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When I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are go

When I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are going to die" movements. Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do, its all half-assed political virtue showing. The change your life (to the worse most of the time) to appear as climate conscious as possible, rather than actually focusing on things that matter crowd certainly arent helping either. IMO individual actions don't matter at all here.

robocat 4y ago
> Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth. Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception. Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ≈1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).
- kuhewa 4y ago
  > In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. It's a philosophical argument but I reckon if negative externalities were fairly priced into the choices available to us, we'd make much different decisions, even with the same wants and needs and values.
  - robocat 4y ago
    It might be an improvement but (1) I expect it would be political suicide for the government to try and implement, (2) if it is just a pricing exercise it wouldn’t change CO2 emissions (edit: if the government just spends taxes then that uses CO2), (3) the examples of the failures of carbon-credits indicates pricing externalities is a complex problem. Let’s use a mental model that externalities should double the price. Existing NZ petrol taxes per litre double the price (about 50% at pump is excise and GST [1]). Using that model we can see that the existing pricing in of externalities doesn’t actually fix anything for petrol. See comment edit above for direct action you can do to marginally fix the problem for yourself (obviously it doesn’t fix the problem, but it is one of the few direct actions you could do that is difficult to be cheated). Edit: alternatively, global oil risks (rather than raw costs) act similarly to externalities in driving adoption of greener technologies: https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-energy-transition-says-iea/ https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-... Presumably because those risks are causing political costs to politicians? [1] https://www.aa.co.nz/cars/owning-a-car/fuel-prices-and-types/petrol/ https://www.aa.co.nz/cars/owning-a-car/fuel-prices-and-types...
  - godelski 4y ago
    I think we can call a lot of this tragedy of the commons. If a business is able to capitalize on common resources (e.g. using air or water as a means of dumping pollutants) and pay nothing for degradation of those shared resources, then they will. But often we have no choice in the matter, and that's even before we get into the complications of even understanding the consequences and nuances of our purchases. Before we consider long term stressors and problems vs short term. Our brains were clearly not designed for solving these problems and it is rather amazing that we can actually do it at all. So I agree, we probably would make different decisions if these externalities were priced in (e.g. carbon tax, pollution/waste tax). But also the market would also likely simply change prior to choices being made simply because we know that we need to adapt to match said new market or be over taken by new players (i.e. if a carbon tax was instituted or seen as likely, oil companies would start investing into researching alternative clean energy solutions to maximize future (<10 years) profits).
godelski 4y ago
> When I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are going to die" movements. Well let me make you feel a bit better. The 8C was often referred to as the "business as usual" model. Fortunately things have changed without substantial intervention[0]. I'm not saying things are solved but that it isn't the worst case scenario. We still have a long way to go, but this should show that there at least is some hope, even if just a little. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDnknU0h0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDnknU0h0s
__pache__ 4y ago
What is the danger we're trying to avoid, though? We don't talk about this enough. It may cost 100 trillion to reduce temperature in 2100 by 0.1F .... Likely we'll slowly wean off usage as fusion/nuclear become more popular and we have a battery breakthrough or two. We have very little to fear from climate change, as far as I can tell. We need to rapidly advance, as there are far greater dangers. Before you say blah blah catastrophic thing is going to happen: think about the last 20k years. There have probably been quite a few extremely crazy events that are much more devastating than 1 degree in average temperature change. (i.e. 12k years ago we had 100ft sea level rise ... uhh)
- boxed 4y ago
  We are looking at 3 degrees right now. The previous ice age was ~4 degrees colder than pre-industrial levels. So 3 degrees sounds pretty much in that context.
  - __pache__ 4y ago
    Source?
    - boxed 4y ago
      Seems my information is out of date. https://news.ucar.edu/132755/scientists-nail-down-average-temperature-last-ice-age https://news.ucar.edu/132755/scientists-nail-down-average-te... claims it's more like 5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels (6 compared to now). Still though. If 5 degrees is the difference between the early 1800s and an ice age, that we've already done ~1 degree seems enormously alarming.
      - __pache__ 4y ago
        That's what I thought. I've seen 10 degrees as well. Sorry man huge hard disagree. 100 trillion to maybe reduce temperature by a tiny tiny amount is clearly not worth it. "But but but, something might happen!" There's plenty already happening. Increase supply of healthcare, for example ...

robocat 4y ago

> Preventing climate change is going to take massive changes that no companies or goverments actually want to do In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. The politicians and businesses are mostly catering to what individuals want, a systemic problem that we seem to struggle to solve. A country’s pollution is approximately proportional to its wealth. To fix the problem requires huge changes to our individual wealth. Few individuals want to make the required changes: individually we buy into cheap denial narratives, green-washing. No democracy can act as a benevolent dictator to force us to make the radical changes required to our priorities, our wants and needs. The majority of us are sold on deception, because we want to buy into the deception. Edit: a few simple assumptions means for a me to capture my carbon with trees, I need to plant ≈1 Hectare (4 acres) of trees, and never harvest the trees. I do intend to do it (it will mean some belt tightening), but it doesn’t address the problem of removing my past CO2 emissions, and would use up 20% of New Zealand’s land to do it if all 5 million of us wanted to. “New Zealand has a total of 10.1 million hectares of forests, covering 38% of the land. 2.1 million hectares are plantation forest.”. “The yearly carbon dioxide balancing rate varies between 21.77 and 31.5 kilogram carbon dioxide for each tree. To offset one ton of Carbon dioxide, between 31 and 46 trees are required. One should use a ratio of 24 kilograms of carbon dioxide per tree and an estimate of five hundred trees per hectare to get the values.”. “New Zealand's gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were 7.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, (CO 2-e) per capita.”. Edit 2: Belt tightening because it isn’t cheap to buy one hectare - far far cheaper if I can find another few tens of people that want to do the same thing).

kuhewa 4y ago
> In the most polluting (directly and indirectly) wealthy democracies, the blame can mostly be placed on us as individuals. It's a philosophical argument but I reckon if negative externalities were fairly priced into the choices available to us, we'd make much different decisions, even with the same wants and needs and values.
- robocat 4y ago
  It might be an improvement but (1) I expect it would be political suicide for the government to try and implement, (2) if it is just a pricing exercise it wouldn’t change CO2 emissions (edit: if the government just spends taxes then that uses CO2), (3) the examples of the failures of carbon-credits indicates pricing externalities is a complex problem. Let’s use a mental model that externalities should double the price. Existing NZ petrol taxes per litre double the price (about 50% at pump is excise and GST [1]). Using that model we can see that the existing pricing in of externalities doesn’t actually fix anything for petrol. See comment edit above for direct action you can do to marginally fix the problem for yourself (obviously it doesn’t fix the problem, but it is one of the few direct actions you could do that is difficult to be cheated). Edit: alternatively, global oil risks (rather than raw costs) act similarly to externalities in driving adoption of greener technologies: https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-energy-transition-says-iea/ https://energypost.eu/russias-war-is-accelerating-the-clean-... Presumably because those risks are causing political costs to politicians? [1] https://www.aa.co.nz/cars/owning-a-car/fuel-prices-and-types/petrol/ https://www.aa.co.nz/cars/owning-a-car/fuel-prices-and-types...
- godelski 4y ago
  I think we can call a lot of this tragedy of the commons. If a business is able to capitalize on common resources (e.g. using air or water as a means of dumping pollutants) and pay nothing for degradation of those shared resources, then they will. But often we have no choice in the matter, and that's even before we get into the complications of even understanding the consequences and nuances of our purchases. Before we consider long term stressors and problems vs short term. Our brains were clearly not designed for solving these problems and it is rather amazing that we can actually do it at all. So I agree, we probably would make different decisions if these externalities were priced in (e.g. carbon tax, pollution/waste tax). But also the market would also likely simply change prior to choices being made simply because we know that we need to adapt to match said new market or be over taken by new players (i.e. if a carbon tax was instituted or seen as likely, oil companies would start investing into researching alternative clean energy solutions to maximize future (<10 years) profits).

godelski 4y ago

> When I read doom articles about climate change I always end up in this hopeless "its going to happen anyway" mode, its a part of why I'm tired of the "we are going to die" movements. Well let me make you feel a bit better. The 8C was often referred to as the "business as usual" model. Fortunately things have changed without substantial intervention[0]. I'm not saying things are solved but that it isn't the worst case scenario. We still have a long way to go, but this should show that there at least is some hope, even if just a little. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDnknU0h0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFDnknU0h0s

__pache__ 4y ago

What is the danger we're trying to avoid, though? We don't talk about this enough. It may cost 100 trillion to reduce temperature in 2100 by 0.1F .... Likely we'll slowly wean off usage as fusion/nuclear become more popular and we have a battery breakthrough or two. We have very little to fear from climate change, as far as I can tell. We need to rapidly advance, as there are far greater dangers. Before you say blah blah catastrophic thing is going to happen: think about the last 20k years. There have probably been quite a few extremely crazy events that are much more devastating than 1 degree in average temperature change. (i.e. 12k years ago we had 100ft sea level rise ... uhh)

boxed 4y ago
We are looking at 3 degrees right now. The previous ice age was ~4 degrees colder than pre-industrial levels. So 3 degrees sounds pretty much in that context.
- __pache__ 4y ago
  Source?
  - boxed 4y ago
    Seems my information is out of date. https://news.ucar.edu/132755/scientists-nail-down-average-temperature-last-ice-age https://news.ucar.edu/132755/scientists-nail-down-average-te... claims it's more like 5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels (6 compared to now). Still though. If 5 degrees is the difference between the early 1800s and an ice age, that we've already done ~1 degree seems enormously alarming.
    - __pache__ 4y ago
      That's what I thought. I've seen 10 degrees as well. Sorry man huge hard disagree. 100 trillion to maybe reduce temperature by a tiny tiny amount is clearly not worth it. "But but but, something might happen!" There's plenty already happening. Increase supply of healthcare, for example ...