DWill wrote:What is wrong with emissions reduction being political?
This question gets to the heart of why I like Trump. The problem with climate change is how we model an economic scenario for future planetary stability and security. The rival scenarios are pro capitalist, based on technological ingenuity, and anti capitalist, based on government leading the way.
My view is that the most coherent capitalist vision clashes with the entire scenario that claims emission reduction is the only way to stabilise the climate. A capitalist entrepreneurial model for climate stability could start with the idea that the only practical way to stop climate disaster is to convert emissions into useful products. Emission conversion is the answer, rather than to reduce emissions. Under that conversion model, alliance with the fossil fuel industry is the key to fixing the climate.
The fossil fuel producers should have a material incentive to sustain their business model in a world of changing technology, by adopting game changing methods, as Kodak failed to do. Neither emission reduction nor runaway emissions will deliver climate stability, and the only people able to manage emission conversion are the ones responsible for the emissions in the first place, the fossil fuel industry.
The problem with emission reduction being political is that it sets up a false moral vision whereby emitters are imagined as evil and governments are seen as good, so political regulation is given the job of saving the world from the wicked capitalists. That is the liberal 'socogony' that Trump voters rebel against. Given how industrial energy supports all modern human achievement, the liberal moral scheme positing growth as bad is a dangerous delusion. Don't pick a fight you can't win.
DWill wrote:The current, negative sense in which you use the word [political] implies factions fighting for ascendancy against each other.
Yes, and that is exactly what is occurring with Trump’s assault on climate science, an assault which is a populist reaction to the political overplay of the Paris Agreement which portrayed the fossil fuel industry as evil. America relies in a big way on fossil fuels, so what you call a “fight for ascendancy” is not going to be won by pointy-heads who don’t get politics.
DWill wrote:You may believe there exists a worldwide environmentalist cabal, bent on emissions reduction, whose real aim is socialistic control of economies, but I'm not with you there and think that no evidence supports that notion.
When I see people asserting claims of conspiracy theory, as you are doing here, I look at how the perceived conspiracy may represent a misunderstanding. The caricature that you describe is actually how many Trumpites think.
There is no secret Bolshevite spectre aiming to impose a climate dictatorship. Rather, what you call the “worldwide environmentalist cabal” are pursuing policies of emission reduction which they see as compatible with market economics and incentives. However, the problem is that these policies would result in an undue level of government control of society, even though such control is not their conscious primary motive.
A conspiracy or cabal requires deliberate conscious intent, whereas the situation for climate policy is that the big government component of emission reduction is seen by environmentalists as only a secondary consequence, not a primary driver. Unfortunately, the Trumpites see the spectre of big government as a primary threat, and view emission reduction through that threatening prism.
DWill wrote: Assuredly, emission reduction will take political work of a very high magnitude.
Not just political work, but scientific work, to persuade voters and policy makers that emission reduction is economically feasible. I do not think that case has been made, or that it can be made. That is why I say forget emission reduction, and aim instead to remove double the amount of carbon we add so the economy can keep emitting carbon and the fossil fuel industry can get on board with actions to save the climate, in a world where carbon is used for mass infrastructure. Claiming that emission reduction can become a compelling political idea is barking at the moon. It has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
DWill wrote:
No one has even implied killing off billions of people because we already use too much energy. If you're referring to population limits, that's obviously not killing people.
The Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, published in 1968, began with the statement: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Even though the Ehrlichs were alarmist, their antinatal meme has entered the popular imagination in the rich world in a big way, not to promote apocalyptic slaughter like the
blood up to the bridle of Rev 14:20, but to convince people that bringing children into this world is morally suspect.
DWill wrote:
Unlimited energy use by one species has to negatively affect the others.
We are nowhere near the real limits of energy use. Industrial algae farms on one percent of the world ocean would solve global warming and provide super abundant energy, also enabling the fossil fuel industries to become sustainable. Using many magnitudes more energy is essential to preserve biodiversity.
Your comment reminds me of
Bill Gates’ alleged 1981 comment about computer RAM that "640K ought to be enough for anybody." The 4GB figure now common is something like seven orders of magnitude more than the situation forty years ago. Similar transformation in energy use is conceivable.
DWill wrote:While I'm sympathetic to win-win scenarios, there needs to be reasonable accommodation on each side.
Carbon mining is a win-win, but there is no accommodation from the carbonistas of Paris, who just loathe and detest geoengineering as a Satanic monstrosity, with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity going so far as to issue a
fatwa demanding “that no climate-related geo-engineering activities** that may affect biodiversity take place.”
DWill wrote:On one side we have the single species, homo sapiens, placing no limits in itself, while on the other is the millions of the rest of species, playing by natural rules that make them perfectly accommodating.
Yes, human civilization has pushed up against the boundaries of the global commons, but that does not at all justify your “no limits” comment. Britain produces vastly more agriculture than its commons did in medieval days. We have physical planetary limits, but a paradigm shift in technology can show that those limits are actually vastly greater than our current total resource use.
We are nowhere near exploiting the potential of the billion cubic kilometres of the world ocean, something that would radically ease the environmental pressure on biodiversity. Failure to manage the commons, especially in the world oceans, is the big threat to the millions of the rest of species. Just as gasoline has triple the unit energy of wood, we can find that new energy sources will unleash hitherto undreamt of power. The ocean is the whale in this space.
DWill wrote:
The presence of high level of toxins in animals living in the deepest, coldest places in the oceans shows that your perspective is clearly wrong. Such an environmental problem is "outside the framework of climate change." So is one such as high levels of lead in public water systems. But there are many others as well.
Those are serious problems, but this issue is about ranking serious problems like in the order of needs. Saying all environmental problems are in the climate frame is like saying that there are no health problems outside the framework of eating, because without food we cannot have health. Without a climate we cannot have safe ecology or water supply. Even the deepest seas are impacted by how carbon added to the sea is destroying their food supplies.
DWill wrote:
If you object to politics in emissions reduction, that's nothing at all compared to the politics of forcing people off land masses. That would require totalitarian world government--unless we've reached such a point of desperation that there seemed to be no choice. That, however, is not the planned and orderly process you think can happen.
How such a new frontier could attract migration is a better way to pitch this idea. If bluefield ocean cities are designed to be very pleasant and attractive and wealthy and innovative places to live, there would be no suggestion of any unwillingness to move.
DWill wrote: outside the realm of the possible.
Not at all. The current world aviation and communications industries could not have at all been imagined when our grandparents were born. Seeing the ocean as the primary frontier requiring pioneers to develop its potential will be the big change in human life in the coming centuries.