DAVOS: ‘It is profitable to let the world go to hell’

[kpete]

‘It is profitable to let the world go to hell’
As politicians and business leaders gather in Davos, climate expert Jørgen Randers argues that democracy will continue to hamper climate action

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In a newly published paper in the Swedish magazine Extrakt he writes:

It is cost-effective to postpone global climate action. It is profitable to let the world go to hell.

I believe that the tyranny of the short term will prevail over the decades to come. As a result, a number of long-term problems will not be solved, even if they could have been, and even as they cause gradually increasing difficulties for all voters.

Randers says the reason for inaction is that there will be little observable benefit during the first 20 years of any fiscal sacrifice, even though tougher regulations and taxes will guarantee a better climate for our children and grandchildren.

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MORE:
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/jan/19/davos-climate-action-democracy-failure-jorgen-randers

[Octafish]

1. Tax the rich and use the money to fix the planet.

Problem solved.

Plus, it would employ a lot of people. And, one day, the rich can get back to getting richer because there will be another day. Otherwise, it's goodnight, Irene and Planet Earth as a biosphere for hoomanetee.

[enough]

3. And especially, tax the profits on current extractive carbon-spewing industries. (nt)

[Scuba]

4. Since 1% of the world's population now has half the world's money, saving the planet ...

... should be rather straightforward.

[The2ndWheel]

2. No matter how much we try to fight it, short term will always win out

It's not because we're dumb either. Nobody says, well, we have 7+ billion people on the planet already, I'll just let this person die of whatever, because the world won't miss them. It's keep this person alive, right now, that's what matters most.

What is the easiest thing to do right now. That's what life does. Things change, because the variables always change, and then you adapt, right now. Not 20 or 50 years from now. We don't care. We can't care. We're not really built to care that far into the future. The universe doesn't care about our plans. You can die tomorrow from, basically anything.

Even if we did care about 50 years from now, there's no way to take every variable into account. We can't even do that for the next year, let alone the next month.

Then you throw in this, I guess, collective evolution idea we seem to have. That everyone has to move in the same direction at the same time. That's not going to happen. Everyone has to do what they think they should do, and that's all anyone can do.

[Fred Sanders]

5. Fox News disagrees...but only after lying about the facts, of course.

Fox Turns Tax Cut Into Tax Hike For Middle Class......by lying.

http://crooksandliars.com/2015/01/fox-turns-tax-cut-tax-hike

[Fearless]

7. Fox news disagrees should be a litmus test

To determine if we're right.

[tclambert]

6. Our system, economic and political, isn't good at dealing with problems that mature over decades.

Business people care about this quarter's bottom line. Politicians care about this election cycle. "Action required now" to avert "disaster a few decades from now" just does not compute for them. It's like they don't recognize that "a few decades from now" will ever really exist. They take an attitude kind of like Jon Stewart once joked, "The killer robots will take over by then." So why worry about any hypothetical future? They seem to count on something saving us just in the nick of time, one second before the climate disaster becomes real.

Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for about a thousand years. The warming effects of increased carbon dioxide take decades to fully develop. That means, if we stopped burning fossil fuels this afternoon, we'd still see the temperatures rise for another few decades, and those higher temperatures would stay here for centuries.

Oh, but it's worse than that. We have crossed numerous "tipping points" that activate positive feedback loops beyond our control. Those feedback loops will amplify the warming even more without further input from us. For instance: Melting permafrost in the Canadian and Siberian tundra releases methane from frozen peat bogs and swamps. Warmer waters along the continental shelves causes release of methane trapped in undersea frozen methane hydrates. Fewer days of snow cover in the far north allows darker ground to absorb more sunlight. Shrinking ice cover of the Arctic Ocean allows exposed seawater to absorb more sunlight. Bushes and trees growing farther north, where lichens and moss used to be the only plant life, means the taller plant material will stick up out of the snow and absorb more sunlight.

Many climate scientists say we will hit the magic 2 ̊C rise that puts us into the red zone without us adding any more carbon to the system at all. The ice sheets will melt. Sea level will rise. But not this quarter, and not before the next election. Most CEOs are in their 60's. Some, like the Koch brothers, are older. They don't expect to live to see the disaster. So it's somebody else's problem.

[colsohlibgal]

8. Trashing The Earth For Riches

Unless something changes drastically where are we headed - a real life "Elysium" situation, the 1% up in an orbiting wonderland while the rest of us live a hard scrabble life on the scorched earth?