We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

[sillhouette]

Patrick Moore (EcoSenseNow)

Matthew Yglesias (mattyglesias)

[Tim_N]

lol… A realistic y-axis scale goes up to 120 degrees F.

[Gordon_Cameron]

Beto O’Rourke now has the most robust climate proposal of any 2020...

[KevinC]

Someone needs to let activists know that no climate proposal is going to go far enough for what needs to be done. Maybe if we had set to work on it decades ago…

[Timex]

But the plans from decades ago didn’t go far enough!

[RichVR]

[RothdaTheTruculent]

Nice. For me, this is the moment that Beto became presidential. He was very much on my 2nd tier of candidates, but with this proposal he’s graduated to the top tier of candidates that I’d be absolutely delighted to donate to, volunteer for, and vote for in the general election.

[DarthMasta]

Between the Devil and the Green New Deal • Commune

Another cheery article.

[Gordon_Cameron]

What does he recommend, ritual suicide?

[Rock8man]

Very interesting.

To meet the demands of the Green New Deal, which proposes to convert the US economy to zero emissions, renewable power by 2030, there will be a lot more of these mines gouged into the crust of the earth. That’s because nearly every renewable energy source depends upon non-renewable and frequently hard-to-access minerals: solar panels use indium, turbines use neodymium, batteries use lithium, and all require kilotons of steel, tin, silver, and copper. The renewable-energy supply chain is a complicated hopscotch around the periodic table and around the world. To make a high-capacity solar panel, one might need copper (atomic number 29) from Chile, indium (49) from Australia, gallium (31) from China, and selenium (34) from Germany. Many of the most efficient, direct-drive wind turbines require a couple pounds of the rare-earth metal neodymium, and there’s 140 pounds of lithium in each Tesla.

Dotted with “death villages” where crops will not fruit, the region of Inner Mongolia where the Bayan Obo mine is located displays Chernobylesque cancer rates. But then again, the death villages are already here. More of them are coming if we don’t do something about climate change. What matter is a dozen death villages when half the earth may be rendered uninhabitable? What matter the gray skies over Inner Mongolia if the alternative is turning the sky an endless white with sulfuric aerosols, as last-ditch geoengineering scenarios imagine? Moralists, armchair philosophers, and lesser-evilists may try to convince you that these situations resolve into a sort of trolley-car problem: do nothing and the trolley speeds down the track toward mass death. Do something, and you switch the trolley onto a track where fewer people die, but where you are more actively responsible for their deaths. When the survival of millions or even billions hangs in the balance, as it surely does when it comes to climate change, a few dozen death villages might seem a particularly good deal, a green deal, a new deal. But climate change doesn’t resolve into a single trolley-car problem. Rather, it’s a planet-spanning tangle of switchyards, with mass death on every track.

TLDR: With Capitalism, there’s no way to reach a solution.

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds here and lose sight of the essential. In each of these scenarios, on each of these sad, warming planets, the Green New Deal fails because capitalism. Because, in capitalism, a small class of owners and managers, in competition with itself, finds itself forced to make a set of narrow decisions about where to invest and in what, establishing prices, wages, and other fundamental determinants of the economy. Even if these owners wanted to spare us the drowned cities and billion migrants of 2070, they could not. They would be undersold and bankrupted by others. Their hands are tied, their choices constrained, by the fact that they must sell at the prevailing rate or perish. It is the class as a whole that decides, not its individual members. This is why the sentences of Marxists (and Marx) so often treat capital as agent rather than object. The will towards relentless growth, and with it increasing energy use, is not chosen, it is compelled, a requirement of profitability where profitability is a requirement of existence.

If you tax oil, capital will sell it elsewhere. If you increase demand for raw materials, capital will bid up the prices of commodities, and rush materials to market in the most wasteful, energy-intensive way. If you require millions of square miles for solar panels, wind farms, and biofuel crops, capital will bid up the price of real estate. If you slap tariffs on necessary imports, capital will leave for better markets. If you try to set a maximum price that doesn’t allow profit, capital will simply stop investing. Lop off one head of the hydra, face another. Invest trillions of dollars into infrastructure in the US and you’ll have to confront the staggeringly wasteful, slow, and unproductive construction industry, where laying a mile of subway can be twenty times as expensive and take four times as long. You’ll have to confront the earthen monsters of Bechtel and Fluor Corp., habituated to feeding at the government trough and billing fifty dollar screws. If this doesn’t chasten you, consider the world-historical inefficiency of the US military, the planet’s biggest oil consumer and, unsurprisingly, also the planet’s main oil cop. The Pentagon is an accounting black hole, into which the wealth of the nation is ploughed and from which no light emerges. Its balance sheet is a blank.

Can’t have a solution as long as we have capitalism. That’s a perspective I haven’t seen laid out like that before. And he’s made some good points.

[Timex]

Can’t have a solution as long as we have capitalism. That’s a perspective I haven’t seen laid out like that before.

Because it’s a nonsense perspective laid out by a marxist poet. That’s literally who that dude is. He’s literally a dude with a PhD in poetry.

He’s not making a compelling argument FOR anything, while making numerous, obvious errors. From basic failures to understand how markets work, to a seeming ignorance of technologies that already exist (“Perhaps breakthrough decarbonizing or zero-emissions technologies are almost here.” Oh yes, perhaps some day we will come up with a zero emissions solution to baseload power generation! Like we already did. In 1956.)

Here’s the only way out at this point… it’s gonna be one of two things. I guarantee.

1. Mass extinction event, where some large percentage of the human population simply dies through war or some natural disaster.
2. Technology enables humans to intentionally direct the path of global climate change.

And here’s the thing… that second one? Marxists ain’t gonna be the ones to give you that. They might be able to help you go down the first path, if that’s what we choose.

The guys who are gonna save us are going to be scientists and engineers, not freaking marxist poets.

[Scott123]

This video is tangentially related; I feel it shows just the astounding amount of energy we consume, usually without even knowing it or having any idea. And its entertaining.

[Gordon_Cameron]

So my dream of the bicycle-powered home ain’t gonna happen?

[KevinC]

That entirely depends on how many Roberts you have available.

[Fifth_Fret]

Yup! A human runs at about 100W. Obviously higher if working hard, lower if sleeping. But roughly 100W on average.

It’s a ton of energy when you think about how we’re always drawing that power, unlike a toaster.

[Scott123]

Well it’s amazing how astronomically huge our power consumption is. We literally can’t toast a slice of bread on our own, yet we drive our 3000lb cars to get a $1.49 coffee.

[Timex]

Yeah, tool use is one of the major elements which separated humans from other animals, and a major component of tool use is leveraging stored energy from other sources to do work.

You’re not gonna solve that equation by reducing the amount of energy humans consume. Because there are always gonna be more humans, and progress demands that they’re going to want to do more work over time.

The solution is going to be to be better able to convert energy from other sources to usable work. And luckily, there’s plenty of energy in the universe for us to use. The energy from the sun, that reaches the earth’s surface, is over 1000 watts per square meter. We’re not gonna run out of energy to use. It’s a matter of developing the technology to better convert it.

[antlers]

Standard of living is roughly equivalent to how much energy you have at your disposal. If we are going to raise the standard of living of the poor people in the world, we need to make a lot more energy available, and it had better be clean energy.

(essentially the same thing Timex just said)

[Fifth_Fret]

And most (almost all?) energy humans consume is via a rather long-winded solar energy collection process!

[Timex]

And most (almost all?) energy humans consume is via a rather long-winded solar energy collection process!

Ya, pretty much all of it… I guess some of it (geothermal) comes from slow winding down of the earth’s rotation.

Hell, one of the core problems that we’re dealing with, is that the earth is absorbing too much energy from the sun due to greenhouse gasses. That’s what global warming is. We have no shortage of energy, and never will.

Standard of living is roughly equivalent to how much energy you have at your disposal. If we are going to raise the standard of living of the poor people in the world, we need to make a lot more energy available, and it had better be clean energy.

Yeah, and those billions and billions of people aren’t going to accept us telling them, “Hey guys, if you could just continue to live like subsistence farmers forever, that’d be cool. I know how we made cars and skyscrapers and stuff, but we found out that’s bad, so we’re gonna need you to not do any of that! Thanks!”

Conservation is great, because wasting money and resources is bad… but humanity is not going to conserve its way out of this problem. That is absolutely not even remotely a viable solution. It’s a total red herring.

Using less energy is a smart thing for us to do, as individuals, because it lowers our electric bills, and lets us… choose to use other energy.

But on a societal level, we need to develop technology that allows us to better convert energy into work… because the amount of work we need to do is going to keep going up, forever, until the end of human existence.