Corruption or stupidity? Whichever it is, this quote will be great material for cockroach Herodotus when he’s writing a couple of million years from now on the decline of human civilization in the 21st century:
“He said the government would not change policy ‘just because somebody might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow and everything that we should do’”
To be fair, we are not going to switch from coal overnight. That is a stupid attitude by the Australian official, though. We can only blame our collective selves for the dumb people we elect.
It is infuriating to me that we have the technology to capture sun energy and we barely use it. I think of my own EV and think I should be able to spend a few thousand and put up solar panels on my roof and store that energy into some kind of charging unit, and then in turn use it to charge my EV. My car should be running some percentage of the time on sunlight. Even if you got 20 miles a day from sunlight energy, think how great that would be for urban owners of EVs.
Not that anyone here needs to be beaten over the head with how dire things are, but this is just … shocking with how bad this is going to get. (The IPCC report didn’t even make a blip in the news cycle, that’s how fucked up everything is right now.)
At two degrees, the melting of the Arctic ice sheets will pass a tipping point of collapse, flooding dozens of the world’s major cities this century — and threatening, over many centuries, to elevate sea level as much as 200 feet. At that amount of warming, it is estimated, global GDP, per capita, will be cut by 13 percent. Four hundred million more people will suffer from water scarcity, and even in the northern latitudes heat waves will kill thousands each summer. It will be worse in the planet’s equatorial band. In India, where many cities now numbering in the many millions would become unliveably hot, there would be 32 times as many extreme heat waves, each lasting five times as long and exposing, in total, 93 times more people. This is two degrees — practically speaking, our absolute best-case climate scenario.
At three degrees, southern Europe will be in permanent drought. The average drought in Central America would last 19 months and in the Caribbean 21 months. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months — five years. The areas burned each year by wildfires would double in the Mediterranean and sextuple in the United States. Beyond the sea-level rise, which will already be swallowing cities from Miami Beach to Jakarta, damages just from river flooding will grow 30-fold in Bangladesh, 20-fold in India, and as much as 60-fold in the U.K. This is three degrees — better than we’d do if all the nations of the world honored their Paris commitments, which none of them are. Practically speaking, barring those dramatic tech deus ex machinas, this seems to me about as positive a realistic outcome as it is rational to expect.
At four degrees, there would be eight million cases of dengue fever each year in Latin America alone. Global grain yields could fall by as much as 50 percent, producing annual or close-to-annual food crises. The global economy would be more than 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change, and we would see at least half again as much conflict and warfare as we do today. Possibly more. Our current trajectory, remember, takes us higher still, and while there are many reasons to think we will bend that curve soon — the plummeting cost of renewable energy, the growing global consensus about phasing out coal — it is worth remembering that, whatever you may have heard about the green revolution and the price of solar, at present, global carbon emissions are still growing.
None of the above is news — most of that data is drawn from this single, conventional-wisdom fact sheet. In fact, nothing in the IPCC report is news, either; not to the scientific community or to climate activists or even to anyone who’s been a close reader of new research about warming over the last few years
I’ll freak out when the climate scientists all stop having children.
(Has this happened?)
Worst case scenario, our last scientific achievement will be solving Fermi’s paradox.
Ouch.
Home ownership is going down too. And renters often pay the utility companies.
But which humans are the ones to die? Surely not the good people backing the non-renewables industry. (Okay, there may be some morons who just are unlucky.)
It should be noted, right wing parties winning now in Canada’s provincial elections are afaik coming out against their carbon tax, and I think the carbon tax brought down Australia’s Labor party (the Murdoch influence is strong there. The efficacy of right wing messaging - often aided and abetted by a pliant MSM - never ceases to confound me.)
When I talk to people about how to design a carbon price, I think the model is British Columbia. You raise electricity prices by $100 a year, but then the government gives back a dividend that lowers internet prices by $100 year. In real terms, you’re raising the price of carbon goods but lowering the prices of non-carbon-intensive goods.
That’s the model of how something like this might work. It would have the right economic effects but politically not be so toxic. The one in British Columbia is not only well designed but has been politically successful.
Wouldn’t this mean, in the relative short term, that plane traffic would come to a near-stop? I ask that because I remember on my plane tickets, the share of CO2 rejected to carry me around was over 1 ton for a relatively long travel.
The implications are quite amazing — wouldn’t it mean the end of globalization?
It’s a tax. Taxes don’t kill any industry now, nor will they halt air travel or globalization. Numerous studies, including those done by Citigroup, all point to a carbon tax as the best tool we have in mitigating climate change.
Edit: Carbon taxes are done by the ton; even at the upper end ($80/ton is the highest I’ve seen, but politically it would probably be closer to $40) that doesn’t make the cost of the plane ticket prohibitive.
…in every policy scenario, in every model, the U.S. economy continues to grow at or near its long-term average baseline rate, deviating from reference growth by no more than about 0.1% points. We find robust evidence that even the most ambitious carbon tax is consistent with long-term positive economic growth, near baseline rates, not even counting the growth benefits of a less-disrupted climate or lower ambient air pollution.
I wasn’t talking about taxes at their tiny, no impact on anything rate, but at the level it was, reportedly, recommended as a goal-line in the last IPCC report:
they propose raising the cost of a ton of carbon possibly as high $5,000 by 2030, a price they suggest may have to grow to $27,000 per ton by 2100.
Well, we could always use Dirigibles!
Oh, I see. There’s alway sail boats! (kidding)
Well, that should spur innovation in the energy sector I would hope. Not too long ago a solar powered plane circumvented the globe, and a few companies in the UK are testing electric powered personal drones (think sky Uber in a sense.)
But so long as we indirectly subsidize fossil fuels, there’s not much incentive to change. In the short term I’m sure there will be some disruption, although it’s better than the alternative.
^^
Indeed, not likely to happen, but it’s such an intriguing mental exercice, not unlike
I have always been terrorized by the nonsensical prospect of “falling upward”, and balloons frankly terrify me because of this.
Sadly, I have never been on a dirigible, so I can’t say how one would make me feel. I can only blame be airplane for the lack dirigibles.
Also, I was envisioned that dirigibles would be a great way to transport things across the United States instead of trucks or trains.
Well, it would certainly reinvigorate investment in rail travel. I read a piece a couple of days ago about how, with high-speed rail, air travel within the UK was actually quite silly. HS rail service from London to Manchester would be under 2 hrs, while flying time (including lost airport time) is probably longer than that. And within Europe, it’s already much more attractive to use rail than air for some trips even international trips. It’s always my first choice.
Can we not make jet fuel from biological sources? I feel like we’ve had this conversation before.
What they need to do is design a plane that makes fuel out of the birds that fly into the turbines.
Maybe they could work with the wind turbine folks in that.