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I don’t think the crises or emergency phrasing is particularly accurate. We have already locked in a great deal of climate change over the coming decades and ur

I don’t think the crises or emergency phrasing is particularly accurate. We have already locked in a great deal of climate change over the coming decades and urgent actions now won’t change that. I don’t think ‘emergency’ should apply to situations where things get worse over the next 30 years but actions today may cause them to be less terrible in 80 years. The narrative about shrinking economies doesn’t make sense to me because for lots of countries like the US, they emitted more when their economies were smaller. We don’t want to go back to that. I think pushing to reduce emissions by shrinking economies is unconscionable as it effectively corresponds to reducing standards of living across the world and particularly harms the poorest countries. I also dislike it because it is obviously politically unpalatable and so the people who favour it either long for some kind of authoritarian to impose it[1] or get to smugly say they were right while their desired plan doesn’t get implemented. I would much rather governments were pushed towards policies that would be desirable to people while also reducing emissions. [1] I also note that the biggest authoritarian country is burning more and more coal with increasing emissions while the biggest non-authoritarian countries have falling emissions and growing economies.

tsimionescu 4y ago
US domestic emissions have fallen slightly - much less than US manufacturing was moved overseas. Also, I am definitely in no way advocating for authoritarianism. I'm advocating for realistic, charismatic politicians to present the real situation to people and help them understand the urgency of this threat to the future of the world. Not to mention, there is plenty of room for reducing economic activity without materially impacting living conditions for the vast majority of consumers. All the cheap plastic crap being produced and shipped overseas is an obvious contender, which produces both massive emissions and additional, faster working pollution. Fast fashion and fast food need more care (as they are important to many poor people around the world), but more sustainable alternatives that reduce overconsumption without impact on basic necessity are certainly possible. Regulating and reducing advertising is a more indirect approach that would help revert the trend of encouraging massive overconsumption in all aspects of life (since one of the biggest focuses of modern advertising is simply to increase the whole market, and only incidentally to advocate for a particular brand). And note that this very much is an emergency, even if the effects are slow to be seen. It's like a contamination with prions - if you don't stop it right this second, it will inevitably produce disastrous effects 5-10 years from now, with no possibility to stop it or even mitigate it later. Just because the disastrous effects will happen later in the future doesn't make the current moment any less of an emergency.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Regarding the first sentence note that trade-adjusted emissions for the US have still fallen - though offshored emissions fell most around the time of the financial crises. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption... (enter United States into the ‘change country’ box) I don’t really have much of a response to the rest of your comment. I can’t tell if the foundation of the argument in your comment above is on that false claim or not. I don’t think it’s true that a charismatic leader will cause people to vote for to make their lives worse in the short term with a truthful promise of making their lives worse in the short term. If people vote for such a leader, they will vote them out when their lives get worse. I don’t really understand why I should be convinced that the way forward is for some supreme charisma to appear (from where?) and persuade the World’s people to suffer hardship for the greater good. I am particularly unconvinced because I think that kind of suffering is unnecessary and not particularly helpful for reducing GHG emissions or climate change. I continue to not think it’s an emergency for the same reason that your mortality is not an emergency when you are in your mid fifties. I roughly expect: government-support / industrial policy causes low-carbon power generation to grow a bit faster than predictions, and gets cheaper to the point that fossil fuel power generation becomes uneconomical apart from leaker plants which take longer to die out; new cars to become mostly-electric sooner than predicted because most car companies get good enough at them and the electric cars are just better cars (potentially hybrid cars should be preferred as a policy if cars are limited by battery production: most miles are short journeys so would still be all on the smaller batteries); global warming / climate change to continue increasing for a while; maybe some improvements to carbon capture but I’m a bit doubtful it would be done much unless power gets a lot cheaper; much migration and ensuing strife due to the uneven consequences of climate change; some powerful country that cares less about the ethics of it (eg China) doing some big geoengineering thing (eg silver particles in the upper atmosphere) to try to reduce the effects of climate change they suffer. Bit of a mixed bag but not entirely hopeless.

tsimionescu 4y ago

US domestic emissions have fallen slightly - much less than US manufacturing was moved overseas. Also, I am definitely in no way advocating for authoritarianism. I'm advocating for realistic, charismatic politicians to present the real situation to people and help them understand the urgency of this threat to the future of the world. Not to mention, there is plenty of room for reducing economic activity without materially impacting living conditions for the vast majority of consumers. All the cheap plastic crap being produced and shipped overseas is an obvious contender, which produces both massive emissions and additional, faster working pollution. Fast fashion and fast food need more care (as they are important to many poor people around the world), but more sustainable alternatives that reduce overconsumption without impact on basic necessity are certainly possible. Regulating and reducing advertising is a more indirect approach that would help revert the trend of encouraging massive overconsumption in all aspects of life (since one of the biggest focuses of modern advertising is simply to increase the whole market, and only incidentally to advocate for a particular brand). And note that this very much is an emergency, even if the effects are slow to be seen. It's like a contamination with prions - if you don't stop it right this second, it will inevitably produce disastrous effects 5-10 years from now, with no possibility to stop it or even mitigate it later. Just because the disastrous effects will happen later in the future doesn't make the current moment any less of an emergency.

dan-robertson 4y ago
Regarding the first sentence note that trade-adjusted emissions for the US have still fallen - though offshored emissions fell most around the time of the financial crises. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption-co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption... (enter United States into the ‘change country’ box) I don’t really have much of a response to the rest of your comment. I can’t tell if the foundation of the argument in your comment above is on that false claim or not. I don’t think it’s true that a charismatic leader will cause people to vote for to make their lives worse in the short term with a truthful promise of making their lives worse in the short term. If people vote for such a leader, they will vote them out when their lives get worse. I don’t really understand why I should be convinced that the way forward is for some supreme charisma to appear (from where?) and persuade the World’s people to suffer hardship for the greater good. I am particularly unconvinced because I think that kind of suffering is unnecessary and not particularly helpful for reducing GHG emissions or climate change. I continue to not think it’s an emergency for the same reason that your mortality is not an emergency when you are in your mid fifties. I roughly expect: government-support / industrial policy causes low-carbon power generation to grow a bit faster than predictions, and gets cheaper to the point that fossil fuel power generation becomes uneconomical apart from leaker plants which take longer to die out; new cars to become mostly-electric sooner than predicted because most car companies get good enough at them and the electric cars are just better cars (potentially hybrid cars should be preferred as a policy if cars are limited by battery production: most miles are short journeys so would still be all on the smaller batteries); global warming / climate change to continue increasing for a while; maybe some improvements to carbon capture but I’m a bit doubtful it would be done much unless power gets a lot cheaper; much migration and ensuing strife due to the uneven consequences of climate change; some powerful country that cares less about the ethics of it (eg China) doing some big geoengineering thing (eg silver particles in the upper atmosphere) to try to reduce the effects of climate change they suffer. Bit of a mixed bag but not entirely hopeless.