DWill wrote:Mann's brief discussion of discount theory explains that unfortunate disconnect. As urgent as the need to act is, the threat of climate change still does not penetrate into psyches the way that an epidemic does.
Disclaimer: still not reading the book. I enjoy commenting more than I enjoy reading, evidently.
There are two kinds of discounts that are relevant. (I don't know which Mann discusses). One is financial, the other is psychological. Clearly the second one is at work - people have little bandwidth to spare for warnings from scientists, in the same way teenagers ignore medical advice about smoking because they are too consumed by the pressures of their own social anxieties.
Financial discounting is supposed to reflect the capacity of an economy to grow in overall capacity at a pace which allows superior response in the future. In theory we will have the economic capacity to move all of New York City (and the other coastal cities) inland in response to the rising waters. Or perhaps we will be able to conduct large scale geoengineering because we put our resources into growth now, rather than into fighting GHG accumulation. You may think I am making this up, but it was at the heart of the debate over the Stern report, the most comprehensive effort to date to take stock of costs and benefits of fighting climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review
Geoffrey Heal and other leading economists took issue with Stern's use of a zero discount rate, which Stern justified on the basis of intergenerational equity, the precautionary principle and the possibility that there will be no response available when the crunch comes. Ironically, within two years of the release of the Review, actual (risk-free) interest rates dropped to zero and have not recovered since. This means that the world is not increasing its capacity at all, but simply piling up cash, and Stern's choice could be justified on the basis of pure market logic.
DWill wrote:The projections of flattened population growth probably depend on large reductions in poverty. That makes sense, though it's hard to understand the relationship between having fewer kids when you have more money to support them. It happens that way.
Around here there is a tendency to think human life is determined by biological, evolutionary imperatives. And yet we know there is a fairly constant (actually, currently increasing) rate of suicides flying directly in the face of such logic. The cross-currents of psychological, social and spiritual forces are far too complex to be susceptible to easy analysis. Opportunity cost of women's time is a critical variable, (as has been demonstrated in numerous studies) but so is understanding and agency that come with education.
My current perspective comes from having had Boko Haram explained to me. In Northern Nigeria there is a social system in which older men who have been successful accumulate land and wives (as labor and a source of offspring) to become still richer. They have paid the young men to kidnap women and to terrorize schools in order to maintain the system and their status. From the time that Indo-Europeans began to feed cereal to their babies so that mothers would wean the children, lose the natural child-spacing that comes from breast-feeding, and have bigger broods, there has been a dynamic at work of men's urge to dominate overpowering natural checks on population growth, and women being the unfortunate victims of the process.
Suddenly education ("Boko") has intruded in this dynamic and put the brakes on so that women could participate in the flowering of cultural opportunities which is the wonderful side of modernity. Economists talk about quality of life taking precedence over quantity of children, but that does not nearly do justice to the way the choices feel.
DWill wrote: And that is what makes our situation more frightening (although not for you). We need economic growth to further reduce poverty. That puts more carbon in the atmosphere. It would be less bad if the growth went to raising the poor, but a lot of it will go toward making the affluent more so.
My goodness. So many false dichotomies, so little time.
First, economic growth does not necessarily mean burning more carbon. With a little nudging from appropriate prices, which was agreed on way back at Kyoto, there could have been almost as much growth with far less carbon in the atmosphere. But in practice, one might object, it will mean more carbon burned. Pouring concrete, for example, is a source of huge carbon emissions (to cook the lime, basically) and India, to choose an example, has a long way to go to get urban infrastructure (including housing) in place. True, but carbon capture can mitigate a lot of that, and it would pay the rich countries to provide the carbon capture. The list is almost literally endless, of all the many ways that incentives can motivate the modern economy to trim GHG's. If the list wasn't so long we could just order up a few key changes. But we need the decentralized incentives of price modification.
Second, the economy is moving on-line. As Amazon has demonstrated, the efficiencies of replacing a bricks-and-mortar system of distribution with an on-line system are too big to ignore. And the pricier heating and cooling get, the more obvious this will be. When all those delivery trucks are moving around on the power of renewable energy, people will get by with a lot less shopping in person and a lot more delivery to the door. But it isn't just retail space and labor that are phasing down. Headquarters jobs, the excuse for much of the commute into the city, are moving on line (with encouragement now from COVID-19). Recreation is moving to virtual reality, including, one supposes, virtual tourism. I could go on, but my point is simply that growth can actually mean less carbon, not more, and that the rich countries are the early adopters for methods showing how to organize modernity more efficiently.
Third, you worry that there is not enough growth to lift the truly poor (such as Northern Nigeria) out of poverty. But the real opportunities for financial returns are in the poor countries. The countries with abundant financial capital have not yet figured out how to move it there in large enough quantities to get the full benefits, but the urgency of accelerating economic growth in the developing countries (to defuse the ticking time bomb of population growth) means we need to give it serious attention. You note that a lot of the growth will go to rich countries. But that can, at least potentially, be an accelerant to the process of de-carbonization. And economic advancement is not zero-sum. More growth in the rich countries is likely to mean more growth in the poor countries, leading them to transition to a modern, education-based economy.
Robert Tulip wrote: Without such a ride the tiger attitude, refusing to cross the frontier, we face the peril of the Margulis prophecy.
Riding the tiger is a good metaphor for relying on technological advance alone. The disrespect for nature is endemic, and such an approach at the level of society's grand strategy encourages people to neglect the spiritual aspect of engagement with wildness, in some kind of frantic effort to use off-roading and zip-lining as a substitute for coming to grips with life. Life has limits. As anyone who works with teenagers can tell you, limits are a blessing. They feel frustrating at the time, and an adolescent attitude responds with "Challenge accepted!" But there is too much ultimacy at stake to stay in that fevered state.
Margulis may not have spelled out the nature of the future with any accuracy. But, as with most prophecy, the imagery speaks to us. It invites us back into the proper relationship with the wildness that gives life richness, and pulls us aside from the scramble for status and "achievement" into a quest for harmony with others, with nature and ultimately with the limits we inevitably face.
DWill wrote:That is another of the many examples of the Wizard/Prophet divide, which on certain points does appear to be unbridgeable. Another BT book, The Righteous Mind analyzes moral foundations and can be applied to Wizards and Prophets especially on the Sanctity foundation. When you talk about re-engineering the planet or reinventing nature, I feel a strong aversion, as from a threat of degradation (the other pole of the Sanctity/Degradation foundation). This is not a rational reaction, but neither, I would contend, is the faith that Wizards have in technology. As Mann says, it is a difference of the heart.
I'm not sure the "evolutionary roots" of Sanctity have anything to say about this difference of the heart, but I do think the heart difference is a deep truth about these choices. Those of us who think technocratic solutions still offer hope need to think deeply about how the emotional flavors of motivation lead people to think about, or deny, the fateful choices that humanity faces. Proposals for a Carbon Tax now automatically come with a Carbon Dividend. If we had thought that deeply in 1990, the resistance organized by the evil Gingrich (whose heart is three sizes too small) might never have ambushed our progress.
Robert Tulip wrote: The problem is not to have multiple Manhattan Projects, but rather to develop an ecological vision so that strategies to address all the problems can be integrated. I see finding ways to transform CO2 into useful products at scale as the key critical factor, alongside an urgent need to send heat to space, as we are very close to some dangerous tipping points that will be far worse than the corona virus, sending planetary weather haywire.
An ecological vision suggests decentralized implementation, rather than handing the responsibility to a few engineers and scientists to somehow solve the problems everyone else goes on creating. If we can't integrate the two approaches, one might even say the two cultures, then we are putting all our eggs in too few baskets.
DWill wrote:I'm looking forward to population growth subsiding, because that will take pressure off the resources of food and water and will less directly help in fighting temperature rise. Multiple plans are going to be implemented simultaneously. It wouldn't make sense, certainly, to wait until temperature is stabilized before acting on food and water. The fact is, we can and we must cope with these problems as it gets hotter.
I fully agree about the priority on food and water. And once again, pricing plays a role. The most acute water deficit in the world is in Pakistan and Western India, where the water table is dropping by half a meter per year. As The Economist magazine has repeatedly observed, this is made worse by the unwillingness to apply pricing for a scarce resource, (mainly because the relative harm to small farmers would be worst) and many, many helpful steps would be taken if the pricing was in place. They are so far from the management approaches taken by places like Windhoek, Namibia that one imagines it might even be easy to fix the deficit, but it is unlikely to happen without incentives.