First of all, don't give up too easy. It's a lot easier to say: we are screwed, my contribution will not change anything. This is wrong approach to the problem, changes start from somewhere.
Imagine the startup, who don't have customers yet and just gives up (because what's point, they will not come). The more traction they have, the more snowballish it become.
How regular people can help?
1) Try to use renewable materials around you (bags, not plastic bags, use the fabric)
2) Sort the garbage (don't know about US), but in Europe this is real thing (organic, general, electronics, etc)
3) Try to limit the car or any fossil fuel usage in your household.
3.1) Don't have 1 car per each family member
4) Don't buy and throw away clothes too often, if you do, return to second hand
5) Use energy saver functions at it's max
6) Stop searching for someone to blame and "Just DO IT!" (c) Shia
How IT people can help?
1) Write less energy consumption programs and servers, they eat too much now
2) Move toward real innovations in "green" tech, not the pseudo ones to collect money and bail
Samsung once done the big screen phone, how the iPhone users called them? "Shovel" phones / users. Then came this "innovative" Apple iPhone with the same big screen and it suddenly became "mainstream". Don't be afraid to be first in something good, especially if this is a future of your planet.
Don't expect that someone will make this problems "go away" or people fly away from here. Humans managed to make orbit a trash can too, so we don't go anywhere in far future.
I think the only way out is political top-down decisions rather than mental shifts. Habits are just too strong and the competitive disadvantage of frugality just too inconvenient for most of our primate brains. Environmentalism and passive-aggressively oppressing of habits via high moral self-standards is too easily strawmanned or misinterpreted as ideology by the mobs. -- The most ignorant win.
The largest impact will be by China, India and Africa, so we'll quickly need to popularize green energy such as solar and perhaps the kinds of nuclear technology which can't be used for weapons (nuclear waste might be preferable over damages caused by pollution and climate change).
We need to be decisive and strong, which might involve bold and expensive media events and populism.
The ones who are able to think in the long term need to stop fighting themselves for superficial issues, political correctness and minor details. We need to strengthen our arguments instead and keep in mind that we are following the same ultimate goal.
One way to influence politics is to spread the culture of being habitually green. The big gains may all be political or require extensive city design, but changing the mindset to 'people want green; and superficial won't cut it' is a big part of making that happen.
Do I want to give up my car? No. What if I did want to; how would that change my outlook? I'd want cities and a job that accommodates those desires. What if everyone wanted to? Those cities would be built and politics might make cars more restricted.
Stop participating in the economy as much as possible. Learn to live a subsistence lifestyle. Move to the second or third world and learn how to live like the third world in a very small amount of space consuming the least amount of resources necessary to live. You can do it. Also don't have any children.
While you do this the capitalists will be trying to move all the 3rd world people to the 1st world lifestyle. Just to balance things out.
This sort of thinking that you have the power to make a change is a religious belief and a control mechanism our society has to prevent revolutions and evolution. You want change, it will have to be revolutionary with completely different economic logic than that which is the basis of our society. Short of that any action is a drop in the ocean of economic policy, human psychology, desire, consumerism, etc. The various forces that make us produce and consume at greater and greater levels and at greater and greater speed with reckless abandon to pretty much anything else. At best we pay lip service to these things the same way kids do to their parents when they know they're not doing right but enjoy doing it, stuff like sex.
You've lost me towards the end. However I disagree with your opener. If you change your habits and appear to lead a happier, more satisfying life others will notice this and adopt similar habits. A sort-of reverse keeping up with the joneses.
That is the reason why nothing changes. Invest in growth, it's popular now. The more people lobby the green interests (don't confuse with any political "green"), the more politics will adapt to them and provide laws to support their beliefs.
Currently this always looks like, hey, X doing Y times more than I do, why I should care? This will not change anything.
Blaming China now is quite not fair, because other countries already caused this global warming, not China, they now just want to grow like the others.
This mindset of modern humans lead to lost of humanity itself. Most of the people don't care about others, they are selfish. Until every bit of climate change hit them personally (like your house underwater, boom!) then they will start to think about that and demand changes.
So "Plan B" will be waiting when this thing will blow into the face of those, but as always this will be too late.
I planted about 50 fruit trees and bushes when I moved into my new place. I also converted the electric to 100% renewable. Other than dumping my natural gas heater I'm not sure what's left that I can do to help reduce climate change.
Politics are the primary enemy of progress. Right now incentives for renewables are being cancelled at a state and national level across the US. That is unacceptable low hanging fruit. NASA, the NWS, and even the NHS (see Zika) should all be studying this actively (edit: and coordinating this research, and publishing/sharing data). Carbon taxes shouldn't just be on the table, they should be in place and should form the basis of tariffs.
This is happening right now, it's not a future thing. We're dealing with it whether we want to or not.
Sadly, your natural gas heater is currently more carbon friendly than electric heat. In an interconnected grid, what you are using is probably offset by a mix of coal and gas generation, and to get to you it's suffering transmission loss. Solar hot water is a big win, though, especially if you are electric there. Same with insulation. Eat less meat. Repair vs replace.
Good luck to all of us.
edit: full disclosure, I replied to you without reading the article. I just read it. Holy shit. I wish there was someone that could comfort me that between ocean acidification, conveyor current shutdown, Greenland/Ross shelf based melting, threats to krill lifecycle, precipitation changes, and changes in farmland suitability (among others) ... we are looking at mass human die-offs over most people heres' lifetimes. When you look at the level of interconnection across the world, specialization, fragility of our complex systems... it's hard for me to not come up with a back of envelope figure ~6 billion deaths from starvation & conflict. Based on our resource extraction rate, it could easily make this the peak of human civilization.
Cows and other animal agriculture contributes as much or more [1], to climate change than all cars and trucks. So eating less meat is one good way.
> Livestock is responsible for 65% of all human-related emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas with 296 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, and which stays in the atmosphere for 150 years.
-“Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options.” Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2006
Cowspiracy takes a somewhat extreme view on this, but the overall message is correct. IPCC numbers estimate the emissions from agriculture at 24%, though that may not count full life cycle costs or the effects of damaging ecosystem carbon sinks. It's scientific consensus that agriculture, and especially ruminant animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to climate change. https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/global.html
This proportion is also likely to go up significantly in the next 30 years. If you want to get a more visceral sense of that, try changing the "Diet" settings in this climate change mitigation model http://tool.globalcalculator.org/ . For more of an eye opener, change the "examples pathways" to IEA 6DS (current trends) and then just manipulate the "Type of meat" parameter. Simply by replacing 64% of expected ruminant consumption (beef, lamb etc.) with other meats (chicken, pork, etc.), we can decrease total worldwide emissions by 43%.
Nitrous oxide and Methane both break down in the atmosphere. If we where starting from zero then sure they would both have a large impact but they are both in sufficient quantities that lot's of them are breaking down making the future contribution have a negotiable net effect.
Methane is, however, much more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, and global livestock contribute a non-negligible fraction of greenhouse gas pollution.
As far as opportunities to curb your own carbon footprint, use one of the calculators available on the web. For many people, jet airplane travel dominates the 'discretionary' portion of GHG pollution.
This doesn't make sense. More nitrous oxide and methane means more heat is captured by the atmosphere. This effect does not diminish with "the amount already in the atmosphere."
"For example, the direct radiative effect of a mass of methane is about 72 times stronger than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame[20] but it is present in much smaller concentrations so that its total direct radiative effect is smaller, in part due to its shorter atmospheric lifetime. On the other hand, in addition to its direct radiative impact, methane has a large, indirect radiative effect because it contributes to ozone formation. Shindell et al. (2005)[21] argue that the contribution to climate change from methane is at least double previous estimates as a result of this effect.[22]"
"Methane has an atmospheric lifetime of 12 ± 3 years. The 2007 IPCC report lists the GWP as 72 over a time scale of 20 years, 25 over 100 years and 7.6 over 500 years.[20] A 2014 analysis, however, states that although methane's initial impact is about 100 times greater than that of CO2, because of the shorter atmospheric lifetime, after six or seven decades, the impact of the two gases is about equal, and from then on methane's relative role continues to decline.[37] The decrease in GWP at longer times is because methane is degraded to water and CO2 through chemical reactions in the atmosphere."
Immediately following this last paragraph they show a table which says that carbon dioxide has a GWP (Global Warming Potential) of 1 over all time periods, while that of methane is 72 over 20 years, 25 over 100 years, and 7.6 over 500 years.
> If we where starting from zero then sure they would both have a large impact but they are both in sufficient quantities that lot's of them are breaking down making the future contribution have a negotiable net effect.
Maybe it's too early in the morning for me, but I don't understand the point you're trying to make here, and I am apparently not the only one. Care to clarify?
As SF author Robert Heinlein said through one of his characters, "Politics and peristalsis are similar, both in the quality of the outcome and the importance to your well-being and continued existence."
I see a lot of down-vote worthy responses to OP, and more downvotes. But in this case, I honestly don't see it: why is this not a fair question? I mean, in a genuinely neutral sense; isn't he right?
Asking if someone supports politicians that claim to be eco-conscious while raising campaign money, who are almost universally left-leaning, is far from "neutral". There are places on the Internet to espouse political support for either side. This, however, is not one of them.
Someone proposed the rhetorical question of "what politicians do you support" as one of the "ways you can affect climate change". The poster is not saying "You should vote (in a particular way)", nor even generalizing what positions the respective parties take, just that voting affects climate policy, which affects climate. The poster literally only said "the way you vote affects the way climate is handled", and -you- are inferring a bias, and a political motivation, and crying foul.
By that logic, we can't talk about voting being a means to -any- end. "How can we prevent the TPP" "Vote out those in favor of it" "NO NO NO, POLITICAL COMMENTARY, GTFO!"
You can talk about voting out politicians who endorse the TPP, or for that matter who want to wreck encryption and crater the economy, because these things have broad bipartisan support and so the only way to reverse that is to vote out everyone.
Talk of tearing the whole system down or whatever is totally acceptable, even if (or maybe precisely because) it's probably also unrealistic. However once a subject comes up where one group is basically wrong, it becomes a lot more difficult to talk about in a forum like this because some folks actually do have to justify their voting habits in the context of e.g. climate change, instead of all of us just kind of posting at each other "those politicians eh?" all day and getting very little actually done.
When it comes to a lot of tech issues, pretty much everyone in Washington is fucking awful and we can find consensus on that (with a few notable exceptions that show up in every thread to concern troll everyone else - not going to name names). However there is only one party in the US right now that is broadly sticking its fingers in its ears and screaming that climate change isn't happening.
So are you saying that if it's a partisan position we're not allowed to post "voting can change things"; we can only post that if it's a bipartisan position? Because if not, you're in no way addressing the point I was raising.
I'm saying that people get a lot more sensitive about "talking politics" when the positions of the two major parties are in pretty stark contrast and it's blindingly obvious they can't pull the usual "both sides are the same / equally bad / etc". At least, you can't really claim to support the GOP because you want to do something about climate change, only that you don't think it's important or don't think it's happening.
Contrast this with a lot of tech issues, where you can throw up your hands and claim the whole system is fucked, and that both sides have their faults in roughly equal proportion. You're not forced to think about the consequences of supporting one party or the other as much.
Supporting environmentally friendly legislation is orthogonal to the economic concerns that divide the left and right. It's true that environmentalists are associated with the left in the US, but that's not true everywhere in the world.
And therein lies the problem. In the US, one cannot support politicians that will be amenable to reasonable, environmentally friendly legislation without embracing leftist economic ideologies as well. That said, once again I think HN is not the place to discuss or voice support for specific political views one way or the other. There are plenty of fact-based, scientific discussions to be had on this topic.
My point was that you were the first one to bring up any particular political affiliation. There are Republicans who support environmental protection, like John McCain in his 2008 bid for president. If the OP is conservative, he might follow the advice you were responding to by lobbying for changes to the Republican Party platform.
Got a good example of this? Every policy I've seen relating to reducing emissions involves higher taxes and redistribution of wealth by a bigger government.
Environmentally friendly legislation can be a bit more diverse but that doesn't really exist now, emissions is all people discuss.
The Chinese communist party is only recently starting to care about air pollution, and the Front National (France's far right party) has an environmental platform.
Historically, the Republican Party gave us the National Park System and the Clean Air Act, and Soviet officials thought green air around factories was a sign of progress.
Which politician is more likely to take steps helpful for climate change: (a) one who "claims" to be eco-conscious, or (b) one who thinks climate change is a hoax? Are you seriously telling me that a person who wants to do what they can for climate change should consider candidates (a) and (b) as equivalent, so far as climate change is concerned? Boggles my mind.
This is more political commentary, and the point of my comment was that this isn't the place for that. Also there are an infinite number of viewpoints on this subject in between those you outlined.
I'm not commenting pro or con on any politician. What I'm saying is that, _if_ someone wants to do what they can to fight climate change, voting for politicians who share their goals would be one thing they could do that would help. And it is, actually, a pretty important thing. That's just common sense.
There is a difference between supporting politicians who support changes to reduce carbon emissions and increase support for renewables and supporting politicians who pretend climate change does not exist or is not affected by us.
Research threats to coral that aren't climate change related, such as deforestation generated silt in rivers, disruption of ocean ecosystems due to destruction of top predators (such as sharks), overfishing, and excessive fertilizer runoff from agriculture. There are groups (not enough) working on those problems than can use support.
Cowspiracy's points on GHG emission and water consumption are simply illiterate. They don't recognize the concept of a net flow. (e.g.: carbon that comes out of a cow first went into a cow - via its food - which got apprx. all its carbon from the air)
Most of the science from Cowspiracy is still on point. A percentage was exaggerated but the main point remains persuasive: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KpmTiHjUEBU
Especially as China and other countries continue eating more meat at higher and higher rates.
Given the data, the smart thing to do is to prepare for a world with that many more cows and pigs. The externality of the carbon released when forests are cut down needs to be paid for.
Biggest impact livestock has is on the forests leveled for grazing. Such as Amazon in Brazil mostly used for livestock when it was a good carbon store previously.
Ok if we're talking about net flow, lets talk about calories of plant required to get 1 calorie of food for us. Vegetarian, 1000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of food. 4000-6000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of chicken. ~9000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of pork. and ~12000 calories of plants make 1000 calories of beef. So eating 1000 calories of plants instead of 1000 calories of beef requires 1/12 the amount of farmland/deforestation/transportation/harvesting fuel etc.
Fertilisers and fuel did not come from the air. There are hundreds of millions of cows (and other livestock) that did not exist before. Landscapes have been sterilised to support them with a massive resulting freeing of previously captured carbon, or carbon trapped in a slow cycle. Methane from ruminants are a significant source of CO2 and are not easily recaptured, not to mention a potent greenhouse gas.
Carbon dioxide is captured from the air, by plants, and then eaten by cows. So you're saying that any greenhouse gas from cows is that which has been previously captured.
But you're missing the fact that some of the CO2 captured by the grass is farted by the cows as methane, CH4.
About 1% of the CO2 is released as CH4.
CH4 is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas. It's one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
Luckily methane has a half life of 7 years in the atmosphere, so anything we do to reduce methane emissions is likely to be helpful.
It actually doesn't matter whether what they say is true or not. Arguing this point won't fix the climate, but supporting it just might because someone paid attention when you were being positive about it.
Nothing short of participating in movements that seek to change the structure of our economy which inadequately penalizes fucking up the environment on decadal+ time scales.
I don't want to offend you, I've lived differently than I do now, but just brainstorming here: sounds like a big piece of property to be able to plant that much. Go minimal to your comfort level. I am not talking a yurt here on 1/10th of an acre, but minimalism can be very rewarding in today's super-size culture.
Not sure I understand the negative, sensitive downvotes to my comment; I was being sincere and careful with a prefatory remark. I grew up in Brooklyn below the poverty line, within a small space, had kids, moved to rural NJ, and lived in a moderate-sized house. I now live in East Java, Indonesia, have been vegetarian for over two years, and started a way of dealing with recycling and management of trash here, as well as an informal outdoor class for 9 to 11 year olds. All of my stuff is in an 8ft x 12ft room that I share with my wife and one-year old baby girl. It's minimalism is compensated by the fact that I can just walk outside. More than half of the houses around me have dirt floors, and their combined electric usage is less than that of one of my friend and his family's household. The reply was to somebody who seemed to really want to know some options, and I gave him one, that I also live by. It's anonymous downvotes without explanation like this, or the seemingly sensitivity-policing of people on this forum that make me think first-world problems are just that.
Your personal choices aren't going to make a difference. If you really want to help, you need to organize with others to make systemic changes to our economy and our energy system. Everywhere in the world, there are fights to prevent new fossil fuel infrastructure from being built and to shut existing infrastructure down. Join them! It's fun.
Yes, many choose wageslavery & their species' destruction, instead of freedom & direct action.
I've known climate-change deniers. They hold on to their political-economic religion as it literally destroys their world. And they're not the worst. The worst are the enablers, who often call themselves "moderates".
Often this is true in spades for politics. Even the politics of hatred. Much has been written on the economic underpinnings of the genocide in Rwanda. Awareness of this makes climate change an even more pressing issue.
Australian here (that was very hard for me to confess)
There was a bit on the news about the massive bleaching event up north, a few mentions on tv. Once in the paper.
My current minister for the environment Greg Hunt, or as he is know amongst his admirers: " Fucking Festering Cunt Hunt", and his jolly band of Liberals (don't be confused, in Australia "Liberal" means far-right fucking nutjob) could care less about the environment and have, on national TV, dismissed climate change as "absolute crap".
We elected this government, and there is a significant chance that we will vote for them again before the end of the year. Fuck me dead if I know why.
I apologize for the cussing, but I believe its appropriate.
There is a whole lot of climate change evidence coming out that is terrifying.
At what point does this become so scary that something happens to increase the taxes on fossil fuels so that consumption will go down?
Falling renewable prices are not enough, and use-based taxes are the single best way to let individuals make their own decisions about what/how much to use.
Carbon credits are a good market-based solution too, but it seems likely that people and industries will try to game the system.
I don't think we will see significant change until people are dying by the millions, in first world countries.
If Japan is losing population to climate change, if the US is losing population to climate change, if the EU is losing population to climate change, THEN we will see change.
Deaths in Indonesia, middle East, Africa, South + Central America won't be enough to inspire change. The people who have the power won't act until they feel directly threatened.
Which is a good reason why we should be spending time researching what to do when that happens instead of only on prevention. The possibility of 100% prevention is _very_ small, we will need to deal with the ramifications.
It's very sad that reefs are dying, but it seems that their whole existence was very much tied to a very specific amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (about 265 ppm co2)
The scary thing is that these reefs are so incredibly diverse & their creation took millions of years. Millions of years to create and they can be globally destroyed in just 200 or so years.
It's also scary is to consider what else may be balanced just as precariously.
The Great Barrier Reef formed over the last 14,000 years since the last Ice Age rather than million years as you suggest. And while the vast colonies may die, and their calcareous skeletons may dissolve as the ocean acidifies, the polyps themselves will probably survive fine in different forms in other ecological niches. This will be no help for the diverse array of creatures that rely on the reefs, or associated fisheries and tourism industries however.
The rest of the ocean might be balanced precariously on how acid they are.
Slight increases make it impossible for some creatures to create shells. Those creatures are key parts of the food chain, which means that fisheries (already under sever pressure from over-fishing) risk total collapse.
> Under very high experimental CO2 conditions, the shells of clams, oysters, and some snails and urchins partially dissolved. But other species seemed as if they would not be harmed, and crustaceans, such as lobsters, crabs, and prawns, appeared to increase their shell-building (see interactive).
Personally, I really don't care about the disappearance of coral reefs specifically. I know that may seem heartless, and indifferent, but the emotion for them just isn't there. There is no rational argument that appeals to me, either, other than scientific study/research.
The entire discussion around coral reefs has been going on since I was young and can remember(at least 20-odd years). It was always emotional (think of the children level guilt-tripping, almost), and was always "assumed" and dictated. There was never any convincing, discussing; it was just the way it is and we as young children were to accept it.
And despite all of that, we as a society have spoken the other way around and gone ahead and potentially ruined the delicate environment required for these creatures. It's who a majority of us are. Perhaps not who we should be, or who we'd like to be, but this is largely of our doing and our inability to convince those in power and the rest of society to protect the things we value.
Individual reefs probably would not have survived. The polyps would have taken root elsewhere (probably closer to the equator in ice ages). The organisms have evolved over millions of years and are clearly hardy to drastic climate change. The issue is that the reefs themselves will certainly die and big, new ones won't form for thousands of years. So from our point of view, they're "extinct".
So true. Washington is too tainted by vested interests that seek to procrastinate shift. Time has literally run out. From here we are already in catch up mode.
It seems like a revolution is necessary to stop them from acting against humanity's long term existence for their short term financial gain.
Washington could be taken over by the Green party, ban fossil fuels, etc - and we'd still be in trouble due to China, et al with their increasing CO2 output.
Reminds me a bit of banning plastic bags in California to help the ocean. That's lovely, but given Asia dumps something like 150 times the amount plastics into the ocean, so is basically meaningless.
> banning plastic bags in California to help the ocean
They were banned because they don't decompose, so they end up all over the place. Not just in the ocean, but on the beach, in creeks, lakes, anywhere near a highway, etc. As an example local to Silicon Valley, Stevens Creek used to be completely clogged with plastic bags. It's gotten a lot better now.
Of course any wasteland or street is still littered with fast food plastic, plastic bottles and the excessive packaging found in most supermarkets.
We have slightly effective recycling schemes for a tiny proportion of what we use, and massive amounts of recycling end up shipped to the developing world to be dumped. Manufacturers of TVs, appliances, IoT toys and any thing else using plastics aren't required to own their debris at end of lifespan.
So, as is typical with modern politics, we've had a token gesture that affects the public but utterly avoids the real issue.
The oceans are doomed unless we grow up and own our debris as a species.
There's some research that the creation of paper bags, and those more permanent plastic bags, is just as harmful to the environment as plastic disposable bags.
gedy regardless we must lead by example. We have seen that guilt and public inertia can drive others to act. Being exemplary does have an impact.
China signed a climate deal with the US to limit emissions for the first time in 2014. In 2015 they and earlier this year they signed a global deal on climate also.
I read the book Guesstimation 2.0 by Lawrence Weinstein a few years ago, and it had this breakdown. This is not addressing any other fact than how much time people spend worrying about the wrong thing, thinking emotionally rather than rationally or mathematically:
"Paper or Plastic?
How many plastic bags does the US use in one year?
10 bags per grocery store trip x 2 trips per week x 52 weeks per year = 1000 bags per person per year.
300 x 10^6 people in the U.S. = 300 x 10^11 bags in the US per year.
Is this a lot? Compared to what?
A roll of bags weighs a few ounces so there are about 200 bags/lb
Your 10^3 bags weigh about 5 pounds.
The 500 gallons of gasoline you burned last year weighs 4000 pounds (2 tons).
Your 10^3 bags are irrelevant. (Just don’t litter)."
...Or use a re-usable bag ;)
I want to read "How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint Of Everything" by Mike Berners-Lee. It addresses similar disconnections on how we think about our impact on the climate, and the steps we take to try and do something. For example, people who bike everywhere, but eat foods shipped from all over the world over local produce.
The thing is, you can make this argument about any individual thing, and the goal is to lead into the (fallacious) conclusion "none of these things make a difference on their own, so the combination of them wouldn't make a difference either".
I commented meaning to address plastic pollution and its direct affect on the biosphere. China's pollution may destroy 98% of foo species, America's plastic may push foo to extinction.
I agree that focus are many times misdirected and ineffective, but that's no reason not to try.
The comment was not to negate the impact of plastic bags; it was to illustrate, and I think very much in line with the evidence, of how we misappropriate our attention. The suburban family who pauses at checkout to decide plastic or paper has good intentions, but misplaced intellect. They should be looking at the gas used to and from the store, imported food purchases vs. locally grown, and their own household for energy-efficiency. Yes, plastic, and paper for that matter, are a reasonable item on the list, but the others outweigh it by magnitudes, and the common person thinks 'paper or plastic?'.
One could say this about both sides of this issue. Clean tech has utilized an enormous amount of lobbying and been given substantial subsidies as a result - despite the lack of appreciable results.
Anything that is subsidized to the level that solar has been will grow until the subsidies end or are reduced. If pedal power were subsidized in this fashion, not only would the power-generating stationary bike industry explode, but American obesity rates would plummet - right up until the subsidy ended.
Solar would continue to grow if it were economically viable on its own. It's getting closer and I hope it gets there. But when I said "appreciable results" I meant the introduction of economically viable alternatives, absent subsidies.
What would the economic viability of oil look like without the massive subsidies the industry reeceives every year, including the construction of infrastructure that favors transportation predicated on cheap oil over everything else?
As long as you also increase taxes and have penalties in every country. Go to India, Hong Kong, Indonesia, China (The list could go on). The air is polluted with the stench of car exhaust pretty much every where you go. I even went to London a few months ago and got sick because of the pollution. When I would blow my nose at the end of the day, black nasty soot would be on the kleenix.
The US has done a lot to help out climate change and the environment. We have all kinds of EPA standards on our vehicles (that are actually followed), which have been in place for at least a decade or more. I can go to most major cities and not feel like I'm choking from the rancid air.
These taxes only end up strangling our economy because we follow the rules and other countries go un-checked because there is virtually no penalty.
"Carbon credits are a good market-based solution too, but it seems likely that people and industries will try to game the system."
Carbon credits are a joke. Huge companies pay for them and then just continue polluting. I thought the goal was to fix our environment, not make carbon credit companies wealthy. Money shouldn't give you a free pass to pollute.
Are we also going to tax electric vehicles because the batteries cause damage to the environment (and we don't have a good way to dispose of them yet)? How about the electricity used to charge the vehicle itself? Will that be taxed as well unless it's solar/wind/hydro?
Are we also going to tax electric vehicles because the batteries cause damage to the environment (and we don't have a good way to dispose of them yet)?
>At what point does this become so scary that something happens to increase the taxes on fossil fuels so that consumption will go down?
You're jumping to conclusions on the actual solution to the problem.
I suggest unpacking this problem a bit more. Given the time scales, and potential delay between addition of CO2 into the atmosphere and consequence, I imagine that we should also be thinking "How do we adjust to our new climate?". "Taxes, now" is short sighted.
Entirely up to if you'd like to understand it that way. The climate is guaranteed to change, whether by man's action or not. Let's treat it less like the act of a vengeful god, and more like a fact of life.
Shouldn't reefs just migrate north in the northern hemisphere, and southwards in the southern hemisphere?
I know this process can be quite slow, but on a long enough time frame it's conceivable there may be no net loss and possibly even a gain global reef acreage?
Yes this has happened repeatedly thru geological history. I live in Iowa, and its limestone rock is all coral. We're 100's of miles from any ocean today.
But coral is built to respond gradually over decades. It's never going to be able to migrate in time at this rate.
Regarding water temperature, there are two big changes when you move away from the equator:
1. Temperatures drop.
2. Temperature variability increases. (Seasons are more meaningful away from the equator.)
The second issue, of temperature variability, is a main problem that prevents reefs from migrating away from the equator in response to global warming. The corals can't tolerate a wide range of temperatures.
The other problem, as you say, is the time frame. Reefs are built up over thousands of years, and we are warming and acidifying the oceans over mere decades.
(And ocean acidification isn't helped at all by moving away from the equator.)
To answer your question: sure, 2000 years from now it's hard to predict total acreage, and it may well be higher (or lower). But there's little uncertainty that on the timescale of centuries, corals will be devastated, and that means really bad things for us and our children, to say nothing of the health of marine ecosystems.
From the article: "An estimated 30 million small-scale fishermen and women depend on reefs for their livelihoods, more than one million in the Philippines alone. In Indonesia, fish supported by the reefs provide the primary source of protein."
It's also inherently a problem that we're going to lose lots of plant and animal species that depend on the coral reefs, simply because those plants and animals are beautiful and we will have been responsible for their deaths.
"Well don't worry, we'll just get food from somewhere else" is not a real answer. At some point, life on a dead planet just isn't worth it anymore.
I think that's so shortsighted, it borders on being rude. It's the most direct impact it has on us, yes, but it's not just food availability for humans that's impacted.
We are looking at the devastation of an entire habitat. Many species that rely on that habitat may cease to exist. As a consequence, many species that eat animals from that habitat may disappear too.
Worst-case, we're faced with the disappearance of an entire food chain. And since many large ocean species travel the entire world, the consequences will not remain local.
I had understood Terry Hughes comments [1] to be that he _expects_ up to half the corals that bleach to die. Has their been follow up surveys already? The final mortality could be much worse, particularly among the ornate, fast growing species, but it will be tough to know for a little while yet.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-28/great-barrier-reef-cor...
Do yourself a disservice browse using Google Earth with satellite view turned on to any location and zoom out. See if you can spot what is left between the mono-culture farmlands.
We have already sterilised much of the earths surface.
It's sad how many apps are being written lately by "innovators" and "entrepreneurs" to try and monetize already existing free services that function perfectly. Where are the real innovators and scientists who will tackle the biggest threat humanity has ever faced? Is it only Musk and Cook and Bezos amongst us?
We need to stop writing apps to monetize what is already provided to consumers as free services and focus on the big issues of today.
We should use technology to solve the biggest problems. Our talent to code and design systems should be used in ways that move society further towards sustainability.
Climate change could ruin everything we have ever built. Everything we ever do in our lives including our families could fade forever if we don't act swiftly.
The people who want to solve life threatening problems will do so and the people who want to make "trivial" apps to make lots of money will do so.
Asking us to just do the former is pointless.
Also what about people who aren't entrepreneurs and work at industries like finance, law, and first country problems? Shouldn't they be held under the same scrutiny? What's so special about tech entrepreneurs that they'll should be more responsible? Knowing how to code Ruby and deploy in Docker is not the same skill set needed to come up with climate change solutions.
The problem is to get started we need more scientists. And academia and education right now right now is so horribly broken with perverse anti-incentives that no young person in their right mind will want to pursue a career in research - they'll go code Ruby instead because they have loans to pay and want a roof over their head.
We also want more engineers and other specialists in government - but decades of bureaucratic creep and managerialism on the one hand and neoliberal-driven cost cutting and privatisation on the other have made government, like academia, very unattractive to young smart people.
So it's not a question of people already in finance, law or tech startups switching over to fighting climate change - as you said, they aren't in the same skill set. We need to train the next generation to fight climate change across a number of fronts - climate study, geoengineering, energy, transport, flood defense, food production and so on. And right now all the incentives are pushing that generation in entirely the wrong direction.
I had not considered that every time a person complains about duplication of apps, or developers that make trivial apps for money (instead of 'changing the world'), the same standard should be applied to the tens of millions of service and industrial jobs that are mostly clones of each other and could be considered trivial by the same standard.
For example: we really need to do something about all of these people working at Costco, trying to make their car and rent payments. It's ridiculous, the duplication of labor going on, where people aren't doing anything original.
That would be considered a cruel, borderline malevolent statement. And following through on it would result in a hundred million people being unemployed. Somehow the standard changes when a person is mostly seeking to earn a living off of an app however.
Are you proposing that we should intentionally keep around duplicate labor?
Duplication of work is a cardinal sin of technology and automation. Millions of jobs have already been destroyed by software, and the rate of obsoletion is only growing. A few thousand LoC and a couple racks of hardware can destroy tens of thousands of jobs. That's why software companies are highly valued. Aggregated across the entire industry and we've replaced millions of jobs already... Hopefully we'll see that number hit tens of millions within a couple decades.
Apps... most apps are frivolous, bordering toys. They add value like a hot dog vendor adds value to a baseball game. Why would app creators be treated any differently?
I can't tell what you mean by your reference to Musk, but if you're criticizing him for this in particular, you're pretty off base. He's (successfully) innovating in a broken system, and what he's doing will benefit any future evolutions of our current system.
Or is it that there aren't enough Musks? If so, sure, but there are plenty of really smart, really hardworking engineers helping implement his vision.
The philosopher Slavoj Zizek often re-tells this joke:
> There is an (apocryphal, for sure) anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian army headquarters in the middle of the First World War: the Germans sent the message "Here, on our part of the front, the situation is serious, but not catastrophic," to which the Austrians replied "Here, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious."
His point is that this is the situation we find ourselves in today: ecologically and socially, the world is falling apart. We can see the catastrophe coming but we don't take it seriously.
As much as I share your sentiment any catastrophe will almost certainly be dismissed as natural or, my personal favourite "act of God". And the massive loss of innocent species and their worlds is too high a price to pay for that education.
Also, it bears noting that these facts have been well understood for some time now. Its simply being ignored because it is inconvenient. Its a great pity that catastrophe is needed to force the masses to force the powers that be to affect change, all the while those powers were very much aware of the coming crisis. How could they not be ?
We have to recognize at that point that the human as a whole is still incapable of dealing with this. Either too busy trying to live (sorry for third world people) or too self centered to not think about short term profits. As for loss of biodiversity, nature doesn't care and if we managed to tilt a planet's climate to the point of wiping half of our own selves from it.. then good for the planet.
I try to understand people, and your despair is loud and clear here. Change is inevitable for sure, man or nature (man is nature, BTW). The sun will devour the inner planets in 4 billion years, but it is burning brighter each year, and in 1 billion years, it will boil off the oceans, coral and all. To the stars if we wish to preserve humankind.
There is a lot of complaining that nothing is being done. There should be some basic steps aside from accepting your problem to begin with, and that is to study some solutions:
#1. Propose and study solutions to match your conclusions of climate change - I don't find too much here compared with the amount of continuing studies on the climate.
And very important to get intellect to act -
#2. Who's going to pay for it, and on whose back falls the labor to implement #1?
Financial illiteracy is the big problem nobody talks about when discussing STEM deficiencies. You may need to build a skyscraper, but if you have 2 guys, 100 bucks and 1 day, you are going to be living in a lean-to, or a makeshift tent at the end of the day, no matter how much you complain or dream. I try and do my best to live minimally, because I prefer it, it makes me feel more peaceful and less distracted, and gives me plenty of time to read and think. I don't preach that all should live my way.
On a more cheerful note, I found a Tweet today about Sweet Meteor of Death, but it was in reaction to people's political apathy or neuroses over the coming U.S. elections. An apocolyptic meteor for POTUS 2016! You should buy the tee shirt and smile!
If we have the power to traverse interstellar space en masse, we are probably bordering on the necessary Type 2 civilization to move the Earth away from the Sun over the billions of years it will take to first boil the oceans and then eat the planet.
Its asymptotic to your point, but practically - assuming we don't destroy ourselves this century - we will spend a lot of resources when we are a trans-universal space-faring race to preserve the Earth in the same way we spend time preserving historical art and architecture.
Yes, you need to survive today to see tomorrow, that's true. Two reads that border on fringe speculation that I happened to enjoy thoroughly were:
The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead by Frank J. Tipler, and The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil.
Now, I am an atheist, and I fully know the zaniness of Kipler's Omega Point and its ties to Christianity, but there are discussions in there like in Kurzweil's book about how we will expand throughout the cosmos all based on hard science. It only gets trippy in some places. Still more fun to read than junk fiction.
I do believe that we are in the period of 'accelerating returns', and that things will come sooner than we think with space mining, colonization and humans spreading throughout the universe. And, yes, we will try to preserve the Earth in the process, but moving it, performing climate engineering on it, etc... will probably fall by the wayside when we are living on other worlds. It's artifacts and history will be preserved I believe. I don't think we will recreate it per Tipler due to having mastery of information, his 'resurrection' discussion which involves everything, not just people! Fun stuff.
At some stage, people may welcome a man-made catastrophe, such as a nuclear holocaust that removes a percentage of humanity such that the remaining percentage may survive.
(I live in the southern hemisphere, so for selfish reasons I'd prefer this apocalypse to take place in the northern hemisphere).
Just critiqued someone's short story recently which had an A.I. deciding to do exactly that. Nuke most of mankind to save it, so a small percentage of it would survive and wouldn't be totally fucked by things like climate change.
Where I live, in the summer seasons, fireflies would would scatter the night sky, and in such plentiful numbers that I had never thought I would stop seeing them in just a couple of years. Only in a matter of 12 years, the fireflies have vanished from my area. Last 1-2 years I have not seen a single one.
When discussing environmental stuff, often activists will say that I "deny climate change". I understand what they mean (that I don't believe the risk of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is grave enough to demand government intervention) but I still have to point out that we live on a rocky planet in space, where everything including the climate constantly changes.
You might be alarmed by a very specific change like this one, and you might want to do everything possible to stop it. That's completely understandable and I wish you success in your advocacy. But the way I see it, change is perhaps the only constant feature of our world, and change absolutely is going to mean death of a bunch of coral sometimes. Go far enough with the rhetoric and it sounds like an argument that the climate shouldn't change, which is futile.
I hope the mainstream environmentalism will someday "grow up" to a point where people understand that change is inevitable, and that as long as we exist we actively participate in the change. Then rather than setting arbitrary "natural" criteria and bemoaning corruption like depressed Platonists, and rather than starting witch hunts after people, we can focus on how that change should be planned for and what actually can or should be done to manage it.
If you want to wallow in ignorance about how and why "the climate constantly changes" and what that means for our civilization, that is your prerogative.
But don't expect to be treated with respect.
You're making a pitiful excuse to dismiss trends that threaten trillions of dollars of inherited infrastructure investment that is at risk of being made useless, and that threaten the comfort and safety of billions of people.
> trends that ... threaten the comfort and safety of billions of people
Again I don't agree that the threat indicated by these trends is as grave as you claim. I agree there is strong evidence of a grave threat to this coral ecosystem, and Australian coastal tourism.
We're talking about the need to relocate entire cities at this point. Those bleached corals don't just close shipping lanes near Queensland. They protect islands comprising entire nation states that now have to relocate. In the Pacific atolls, entire islands have had to give up conventional agriculture because of sea water intrusion.
It takes willful blindness to "not agree" at this point.
"At least some of the activism is motivated by fear, when people notice this or that smaller problem, get very scared by warnings of much bigger problems to come, and make the not-completely-rational choice to give up freedom for the promise of safety. "
And just what "freedoms" are we talking about here?
Please elaborate so we can mock your argument a little more thoroughly.
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The freedom to drill an oil well on land you own, for example.
And by the way, I'm very used to "not being treated with respect" from the opposition on this topic. Usually they aren't so eager to keep mentioning it, though. What's the deal?
I see nothing wrong with drilling an oil well on your own land. Where we have a problem is when you start spreading that oil, or stuff derived from it, in my air and water. For reasons I don't understand, the "property rights and personal freedom" crowd usually (though certainly not always) thinks the freedom to pollute outweighs the freedom not to have your property polluted.
> I see nothing wrong with drilling an oil well on your own land.
Yet drilling an oil well is currently illegal on a lot of private land in the US.
> Where we have a problem is when you start spreading that oil, or stuff derived from it, in my air and water.
Air and water pollution are regulated separately by another group. I don't have any problem with this kind of regulation unless it gets out of hand (classifying CO2 as pollution for example).
Because we do it every time we exhale. Criminalizing breathing (or any policy that could be interpreted as such in the future) is way beyond "out of hand", it's the lowest form of fascist garbage I've ever seen during my time in America.
In this country, you can't do that without a drilling permit, because of several concerns:
1. Soil subsidence.
2. The well casing can break, causing migration of oil, gas, and other pollutants to neighboring wells.
3. You over-pumping your well, drawing oil from under neighboring lands.
4. Releases of gas and natural gas liquids into the air.
So now if instead of having to comply with intense drilling regulation about drilling, owing to the rights of other citizens, you are told not to drill at all, this makes our country an authoritarian tyranny?
Can you try offering an argument that passes the giggle test?
You acknowledge that in NY land owners were previously allowed to obtain a drilling permit after following the proper procedure, and this freedom has been taken away?
The freedom to drill wells both for fossil fuels and for water is regulated for legitimate reasons, and can sometimes be taken away when new concerns arise. (E.g. fracking fluid mishandling incidents, bad well casings, earthquakes, et cetera.)
Again, try to explain why this turns our country into an authoritarian hellhole, and try to do it in a fashion that passes the giggle test.
The answer you're leading toward is "something akin to apocalypse", and I get it, it's scary.
On the other hand have you really taken enough time to consider the consequences if your faction is wrong? Have you acknowledged that there could be bad consequences in that case too?
Typically I hear "we would be taking better care of the environment anyway so win-win" but nobody ever adds "by granting loads of new power to governments and big institutions, which may or may not be corrupted just as big and powerful institutions have been corrupted throughout history" and that is a significant detail!
Out of curiosity, I'm interested to know which of the following descriptions you consider more accurate:
a) The climate/environment situation is exactly as bad as the mainstream warnings indicate. The only hope at this point is if we can start a large long-term centrally planned project to administer the solution as decided by the most prominent or respected thinkers.
a) The climate/environment situation is not as dire as mainstream warnings indicate. At least some of the activism is motivated by fear, when people notice this or that smaller problem, get very scared by warnings of much bigger problems to come, and make the not-completely-rational choice to give up freedom for the promise of safety.
I wouldn't characterize the situation in either of those ways.
I think we could all agree that non-renewable energy sources will run out at some point. Hence the name :). Or, to be more precise, the extraction of non-renewables will cost more than their utility.
So, at some point we have to transition: first to a mix, and eventually to renewables only.
I would venture that we could also agree that those who make their money from non-renewables have an interest in delaying this transition as long as possible. That's what I would do. So, there will need to be some sort of agreement to transition, and incentives to do so.
This doesn't necessarily need to be a "large long-term centrally planned project to administer the solution as decided by the most prominent or respected thinkers" - you can use economic incentives to leverage the market to do so. Well, you can in one country at a time fairly easily, but globally - it's tricky.
If (as it seems) use of non-renewables is also a cumulative pollutant and could cause large costs to society globally, then the smart thing to do would be to accelerate this process. This doesn't mean giving up "freedom for the promise of safety" - it means, again, using economic incentives, but balanced against the costs. This already happens, all the time. We aren't giving up freedoms. In my opinion, anyway. We don't need to give governments loads of new power. We need to agree this is what we want and instruct our governments to do it. They already tax, rebate, and subsidize many things (e.g corn crops).
The difficulty is the tragedy of the commons - and that's what all the arguments are about. Lots of countries, lots of different incentives, different histories, etc.
OK, first of all I appreciate the thoughtful response.
I agree that the necessary transition from scarce hydrocarbons to something else, whenever that happens, is not likely to be totally pain-free. One of the traditional problems with markets is the turbulence that happens around these big paradigm shifts. America is in the middle of one right now as we transition to an information-based economy.
I don't agree that the existing players in the hydrocarbon market have the ability to delay the change in the way that you're implying. In other words, resource availability is not a stepwise function that can just go from "available" to "not available" overnight. Rare things gradually get more expensive, investment is gradually shifted into alternatives, and this is basically guaranteed to happen with oil as long as there is not a perfect monopoly or perfect collusion.
Also I'm skeptical that the economic policies you're suggesting won't lead to giving up freedoms. In practice freedoms do get taken away very often when institutions obtain the power to do so (e.g. the regulatory blockade on nuclear power, the ratcheting emissions rules for automobiles that will make a legal gasoline-powered car physically impossible in the near future, the outright ban on fracking in NY). I think this has a good chance of happening even if the initial plan is just to influence the market. A possible scenario: Some bad idea is encouraged for whatever reason by policy makers, and the economic policy isn't able to overcome the fact that it is a bad idea, so the decision makers cling to the sunk cost and pile on more regulations, until they start taking away freedoms.
For the record I'm not a big fan of the current agricultural policies we have in general, even though I do think imposing a tariff or offering an incentive is infinitely preferable to a ban.
Well, just to be clear: I believe that in the same way my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose, my freedom to pollute ends at the boundary of my property. There are still a lot of externalities that are not born by those that incur them or profit from them. This is a market inefficiency. History has shown that there are plenty of people who are willing to profit in the short term and ignore such externalities, and who will fight hard to avoid paying for any large scale pollution problems. There are many examples.
That is why it is necessary to put the burden of proof on the industry. That's why I see regulation as being a necessary evil. That is why a ban on fracking in NY is fine (in my opinion) - in the big picture, it shouldn't matter. If fracking is OK, time will tell and the ban will be removed. The gas can only be removed once, so who cares when? The companies are big enough to focus elsewhere in the meantime.
In the US, the Citizens United vs FEC case ensured that much money can be spent on influencing the government. Much more money has been spent by the fossil fuel lobby than the renewables lobby - they have more money to spend. I don't doubt for a second that they are slowing down the shift to renewables as much as they can. It's happening right now, and it is real. This is normal, and expected, and according to the rules. I don't expect them to act outside their own significant interests. However, I think that it is not in the best long-term interests of humanity and I am willing to tolerate some ineptitude and over-regulation to shift the balance.
Nobody is suggesting that it's either necessary or possible for the climate to never change at all, even slightly. The point being made is that climate change of too large a magnitude, occurring too quickly, is damaging, potentially even catastrophic, so we need to mitigate the change in order to mitigate the damage.
Imagine the startup, who don't have customers yet and just gives up (because what's point, they will not come). The more traction they have, the more snowballish it become.
How regular people can help?
1) Try to use renewable materials around you (bags, not plastic bags, use the fabric)
2) Sort the garbage (don't know about US), but in Europe this is real thing (organic, general, electronics, etc)
3) Try to limit the car or any fossil fuel usage in your household.
3.1) Don't have 1 car per each family member
4) Don't buy and throw away clothes too often, if you do, return to second hand
5) Use energy saver functions at it's max
6) Stop searching for someone to blame and "Just DO IT!" (c) Shia
How IT people can help?
1) Write less energy consumption programs and servers, they eat too much now
2) Move toward real innovations in "green" tech, not the pseudo ones to collect money and bail
Samsung once done the big screen phone, how the iPhone users called them? "Shovel" phones / users. Then came this "innovative" Apple iPhone with the same big screen and it suddenly became "mainstream". Don't be afraid to be first in something good, especially if this is a future of your planet.
Don't expect that someone will make this problems "go away" or people fly away from here. Humans managed to make orbit a trash can too, so we don't go anywhere in far future.