5 ms·

To put it in perspective, 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable when the alternatives

To put it in perspective, 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable when the alternatives are Water World level flooding or living like a vegan hermit in a cave...

quotemstr 6y ago
> 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable In the eyes of the annoying kind of climate activist, the affordability you've mentioned is a bug, not a feature. Too many people who claim to care about the planet want to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally. This sort of activist doesn't see the carbon problem as an engineering challenge, but instead as a political and aesthetic project. It's super annoying, because people like this reject technology that would let us have our modern lifestyle cake and eat it too. Not all climate activists are like this, but there are enough of these bad faith people around to seriously impair earnest and good faith efforts to solve the actual engineering side of the carbon problem.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  > to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally. Not roll back. But do smarter. It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from harvesting rare earth minerals. We can't keep doing this. Maybe we can keep it up so before your lifetime is over, but sooner or later it's going to be a problem that can't be avoided just like climate change is now. There's many quick wins here. Buying locally produced foods instead of stuff flown in from half a world away. Not flying across europe for a 1 hour business meeting. Reducing plastic packaging. And there's good news too. We're continuing the excellent path of energy reduction in electric appliances. They had to keep adding "+"es and now rework the entire energy labels in Europe because "A++++" efficiency became too long. I think COVID already brought us halfway there. We're no longer used to business meetings, the fragility of our supply chains has opened up many eyes, and most office workers now work from home at least part time and do just fine. For the environment this has all been pretty great :)
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    > We can't keep doing this In the broadest possible sense, no, we can't keep doing "this": either we limit fertility somehow or we got the Malthusian limit eventually. That's just the consequence of the exponential function. And right now, whether population will stabilize on its own before we hit carrying capacity is an open question. But if you hold population constant? Yes, we can keep doing this indefinitely, or at least until the sun boils the oceans in 500 million years or so. Why wouldn't we? There's every reason to believe that we can supply oranges in January to everyone. Show me the math that says we can't. I'm not persuaded by rhetoric about rust bucket cargo ships. It's exactly this sort of sentimentality that makes it difficult to actually make progress on addressing actual climate problems.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century. It's not really an open question - it would take reversal of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do more than at most delay the reversal.
      - quotemstr 6y ago
        The reversal analysis you've mentioned doesn't take into account (not in the forms I've seen) the presence of high fertility subpopulations that will come to dominate larger low fertility populations eventually and drag everyone's fertility rate back up.
        vidarh 6y ago
        There are no "high fertility subpopulations" that maintain fertility rate irrespective of external situations. Research on immigration for example consistently show that immigrant populations adapt to local fertility levels within 1-2 generations. If anything, increasing immigration to developed countries would likely accelerate the reversal of population growth because of this effect. Furthermore, fertility drops as education increases and poverty decreases. This trend is consistent in every population where we can correlate economic development. E.g. here's the fertility rate for Niger [1], one of the poorest countries in the world. Even that has taken a sharp downturn as economic growth has started decoupling from uranium export (which previously dominated Niger's GDP, but provided very little benefit to the population). Niger, incidentally, has the highest fertility rate in the world, and is one of only 10 remaining countries with fertility rate above 5. As such such "high fertility subpopulations" are really high poverty, low education populations - currently countries categorised as "Least Developed Countries" by the UN have a fertility rate of 4. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world that remains above 4, but that too is dropping fast as most of the countries in the region are seeing solid economic growth. As poverty drops and education increases, fertility rates are dropping across the board, just not at the same rate. But even sub-Saharan African is headed for reversal. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=NE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  Best get on and solve it as an engineering issue before too many people read the Unabomber Manifesto...
pjc50 6y ago
The flooding is hardly "water world": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z "Central estimates in the recent literature broadly agree that global mean sea level is likely to rise 20–30 cm by 20503,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. End-of-century projections diverge more, with typical central estimates ranging from 50–70 cm under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 70–100 cm under RCP 8.53,9,10,12, though more recent projections incorporating Antarctic ice sheet dynamics indicate that sea levels may rise 70–100 cm under RCP 4.5 and 100–180 cm under RCP 8.5, and could even exceed 2 m or more in far-tail scenarios4,7,8,11. Via a structured elicitation of opinion, experts now estimate there is a 5 percent chance 21st century sea-level rise will exceed 2 m" Bad news for East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, and many estuary cities including London will need mitigation work.
- refulgentis 6y ago
  #1 thank you for sharing, I was all prepared to come back here and say "20 cm-30 cm is a lot! that puts half of boston underwater!", but it doesn't, not even remotely, and thus is a useful reminder to me I can chill #2 to be fair to OP, think they're referencing what would happen to humanity as a whole if we _didn't_ have carbon capture, not specifically "water world by 2100", and something I've picked up since moving to Boston from Buffalo is that storm surge has a _much_ more significant effect when you're around so much water. Even the 20-30 cm, once you add a foot or two of storm surge that we get a handful of times a year, floods most of Boston in 2050.
rayiner 6y ago
Yes. But don’t forget that for many, berating people into living like a vegan hermit is part of the point, and if science solves that problem it gets taken away from them. It’s the same people who want everyone to keep using masks even after vaccination.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Where are those "masks forever" people? I hear about them, but I never seem to hear them. Is there a news report or something I can read?
  - rayiner 6y ago
    You should read my Facebook wall. I’m not saying there’s a lot of them, but I’m apparently Facebook friends with all of them. :D
    - dllthomas 6y ago
      "Forever" or "after a particular individual is vaccinated, while vaccination rate generally is still low and incidence is still high"?

quotemstr 6y ago

> 100usd/tn would let me (limey brit) maintain my wasteful lifestyle for just 5300 a year. That's very affordable In the eyes of the annoying kind of climate activist, the affordability you've mentioned is a bug, not a feature. Too many people who claim to care about the planet want to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally. This sort of activist doesn't see the carbon problem as an engineering challenge, but instead as a political and aesthetic project. It's super annoying, because people like this reject technology that would let us have our modern lifestyle cake and eat it too. Not all climate activists are like this, but there are enough of these bad faith people around to seriously impair earnest and good faith efforts to solve the actual engineering side of the carbon problem.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
> to use the climate as a pretext to reform everyone's lifestyle and to roll back industrial civilization more generally. Not roll back. But do smarter. It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from harvesting rare earth minerals. We can't keep doing this. Maybe we can keep it up so before your lifetime is over, but sooner or later it's going to be a problem that can't be avoided just like climate change is now. There's many quick wins here. Buying locally produced foods instead of stuff flown in from half a world away. Not flying across europe for a 1 hour business meeting. Reducing plastic packaging. And there's good news too. We're continuing the excellent path of energy reduction in electric appliances. They had to keep adding "+"es and now rework the entire energy labels in Europe because "A++++" efficiency became too long. I think COVID already brought us halfway there. We're no longer used to business meetings, the fragility of our supply chains has opened up many eyes, and most office workers now work from home at least part time and do just fine. For the environment this has all been pretty great :)
- quotemstr 6y ago
  > We can't keep doing this In the broadest possible sense, no, we can't keep doing "this": either we limit fertility somehow or we got the Malthusian limit eventually. That's just the consequence of the exponential function. And right now, whether population will stabilize on its own before we hit carrying capacity is an open question. But if you hold population constant? Yes, we can keep doing this indefinitely, or at least until the sun boils the oceans in 500 million years or so. Why wouldn't we? There's every reason to believe that we can supply oranges in January to everyone. Show me the math that says we can't. I'm not persuaded by rhetoric about rust bucket cargo ships. It's exactly this sort of sentimentality that makes it difficult to actually make progress on addressing actual climate problems.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century. It's not really an open question - it would take reversal of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do more than at most delay the reversal.
    - quotemstr 6y ago
      The reversal analysis you've mentioned doesn't take into account (not in the forms I've seen) the presence of high fertility subpopulations that will come to dominate larger low fertility populations eventually and drag everyone's fertility rate back up.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        There are no "high fertility subpopulations" that maintain fertility rate irrespective of external situations. Research on immigration for example consistently show that immigrant populations adapt to local fertility levels within 1-2 generations. If anything, increasing immigration to developed countries would likely accelerate the reversal of population growth because of this effect. Furthermore, fertility drops as education increases and poverty decreases. This trend is consistent in every population where we can correlate economic development. E.g. here's the fertility rate for Niger [1], one of the poorest countries in the world. Even that has taken a sharp downturn as economic growth has started decoupling from uranium export (which previously dominated Niger's GDP, but provided very little benefit to the population). Niger, incidentally, has the highest fertility rate in the world, and is one of only 10 remaining countries with fertility rate above 5. As such such "high fertility subpopulations" are really high poverty, low education populations - currently countries categorised as "Least Developed Countries" by the UN have a fertility rate of 4. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world that remains above 4, but that too is dropping fast as most of the countries in the region are seeing solid economic growth. As poverty drops and education increases, fertility rates are dropping across the board, just not at the same rate. But even sub-Saharan African is headed for reversal. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=NE https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
LatteLazy 6y ago
Best get on and solve it as an engineering issue before too many people read the Unabomber Manifesto...

pjc50 6y ago

The flooding is hardly "water world": https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12808-z "Central estimates in the recent literature broadly agree that global mean sea level is likely to rise 20–30 cm by 20503,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. End-of-century projections diverge more, with typical central estimates ranging from 50–70 cm under representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 70–100 cm under RCP 8.53,9,10,12, though more recent projections incorporating Antarctic ice sheet dynamics indicate that sea levels may rise 70–100 cm under RCP 4.5 and 100–180 cm under RCP 8.5, and could even exceed 2 m or more in far-tail scenarios4,7,8,11. Via a structured elicitation of opinion, experts now estimate there is a 5 percent chance 21st century sea-level rise will exceed 2 m" Bad news for East Anglia and the Somerset Levels, and many estuary cities including London will need mitigation work.

refulgentis 6y ago
#1 thank you for sharing, I was all prepared to come back here and say "20 cm-30 cm is a lot! that puts half of boston underwater!", but it doesn't, not even remotely, and thus is a useful reminder to me I can chill #2 to be fair to OP, think they're referencing what would happen to humanity as a whole if we _didn't_ have carbon capture, not specifically "water world by 2100", and something I've picked up since moving to Boston from Buffalo is that storm surge has a _much_ more significant effect when you're around so much water. Even the 20-30 cm, once you add a foot or two of storm surge that we get a handful of times a year, floods most of Boston in 2050.

rayiner 6y ago

Yes. But don’t forget that for many, berating people into living like a vegan hermit is part of the point, and if science solves that problem it gets taken away from them. It’s the same people who want everyone to keep using masks even after vaccination.

tptacek 6y ago
Where are those "masks forever" people? I hear about them, but I never seem to hear them. Is there a news report or something I can read?
- rayiner 6y ago
  You should read my Facebook wall. I’m not saying there’s a lot of them, but I’m apparently Facebook friends with all of them. :D
  - dllthomas 6y ago
    "Forever" or "after a particular individual is vaccinated, while vaccination rate generally is still low and incidence is still high"?