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What is the proposed mechanism for implementing a cut back? A global population with 8 billion people and 1950s carbon emissions implies an average living stand

• bix6 1y ago
  I volunteer yeah. I can get everywhere I need on my bike so horse and buggy would give me enough range and prevent all the over touristing.
  • dingnuts 1y ago
    there are many problems with this attitude but even bicycles require industrial processes and trade to maintain. Mainly the tires but if anything breaks the metallurgy for the spokes wouldn't be available
    • JackMorgan 1y ago
      This feels like whataboutism. "Sure, you're not doing international air travel and avoiding all the incredible waste of a modern car, but whatabout that small amount of resources needed for a bike?!" It encourages helplessness and fatalism. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
    • bix6 1y ago
      Sure there are also many problems with saying only tech can fix all our issues. Tech is the reason we have all these issues in the first place. People survived just fine in teepees. Some might even say they lived a better life before the tech (guns) and non-native disease enabled by tech (travel) wiped them out. Swap the bike for a horse then. All you need for that is wild food and people who care about animals.
      • lazide 1y ago
        Noble savage much? They had war, rapes, atrocities, tragedies, plagues, shittiness, famines, etc. too you know. At least from what we’ve been able to gather after they mostly got wiped out. It is no picnic living in a preindustrial society.
        • bix6 1y ago
          It’s no picnic right now either. Massive inequality while the world prepares to wipe us all away. I’m aware of the stats about xyz improving over time. But if we let the earth fall apart, as is the trend, it’s all for naught.
          • lazide 1y ago
            Do you think pre-industrial civilizations were super equal, or didn’t have ‘world trying to wipe us away’ issues?
            • bix6 1y ago
              Pre ag it was hard to store wealth or accumulate power so hunter gatherers may have been the most egalitarian setup in our history. Sure it’s always been a battle but they weren’t speedrunning GHG into the atmosphere.
              • lazide 1y ago
                Ghenghis Khan?
                • TimorousBestie 1y ago
                  They said pre-agricultural revolution, c. 10000 BCE.
                  • lazide 1y ago
                    Pre-ag is likely MUCH earlier than 10000 BCE. We have no records of it however, so we have no way to know what it was like.
• dr_dshiv 1y ago
  > The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions. I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
  • tcoff91 1y ago
    The moment anyone tries anything on that scale of geoengineering, they will immediately be blamed for whatever weather-based natural disasters that follow. I just don’t see how this can work without creating massive diplomatic tensions.
    • oorza 1y ago
      I mean, if I had Elon Musk money, I'd build some kind of giant carbon capture mechanism. Perhaps I'd buy the largest basalt quarry I could find and start sequestering carbon at a planetary scale. It would cost a ton of money, but I'd do it in secret. If it worked, eventually it would show up on the scales, and I'd emerge from the shadows. This particular method of carbon capture could potentially work at a planetary scale and could potentially be done in secret, at huge cost, but the only blocking factor today is money. https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-permanent-storage https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-... This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing. If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527 > Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth." Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
• manoDev 1y ago
  “Horse and buggy”. How dramatic. If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita The problem is not the 8 billion people, is the handful that have an disproportionate impact.
  • dingnuts 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • ekianjo 1y ago
    > If at least the US got in line with the rest of the world, we would be half-way there. China and India would like a word with you
    • anonymars 1y ago
      Per-capita? But even so, in the future it'll be small consolation to think "nothing to be done, someone else was worse"
      • ekianjo 1y ago
        Why consider per Capita? The climate does not care about arbitrary per Capita metrics, it cares about absolute volumes and India and China are the ones you need to tackle.
        • anonymars 1y ago
          Why consider per country? The climate doesn't care about arbitrary lines on a map either
          • lazide 1y ago
            To actually answer both of your rhetorical questions. “Why per capita?” - many people have an innate desire for ‘fairness’ and assigning some degree of accountability (or expectation of impact of mitigating changes) based 1-1 per person, appeals to that. It also bypasses thinking about the larger overall problem, while giving a degree of apparent control to them as individuals. And let’s them blame other individual for the problem if it doesn’t get fixed. “Why per country?” - because anyone trying to actually accomplish anything realizes that issues of this scale are not really resolvable through individuals making decisions against their incentives, but at best national policy making - but really international treaties to change incentives. The atmosphere is the largest ‘commons’ we have, except perhaps the oceans. Perhaps not even then. Since every country has an incentive to avoid actual accountability for their own actions, while pawning off the consequences onto someone else, and managing that type of situation typically requires an overarching authority. And no sovereign (for good reasons!) wants to bend the knee to a foreign power. And any international authority is necessarily going to be foreign to everyone to some extent. So attempting to assign accountability at the coarsest level of sovereign control on that front feels most actionable. Really I expect things will get much worse until individual countries start doing emergency geo-engineering to attempt to stop widespread famine, out of control flooding, or lethal heat waves, making it worse for some, better for others but rather randomly. I’m honestly surprised India hasn’t already started. I’m guessing within the next decade or two. This will lead to other countries starting wars with them to attempt to control such behavior, until some sort of international accords can be worked out - where the rich countries will prosper, and the poor countries will be fucked. As usual. But people call me an Optimist. You don’t want to hear what I say when I’m being cynical.
• Arainach 1y ago
  We could start by banning things that explicitly waste resources such as proof of work cryptocurrency and adjust tax incentives to punish huge energy consumers for things like AI. Make the energy cost factor in the long-term externalities and maybe companies will hesitate before burning the world for things that aren't necessary. Things don't have to be perfect - you start with the biggest polluters/consumers and use trade incentives to convince other nations to join. We've seen this work under Democratic administrations (China's outputs are dropping) before Trump etc. threw it all away.
  • exoverito 1y ago
    Disturbingly authoritarian impulses for a dubious prescription. The climate goes through natural cycles, we are actually coming out of a global temperature low after the ice age. Cold eras are actually far more dangerous throughout human history, for example the Little Ice Age during the Dark Ages which caused widespread crop failures and famine in Europe. Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations, such as the Roman Warm Period. Zooming out over geological time, the Earth is currently near an all time low in terms of surface temperatures. Cryptocurrency functions as a decentralized means of exchange outside of the control of centralized powers. Governments have been feverishly debasing their fiat currencies, which has fueled inflation, pricing many young people out of owning a home. It would seem you would rather trap people in an inflationary monetary paradigm, justifying it with secular eschatology. Millenarian Marxists have similarly latched onto climate change as their justification for abolishing private property, policies of degrowth, and other anti-human initiatives. Energy per capita is tightly correlated with living standards. We saw broad wealth increases up until about 1970, after which energy per capita flat lined, and income inequality started worsening. Europe has implemented many of the polices you want, and has achieved nothing besides deindustrialization and irrelevancy. China's CO2 emissions are increasing dramatically, and they continue to build more coal and natural gas plants. The USA and Europe reduced their emissions mostly by offshoring manufacturing to China. It seems you're deeply confused about how the world works.
    • anon84873628 1y ago
      >Warm eras are correlated with the golden ages of civilizations Yeah, and hot eras kill civilizations. There's a famous one called the 4.2 kiloyear event. Does modern mesopotamia seem like a great place for the birthplace of agriculture? I don't necessarily agree with the parent's politics, but you seem to be completely ignoring the categorical difference of CO2 emissions and associated risks of climate tipping points to our civilization.
• lazide 1y ago
  Notably, I’d count ‘technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions’ as cutting back on the crazy. I’m pretty sure that’s long forgotten now in the list of national priorities eh? Definitely in the USA. With war on their borders even the EU is reconsidering plans eh?
• griffzhowl 1y ago
  > The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions. Jared Diamond said a funny thing in his book 'Collapse', when talking about the last person on Easter Island to have cut down a tree. Easter Island had at one point been densely forested and supported a dense human population. When Europeans found it there were no trees and it was sparsely populated. It's thought that their famous Moai statues were rolled to the shore on logs, and trees were found plentifully according to the pollen record there. Anyway, Diamond envisages the person cutting down the last tree as thinking "It's ok, technology will save us!"
  • griffzhowl 1y ago
    btw, Jared Diamond's "Collapse" begins with a chapter on Montana gold mines. When I first got it I thought "oh no, this is gonna be boring af", but his depth and breadth of knowledge made even that captivating. I also learned later in the book about the Greenland Norse and their ups and downs, and that was also revelatory. Reading that book was one of the top edifying experinces of my life. I highly recommend it.
• tfourb 1y ago
  CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks. And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
  • lumost 1y ago
    While earnest, I’ve heard this claim for 30 years - that it’s simple political will. The reality is that until very recently there were only two economically viable carbon neutral energy sources. We now have four, however there are real unsolved problems with scaling three of those solutions. The only technology which can reliably solve the crises brings along its own set of externalities. It does few favors to anyone to underestimate the scale of the problem facing the world. There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.
    • tfourb 1y ago
      „There is no set of political body in the world with the capability to freeze consumption and lock billions of people into poverty.“ I don’t think this is actually necessary to manage climate change (see my point advice above about the decoupling of economic growth and energy use). But just for the sake of the argument: „freeze consumption and lock people into poverty“ is literally what happens when nation states go to war and we have managed to do that plenty of times, including for really stupid reasons, without much of a problem. Governments are also quite happy to freeze consumption and lock people into poverty if they can somehow be labeled as undeserving and/or threatening. Plenty of that going around recently.
    • lazide 1y ago
      In many (very real) ways, it’s like saying ‘people are fat because they lack the willpower to control their eating’. Which, while generally true, isn’t going to solve the obesity problem anytime soon. Which I think is what you’re getting at.