JD
6318
I’m sure there’ll be a dignified and thoughtful comment tweet from Don-Don.
Good for her. She’s a heroic figure in our time, though I’m sure she would rather just be at school and it’s frankly disgusting that we need to rely on a child to remind us to fix our shit.
rowe33
6321
His son is already shitting it of course.
My initial reaction was skeptical, but after reading the article. I think Time made an excellent choice, it was helpful to read more of the backstory about Greta. They didn’t mention it in the article, but I assume she is the youngest ever to win the honor. So maybe we can have a young president for a change.
Oghier
6325
That is a heck of an article. It’s a real-life version of an 80’s movie…
Wow. What a great visual illustration of the results of less industry regulation.
Enidigm
6327
I guess i’m pessimistic because there are only, legimately, three real climate change solutions. Four, if you’re the “guns to head” sort.
- Technology our way out. This is basically what most progressive / liberal people are banking on.
- Market our way out. This is basically what most moderate / conservative non-climate deniers are banking on. Just tax the hell out of carbon, worldwide, like just set a tax per ton, and let the market sort out the details.
- Reduce consumption dramatically. This isn’t going to happen. You’re not going to do it, i’m not doing it, nobody is doing it. Hydrocarbons are energy, and energy is directly, 1:1, quality of life.
There’s no real alternative to carbon based energy right now. There’s no current scheme, right now, that eliminates carbon emissions below current levels without massive enforcement and reductions in quality of life for most of the people in the world. Most people in the world, including you (not you personally, but the plural you), aren’t going to lift a finger except in the most vague and handwavy sense, like not getting straws at Starbucks or something. No one is going to voluntarily reduce their quality of life. It’s got to be mandated, enforced, and taken out of their hands. And in a Democracy there’s always the possibility of another populist party just campaigning on a “we’ll restore your wasteful toilets and light bulbs, like the good old days!” and enough people will vote for them that effectively no progress will be made.
So I’m extremely skeptical. It doesn’t help that the O&G business has billions of dollars, both at stake and at hand, that they can use to run interference and tackle progress.
For example, the O&G business in the US is all over this so-called 45Q tax credit they’re trying to push. Basically they’re trying to get the government to subsidize ROZ CO2 flooding by using carbon capture legislation. Since ROZ projects always leave a little CO2 behind, the “benefit” is that they’re using carbon storage legislation to get access to plentiful CO2, to pull more oil out the ground, and then get paid to do it.
Much like our political stagnation and collapse, it’s going to take a dramatic break with the current political system to make climate change stick - the powers that be are like Russia in the 19th Century, trying to keep the status quo for as long as they’re alive.
1 isn’t going to happen. Not that there aren’t tech solutions to the problem, but nothing will come close to the sheer scale required. Plus it’s going to be rabidly expensive.
2 is a better idea provided that there is actual oversight on whatever schemes the market conjures up. There was a big stink recently here over the use of biomass powerplants being worse than coal plants with regards to emissions because assumptions made about the biomass cycle were complete fiction. Instead of more trees being planted it led to more clear-cutting, because nobody is checking where the biomass fuel is coming from.
3 This is going to happen. Just not voluntary.
All in all, I’m ready to jump on board of the guillotine train. Climate deniers in a position of power need to be removed from them by any means necessary.
Note: This isn’t directed at you personally or intended as a hostile rejoinder, nor do I necessarily disagree that people are unwilling to change behavior - since, well, it’s manifestly true. I just find it ironic how “quality of life” is defined: Tens of thousands of years of evolution and the pinnacle of achievement that sentient life on earth has managed to attain is the accumulation of useless shit.
… perhaps more importantly, it sells consumerism: the idea that there’s always more, and that you shouldn’t only aspire to those things, you deserve them. In this respect, it’s the oil that greases the wheels of capitalism — it creates demand out of desire rather than need, encouraging people to spend money on an ongoing basis. This much, of course, we know already. But as Mad Men comes to an end, it’s become clear that virtually all of its characters have bought into variations on this idea — and, ultimately, that is what’s responsible for their enduring unhappiness. As Leonard Cohen once wrote, “You are locked into your suffering/ And your pleasures are the seal.”
I think we need to draw a distinction between “technology will stop climate change” and “technology will mitigate the effects of climate change”. I agree that the former is pretty much impossible. By the time we’ve researched that much Future Tech, we’ll already be dealing with major impacts. But I think that mitigation through technology is possible, and even already happening. (Marketplace Tech has a series of episodes that talks about a few small ways this is happening, and there are more coming.) There will still be impacts, obviously, but it is possible to avoid the worst-case scenarios.
Outside of, maybe, academic economists, this sounds backwards to me. In practice, conservatives are the ones putting their hopes on tech, while liberals/greens/socialists are calling for steeper/broader carbon pricing.
I think you are missing the most likely option. 4 Muddle our way through. That’s been pretty much mankind response to previous natural disasters. 100,000 years ago during the ice age, our ancestors dealt with far large climate change. More recently the Little ice age that same 1.5C+ degree swing as we are going to experience. We are lot better equipped to deal with climate change than our ancestors.
We will build seawall around major urban area, evacuate low lying rural areas. Develop crops that are better suited to higher temperature and low water needs. Russia, Central Asia, and Canada, and northern great plains in the US have plenty of land that would benefit by warmer temperatures. I’m not saying there wouldn’t be some awful affects, but the think the doomsday prophecy are overwrought.
I personally think that we will be able to tech our way out of it. Nathan Myhrvold, founder of Intellectual Ventures, is one of the smartest guys I’ve met and with Bill Gates money backing him, they are working on a lot of exciting ways of dealing with climate change. Everything from increasing the reflectivity of the atmosphere to sucking carbon directly out of the atmosphere. If we need to spend a few trillion dollars, it will be cheaper than dealing with mass evacuations, global fires etc.
Renewable are already cost competitive with fossil fuel and see the west continue to adopt them. I see a country like China being able to mass produce nuclear plants to replace their coal plants.
I do agree with you the reducing our energy usage dramatically isn’t going happen, nor should it.
MikeJ
6333
It’s the ‘+’ I worry about.
Sure we can adapt to 1.5 degrees. But that’s not the world we are on course for. Right now, it’s more like 3-4 degrees. Each fraction of a degree we increase ramps up the chances of those nasty feedback loops. Sure the doomsday scenarios are not the most likely outcome but what chance of self-inflicted doomsday is not cause for drastic action? Roll a d20, whoops a 2. You failed your saving throw!
I am also fairly optimistic about technology but I am less optimistic about the politics. Will we be willing to pay the trillions before we go too far down the road? That last 30 years have really sucked in that regard.
Quaro
6334
I think you have these reversed too, but I also think we need to do both. If you want to price carbon, we will have to develop low carbon processes for stuff like steel and essentially give it away to the rest of the world for them to have any chance of also pricing carbon. You need 1 & 2 together.
By various accounts, the little ice age killed off 10-20% of the population at one time or another, by destroying agriculture for generations.
We muddled through the bubonic plague too, but somehow that doesn’t comfort me a ton.
Meanwhile: it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s supertrees!
