know anything about the actual changes caused by those directions.

We should prefer small random changes to big changes, unless we're really, really sure that the big changes are actually beneficial.

True. But natural changes in history have been anything but small.

Who is we? The majority of the world believes in a "Supreme Being". In the US, about 75% believe in God, and in the EU 51% believe in God.

The sensible people, who can clearly see that there's less a God than there is an Auditor of Reality, an anal, obsessive-compulsive cosmic bureaucrat who doesn't give half a damn what happens to people as long as every atom reports its spin and the paperwork is filed on every chemical reaction.

You sound uncannily like the misinterpretation I held of D&D3.0's moral system. The Morality of Killing people to further your own ends Is highly dependent on what those ends are.

Plus I'm pretty sure if there is a majority among murderer, it is anger problems, not slytherin

Feels good to live 4 metres below sea level.

Not surprisingly, it does not occur to them that we might be able to harness and redirect the formidable forces of the industrial economy to do good instead of evil under certain circumstances. Even though this would be easier and more effective than getting rid of it altogether.

This is not a failure to think big. It's just what happens when you think big and only big. Nothing less than the entirety of the industrial economy can be the subject of their moral judgments, because they don't want to spend any time trying to find out which parts are okay and which parts are truly evil.

I don't know if I agree with your premise here. Why do destructive (or even self-destructive) systems have to have "evil parts"?

These are systems problems, not the type of problem you can solve by taking out one kind of people and putting in another (or technology, or political party, or company, or…).

Systems based on faulty architectures tend to be the most difficult to fix, since changing the basic architecture will affect nearly everything else. But even in such cases, it's not helpful to claim that the system as a whole is evil. If the architecture is bad, the architecture is bad. Anything more or less than that is hyperbole.

Agree 100%. The architecture is bad, and that causes suffering.

Without stoping the industrial economy (actually just slowing it down) this is a non starter.

This only covers the food production/water, and perhaps energy needs. What about pollution from production? What about plastics, etc? Even with all that, the US/Western consumption levels don't scale to 7 billion people.

(Plus, what about people not actually really needing 90% of all the crap that's produced in the first place? The main reason behind all that stuff's production is not human need, either to create or to consume those products, but as a way to make money. That's why they have to be marketed that hard, or why other items have to be brittle to "expire" artificially and drive a new purchase cycle).

>and one that may even let us maintain our standard of living

I'd think the whole idea for me is to NOT maintain our catastrophic standard of living (I'm a European, the US one is even worse by most metrics), but to go into a sustainable (and humane) standard of living, and expand that to the third world.

These guys seem to be on to something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

Note that industrial agriculture isn't a viable replacement for itself (that's what being unsustainable means). So if you're expecting any drop-in replacement for industrial agriculture to be sustainable, you'll be disappointed.

Permaculture is a process for designing systems. You can use it to design food systems, financial systems, energy systems, etc. And like most processes, you can fuck it up and do a bad job. :)

>Can they produce enough calories per acre to feed the projected world population on the projected amount of arable land?

An underlying assumption here is that food has to be produced on "arable" (read: cleared) land. This is tremendously inefficient, since most sunlight strikes bare soil and therefore isn't photosynthesized.

Forests yield an order of magnitude more biomass per hectare without any human inputs, so it's definitely possible. The trick is to design the forest so it yields useful outputs while minimizing inputs.[1]

This is all pretty abstract, so here's a simple example. Human labor is an input, and one technique to minimize it is zone analysis[2]. During zone analysis you minimize labor and energy by consciously placing the most frequently visited elements closest, followed by the next, and so on. This sounds obvious, but it avoids many common mistakes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s

[2] http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-d...

These "solutions" are merely a continuation of business-as-usual.

Each will inevitably cause problems larger than it solves, because until it does we'll just view that as "headroom" to grow more.

Desalination is particularly nasty, destroying huge amounts of land (at the opportunity cost of the ecosystem services the site could perform were it regenerated) in order to concentrate power and wealth. This is bad for socio-economic sustainability as well.

Proper rainwater harvesting and storage—or as I call it, "lazy desalination"—is quite sustainable both ecologically and socially, but that's the un-sexy problem: decentralized solutions don't make rich people richer. Try tackling that with your start-up. ;)

Continuous growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

EDITED for spelling and added clarity.

Acid rain can be buffered by adding seashells (lime) in the tank.

You can easily tip off the first N gallons of dirty rain (pollution, roof washing, etc) with a dead-end pipe with a dribble tube.

How does desalinating seawater destroy huge amounts of land?

I don't think I need to enumerate the counterexamples here, as any long-lived extant species would suffice.

http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/how-populat...

2) realize why populations "stabilize" ... (which for all species but humans and domesticated species means that the rate of die-off is equal to the rate of exponential growth. It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially).

There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.

I'm talking about physical growth (the growth of measurable quantities in a system through time, e.g. population counts). This would of course be net growth, as an individual dying off would reduce the count.

You seem to using "growth" as "replacement rate". Of course the replacement rate must be non-zero, but that says nothing about the net growth rate.

>It does NOT mean that the individual members of the species aren't growing exponentially

Wait… individuals grow exponentially? https://what-if.xkcd.com/77/ :)

>There are many examples of species that stopped growing exponentially, or lost the ability to do so. They're all extinct.

That's true. It's also true that any element that never stops growing exponentially (again, net growth) is bound for the same fate.

Those are animal species. We have other talents, and other issues to solve.

On the other hand, a single rouge nation could engage in geoengineering. Some even claim a rouge billionaire could do it.

There is no fourth option. It's simply delusional.

Weather is not climate.

I don't think we should act immediately. Atmospheric and oceanic engineering could take decades - maybe even a hundred years - to research, test, and convince the world of.

I'm talking about multi-generation engineering projects.