Enidigm
5737
I just think… it’s hard to believe the temperature going up even 10 or 20 degrees (F) on average is going to be that bad, if you’re living on the coasts or middle America or whatever. Sure, it’s going to be a dramatic change, but people can rationalize it away. Oh, look, no snow but at least i can run in the winter, and look, i can hide in the summer in the A/C!
Saying everyone on earth is going to die from asphyxiation… i think that’s close to anti-nuclear fears. At least enough people will care anyway to force politicians to care.
There is no easy way for me to get to work without a car. The bus line can get me close but it will take something like 4 times as long as driving. It’s too far to walk. The streets are too busy to ride a bike. Car pooling is about the only immediate solution I can come up with, or working from home. The latter would work. For what we do we could work from home three days and go in two days so we could meet and review.
I think 20-30 years ago when scientists weren’t routinely ignored then a bolder “this is fucking serious!” (rather than “our results kinda suggest, maybe, possibly that something is going on, but we don’t want to alarm anyone!”) might have been more effective. Now, I’m not so sure. I’ve definitely met a worrying number of people who think “12 years to save the Earth” is alarmist hyperbole, some of them scientists. They argue, and I tend to agree, that it’s a bad narrative because the planet will still be here in 12 years and probably won’t feel like the apocalypse yet. It’s easy for bad actors to spin that negatively.
Change is happening at the generational level, a few governments are starting to show the beginnings of leadership, but I think humans tend to be reactive as a society (safety precautions happen after an accident, not before) not predictive. The next year will be interesting.
No one is even asking anyone to give up cars. I’m not sure why Drum includes this other than hyperbole to prove a point.
But if human behavior is deterministic there really is no point to anything at all and we may as well just embrace nihilism and be done with it.
We may all bemoan and wail and despair, but we still have to try. As collective action on a government scale is probably the only thing that gets it done (barring some really impressive technological developments), that means persuading, debating, donating, voting, all that sort of thing.
Yeah. Drum’s not wrong on past human reaction to ecological collapse, but we’ve always had a new frontier or wilderness to exploit and ruin. But climate change is global and there’s no where else to go. It seems a bit of a fallacy to assume because humans always behaved = humans will always behave or technology has always bailed us out = will always save us.
In any case, sequestration has to be be done along side of changing behaviors, not instead of. Here are some articles on the challenges facing sequestration:
(NET=negative-emissions technologies.)
In the following sections, C&EN examines some NET approaches that are just getting underway. Whether they will be able to scale up to meet the need is an open question. The numbers are staggering: globally, nearly 50 billion metric tons (t) of greenhouse gases are emitted to the atmosphere annually, the UN Environment Programme estimates. Of those emissions, about 37 billion t is CO2 and the rest is mostly methane. And even with various efforts in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, global CO2 emissions increased by nearly 3% in 2018.
Avoiding a climate disaster would require some 10 billion t of CO2 emissions to be eliminated from the atmosphere each year by midcentury through emission reductions or NETs, the National Academies study estimates on the basis of UN data. By 2100, that number grows to 20 billion t per year.
Scientists estimate that NETs, if scaled up successfully, could address roughly 30% of the needed reductions.
Each CDR technology is feasible at some level, but has uncertainties about cost, technology, the speed of possible implementation, or environmental impacts. It’s clear that no single one provides the ultimate solution to climate change.
“Carbon dioxide removal alone cannot do it,” said Kate Gordon, a fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy. “If there’s one thing the IPCC report really underscores is that we need a portfolio—we need to reduce emissions dramatically, we need to come up with more renewable energy options to replace fossil fuels, we need to electrify a lot of things that are currently run on petroleum and then we need to do an enormous amount of carbon removal.” In the near term she would like to see more deployment and ramping up of tried and true strategies, such as tree planting trees and more sustainable agricultural practices.
Matt_W
5743
He specifically said, “We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.” And then used cars as an example of dramatic change. Seems pretty apropos to me. That’s precisely the kind of lifestyle change that climate change now requires.
Reality is we’re going to be forced to it one way or another.
It’s not that we don’t need to (probably) give up cars, it’s that we can’t just give up cars in a vacuum without massive investments in public transportation and infrastructure (and probably other stuff). If it’s not going where you need to, or if it’s packed already, it’s not an option. And not everyone is fit to bike for miles, assuming the roads weren’t designed to kill bikers.
My beef is that half-measures like Macron did or cap and trade are doomed to failure because they’re just taxes on stuff people still need to do. And the market is fine with providing incremental cost decreases (shifting the costs to Uber employers) while making things worse (Airbnb makes cities empty of locals, which then need to move further to get to their jobs, increasing traffic tremendously and making bus travel much worse).
And, honestly, the kind of shift the GND represents doesn’t necessitate a severe change to income and way of life for most people, and it’s still a hard sell. Sending the bill to them is not going to work.
Matt_W
5745
That’s his point though. He thinks it will never happen until we’re paying $20/gallon for gas or whatever. Thus political effort should focus on the technology side. At this point though, we’re not going to affect whether we’re fucked (we are) but what the (literal) degrees of fucked-ness are.
When gas hit 4 dollars a gallon, didn’t we start to see some positive changes in habits though?
It remember a local factory actually built a train line to ship goods from one factory to another to reduce the costs. So it doesn’t need to be a lot to shift people’s habits.
Whatever it is, I don’t mind. I already work from home, which has hopefully reduced my carbon footprint.
That’s still cheap by European standards and while Europe is certainly ahead of the US on behavioural changes, it’s not anything like enough (and is mostly enforced through things like low emission zones and effective subsidies, eg in Norway which has very high EV take-up as mentioned on the other thread).
Oh, I know. My parents pay much more in the Netherlands. Couple it with the high cost of ownership and available public transportation, and it becomes a chore to own and use a car.
But, I think that im the US we can nudge behavior without needing to go all out and make poor people suffer. It doesn’t take a lot to alter behavior.
Cormac
5749
Yeah… Those high taxes on cigarettes sure got people to stop smoking!
Cormac
5751
Yeah, but that’s not because of the taxes, though obviously its tough to really separate the various factors.
(& on a personal note, frustratingly here the rate is still at 28% - I can’t open my windows in this stifling heat because my damn neighbour downstairs smokes like a chimney…)
Not solely the taxes, but I’ve known many people over the years for whom the cost was one of the driving factors to giving up smoking.
You got citation for that claim? Because there is small amount of evidence that disagrees.
Some more direct evidence involving Turkey, of all places.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6321a2.htm
And, some data posted on Reddit.
Cormac
5754
I’ll try to find some.
My statement was primarily based on the people I’m in contact with (eg 8 of the 10 people in my department smoke) and like I stated earlier, there are still lots of smokers here in Germany. As a non-smoker myself this is pretty frustrating as I am sick of people smoking around me the whole time (anti-smoking laws are also rather weak here). I have also read articles in that past that state that the previous efforts to motivate people to stop smoking (at least in Germany) such as taxes and those bleak pictures on the cigarette packs, haven’t really moved the needle much.
You should check out the CDC one that talks about Turkey. That is a real eye opener.
We have no branding, all advertising banned, cigarettes are stored in closed cupboards, warnings are generally a bit more graphic than these, it currently costs $15.25 for a pack of my old brand, vapes are ubiquitous and vape shops are everywhere and smokers are now rare spawns. It really is quite noticeable. 15.1% remain addicted. It’s more publicly apparent as the younger generations have the biggest increase in non-smoking, so the places you used to see and smell smokers, work, bars, restaurants and out and about on the streets have less about.
