Okay, so it was the writer for GWPF who wrote that--I still say misleading--summary of Edenhofer's statements. A less serious lapse is enclosing in quotation marks the words "Climate policy is redistributing the world's wealth," when that is not exactly what Edenhofer said. But that's a cavil.

Bottom line for me, Robert, is that if this writer or you are claiming some smoking gun in Edenhofer's contention that to address the problems climate change causes, we need to have strong redistributive development policy, there's no smoke. Agree with him or not, but the basis of all he says is predicated on climate change being real. Charges of 'communistic' motives masquerading as environmental concerns poison the debate. We are not in the 1950s.

Edenhofer presents a strong ethical argument to all citizens of developed countries.

DWill wrote:if this writer or you are claiming some smoking gun in Edenhofer's contention that to address the problems climate change causes, we need to have strong redistributive development policy, there's no smoke.

There is enough smoke here to asphyxiate. Sharing wealth is an important political problem. However, it is an entirely separate problem from climate change. The climate change problem is that the amount of carbon in the air is a direct risk to global security and stability. Holding the planet hostage to desires to share wealth more equally is a dangerous mistake, imperilling world security and stability.

It does not at all surprise me that people who are fixated on sharing wealth (ie communists) have secretly taken over the world climate movement through the IPCC and shifted its focus from fixing the climate to sharing wealth. A very dangerous situation. That explains fully why the IPCC has a fatwa against geoengineering. Communists hate anything that supports capitalism, and instead want to keep the focus on the war on coal in order to collapse energy stock prices.

DWill wrote:Agree with him or not, but the basis of all he says is predicated on climate change being real.

I would question that, in the sense that even though he nominally accepts the science, he does not seem to think it really matters, given that he appears to think sharing money is more important than stopping global warming.

DWill wrote:Charges of 'communistic' motives masquerading as environmental concerns poison the debate. We are not in the 1950s.

Communists are the ones who have managed to poison the debate by demonising capitalism, within their leftist culture bubble, generating a widespread failure among Sandersistas and co to understand that capitalism is the only source of sustained growth.

DWill wrote: Edenhofer presents a strong ethical argument to all citizens of developed countries.

Yes, very true. There are important moral concerns around equity and development. However, those concerns should be kept entirely separate from global warming, which is a security problem.

Mixing up climate and politics in this way is exactly why Trump has ridden such a backlash against climate policy, with the growth of the denial movement and his very sensible decision to abandon the failed communist mentality of the Paris Accord. Now we have the perception that climate is a gravy train for the poor to extract money from the rich, after Hillary’s idiotic $100 billion annual pledge for the UN Green Climate Fund and related activities.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/planetpo ... realistic/ documents the desperate fraud and deception involved in Hillary's stupid pledge, while completely failing to mention its primary gross failing, the fatwa against geoengineering that means almost none of this money goes to work that will actually stop climate change.

If you would argue less emotionally, avoiding gratuitous negative labels, I'd be better able to give your arguments the consideration they deserve. Lomborg is the model here. I don't hear much tribalism in his writing. It's not a hard problem to solve, involving only subtraction.

Robert Tulip wrote:Communists are the ones who have managed to poison the debate by demonising capitalism, within their leftist culture bubble, generating a widespread failure among Sandersistas and co to understand that capitalism is the only source of sustained growth.

Isn't sustained growth a future evil? Shouldn't we focus on equilibrium and maximized quality of life instead?

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If we manage to kill ourselves through greedy, short sighted solutions to the carbon dioxide menace, nature will not turn a single leaf to mourn us. Nature has no duty to us or sympathy for us. We are just as much a part of nature as any other species now extinct. If we poison the atmosphere we'll die. In a 100,000 years or so nature will shake it off and start again without us. We reached the moon due to our intelligence. If we aren't intelligent enough to address the climate problem nothing in the universe will know or care we're gone. It's survival of the fittest as we well know.. Are we tough enough to overcome ideologies and greed and save ourselves? If not, nature will toss in the reject bin and something tougher and smarter will replace us as is nature's way. I blame religion for the deus ex machina mentality. "Oh, nothing will happen to us, God loves us!"

But then, I blame religion for almost everything, so...

DWill wrote:If you would argue less emotionally, avoiding gratuitous negative labels, I'd be better able to give your arguments the consideration they deserve.

Whether labels are ‘gratuitous’ depends on whether they make sense. You have previously objected to the association I have drawn between emission reduction and communism. I assume that is what you are calling a gratuitous negative label.

Far from gratuitous, the point of this association is that communism, broadly defined as class war by the poor against the rich, has a strong analytical political continuity with the contemporary movement to reduce CO2 emissions.

I am not just flinging wild abuse, but examining how progressive politics has evolved from its earlier focus on class war for control of the state into current ideas about identity and environment. For example, the Paris Accord has been corrupted by the reparations argument, that rich countries should compensate poor countries for climate damage.

Morally attractive as that may seem, a focus on monetary compensation diverts attention from the real security threat of global warming, and diverts resources from the urgent priority of technological research and development to address the clear and present danger that climate change poses to the world.

The emotional issue here is that ongoing failure of the world to engage with climate politics is worsening the scale and pace of extinction damage and threat.

DWill wrote: Lomborg is the model here. I don't hear much tribalism in his writing.

Bjorn Lomborg is portrayed by his many opponents as an intensely tribal figure, as a shill for big oil, as a hate figure and deceptive liar who distorts facts about climate and environment for corrupt political motives.

Those perceptions about Lomborg are entirely false, and have been constructed by the climate movement to justify its hollow false argument that reducing CO2 emissions is the best strategy to fix the climate. Lomborg has become the classic straw man, a person widely depicted for political motives as quite different from what he really says.

His actual information, such as that Paris only addresses 1% of the carbon problem, tends to be generally ignored in favour of a superficial political argument between climate denialists and emission reductionists. Denialists say there is no climate problem, while reductionists say reducing emissions is the only viable strategy. Both are entirely wrong.

Interbane wrote:Isn't sustained growth a future evil?

Thanks Interbane, your question of the morality of economic growth opens a key question in politics. The question is whether growth can be sustained without causing massive damage or even breaking the physical capacity of the planet.

My view is that technological innovation can create vastly more wealth than now exists, while also protecting ecology. Indeed, ecological biodiversity is mainly threatened where poor people see no alternative other than direct use of resources. But if resources can be transformed into higher value uses, that in turn frees up the ability to protect the environment, creating a virtuous circle.

The ocean covers 71% of our planet and contains more than a billion cubic kilometres of water. To make an obvious pun, we have barely scratched the surface of this vast resource. My view is that industrial algae farms on a small proportion of the world ocean will generate universal abundance, enabling construction of floating cities, roads and other infrastructure, enabling humans to move to the sea with a lifestyle far better than currently enjoyed, allowing continents to be managed to enhance biodiversity, rather than exploited with inefficient technology.

Mining the ocean for elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and even metals like gold could vastly increase the stock of capital wealth while also generating ability to steward these resources sustainably.

Technological innovation such as seen in the industrial and communications revolutions has vastly increased productivity and growth, bringing billions of people out of poverty and hardship. Although, as your comment implies, this economic transformation of the world has largely occurred in a heedless and destructive way. The false providential assumption that the frontier is infinite has provided the grounds for the suspicion you voice. By considering the ocean as the new finite frontier, new methods of industrial organisation can enable a quantum step up in economic activity.

Interbane wrote: Shouldn't we focus on equilibrium and maximized quality of life instead?

That attitude is self-contradictory, since attempts to hold equilibrium in a dynamic context generate a dangerous combination of stagnation, control and conflict, thereby undermining quality of life. Far better to set rules for innovation and allow free enterprise and invention and discovery in a well-governed framework.

Pioneering innovators create the potential for improved quality of life for all. Preventing innovation, which is what a focus on equilibrium really means, stops the economy from evolving in new productive directions.

There is no way we will stop global warming by slowing the pace of change and growth. Rather, we urgently need to increase the investment in research and development of new industrial technology, especially for managing the oceans. Unfortunately, the backward mentality of preventing growth is at the heart of the Paris Climate Accord, which is a complete disaster for realistic strategies for climate security.

This is the opening to an article in the March issue of The National Geographic.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/201 ... n-c40-spd/

Not sure they'll let you read it if you're not a subscriber.

By Stephen Leahy
PUBLISHED MARCH 6, 2018

The carbon footprint of some of the world’s biggest cities is 60 percent larger than previously estimated when all the products and services a city consumes are included, according to a new analysis.

The report was released Tuesday at the IPCC Cities and Climate Change Science Conference in Edmonton, Canada, and estimated the carbon emissions for the food, clothing, electronics, air travel, construction materials, and so on consumed by residents but produced outside city limits.

The world’s cities emit 70 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide—and that’s likely higher when consumption emissions are included, says report author Michael Doust, program director at C40 Cities, a network of the world’s cities committed to addressing climate change.

Robert Tulip wrote:. Rather, we urgently need to increase the investment in research and development of new industrial technology, especially for managing the oceans. Unfortunately, the backward mentality of preventing growth is at the heart of the Paris Climate Accord, which is a complete disaster for realistic strategies for climate security.

We've been such superb managers of the environment to this point--not. Now we consider ourselves well qualified to "manage the oceans"?

DWill wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:. Rather, we urgently need to increase the investment in research and development of new industrial technology, especially for managing the oceans. Unfortunately, the backward mentality of preventing growth is at the heart of the Paris Climate Accord, which is a complete disaster for realistic strategies for climate security.

We've been such superb managers of the environment to this point--not. Now we consider ourselves well qualified to "manage the oceans"?

There should be no question that a paradigm shift is needed to replace the mentality of heedless exploitation of natural resources. Instead, we need recognition of the urgency of wise stewardship of biodiversity, recognising the planetary genetic inheritance as the most valuable asset that we have, since once genes and species are extinct they are gone forever.

The sad fact, after six millennia of growing human planetary dominion, is that we are riding the tiger, and cannot jump off. Dominion has traditionally been understood within the alienated religious paradigm of heedless exploitation, but can equally apply in the integrated paradigm of wise stewardship.

The implication of not choosing to manage the oceans with methods of wise stewardship is that the oceans could die, with a repeat of the Permian Great Dying of 252 million years ago when climate change caused the great currents of the ocean to stop, turning the seas to anoxic acid and sending 95% of all species extinct. If we allow that to happen this century, which is a risk with high impact and medium probability, then human civilization will collapse. That is the primary security agenda for our planet.

Even if we somehow avoid a Great Dying, the Arctic and the coral reefs are now being killed by climate change. The way to fix that is to immediately work out how to remove the extra carbon from the air and sea. But the problem is that the climate change political movement has put all its eggs in the basket of emission reduction.

Unfortunately, emission reduction is purely incidental to climate change. Climate change can only be reversed through carbon removal, which can only be achieved through ocean management.

The oceans are extremely big, with surface area 2.4 times bigger than all the land put together, average depth four kilometres, and volume 1.2 billion cubic kilometres. That scale of resource offers the potential to shift the global economy to a new paradigm of universal abundance, where climate management and biodiversity enhancement are primary goals.

So the answer to your question is yes, humans are well qualified to manage the oceans, since we have no alternative that will ensure survival. Even if our track record deserves to be judged harshly, the necessity of change means there is no alternative to an intensive frontier use of the world ocean to save us from the looming catastrophe of climate change.

The view is widespread in the marine biology community and the climate lobby that deliberate intervention to manage the planetary climate carries too high risk. That view, while superficially attractive as an incentive to reduce emissions, is unfortunately stupid and incoherent, because it just won’t work.

All the pledges in the Paris Accord can only remove at most 1% of the dangerous carbon that humans have added to the air, far too small to stop global warming. The risks of not intervening are much bigger, and primarily include ecosystem collapse and extinction.

There may be some coherent souls who think collapse of civilization would be a good thing for our planet, but I disagree. I would prefer that we put faith in human intelligence and our ability to reform and work together in order to become wise stewards of our planetary resources.