Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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

oh, i completely understand. i'm kind of disturbed by how little that stuff affects me, because i generally believe that we're fucked! but yet, i'm listening to the B-52s and everything is ok

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?

― Fedora Dostoyevsky (man alive), Friday, November 2, 2018 9:33 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, November 2, 2018 9:57 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's interesting to think about what would have happened had obama blown all his political capital on climate change instead of healthcare. saving lives in the future vs saving lives now, i don't envy his situation.

but yeah, if a progressive/socialist who really gets climate change is in the white house, and democrats control congress, i would like to see a Moonshot/WW2-style combination of funding and mobilization of the workforce dedicated to clean energy, energy efficiency, and public transport. it would create millions and millions of jobs. i would support just straight up giving the 50,000 fucking coal miners dibs on the first of those clean energy jobs, even, giving them buyouts on their shitty coal mining jobs, paying for their retraining, and paying them to work in the sunshine and lay solar panels or build wind turbines. i don't even care if the sun shines in west virginia or if there is wind in south dakota. just stop mining coal, for fuck's sake.

i would support any number of carbon tax variations. i think sanpaku's idea of using it to replace other taxes might ultimately be something that would push a handful of conservative assholes across the aisle. at any rate (no pun intended), we need to address the externalities of burning carbon.

honestly, though, i think we are headed toward geoengineering. even if the united states does all the good stuff we want them to do, we are only part of a world which is still heavily reliant on fossil fuels and which is set to add billions more people with higher living standards, many of whom would like to eat more meat.

it's interesting to think about what would have happened had obama blown all his political capital on climate change instead of healthcare

distinct memories of having this EXACT argument with my family in 2008

ha, how did that go? probably paaaainfully

do people itt know about Drawdown

and part of my calculation was v v cynical ie the boomers fucking suck if a bunch of them have to die from shitty healthcare in order to save a future, hopefully better generation then so long assholes

I am in a bad mood today fyi

ha, how did that go? probably paaaainfully

eh it was all the lefty side of the family so it wasn't too bad tbh. I was mostly accused of arguing from my own narrow perspective working in the energy industry - which is true, but also, I WAS RIGHT

https://www.drawdown.org/ xxp

xp

i haven't read drawdown but i learned a lot from Hawken's Natural Capitalism, back in the day

and part of my calculation was v v cynical ie the boomers fucking suck if a bunch of them have to die from shitty healthcare in order to save a future, hopefully better generation then so long assholes

recently i've been wondering if a large part of the conservative opposition to caring about climate change is due to lingering distrust/anger over perceived fearmongering by environmentalists back in the late 60s/early 70s (club of rome, population bomb, etc) during their baby boomer young adulthood. they see people now warning about climate change, pointing to complicated models and graphs that most common people don't really understand, with the backing of scientists and very important people and passionate young people, and they're reminded of paul ehrlich on johnny carson, warning that we were surely all going to die soon from overpopulation and pollution and overconsumption of resources, using complicated models and graphs that most common people didn't really understand back then, with the backing of scientists/VIPs/youth. so they just say baloney and ignore it, believing that either the whole problem was bullshit then just as it is now, or that the new problem will be solved via technological advances, like it was then.

i don't know, i was born after most of that played out, so i'm not really sure how much of that cultural memory lingers

i definitely hear that casually referred to a lot -- "in the 70s they said we were gonna have an ice age!" thanks TIME magazine -- by everyday skeptic types

They're different political fracture lines.

Those who read the scientific literature are horrified by the train in tunnel of climate change, and recognize that what we do in our generation will kill billions over the next several thousand years. Those of advanced age or with prexisting conditions in their families will think that enacting even the lousy 1994 Republican health care plan will make a difference in their lives.

I try to be a utilitarian, without discriminating against future generations or others in developing nations. I know that it would be preferable for the United States to cease to exist, if that meant preventing the worst predictions from climate science. Nothing else on the political landscape is remotely comparable, because only climate change will effect humanity and the entire biosphere for the next 10 to 160 thousand years. The numbers add up. One generation just doesn't fucking matter in the expanse of time.

I try to be a utilitarian, without discriminating against future generations or others in developing nations.

i think this is great, and i try to be that way too. but of course this flies in the face of human nature. and also we have plenty of trouble with discriminating against our current generation! as climate refugees start to pile up, that will become painfully apparent.

i wish i didn't believe that geoengineering is our fate, because it is the worst option (possibly even worse than doing nothing at all, if unintended consequences of geoengineering lead to something even worse than BAU). but it seems like the default direction for humanity, given that

1) a significant amount of chaos is already baked-in based on historical emissions - warming, sea level rise, acidification, species lost.
2) in some ways, technology is the defining human characteristic (especially if you consider language to be a tool/technology). it is what we do.
3) (loopy apocalyptic speculation alert >>) if a country, city, organization or individual actor has the resources to unilaterally implement geoengineering, what can be done to stop them? one can imagine the restraints right now, ways to prevent that from happening, or stopping the implementation after it occurs. but what about in 2050, or 2075 or 2150, as climate chaos mounts? again, even the baked-in climate change from our history to date is going to be creating escalating, severe problems that won't stop for many generations. there will be pressure to "fix" it.

oh man is the geoengineering war gonna precede the water wars

Geoengineering can be "done right".

For example, if the equilibrium mean global warming is 4° C, it is still beneficial for biodiversity to limit the pace of that warming so that it occurs over two centuries, rather than one, as this (alongside policies like making mountain ranges linear refuges) can permit much current biodiversity to survive that would otherwise perish. This also has the merit of limiting our commitment (to flying a couple of squadrons of U-2 spy planes to deposit sulfates in the stratosphere) to a a comprehensable century or two, rather than indefinitely.

I have no children, and will never have any: I've known this was in the works for decades. But I have nephews. If they have children, there's a non-zero chance that some will starve to death. The most important effect of global warming for human civilization is in radically reducing crop yields and human carrying capacity. I sometimes hate Al Gore for soft pedaling the case by pointing at storms and sea level rise, which aren't existential risks in the same sense that collapse of agriculture presents.

The amount of climate change that is already "baked in", when one considers the moderating effects of oceans, "global brightening" as we reduce tropospheric sulfate emissions from coal, and permafrost/peat/seabed hydrate etc, seems likely to me to be around 3° C. If humanity makes heroic efforts to decarbonize, we might limit the end state to the 4° C range. If we don't, its 6°+ C. The main brakes will be that 1) climate forcing is a logarithmic function, with the Earth system's climate sensitivity probably around 3°/CO2 doubling, and 2) dead people don't burn coal.

A 3-6° world is a world where only Canada, Scandanavia, and parts of Siberia can support their current population, much less refugees. America and other developed nations shift from the politics of abundance that they have known, to a politics of scarcity. Its rather unfortunate that our legacy of politics of scarcity is Italian/German/Japanese fascism. We in the West have never lived with fear of starving with the next winter. Trump is only a vague hint of what is to come.

As I see it, we can reduce our personal guilt by "living small", including urbanism, veganism, and consumer "minimalism", but this won't save the world. There may be no saving the world. We must decide what we want to save. Our models should be the Svalberg seed bank, or the Long Now societies Rosetta disk. We should expand these to encompass all of human civilization that is worth saving. Because rebuilding after climate change will be a lot easier if our descendants don't have to make all the mistakes we did.

There's nothing (besides war) to prevent, say, Bangladesh from lofting sulfates into the stratosphere on weather balloons to delay climate change. Preventing sea level rise matters a lot more to them than it does to Geneva diplomats. Geoengineering would cost only billions per year, and hence is several orders of magnitude cheaper than the economic/social effects of climate change.

The problem with stratospheric albedo geoengineering generally arise because it is a "temporary" fix. Should whatever political body sponsoring it be voted out, or their nation states collapse, all the effects of aggregate greenhouse emissions still take place, just in decades rather than centuries. It the intermittancy that's calamitous for natural biological and agricultural symptoms. Geoengineering, as conventionally envisioned, is just recipe for delaying but intensifying climate chaos.

I agree with Gwynne Dyer that we will inevitably engage in stratospheric albedo geoengineering. In coming decades, starving populations will make it a political necessity. I hope that we will manage it so as to slow the pace of climate change, rather than attempt to reverse it. As noted above, this may preserve much biodiversity, while avoiding an indefinite commitment.

^biological and agricultural systems (not symptoms).

any geoengineering measures used to combat climate change would, due to their scale, be necessarily things that couldn't be tested first, and would have irrevocable and unknowable consequences.
― Cornelius Pardew (jim in glasgow), Monday, January 25, 2016 1:51 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also there's the law of unintended consequences, whereby injecting all that shit into the air will inevitably lead to complex unmodelable conditions causing who knows what other problems.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Monday, March 5, 2018 5:53 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

by the very nature of the thing geoengineering is not something that can be tested in a real world setting, and has to be completely based on theoretical calculations
― khat person (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, March 6, 2018 4:11 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

All true, all irrelevant. You haven't lived in an era in which millions faced starvation in developed nations.