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> The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to. Thi

by api 5y ago

> The only thing this narrative will accomplish is failure. Nobody will support significant sacrifice to combat climate change. Luckily they don't have to. This gets even more true when you start talking about the developing world. I'm sure Africans are going to stay poor to help deal with a problem largely created by the Europeans and Americans that have been abusing that continent for centuries. There is not a "fuck you" big enough. I call the approach in this article "abstinence-based environmental solutions" by analogy with "abstinence-based" sex education, and it will be about as successful as trying to shame teenagers into not having sex. This approach to sex education results teens hiding their sexuality, not using condoms or birth control, and getting more STDs and teen pregnancies. The analogous approach to fixing environmental problems will get us a lot of fake "greenwashing" and a continuation of the current CO2 growth trajectory. Attempting to force austerity on us will result in a massive populist backlash and the election (or installation) of explicitly anti-environmental quasi-fascist or economic libertarian leaders.

archduck 5y ago
Or ecofascist movements, which acknowledge that we humans have shit the bed, but whose ecofascist solution to climate change is just to mobilize the military to enforce our ownership and exclusive control over our temperate lands, in the face of ecomigrants, who we'll just shut out. We'll strengthen border enforcement and lock out the ecomigrants fleeing droughts and floods from the Global South. Much of the world population will find themselves faced with inhospitable climate, lack of opportunity, no future in the temperate zones.
- api 5y ago
  Yeah, that is definitely a possibility and I've already heard rumblings of it in the alt-right orbit. Bannon is a little bit there. The way I see it, there is one and only one climate change solution: develop alternative sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, oil, and gas, and can scale more easily. Nothing else will work. If we can't do that we should prepare for much higher CO2 levels and all that comes with it. The good news is that solar/wind plus batteries could actually get us there if those costs keep falling rapidly as they have over the last decade. In the longer term I would not totally count out nuclear fission or fusion, though in the short term I think it would take too long to scale up the former and the latter is simply still R&D.

by api 5y ago

archduck 5y ago

Or ecofascist movements, which acknowledge that we humans have shit the bed, but whose ecofascist solution to climate change is just to mobilize the military to enforce our ownership and exclusive control over our temperate lands, in the face of ecomigrants, who we'll just shut out. We'll strengthen border enforcement and lock out the ecomigrants fleeing droughts and floods from the Global South. Much of the world population will find themselves faced with inhospitable climate, lack of opportunity, no future in the temperate zones.

api 5y ago
Yeah, that is definitely a possibility and I've already heard rumblings of it in the alt-right orbit. Bannon is a little bit there. The way I see it, there is one and only one climate change solution: develop alternative sources of energy that are cheaper than coal, oil, and gas, and can scale more easily. Nothing else will work. If we can't do that we should prepare for much higher CO2 levels and all that comes with it. The good news is that solar/wind plus batteries could actually get us there if those costs keep falling rapidly as they have over the last decade. In the longer term I would not totally count out nuclear fission or fusion, though in the short term I think it would take too long to scale up the former and the latter is simply still R&D.