> will be required to avoid 800 million climate refugees "to handle" or "to mitigate" it's way to late for "to avoid"
I get a feeling it'll be "handled" in the same manner that it's "handled" in Cyberpunk 2077 if that's the scale that we're talking about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UamAMzVT4YA
The one plausible thing I found in Ministry for the Future was a country in a large scale heat crisis, India, putting a lot more pollution in the air to short term delay the warming trend over India.
And just on cue there it is: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Capitalism”, variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher (amongst others).
Because communist countries don’t pollute?
If someone says "end of capitalism" and this is assumed to be "about communist countries", because it's binary, what else is there? Then this is precisely the dangerous failure of imagination being pointed to.
The World Meteorological Organization estimates that in the 50 years from 1970 to 2019, deaths from climate dropped to one-third[0]. That's not one-third the rate; that's one-third of the absolute number of deaths, even as the world population more than doubled in that time period and atmospheric CO2 went from ~325ppm to ~410ppm. In my opinion, this reduction in deaths is mostly due to the increasing ability of the d…
All it takes is one wet bulb event in a city near the equator. The deaths will be among those that can’t access climate control powered by cheap fossil fuels.
And I'd happily bet that even with extra wet bulb events, death rate will be lower and life expectancy higher at the equator. And I would assign a .0001% chance of a single wet bulb event killing millions of people.
> Two main factors are at play in driving temperatures to such extremes: their inexorable increase from burning fossil fuels and an El Niño event that is shaping up to be a strong one. It would be quite educational to attribute in more detail the impact of these two factors. The degree of "El Nino" influence is presumably known, and if its strength is not related with global warming in complicated and unknown ways it…
The debate over exact causes has always felt misguided to me. The planet is extremely complex, human impact on the planet is largely based on estimates and modeling, and at the end of the day an understanding of why it's getting hotter isn't itself a course correction. There are such obvious first steps we could take without a complete understanding of cause if we really cared. We could easily cut our use of fossil f…
Some of your proposed first steps are hardly obvious. Food transport is highly efficient and constitutes only a tiny fraction of CO2 emissions. Eating locally isn't going to help; it might even have the opposite effect in some places. Same for clothing.
In urban or suburban housing people don't have enough space or direct sunlight to grow a useful amount of food.
And just on cue there it is: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of Capitalism”, variously attributed to Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher (amongst others).
Because communist countries don’t pollute?
It’s not an observation about communism-vs-capitalism (or at least that’s not how I understand it): it’s about how we’re collectively as a society so fixated upon the inevitability of property rights and capitalism and return on investment and the primacy of profit that we cannot contemplate that we may need to abandon all these precepts in order to avert climatic disaster (or some other existential threat).
Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. The winning argument is to show how you can consume more energy for less money by using sustainable technology. Cramped trains will rarely win politically but electric cars that go fast and look cool do win. In essence I believe the only politically viable way to reduce carbon is to engineer and tech our way to systems that…
This sounds like the argument someone in massive credit card debt would give when told to cut their spending. Sure I hope there are ways to solve climate change without lowering standard of living, but if there aren't we still have to do it or our standard of living is going to get lowered from the consequences of our civilizations actions.
I think the point is that we are not that civilized. If the stakes are as high as many claim, we would be waging war to stop climate emissions. Of course, we won't do that. And if we did, many more would wage war to continue emitting (and emit in the process). This is a one-way train unless and until there's a lower-cost, low emissions solution. Humans are humans, and politics are politics. The stakes are too high to "altruism" our way out.
> Asking people to have less, experience less, and do less isn’t an argument that can ever win. Asking people to eat less might never win... But when there is a famine, people have no choice but to eat less. It's not that there is no food available in a famine - it's just that prices go sky high. Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 em…
>Tomorrow the government could shut down the oil wells and say "nobody may emit any CO2 unless they pay $1000/ton of CO2 emitted.". And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do. It shouldn't stop us from trying to increase efficiency, but panic and insane ideas of the sort of "no one can emit a ton of CO2…
> And it would not change anything at planet scale, because on the other side of the world China is going to "pick up any slack" of CO2 generation we may not do.
Even if that was true in the short term (and reducing global supply by shutting down oil wells makes ir unlikely) the relative incentive for alternatives created here would lead to global improvements over the medium and longer term.
(That said, the time to apply solutions with medium-to-longer term payoff was 50 years ago.)
It’s not an observation about communism-vs-capitalism (or at least that’s not how I understand it): it’s about how we’re collectively as a society so fixated upon the inevitability of property rights and capitalism and return on investment and the primacy of profit that we cannot contemplate that we may need to abandon all these precepts in order to avert climatic disaster (or some other existential threat).
What exactly are you proposing as an alternative? So far everything else that we have tried has quickly devolved into famine and genocide.
We do need to urgently discuss the role of the first world towards massive third world calamities. I'm a global warming believer, but I'm starting to question whether the planet warming won't actually be posivite for a lot of first world economies. More solar power, less money spent on heating, less dependent on foreign resources etc etc etc. Meanwhile, poor countries will take the brunt of the disasters due to geogr…
> More solar power Aren't solar cells led efficient at higher temperatures? But the rest of your point does stand. Europe is pretty far north, as is Russia and Canada and even the northern parts of the US.
That's batteries that behave that way, not solar cells.