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U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

scientificamerican.com

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Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#51

Post by toomuchtodo »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #45
toomuchtodo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarboniz…

The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly. Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you. Holding down people's standards of living makes thei…

You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#52

Post by giantg2 »

legulere wrote: post #2

So much opportunity wasted considering China would do more if the US also did more.

I highly doubt that. As others have said, China has no plans to reduce pollution until 2030 (negotiated at the accord) and is currently increasing their polluting infrastructure.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#53

Post by mytailorisrich »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #35
roenxi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics. If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.

The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarboniz…

Aggressive population control should be given high priority, yet declining population growth and fertility rates are always depicted as negatives in Western countries. In Europe many countries still have incentives to boost fertility.

It's high time we give up on the fantasy of an ever growing population as a ponzi scheme to boost the economy and finance public spending. We need to face the reality that we ought to have at the very least a stable population and reorganise society accordingly.

In relation to developing countries, any healthcare-related aid should be conditional to implementation of birth control policies.

Globally we really should have a target to reduce population by a few billions if we want to all enjoy life in comfort (~Western country level) on a thriving planet.

Edit: Judging by the reactions, the penny has not dropped yet for some... Hopefully it will before it's too late.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#54

Post by ForHackernews »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #45
toomuchtodo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarboniz…

The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly. Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you. Holding down people's standards of living makes thei…

We can also just have fewer people: If you lower infant mortality, educate women and give them access to family planning, all evidence suggests they will choose to have fewer children.

It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#55

Post by treypitt »

__jf__ wrote: post #29

Meanwhile, awareness/disclosure of climate risk is rising sharply in large publicly traded companies, measured by counting the percentage of companies reporting "climate risk" in their 2019 annual reports: - 26% of companies in EU - 9% of companies in APAC - 7% of companies in US Still a long way to go obviously, but these numbers have doubled compared to fiscal 2017.

Wow. Rising sharply, from what, 0%? Assuming the size of the US public markets is the largest in the world, and that we needed to take action decades ago to prevent climate change's worst effects, these statistics place the blame squarely on large corporations

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#56

Post by mkoubaa »

originalvichy wrote: post #3

As a European this is the main fear I have during this election. 4 more years of inaction from the government of one of the biggest polluters in the world will really bite us in the ass. Not that I’m super proud of how we are doing in my country, but it can’t get worse.

Oh it certainly can get worse

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#57

Post by nahuel0x »

corty wrote: post #30
paganel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people still say Malthus was wrong. At least some of them have woken up to the realisation that exporting your pollution/nasty stuff to other parts of the world doesn't really solve all that much, but even so, they're still a minority, the great majority still believes in silver bullets like recycling, "clean tech" etc.

The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.

"natural self-regulation"... of human population, in the best case. But before we will extinguish all the biodiversity left. Future generations will see us as the stupid ones, killing the richness of the planet created after eons of evolution.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#58

Post by Ensorceled »

paulgb wrote: post #22
tootie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was barely debated. We can't even get half the country to care about a disaster that's unfolding in their faces.

The frustrating thing about the handling of COVID is watching the climate change story play out at lightning speed. Deny the problem exists, politicize the science, eventually admit the problem but say there's nothing we can do about it, etc.

It's almost like there is a playbook for this that just gets applied to things like asbestos, cigarettes, lead gasoline, DDT, sugar, climate change, COVID ...

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#59

Post by hengheng »

perfunctory wrote: post #36
corty wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The silver bullet is natural self-regulation. Mankind will shrink automatically after hitting a real ceiling.

I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage. This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.

Not GP but I do say the same, and yes it will be uglier than the first half of the 20th century. The fight for food will be very real and it takes away confidence from my family planning.

Re: U.S. Exits Paris Climate Accord

#60

Post by giantg2 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #48
sethammons wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What gives you that belief?

They have linked economies. What China makes for US they also use a version of that internally. So if US goes all electric car, China would follow suit, etc.

So Tesla is being built in China? That's not what I've heard. In fact Tesla has shipped cars to China. Just look at the recent recall. China has their own versions of electric cars (see NIO as an example).
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