Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

I'm sympathetic to the negative utilitarian argument, but as far as we know, humanity and more generally conscious life is the only thing giving the entire universe meaning. Whether they're suffering or happy.

yeah but meaning to whom

https://www.theonion.com/climate-researchers-warn-only-hope-for-humanity-now-lie-1828171232

hypothetically, what would a "fix" to climate change even look like? could we, I dunno, plant a billion trees or something?

― frogbs

hypothetically, what would a "fix" to climate change even look like? could we, I dunno, plant a billion trees or something?

― frogbs

hard to say. nobody who's actually knowledgable on the topic is arguing for it.

it's going to be difficult over the next century. in a sense climate change was the equivalent of that thought experiment with the train and whether to switch it from its track with, you know, seven billion people on it to the track with only hundreds of millions of people, and we collectively spent the time arguing about whether there was even a train at all. we humans are very philosophical people. i guess the next century will be a mad struggle for excuses about why it's ok that the bulk of the world's human population (along with innumerable non-human species) is dying off. in that respect i guess the current political situation is helping, because it's allowing me to let go of personal ethical beliefs that are frankly ludicrous in that context.

for almost all of the wild environment, i think maybe we’re not at excuses yet. our current management practice is transitioning from ignorance to denial. Hmm you are probly right that we’re on the cusp of an excuse-dominant social environment.

my parents are in spain at the moment, where the recent heatwave likely just played a sizeable role in killing one of their elderly friends

itshappening.gif

multiple xps
i'm all for eliminating payroll taxes, but it seems that tying that to the revenue raised thru carbon taxes would eventually lead to falling gov't revenue as less carbon is used. i tried googling about this question but my phraseology may have been off because i got nothin' except for some Alliance for Market Solutions stuff about how carbon taxes could be good insofar as they could constrain federal spending thru just that mechanism.

Tax rates are arbitrary, merely a political problem. If civilization is saved through reducing emissions, we can transfer the tax burden to the rich or everyone or on some other economic externality.

Fundamentally, unchecked climate change means most countries south of Switzerland (including the U.S.) cease to exist as organized political entities. Doing something about this, quickly, is more important than any local politics, and will be understood as such by end century. Far enough into the crisis, I expect that countries that violate emissions restrictions will be blockaded and their fossil infrastructure bombed.

absolutely agree, at the end of the day centering 'how we will pay for' measures against climate change is crazy, because there is no possible way we can afford the alternative. i really worry about the possibility of international cooperation, rather than increasingly dangerous competition, over the next century as resources become more scarce though.

it's cheap for everyone to die, costs nothing, nbd

*vox.com voice* you may think so, but i have some cards here which show mass human death would actually have a deleterious effect on global GDP.

going to see Roy Scranton talk about his new book WE'RE DOOMED: NOW WHAT? tonight

also walking around carrying "antropocene or capitalocene" everywhere

some shocking news - it looks like former EPA administrator scott pruitt might not be approaching this important debate about climate change in good faith!!

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not been able to offer any scientific evidence for statements made by the agency's former Administrator Scott Pruitt when he went on CNBC in March 2017 and said that carbon dioxide was not known to be a major contributor to climate change.

During a live interview last year on Squawk Box, the administrator stated: “I would not agree that [carbon dioxide is] a primary contributor to the global warming that we see,” adding, “there’s a tremendous disagreement about the degree of the impact” of “human activity on the climate.”

Pruitt’s statements contradicted overwhelming scientific evidence as well as everything the EPA had published before he took office. In response, a group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) formally requested any scientific documentation that might have informed Pruitt’s opinion, given the gravity of the about-face.

The EPA stalled and refused to turn over any documents. PEER responded by suing the agency for dereliction of its duty to supply public documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

In June, a federal judge sided with PEER and ordered the EPA to provide any scientific documentation that might have helped Pruitt come to the conclusion he asserted on CNBC.

The EPA eventually provided a 12-page document to PEER. The document included six pages of emails between CNBC producers and Pruitt aides, as well as four pages of “top-line notes” that Pruitt used, outlining what he would talk about on the interview. None of those notes mentioned climate change or carbon dioxide’s effect on the environment at all.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/epa-docs-dont-show-any-scientific-evidence-for-scott-pruitts-climate-claims/

i never thought anyone would be able to claim the "even worse than anne gorsuch" throne, but Pruitt managed to pull it off without a problem

Fundamentally, unchecked climate change means most countries south of Switzerland (including the U.S.) cease to exist as organized political entities. Doing something about this, quickly, is more important than any local politics, and will be understood as such by end century. Far enough into the crisis, I expect that countries that violate emissions restrictions will be blockaded and their fossil infrastructure bombed.

― Roomba with an attitude (Sanpaku)

other than the immediate implementation of a brutal global authoritarian government accompanied by mass extermination of all dissenters, i'm not sure what "doing something about this, quickly" could possibly look like. furthermore, i'm not convinced that there was ever any other possible option when it came to controlling anthropogenic climate change.

this is the frustrating thing to me - we keep framing the stuff we didn't do because it was "expensive" and acting like that cost can be measured only in dollars when in fact the greater cost always has been and always will be human lives. freed from the necessity to sell unpopular measures, i'd kind of like to know what the actual costs of controlling anthropogenic climate change would have been, and what would have been necessary to make it happen.

if the midterms don’t go well i’m cashing out my meager IRA (5k, 30 years old) to pay off some debt and pad my savings. fuck it

this thread is so great because it's about the most important issue that nobody wants to touch, hence why it never gets bumped. because there is almost no solution. let's seriously make this an over/under thread about the value of saving for retirement etc. obviously nobody cares. i think we are increasingly fucked and meant to see the end of the world either via a nuke screwup or just from climate decline. the 21st century rocks!!! peace!!

Why do anything about it, aren’t we all just waiting around to die childless as it is

Globes just sit back and enjoy the ride

it's a good topic to avoid. just thinking about it tends to drain sanity points, much less talking about it. the only reason i'm here is because i've recently had extensive treatment for my suicidal depression, and as a result i temporarily have the emotional resilience to even consider what the world will look like in 100 years. it's emotionally healthy to think about the future, i've been told.

and yeah, of course i don't have kids. i've known for long enough the vague shape of what's coming, consciously or subconsciously, that it didn't seem right to put them through that. other reasons too, of course, but my personal emotional state (and apparently the personal emotional state of plenty of other people) isn't as separable from the world at large as certain people seem to believe it should be.

i've dabbled in antinatalism, but ultimately i find that a lot of beliefs today, including my own humanism, are just plain irrelevant in the face of this terrible and alien future. that's the real challenge, this complete disjunction between what's necessary to believe to survive today and what will be necessary to believe fifty years from now, to do the little things to make life tolerable even understanding the overwhelming likelihood is that it's all for naught, that the "good" i try to strive for today is something that will be utterly impossible in fifty years.

if any members of the future human race wants to know what the hell was going on with us during the 20th and early 21st centuries, just know that we're all fucking lunatic basket cases. don't even try to look for rational motivations, we didn't have them. just a big basket of excuses. i hope that humanity will survive, in whatever form, and one day learn to do without excuses.

not an antinatalist but if this board survives the coming ecopocalypse a lesson of our tragedy future laffer-era americanist scholars might take away is women should have 100% control over their reproductive rights and priests (witch doctors, whatever) need to keep their voices down about that

wonderful writing rushomancy. i don’t get why people say ilx sucks, seems glib. y’all are the smartest and most insightful people online

i don’t get why people say ilx sucks, seems glib.

rusho's post touches on similar points (IMO) that got Sanpaku shouted down in one of the politics threads, so there's that.

Is it that the positions taken by ILX (or the left, in general) are tenable only because of the resources produced by big ag (and therefore the entire capitalist edifice)?

but you engaged with me in good faith and very intelligently. where else does that happen

I guess #notallilx then? Thanks for the compliment though, sometimes it feels like I'm screaming into the void.

Is it that the positions taken by ILX (or the left, in general) are tenable only because of the resources produced by big ag (and therefore the entire capitalist edifice)?

― Abercromb Metrion Finchos (Leee), Friday, August 10, 2018 5:15 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the Jason Moore book I'm currently reading there's a case that current food justice and climate movements are pushing an ontological shift in our relationship with the ecology -- that it's our existing social relations as such, a narrower target than "human impacts," that are creating the ecological crisis. I'm only just now in the first chapter, but it impressively systematizes a lot of the more polemical points the climate movements et al have been making for years.

This one? https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Web-Life-Ecology-Accumulation/dp/1781689024/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533933263&sr=8-1&keywords=jason+moore

no uh this one though there's a lot of the same ideas ofc:

https://www.amazon.com/Anthropocene-Capitalocene-Nature-History-Capitalism/dp/1629631485/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1533933769&sr=1-1&keywords=anthropocene+or+capitalocene

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-scientists-mineral-co2-atmosphere.html

idk how futile this all is but this is the sort of development i'm watching pretty closely

HOOS, I've started reading Anthropocene vs. Capitalocene. I've only finished the intro, and am in the middle of the first chapter proper, but at least so far the critiques seem like the '60s-'70s(?) anti-materialist environmentalism with moar Marxism? The hairsplitting about "Anthropocene" as a discourse especially seems wrong-headed or counterproductive when a majority of Americans don't think climate change exists or that the current warming is caused by nature.

But I expect I should continue reading. (And am looking forward to the Haraway piece, even if I never finished the Cyborg Manifesto.)

wonderful writing rushomancy. i don’t get why people say ilx sucks, seems glib. y’all are the smartest and most insightful people online

― global tetrahedron

oh hey thanks btw i lost sight of this thread when it fell off sna (i don't bookmark)

The former Soviet Union is packed end to end with sites that would bankrupt the EPA's Superfund.

It isn't "capital" in the sense of the ownership system prevalent in the West for four centuries, but capital in the sense of investment in industry, infrastructure, and skills that has permitted so large a population to release so much carbon, so quickly. It doesn't matter much to atmospheric physics whether emissions came from jetsetters or collectivized smelters.

I understand the desire to paint one's enemies with every evil, but Capital responds to profits and costs fairly efficiently. Force it to bear the costs of its externalities (in this case, with a price on carbon), and it will adjust more rapidly than alternative decision systems.

if the midterms don’t go well i’m cashing out my meager IRA (5k, 30 years old) to pay off some debt and pad my savings. fuck it

― global tetrahedron, Thursday, August 9, 2018 6:05 PM (six days ago) Bookmark

won't help when global fiat currency collapses and we go back to like, the gold standard

I understand the desire to paint one's enemies with every evil, but Capital responds to profits and costs fairly efficiently. Force it to bear the costs of its externalities (in this case, with a price on carbon), and it will adjust more rapidly than alternative decision systems.

― Roomba with an attitude (Sanpaku)

nah man i'm not anti-capitalist in general - i think capitalism has done a lot of good things for the world. in fact i'm inclined to take "evil" out of the equation entirely - even if we assume capitalism isn't basically malevolent, it is pretty likely to have created the preconditions for our current environmental situation.

that doesn't mean that capitalism can't also contribute to the solution, of course. having said that, capitalism isn't capable of meaningfully contributing to the solution given the current political and technological circumstances we find ourselves in; capitalist societies can construct all kinds of artificial carrot/stick regulations to attempt to mitigate carbon usage, but it can't create a situation where circumventing those regulations, or attempting to repeal them by fomenting popular unrest, isn't easier than complying with them.

It isn't "capital" in the sense of the ownership system prevalent in the West for four centuries, but capital in the sense of investment in industry, infrastructure, and skills that has permitted so large a population to release so much carbon, so quickly.

the ownership system prevalent in the West for four centuries
vs.
investment in industry, infrastructure, and skills that has permitted so large a population to release so much carbon, so quickly

Surely the strong relative overlap of the former and the latter is obvious. I'm not sure I follow your distinction other than as a way to defend Capital as an abstract category--while "it doesn't matter much to atmospheric physics whether emissions came from jetsetters or collectivized smelters," it does matter that development in the 19th and 20th centuries generally followed a logic of profit, which is among the key culprits in our shared wicked problem.

Yeah strong vibe of “guns- they don’t kill people” built into that.

when u find out certain pernicious behaviors are radically empowered by an organized rules base (and in the face of other positive, related outcomes), what should you do? What CAN you do?

http://www.grubstreet.com/2018/08/climate-change-bloody-mary.html

celery is a very good + important ingredient of many good sauces and soups, so I'm happy that it is resilient!

good luck meeting your daily caloric needs on celery alone tho

don't forget all the bodies

celery is also said to be good for detecting certain gases in the praxis range of the spectrum, so that could come in handy.

what we're facing is basically a modified version of the malthusian trap, isn't it?

Not sure how climate change related this is, but I just heard vanilla is now more expensive than silver by the ounce. Hence farmers in Madagascar having to do night-shifts to guard their crops.

When one looks at history, the Malthusian Trap is the normal state. It might not have been possible before the 18th century (and caloric imports from New World as sugar, rum, and dried cod, as well as crops like potatoes) for Malthus to even notice it, as before then it was normal for peasants and paupers with every bad crop.

^to die en masse with every bad crop.

of course, malthus was writing about all of history up to and including his own time. the difficult thing is that a lot of people, including myself, thought that post-industrial capitalism offered an escape from the malthusian trap, in that a couple generations of societal prosperity cause the birth rate to drop back down to sustainable levels. unfortunately malthus was a little too specific in his theory, which led people to focus entirely on the birth rate statistic. the real problem is the human species' insatiable appetite for growth, an appetite which can be checked only by resource limits - birth rates drop, resource consumption rates don't. the tragedy of capitalism is that it reached a point where it appeared to offer a solution to the malthusian trap, but in fact was simply acting to implement that trap on a planetary scale.

We gotta be out here reweaving the social fabric, team. Hell & high water comin both.

perhaps one of you clever lot can tell me (or point me towards an article that can tell me) to which extent we are already seeing the effects of global warming?

I ask because I have a feeling we ain't seen nothign yet and when people blame a hot summer, forest fires etc. on global warming this is more anecdotical than scientific

dunno if this is the type of thing you're after. just read it this morning though, and it's relevant imo
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-arctic-permafrost-is-melting-strange-thermokarst-lakes-climate-change-abrupt-melting