I wonder if future generations will think people were even serious about solving the problem. In this respect the war was lost long ago.
The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.
A large part of it is that it is a collective action problem. If you want to talk about "effective action"? You're talking about shutting down coal plants, not going after the man or woman on the street. A person needing a car to get to work is, both in real and proportional terms, causing overwhelmingly less damage to the environment than industrial-scale polluters. If everybody who could switch to a bike instead of a car (which is fewer people, at least in America, than you might realize), you would see a blip on the graph.
Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.
Not all of that is personal transportation, but a lot of it is. This is not a blip on the graph.
I also agree that large polluters need to change, and that we need state action. I was just pointing out that people who seem to believe climate change is a problem rarely make major lifestyle changes consistent with their stated beliefs.
Saying this is primarily a collective action problem is passing the buck. It's a convenient excuse for doing nothing. Collective action is much harder than personal action. Ultimately, we need both collective and personal action.
> Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff.
You seem to believe that cycling to work is much more challenging than it actually is. You may be surprised, but no cyclist I know has the problems you've mentioned. Those problems can happen, but they are not that common in my experience.
Yes, the US is a car dependent society, but you can choose where to live and choose your job. Like most people choose where to live based on their driving commute, I choose where to live based on my cycling commute. It is not a long commute, and I arrive on time and usually am not sweaty.
Also, cycling was just an example. It doesn't need to be cycling. Work at home, switch from your gas guzzler, etc.
Cars are bad but they're a pretty small problem compared to airplanes. A single trip across the Atlantic and back is about equivalent to commuting in a SUV for a year. Per passenger-mile cars and planes use about the same amount of carbon but people tend to take far longer plane trips.
But it seems to me that the marginal cost in terms of CO2 emissions is not exactly clear for flying. Whether I fly or not, the planes will fly. My addition to a single plane in terms of the weight is not that significant. It becomes a more murky economic argument. I agree people should not fly, but this is more of a collective action type approach in my view. It takes roughly a plane load of people to make a difference.
In contrast, a driver has much more direct control over the CO2 emissions. The marginal addition of CO2 is much clearer.
If people stop or reduce flying one by one there's clearly some point at which a stepwise reduction in service occurs. Your are unlikely to be the person who triggers this but the reduction will also be proportionately larger than your contribution too. So you should think of yourself as reducing carbon emissions by the person-mile amount in expectation even if it will never actually be that amount.
Or to frame it another way, when you fly you're playing Russian roulette with adding an amount of CO2 to the atmosphere dwarfing anything else you might be causing.
Commuting using a 50+MPG vehicle is an option for the vast majority of humanity and would make a huge difference. So, it's not like the average person has zero options. People drive ~3.22 trillion miles in the US using 142.85 billion gallons = ~22MPG so a 50% reduction is completely viable.
Further the first 50% reduction is the lowest hanging fruit. We don't need to get to 100% to make a huge difference over time.
Good points. I think even if we could muster collective action it would be required on a global scale. Related to this is that in many cases large emitters of green-house gases are largely divorced from the consequences. Ultimately most people around the world will feel some impact but it's not really a problem in the here and now. For example animal husbandry (cattle and possibly sheep) is apparently responsible for emissions of methane which is in theory has a disproportionately larger impact on raising global temperatures...but we'll have a hard time convincing people to stop eating those meats. Especially in parts of the world that are becoming more affluent, have large growing populations and are rather keen on enjoying their share of steak or leg of lamb
Outside USA many people goes to work in public bus, train and subway. In some places they are nice, in some place they are nasty, but they consume much less fuel that a car for each person
Shutting down coal power would achieve all climate goals for several decades and we can in fact just kind of do that in most places. Government subsidies are what's keeping coal power plants online in many locations. The problem is that this would impose costs on business owners, or force banks and/or governments to pay out large sums to those business owners (not that large though: tens to hundreds of millions per plant). In other words : governments worldwide would have to scale back what they're doing for a short while to instantly destroy their climate goals.
In other words: government, elected CHOICES are what's keeping the biggest co2 producers online. Governments absolute unwillingness, in Australia's case, to pay out relatively small sums they agreed to pay decades ago, and of course not getting a budget increase out of it.
Laws that are proposed, almost without fail, go after individual, totally insignificant co2 producers, and impose large costs on individuals for marginal, or even net negative gain (e.g. well known example: for the longest time, and maybe even now, solar panels were net-negative, and certainly, in the short term that's still true. Certainly in the short term switching to solar power increases CO2 emissions, it doesn't reduce them. It may become a net positive after 10 years of constantly using the panels, under idealized conditions).
Suggested changes to individual lives, like forgoing cars entirely, impose yet larger costs but thankfully for now governments are mostly unwilling to do this.
At what point do we get to conclude that the intent of climate action parties is simply to exert power over individuals, to capture government, regardless of all costs to the climate ? That these parties not only don't care about climate change, but are actually willing to sacrifice the climate, just to gain power ?
Besides: I think it's extremely telling that nobody is willing to consider geoengineering (artificially lowering out planet's albedo). We know methods to do that, and of course all governments promptly decided that was off-limits (with, get this, "what if we're wrong" arguments. Look: either climate prediction works, or it doesn't. Denying geoengineering solutions is little better than outright denying climate change entirely).
It is more telling that nuclear is on the decline. The right doesn’t take the problem seriously, and the left doesn’t take the solution seriously. So of course there is no progress.
That's one of the engineering solutions that people seem to be terminally opposed to. We have global warming ... and we have engineering solutions, indeed nuclear could do a lot as well, especially in countries like China.
Let's NOT USE THOSE ! They're scary ! Science is wrong and evil ! Green glowy children !
And of course, somehow you can criticize science like nuclear and it's safety record, but shout "science denial" at people opposing climate science. That's an entirely reasonable attitude of course.
But it's very clear: getting and grabbing power, that's what it's about. Not fixing a problem.
I drive about 50x less than most people, but this is entirely 100% a collective action problem. There are many problems government can't solve, but this is a problem only government can solve.
IMO phasing out automobiles as the primary form of transit is a herculean battle the environmental groups probably don't feel like they have a prayer of winning. I bike & bus to work, but speaking on a grand scale cars prey on our weakness for comfort & convenience, and the cities we live in are designed to accommodate cars, not bicycles.
I do get frustrated with some enviro groups though, currently the ones who want to replace nuclear plants with natural gas plants.
> cars prey on our weakness for comfort & convenience, and the cities we live in are designed to accommodate cars, not bicycles.
I agree.
Cars break a feedback loop between how far you travel and how tired you are. Bikes merely modify this feedback loop. As long as the feedback loop exists, energy use is constrained regardless of price. But this is also what makes cars so addictive.
Car dependency seems to have peaked in the US, so I am hoping to see a reduction in the future. Removing parking requirements would be a good start.
Yeah, I'm hopeful that we will reverse the dependency, but I think it needs to be more organic/grassroots than the Sierra Club can drive. We need to come to a collective understanding that we want more alternative forms of travel, for safety or economy or health or just to escape traffic jams.
The uncomfortable reality is that 7 billion people can’t all live like Americans (or Europeans). Extracting the resources necessary for everyone to live like Americans would be very bad for the environment. The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.
They very likely can, but it would require a massive program of nuclear power plant building. This is unacceptable to environmentalists, who prefer to pretend that people will voluntarily reduce their quality of life.
It’s not just energy production and consumption that is the problem. Resource extraction, pollution, toxification of the environment are all contributing to the creation of a planet that sucks to live in.
Cheap energy goes a long way toward solving those problems. Many "rare" materials are only rare because they're energy intensive to extract, or they might not be needed at all (e.g. rare earth metals in motors and batteries) if we can afford to sacrifice energy efficiency in products. If we can irrigate all the deserts with desalinated sea water then there's less need for intensive agriculture. Pollution control technologies need energy to run and build, so cheaper energy means there's less opposition to using them.
The classic hyperboloid cooling tower works by evaporation, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is high, so a few degrees difference in the temperature of the make-up water isn't going to matter. It only matters with the more environmentally harmful once-through cooling, where the waste heat is dumped directly into the sea.
We have a route to that direction, and have made a lot of progress. It involves ending global poverty, providing economic opportunities for women, and ensuring contraception is available.
If you have high child mortality, limited access to contraception, and few employment opportunities for women, they have a lot of children. You change that, and they choose to have fewer. It happened in Europe. It happened in North America. It happened in South America. It happened in Asia (with some draconian policies to help it along). It's starting to happen in Africa: [0] (Check the map tab to see country-by-country over time).
We can do this without draconian policies. All we have to do is work to end global poverty. People think is hopeless, but twenty-five years ago, those same people would have said there's no way we'd cut it in half by now, and we did[1].
(Obligatory plug for the Against Malaria Foundation[2], which is my charity of choice for fighting global poverty, and at the same time, climate change.)
Yeah, it’s not a practical solution in terms of implementation. However, if implemented it would work and not require Star Trek levels of innovation. There are simply too many people in the world.
Okay...but how would that work? Where are all these people? China had a one-child policy which they've recently reversed because the ratio of old people/young people has basically reversed. On the plus side it seems that with education and generally societal improvements people tend to have less children anyway. Having said that in some developed countries they're struggling with declining birth rates. Partly because of lifestyle choices and partly due to high costs of raising children...
I mentioned that it's not practical. Forced sterilization - I'm not advocating this - would do the trick. Again, it's not practical to implement just now but I think it's clear that having fewer people would be ideal and would solve lots of problems.
I reckon the first step is to price negative
externalities into the things we buy for once. The first reason people and businesses consume so much is because they can afford it.
You don't believe that having fewer people in the world would lead to less pollution and less harm to the environment due to human activities? Or you don't believe someone is suggesting that there needs to be fewer people?
It seems clear to me that if there were only 5 million people in the world then human caused climate change wouldn't be an issue. Isn't that obvious? I'm not advocating that we get to that level. I'm just pointing out that there exists a number for the population such that human caused climate change would no longer be an issue. I don't think it's disputable that this is so.
I'm not advocating mass killings or anything like that. Just pointing out an obvious thing. If where were way less people then pollution, etc. would not be an issue.
Given how most polution comes from places where people generally have very little children, I doubt that reducing births in the third world would be an effective measure.
We need to solve for different variables: energy source (we need more nuclear), transportation (we need people to utilize public transportation and drive less cars), and we'd need to work on carbon capture (which is a technological problem).
Solving all these requires policy shift and government enforcement.
> ...seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere.
That's my problem with the entire political side of climate and environmentalism. The simple fact that Al Gore flies in a Learjet while simultaneously claiming the "Earth has a fever." Makes it impossible for me to take that movement seriously. Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated. You can't dump mercury in a river and then pay a bunch of money and pretend mercury wasn't dumped in a river.
The Paris Climate talks -- Anyone have a look at the tarmac at Le Bourget? Delegations of essentially anonymous officials arriving via private jets and being shuttled around by private cars while suggesting that I should make my house hotter by turning up the air conditioner temperature or I should pay more to take my kids to school each morning. And they're flying private? They're actually having an in-person meeting at all? If the threat were so dire, then why not video conference? Or at the very least fly commercial and take public transit.
Even Bill and Hilary have flown commercial -- so arguments about the feasibility of that aren't very valid. Certainly random environmental officials where nobody even knows their names, let alone faces aren't subject to any special security requirements that would necessitate private jets. They do it because they see themselves as more important than those that they would regulate. It's Animal Farm where some animals are more equal than others.
To be clear, I'm not debating any particular scientific position -- I'm just suggesting that many people (like me) have a hard time reconciling how "dire" our situation is when the supposed "experts" aren't making any changes to their own lifestyle unless it's politically expedient. Personally, I try to live a low-impact lifestyle when possible. I don't waste water, I use programmable thermostats, I reuse when possible and I don't drive if it's easy to take public transit or company shuttles. However, my adherence to a reasonably green lifestyle is offset 1000 fold when some factory in China dumps benzene in the water or some Delhi trucker fills the air with dense smoke while idling in traffic for hours.
It might seem to an skeptical observer that the anti-carbon political movement might be more about controlling/profiting from/reallocating the means of production more than helping the actual environment. The implication that people on the far left care more about the environment seems to be good marketing -- people on the far left seem to care more about far left economics than the environment -- the environment is just good populist toast upon which to serve a marmalade of collectivist economic policy.
It seems that most normal people, right and left, care about the environment. For me though (on the libertarian side of the aisle,) when I hear stuff like this, from former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:
"One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
When I hear stuff like that, then that discredits a lot of the climate alarmism in my mind -- despite the fact that I actually do care deeply about the environment.
Even if he buys "carbon credits" -- that carbon he's generating is still being generated.
The point of carbon credits is offsetting. For example, suppose I plant a bunch of trees to earn carbon credits. I then sell Al Gore my carbon credits. Thus, Al Gore is able to fly about in his jet, I am able to make money planting trees, and in the end no net carbon has been added to the atmosphere.
The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.