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"to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the sustainment of life past a certain threshold," Wow, do you hear yourself? Who decides what "threshold" is acc

"to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the sustainment of life past a certain threshold," Wow, do you hear yourself? Who decides what "threshold" is acceptable, you? You think you should be able to determine whether my infant daughter freezes in the winter or swelters in the summer? Oh I'm sure your theory involves some utopian government that never gets anything wrong. What you're proposing is a dystopian police state where the government decides how warm or cold your house should be on any given day. Of course the rich will be able to just pay any fines to keep the power/gas on, so they can blast their AC all summer while the poor swelter or go into debt to pay fines, because their house unfortunately isn't built in the shade and gets hotter than the ones around it, so the government weather stations think their house is cooler than it actually is. Or the government will have to put thermostats in literally every house to accurately monitor internal temperature, and decide what's good enough for you. Why not grocery rations while we're at it? The government will assign you the number and type of foods you're limited to, namely the ones that produce the least carbon emissions to produce and with the caloric and nutritional profiles determined by the government to be ideal. Would cure obesity as a side effect! Also housing will be limited to a certain number of sq ft per person, any existing property with a footprint exceeding that number will be seized and turned into multi-family housing, with government-determined "fair" compensation to the existing property owner of course. Both of those ideas follow the same priorities and rationale as your energy quotas. Shit like that is the real reason why the second amendment exists. You're probably just wealthy enough that you assume you'd be among the ruling elite that maintains its personal freedom, or you really haven't thought these ideas through. I'm far less worried about climate change, something we can at least potentially adapt to at cost, than I am about rhetoric like this. It's akin to the Chinese Nationalists opening the Yellow River dam in 1938 in an attempt to slow the Japanese advance. The resulting flood killed between 400,000-900,000 civilians directly depending on who's counting, made millions more homeless, and ultimately did little to slow the Japanese advance. But I guess it was a "tiny step in the right direction" from a war-fighting perspective, right?

Shaanie 4y ago
The alternative is that we do nothing until it's too late, and then the consequences will be much worse. Don't worry though, society is terrible at preventive action, so I'm pretty confident we're going for the reactive action once it's too late.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  The thing we have to do is innovation. We need cleaner, cheaper tech. There are some regulations we can implement to incentivize that, but we're not going to conserve our way out of climate change with our current technology, not unless you're willing to sacrifice democracy and Western society itself to do it. And even if you are, good luck getting the rest of us to go along with it. I'd much rather endure the effects of climate change than literally create a dystopian New World Order out of science fiction.
schiffern 4y ago
>What you're proposing is a dystopian police state where the government decides how warm or cold your house should be on any given day. Of course the rich will be able to just pay any fines to keep the power/gas on, so they can blast their AC all summer while the poor swelter or go into debt to pay fines... >Why not grocery rations while we're at it? The government will assign you the number and type of foods you're limited to... >Also housing will be limited to a certain number of sq ft per person... Spoiler: how rich you are already determines how warm/cold your house is allowed to be, and how large it's allowed to be, and the foods you're allowed to eat.
- scottLobster 4y ago
  To a point, but there are payment plans for people who can't make their utility bills, there are charities and soup kitchens for people who are food insecure. Also welfare and food stamps. It's not a perfect system by far but there's at least some semblance of a safety net. Also the government doesn't directly dictate how much you eat or the precise temperature of your house. If you run out of resources, the government gives you a minimum. You still have the freedom to acquire more resources if you're able, in fact it's generally expected that you try. What these proposals are talking about is forcing people to live in poverty by government mandate to fight climate change. (So much for the war on poverty I guess, now poverty is the solution!) It's about putting a hard, government enforced ceiling on the level of prosperity one is allowed to earn, and making that ceiling lower than most peoples' current living standards. All so one individual nation can fight climate change, because there's no way the entire world is going to agree to this. After centuries of democracy and prosperity, people will kill over that, and they would be right to. It's also ineffective and unnecessary. The amount of carbon saved would be offset by the massive internal security and enforcement departments needed to achieve any of this, and it would stifle innovation as the social/cultural motivations that encourage it in the populace are removed by government mandate. It would also kill the economy and consequently make governments poorer due to the loss in tax revenue. I'm pretty left by American standards, but I believe in American founding principles. If that shit ever starts I'm going to be dealing in illegal wood-fired generators, and helping the more militant resistance properly encrypt/secure their communications until such time as the government is overthrown. But democracy still works here, so thankfully I can be confident enough that's never going to happen that I can post about it here.

Shaanie 4y ago

The alternative is that we do nothing until it's too late, and then the consequences will be much worse. Don't worry though, society is terrible at preventive action, so I'm pretty confident we're going for the reactive action once it's too late.

scottLobster 4y ago
The thing we have to do is innovation. We need cleaner, cheaper tech. There are some regulations we can implement to incentivize that, but we're not going to conserve our way out of climate change with our current technology, not unless you're willing to sacrifice democracy and Western society itself to do it. And even if you are, good luck getting the rest of us to go along with it. I'd much rather endure the effects of climate change than literally create a dystopian New World Order out of science fiction.

schiffern 4y ago

>What you're proposing is a dystopian police state where the government decides how warm or cold your house should be on any given day. Of course the rich will be able to just pay any fines to keep the power/gas on, so they can blast their AC all summer while the poor swelter or go into debt to pay fines... >Why not grocery rations while we're at it? The government will assign you the number and type of foods you're limited to... >Also housing will be limited to a certain number of sq ft per person... Spoiler: how rich you are already determines how warm/cold your house is allowed to be, and how large it's allowed to be, and the foods you're allowed to eat.

scottLobster 4y ago
To a point, but there are payment plans for people who can't make their utility bills, there are charities and soup kitchens for people who are food insecure. Also welfare and food stamps. It's not a perfect system by far but there's at least some semblance of a safety net. Also the government doesn't directly dictate how much you eat or the precise temperature of your house. If you run out of resources, the government gives you a minimum. You still have the freedom to acquire more resources if you're able, in fact it's generally expected that you try. What these proposals are talking about is forcing people to live in poverty by government mandate to fight climate change. (So much for the war on poverty I guess, now poverty is the solution!) It's about putting a hard, government enforced ceiling on the level of prosperity one is allowed to earn, and making that ceiling lower than most peoples' current living standards. All so one individual nation can fight climate change, because there's no way the entire world is going to agree to this. After centuries of democracy and prosperity, people will kill over that, and they would be right to. It's also ineffective and unnecessary. The amount of carbon saved would be offset by the massive internal security and enforcement departments needed to achieve any of this, and it would stifle innovation as the social/cultural motivations that encourage it in the populace are removed by government mandate. It would also kill the economy and consequently make governments poorer due to the loss in tax revenue. I'm pretty left by American standards, but I believe in American founding principles. If that shit ever starts I'm going to be dealing in illegal wood-fired generators, and helping the more militant resistance properly encrypt/secure their communications until such time as the government is overthrown. But democracy still works here, so thankfully I can be confident enough that's never going to happen that I can post about it here.