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I understand that pointing out problems in complex systems without proposing a solution is ultimately indifferent from eloquent bitching, which I can certainly

I understand that pointing out problems in complex systems without proposing a solution is ultimately indifferent from eloquent bitching, which I can certainly be fairly accused of. That said, what the west is currently doing to address climate change - analogous to cheering for the people trying to push a derailed 130-ton freight car back onto the rail tracks with unassisted manpower alone - is not a solution either. The first step towards a real solution is recognizing that what we are currently doing is a categorically pointless waste of time, so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions.

ireflect 4y ago
You are a very good writer and I’m intrigued by this thread. Can you elaborate on what you see as actual solutions and how they would look (no matter how far fetched)?
- anonym29 4y ago
  Thank you for the complement. I'm under no delusion that I have the solutions to the whole world's problems figured out. These ideas are like unrefined chunks of coal, rife with imperfections and riddled with flaws and only under the great pressure and heat of vigorous, critical debate may they ever hope to become diamonds. I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts across the board and may require a transformation of what are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare, and medicaid. These three programs combined take up almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're mathematically unsustainable. Social security and medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates, dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of existing population, in this country's history). These programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous spending towards solutions for problems that can save billions rather than millions? At the same time, there probably needs to be major overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax write offs for them. As a result, total federal government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail to get them on the same page diplomatically or militarily, and I will never support military intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as a solution. Imagine the sheer power of the US government being deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are on board or not. Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest issue first, and then work our way down the chain to smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now. These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I don't think there is political will to even have anything remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt, money-influenced political system probably needs to be changed first. Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we too need to protect the control plane from adversarial influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united, etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful political outcomes. Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first step.
  - quesera 4y ago
    The usual response is that this would be economically suicidal for the US, and that other ambitious competitors would attempt to create a new world order more suited to their preferences. This would probably anoint China as the next century's global hegemon, although it's at least equally likely that the world would devolve into warring fiefdoms as the world economy imploded. Tens or hundreds of millions of people would die as a direct consequence of this economic malpractice, including a decent portion of the US citizens who voted for the persons responsible. Reelection would be tricky, although it would not be difficult to imagine the US democratic process being suspended as a reaction to the catastrophe (legal precedent is not relevant, see history). Don't get me wrong: climate change is a problem! But this would create a much bigger and more acute problem.
bluGill 4y ago
The west is moving to renewable energy quickly. It will take time, but we have made a lot of progress and are making more.
smoldesu 4y ago
> so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions. If there were better "actual solutions", stupid moonshots wouldn't get funded in the first place. I don't think your framing of this situation is very accurate.
jjoonathan 4y ago
If you think that nothing we are doing could possibly help, you are ignoring the power of exponentials and economies of scale. Besides, a planet with colossal amounts of solar/wind/battery/nuclear production capacity left over from a developed world ramp is in a much better place to help the developing world than one without. > stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions I thought you didn't have any actual solutions and admitted as much?
- anonym29 4y ago
  To be clear, it's not that I think nothing we're currently doing helps, it's that I think everything we're currently doing is grossly insufficient.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I think its right to point out the particular futility here, but I also think that it is a mistake to attribute it all to a "mistake" or particular irrationality of the West as a whole. These things appear to us a "pointless" and a waste of time because there are overriding economic principles we just don't want to touch, it is a willful pointlessness that is quite apparent in the big picture. It's not China, it's capitalism, (of which, granted, China is a huge agent within). If we lived in a world where the problems were simply about the distribution itself of food and shelter and power, we could point to the complexity of the systems, and understand the risks of wrongheadedness in the face of them, but we live in a world plagued by bad faith and non-human incentives that certainly muddy these waters, but it doesn't mean there aren't some simple solutions to a few things people haven't thought of... To create this dichotomy between the West and China is to deny the Anthropocene we are all in! One that is defined necessarily by the literally geological forces of a world-dominating economic order.
8note 4y ago
I don't think you're giving the west a fair shake here. The work the west(and China) is doing to develop non-fossil fuel based tech cheap is directly applicable to those growing economies, and not a pointless waste of time.
amanaplanacanal 4y ago
What would really help is across the board carbon taxes. Tax imports by carbon equivalents. But that seems politically impossible.

ireflect 4y ago

You are a very good writer and I’m intrigued by this thread. Can you elaborate on what you see as actual solutions and how they would look (no matter how far fetched)?

anonym29 4y ago
Thank you for the complement. I'm under no delusion that I have the solutions to the whole world's problems figured out. These ideas are like unrefined chunks of coal, rife with imperfections and riddled with flaws and only under the great pressure and heat of vigorous, critical debate may they ever hope to become diamonds. I think R&D on the scale of what the US spent relative to GDP during WW2 might be a place to start. That's economically likely to require severe and heavy cuts across the board and may require a transformation of what are seen as the traditional roles of government. Half of all spending in the US goes to social security, medicare, and medicaid. These three programs combined take up almost triple US military spending. What's worse, they're mathematically unsustainable. Social security and medicare are effectively pyramid schemes that are running out of new people to recruit (result of low birthrates, dramatic improvements in life expectancy, and the lowest rates of net immigration into the country, as a % of existing population, in this country's history). These programs are going to die sooner or later anyway, why not rip off the band-aid now and start putting that enormous spending towards solutions for problems that can save billions rather than millions? At the same time, there probably needs to be major overhauls to the US tax system. Even when top marginal rates were close to 90% last century, large corporations effectively bought politicians to create enormous tax write offs for them. As a result, total federal government receipts as a percent of GDP have never left the range of 16%-26%. Let's consider a flat federal tax rate of 27% across the board, with only one category of write-offs: R&D for carbon-negative / climate-healing solutions (as opposed to carbon neutral / climate-unaffecting solutions). We're going to need to be capable of removing other countries' carbon emissions if we fail to get them on the same page diplomatically or militarily, and I will never support military intervention (read: mass murder of innocent civilians) as a solution. Imagine the sheer power of the US government being deployed full-force, with such overwhelming financial backing that we strive to go so deeply carbon negative that it doesn't even matter whether India and China are on board or not. Yes we would be giving up the fights on a lot of problems, but IMO, no problems other than climate change and nuclear conflict between superpowers threatens the whole of humanity. While not perfect, the nuclear superpower problem is not getting worse as quickly as climate change, so on some level it makes sense to go full-steam-ahead on resource allocation to the largest issue first, and then work our way down the chain to smaller ones, rather than overextending ourselves and failing to solve problem #1, like we're doing now. These are obviously some pretty radical proposals and I don't think there is political will to even have anything remotely like this seriously considered, so our corrupt, money-influenced political system probably needs to be changed first. Just like how FTP separates the data plane (political outcomes) from the control plane (political process), we too need to protect the control plane from adversarial influence (big corporation lobbyists, citizens united, etc) before we can ever hope to achieve meaningful political outcomes. Accordingly, whatever solves the political corruption ("lobbying") problem first should probably be our first step.
- quesera 4y ago
  The usual response is that this would be economically suicidal for the US, and that other ambitious competitors would attempt to create a new world order more suited to their preferences. This would probably anoint China as the next century's global hegemon, although it's at least equally likely that the world would devolve into warring fiefdoms as the world economy imploded. Tens or hundreds of millions of people would die as a direct consequence of this economic malpractice, including a decent portion of the US citizens who voted for the persons responsible. Reelection would be tricky, although it would not be difficult to imagine the US democratic process being suspended as a reaction to the catastrophe (legal precedent is not relevant, see history). Don't get me wrong: climate change is a problem! But this would create a much bigger and more acute problem.

bluGill 4y ago

The west is moving to renewable energy quickly. It will take time, but we have made a lot of progress and are making more.

smoldesu 4y ago

> so we can stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions. If there were better "actual solutions", stupid moonshots wouldn't get funded in the first place. I don't think your framing of this situation is very accurate.

jjoonathan 4y ago

If you think that nothing we are doing could possibly help, you are ignoring the power of exponentials and economies of scale. Besides, a planet with colossal amounts of solar/wind/battery/nuclear production capacity left over from a developed world ramp is in a much better place to help the developing world than one without. > stop wasting energy and thought on that and start diverting it to actual solutions I thought you didn't have any actual solutions and admitted as much?

anonym29 4y ago
To be clear, it's not that I think nothing we're currently doing helps, it's that I think everything we're currently doing is grossly insufficient.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

I think its right to point out the particular futility here, but I also think that it is a mistake to attribute it all to a "mistake" or particular irrationality of the West as a whole. These things appear to us a "pointless" and a waste of time because there are overriding economic principles we just don't want to touch, it is a willful pointlessness that is quite apparent in the big picture. It's not China, it's capitalism, (of which, granted, China is a huge agent within). If we lived in a world where the problems were simply about the distribution itself of food and shelter and power, we could point to the complexity of the systems, and understand the risks of wrongheadedness in the face of them, but we live in a world plagued by bad faith and non-human incentives that certainly muddy these waters, but it doesn't mean there aren't some simple solutions to a few things people haven't thought of... To create this dichotomy between the West and China is to deny the Anthropocene we are all in! One that is defined necessarily by the literally geological forces of a world-dominating economic order.

8note 4y ago

I don't think you're giving the west a fair shake here. The work the west(and China) is doing to develop non-fossil fuel based tech cheap is directly applicable to those growing economies, and not a pointless waste of time.

amanaplanacanal 4y ago

What would really help is across the board carbon taxes. Tax imports by carbon equivalents. But that seems politically impossible.