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It's so crazy to me that everyone in vulnerable places--Tokyo and Houston in the article for example--are happy to spend hundreds of millions, even billions, to
by acabal 9y ago
It's so crazy to me that everyone in vulnerable places--Tokyo and Houston in the article for example--are happy to spend hundreds of millions, even billions, to put a bandaid on their local climate change problems.
It seems like they all acknowledge the reality and danger of climate change and are willing to spend money on it.
In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
It's as if our eyes can see the oncoming train just a mile away, but instead of stepping out of the way we want to build a mechanized winch that will temporarily lift us over the train, and hopefully we'll be done building it before the train hits us, and oh yeah, never mind how we're supposed to get down, or the taller train after that one.
Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary?
Yes it's a global problem, but solutions to global problems start at home. Throwing our hands up and saying it's pointless until the other guy does something too can't be the way to progress on this issue.
- eliben 9y agoTragedy of the commons - it's a ubiquitous and powerful economic principle.
- danharaj 9y agoThe tragedy of the commons is another name for the failure of private property and markets to account for externalities. For a real theory of the commons without leaving mainstream economics cf. Mary Ostrom's Governing the Commons. Otherwise, all of anthropology.
- bdamm 9y agoIt's clear that our contemporary social structures are not well equipped to deal with climate change. This is unlikely to change in the next 10-50 years. So local governments that are able to act must do so. "Solutions to global problems start at home." --> If everyone in Houston switched up their SUVs for Prius', nothing globally would change at all, except that the people of Houston would have smaller cars. Why does this make sense for them?
- SapphireSun 9y agoYou're right that we require a policy attack on Climate Change, but nonetheless, it feels a bit odd to keep doing the thing that'll kill you.
- zanny 9y agoIf only Houston produced carbon and the rest of the world were carbon neutral the 4 million residents of the metro area wouldn't be able to raise the temperature of Earth a degree in a millennia at current emissions rates. This is why Climate Change is hard. Individually nobody is causing that much damage (except maybe Californian cows) but the sum of the parts causes an extraordinary problem.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 9y agoIt's very likely that local band-aids are the most effective way to deal with this. Your train example is a pretty good one, but you've mixed up the metaphor. Here, "stepping out of the way" = mass migrations out of coastal cities. "A mechanized winch that temporarily lifts us over the train" = flood control projects like in Tokyo, Houston, Venice, or the Netherlands. "Calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains" = stopping global warming by addressing carbon emissions. If you had a train barreling down on you, which one would you choose? I'd bet it wouldn't be calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains, because a.) they are unlikely to anyway and b.) even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway. I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere. If they're proactive, they might evacuate before the city is actually destroyed, and we'll see mass migrations of people (as have been happening for the last several hundred years anyway) away from areas that will face greater climate risks and toward areas that benefit from global warming. That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
- blondie9x 9y agoAdaptation without mitigation will not be effective as the impacts worsen. Uncapped emissions and business as usual scenarios will cause outcomes that we will not be able to build ourselves out of. We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now. We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to lead sustainable lifestyles will we be able to beat climate change. We must push for renewable energy, and technological solutions to efficiently use resources. The policy coming out of the White House is against these efforts and we need to find a way to prevent them from hurting us and our posterity by postponing the efforts to transition to clean energy. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan....
- 9y ago
- hkmurakami 9y agoEven billions is cheap for Japan given that their strongest export sector these days is automobiles.
- pascalxus 9y agoThe same thing happens with our health. People would rather spend trillions of dollars on health care, rather than start eating healthy. 70% of all healthcare dollars go towards diseases and causes of death that are lifestyle related causes (eating, nutrtion, excercise, smoking, etc)
- pizza 9y agoWell, as for the excessive spending, there is also the fact that healthcare is basically a parallel to the military industrial complex (doctors, hospitals, insurers, drug companies) especially conducive to oligarchy/monopoly-like behavior. Paradoxically enough (but not so much if you think about it a while), a review of patient mortality rates during doctor's strikes found that mortality decreased when doctors were on strike. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18849101
- nickik 9y agoSimple economics. Its a free rider problem, both on state to federal, as well as federal to global level. There simply are not the institutions to have global solutions.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoEveryone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place. Careful how you throw around “they” there buddy. We Houstonians are 7 million diverse people doing the best we can with what we have. Thanks for your outrage on our behalf. Instead of grand standing and virtue signaling perhaps you could, you know, actually do something to help.
- wavefunction 9y agoY'all could build a robust mass-transit system and get those cars off of the road for a start.
- ryanmarsh 9y agoWhat do you think we’ve been trying to do? Read the Houston Chronicle or Houston Press.
- ctdonath 9y agoyet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and using gasoline-powered vehicles (directly or by proxy), you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. And "leaders" who take private jets to "climate change policy conferences" are straight-up charlatans. (I'd be construed as a "climate change denier", and yet I do more about mitigating climate change than anyone else I know.) Be the change you want in the world. You can afford it.
- savanaly 9y agoThis doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching. Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.
- roenxi 9y agoThis isn't prisoner's dilemma though - everyone has a full ability to communicate with each other. That breaks a pretty basic assumption. To stretch your analogy, you are playing prisoners dilemma with someone who is swearing he will snitch, has a lawyer who is saying "my client will cooperate fully with the police" and who has signed a document explaining the facts.
- savanaly 9y agoIn the classical prisoner's dilemma it doesn't matter whether the prisoners can fully communicate with each other or not as long as it hold that they cannot change their move after seeing what the other guy moved. And it's perverse because they both have a strategy A that strictly dominates B but if they both play A then they're worse off than if they both played B.
- wizardforhire 9y agoClimate change is in dire need of a Themistocles type character that can sway the public. The current talking heads I feel are just not up to the task. Someone who the right can relate to who but doesn't alienate the left in the process and who can rise above the media noise and can encapsulate their arguments into easily digestible sound bites so as to not get lost. There's no doubt humanity is in for a hep of trouble in the immediate future, however the powers at be are too disjointed with conflicting interests to be expected to reach a rationale consensus. It Doesn't help that the right has developed some pretty powerful newspeak rife with thought terminating cliches that makes argument all but impossible. If history is any consolation, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Unfortunately things getting worse in this case means it'll probably be too late to make things better.
- mkempe 9y agoBuilding such infrastructure does properly address specific risks of natural disasters and climate change. One should not assume that climate changes have been, are, nor will be, exclusively caused by human action; one should not think that there is a single, global path of action that will somehow set all future climates to some ideal version. More concretely, consider that we happen to live in an interglacial period. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interglacial
- jjawssd 9y ago> In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place. It sucks to have to drive for miles to get anywhere in Houston. Public transportation is downright dangerous in Houston where the threat of violent crime is very high. It is not practical to arrive at work sweaty from walking or bicycling. Just being outside on a motorcycle moving at moderate speed causes intense perspiration within 10 minutes. Air conditioning is necessary. There is no alternative to the gasoline powered automobile because the city is planned so poorly. So you deal with it the only way you can by taking personal responsibility to ensure your own safety and comfort. Fundamentally the problem may be poor planning or that the government is dysfunctional and taxpayer money is squandered.
- brador 9y agoRational self-interested bots engineered to maximise shareholder value.
- gfdgsdgdfgsdfg 9y agoWell, mitigation without adaptation would be a terrible idea. That's how you get screwed over by industrial countries with little regulation. Obviously the answer is a bit of both, so it's not entirely clear what you're arguing for....
- neuronexmachina 9y agoIt's basically the Tragedy of the Commons on a global scale. The atmosphere is a huge public good, and climate change is a huge negative externality. It's relatively beneficial to the individual person, and even the individual country, to ignore the problem, even if it ultimately harms the population as a whole in the long run. That's why so many people prefer to ignore the problem or pretend it doesn't exist, rather than actually confront the issue. http://tragedy.sdsu.edu/ http://tragedy.sdsu.edu/
- agumonkey 9y agoVery interesting idea
- shoo 9y agoYep. If I have a pile of coal, and you want electricity, I can sell you coal for a good price. I make a profit, you get energy, we both lose a tiny bit due to increased global warming. The other 7 billion people in the world each lose a tiny bit to global warming and get zero direct benefit from our trade. It is rational for me to keep selling you coal, and for you to keep buying it, while we can keep the game rolling and push the costs onto everyone else. It's be beneficial for everyone else if they banded together and prevented us from trading without paying them appropriate compensation. If you're feeling particularly misanthropic / politically foolish, repeat similar argument about living in society with high per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Suppose you and a partner decide to have children. Maybe everyone else in the world should band together and demand compensation/regulation for the global environmental impact due to population growth in these countries. Some things we currently regard as individual freedoms are not logically compatible with constrained resources/constrained pollution sinks.
- s_kilk 9y ago> Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary? In part because the Carbon Industry is huge and powerful, and holds power over most of the worlds major governments. I mean Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil is currently the US Secretary of State. The rest is because the machine of Late Capitalism is built on a presumption of endless growth with no consequences. The crisis that's barrelling down on us is so __alien__ to the established way of thinking that it's literally impossible for these economies to react with anything other than stupor and paralysis.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoPreparing for the effects is much more practical, and something that you can execute against. I have long been a proponent of the notion that there is ample, and incontrovertible, evidence of climate change even before people started adding their own hand to the mix. As such, the expected value of a dollar spent on preparing for a change in climate gives a better return in terms of survivability than spending a dollar changing a local contribution to CO2 production. Spending money on both is even better. When one of the super volcanoes burps its going to screw up a lot of things, and it would be nice to have some options.
- wallace_f 9y agoThis is all a great illustration of support for Elon Musk's idea that a carbon tax is the best way to fight climate change. Unfortunately, a global carbon tax would put the billion dollar Climate Change Bureaucracy Industry nearly out of business. And people act like we haven't seen this kind of perverse incentive structure--bureaucratic inertia--before with the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrror, etc.: they all end up focusing on self-preservation rather than their apparent objectives.
- jessaustin 9y agoYeah I won't really be worried about global warming until they start talking about something like "The Climate War". We lose all our wars, so that would be a declaration of inevitable doom.
- gozur88 9y agoJapan didn't (over)build that flood control system because they're worried about global warming or thousand year floods. They did it to create jobs. In the same way the US is said to have a "military industrial complex", Japan has a "construction industrial complex", wherein the government builds a whole lot of infrastructure the country can't really justify or even maintain. Flood control, rail lines, airports, etc. It's all stuff an industrialized country needs, but the Japanese take it up to eleven in an effort to stimulate the economy.
- toephu2 9y agoI find this argument a little weak. I think you are confusing Japan with China? Or do you have any sources?
- agumonkey 9y agoI kinda agree with you, but I still find this more interesting than the usual nothing + catastrophy aftermath in flooded areas.
- graeme 9y agoThere's a coordination problem at work. If Tokyo stops emitting entirely, it still gets flooded. Whereas the flood prevention actually stops the flood (for a couple of decades anyway). Even though it's not a great solution, it turns out that flood prevention is the only solution Tokyo can actually implement on its own. I wish we had a global system of carbon taxes, and hope that we might make an effective solution. And I wish cities like Tokyo would push harder for national/international solutions. But I don't think they're wrong to prepare locally.
- corey_moncure 9y agoThe way I see it, the only possible way to stop the coming disaster is for the entire world to come together, collectively, and limit population with sterilization lottery programs. We need to bring things down to 1 billion or less people. Nations that don't volunteer willingly will have to be drug along by force. This probably won't happen, though. We're f#@^ed.
- matt4077 9y agoEvery single country that has become wealthy has seen a drop in reproduction rates to rates lower than what's necessary to keep population numbers steady–except the US because somehow they managed to be become more religious with time. Meaning you can make excellent progress towards your goal without committing injustices on an industrial scale. Instead, you get to work on empowering women and bringing education, economic opportunity, and health care to everyone. Yeah!
- jessaustin 9y agoUSA's exceptionalism in fertility is due to immigration not religion.
- djrogers 9y agoThe only reason the US reproduction rate isn’t lower is due to massive immigration. If you take out the cohort of people who’ve moved here in the past generation, the rate looks much more like that of European nations.
- corey_moncure 9y agoEducation, social justice, economic opportunity and universal health care are all wonderful things but this is a problem we need to solve -now-. We have something like 100 years by conservative estimates before runaway effects like methane clathrate melt and ocean acidification make warming inevitable and irreversible. Even now, in the "wealthy" USA, abandoning coal power is being described as unrealistic, let alone implementing the sweeping social changes you've mentioned in places like Africa, Central America and China. "Injustices on an industrial scale"? When billions of people are displaced from the rising coasts, when entire nations disappear into the ocean, when our over-homogenized agriculture fails to sudden environmental shifts leading to widespread famine, we'll wish we had just gotten vasectomies instead.
- whazor 9y agoBecause climate change makes the floods worse, meaning that without climate change you still have floods. Reversal of climate change is not significant enough to be able to safe money on these tunnels. Although we would save a lot of lives by undoing climate change.
- samplonius 9y agoI don't get why Houston wants to spend $400M on a reservoir. Sure they need a reservoir, but they need all of the other stuff too. Perhaps if they had $4B budget, they could actually fix everything that needs to be fixed. Houston needs to get to the point that they can handle 60+ inches of rain in a 24 hour period. Token efforts might keep their budget balanced and the voters appeased until the next election, but they're getting 100 year storms so frequently now, they'll have to stop calling them that. Climate change is great and all, but even if you sharply cut carbon emissions today, it would take a years before 100 years storms went back to their previous frequency.