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Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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DWill

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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote: I have been a staunch anti-communist since I visited Seoul and Pyongyang thirty years ago in July 1989, representing the World Student Christian Federation at the North Korean World Festival of Youth and Students, just after the Tian An Men massacre and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. My previous leftist sentiments were destroyed by comparing the free dynamism of South Korea with the stagnant autocracy of North Korea.

So my language about communism may seem excessive, as it is coloured by this ‘end of history’ optimism about neo-liberal economics from 1989. Even so, I have adopted the economic thinking of the Austrian economics of Hayek and von Mises, and even to some extent Ayn Rand, in recognition that free market growth is the only way to create the wealth that can reduce poverty, and that state power can be a pernicious cancer.
I think that, since your context derives from your experience in North Korea, it is excessive to apply 'communist' to people who promote economic conservatism (my own coinage) as necessary to neutralize our impact on the climate. Essentially, this conservatism is a reaction to the free-market liberalism that exalts growth as the highest value. This liberalism has indeed reduced poverty, but if we continue to rely on it to lift all boats (including those of the already-rich), we are working at cross-purposes to the goal of managing climate change, preventing mass extinctions, and avoiding plasticizing the planet.
Communist logic is the view that poverty can be reduced by using the power of the state to redistribute wealth, ignoring the perverse incentives and effects created by that policy. To some extent communist logic may be needed and justified, as in progressive tax systems. But I still think it is important to note the communist origins of progressive thinking, with the dangers of excessive reliance on the state.
But is progressive thinking wrong just because it may have come from communist thinking? It is communist societies that have failed, not necessarily all the idealism that went into them, and the failure seems to have resulted largely from the brutal power used to remake humans in the image of the state and from the emergence of a small ruling elite. Redistributionist societies may have succeeded in using what was good in the communist model. You can make this case for some northern European countries, which are capitalist to the core yet have chosen to fund a generous welfare state. Less abject poverty and wealth inequality apparently combine to create more content societies. That a portion of the population will respond to perverse incentives is an acceptable negative.
With climate change, communist logic is the idea that a political attack on the capitalist system and its representatives is the only way to fix the problem. That seems to me central to decarbonisation arguments, with the UN Secretary General the cheerleader. Communist logic rejects geoengineering precisely because it enables the capitalist system to prosper.
No, I have to think that it's not that environmentalists are conducting a stealth attack on capitalism that accounts for their opposition to geoengineering. I would bet that none of us even think of geoengineering as a big opportunity for the capitalist system. There is fear of hubristic manipulation of the earth, and there is a feeling that geoengineering will be used as a get-out-of-jail-free card, making basic changes in habits and lifestyles unnecessary. We can even tell ourselves that continuing to burn everything in sight will be okay. I think you are pretty convincing that geoengineering is something we need to begin to seriously test. I just don't see the animus against it in the same way you do.
Climate response has a major problem with public trust. There is a widespread suspicion that advocates of emission reduction are socialists masquerading as environmentalists, as former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said. This concern is a severe stumbling block for climate action. It enables a range of conspiratorial memes about the real motives of climate activists, as to whether their main agenda is social justice through big government and high taxes. Are they just using public fears about global warming to achieve these concealed socialist political goals, since they know that arguing their real views will be unelectable?
I can't deny that what you say about motive-suspicion has a lot of truth. However, I think that in the U.S., nationalism as we've come to view it in the Trump era has more to do with denying need to act on climate change than does revulsion of socialists. It's clear as can be that for the U.S. president winning is the only international goal. If we believe we can do relatively better than the rest of the world, we have an advantage through climate change. (After all, the president has said that our climate is the "cleanest it's even been," so why worry?) Pure fantasy, of course, in the longer term, but politically effective.
I have a lot of sympathy for this conservative critique, which is why I pitch climate change as a planetary security problem that can only be fixed in alliance with the fossil fuel industry and other capitalist industries such as insurance and agriculture who will be badly affected by global warming. That makes me unpopular in climate circles that assume a ‘popular front’ leftist political strategy, when I point out their emission reduction strategy cannot work.
Whether leftist or not, a popular front is necessary. The problem is that if it only accepts actions on emissions reduction, its program will fail, as you keep saying. That is the impasse, but popular will is still key. I can't have much faith in "sit back, relax, go about your business while we put our global strategies in place."
Energy companies are mostly adamantly opposed to increasing their prices through carbon taxes, despite their lip service to that model. So I propose geoengineering as a way to address climate change that does not harm their economic interests. That leaves emission reduction as a small factor in climate response, maybe 10% of the required 35 GTC removal needed each year.
The energy companies, that is the fossil fuel companies, harm their own interests if they don't become major players in renewable energy. Oil and gas are not plentiful at world consumption rates, and most coal is best left in the ground anyway. But it's also barely conceivable that we can let the fossil companies continue to burn until supplies run out, and take care of the carbon through geoengineering. It's likely to place an impossible burden on geoengineering. In my view you are too sanguine about what geoengineering can accomplish, and for certain we should use the minimal amount necessary.
I completely get your suspicion about a world government agenda. This fear is widely held and reasonable. To my analysis the fear of world government is something that applies much worse to the non-feasible model of addressing climate change through carbon pricing, whereas geoengineering can be designed to minimise this problem. The need to prevent the upward creep of government size is a major reason that I am opposed to carbon pricing, even though taxing carbon has economic benefits. It is more important to get the political right on board by rejecting the tax and spend logic of the left.
But really, I'm not suspicious of world government. It's something that can't come about in time to help with the climate crisis, anyway, but over the long term to maintain climate stability, maybe it can. What if greater international power is the only way to get around the obstacles of nations fighting over geoengineering measures whose benefits won't be equally shared across countries? It might be that some of our cherished notions will need to be on the table if we are to succeed. On the other hand, maybe giving up what we think of as our freedoms will be too high a price to pay (better dead than red), and instead we will take our chances with the climate. Human societies have made choices like that before.

I am suspicious about solutions that smack of having our cake and eating it: We can continue to place no limits on growth of the economy and population, while halting global warming, while protecting species, while keeping the planet green. That thinking comes from evolution, but we need to resist it. What better mechanism for the spread of a species could there be than this powerful need to rationalize our impact on the planet? This has "worked" splendidly to make us the most dominate megafauna of all time. But we have come to a point of much destructiveness as a result. Can we ever admit that to ourselves?
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Taylor

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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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For the past few days I have been mulling over in my mind RT's commentary toward communism.

I find it somewhat contradictory, There seems to be a tendency to finger point at the "watermelon environmentalist", I'm going to lablel them the "Decarb Commies". (feel free to use my coined expression as there in no trade or copyrights on my part). If we view from the individual perspective I would wager that most if not all Decarb Commies are consumers, They must experience some level of self-loathing for they too are caught up in a material world, A world that is peopled by polluters,(myself included). I pollute along with every other consumer on the planet Earth, There's a lot of us :) . So pollution is a communal enterprise, but lets blame the decarb commies for forcing a wrench in the machinery of pollution mitigation and subsequent climate benefits. Its preposterous to say the least, Its scurrilous up-front. The Decarb Commies are just as wary of oversized gov't as RT's Mont Perlerin Society, I'd even add too that the Federalist Society, Both devoted to limiting the size and scope of gov't. There are likely versions of these two groups operating on a global scale, Is that not a form of communal behavior?.

See...This is the contradiction, private enterprise organizes, while at the same time discouraging the organization of labor, environmentalist, consumers etc. These latter groups are scapegoated as being...commie fronts. Libertarianism and environmentalism are likewise contradictory. There is a further contradiction, Globalization in the era of nationalism. Nationalist, publicly extol as virtuous the notion that it is reasonable to reject public global initiatives like the Paris accords as being unduly costly to the U.S. while at the same time limiting the publics ability to seek restorative actions in international courts. The hidden hand here is Libertarian thinking on a global scale, I would add that libertarian thinking is endemic in consumers around the world, I think that most are not aware of that thinking that is buried in their subconscious. The decarb commies are attempting to bring too the light of day these hidden bias. There is however a thwarting influence, The industries that manufactured this mess of contradiction present themselves as the white knights, They will somehow geoengineer a communal way out of this mess that has been created not by their products but by consumer demand. Contradiction rears its ugly head.

It seems to me to be indeed a high mountain to summit...these contradiction. Combined with an equal attempt at transforming Christian theological thinking from the irrational to rational...good luck on that score, I find it a rather strange contradiction, Christianity without mythology. Parabolic teaching, seems to me to be just a matter of method with its own baggage.

This brings me to another thought: Eschatology, There are literal millenniums of practice in end times thinking, I don't think I am incorrect when I propose that there are millions dedicated to the actual second coming why would these devoted followers hinder their rapture?. This again seems to be a contradiction does it not?. Bridging the gap between liberal and conservative Christianity and bridging the gap between decarb commies and free market fundamentalist are not compatible concepts. The former has to be handled from within, that latter from without. I can not regulate your religion but I can regulate pollution. I am in agreement that the regulation of pollution can be viewed as the Christian thing to do, proverbs can be interpreted too prove as much but I do not see that type of liberal interpretation coming from a libertarian philosophy that is prohibitive of social democracy.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Looking forward to responding to Taylor, but first here are some thoughts on DWill’s comments.
DWill wrote:since your context derives from your experience in North Korea, it is excessive to apply 'communist' to people who promote economic conservatism (my own coinage) as necessary to neutralize our impact on the climate.
My view on communist influence is not just from visiting North Korea, but also from fairly extensive reading about modern history in Russia and China. More pertinently, the problem of communist thinking arises from perception of how since the collapse of the USSR there has been a return of class war ideology, the defining theme of communist politics, especially within the popular climate meme of the war on fossil fuels.

Some might think that if I can redefine communist to include soft left progressive capitalists in the USA, then you are equally entitled to redefine conservative to mean environmental conservation. While superficially reasonable, the comparison does not hold. My point was that there is a simplistic reasoning that sees climate politics in terms of class war, readily apparent in documents like the Green New Deal. It is perfectly reasonable to call this class war ideology “communist logic”, in view of its unrealistic ambition of using political confrontation and mobilization of a mass movement to shut down the entire fossil fuel industry as the top climate priority.

I want to disrupt that class war thinking. My assessment is that it cannot possibly succeed in restoring the climate, a task that requires alliance with capitalist industries, not hostility toward them. This is mainly a pragmatic stance, not an ideological one. In terms of a theory of change, avoiding dangerous climate change has far better chance of success through cooperation with the capitalist system than through opposition to it. Cooperation will enable focus on the main game, namely least cost abatement of radiative forcing, whereas confrontation will divert attention into political conflict with resulting delay and cost that derail climate goals.
DWill wrote:Essentially, this conservatism is a reaction to the free-market liberalism that exalts growth as the highest value.
Perfectly understandable in principle, and I share your rejection of the narrow selfish materialism of dominant American values, in favour of a more engaged existential openness. However, I return to the 'theory of change' problem, that the social engineering involved in shifting cultural values is far harder than the geoengineering problem of removing excess carbon from the air, so we should focus on the simple urgent technological problem rather than holding it hostage to the longer term agenda of cultural transformation.

It is good to have a discussion about the spiritual thirst and machinery for change, but the idea that democracy is coming to the USA any time soon should be a secondary priority to stabilising the planetary climate. Leonard Cohen may be correct in arguing the heart has got to open in a fundamental way, but saving the climate has years, and his conversion agenda will take decades.
DWill wrote:This liberalism has indeed reduced poverty, but if we continue to rely on it to lift all boats (including those of the already-rich), we are working at cross-purposes to the goal of managing climate change, preventing mass extinctions, and avoiding plasticizing the planet.
One of the constant fascinations in economics is the importance of counter-intuitive ideas, notably Adam Smith’s outrageous view that selfishness is central to the generation of universal abundance and opportunity. The counter-intuitive idea for climate change is that finding profitable ways to mine carbon from the air will establish new industries that will rapidly scale up and replicate, incidentally delivering those worthy goals you mention in ways that any other method simply cannot, especially taxing carbon.

My analysis is that this market based philosophy is intuitively rejected by climate activists because it undermines the mass movement strategy of emission reduction, so there is a serious lack of investment, given the lack of ability to pitch a coherent strategy to capitalists. However, friends of mine such as the Ocean Foresters are establishing large scale ocean based algae farms in the Gulf of Mexico with support from ARPA-E as a way to clean up pollution, fix the climate and return fertilizer to the soil, so I think this capitalist model will triumph, even though to date it has gone under the radar due to the perverse virulence of activist opposition.
DWill wrote:is progressive thinking wrong just because it may have come from communist thinking?
That is not at all my view. My issue is solely with the communist class war theme as it has infected progressive thinking. There are numerous valid and essential ethical themes in progressive thought such as human rights and dignity, biodiversity, equality before the law, transparency and accountability that do not derive from communism. I mentioned the Biblical theme of protection of the vulnerable, a key progressive idea.

Progressivism falters in the climate space due to the corrupted communist principle of the unity of the left, which subordinates scientific and pragmatic analysis beneath political ideology. Emission reduction is viewed on this communist logic as a program that can unify progressives, while the fact that emission reduction cannot stabilise the climate is suppressed.
DWill wrote:It is communist societies that have failed, not necessarily all the idealism that went into them, and the failure seems to have resulted largely from the brutal power used to remake humans in the image of the state and from the emergence of a small ruling elite.
These problems of brutality and elitism reflect the memetic degeneration of communist ideology from Hegel to Marx to Lenin to Stalin, with each step in the dialectic driven by practical observation of the centrality of totalitarian politics to the achievement of socialism.

You might call it idealistic and pure to invoke Marx’s slogan 'from each according to ability, to each according to need.' The reality is that this idea conceals a perverse rejection of basic economic and psychological incentives. Implementing it requires the brutal elitism of the dictatorship of the proletariat as the vanguard of the working class, Marx's method that Lenin refined into 'democratic centralism' and Stalin turned into 'the liquidation of the kulaks as a class', murdering millions in the gulag and inflicting mass suffering on the world.
DWill wrote:Redistributionist societies may have succeeded in using what was good in the communist model. You can make this case for some northern European countries, which are capitalist to the core yet have chosen to fund a generous welfare state. Less abject poverty and wealth inequality apparently combine to create more content societies. That a portion of the population will respond to perverse incentives is an acceptable negative.
Sure, and my take on this is that enabling people to achieve their potential through capitalist ingenuity is the only way to fund works of mercy, as the key message of the parables of Christ in Matthew 25 about talent and distribution. But communist logic suppresses talent and creates stagnant conformist societies with no hope of reducing poverty.
DWill wrote: it's not that environmentalists are conducting a stealth attack on capitalism that accounts for their opposition to geoengineering.
Hardly a stealth attack. The broad environmentalist opposition to use of fossil fuels is based on the false argument that stopping emissions could save the climate, and is a frontal assault on the capitalist system. Greenpeace argues that geoengineering constitutes a moral hazard, diverting political and economic focus from emission reduction.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Tue Jul 16, 2019 6:07 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote: My assessment is that it cannot possibly succeed in restoring the climate, a task that requires alliance with capitalist industries, not hostility toward them. This is mainly a pragmatic stance, not an ideological one. In terms of a theory of change, avoiding dangerous climate change has far better chance of success through cooperation with the capitalist system than through opposition to it.
We know from long experience that business is excellent at solving environmental problems, once they have the incentive. If fools keep referring to giving them this incentive as communist plots, etc., then no such "alliance" will happen.

If there was an appropriate incentive to reduce carbon concentrations, either by extraction from the atmosphere, or by reducing emissions, it would happen. Even the fabulous improvements in renewable energy efficiency that have ridden the learning curve to a favorable cost-benefit ratio have been driven by public incentives as much as by the prospect of eventual profits. Without such incentives, we will continue to have pipe dreams and slow suicide as usual.
Robert Tulip wrote:One of the constant fascinations in economics is the importance of counter-intuitive ideas, notably Adam Smith’s outrageous view that selfishness is central to the generation of universal abundance and opportunity.
It would be good to recognize that Smith's view of the role of selfishness was hardly revolutionary or counter-intuitive. The alternative he opposed was mercantilism, as most prominently practiced in France, which held that state direction was needed to develop quality production (e.g. the porcelain factories at Limoges and Dresden). Mercantilism derived economic principles from the priorities of the ruling class, which saw industry as a source of revenue for the wars against rival aristocratic houses.

Today's capitalists have a similarly narrow view of what achieves effectiveness in an economy. Since they make money on the basis of "move fast and break things" they assume that this must be good for the economy. That is actually a highly complex question, but the evidence is running against it at the moment. The externalities are now as nebulous as the CO2 in the atmosphere, and potentially as dangerous. If they cannot take on board the tangible principle of turning the public good into cash by use of government incentives, then more monolithic countries which incorporate the principle naturally will, in fact, leave them in the dust.
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Jumping ahead to respond to Harry, will come back to reply to DWill's remaining comments and to Taylor.
Harry Marks wrote:We know from long experience that business is excellent at solving environmental problems, once they have the incentive. If fools keep referring to giving them this incentive as communist plots, etc., then no such "alliance" will happen.
Many on the left seem to find the equation between “class war” and “communism” objectionable because they want to support ideas that involve class war but find the stigma of communism unacceptable. I am just saying as a matter of definition that anyone who advocates class war on behalf of the poor is a communist.

Now obviously that does not include George Shultz or other conservative advocates of taxing carbon, but Shultz does not support the extreme attacks on fossil fuels that are widely advanced by the Squad and their socialist fellow travellers.

Climate change is very different from previous examples of solving environmental problems, with far worse impact and broader public engagement than pollution issues like sulphur in coal, lead in fuel and CFCs destroying the ozone layer. The role of climate as a polarising political issue means the left wrongly think they can use it to build a coalition against the right, but this subordinates climate to other leftist justice agendas and destroys the potential to cooperate effectively with affected industries. Only by treating climate as a security issue can it be rescued from the left so capitalism can implement geoengineering solutions.

The communist thinking that informs climate debate is seen in the Green New Deal and Extinction Rebellion, popular mass movements that began with calls for zero emissions by 2025 or 2030, but now weirdly talk about “net zero” while not discussing geoengineering except to condemn it as an excuse for business as usual (as far as I can tell), even though "net zero" means "emission reduction plus geoengineering".

The Green New Deal proposes meeting all the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources by 2030, while Extinction Rebellion says “just leave the fossil fuels in the ground and allow nature to rewild.” These proposals are not about using incentives to reform capitalism, but rather look like calls for a revolutionary overthrow of the current economic system. The vacuous dimension here, apart from its communist resonance, is that renewables use large quantities of emissions for their metal and concrete infrastructure.

The problem with reliance on economic incentives is that they are too small and slow and conflictual against the scale and urgency of the climate problem, rather like saying Poland could have stopped Hitler in 1939 by reforming its tax system. I have no problem with calls for incentives, as long as they are based in practical evidence-based analysis rather than extremist ideology, and are not used as stalking horses for opposition to practical geoengineering.
Harry Marks wrote: If there was an appropriate incentive to reduce carbon concentrations, either by extraction from the atmosphere, or by reducing emissions, it would happen. Even the fabulous improvements in renewable energy efficiency that have ridden the learning curve to a favorable cost-benefit ratio have been driven by public incentives as much as by the prospect of eventual profits. Without such incentives, we will continue to have pipe dreams and slow suicide as usual.
Sorry Harry, the climate market has been corrupted by politics, making your simple picture highly unrealistic. The UN climate activists are basically opposed to geoengineering on spurious moral hazard grounds. The thinking is that allowing field trials would be a slippery slope to deployment at scale, so must be resisted. The strength of this ideology led to the backlash from the US and Saudis at the Nairobi UNEP conference this year, allegedly due to their view that reviewing geoengineering would require admission that climate change is real.

Emission reduction alone, the preferred strategy in the UN 1.5° report until 'later this century', can only realistically deliver up to 15% of the required cooling to stabilise the climate. The worst signal of the lack of incentive for a market based approach in my view is the failure of UN Secretary General Gutierrez to call for immediate field tests of carbon removal technologies, despite his dire predictions about having only a decade to act. Companies will only invest when they think there is political permission for the proposed activity.
Harry Marks wrote: Smith's view of the role of selfishness was hardly revolutionary or counter-intuitive. The alternative he opposed was mercantilism, as most prominently practiced in France, which held that state direction was needed to develop quality production (e.g. the porcelain factories at Limoges and Dresden). Mercantilism derived economic principles from the priorities of the ruling class, which saw industry as a source of revenue for the wars against rival aristocratic houses. Today's capitalists have a similarly narrow view of what achieves effectiveness in an economy.
But your examples of the intuitive dominance of mercantilist thinking show how Adam Smith’s capitalist logic in The Wealth of Nations ran directly against dominant intuitions. Modern leftist thinking about poverty reduction adopts an equivalently mercantilist intuitive view by giving priority to state action including in the welfare system, rather than enabling the market to grow and provide jobs. The point of economics as a rigorous discipline is to use evidence and logic to test our intuitions. Unfortunately I don’t think this counter-intuitive method is well used in assessing climate change.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Jul 17, 2019 9:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Second part of response to DWill
DWill wrote:
I can't deny that what you say about motive-suspicion has a lot of truth.
The general public widely suspects that climate activists are deceptive about their motives, and as a result too many people discount both climate science and the claims that emission reduction is essential.
DWill wrote: Whether leftist or not, a popular front is necessary.
Based on Mark Twain’s theory that history does not repeat but it rhymes, it is highly interesting to compare current climate politics with the popular front era before WW2 as explained at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_front

My hypothesis is that the climate movement involves an unconscious repetition of the popular front mentality of the anti-fascist coalitions seen in 1930s Europe. For example, the attitude that anyone on the political right is a ‘troglodyte knuckle dragger’ on climate, as the failed recent leftist aspirant to lead Australia argued. The farcical tragedy of this 18th Brumaire, repeating the failed strategy of the anti-fascist coalitions that resulted in the tragedy of war, is that it refuses to acknowledge any truth in the right wing arguments. While there is not the overt repeat of how 1930s leaders of popular front parties took secret orders from Moscow, there is a repeat of the stupid lowest common denominator approach to politics based on coalitions around popular myths.

In the climate case, the myth is that emission reduction can restore a stable climate. The weird thing, perhaps reflecting a resonance to the mad psychology of fascism, is that the political right today has not cottoned on to this underlying unconscious factor of mythology in politics. The right should expose emission reduction as a myth and instead support geoengineering as a practical climate strategy. Instead Trump clutches at the straw of climate denial, thereby only fuelling the left wing popular front decarbonisation mentality as a reaction to right wing irrationality.
DWill wrote: The problem is that if it only accepts actions on emissions reduction, its program will fail, as you keep saying. That is the impasse, but popular will is still key. I can't have much faith in "sit back, relax, go about your business while we put our global strategies in place."
Democratic legitimacy is essential, but the real key is to develop a coherent theory of change, an explanation of how to shift from the present situation to a desired future. Such a program logic involves strategic analysis of how to gain popular acceptance of necessary measures. My view is that geoengineering programs should be fully transparent and accountable to the public, managed in alliance between science, business and government.
DWill wrote: The energy companies, that is the fossil fuel companies, harm their own interests if they don't become major players in renewable energy. Oil and gas are not plentiful at world consumption rates, and most coal is best left in the ground anyway. But it's also barely conceivable that we can let the fossil companies continue to burn until supplies run out, and take care of the carbon through geoengineering.
The vast planetary transfer of carbon from the crust to the air can only be sustained if the carbon is converted from CO2 and methane into stable commodities, from toxic waste to useful asset. Once we work out how to do that profitably, carbon mining can remove the hard constraint you mention on coal. If we don’t work it out, the prognosis is for collapse and war. So it would be good for governments and businesses to apply resources to invest in geoengineering.
DWill wrote:It's likely to place an impossible burden on geoengineering. In my view you are too sanguine about what geoengineering can accomplish, and for certain we should use the minimal amount necessary.
The really dangerous sanguine insouciance comes from the UN, with the cavalier ignoring by the IPCC of solar radiation management and dismissal of carbon removal as only a Plan B for later in the century.

The Healthy Climate Alliance argues that climate restoration can be achieved through a combination of ocean iron fertilization including iron salt aerosol, conversion of CO2 into concrete aggregate and re-freezing the North Pole. That is a practical research agenda that is now generally ignored by the climate mainstream due to the prevalence of spurious moral hazard popular front thinking.
DWill wrote:I'm not suspicious of world government. It's something that can't come about in time to help with the climate crisis, anyway, but over the long term to maintain climate stability, maybe it can.
I support slow evolutionary integration of global governance systems, for example with cooperation on solar radiation management. But as the EU has shown, its claimed principle of subsidiarity, ensuring power subsides to the lowest possible local level, is widely seen as a failure, producing the Brexit backlash against the sprouting Brussels elite.

The difficulty of central power in fact is a big part of my insistence on the role of Christianity. The core solidarity principle of the Second Coming in Matthew 25:45 - to treat the least of the world as though they were Jesus Christ – serves as a corrective to this creeping elitist tendency of centralised power.
DWill wrote:What if greater international power is the only way to get around the obstacles of nations fighting over geoengineering measures whose benefits won't be equally shared across countries? It might be that some of our cherished notions will need to be on the table if we are to succeed. On the other hand, maybe giving up what we think of as our freedoms will be too high a price to pay (better dead than red), and instead we will take our chances with the climate. Human societies have made choices like that before.
Again, my point in injecting Christianity into this debate is precisely to avoid this ‘better dead than red’ populist emotional critique of climate policy. Pompeo’s glee at the prospect of an ice-free Arctic shows that the autocrats of the world may never be convinced of the need for climate stability, although their supporters may be. I think the answer to that is to show how carbon removal and direct cooling serve the commercial interests of capitalism far more than Pompeo’s idiocy. His gross scientific ignorance about the instability resulting from turning the pole from white to black is highly dangerous, ignoring how amplifying feedbacks are already producing an acceleration of dangerous warming.
DWill wrote:I am suspicious about solutions that smack of having our cake and eating it: We can continue to place no limits on growth of the economy and population, while halting global warming, while protecting species, while keeping the planet green. That thinking comes from evolution, but we need to resist it. What better mechanism for the spread of a species could there be than this powerful need to rationalize our impact on the planet? This has "worked" splendidly to make us the most dominant megafauna of all time. But we have come to a point of much destructiveness as a result. Can we ever admit that to ourselves?
A geoengineering approach to climate should be far from placing “no limits on growth”, since the objective should be minimising the impact of the current sixth extinction and therefore focusing on protecting biodiversity and biomass.

However, as we have discussed before, my view is that the world ocean, with its vast natural scale, energy and resources, is the real next frontier for human pioneers, offering immense potential for our species to move to the sea, rather like whales did 50 million years ago but much faster and more deliberately. We simply don’t know what the real limits to growth might be if we move into a high carbon ocean economy based on converting fossil fuels into useful products.

As I noted in my first comment here on Christianity and climate change last week, the underlying thinking I suggest is to revise the apocalyptic mythology of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ against a modern scientific analysis, to discuss what it would mean for Christ to rule the world. The key theme of such a revision should be that “the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth”, the little known line from Revelation 11:18 that completely rejects the alienated rapture thinking of fundamentalist faith. Instead, the Biblical vision of a new heaven and new earth (Rev 21:1) requires a scientific approach to ecological management of the planet. The climate emergency therefore presents the opportunity for a natural ecological reformation of Christian theology, compatible with the terrestrial cosmology emerging from study of long term climate.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote: However, friends of mine such as the Ocean Foresters are establishing large scale ocean based algae farms in the Gulf of Mexico with support from ARPA-E as a way to clean up pollution, fix the climate and return fertilizer to the soil, so I think this capitalist model will triumph, even though to date it has gone under the radar due to the perverse virulence of activist opposition.
ARPA-E is an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, according to the linked site their total funding is from U.S. tax payers.
Robert Tulip wrote: My point was that there is a simplistic reasoning that sees climate politics in terms of class war, readily apparent in documents like the Green New Deal. It is perfectly reasonable to call this class war ideology “communist logic”, in view of its unrealistic ambition of using political confrontation and mobilization of a mass movement to shut down the entire fossil fuel industry as the top climate priority.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal I encourage people to go to the wiki site and read about the Green New Deal for themselves. Like me you wont read anything about "class war" or "communist logic" or a" ambition of using political confrontation and mobilization of a mass movement to shut down the entire fossil fuel industry as the top priority".

Really Robert, Don't you think you've exaggerated just a bit.
Robert Tulip wrote:Fixing the climate requires removal of about 20 gigatonnes of carbon every year, together with direct cooling measures, to head away from the precipice of a phase shift into a hothouse earth.
Phase shifting is a form of distortion, so yes Robert, humans are distorting the climate through our pervasive polluting of the planet.

Roberts attempting to phase shift logic.

One of the most important lessons I've taken from my years on Booktalk.org was learning to follow the logic of my own thoughts. If I come to a dead end, then logic requires that I change my thinking or I will not progress. It is a lesson all people need to learn.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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I do apologise to readers who find my comments too long. I find the conversation here an excellent way to order my own thinking, noting where my comments are misunderstood, and expanding on the whole vexed problem of how we can develop thinking capable of getting our society to take climate change seriously. As promised, here are my responses to Taylor's initial comments.
Taylor wrote:For the past few days I have been mulling over in my mind RT's commentary toward communism.
Hi Taylor, although we see things quite differently I welcome your thoughts here. We can only learn through dialogue.
Taylor wrote:I find it somewhat contradictory, There seems to be a tendency to finger point at the "watermelon environmentalist", I'm going to label them the "Decarb Commies". (feel free to use my coined expression as there in no trade or copyrights on my part).
Since marijuana is illegal in Australia, I was not familiar with this “decarb” term until I looked it up and went to various websites that insisted I certify I am of legal age. Now I wait for the spam ads from Johnny in the basement. I am not quite sure how 'decarb' fits so I prefer to use the watermelon environmentalist label, or just socialist environmentalist, meaning people whose primary commitment is to social change, and who see climate activism as a way to achieve this goal.
Taylor wrote:If we view from the individual perspective I would wager that most if not all Decarb Commies are consumers, They must experience some level of self-loathing for they too are caught up in a material world, A world that is peopled by polluters,(myself included). I pollute along with every other consumer on the planet Earth, There's a lot of us :) .
Anyone who eats is a consumer. It is entirely wrong to view climate change from the individual impact level, in terms of the alleged morality of our personal footprint, except where our consumption is egregiously beyond our needs. The only climate solution is through collective action, which can only be done effectively through industrial capitalist investment in cooperation with governments and scientists. Individuals can do far more by investing in climate solutions than by minimizing their consumption.
Taylor wrote:pollution is a communal enterprise, but lets blame the decarb commies for forcing a wrench in the machinery of pollution mitigation and subsequent climate benefits. Its preposterous to say the least, Its scurrilous up-front.
You have misunderstood. The problem with socialist environmentalism is that it proposes a solution that will not work. Trying to shut down the fossil fuel industry as fast as possible inevitably produces a strong right wing reaction that results in failure.

While emission reduction is a good thing, any specific measure should be assessed on the same scale of least cost abatement. I believe many geoengineering interventions to manage the climate offer far better value for money than many emission reduction measures. But such economic analysis is unacceptable to those driven by socialist ideological fervour.
Taylor wrote:The Decarb Commies are just as wary of oversized gov't as RT's Mont Pelerin Society, I'd even add to that the Federalist Society, Both devoted to limiting the size and scope of gov't.
No, in general the socialist environmentalists are in favour of increasing the size of government through tax and spend policies to redistribute wealth. Only libertarians want smaller government.
Taylor wrote:
See...This is the contradiction, private enterprise organizes, while at the same time discouraging the organization of labor, environmentalist, consumers etc. These latter groups are scapegoated as being...commie fronts.
There is nothing wrong in principle with social organisation. Everyone should have a human right to freedom of association. You are missing my point here. The issue is whether this method of popular mass social organisation offers good prospect of stopping dangerous global warming. I simply contend that it does not, because it generates a lowest common denominator mythology whereby decarbonisation of the economy is shifted from its proper place as one means among several to instead become an end in itself. The mass movement agenda shunts aside analysis of other better methods to cool the planet. I think that elite cooperation between businesses, scientists and governments offers far better strategic hope than popular mobilisation of a mass movement.

So my discussion of communist logic is more intended as disruptive satirical mockery of the climate movement, while also having a hard edge in political analysis of the memetic resonance from the old 1930s popular anti fascist movements.
Taylor wrote:Libertarianism and environmentalism are likewise contradictory.
While the prevailing opinions of these ideologies are certainly at odds with each other, it is entirely possible to reconcile environmentalism and libertarianism in intellectual terms, recognising protection of biodiversity as compatible with protection of personal freedom.

I found Ayn Rand’s example of John Galt inspiring as a model of the libertarian inventor, applying his individualist creative attitudes to new methods to fix the climate using geoengineering.
Taylor wrote:There is a further contradiction, Globalization in the era of nationalism. Nationalist, publicly extol as virtuous the notion that it is reasonable to reject public global initiatives like the Paris accords as being unduly costly to the U.S. while at the same time limiting the publics ability to seek restorative actions in international courts.
Trump’s basic problem with the Paris Accord, as he correctly explained in his speech announcing the decision to leave, was that this “unduly costly” measure offered no hope of achieving its goals. Trump said “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount.”

That speech is actually well worth reading in full, while trying to avoid the prism of anti-Trump bias, although of course his do-nothing option is the height of stupidity. The main point is that Nationally Determined Commitments under the Paris Accord would if continued through to 2100 lead to temperature rise of 3.8°C, at very high economic cost, whereas Business As Usual would lead to temperature rise of 4°C, at much lower cost. Considering the immense costs to the world of achieving that insignificant 0.2° result, the two options should be doing nothing or examining if there are other methods that could achieve the desired goals at lower cost. I personally think there are far far better climate investments than the shift to renewables.
Taylor wrote:The hidden hand here is Libertarian thinking on a global scale, I would add that libertarian thinking is endemic in consumers around the world, I think that most are not aware of that thinking that is buried in their subconscious.
Yes, true. People are in favour of climate action until they realize it will cost them money. The hip pocket nerve is not buried too deep in the subconscious. The Yellow Vests in France demonstrated against high energy prices because climate goals would increase diesel prices, illustrating that any effort to raise energy prices as a key climate instrument will face strong political backlash.
Taylor wrote:The decarb commies are attempting to bring to the light of day these hidden bias.
Do you think so? My impression is that socialists have very strong hidden biases themselves, so are hardly the ones to explain any objective facts. Climate activists want to "re-educate" the public to support frugality instead of prosperity and redistribution instead of initiative. Not as bad as Mr Xie "re-educating" the Uighers but comparable.
Taylor wrote:There is however a thwarting influence, The industries that manufactured this mess of contradiction present themselves as the white knights, They will somehow geoengineer a communal way out of this mess that has been created not by their products but by consumer demand. Contradiction rears its ugly head.
I don’t think anyone can deny that global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels. In Aristotle's terms, burning fossil fuels are the material cause of warming, economic activity is the efficient cause, and human desire is the final cause.

The problem of finding a pragmatic way to minimise warming is to recognise that established energy industries have the money, skill, contacts and resources to solve the problem. It is therefore far better to cooperate with these firms than to apply the Green New Deal method of confrontation, which can only produce conflict, cost and delay while the world burns.
Taylor wrote:It seems to me to be indeed a high mountain to summit...these contradiction. Combined with an equal attempt at transforming Christian theological thinking from the irrational to rational...good luck on that score, I find it a rather strange contradiction, Christianity without mythology. Parabolic teaching, seems to me to be just a matter of method with its own baggage.
Yes, all fair comment, and good description of what I am trying to do. In his famous poem The Second Coming WB Yeats described the spirit of the world as having had twenty centuries of stony sleep. I find that an apt metaphor for the problem of Christian theology, that it started with secret Gnostic Mystery Societies who constructed their mythology with deliberate parables, but then we had twenty centuries of Rip Van Winkle, while these myths were misread as literal claims. Wrenching Christianity away from the mass delusion of literal supernatural faith is in my view an essential part of seeing the real apocalyptic threat of climate change. You may like to watch my speech about Christianity and Climate Change last weekend.
Taylor wrote:
This brings me to another thought: Eschatology, There are literal millenniums of practice in end times thinking, I don't think I am incorrect when I propose that there are millions dedicated to the actual second coming why would these devoted followers hinder their rapture?
Thanks for again drawing attention to this important topic which is a main theme in my talk on Christianity and Climate Change. My argument is that a paradigm shift is required to reconcile eschatology with science, interpreting the mythology of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ against the astronomy of the dawn of the Age of Aquarius.

Rapture thinking is evil, seeking escape from matter, in heretical conflict with the Biblical teachings that Jesus came to save the world and that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth.
Taylor wrote: This again seems to be a contradiction does it not?. Bridging the gap between liberal and conservative Christianity and bridging the gap between decarb commies and free market fundamentalist are not compatible concepts.
“Bridging the gap” in both these cases needs completely new ways of thinking that draw from the good elements on both sides of these intractable debates, keeping the wheat and tossing out the weeds, as it were.
Taylor wrote: regulation of pollution can be viewed as the Christian thing to do. I do not see that type of liberal interpretation coming from a libertarian philosophy that is prohibitive of social democracy.
You are inferring far too much from my comments. I am not suggesting prohibition of social democracy. All I am saying is that social democracy as a political movement does not offer the tools needed to stop dangerous climate change.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Robert Tulip wrote: here are my responses to Taylor's initial comments.
No, no, I want to read your response to
Taylor wrote: ARPA-E is an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, according to the linked site their total funding is from U.S. tax payers.
Robert Tulip wrote:Now I wait for the spam ads from Johnny in the basement.
I am so going to steal this.
Robert Tulip wrote: The only climate solution is through collective action,
:welcome: At last you have acknowledged the key point. Public goods have a free rider problem. No more needs to be said.
Robert Tulip wrote:his do-nothing option is the height of stupidity.
But you can add that anyway.
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Re: Dispatches from the Front Line of the Apocalypse

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Up Front:

Thank you RT for your response's to my questions.

Quick note:

RT's
Robert Tulip wrote:You may like to watch my speech about Christianity and Climate Change last weekend.
It was a very good speech, I personally have been in agreement with your views on ancient astrology in relation to modern Christianity.
Robert Tulip wrote:Hi Taylor, although we see things quite differently I welcome your thoughts here. We can only learn through dialogue.
I think that we are quite in agreement with the over arching theme, my disagreement is mainly with some of the political language.
Robert Tulip wrote:Since marijuana is illegal in Australia, I was not familiar with this “decarb” term until I looked it up and went to various websites that insisted I certify I am of legal age. Now I wait for the spam ads from Johnny in the basement. I am not quite sure how 'decarb' fits


This is particularly interesting. Throughout the nine pages of this thread there has been repeated use's of the word "decarbonization", Note the highlighted portion :wink: , thought it is similar in spelling to 'decarboxylation' the two are not interchangeable and one was as I've wrote never even used in this thread. Sorry if you're spammed Robert, but really I thought my abbreviation was rather obvious :) . I don't think he did, but I momentarily considered that RT was taking a jab at me :) . For the record, I do not use marijuana, have not for several decades, My preference is single malt Scotch. :wink: .
Robert Tulip wrote:I prefer to use the watermelon environmentalist label, or just socialist environmentalist, meaning people whose primary commitment is to social change, and who see climate activism as a way to achieve this goal.
I don't have objections to the use of climate activism as a tool for social change, the two seem to be necessarily associated.
Robert Tulip wrote:Anyone who eats is a consumer. It is entirely wrong to view climate change from the individual impact level, in terms of the alleged morality of our personal footprint, except where our consumption is egregiously beyond our needs. The only climate solution is through collective action, which can only be done effectively through industrial capitalist investment in cooperation with governments and scientists. Individuals can do far more by investing in climate solutions than by minimizing their consumption.
Here we are in total agreement with the exception of the highlighted portion. Climate mitigation starts at the individual recognizing their personal footprint, if they don't imagine their place in the causal chain then we are not linked together and isn't what a portion of your work is? showing how we humans are all linked together?.
Robert Tulip wrote:You have misunderstood. The problem with socialist environmentalism is that it proposes a solution that will not work. Trying to shut down the fossil fuel industry as fast as possible inevitably produces a strong right wing reaction that results in failure.
I'm not misunderstanding a thing, I'm following the logical course. I do not agree that there is strong public support to shut down the fossil fuel industry, I do however think that there is strong public support for regulating the industrialist, I also think that in the U.S. especially there has been public pushback towards the industrialist since the American civil war.
Robert Tulip wrote:While emission reduction is a good thing, any specific measure should be assessed on the same scale of least cost abatement. I believe many geoengineering interventions to manage the climate offer far better value for money than many emission reduction measures.
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060075503 An excellent article on geoengineering and the struggles for economic support. The linked site is well worth exploring as there are many informative articles throughout.
Robert Tulip wrote:No, in general the socialist environmentalists are in favour of increasing the size of government through tax and spend policies to redistribute wealth. Only libertarians want smaller government.
Interesting dilemma here: One part fear mongering, one part virtue coating. The real question is not answered by libertarians, and that is what should be the exact size and scope of gov't? . truth be told, if they answered that question they would be run out of town on a rail because they are well outside the American tradition of pushback on uninhibited laissez faire. On the other hand you have those political philosophies that are honest in their assessment that gov't should be of a size that is necessary to govern, in other words not to big not to small, but large enough to protect all people from abuse from private Individuals and organized groups of individuals who will take advantage if not held in check by a more powerful centralized authority not controlled by unrighteous opportunists such as industrialist.
Robert Tulip wrote:I found Ayn Rand’s example of John Galt
John Galt is a fiction and Ayn Rand was over the top a materialist.
Robert Tulip wrote:That speech is actually well worth reading in full, while trying to avoid the prism of anti-Trump bias, although of course his do-nothing option is the height of stupidity.
Thing is and I'm swallowing a bit of vomit writing this but PSfB (trump) was actually being consistent with the libertarian ideology he and his ilk so adore.
Robert Tulip wrote:Do you think so? My impression is that socialists have very strong hidden biases themselves, so are hardly the ones to explain any objective facts. Climate activists want to "re-educate" the public to support frugality instead of prosperity and redistribution instead of initiative.
Bringing to the light of day hidden bias is precisely what this conversation is about, it is also about depolitisizing restoritive climate actions. It begins with honesty about not just individual motivation but the motivations behind groups as well. In recent weeks the U.S. markets attaind all time highs in accumulated wealth, it is time for them to step-up and generously fund geoengineering projects.
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