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Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

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Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#71

Post by js2 »

pathseeker wrote: post #48
ridicter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _is_ a political issue. The technology already exists--courtesy of the scientists/engineers of course. Whether that technology is deployed is a problem of politics. For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclea…

>This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them. You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or Indi…

Of course it will help. It's progress. Besides that, why won't the solutions which enable the US to go to zero emissions work as well for other countries? Because those countries can't afford those solutions? Well then the rest of us are going to have to figure that out too.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#72

Post by tekstar »

pathseeker wrote: post #48
ridicter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _is_ a political issue. The technology already exists--courtesy of the scientists/engineers of course. Whether that technology is deployed is a problem of politics. For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclea…

>This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them. You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or Indi…

This is a problem that has no single, simple solution. If every possible solution is shot down because it doesn't solve ALL the problems at once then we will never succeed.

We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#73

Post by rayiner »

the_gastropod wrote: post #65
pathseeker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them. You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or Indi…

Perfect is the enemy of good. Of course we can't instantly solve global carbon emissions. But we can do our (very large) part here in the U.S. By shifting where our dollars go. By moving from carbon to renewable sources, we'll drop the price of renewables, helping small economies afford to do the same. Progress is virtually always incremental. We need to begin by stopping dragging our feet.

That’s like saying we should try to bail out the boat with spoons because “progress is incremental.” It’s not only pointless, but actively dangerous, because it’s a distraction.

The “Green New Deal” is a great example. A jobs program obviously won’t do anything to seriously address climate change. Worse, it wastes money and political capital on things that could have more utility. If you spent that money on nuclear energy research and gave it away to developing nations, then you could really move the needle.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#74

Post by rayiner »

gdubs wrote: post #68
rayiner wrote: post #3

Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, m…

The United States is enormously influential throughout the world. We have the highest per capita emissions. If we make changes, it has ripple effects across the globe. We define what it means to live a wealthy, “middle class” lifestyle. Also, Nigeria and just about the rest of the world is part of the Paris accord, the US is not. China is poised to enact carbon taxes on a significant chunk of global emissions... We m…

> Two decades ago we could have solved the problem at a relatively low cost compared to what we’ll pay now, or what we’ll pay if we do nothing. Every year it gets more expensive.

This is utterly false. Two decades ago we could have solved the problem if economic growth in the rest of the world stopped. (And maybe not even then.) It was never a solution.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#75

Post by spaginal »

fallingfrog wrote: post #56
bregma wrote: post #39

I was alive in the 1970s when folks like the Club of Rome declared we'll all be dead form overpopulation and Malthusian collapse by the year 2000. Those self-same folks told us this century the arctic will be completely ice free by 2013. In the 1980s, others predicted our total demise due to acid rain and ozone depletion. Mean time, people are making good progress on both feeding the masses and curbing the exponentia…

Except the people predicting climate change isn’t the club of Rome, it’s an entire scientific community, who have been double, triple, and quadruple checking every measurement and assumption for 50 years. This is not some hysterical group of panicked hippies. We’re talking about broad consensus among all the most educated and intelligent members of our civilization. Please show a little respect and listen to them.

You are missing the fact that the salesmen of climate change have been politicians, and politicians lie, and politicians propose political solutions, they want more and more of my limited money, and browbeat people who already don’t like or trust them, and frankly that is a bad combination of tactics if the solution is needed that badly across the broad spectrum of the population.

If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don’t trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn’t get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.

Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn’t work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#76

Post by TeMPOraL »

tekstar wrote: post #72
pathseeker wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them. You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or Indi…

This is a problem that has no single, simple solution. If every possible solution is shot down because it doesn't solve ALL the problems at once then we will never succeed. We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.

> We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.

And then donate some of the tech and resources, too. By virtue of being first, we've cut out the developing nations from the most direct path to improving their living conditions. We do, IMO, have a responsibility to help them leapfrog the "fossil fuel" part of that path.

(Though honestly, we can revisit that point later. First, let's get to zero emissions ourselves.)

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#77

Post by gdubs »

rayiner wrote: post #74
gdubs wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States is enormously influential throughout the world. We have the highest per capita emissions. If we make changes, it has ripple effects across the globe. We define what it means to live a wealthy, “middle class” lifestyle. Also, Nigeria and just about the rest of the world is part of the Paris accord, the US is not. China is poised to enact carbon taxes on a significant chunk of global emissions... We m…

> Two decades ago we could have solved the problem at a relatively low cost compared to what we’ll pay now, or what we’ll pay if we do nothing. Every year it gets more expensive. This is utterly false. Two decades ago we could have solved the problem if economic growth in the rest of the world stopped. (And maybe not even then.) It was never a solution.

A carbon tax is a viable solution. Last year’s Nobel winner in economics believes that even today, if a carbon tax were implemented we would be, paraphrasing, “stunned at how quickly the world would change”. Had we implemented a carbon tax two decades ago, enforced through global trade agreements, we could have started slow and ratcheted up over time.

We need to move beyond the scare tactic that it’s a choice between the economy and solving climate change. We already solved this on a small scale with the ozone layer.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#78

Post by PeterisP »

WilliamEdward wrote: post #21

What are the implications of 'irreversible'? Practically irreversible? Cannot be reversed naturally? If we run out of ice, what's to say cooling down the planet by halting carbon production won't recreate the ice caps?

The implications of 'irreversible' are that it's going to become much more difficult to reverse in the "short term" (less than hundreds of years) as after the various tipping points reversing would involve not only to cancel/compensate for our emissions, but also to overcome the much larger positive feedback loops e.g. methane released by melting permafrost, increased solar absorbtion/heating after the reflective icecaps melt, etc.

It's not technically irreversible, however, the point is that however expensive and difficult prevention might seem, reversing it after the temperature increase is going to be much, much more expensive and difficult. And our capacity to do stuff is going to decrease as we suffer from the consequences - e.g. population reduction, conflicts, etc.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#79

Post by wolfgke »

js2 wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #3

Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, m…

I don’t know what to make of your comment. One of the politicians during yesterday’s CNN climate change debate said the following: "No individual can be expected singlehandedly to solve this problem. It's going to require national action. And by the way -- this is why we invented government. It's for dealing with issues that are too big for each of us to do on our own." This is a humanity scale problem and government…

> Scientists and engineers put us on the moon, but it was government that directed and enabled them to do so.

Rather: the government was arguably the only institution that could spend a sufficient amount of money for this mission. If there had existed another insitution with similar financial backing that was willing to finance such a mission: I doubt that the government would have been necessary.

Re: Did Setting a Timeline Doom the Fight Against Global Warming?

#80

Post by mLuby »

js2 wrote: post #60
rayiner wrote: post #3

Climate change was never going to be reversible with behavioral measures. Even if everyone had followed the Kyoto protocol to the letter starting in 1992 that wasn’t going to avert climate change, because nobody contemplated how quickly China and India would develop. There is no calculus where you can significantly limit climate change through behavioral measures that also allow the third world to have comfortable, m…

I don’t know what to make of your comment. One of the politicians during yesterday’s CNN climate change debate said the following: "No individual can be expected singlehandedly to solve this problem. It's going to require national action. And by the way -- this is why we invented government. It's for dealing with issues that are too big for each of us to do on our own." This is a humanity scale problem and government…

I think they meant government-directed (mega-)engineering projects will solve this, not individual efforts. When the US wanted to get to the moon, its government created and funded a huge engineering program (Apollo) but the most individuals could do was pay their taxes and support the program—no amount of individual-scale collective action would ever put astronauts on the moon.
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