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>If I have a house run by solar power and walk to the store to buy fruit from 10,000 miles away to feed to my 5 children, my carbon costs are so astronomically

>If I have a house run by solar power and walk to the store to buy fruit from 10,000 miles away to feed to my 5 children, my carbon costs are so astronomically high from the last two that the first two don't matter. >I agree! Absolutely! No, you're not agreeing with me. You're talking about a family unit as if the net balance matters. That's exactly what I was saying makes no sense. Nothing has to balance except the whole world. Not people, or families, or industries, or companies, or countries. I don't know if there is a name for the fallacy, but there's this mental short circuit I think I observe, where people want to compose the parts of something to get a quality of the whole, and it doesn't work. If you want a blue city, then the way you get it is by making all the parts of the city blue. And recursively, every part of the parts can be painted blue. But if you want a profitable company you do not get it by making every part profitable. That's stupid and destructive and often people seem to consider it obviously idiotic when it is tried. Carbon emissions are like the latter, not the former. In equations: blue + blue = blue but 5 + 5 ≠ 5

kristopolous 5y ago
If you expect coordinated global action from some kind of global conductor I really invite you to look at the literature from about 1915-1950 or so that culminated in the United Nations. It was typically called "world government" in the literature. Essentially their highest aspirations were to avoid global war and assist in ongoing nation scale catastrophes, which they have done ok at. They were pretty cynical about systems that essentially COP is structured under as being ineffective. Which it has been, closing in on year 30 of ineffectiveness. This problem of global governance for issues like this is still fundamentally unsolved. It has to work more like slavery, colonialism and chemical weapons; humanity eventually collectively found the idea reprehensible and we are mostly in agreement on the right direction. This is the only method that has worked so far. You can have inspectors and enforcements but unless the people of the country also find the thing to be dishonerable, their loyalty to their leaders (political, bosses, wealthy, whatever) is the more important loyalty. They'll stop shoveling coal into the furnace when the global police come by but then do it again after they leave. They have to want to stop intrinsically, not through a punitive threat. They have to be able to thrive and live well by not doing it too. It's gotta be less work, easier, and pay better. I mean look, I'm open to trying other things but they haven't been working. This method takes centuries, we still have prison and indentured labor which are effectively slavery, over 200 years later We don't have that kind of time but also we don't have any other kind of solution
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >If you expect coordinated global action from some kind of global conductor I really invite you to look at the literature "I lost my keys in the dark, but I'm looking under the streetlight because that's where the light is". I don't understand the frame of mind where you keep arguing about how you don't have a flashlight, I don't have a flashlight, we can't possibly wait until morning, etc. If you can't solve a problem, swapping it for some arbitrary thing you can solve is pointless. Saying "it has to work" is the sort of thing people say in the movies. Something "has" to work because the script writer decided on it. Coordinated global action may in fact be impossible. Some people think an effective world government would be a fate worse than unrestricted emissions. I'm just saying it's the solution by definition. Again, because that's what "global" means. >It has to work more like slavery, colonialism and chemical weapons I don't know what I can say for a third time that I didn't say the first two and I feel like you are ignoring. These are all things that compose like my analogy of painting things blue. If the people in a family did bad stuff, then their family did; if the families in a country did, then the country did, etc. They are not things that compose via the summation of numbers corresponding to their parts. You don't add up a measure of colonialism produced with a measure of colonialism consumed elsewhere. There is no target threshold for colonialism or slavery or chemical weapons. Not to mention, from what I read, all three things are very widespread to this day, so if they were like carbon dioxide emissions, it would be a pretty pessimistic sign anyway.

kristopolous 5y ago

If you expect coordinated global action from some kind of global conductor I really invite you to look at the literature from about 1915-1950 or so that culminated in the United Nations. It was typically called "world government" in the literature. Essentially their highest aspirations were to avoid global war and assist in ongoing nation scale catastrophes, which they have done ok at. They were pretty cynical about systems that essentially COP is structured under as being ineffective. Which it has been, closing in on year 30 of ineffectiveness. This problem of global governance for issues like this is still fundamentally unsolved. It has to work more like slavery, colonialism and chemical weapons; humanity eventually collectively found the idea reprehensible and we are mostly in agreement on the right direction. This is the only method that has worked so far. You can have inspectors and enforcements but unless the people of the country also find the thing to be dishonerable, their loyalty to their leaders (political, bosses, wealthy, whatever) is the more important loyalty. They'll stop shoveling coal into the furnace when the global police come by but then do it again after they leave. They have to want to stop intrinsically, not through a punitive threat. They have to be able to thrive and live well by not doing it too. It's gotta be less work, easier, and pay better. I mean look, I'm open to trying other things but they haven't been working. This method takes centuries, we still have prison and indentured labor which are effectively slavery, over 200 years later We don't have that kind of time but also we don't have any other kind of solution

perl4ever 5y ago
>If you expect coordinated global action from some kind of global conductor I really invite you to look at the literature "I lost my keys in the dark, but I'm looking under the streetlight because that's where the light is". I don't understand the frame of mind where you keep arguing about how you don't have a flashlight, I don't have a flashlight, we can't possibly wait until morning, etc. If you can't solve a problem, swapping it for some arbitrary thing you can solve is pointless. Saying "it has to work" is the sort of thing people say in the movies. Something "has" to work because the script writer decided on it. Coordinated global action may in fact be impossible. Some people think an effective world government would be a fate worse than unrestricted emissions. I'm just saying it's the solution by definition. Again, because that's what "global" means. >It has to work more like slavery, colonialism and chemical weapons I don't know what I can say for a third time that I didn't say the first two and I feel like you are ignoring. These are all things that compose like my analogy of painting things blue. If the people in a family did bad stuff, then their family did; if the families in a country did, then the country did, etc. They are not things that compose via the summation of numbers corresponding to their parts. You don't add up a measure of colonialism produced with a measure of colonialism consumed elsewhere. There is no target threshold for colonialism or slavery or chemical weapons. Not to mention, from what I read, all three things are very widespread to this day, so if they were like carbon dioxide emissions, it would be a pretty pessimistic sign anyway.