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Trump's Climate Decision

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DWill

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Re: Trump's Climate Decision

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Robert Tulip wrote:In terms of emotional comfort, the idea that we as individuals and small groups can take action to affect climate change resonates well. However, the moral philosophy advanced by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, that capitalist efficiency depends on economies of scale and the profit motive, presents an alternative path with a stronger basis in evidence. These heartless capitalist drivers of business have delivered all the fabulous wealth of the modern world, and they operate at industrial orders of magnitude that render small artisanal craft operations uncompetitive. Local activity is essential for social capital and democracy, for involvement and belonging, but the best local activity is to understand and debate the global problems, not to pretend that personal emission levels make any difference to global warming.
Individuals sign on to initiatives by states and cities to reduce production of carbon emissions. Significantly, capitalist entities whose only mandate is to worry about their bottom lines see harm in the Administration's decision to withdraw from Paris. http://www.businessinsider.com/execs-re ... ent-2017-6. What if it is the wish of capitalism to pursue emission reduction, as by the evidence seems to be the case? The wisdom of the market must be respected. Setting up shop on a massive section of the ocean has yet to find any favor with captitalists, and unless it does government is left to the task. That prospect conjures visions of a world government, anathema to lovers of freedom and sovereignty.

I again reflect on the pity of the narrowed focus of environmentalism since global warming has dominated the discussion. Our impact on the planet is so much more than simply raising its temperature. I spent a weekend along a river rendered lifeless by acid mine waste, and similar scenarios are repeated millions of times throughout the world. We are on our way to ruining the planet through heedless over-exploitation, but there seems to be a new crop of cornucopians who tell us not to worry, we can have it all--a healthy planet and limitless manufacturing.
This issue of paradigm shift is something I have been thinking about a lot. Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions proved the strong role of psychology in people’s beliefs, even in scientific matters that seem to be objective and rational. The paradigm shift required in climate science is from emission reduction to carbon mining.
My thought on this would be that calling for a paradigm shift never works and the usage is faddish. Some historians observe changes in psychology taking place over long periods, but these movements can't be commanded into action.
An old paradigm begins to crack when researchers identify anomalies that its defenders cannot answer or explain. The Paris Accord has just such anomalous language, in its untrue statements that emission reduction is essential to climate stability. That is untrue, because if the world removes more carbon than we add to the air, then a path to stability does not need to involve emission reduction.
That is the big "if" currently, if the world can remove this carbon from the atmosphere, and without waiting decades for results to become evident. You believe it is mere blinkeredness that prevents "the world" from seeing that it should drop all of its efforts to prevent carbon from entering the atmosphere, because, of course, we can only go one way, must not use a mixture of approaches (as you say). That is where most people, I think, would say you're mistaken. Pursuing emissions reduction does not somehow block minds from realizing that, instead, carbon should be removed from the atmosphere. That approach, also, is useful, but its day has not arrived and apparently the time will not be forced.
That simple logic of carbon mining hits up against the paradigm of the UN and its supporters, who are doubling down on the failed emission reduction agenda, seeing ever greater reductions as the only path. Trump has called them out, even if he does not fully understand the likely consequences of his decision and is mainly doing from the limited attitude of back to the future with coal.
Although you've cited specific geoengineering that the signees are told to avoid (with no legal penalties), this is not the same as a directive that countries must not try to include in their goals the removal of carbon. The agreement intends to solicit national ambitions to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, that's all as far as I know.
Zero climate impact is not a meaningful goal, given the enormous scale of existing impact. The better path is ensuring stability, fecundity and durability, the great evolutionary values of genetic adaptation.
I would just note that even stabilizing the climate won't achieve this goal. It's necessary but not sufficient. Say, as does seem very likely, the temperature by century's end has risen by 4-5 degrees F. Aside from adapting (thank you) to this change, we have enormous work to do to save our planet from non-warming related harm.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Trump's Climate Decision

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DWill wrote:Individuals sign on to initiatives by states and cities to reduce production of carbon emissions.
Signing up for purely symbolic gestures like the so-called Earth Hour is a typical example of the vanity politics of the climate lobby. Despite having a probable effect of increasing emissions, lighting candles provides romantic emotional comfort for its participants, which takes precedence over any factual analysis. Sadly, that same emotional syndrome looks to apply broadly to state and city level initiatives on climate; they are more spin than substance.
DWill wrote:Significantly, capitalist entities whose only mandate is to worry about their bottom lines see harm in the Administration's decision to withdraw from Paris. http://www.businessinsider.com/execs-re ... ent-2017-6.
All those companies like Tesla, Microsoft, Facebook and Google are paid up donkey supporters, so would be expected to toe the party line supporting the old paradigm of emission reduction.

Why Tech Billionaires Like Democrats suggests “Changes in the Forbes 400 partisanship reflect changes from a manufacturing and extraction economy to a technology and information economy—Silicon Valley and Hollywood are generous to Democrats.”
DWill wrote:What if it is the wish of capitalism to pursue emission reduction, as by the evidence seems to be the case? The wisdom of the market must be respected.
Emission reduction is often a sensible objective for firms just in terms of energy efficiency, to reduce power bills. Shopping malls in Australia are installing solar power as it is cheaper than grid electricity. That is all fine, but no one should pretend it amounts to a hill of beans in slowing climate change, or that solar can deliver reliable baseload.

The only way to slow climate change is to remove carbon from the air. Only when a prospectus offers a profitable path to that objective will investors come on board. We should also note that emission reduction is a very bad idea for the fossil fuel industries, as ‘decarbonisation’ aims to put them out of business. The carbon mining prospectus should focus on how the fossil fuel business model can be saved by removing the pollution their products add to the air and sea and converting it to profitable commodities.
DWill wrote:Setting up shop on a massive section of the ocean has yet to find any favor with capitalists, and unless it does government is left to the task. That prospect conjures visions of a world government, anathema to lovers of freedom and sovereignty.
My expectation is that capitalists will come on board when they realise that there is money to be made from large scale algae production, and that this will also preserve traditional energy stock value, enabling mining of reserves. Without carbon mining at sea, Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math shows that the stock prices of the energy industry are predicated on activities that would boil the sea. Commercial activities such as mines occur when prospectors seek licences from government, who regulate for environmental and social impact. That is an established system of private enterprise that should work for carbon mining.
DWill wrote: I again reflect on the pity of the narrowed focus of environmentalism since global warming has dominated the discussion. Our impact on the planet is so much more than simply raising its temperature. I spent a weekend along a river rendered lifeless by acid mine waste, and similar scenarios are repeated millions of times throughout the world.
With ecology, it is essential to see the overall scientific framework of causality, to see the scale of impact and linkages of various problems.

What you call “simply raising its temperature” is the biggest single ecological problem for the planet, with impacts on everything else, threatening to create a sudden tipping point, phase change and mass extinctions. By comparison, while acid mine waste is a serious local problem, treating rivers as sewers, it does not have the systemic extinctive impact of global warming, where humans treating the air we breathe as an open sewer.
DWill wrote: We are on our way to ruining the planet through heedless over-exploitation, but there seems to be a new crop of cornucopians who tell us not to worry, we can have it all--a healthy planet and limitless manufacturing.
My cornucopian view is that the vast unused resources of the billion cubic kilometres of the world ocean can lift the world economy to a new paradigm of universal abundance, applying the sustainable principles of recycling.

The wealth produced by that paradigm shift could enable terrestrial mining and agriculture to operate in ways that are environmentally responsible, providing enough money so that local environmental destruction no longer becomes necessary.

The world is at a pioneering threshold, having to cross the frontier to the world ocean economy, to develop new simple large scale industrial technologies that have barely yet been imagined. Failure to see and cross this ocean threshold is the primary risk to the world environment. The Paris Accord has not seen this threshold, and therefore sits within an old failed paradigm that cannot deliver results.

Trump has seen that Paris must fail, but does not understand why.
DWill wrote: calling for a paradigm shift never works and the usage is faddish. Some historians observe changes in psychology taking place over long periods, but these movements can't be commanded into action.
Will, vision, possibility and intent are the only things that construct new worlds. I see the paradigm shift from emission reduction to carbon mining as essential, but am not aware of anyone else who supports it or sees it as plausible, let alone as persuasive or compelling.

I am far from convincing anyone that this specific paradigm shift to a global carbon mining economy is likely or even possible, which in my view illustrates that humanity is on a path to extinction or collapse.

A paradigm shift is a change in philosophy. This industrial paradigm shift to move to the oceans is connected intimately to paradigm shifts in religion, science and economics. The religious paradigm shift is to see that Christianity originated as a Gnostic movement with a coherent cosmology based on precession of the equinoxes, which was completely corrupted by Christendom. The linked scientific shift, which ironically was the main point of Copernicus’ On the Revolution of the Heavenly Sphere five centuries ago, is again that precession provides the structure of cosmology, expanding to see how human biology relates to the astrophysics of the solar system, as a way to see the cosmos as the meaningful context for human flourishing.

Ayn Rand presented a related economic paradigm shift with Atlas Shrugged, in a vision of how American values of liberty and initiative can produce abundant creativity, but require severe limitation of the seductive intrusion of the state. I think that Donald Trump is broadly within that libertarian paradigm shift, even though he is not presenting it coherently. The US spending more on the military than the rest of the world combined does is the opposite of small government. I would like to see a paradigm shift in security thinking, aiming toward a long term de-weaponisation, but only on the basis of strong philosophical values of personal freedom supported by economic abundance.

I see these paradigm shifts as connected, since pursuing them as separate issues fails to generate a recognition of the transformation of thinking involved with a shift of paradigm.
DWill wrote:if the world removes more carbon than we add to the air” That is the big "if" currently, if the world can remove this carbon from the atmosphere, and without waiting decades for results to become evident.
Sure. As my compatriot Tim Flannery argued in his book An Atmosphere of Hope, the work of my colleagues in the Ocean Foresters group has shown that non-industrial algae farms on 9% of the world ocean could remove more carbon from the air than humans add. My argument is that applying capitalist efficiency to ocean forest technology, shifting from seaweed to micro algae grown in plastic bags as promoted by NASA, would reduce the amount of ocean needed to just 1% by my calculations of yield potential.

To illustrate how marginal this thinking is in its efforts to subvert the dominant paradigm, I just again saw a Professor of Physics from Oxford University argue that emissions are permanent, a common but false UN view that to me illustrates a failure of vision, linking to the view that we should not undermine the incentives for emission reduction. Emissions do not permanently increase the amount of carbon in the air, since expanded photosynthesis can remove that extra carbon, especially when applied with industrial efficiency. The widespread belief in permanence of emissions is political, not scientific.
DWill wrote: You believe it is mere blinkeredness that prevents "the world" from seeing that it should drop all of its efforts to prevent carbon from entering the atmosphere, because, of course, we can only go one way, must not use a mixture of approaches (as you say).
Yes there is blinkered thinking, but complaining about that is not a way to change it. An alternative vision to the dominant narrative on emission reduction has not yet been presented in any mainstream context, even from advocates of carbon removal.

The fact that an argument is marginal does not make it false, but means the onus is on the proponents to better convert others to their way of thinking through logical demonstration, not blame others for being blinkered. My statement just now about permanence of emissions points to an example of blinkered thinking, but that is not a matter of blame, rather it is a description of an old paradigm that has not yet been adequately challenged and still seems the best available to the scientific community.
DWill wrote: That is where most people, I think, would say you're mistaken.
The numbers that I have presented in this thread about the non-feasibility of emission reduction as a climate stability strategy are a scientific argument. Opinions are not relevant to what is quantitatively possible, which can only be assessed by measurement and testing. My hypothesis is that climate stability can only be achieved by carbon mining, not by emission reduction, due to the orders of magnitude involved.
DWill wrote: Pursuing emissions reduction does not somehow block minds from realizing that, instead, carbon should be removed from the atmosphere.
The text of the Paris Accord itself provides a mental block against carbon removal. It states "In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.” That principle of emission peaking directly blocks minds from pursuing carbon removal. Climate lobbyists say that carbon removal distracts from the core goal of emission reduction.

This ‘peak emission’ concept in the Paris Accord is different from the objective of the UNFCCC, which is “to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations at a level that would prevent dangerous human induced interference with the climate system.” This crucial shift is political and unscientific. It involves a change of goal from the scientifically valid UNFCCC term “GHG concentrations” – meaning the total amount of carbon in the air – to the scientifically invalid Paris Accord “GHG emissions” – meaning only the carbon people add to the air.

Attacking emissions, as enshrined in the Paris Accord, is a political assault on the American economy, whereas attacking GHG concentrations is the proper scientific path. It is precisely this political shift from concentrations to emissions that blocks minds and polarises debate, seen in examples such as the Convention on Biological Diversity edict against Ocean Iron Fertilization. It appears the main reason for this edict is not any scientific problem, but just that OIF undermines the emission reduction agenda, despite its proven benefits for biological diversity.
DWill wrote: [Carbon Removal] also, is useful, but its day has not arrived and apparently the time will not be forced.
Of course the time cannot be forced, since investors will only support proposals with a sound prospectus, and that remains a way off for large scale carbon removal.

In chatting with my scientist friends, one of the key problems with industrial algae production at sea is that the use of nutrient raised from deep ocean water also brings with it a quantity of dissolved CO2. There are technical challenges in using the phosphorus and nitrogen-enriched deep water in ways that can also use carbon sourced from the air or from point sources such as mines and power stations.

Identifying such key challenges is necessary, but is made difficult by the false politics of Paris. Trump leaving, even for unclear reasons, will open up the politics to enable more constructive analysis.
DWill wrote: Although you've cited specific geoengineering that the signees are told to avoid (with no legal penalties), this is not the same as a directive that countries must not try to include in their goals the removal of carbon. The agreement intends to solicit national ambitions to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, that's all as far as I know.
There is a crucial point of pedantic detail here, that the Paris Accord only deals with how much carbon nations add to the atmosphere, and therefore does not “solicit national ambitions to reduce carbon in the atmosphere”.

The issue here is not directives, but rather the consensus of scientists and policy makers. The consensus that climate policy is all about emission reduction creates a paradigm, a mindset, a philosophy, an attitude, that is sceptical about carbon removal.
DWill wrote:stabilizing the climate …is necessary but not sufficient. Say, as does seem very likely, the temperature by century's end has risen by 4-5 degrees F. Aside from adapting (thank you) to this change, we have enormous work to do to save our planet from non-warming related harm.
My view is that if action started now, it could be possible to have industries in place on sufficient scale in the 2020s to reduce the amount of carbon in the air. That would pull the world back from the brink of rapid warming, providing the broad conditions for environmental sustainability.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Mon Jun 26, 2017 7:14 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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