Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumClimate change: some reasons for our failures
A comprehensive and sobering read from the Guardian.
Virtually no one any longer believes that temperature will be able to be contained to the internationally recognised tipping point of two degrees Celsius above temperature levels at the time of the industrial revolution. Many climate scientists fear a temperature rise of four or five degrees Celsius by century’s end.
In the way it has evolved, the post-war international “system” of nations is entirely unfitted to the kind of broad-ranging international cooperation now required. Nations participate in the international system predominantly to safeguard and advance their self-interest – the so-called "national interest". Only when they think the national interest is served will they form alliances or involve themselves in broader schemes of international cooperation.
International action against global warming needs to be different. The action required involves a series of domestic economic revolutions—transferring the source of energy from fossil fuels to clean alternatives in a relatively short time. This necessarily involves some sacrifice of national self-interest in the short and the medium term. Immediate, radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are expressions not of national interest as commonly understood but rather of national altruism.
The failure of the climate change catastrophe to ignite widescale or radical Left-wing political resistance, even on the scale of global Occupy Wall Street movement, is genuinely surprising. In part this reflects the contemporary weakness of the revolutionary anti-capitalist Left, which has been greatly wounded by the mistake it made in associating the Soviet Union and the Communist movement, during the course of “the short twentieth century”, with human liberation. In part it reflects the long-term nature of the global warming crisis where the danger is looming but never quite pressing or imminent. In part too the challenge of the global warming crisis represents something the Left has never before faced—an injustice perpetrated not by one class or race or gender or majority on another but of one generation—ours—on all the generations of both humans and other species yet unborn.
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CRH
(1,553 posts)The problem with the Left, of which I once considered a hope of our salvation, is the Left never could grasp their own over consumption and lifestyle was a part of the problem, their green solutions an attempt to continue status quo, their high tech visions of the future another effort preserve their comfort.
Synergy and sustainability require sacrifice and a fundamental realignment of manifest human illusions of superiority and grandeur.
hunter
(38,313 posts)... and their eco-vacations to Costa Rica.
But nobody wants to sit next to the guy who rides his old bicycle to the meeting, buys his clothes at the thrift store, and doesn't dress up in freshly washed outerwear every day. My most infamous conflict was with my wife... she took my old winter jacket to get cleaned. It's not like it smelled like rotten fish or feces -- it simply smelled like a winter jacket that had never been washed. The benign bacteria living in it were doing a good job eating hostile invaders. It's my opinion they should have been left alone.
I don't wash my cars either, except for the windows. My cars have lichen growing on them. Sorry kids, drive mine or buy your own. I hate my cars and they hate me. That's why they last so long. They've got mileage to the moon and now they are coming back. It's a balance of nature thing.
Yes, I am a dirty hippie.
I was a member of the Sierra Club for a long time, since I was fourteen years old, but it got to be ridiculous. I couldn't relate to the people at the meetings, and they couldn't relate to me. My idea of conservation was riding my bike to a "wilderness adventure" in the local mountains, eating rice and beans, living in a shack, hanging out in the computer lab all night.
Meanwhile they were talking about the MacIntosh computer they just bought, or the expensive cameras and backpacking equipment they were testing out in the Yosemite back country. One of the greater consumerist splurges of my life was an Olympus XA-2. I still have it. Cost me a day and a half moving furniture. I haven't bought a fancy camera since, except in thrift stores. My 35mm SLR with the very nice lenses cost $16. My digital cameras are crap but I'm quite fond of them. Pictures for free!
I was as guilty as anyone burning gasoline whenever my clunker small Toyota worked. After all, I could fill the gas tank for less than an hour's work and drive to Yosemite or Baja California for the weekend. But mostly I was happy to be where I was, wearing the same blue jeans and flannel shirt for five days in a row (changing only socks and underwear), mostly walking where I wanted to go, and feeling happy whenever I scored a few hot sauce packets abandoned at Taco Bell, or whenever I traded something for government surplus powdered milk which I'd turn into rich delicious buttermilk.
Personally, I don't think sustainability requires great "sacrifice." Most of the things modern society sees as "necessities" are actually great burdens. Private automobiles are one of those burdens. Airlines are another.
Adequate food, shelter, universal literacy, birth control, and medical care are not unobtainable goals -- the current world economy is much, much larger than that.
But the more powerful among us piss it all away and that unwitting elite group of feudal lords includes many Sierra Club liberals.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)If you do that, there isn't any real thermodynamic difference between a multinational CEO and a western environmentalist.
Step back two more paces, and the same can be said for a resident of a Brazilian favela or a Bangladeshi ship-breaker.
We are all "system insiders", people for whom existence is scarcely possible outside the cybernetic, technological exoskeleton of modern civilization that cocoons us. We are all direct and indirect beneficiaries of the entropification of the planet that makes "life" possible for 7 billion of us.
Without that civilization, there would be sustenance for maybe 50 million people on the planet. With civilization, we got 7 billion humans living on what is rapidly becoming a dehumanized, denatured slag tip.
I don't blame anyone any more for this, though. Blame and shame drain too much emotional currency that is better used on other things. Besides, I suspect there have been much deeper forces than simple immorality at work over the last five thousand, five million and five billion years - from thermodynamic principles to genetic imperatives, from evolutionary influences to the sunk costs of historical accident. The road to this particular hell has been paved with the noblest of intentions and an utter paucity of insight into what was actually happening, every step of the way from prokaryotes to the Exxon boardroom.
hunter
(38,313 posts)Look below the surface, it's a strange world we were born into.
I'm formally educated as an evolutionary biologist.
What's happing now is as it's always been. An innovative species changes the world.
Our self-proclaimed "intelligence" is the same sort of innovation as a chloroplast.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)My short recent article on humans as mitochondria:
I've recently begun to suspect that humanity is at a point of endosymbiosis with our electronic communications and control technology, especially through the Internet. In a sense, we humans have incorporated ourselves as essential control elements of a planet-wide cybernetic super-organism. The precedent for something like this is the way that mitochondria migrated as bacteria into ancient prokaryotic cells to become essential components of the new eukaryotic cells that make up all modern organisms, including us.
hunter
(38,313 posts)
joshcryer
(62,271 posts)Kurzweillian IP/patent/corporation cybernetics or Ferhout's open source/free/decentralized/autonomous/anonymous cybernetics.
I am unconvinced Kurzweil is correct and I think, in fact, the backlash against the corporate security culture is evidence that it is simply unsustainable. More so even than current fossil fuel civilization.
CRH
(1,553 posts)well worn jeans, flannel shirts, dirty cars is a way of life in northern CA. where I used to live.
Living with less is liberating, my sacrifice is minimized by reducing emotional desires. For me, life is much simpler that way.
joshcryer
(62,271 posts)No.
The article misses one very very important point. The global profiteers, the global managers, the global elites have already decided what they're going to do about climate change. The CIA recently gave us a hint, and you can be very well assured that every top level intelligence report on climate change in every major country in the world and even in smaller developing countries is getting the same message.
"We can avert climate change through geoengineering. It is not a big deal."
The question then becomes, what happens when China or India are facing shortages and other countries like the US or the EU decides that their genetically modified crops can withstand climate change? Do China and India get to put sulphates into the atmosphere after all that R&D or are they forced to buy the GMO crops to persist?
I think there will be an impasse and that ultimately geoengineering will take a back seat as famine scorches the world. After which, of course, it will be implemented, because the weather conditions will simply be too great to deal with and we'll be back to square one.
What is certain though is that no significant quantities of fossil fuels will remain in the ground. Perhaps 5% of all that was ever technologically recoverable.
hatrack
(59,587 posts)Consider a major power (China, America, the EU) unilaterally setting up a system for sulphate dispersal. Let's assume that it works, and that it reduces insolation to a level that allows BAU to continue.
But if BAU is indeed BAU, consider the possibilities of blackmail inherent in such scheme. Let's say it involved getting another nation or bloc of nations to buy certain brands of transgenic crops or animals, or to yield water rights, give up seed banks or genetic information specific to a nation or region, or signing onto yet another free trade treaty.
"Nice capacity to feed yourself you've got there. Sure would hate to see anything happen to it if the sulphates stopped flowing." Rich nations, with the money to reinforce key infrastructure and investments, could probably take a (relatively short-term) hit. Pakistan, Chad, Mexico, Egypt - probably not.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)Consider how generally basically immoral we (collectively) are with regards to
the crimes currently justified for profit.
Now add to this heap of greed-driven crime an even larger one of fear-driven crime
and consider the future in such a foul place.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)We get the energetic ability to maintain and grow our civilization's physical infrastructure from the exploitation of new (hopefully larger and larger) energy sources and constant improvements in energy efficiency across as many sectors of the global economy as possible.
If Tim Garrett's insight is correct, over 90% of our energy use goes to supporting civilization's "operations and maintenance" (O&M) activities. If GWP grows by 3% in a given year, then the world's energy budget must grow by about the same amount to support it, less the amount recouped by efficiency improvements.
The amount of energy we use each year becomes a new baseline that must be repeated every following year (less some decrement for efficiency improvements, plus an increment for yearly growth)). This is why, even during an economic crash, energy use doesn't decline much. Growth takes a hit and O&M activity goes down, but we still need to maintain the infrastructure, so energy use can't go down too far, or for too long.
This is one of the reasons I think most renewable energy build-out is going to remain additive to the FF consumption base. Civilization needs every last joule we can get our hands on if we don't want our existing stuff to fall apart, and then a bit more to underwrite the growth everyone is so keen on. But even if growth were to cease altogether, it wouldn't reduce the amount of energy we need, beyond the efficiency improvement rate. The growth in global energy efficiency (as measured by the change in the energy intensity of constant dollar GWP) is dropping right now, and is under 2% per year.
CRH
(1,553 posts)I always stumble on the same flaws with the theory.
If we could sufficiently alter the atmosphere it still doesn't change the carbon problem. The oceans die from acidity, less sunlight provides less food, the melting frozen carbon sinks do not refreeze and continue to ooze. Then there is the problem of controlling the currents in a constantly changing atmosphere as well as oceans. How would scientists tinker with aerosol distribution guaranteeing the proper concentrations in the desired places, how do we predict where the next ocean current will carry warmth and form weather.
For me thoughts of geo engineering a solution vastly over estimates our understanding of science, cause and effect relationships between interactive species, ecosystem functions, and everything that allows the planet to exist and evolve as it does. As a specie humans can't even social engineer a sustainable population, how will they ever find a balance tinkering with the atmosphere.
I remain a skeptic, those who believe a geo engineering solution is plausible, suffer from delusions of grandeur.
joshcryer
(62,271 posts)Volcano eruptions have proven that sulphates in the high atmosphere will cause a significant enough albedo change that's measurable and quantifiable. They also are very short lasting, so you don't have to worry about a runaway process because as soon as you stop injecting them, everything goes back to the way it was before, albeit with a reduction in thermal absorption.
This is the go-to "solution."
As far as oceanic acidity, hey, I didn't say it'd be all dandy, the oceans will be in big trouble, too. Countries that rely on oceanic resources are going to be in trouble. No doubt about it.
hatrack
(59,587 posts)Again, let's posit that somebody pulls off sulphate injection and it works, "works" defined as holding down global surface temperatures. Woo-hoo - Fossil Party Time!
Except that it wouldn't be. Under Extended BAU, the same ratio of atmospheric vs. marine carbon continues apace, further speeding acidification, ending fisheries and reefs and (eventually) eliminating the single biggest source of planetary oxygen.
What then for the Last Best Hope Of Earth?
joshcryer
(62,271 posts)Which would reduce acidification and reduce the carbon in the atmosphere.
My thought is that atmospheric albedo changing injections will come first, because we're going to have to deal with massive temperature extremes once the arctic goes, and it won't be a long term thing, it'll be a quick dust bowl type scenario where we are like "damn we need to get shit done, now!"
And note: I don't say necessarily sulphates, though they are proven to work (volcanoes) they will hurt the ozone layer so it'd probably be something else. I'd suggest other possibilities but they tend to come with woo in a cursory google search. I just figure it won't be sulphates except for maybe the first proof of concepts.
After that I think that the PTB will actually use the oceans as sinks for the carbon (since the oceans already are massive sinks for carbon) and will pollute the fuck out of them.
Albedo changing geoengineering will turn the skies white.
Oceanic acidification geoengineering will turn the seas brown (OK, probably not, but it's a nice metaphor).
Iterate
(3,020 posts)I'd rather eat. I guess that means I still see a path out of this, but it's not bloody likely anyone will follow. On foot, or by rail, if you please. Without fighting.
The author looks at nations and ideologues, wondering why there is no adequate solution on the table, but it's hard to imagine groups less likely to generate a challenge to the status quo. They'll tweak around the edges a bit, and that's about it. You're not going to see Ghandi the Climate Change Visionary come from that lot.
Some time back I was looking at online postings of lectures for economics students and the insurance industry and their take on climate change. I didn't post it here because I'd never be forgiven for repeating anything so astonishingly boring, but there were some nuggets imbedded.
First of all, there was no industry boosterism, as there was no need for it. I learned that the insurance industry has much more power than I had imagined. There also was no climate change denial. There was no conspiracy, and no challenge to their assumptions about how economies must work. It was simply banal, mundane, and horrifying calculations of the cost of mitigation and how not to spend a nickel more. If any of them imagined a world with a failed insurance industry and system-wide collapse, they didn't mention it. If they had, why would they be there?
And so the economies march on, until the day in 2113 when we get the headline "Golden Gate Seawall Fails (GG was right it should have been three meters)". For the WSJ, it reads "Fresno Reinvents Itself as a Seaport: Real Estate Market Booms".
