If one country can’t get its stuff together across religious, educational, socioeconomic and cultural barriers....how can a planet scale coordinated governmental effort by committee work?
Ask Al Gore how that worked. Or the Paris Treaty folks.
Waiting for consensus is garbage. We don't need to wait for everybody else to do the right thing before we do it.
You also don't need an international agreement to impose tariffs on any country that emits more than a given amount of CO2 per capita, and if more than a couple of countries impose those conditions (or even just one big one like the US) then it gives others domestic cover to do something meaningful because they can argue they have to do it to avoid the tariffs. Meanwhile they can "retaliate" by imposing the same conditions and soon enough everyone is hitting their targets to avoid all the tariffs, without anyone ever having to sign up for a unified agreement.
Really? Are the other countries on target? I heard the EU was not.
I want it to work. I'm just not sure it is, or if humans are even capable of coordinating on the scale required to address this problem outside of some geoengineering solution.
We used to only live and cooperate with tightly knot tribal groups. Now we often call ourselves Americans, Europeans, Arabs, Jews, Sikhs etc. We are capable of cooperating on a global scale but a certain group of self interested folks need to get out of the way
True but all you need is one of the bigger ones to spoil the party and that gives cover for everyone else. This problem cannot be solved by committee. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, I just plan to move to higher ground.
How can a planet scale coordinated governmental effort by committee work?
The same way countless other endangered subsets of humanity (particularly those facing essentially total annihilation by, or permanent subservience to a foreign occupier) have: by recognizing the simple the simple fact that they'll either have to put their heads together, put aside their differences, and "figure out a way" to prevail against overwhelming odds --
or face the inevitable consequences of failing to do so.
I think the transition from apathy to resignation will be seamless - humans are not good at dealing with long term risk and threat. When it becomes an imminent threat, which will likely be soon, it will already be too late.
No, the only way anything changes is at the point of a spear. There has to be an imminent and tangible threat, now. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.
And on top of that, inter-government cooperation to tackle a global problem. Like we had to address CFCs pollution. With the political will to sanction countries that deny the evidence and won't play ball.
It's still being solved, in the sense that CFCs in the atmosphere aren't zero but they are decreasing. The new emissions were only a minor setback. From the article you linked:
> Atmospheric chlorine levels are still decreasing but more slowly than expected
It is a strange moment in time we are in when government is no longer seen as a viable solution to problems. The consensus to act in the common good is being diverted into niche outlets. Is it a result of technological advance in communication? And how do we solve this problem? With more technology?
Restore faith in government; which entails restoring faith in elected officials; which involves electing people who support the common good; which requires people to take an active, thoughtful place in political discourse.
> Restore faith in government; which entails restoring faith in elected officials; which involves electing people who support the common good; which requires people to take an active, thoughtful place in political discourse.
Which requires people to work 30 hours a week (not 50) and requires removing money from politics, which requires an incredibly complex rebirth of the political system...
Not saying it can't happen, but the time frames don't add up.
We need to solve this problem right fucking now not in 50 years. And with a large segment of people still even denying the existence of climate change, it's hard to be hopeful about meaningful reforms in the right direction when so much has to change.
Yes, as long as the government recognizes that the ones who created the problem are the ones who should pay for it, in other words the businesses and not the people.
It's a classic tragedy of the commons. It is in everyone's best interest for everyone to act, but it is in hardly anyone's individual interest to act alone if no one else does.
Why? Are there reasons to believe that the shareholders/board members of these companies would not be negatively affected by climate change? Or are they ignorant?
It's a tragedy of the commons situation. Any individual company could bankrupt itself with climate action and not make a dent in emissions. Worse, any progress they did make would be an excuse for other actors to lessen their own efforts. Little serious progress will be made until nation states start putting the screws to corporations and each other.
Except that climate change response is the best wealth generation mechanism for the 21st century. No company will bankrupt themselves by being more efficient, using more renewable, buying some batteries, EVs. These are already good investments. The problem is corporate greed driving down investment and morality in exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation.
> No company will bankrupt themselves by being more efficient, using more renewable, buying some batteries, EVs.
All those things cost money... More money than they are spending today. Even if they just replaced things as they retired, say a work vehicle -- there is still a non zero cost of owning two different types of vehicle.
> These are already good investments.
All the things you listed would normally be listed as a liability and deprecate fairly fast.
> exchange for buybacks and CEO compensation
This is such a small dent in the entire system that it would not make any difference if they spent all the excess cash on the problem. There was a article once about some big CEO of a airline getting some bonus of 12 million. Everybody was freaking out, and demanded it be given to the workers. I did the math on that one, it would have been about 19 cents a hour more for every worker (who were already making $12 + a hour, a 1.6% pay increase or less in most cases)
I am on your side, but just wanting it to happen and calling those who say the money math don't work as greedy is not going to solve the problem. I think people vastly under estimate how much it cost to run some of these large companies, and how thin the profit margin actually is. Paying even slightly more than your competitor can make our break you.
There is abundant incentive to not act unilaterally in a manner that hurts the bottom line in a competitive environment (i.e., most business environments). There is very little incentive in that environment to act collectively.
That's why voluntary unilateral actions won't be sufficient, but it doesn't explain why we're not taking collective action, like enacting a price on carbon.
That has quite a bit due to the fact that lobbying works and has an amazing ROI. It only cost about $1 million to divide voters enough to fail to pass a carbon tax in Washington State: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/rival-par.... (I understand it wasn’t just lobbying, but I think it played a major role.)
I hate to be cynical but the ROI of lobbying against climate change is super cheap. How can we switch this equation?
Get money out of politics, that is the one lens through which all issues are focused these days. The greater Good is out of focus while corporations focus the lens exactly where they want
The sad reality is that they probably are able to buy their way of of this.
I was visiting Tito's bunker in Bosnia last week, and to think it was ok to build a multi-billion dollar facility to hold only 350 politicians and VIPs in case of global nuclear wipeout seems crazy, but when the need arises, people with power will always try and find a quick way out, often at the expense of others.
No it's located in a mountain near Konjic, between Mostar and Sarajevo. It now serves as a modern art gallery and a museum to the cold war. The place is very well preserved, as the bunker's HVAC unit has been running since the 60's.
The vast majority of people, at best, think climate channge is something that'll be a problem for their grandchildren or great grandchildren. Many still believe it is a made up thing the news/politicians created.
Many people don't care about long-term stuff either. Look at how many people have no qualms throwing trash out their car window. Look at how many people have no qualms about taking vacations flying all over the place racking up tons of CO2 personally.
Even YC created http://carbon.ycombinator.com as they acknowledge it's an issue (to some extent anyway) yet they still fly hundreds of people out to the Bay Area for in-person interviews each year to select founders for funding, which could instead be done via video chat and used kilograms of CO2 at worst instead of many tons (on average, a plane produces a little over 53 pounds of CO2 per mile. This can be somewhat higher or lower depending upon the type of aviation fuel).
And then take people that truly realize how much of a problem is like I do.
- I have to go to work, it is not practical for me to walk to work so I have to drive a car to work.
- It is not practical for me to not use electricity, living in an apartment I have to use it to cook, to dry my clothes even if I chose to wash them by hand, to run the air conditioning a good chunk of the year to keep the humidity down to prevent mold, to run the heat in the winter because it gets down to -12F/-24C a few days of the year
- I can't walk around naked and both natural fibers and synthetic fibers rely heavily on oil to manufacture
- I can't go buy food from my neighbor or grow my own in a garden, so my food is trucked across the country or even shipped from halfway around the world
So people like me go "nothing I do on a personal level is going to make a damn bit of difference, why bother" and you sit there watching Netflix knowing that every gigabyte you stream is probably another 100-300 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere.
And you sit there depressed - knowing you are breathing in microplastics, knowing you are eating and drinking microplastics, knowing those microplastics and other air pollutants are likely increasing your risk of cancer considerably, knowing that 30 something cities with populations over 1 million people have run out of clean water (or water entirely) including India's 6th largest city by population, knowing that it's probably unwise to have children because sooner or later in their life the world is going to become a largely shitty and miserable place when food/water wars start, knowing that global insect biomass has considerably reduced in your short 34 years on earth, knowing because you are barely in the lower middle class you're probably going to be one of the ones to starve at some point because you'll lose your job and have a hard time finding another and a crop failure or three will cause food prices to go up 200%, 300%, 1000% or more in your lifetime and you'll get to experience what life is like for people in North Korea when you're eating whatever you can get your hands on.
The shareholders, the C-level employees, don't care because they aren't feeling the impacts already. They have fancy houses, fancy cars, take fancy vacations, they wear nice clothes and have more money than they need. The bulk of them have never filed bankruptcy or worried regularly how they're going to put food on the table, the majority of them have never known real struggle. They aren't concerned about climate change because they think the money will always be flowing in and they'll always have stuff.
Look at the articles over the past few years about the rich buying land in New Zealand like Peter Thiel did.
If it makes you feel better, by almost every metric the vast majority of humanity is living the best they have in all of human history. If you live in the west it’s even better because we haven’t had any local wars in nearly 80 years. I think a lot of people need to study history a bit more to understand how great things are now for most of the global population.
I definitely agree with you that things are better than they’ve ever been.
However, much of that security, it hinges on a delusion that this security will go away if we address climate change, which is of course mostly untrue. If we address this soon, it’s a matter of scaling back on a few luxuries while keeping other luxuries and the basics which keep us healthy and fed.
One example of many, how many suburban homes in the US touch much of their space more than once or twice a year? How many have multiple completely unused heated and air conditioned bedrooms? How much of suburban home’s storage is used by stuff which is bought and never gets touched again?
My house currently, about 2/3rds of the space is rarely touched, the storage in the garage and closets is full (organized, i’m not a hoarder lol) but full of projects and stuff which was bought because it seemed like a fun idea at the store, and all of that space is heated and cooled all year long.
The thought processes which go into the type of “need” for this much wasted space is just a norm readjustment which on a fundamental level mostly won’t impact our daily safety issues and still allow actual important luxuries.
If we wait, well, that’s when difficult decisions will have to be made, many of which will greatly impact fundamental life changes.
Great so let's just forget any of what the parent commenter just said...
This Steven Pinker/Bill Gates cheerleeding nonsense is such a distraction. We need more anger and frustration to be stoked against those in power, not some kind of pacifying bullshit about how amazing all our technological gadgets have made our lives. It won't be worth anything once all the above starts happening. And for some people, this apocalypse has already begun.
And I'm not Amish, I don't have an Amish or Mennonite community to support me with all these things.
Also the Amish and Mennonite communities still heavily rely on mass-produced goods manufactured in the same factories we all get stuff from.
- mass produced pre-packaged foods (they will absolutely buy and consume junk food, I know a former Amish - he literally wrote a book called Growing Up Amish) and we have a ton of them here in Indiana)
- hired cars/mass transportation
- community telephones
- manufactured farm equipment
- refrigeration for dairy operations (they have to by law)
Amish also have
- Alcoholism in their communities, mostly among youth
- A good deal of drug use in their communities, mostly among youth
Orange is the New Black didn't include an Amish girl just for the novelty of it, the included her because it's accurate. I imagine a good deal of this escapism via drugs and alcohol is a direct result of their lifestyle.
And yes, some tribal society in Randomplace also lives largely without modern conveniences but they have the knowledge, they have the experience, in most cases it is all they've never known.
My comment was talking about ME, Ryan Mercer, not Generic Human. I can't go claim a bunch of land and set up my own farm/commune/colony, I do not have the knowledge or manpower, I do not have the resources, it is not practical for me or most of the 'first world'.
Geez, I didn’t know that “for-profit corporations” where out there releases GHGs into the atmosphere just for funsies.
Also, fun fact: “not for profit corporations” in the Soviet Union were massively more polluting per unit of output: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-grim-pollution-pictur_b_9.... GHG emissions scale with energy efficiency, and in a socialist state that subsidized energy as an essential need, they had no incentive to be efficient.
GHGs are the result of the stuff people want—food, transportation, next day Amazon delivery, etc. for-profit corporations are a way to deliver that level of stuff as efficiently as possible.
You're right. The problem isn't the corporations, it's the system that allows them to exist.
We need a system that prices items based on actual costs: scarcity of raw materials, labor, pollution, and difficulty of recycling/reuse.
Currently capitalism only prices in scarcity of raw materials and labor, and even those it does a pretty shitty job of. Whether the state controls industry or not is ancillary to the need for pricing actual costs into things, which capitalism is completely incapable of.
What's really needed is complete transparency in primary production, such that if I buy a TV, I can see all the manufacturers/shippers, all the inputs to production, and all the workers and what they are paid in order to make that TV. Then the individual can decide between the TV that takes a liter of oil to produce or a TV that used solar energy for 60% of its production.
I'm sick of people pretending that capitalism is "democracy through spending." We don't have the information needed to make it democracy through spending. The market pricing system obscures all useful information and aggregates it into a completely useless number.
By they, you mean collectively? In the US the government annually diverts more than 25% of GDP, which is about 650 times what the largest private company diverts annually as profit and 100 times more than what that company has on it's balance sheet. So if we want to find the single entity that "own[s] the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem", it's the government. I think it might be more effective if we, being in a democracy, would tell the government to change its priorities for all that resource. But then that would mean it's our fault which means we wouldn't be able to point fingers at others.
It's a time value of money problem; there's been plenty of investigation into the future costs of climate change (most notably the Stern Report [1]) but people prefer to have money now, rather than pay now to defer future cost.
>No one wants to pay the cost of tackling this problem.
No one can afford to. The most practical (wildly impractical and at present completely impossible) known method would be something akin to what YC proposes on http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/
They want to create 'pools' in the Sahara. Incredible amounts of desalination and pump the water into these pools to grow algae and then store the algae under anoxic conditions to effectively sequester the carbon. Problems with this:
- The cost simply to construct the pools, bring the desalination plants online, deploy pipes would be the single most expensive things humans have ever done, and may ever do.
- The power required to do this would exceed what humans already produce
- The amount of brine created would kill all life in coastal waters, we area already seeing this in the coastal waters of areas that currently heavily use desalination to provide freshwater to their populations. This would be on a scale several orders of magnitude larger.
- The amount of mining that would need to be done to provide the algae with what they need to grow beyond sunlight and atmospheric carbon
- The problem of actually sequestering thousands of gigatons of desiccated algae. Especially for the decades to centuries that would be required.
- The massive change in global weather patterns that could likely be catastrophic, that much evaporation over such a wide area would absolutely change weather patterns globally and would be extremely difficult to even remotely accurately model.
- Doing this in the Sahara would negatively impact the Amazon, the Sahara heavily fertilizes the Amazon as winds carry fine particles from the sand across the ocean. [1]
- The amount of clay, concrete, etc to create these 1 square kilometer reservoirs would alone likely make the project unworkable at the scale needed
- The cost of upkeep at the desalination plants, salt water is extremely corrosive, would cost unimaginable amounts of money. Maintaining pipes leading out to the reservoirs would similarly be extremely expensive.
- Running all of this pipe, in a desert you are suddenly introducing obscene amounts of humidity too via evaporation... you're probably going to generate some pretty incredible storms and it would not surprise me at all if you have regular failures/ruptures from lightning strikes on the pipes, the flash flooding (deserts can not handle even minimal amounts of rain well) would regularly cause massive damage to infrastructure as well
- Etc etc.
Sadly, the only realistic solution to the scenario is a fleet of alien ships showing up with exotic-to-us technology, gifting us clean power generation to meet our needs several times over and giving us some sort of widget to pull carbon straight out of the air and create carbon bricks out of it in exchange for IP rights to all of our tv shows and music for sale to the Galactic Hegemony.
The next most realistic solution would be to agree as an entire planet to safely shut down all fossil fuel processing operations and nuclear reactors, then EMP the entire planet and hope we can survive the next several decades of destabilizing weather while we learn how to be a pre-industrial revolution society again and wait a few centuries for the Earth to start to deal with the carbon on its own.
Anything looking at 2040 timescales is inherently not enough. That’s the definition of passing the buck!
No, there needs to be a decision at the individual level and the investor level to forego easy money on building the next furry slipper delivery startup and only buy (a lot less for a lot more) from companies that take this seriously, work for companies that take this seriously, and invest in companies who can be serious today.
Otherwise, Earth will solve this little problem one way or another. The talking monkeys may not like it, though...
Why grow freshwater algae to sequester carbon when there's already a readily available supply of saltwater algae in the form of seaweed?
Take seaweed from ocean. Turn it into activated charcoal using solar pyrolysis. Bury the charcoal in farmland and marginal land to make terra preta. Terra preta sequesters carbon for hundreds of years and makes the soil more fertile, reducing the need for fossil-based fertilizers. Plant trees and grass on the marginal land.
>Take seaweed from ocean. Turn it into activated charcoal using solar pyrolysis.
Kelp and seaweed forests are vanishing due to ocean changes (as a result of climate change) and overfishing in coastal waters. It will only grow in water with a maximum depth that effectively limits it to coastal waters.
Then consider that you would need several orders of magnitude more area to grow it than currently exists.
For the solar pyrolisys too, you simply couldn't process it fast enough even if you found a way to grow it fast enough.
The seaweed route is even more unworkable than the algae would be.
Similarly I did the maths on using the 10 largest fresh water bodies (all other life in them be damned) to grow azolla and even THAT wouldn't even get us close to carbon neutral (a fraction of being carbon neutral) assuming 100% sequestration to anoxic depths.
There legitimately isn't a workable solution here, even if the entire planet came together, other than outright abandoning fossil fuels completely in addition to establishing new seaweed and kelp 'forests', reforesting land that has been clear cut, switching to permaculture for our food needs, outright abandoning cattle for food, etc.
Humans aren't going to extinct, but the next few decades will likely cause drastic changes in civilization as we know it and a couple centuries from now, barring multiple miraculous inventions and/or ET intervention, life for the common man will be incredibly different.
Good points... I had free-floating sargassum in mind,which is washing up in volume on beaches around the world, rather than kelp or something that has to be ripped up off the seabed.
Sargassum is in a state of hyper-growth around the world. something has created optimal conditions for it. I suspect that whatever was taken from the ocean would quickly be replaced. Is there a calculable upper limit to the amount of sargassum that could be produced by the ocean if it were aggressively being removed?
Not saying this idea is practical, but the goal was to be more practical than covering half the Sahara with algae growing ponds.
>Is there a calculable upper limit to the amount of sargassum that could be produced by the ocean if it were aggressively being removed?
I suppose the biggest limiting factor will be whatever minerals/nutrients it is taking from the water being in a sufficient volume in a given area. Although water temperature will probably matter considerably too.
But it isn't right now and you'd be talking about several orders of magnitude more than is currently being produced.
Current production appears to be something along the lines of 51.8 billion cubic meters [1] of brine each year being produced. Basically 1.5 brine per 1 desalinated water. If we use the YC page I linked above, " create millions of 1 km2 oases" let's assume roughly 2ft deep (61cm) and just 2 million oases... to fill them once you are talking about 1,200,000,000,000 cubic meters of water so 1,800,000,000,000 cubic meters of brine 34.75x as much brine as is currently being produced just to initially fill them, now factor in evaporation and water lost in algae you remove (to go sequester the carbon) and you're probably talking hundreds of times as much brine as currently produced. That's just for 2 million, what if you need 10 million of the pools? 20 million of them?
That's 1800 cubic kilometers of brine just to fill 2 million of the above pools, Lake Ontario is 1,640 cubic kilometers for some reference.
Especially not the for-profit corporations that are responsible for some of the worst pollution in the world.
Ironically, they own the biggest capital and resources to be able to tackle the problem that they are creating.