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Here's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving climate change will involve reducing the standard of living of a lot of people. Some things will be more ex

Here's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving climate change will involve reducing the standard of living of a lot of people. Some things will be more expensive, and people will consume less. If you think about it, without massive technological innovation, how could it be any other way?

epistasis 5y ago
They don't want to admit it because it's not clear it's true. Except perhaps for cars, because we need to drastically reduce vehicle miles travelled as we can't swap out our fleet fast enough and transportation miles are the biggest, hardest to solve sector of US emissions. Personally, if regulations allowed more living without cars, I think we would all have massively higher quality of life. The suburban lifestyle of living on a tiny island that can only be left with a car has drastically reduced most people's health, left them isolated, and has effects like making it so kids no longer play in streets. Allowing more people to live in neighborhoods where their daily errands and school drop offs could be met by short walking or biking trips would drastically improve their quality of life, instead of piling the family into the SUV and spending hours in traffic everyday. For the rest of the word, we are having that massive technological innovation right now that will increase quality of life globally. For electrifying the developing world, micro grids with renewables and storage will be immensely cheaper than building our massive transmission grids and large centralized production. Industrial sectors have the least clear path to decarbonizations, as well as sea-freight and flight, but if we can solve electricity and transportation in the next decade we have a few years so solve these far smaller sources of emissions. There is a lot of reason to be worried, but there's also a ton of reasons to be hopeful. GDP is already decoupling from emissions, and I think as we decouple it further, we will find a higher quality of life for the vast majority of people, both in developed or developing nations.
- rthomas6 5y ago
  It's not going to be a dystopia, and yes, urban design/zoning in the US is absolutely terrible. I hate it. I could rant about it for hours. But if we have to drastically reduce ground freight and shipping emissions to reduce co2 emissions enough, which we do, goods will be more expensive. And it's also not free to switch private cars to EVs. If goods in general are more expensive, then peoples' money goes less far. To be clear, I am in favor of this. Maybe you can make the very wealthy eat the cost, but somebody has to pay for it, and I can't see how it doesn't result in lower mean quality of life.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  > we can't swap out our fleet fast enough Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. The fleet gets swapped out naturally pretty quickly, and slight incentives would accelerate that. It's faster than swapping out electric generating capacity.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    The other side of that is that we can't ramp EV production quickly enough to cause that swap out to happen any time soon, at least as far as I understand the industry. If we are at 100% of new vehicles being electric in 2030, I'd be surprised but also ecstatic.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      Having EVs dominate new vehicle sales in 2030 would require an annual growth rate of ~50%. This is plausible.
NickM 5y ago
Here's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving climate change will involve reducing the standard of living of a lot of people. I don't think that's necessarily true. It will be expensive to switch to renewables, certainly, but the ongoing externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are already extremely expensive to society. Even if you completely ignore climate change, the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous. We have the technology we need to solve climate change already, the problem is not that people aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices, the problem is that it's hard to get past societal inertia and overcome entrenched special interests.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > but the ongoing externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are already extremely expensive to society Not really, that’s why it’s an externality. The damage in the US caused by climate change is maybe a few billion annually in increased hurricanes right now. That’s only like $10/person a year. This is why it requires getting people to understand the future damage that will be caused. What’s happening now isn’t enough to justify doubling electricity costs, etc because most citizens aren’t feeling any pain from climate change. > the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous. CO2 != “air pollution” in the sense that causes health problems.
PoignardAzur 5y ago
Exactly. In France we had a Citizen's Convention for Climate (CCC), basically a citizen's jury of 150 people tasked with finding solutions for the climate crisis. One thing was extremely clear from their proposals: people are absolutely willing to have strong climate laws passed as long as they only constrain other people. Usually these other people being vague shapeless corporations, because it feels like any cost that they bear isn't a real cost. Maybe a climate change solution won't reduce anyone's standard of living, but maybe it will. If we're content to say "we have to stop polluting activities unless someone's livelihood depends on it in which case we'll do something else", we're screwed. Every polluting activity has someone's livelihood depending on it.

epistasis 5y ago

They don't want to admit it because it's not clear it's true. Except perhaps for cars, because we need to drastically reduce vehicle miles travelled as we can't swap out our fleet fast enough and transportation miles are the biggest, hardest to solve sector of US emissions. Personally, if regulations allowed more living without cars, I think we would all have massively higher quality of life. The suburban lifestyle of living on a tiny island that can only be left with a car has drastically reduced most people's health, left them isolated, and has effects like making it so kids no longer play in streets. Allowing more people to live in neighborhoods where their daily errands and school drop offs could be met by short walking or biking trips would drastically improve their quality of life, instead of piling the family into the SUV and spending hours in traffic everyday. For the rest of the word, we are having that massive technological innovation right now that will increase quality of life globally. For electrifying the developing world, micro grids with renewables and storage will be immensely cheaper than building our massive transmission grids and large centralized production. Industrial sectors have the least clear path to decarbonizations, as well as sea-freight and flight, but if we can solve electricity and transportation in the next decade we have a few years so solve these far smaller sources of emissions. There is a lot of reason to be worried, but there's also a ton of reasons to be hopeful. GDP is already decoupling from emissions, and I think as we decouple it further, we will find a higher quality of life for the vast majority of people, both in developed or developing nations.

rthomas6 5y ago
It's not going to be a dystopia, and yes, urban design/zoning in the US is absolutely terrible. I hate it. I could rant about it for hours. But if we have to drastically reduce ground freight and shipping emissions to reduce co2 emissions enough, which we do, goods will be more expensive. And it's also not free to switch private cars to EVs. If goods in general are more expensive, then peoples' money goes less far. To be clear, I am in favor of this. Maybe you can make the very wealthy eat the cost, but somebody has to pay for it, and I can't see how it doesn't result in lower mean quality of life.
pfdietz 5y ago
> we can't swap out our fleet fast enough Average age of a car in the US is 12 years. The fleet gets swapped out naturally pretty quickly, and slight incentives would accelerate that. It's faster than swapping out electric generating capacity.
- epistasis 5y ago
  The other side of that is that we can't ramp EV production quickly enough to cause that swap out to happen any time soon, at least as far as I understand the industry. If we are at 100% of new vehicles being electric in 2030, I'd be surprised but also ecstatic.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Having EVs dominate new vehicle sales in 2030 would require an annual growth rate of ~50%. This is plausible.

NickM 5y ago

Here's the thing. Nobody wants to admit that solving climate change will involve reducing the standard of living of a lot of people. I don't think that's necessarily true. It will be expensive to switch to renewables, certainly, but the ongoing externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are already extremely expensive to society. Even if you completely ignore climate change, the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous. We have the technology we need to solve climate change already, the problem is not that people aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices, the problem is that it's hard to get past societal inertia and overcome entrenched special interests.

kortilla 5y ago
> but the ongoing externalities and subsidies for fossil fuels are already extremely expensive to society Not really, that’s why it’s an externality. The damage in the US caused by climate change is maybe a few billion annually in increased hurricanes right now. That’s only like $10/person a year. This is why it requires getting people to understand the future damage that will be caused. What’s happening now isn’t enough to justify doubling electricity costs, etc because most citizens aren’t feeling any pain from climate change. > the costs in terms of healthcare and QALYs just due to air pollution alone are tremendous. CO2 != “air pollution” in the sense that causes health problems.

PoignardAzur 5y ago

Exactly. In France we had a Citizen's Convention for Climate (CCC), basically a citizen's jury of 150 people tasked with finding solutions for the climate crisis. One thing was extremely clear from their proposals: people are absolutely willing to have strong climate laws passed as long as they only constrain other people. Usually these other people being vague shapeless corporations, because it feels like any cost that they bear isn't a real cost. Maybe a climate change solution won't reduce anyone's standard of living, but maybe it will. If we're content to say "we have to stop polluting activities unless someone's livelihood depends on it in which case we'll do something else", we're screwed. Every polluting activity has someone's livelihood depending on it.