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> 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 a

> 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...
- imtringued 6y ago
  You don't get it, the rich can afford to care about the environment. The poor destroy it because they have no other choice and that's not a big conspiracy, it's what the Europeans and Americans did 200 years ago when they were poor.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
  A lot of the seemingly-dumb stuff happens because the market is a lot more effective at finding efficient solutions than gut feelings. Some of it is also because externalities like pollution aren't priced in, but often the seemingly-bad thing is actually better by most metrics. Reducing plastic packaging may be one such example: Sure, it reduces plastic waste, but it creates more wasted product, and packaging from stuff consumed in households is exceedingly unlikely to end up in the ocean in a western city that burns their trash in a waste-to-energy plant.
LatteLazy 6y ago
Best get on and solve it as an engineering issue before too many people read the Unabomber Manifesto...

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...
imtringued 6y ago
You don't get it, the rich can afford to care about the environment. The poor destroy it because they have no other choice and that's not a big conspiracy, it's what the Europeans and Americans did 200 years ago when they were poor.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
A lot of the seemingly-dumb stuff happens because the market is a lot more effective at finding efficient solutions than gut feelings. Some of it is also because externalities like pollution aren't priced in, but often the seemingly-bad thing is actually better by most metrics. Reducing plastic packaging may be one such example: Sure, it reduces plastic waste, but it creates more wasted product, and packaging from stuff consumed in households is exceedingly unlikely to end up in the ocean in a western city that burns their trash in a waste-to-energy plant.

LatteLazy 6y ago

Best get on and solve it as an engineering issue before too many people read the Unabomber Manifesto...