Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

That's what always bugged me about the Walking Dead series. Wouldn't people band together to exterminate all of the zombies, rather than turning on each other and murdering the few humans left on the planet?

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/who-is-we-causing-climate-change.html

At times of peril, such as war, pursuing business-as-usual sucks as a response. Every successful nation puts a stop to business as usual in order to coordinate and direct society's resources toward neutralizing the peril. WWII is just the most recent US example.

One reason (among many) why conservatives and nationalists HATE accepting the science of climate change is that it presents humanity with an imperative need to coordinate and direct the resources of every society, in concert, and their visceral hatred of global governance requires them to resist such a response with every fiber of their being.

Wouldn't people band together to exterminate all of the zombies, rather than turning on each other and murdering the few humans left on the planet?

If dwindling/finite resources are worth fighting for, you can bet that people will.

water wars in our lifetime, yes. waterworld in our lifetime, i'm much less convinced.

It's tricky. People cooperate with those they view as being "in the same boat" with them. There's a innate desire to make common cause with other humans, simply because we are ill-equipped for solitary survival and cooperation works to our benefit.

The reach of that beneficial commonality is very elastic. Neighbors almost always will help one another, even when they weren't acquainted before. As that circle extends outward, the bonds of cooperation and sharing weaken. The degree of weakening is asymmetric from one person to another and one society to another, according to one's socialization and according to the amount of resource available to be shared. iow, making friends is very natural to us; same thing with enemies.

Apropos: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-reduction-in-meat-eating-essential-to-avoid-climate-breakdown

I don't think WW2 example is the best example for fighting climate change. I mean wasn't a big element of the pulling together mostly about nationalism and Fordism on steroids? And maybe a bit of a learning curve for models of unrelenting + ruthless manufacturing (albeit with decent pay and happy workers in this case)? I put question mark because I'm just positing this with caution!

thanks upthread as always hoos. that macy is quite a trip. emergent properties in lieu of hope. "To be a human now in this darkness of uncertainty...they're all plugging for us, please feel them...the ancestors, and the future beings. We have great work to do."

(the darkness of the v likely certainties is its own burden for me).

I don't think WW2 example is the best example for fighting climate change.

The best sort of UN examples, like UNICEF, WHO & peacekeeping forces, are too minor to serve as an example of the sort of global unification of policy necessary to combat the root causes of climate change. fwiw, this has never yet been attempted on the necessary scale, other than perhaps the Paris Accords, which still do not reach the necessary throw weight to get the job done.

btw, I didn't cite WWII as a model to follow against climate change, but as an example of shared peril overriding the usual capitalist misallocation of resources and the unfettered grab for profits.

WWII isn't a *good* comparison, but i don't think there's a better one. the requirements here are unprecedented

The only other historical event I’ve seen referenced as a model is the Apollo program (in terms of making a huge investment with a sense of urgency) but WW2 is a better example because the response affected the entire economy

WW2 was also incredibly good for capital. not sure the war on carbon looks like that yet.

that's exactly what I was hamfistedly trying to say!

i feel like "socialism or barbarism" can sound glib to people when its invoked but its stark truth seems more obvious to me by the day

my man

there are opportunities for capital, but there's also an enormous downside for existing interests. WWII largely didn't present that, and where it did, it was forced by violence

which suggests . . .

makes sense to me

https://theoutline.com/post/6388/the-only-individual-action-that-matters-is-voting-for-people-who-care-about-climate-change

i feel like "socialism or barbarism" can sound glib to people when its invoked but its stark truth seems more obvious to me by the day

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver

i feel about this the way w h auden felt about having written "we must love one another or die"

mind you, wwii was very much in our wheelhouse as a species. yes, it was hard for people in america and england to cooperate with those dastardly foreigners in the soviet union, but we were glad to do it for the greater good of killing those other foreigners from germany and japan.

makes sense to me

https://theoutline.com/post/6388/the-only-individual-action-that-matters-is-voting-for-people-who-care-about-climate-change

― a Mets fan who gave up on everything in the mid '80s (Dr Morbius), Saturday, October 13, 2018 6:09 AM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hell yeah. This is why I holler often about my pals at Sunrise Movement, who're engaged in an unusual and excitingly broad variety of tactics--from voter registration to door knocking to civil disobedience--to mobilize young people to make climate & fossil fuel money a decisive issue in elections. Their strategy, imo, is brilliant. What I worry about is whether they can do enough in time. A year ago I thought they could. Now I'm not so sure what "enough" and "in time" means anymore.

not so sure what "enough" and "in time" means anymore.

that's ok. this is not a situation with well-marked boundary lines. because it is all about possible futures, it can only be measured in trends and directions. the future itself is not visible.

It occurs to me that there's a point I keep seeing made, as a sort of counterpoint to the "it's all the bad corporation's fault" view: that it's our choices as individuals that drive the production of fossil fuels & factory farming. This view returns our individual choices (to go vegan and drive a VOLT etc) to a position of value over political solutions.

But imo this misunderstands that these particular choices are an artifact of political, market-making choices that the system has made available to us. My grocery trips are vegan and I ride mass transit, and I want more of those things in the world, but I'm much more interested in changing the realm of possibility.

> only-individual-action-that-matters-is-voting-for-people-who-care-about-climate-change

Pretty much why I was an O'Malley enthusiast in 2016. Sanders was the economic justice candidate, Clinton the family issues candidate, O'Malley entered the contest because of climate concerns.

O’Mentum!

Maoists for O'Malley was my favorite meme page of early 2016

omalleymentum is in full swing!

― lag∞n, Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:53 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O'Mentum, surely

― Doctor Casino, Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:55 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoa lets not get carried away here

― lag∞n, Saturday, May 30, 2015 11:57 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O'mallaria

― Οὖτις, Saturday, May 30, 2015 12:25 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/what-is-donald-trumps-response-to-the-uns-dire-climate-report?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Supreme Court, for its part, appears unlikely to challenge the Administration’s baleful reasoning. Last week, it declined to hear an appeal to a lower-court ruling on hydrofluorocarbons, chemicals that are among the most potent greenhouse gases known. The lower court had struck down an Obama-era rule phasing out HFCs, which are used mostly as refrigerants. The author of the lower-court decision was, by the dystopian logic of our times, Brett Kavanaugh.

https://www.gq.com/story/billionaires-climate-change

As the world faces environmental disaster on a biblical scale, it’s important to remember exactly who brought us here.

This week, the United Nations released a damning report. The short version: We have about 12 years to actually do something to prevent the worst aspects of climate change. That is, not to prevent climate change—we're well past that point—but to prevent the worst, most catastrophic elements of it from wreaking havoc on the world's population. To do that, the governments of Earth need to look seriously at the forces driving it. And an honest assessment of how we got here lays the blame squarely at the feet of the 1 percent.

Contrary to a lot of guilt-tripping pleas for us all to take the bus more often to save the world, your individual choices are probably doing very little to the world's climate. The real impact comes on the industrial level, as more than 70 percent of global emissions come from just 100 companies. So you, a random American consumer, exert very little pressure here. The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms of these companies.

There are probably no individuals who have had a more toxic impact on public and political attitudes about climate change than the Koch brothers, and it would take an absurd amount of space to document all the money and organizations they've scraped together for that purpose. (Investigative reporter Jane Mayer's groundbreaking Dark Money does basically that.) And they have every reason to: In her book, Mayer notes that "Koch Industries alone routinely released some 24 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year."

But the scope goes far beyond merely sowing dissent and skepticism. While billionaires and the companies they run have spent years insisting that climate change either doesn't exist or is overblown, they've known the reality of the situation for a long time. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, for example, used to donate to the Seasteading Institute, which aimed to build floating cities in order to counteract rising sea levels. And Exxon Mobil allegedly knew about climate change in 1977, back when it was still just Exxon and about 11 years before climate change became widely talked about. Instead of acting on it, they started a decades-long misinformation campaign. According to Scientific American, Exxon helped create the Global Climate Coalition, which questioned the scientific basis for concern over climate change from the late '80s until 2002, and successfully worked to keep the U.S. from signing the Kyoto Protocol, a move that helped cause India and China, two other massive sources of greenhouse gas, to avoid signing.

Even when Republican lawmakers show flashes of willingness to get something done, they're swiftly swatted down. There are myriad examples, but one example comes via Dark Money, where Mayer describes an incident in April 2010 when Lindsey Graham briefly tried to support a cap-and-trade bill: A political group called American Solutions promptly launched a negative PR campaign against him, and Graham folded after just a few days. American Solutions, it turns out, was backed by billionaires in fossil fuel and other industries, including Trump-loving casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

In recent years, fossil-fuel companies have tried to cast themselves as being on the same side of the general public. Just this month, Exxon pledged $1 million to fight for a carbon tax, a stopgap measure that charges a fee of $40 per ton of carbon produced and increases as production goes up. At a glance, that may seem magnanimous, but the truth is that Exxon can afford the tax. Not only is the oil and gas industry experiencing a serious boom right now, companies know that the only real solutions to climate change will hurt them even more than a measly tax.

That's largely because there is no "free market" incentive to prevent disaster. An economic environment where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. Instead, market logic dictates that rather than take the financial hit that comes with cutting profits, it's more reasonable to find a way to make money off the boiling ocean. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the burgeoning climate-change investment industry. According to Bloomberg, investors are looking to make money off of everything from revamped food production to hotels for people fleeing increasingly hurricane-ravaged areas. A top JP Morgan Asset investment strategist advised clients that sea-level rise was so inevitable that there was likely a lot of opportunity for investing in sea-wall construction.

Even today, after literally decades of radical libertarian billionaires fostering disbelief in climate change and skepticism about the government, three out of five Americans believe climate change affects their local community. That number climbs to two-thirds on the coasts. Even the Trump administration now admits that climate change is real, but their response to it is dead-eyed acceptance. If popular support actually influenced public policy, there would have been more decisive action from the U.S. government years ago. But the fossil-fuel industry's interests are too well-insulated by the mountains of cash that have been converted into lobbyists, industry-shilling Republicans and Democrats, and misinformation. To them, the rest of the world is just kindling.

grr, i meant to only excerpt the last two paragraphs, not the entire fucking article. sorry GQ

wow hello i am a copyright policeman and you are under the fuck arrest

How do you sleep at night, m bison? Probably on a pile of copyright violation penalty payments

talking back to a police officer AND violating john lennon's copyright on "how do you sleep at night"?

you commies are all the same, please go to jail.

jk jk, capitalism is a cancer on the world

About those 100 companies: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change (PDF of the report is linked off of that page)

Easily the most extraordinary exchange I've ever seen in a panel Q&A. @SciFleur, at the end of the #ApolloPlus50 panel, challenged Harrison Schmidt, the 12th man to walk on the moon, about his record of climate denial. 1/n

— Adam Becker (@FreelanceAstro) October 15, 2018

From the NYer article Karl linked earlier:

(This past winter, parts of the Arctic saw temperatures of up to forty-five degrees above normal, even as parts of the United States and Europe were being buried under snow; some scientists believe the two phenomena are related, though others note that the link is, at this point, unproved.)

I work with people who legit believe that there’s a ton of money to be made in pushing the climate change hoax. “Follow the money,” they say, fuckin QED — wilfully oblivious to the fact that all the money is in industry. “Just look up Al Gore’s net worth.” QEfuckinD.

If there’s a shitton of $ to be made convincing people to stop burning the fucking planet down, where do I apply?

*soros punchline*

some good news is nice, on occasion

The US power sector has reduced its CO2 emissions 28% since 2005. What's responsible? Roughly speaking: 50% reduced demand, 25% coal-to-natural-gas switching, 25% renewables. https://t.co/0u2J3nXt4w pic.twitter.com/uuR3fSwTMl

— David Roberts (@drvox) October 30, 2018

it's not enough to offset growth in the rest of the world, and there's much more to do. but it's something.

it kinda drives me nuts when the Y-scale is manipulated like that, just because a lot of people don't notice. so i made a few edits. here's the full scale version:

https://i.imgur.com/2fv7QMd.jpg

Reduced demand is where its at! Around our house I refer to wasting electricity as "killing baby salmon".

Say by some miracle democrats control all three branches of government in 2021, what would we want them to do/what could they realistically do that would help the most? What solutions should we be priming for?

green jobs guarantee for infrastructure transformation, which is what i thought obama was gonna give us 10 years ago when he talked about the seas beginning to roll back

also what the hell those of us out left let's swing for the fences and start talking way more about degrowth and see how that filters its way into the partisan discourse

We need a carbon price, with values for the carbon tax much higher than generally recognized. The EU carbon price is currently $23/tonne, the recent UN report calls for a tax of $135 to $5,500 per tonne by 2030. So, imagine a carbon tax bill that replaces all current gasoline taxes, which our few hundred fossil fuel producers pay at the mine, well, or point of import of petroleum, starting at $30/tonne ($0.09/gallon) in 2021, ramping towards $300/tonne ($0.90/gallon) by 2030. At future intervals, regulatory bodies can determine the pace at which the carbon price should increase to match emissions targets.

While PACs such as Citizens' Climate Lobby, Vote Climate U.S. and Americans for Carbon Dividend call for returning the revenue from such a tax with flat dividends, I think a simpler course is to use carbon taxes to replace other regressive taxes, from state sales taxes to federal payroll taxes. Americans will pay more at the pump and for their winter heating oil, but they will go home with considerably more income. Small business owners will no longer have to pay their share of payroll taxes. It can be designed to make life for average Americans simpler, with no more tax paperwork, while providing the right incentives to reduce fossil fuel use via renewables, efficiency, and conservation, whichever makes more sense for each family or electricity producer.

http://www2.aceee.org/e/310911/ia-reduced-electric-demand-has/4m4q7s/239486839

that headline - "Reduced electric demand has halved carbon emissions in power sector" - is more than misleading, it's inaccurate. carbon emissions in the the power sector are 1,744 MMmt in 2017, compared to 2,416 MMmt in 2005. that's a decline of about 28%. and that's great! it's just not the same as "halved carbon emissions".

as the article itself notes, it's not that carbon emissions in the power sector have halved, it's that reducing demand growth has accounted for half of the decline in carbon emissions. the headline writer just got it wrong.

the EIA's original graph (posted just above) may have contributed to the confusion, because it appears to show carbon emissions at about half the level of 2005. that graph is misleading, because the Y-axis is truncated, so i photoshopped in the rest of the graph for the correct scale (also a few posts above)

ah sorry glad this was already covered

I generally stay out of this thread because it's too nerve-wracking/infuriating/nihilist-heavy