Welp. Time for a conference we all fly to using private jets to tell the plebs how it's their doing that's destroying the planet. Maybe agree on a tax or something that screws over the little guy while having absolutely no effect on the global climate.
A tax on CO2 producers that is redistributed as basic income, helping the smallest guy the most, would be a gradual force to shift to cleaner energy, since the seismic shift that is required cleary is not favored by anyone.
Since the people who decide this got into their positions with support from the only group who would lose from this in the short term, we can be sure that it'll never happen.
Any tax in America would be completely pointless if there's nothing that limits, China, and India, as the world's largest polluters. Anything the West does is just a drop in the bucket, unless those two countries follow.
33% of global carbon emissions are from the west
18% from the united states
A significant share of chinese emmissions is driven by western consumerism as well and could be reduced.
Even a 10% reduction of the overall share driven purely by the west would amount to a lot more than a drop. Even more if coupled with a proper incentive system for other countries to follow
Exactly. People forget that all the environmental damage coming from China and other sweatshop countries, comes from manufacturing stuff on the cheap to feed western consumerism, and those corners cut to achieve such low prices are not just on labor but also on lack of environmental protection.
There's a reason semiconductors are no longer manufactured in 'Silicon Valley' who's soil is still full of forever chemicals, but mostly all moved to Asia where there's a lot less concern for the local environment as long as billions are flowing in the country.
You missed the part about a tax in America. Just because America does something doesn't mean the rest of the world is going to follow. Introducing a tax on carbon emissions will only harm America, while other parts of the world continue to pollute. It's still results in no benefit. And that's very naïve to think that it's western consumerism, when there's plenty of consumerism in Asia and Europe. This American centric focus is so very naïve.
That "Klimageld" is actually planned in Germany by the current Government. It should already have been implemented but different forms of inability to implement have it delayed by a lot.
Do you have a source to support your claim that a carbon tax, which is generally seen as an efficient way to reduce carbon emissions, would have no effect on the global climate and screw over the little guy?
I ask as a renter who doesn't own a car and would love to stop paying for other people's fancy electric SUV's and house retrofits that costs tens of thousands of Euro.
A flat per gram CO2 tax would be a great idea, but universal international cooperation is required and this would hurt less developed countries a LOT.
At this point lots of warming is inevitable regardless of what (peaceful) things the US and EU do. Africa will get four billion people this century and they want things.
PV is cheap, and for places that don't yet have a reliable grid connection, batteries may be cheaper than building a grid (or stabilising it if they have one that's unstable).
I've only visited one place in Africa (Nairobi) an only once (about a decade ago); the cars I saw were all in poor condition and about 20-30 years old when I saw them.
Also one of the people we visited had an income so low their annual rent was equivalent to about US$1k, so consider how old and decrepit a vehicle has to be on a western market to be in her price range.
There's a huge variation of culture and living standards across the continent, from people much richer than that who buy new cars that are expensive by western standards to people who walk miles to get water from a well because there isn't any plumbing.
PV and storage have the advantage of being scalable down to small cheap things that even the poorest can benefit from. Cars, not so much, so for low priced transportation, think instead about e-bicycles and e-motorbikes, and even manual bicycles. Or public transport (but even then, the crowded matatu I was in for one trip looked old).
At this point, isn’t tax basically for those who can’t afford to "optimize fiscal plans" to zero, only letting a few pennies for PR matters along the "philanthropic non-profit" foundation?
Banning plastic bags at grocery store checkouts. But still allowing the store to sell their plastic kitchen garbage bags, and policy to only pickup recycling if it’s in a clear plastic bag instead of the old reusable blue bins.
> “Banning plastic bags at grocery store checkouts. But still allowing the store to sell their plastic kitchen garbage bags…”
The ban should have economic effects somewhere in the supply chain. One hopes the economic data will help policymakers understand the effects of eliminating those kitchen garbage bags, and then craft the arguments that influence people to change their behavior—-in other words a move was made. Now we need the data.
Plastic is probably the single greatest threat to our environment right now. Solve the plastic problem, and CO2, and other forms of carbon based pollution will come down.
Merely an observation: no tax thus far exacted by any government anywhere has had any measurable effect on the global climate, again, thus far. Taxes relating to emissions and the like relate to emissions etc., not global climate metrics. They have had a beneficial effect on atmospheric pollutants like sulfur dioxide, fluorocarbons and many others.
If the emissions (of CO2, etc) have an impact on global climate doesn't that mean a measurable effect on emissions has an impact on global climate? If you have doubts about emissions impacting climate say that, but that's another discussion.
There are many things not directly measurable which have an impact. Example: when learning a new programming language reading one paragraph of a tutorial does not have a measurable effect on you knowing the language - for most paragraphs. But if you read zero paragraphs you might not know anything.
Most taxes on motorists outside of large towns/cities (where there's no viable alternative to cars).
Of course, climate catastrophists want everyone living in pods in dystopian mega-cities as the solution for this.
Ok, 'get in the pods' may be a silly meme, but living a tiny but ludicrously expensive city centre apartment and working from home on a screen (or in a future metaverse) all day, getting most things delivered and rarely needing to go outside, it's getting pretty close.
The only reason cars are viable "outside large towns/cities" is because the large cities are subsidizing road construction in rural areas.
Those rural area voters, in turn, elect politicians who scream blue bloody murder about how high taxes are, and refuse to vote for funding for public transportation...something that would benefit the cities generating the wealth the rural areas.
Isn't it wild how the "fiscal conservatives" always come from states that consume far more federal spending than they contribute in federal tax revenue?
Further, we over-paved rural areas in the name of "progress" - dirt roads are much, much cheaper but people hate them because they think it's a sign of being poor.
> Except for the elite who of course get to keep their private jets and superyachts...
Judging by your comments, you seem to be of the opinion that environmentalists mostly love rich people and want to exempt them from climate taxes while allowing them to continue enjoying luxuries that produce as much carbon as dozens of middle class lifestyles.
I have to say that in my experience with environmentalists, nothing could be further from the truth. They are, largely, middle class to poor (in U.S. terms) themselves, and overwhelmingly blame consumption by the rich and corporate practices encouraged by externalized costs under our present economic system.
That's not to say that there aren't some activists and scientists who fly to conferences. But they tend to be more aware of this conflict than you might think. Some scientists, for example, refuse to fly. And there is some credibility to the idea that the work they are doing is vital, whereas luxury vacations clearly are not.
I'm simply stating the fact that just because food production happens outside of cities doesn't mean that most people in rural areas live there for that particular reason. It's a very common counter-argument, that cities need the countryside for food production. Which is true. But cities don't need the vast majority of people living in rural areas for food production, because they have nothing to do with food production in the first place. So it's a bad argument.
As to the other strawman arguments, it's besides my original point, but no I don't think we should forcefully move anyone. But it's just a simple fact that rural living and suburbia are heavily subsidized by the economic engines that are cities. And, accounting for economic production, cities have a much smaller environmental impact per capita.
I live in a rural area. Most of what they grow here is soybeans, corn and tobacco. You cant' eat any of it. It's a common misconception that rural areas are food producing. The U.S. imports something like 40% of it's produce.
Haha, Funny, I live in the Falklands and plastic bags along with plastic straws have been banned. But you can walk along the coast line and most of the time, the pollution there is all plastic coming from the fishing industry... Yet, no one is saying nothing about that, since the economy is driven by the fishing industry...
Not long ago I had a few scientist friends working for an "NGO", and it was so crazy to see mugs and other swag from oil companies over at their HQ...
Yeah, I was referring to this past move of EU as being particularly effective one to combat plastic pollution. EDIT: But you are right, banning single-use plastic bags is a first step. Let's keep walking.
It's also time to greenwash some money to warm up our image.... I mean... it's time to invest in some corporations that promise to fix climate through elaborate yet ineffective means.
... or if that not helps maybe it is time to destroy some more Van Gogh paintings or something.
The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has been named to lead the COP28 global climate talks in Dubai, later this year. [0]
Hydrocarbon fuels will continue to lead the agenda and pace, read stiffle action, for climate emergency mitigation through lobbying and media narrative.
The end game is obvious but there is still a long runway of profit that can be extracted until it is no longer palitable for public opinion.
I see three possible tipping points:
- Climate change erodes US hegemony to a point that is no longer palitable to US national interests [1]
- People mass suing companies for climate damage in a magnitude that impacts the bottom line or charges C-levels criminally.
- Environmental groups start taking out Oil & Gas Board members and lobbyists, subsequent 'terror' precipitates an actual sunsetting.
At least the geometric shape building in America seems to be ahead of this in contingency plans for some tipping points.
Farmer here. Planted about 1,000 native trees this year in our home-grown revegetation project, and going to spend the next 2 years making sure as many of them as possible don't die.
No govt subsidies or anything. Our own $ and our own work. Nobody will do it, nobody will pay to do it, so we do.
Peatland takes centuries to develop and store that carbon though.
If we want to achieve this sort of thing, we'd need to manufacture peat and store that underwater. Possible but when we make more, we usually destroy the planet more too. I'm not sure we'd offset it.
"The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best is today."
For the short-term, planting rice differently can reduce methane emissions substantially. In the short-term, methane is much worse. In the long run, methane breaks down to carbon which persists.
If we want to reverse climate change, we need to restore nature's ability to sink that carbon.
No argument that rice can be grown better, but going back to your call for increasing wetland, isn't it the wet that makes soil produce methane? In the same way that the flooding causes rice paddy soil to create methane, and drying it out (per your study) arrests the process.
With 20-30% of atmospheric methane coming from wetlands, while they may ultimately sink more carbon into themselves, the process seems too inefficient, trading CO2 for some CH4.
Forestry produces a much healthier mix of gasses. On its own it's not a quick sink but when you manage it, and extract timber and end up sinking tonnes of carbon into your buildings. The trees consume CO2 to photosynthesis and aerobic bacteria in open forests consume CH4. Seems like a win-win.
Peatlands cover 3 percent of the earth and hold 30 percent of stored carbon. As a quick and dirty guesstimate, if you multiply that by a 6.66 to replace the lost 85 percent, you get 20 percent of the surface and 200 percent of current carbon stores.
It seems likely that a notable percentage of global warming is due to wetlands loss, not just industrialization.
So far, I haven't managed to do a deeper analysis with hard numbers. Feel free to do a write up if you think you know enough about the topic. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be interested.
I'm just trying to point out a couple of issues in your logic.
You cannot multiply wetland. It takes a thousand years to get a 10m deep peat bog and every second of its wet, rotting existence creates CH4. Wetlands offer lots of benefits —nature, water management, etc— but greenhouse gasses really aren't one.
More importantly you're only comparing standing volumes of carbon. We extract billions of m³ of lumber out of forests each year. Even the process of growing it, is far better. Methane is being consumed, not created.
The overall picture is complex but if we're thinking about things in the short term, farming lumber (and using less concrete, brick) would do far more good than creating wetland.
Even worse, not only are you not paid to do it, you are paid NOT to do it. I have a few acres of land in Ireland (not a lot, admittedly!) and rewilding it means it is no longer eligible for agricultural subsidies. The government effectively pays you to destroy biodiversity with beef.
Okay, we have a small farm in the Great Southern Region of Western Australia. A large chunk of it was cleared for cattle and is kikyu/gass pasture, and we still run a small herd of 8 head. But we're very lucky to have about 3/4s of our land well preserved bushland.
The first thing we did when we bought the place was to plant several broad wind-breaks and shelter-belts with native species in the pasture, forming "corridors". Over the years we've added more -- revegetating the road-verge and encouraging the stuff already there to grow back. We've also planted hedgerows of some other trees that aren't native, but are stock fodder, and the birds and insects love them.
We plant a variety of eucalyptus species, acacias, sheoaks, and a number of melaleuca's and various bushes and shrubs.
This year we enlarged two of our large shelter-belts, extended several of our shade-clumps, and did an ambitious amount of planting along the road verge (which hopefully won't be shredded by the council next time they come along).
It's a drop in the ocean, but it's local, it's something concrete that we can do beyond the rather ridiculous appeasement of separating the recyclables.
Some of the trees we plant will outlive us, and I love that.
In some areas the climate change is creating too much “wetland” which poses a different set of issues. We’ve had record amounts of rain here in Denmark, and the local farmers should probably look into farming rice, or maybe seaweed, if it continues. Which it probably will since the records we broke were set in 2019, which in term broke records set one of the years before that and so on.
Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying. That basically put us on a better track than what we need for almost two years.
I’m optimistic though. This year alone has been a massive impact on the global economy in terms of climate costs. Which in term have our local politicians actually talking about solutions. Many of them are focused on being better prepared, but some of them are also waking up to the fact that large parts of our country will be basically inhabitable unless something is done. Not sure why it took them 50 years to get there, but it is what it is.
> Looking at the graphs, however, we should go back to covid society, well, without all the dying.
With the dying you save the environment way faster. "We should go back to covid society" just means let's all be ascetic monks. There's too many people in the world. We don't need more wetlands or this or that, we just need to understand that a population that grows without limits always destroys itself, that's all.
What's the point of a planet with billions of people if their lives suck and they have to stay home using their CO2 quotas? Much better to have less people living normally.
Since I rarely get to talk to Malthusians: Do you have a preferred approach for population reduction?
Tangential point: You severely underestimate the impact of scale and specialization on our standard of living. There is no way we could the same variety of nice things at 500million people
It's happening already, I'd just not create incentive programs to boost birthrates. I don't like to take a very heavy handed way to "control" society, think it's better to just let some things happen the way they happen, because if I'm wrong at least I didn't go full on. But the most developed / educated countries are already going down fast except for immigration. Once the countries immigrants come from rise to the same economic levels, I would predict their birth rates would also go down.
To your tangential point: I think technological development will allow less and less people needed on the supply chain to sustain the same quality of life for society. I think this is clear from history and it only goes in one direction.
I'm aware there's people that defend more extreme views like boosting abortions or other dystopian measures. I don't believe in any of those, I think everyone should have the right to reproduce if they feel like it, I'd just rather it be an informed decision, but I wouldn't add any control measures for fear of abusive mis-use by the government later on.
We'd need a human beings cap in millions to have a lavish lifestyle with managable consequences to environment. And probably in low hundrends. And even then if everybody lived like a king we'd be fucked.
I'd also say that more asceticism would produce a healthier society. Current western consumerist society isn't healthy for anybody. Neither the planet, nor humans.
Been donating to Ducks Unlimited here in the US for years. Their angle is to protect the hunting pastime, but to that end involves getting involved with many states' local issues to keep the wetlands protected.
They can't switch to renewable energy fast enough to keep up with their energy needs. Those coal plants will be shut down as soon as possible. It would help if other countries moved more production out of China.
>Yes, but: Breaching the 2-degree threshold for two days does not mean that the Paris Agreement's target of holding global warming to "well below" such a mark has been exceeded.
If we wait for panic, it's gonna be really, really bad.
We've been "concerned" for a long time. We've done very little about it.
The entire point is that they're trying to get people to take it seriously before it's time to panic. When there's cause to panic, it's much, much too late.
I'd say it's already too late, because we can't even get people to "concerned". There are too many people ideologically or financially insistent that it's all a hoax, and that there's nothing to be concerned about.
I'd say that the fact that so many people aren't even concerned is cause for panic. Panic of the form: "This is all so obvious that one of us must be incredibly stupid, and increasing levels of evidence points to you."
It’s not critical, it’s arbitrary. The earth is warming, it’s going to keep warming. What we should do is focus on practical responses to both limit future warming and handle the consequences of where we’re heading.
The moralizing and doom don’t really help anybody.
Well now we have half of the political spectrum claiming morality with one extreme position and the other half claiming morality with the opposite extreme.
What I mean is the number isn’t critical. 1.9 degrees or 2.1 degrees aren’t substantially different, 2.0 degrees is an arbitrary milestone not a critical threshold. There is nothing particularly special about 2 with regards to outcomes.
There's nothing particularly special about any number, because by each 0.1 increase more species go extinct on average. We have to pick a point where we say "that's enough species gone", and 2 is bad enough. 1.9,1.8 etc is already critical imo
Quite the opposite. The doom attitude demotivates many people who don’t believe it. It’s easy to disprove or disbelieve exaggeration and emotional appeals and as a result the things which do need to be believed are thrown out with the exaggerations.
The primary thing exaggeration does is convince a small number of people that they also need to loudly exaggerate adding more noise drowning out the folks who aren’t exaggerating and need to be heard.
You cannot hold governments accountable with first-past-the-post elections or any type of electoral system that give 100% power to one party. Fix this, and then maybe we have a chance of reining in unchecked power of corporate influence.
If Americans doesn’t act as the biggest consumer per person, there will not be a future for coming generations,regardless of what the Asians do. Europeans has come much further in the transition.
2 degrees is fine I guess, but id prefer if it were at least up in the 60's every day, I wouldnt complain about still being able to feel my hands after taking the dogs for a walk.
