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> Do we need more evidence to act? What are we waiting for? We're waiting for a reversal in the apparent worldwide collapse of liberal democracy, I guess. Pro

> Do we need more evidence to act? What are we waiting for? We're waiting for a reversal in the apparent worldwide collapse of liberal democracy, I guess. Probably climate change and said collapse will feed into each other. The way most oligarchs and their toadies are wired, I think they're more likely to look to pull the ripcord for themselves rather than spend big on best-effort change for everyone else. Dismantling democracies like America must be a central pillar of their strategy for consolidating power. Incidentally, right now the single person most standing in the way of positive change (and he has even been dismantling previous progress) is a comically narcissistic, borderline illiterate fraud artist who'll most likely be dead before the shit hits the fan even according to the most alarming predictions. I don't mean to say he's fully responsible (far from it), but that's a good proxy for where we're at.

MiroF 7y ago
Your mistake is assuming that democratic consensus will spur the kind of action we really need. Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  It's not so much that voters are selfish (although some are; probably 20-30%) as that they don't like being ripped off and it has become very clear over the last ~30 years that all the happy talk of market economics is mostly self-serving BS. We've seen from recent economic crises that people are willing to tolerate and even vote for austerity; but since then they've noticed that all the austerity happened to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those at the top barely suffered at all. They've also noticed that a considerable portion of their taxes is pent on policing whose purpose is not the prevention of crime but the maintenance of the economic status quo.
- worldsayshi 7y ago
  > Once voters realize that this would take personal cost This is why we need to make sure that voters feel that lost income from climate gas taxes goes directly back to them through other means. It could just be income tax subsidies for low income brackets. Or I mean anything that makes sense. Taxing climate impacting practices doesn't need to have an overall negative impact on the economy of the average voter! This needs to be made super clear.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    > Taxing climate impacting practices doesn't need to have an overall negative impact on the economy of the average voter! This needs to be made super clear. Everything I've seen about the magnitude of change needed suggests this isn't true. And if we keep telling this story of "green growth", "only big corporations will have to sacrifice", you're going to get a ton of backlash once it becomes clear that is very much not the case.
    - ericd 7y ago
      And if the carbon taxes or whatever else are revenue-neutral? Some things (eg flights) would get much more expensive, whereas more efficient modes of transit (trains) would get relatively cheaper, and also be subsidized by the fliers.
    - isoskeles 7y ago
      It’s not like we run a balanced budget. I hate that we do this, but we can always add to the debt and expect future generations to pay it off.
    - worldsayshi 7y ago
      And while we endlessly debate whether we should slam the brakes or take control of the wheel we are ruled by people that are hell bent on taking away the wheel and the brakes all together...
- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  >Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal. Dying on a burning planet is a cost I expect to feel personally.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    > Dying on a burning planet is a cost I expect to feel personally. But you understand that isn't how the science works, right?
    - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
      No, I legitimately thought that the food web was slowly collapsing from the bottom up while deforestation and desertification accelerate. I had thought we were either headed for starving to death or choking to death for lack of core biological dependencies (food and oxygen) once but no longer supplied by nature.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  > Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime Oh, they are feeling the personal costs of climate change. It's just the political machines are trying their best to hide this fact. Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-carolina-lawmakers-reject-sea-level-rise-predictions-idUSBRE86217I20120703 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-c... I think a generation of people are so brainwashed that they can never be convinced of the harms that climate change is having directly on them.
  - MiroF 7y ago
    As an example of people being concretely impacted by climate change now, you are citing projected sea level increases. I think you could have probably picked a better article to prove your point. That aside, the point I'm making is that it would still be much cheaper to relocate people from those coasts (in the immediate future) and engage in emergency preparedness than it would be to substantially mitigate our emissions output. In the long term, that fucks us, but most voters aren't long term thinkers.
  - Mikeb85 7y ago
    Well, I'm in Alberta, Canada, and I guarantee 95% of voters here would choose increasing oil production vs. any sort of climate action. We just had a pretty bad recession, our unemployment is still above typical levels, and we just had an unseasonably cold summer after a pretty cold winter. It's not an issue of being brainwashed, people really do prefer having jobs and homes over climate targets to fix a problem that isn't readily apparent.
    - rconti 7y ago
      It's not just jobs and homes (poorer people). It's everyone. Everyone is chasing the jonses and is convinced they don't have enough. I'd like a fifth car. And a bigger house. And more vacations. I'm not saying I, personally, favor those things over what it will cost to limit climate change. But I think society as a whole doesn't have the stomach for it, and it's not just those living on the margins.
    - 7y ago
- perfunctory 7y ago
  I believe people are much more reasonable then you give them credit for. When properly informed they will make the right choices. And the good news is that you don’t even need to wait for the majority to make the “right” vote. Apparently, it’s enough for the 3.5% of the population to take part in a sustained active resistance to bring about radical change [0]. This is also why I believe Extinction Rebellion is the last hope of humanity. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
  - MiroF 7y ago
    The majority of people who believe in climate change would be unwilling to pay $10 a month to avert it entirely. 3.5/100 is for easy concessions that didn't actually require giving up capital (like race concessions, because racism is actively irrational). A rational actor today who only cares about their own interests (like the super rich) will fight tooth and nail to prevent any actual change to their consumption.
- GVIrish 7y ago
  > Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal. Luckily renewable energy is getting to the point where it actually saves money over fossil fuel based energy. People might be loathe to move to electric or fuel cell vehicles, but costs are coming down there too, not to mention that many governments are banning ICE vehicles anyway. So the costs of shifting may not be that bad, and people will be able to realize some cost savings. Right now we're at a point in history where shifting to a carbon neutral economy will be uncomfortable in some ways, but not horribly painful. But the longer we wait, the more likely it is that we'll experience a lot of pain from climate change consequences. And the climate change will destroy a tremendous amount of wealth, cause massive refugee crises, and cause massive drops in food supplies. When those things happen it's going to much harder to make the shifts to clean energy because many will just be worried about surviving disruption in the short term.
  - pkaye 7y ago
    The ICE vehicle bans don't seem realistic. If they set a goal like 10% sales first year, 20% next year etc, then I can understand a goal for a total ban in 10 years. Sometimes politicians set unrealistic goal expecting they won't be involved by the time the deadline reaches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
    - GVIrish 7y ago
      What we're starting to see is that enough major global markets have committed to banning combustion engines in cars in the next 10-20 years, that it will make economic sense for global auto manufacturers to focus their product development on alternative fuel vehicles. Mercedes just announced that they will cease development of combustion engines to focus on EV's. VW Audi Group just said that this is their last generation of combustion engines. I suspect we'll see similar announcements from other manufacturers in not too long. We may see some countries soften their goals, but I think if some of the big automotive players commit to having products available to meet those goals, there won't be much need to relax the goals. Only things that would cause a rollback is if anti-environmental politicians get into power or governments attempting to protect domestic car companies that are late making the shift.
- pohl 7y ago
  I don’t think it’s a mistake, but a prerequisite. Oligarchs and autocrats only have their own interests in mind.
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  In a stable society situation, money tends to go to money and power tends to centralize. Thus probably the rich enough can protect themselves and their children from climate effects. They can sacrifice the pawns. What's a hundred million refugees if they can prop up their coal investment for another decade.
api 7y ago
I see a darker possibility. Maybe we are acting. Maybe governments and oligarchs in richer more powerful nations have concluded in secret that the situation is hopeless and that it's too late to prevent major climate change, so they are deploying totalitarianism. When I see Trump's push to build the wall, I think maybe the wall is not for today's migrant workers and trickle of refugees. Maybe it's to wall off America from millions of refugees fleeing climate change related catastrophes and the resulting political instability. Trump's bizarre floating of a Greenland purchase? Maybe Greenland will be more valuable when the ice melts. The push to bring back lower-margin manufacturing even at the cost of an expensive and economically dangerous trade war? Maybe the people behind Trump see a global melt down (pun intended) as leading to a world with less international trade and more animosity and they want to make sure we have our own manufacturing capacity under our control. (I see Trump as a figurehead with a certain faction of the intelligence and American oligarch community behind him. He's an actor playing a part.) When I see China's social credit system I think extreme system of social control to deal with the unrest that's likely to come. Maybe China is adding another 250GW of coal because the situation is hopeless anyway and they've calculated that it's better to accelerate their economic development so they have more resources going into this period. If the ship is sinking who cares if you put another hole in it, especially if it buys you more lifeboats. Maybe Russia is building nuclear cruise missiles and other doomsday weapons to defend itself from China. (Others too, but China is the scariest threat in this scenario.) It like Canada has a huge territory with a small population relative to its size, but unlike Canada it does not have a superpower ally neighbor. If climate change warms northern Russia it could become prime farm land. Russia also has massive natural resources including probably a ton of undiscovered rare Earths and lithium for high technology and batteries. I could see China with its 1.3 billion people living in low-lying areas that are likely to be flooded in a worst case scenario deciding that it's going to just seize the sparsely populated half of Russia to its North. Right now China with its tens-of-millions-strong army could walk right up there and take it and there's not much Moscow could do about it. This scenario is not "the end of the world." The richer nations actually might not fare that bad. Some could even benefit. The poorer nations and their inhabitants could suffer mightily. It could be an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. I'm not advocating this by any stretch. Don't shoot the messenger. This is the horrible Realpolitik outcome that we'll get if we choose defection over cooperation in a game theoretic sense. Personally if this scenario unfolded I would advocate unification of the United States and Canada (to whatever extent is politically possible) and opening our borders to anyone without a provable criminal record. Let all those migrants head all the way up to the far North, settle it, and establish farms and industry. Brain drain from places like Nazi Germany, China, the USSR, etc. created the last American century, so maybe it could happen again. In any case the economic growth we would get from this would help us afford to do things like build the great New York and Boston sea walls, the system of locks and pumps to save much of Los Angeles, and New Miami. We're unlikely to do that though. That's not how most people think in a scarcity or threat scenario.

MiroF 7y ago

Your mistake is assuming that democratic consensus will spur the kind of action we really need. Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal.

anigbrowl 7y ago
It's not so much that voters are selfish (although some are; probably 20-30%) as that they don't like being ripped off and it has become very clear over the last ~30 years that all the happy talk of market economics is mostly self-serving BS. We've seen from recent economic crises that people are willing to tolerate and even vote for austerity; but since then they've noticed that all the austerity happened to people at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those at the top barely suffered at all. They've also noticed that a considerable portion of their taxes is pent on policing whose purpose is not the prevention of crime but the maintenance of the economic status quo.
worldsayshi 7y ago
> Once voters realize that this would take personal cost This is why we need to make sure that voters feel that lost income from climate gas taxes goes directly back to them through other means. It could just be income tax subsidies for low income brackets. Or I mean anything that makes sense. Taxing climate impacting practices doesn't need to have an overall negative impact on the economy of the average voter! This needs to be made super clear.
- MiroF 7y ago
  > Taxing climate impacting practices doesn't need to have an overall negative impact on the economy of the average voter! This needs to be made super clear. Everything I've seen about the magnitude of change needed suggests this isn't true. And if we keep telling this story of "green growth", "only big corporations will have to sacrifice", you're going to get a ton of backlash once it becomes clear that is very much not the case.
  - ericd 7y ago
    And if the carbon taxes or whatever else are revenue-neutral? Some things (eg flights) would get much more expensive, whereas more efficient modes of transit (trains) would get relatively cheaper, and also be subsidized by the fliers.
  - isoskeles 7y ago
    It’s not like we run a balanced budget. I hate that we do this, but we can always add to the debt and expect future generations to pay it off.
  - worldsayshi 7y ago
    And while we endlessly debate whether we should slam the brakes or take control of the wheel we are ruled by people that are hell bent on taking away the wheel and the brakes all together...
eli_gottlieb 7y ago
>Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal. Dying on a burning planet is a cost I expect to feel personally.
- MiroF 7y ago
  > Dying on a burning planet is a cost I expect to feel personally. But you understand that isn't how the science works, right?
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    No, I legitimately thought that the food web was slowly collapsing from the bottom up while deforestation and desertification accelerate. I had thought we were either headed for starving to death or choking to death for lack of core biological dependencies (food and oxygen) once but no longer supplied by nature.
mywittyname 7y ago
> Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime Oh, they are feeling the personal costs of climate change. It's just the political machines are trying their best to hide this fact. Example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-carolina-lawmakers-reject-sea-level-rise-predictions-idUSBRE86217I20120703 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-c... I think a generation of people are so brainwashed that they can never be convinced of the harms that climate change is having directly on them.
- MiroF 7y ago
  As an example of people being concretely impacted by climate change now, you are citing projected sea level increases. I think you could have probably picked a better article to prove your point. That aside, the point I'm making is that it would still be much cheaper to relocate people from those coasts (in the immediate future) and engage in emergency preparedness than it would be to substantially mitigate our emissions output. In the long term, that fucks us, but most voters aren't long term thinkers.
- Mikeb85 7y ago
  Well, I'm in Alberta, Canada, and I guarantee 95% of voters here would choose increasing oil production vs. any sort of climate action. We just had a pretty bad recession, our unemployment is still above typical levels, and we just had an unseasonably cold summer after a pretty cold winter. It's not an issue of being brainwashed, people really do prefer having jobs and homes over climate targets to fix a problem that isn't readily apparent.
  - rconti 7y ago
    It's not just jobs and homes (poorer people). It's everyone. Everyone is chasing the jonses and is convinced they don't have enough. I'd like a fifth car. And a bigger house. And more vacations. I'm not saying I, personally, favor those things over what it will cost to limit climate change. But I think society as a whole doesn't have the stomach for it, and it's not just those living on the margins.
  - 7y ago
perfunctory 7y ago
I believe people are much more reasonable then you give them credit for. When properly informed they will make the right choices. And the good news is that you don’t even need to wait for the majority to make the “right” vote. Apparently, it’s enough for the 3.5% of the population to take part in a sustained active resistance to bring about radical change [0]. This is also why I believe Extinction Rebellion is the last hope of humanity. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w
- MiroF 7y ago
  The majority of people who believe in climate change would be unwilling to pay $10 a month to avert it entirely. 3.5/100 is for easy concessions that didn't actually require giving up capital (like race concessions, because racism is actively irrational). A rational actor today who only cares about their own interests (like the super rich) will fight tooth and nail to prevent any actual change to their consumption.
GVIrish 7y ago
> Once voters realize that this would take personal cost for benefits they won't see in their lifetime, I can't see them willfully voting for any substantial reversal. Luckily renewable energy is getting to the point where it actually saves money over fossil fuel based energy. People might be loathe to move to electric or fuel cell vehicles, but costs are coming down there too, not to mention that many governments are banning ICE vehicles anyway. So the costs of shifting may not be that bad, and people will be able to realize some cost savings. Right now we're at a point in history where shifting to a carbon neutral economy will be uncomfortable in some ways, but not horribly painful. But the longer we wait, the more likely it is that we'll experience a lot of pain from climate change consequences. And the climate change will destroy a tremendous amount of wealth, cause massive refugee crises, and cause massive drops in food supplies. When those things happen it's going to much harder to make the shifts to clean energy because many will just be worried about surviving disruption in the short term.
- pkaye 7y ago
  The ICE vehicle bans don't seem realistic. If they set a goal like 10% sales first year, 20% next year etc, then I can understand a goal for a total ban in 10 years. Sometimes politicians set unrealistic goal expecting they won't be involved by the time the deadline reaches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehicles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
  - GVIrish 7y ago
    What we're starting to see is that enough major global markets have committed to banning combustion engines in cars in the next 10-20 years, that it will make economic sense for global auto manufacturers to focus their product development on alternative fuel vehicles. Mercedes just announced that they will cease development of combustion engines to focus on EV's. VW Audi Group just said that this is their last generation of combustion engines. I suspect we'll see similar announcements from other manufacturers in not too long. We may see some countries soften their goals, but I think if some of the big automotive players commit to having products available to meet those goals, there won't be much need to relax the goals. Only things that would cause a rollback is if anti-environmental politicians get into power or governments attempting to protect domestic car companies that are late making the shift.
pohl 7y ago
I don’t think it’s a mistake, but a prerequisite. Oligarchs and autocrats only have their own interests in mind.
Gravityloss 7y ago
In a stable society situation, money tends to go to money and power tends to centralize. Thus probably the rich enough can protect themselves and their children from climate effects. They can sacrifice the pawns. What's a hundred million refugees if they can prop up their coal investment for another decade.

api 7y ago

I see a darker possibility. Maybe we are acting. Maybe governments and oligarchs in richer more powerful nations have concluded in secret that the situation is hopeless and that it's too late to prevent major climate change, so they are deploying totalitarianism. When I see Trump's push to build the wall, I think maybe the wall is not for today's migrant workers and trickle of refugees. Maybe it's to wall off America from millions of refugees fleeing climate change related catastrophes and the resulting political instability. Trump's bizarre floating of a Greenland purchase? Maybe Greenland will be more valuable when the ice melts. The push to bring back lower-margin manufacturing even at the cost of an expensive and economically dangerous trade war? Maybe the people behind Trump see a global melt down (pun intended) as leading to a world with less international trade and more animosity and they want to make sure we have our own manufacturing capacity under our control. (I see Trump as a figurehead with a certain faction of the intelligence and American oligarch community behind him. He's an actor playing a part.) When I see China's social credit system I think extreme system of social control to deal with the unrest that's likely to come. Maybe China is adding another 250GW of coal because the situation is hopeless anyway and they've calculated that it's better to accelerate their economic development so they have more resources going into this period. If the ship is sinking who cares if you put another hole in it, especially if it buys you more lifeboats. Maybe Russia is building nuclear cruise missiles and other doomsday weapons to defend itself from China. (Others too, but China is the scariest threat in this scenario.) It like Canada has a huge territory with a small population relative to its size, but unlike Canada it does not have a superpower ally neighbor. If climate change warms northern Russia it could become prime farm land. Russia also has massive natural resources including probably a ton of undiscovered rare Earths and lithium for high technology and batteries. I could see China with its 1.3 billion people living in low-lying areas that are likely to be flooded in a worst case scenario deciding that it's going to just seize the sparsely populated half of Russia to its North. Right now China with its tens-of-millions-strong army could walk right up there and take it and there's not much Moscow could do about it. This scenario is not "the end of the world." The richer nations actually might not fare that bad. Some could even benefit. The poorer nations and their inhabitants could suffer mightily. It could be an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. I'm not advocating this by any stretch. Don't shoot the messenger. This is the horrible Realpolitik outcome that we'll get if we choose defection over cooperation in a game theoretic sense. Personally if this scenario unfolded I would advocate unification of the United States and Canada (to whatever extent is politically possible) and opening our borders to anyone without a provable criminal record. Let all those migrants head all the way up to the far North, settle it, and establish farms and industry. Brain drain from places like Nazi Germany, China, the USSR, etc. created the last American century, so maybe it could happen again. In any case the economic growth we would get from this would help us afford to do things like build the great New York and Boston sea walls, the system of locks and pumps to save much of Los Angeles, and New Miami. We're unlikely to do that though. That's not how most people think in a scarcity or threat scenario.