I was curious - land use stats in the US show agricultural use has dropped from 49% to 45% in the last 60 years, with the majority of the loss in the 90s and early 60s. Basically zero change in the last 20 years. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS?location...
It looks like there's about 20x more ag land, by sq km, than urban land in the US (4M to about 200k). So even if urban areas doubled in size, purely at the expense of ag (and not forests), it would be about 5% loss overall.
I have a feeling these numbers don't account for suburban land use, and that's actually an issue... Not urban use.
> We never hear of encroachment of precious farmlands by sprawling urban areas either.
I hear this a lot and trust it is a widespread occurrence. Here (gulf-coast FL), farms are commonly non-viable when sold to developers. Our tree-based crops seem especially prone to farm-busting economics, diseases and weather.
It's a "big" topic here in France, a law recently passed that prohibits mayors from increasing the total artificial surface in their municipalities. I have seen many right-wing politicians wanting to get rid of it.
Whats interesting to me is climate change has been shown to actually increase total annual rainfall on land[1], but I guess this means that its those areas where farming was once feasible and where people now live are becoming more arid?
> but I guess this means that its those areas where farming was once feasible and where people now live are becoming more arid?
Yep, it's an agricultural catch 22. Arid regions where people live are generally formed by mountains absorbing rainfall. When that water washes down, it carries nutrients and forms very agriculturally productive alluvial plains like in the Nile delta (although the reason for that desertification is Hadley cell circulation, not mountains, iirc). It's both why Egyptian civilization was so successful and why so many artifacts survived as long as they were stored away from the delta. The longer the region has been arid, the thicker the layer of usable nutrients and some areas like California are also on top of ancient oceans with thick layers of fossilized organisms providing calcium carbonate and phosphorus. These regions also tend to have favorable temperatures that support multiple growing seasons per year and without plentiful water, there are far fewer other plant species to compete with.
In wetter regions, that water instead washes most of the nutrients into the ocean to the point where areas like the Amazon are so nutrient poor that organisms evolve unique adaptation like pitcher plants and the whole ecosystem depends on intercontinental dust that's carried all the way from the Sahara (the Bodélé Depression especially) [1]. Farming is still plenty feasible in wetter areas (Brazil and the PNW have plenty of agriculture for example and it's the whole basis for rice farming) but it's nowhere near as productive
The issue is that the increased temperatures increase evaporation at the same time that they increase precipitation, and in many places, the net effect on water availability is expected to be negative.
People don't understand the full impact and consequences of drought.
When you draw down the water table, the ground compacts. You never get that water storage capacity back. There's no way to uncompact hundreds of feet worth of ground across thousands of square miles of earth. There are places in California where the ground has compacted several dozen feet.
When you put poison onto the ground, it usually goes into the ground, and sure, the ground may act like a kind of HPLC column and some of that poison might take years to decades to reach the water table...but then what?
When you melt chunks of the arctic and antarctic, you don't just cause sea water levels to rise. You also reduce salinity, and affect global-scale air and water currents like the jetstream - causing dramatic shifts in temperatures and water content of air.
Indigenous peoples have been warning us for ~10 generations that selfishness will/is destroying the planet. Nobody in power has cared, instead mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress" and so on. All to make more money.
This was possibly an option 30+ years ago, but I think we may have sailed past that point of no return. We will need to double down on human industriousness in order to accomplish massive necessary geoengineering and/or bioengineering feats within the next couple hundred years.
I assume by "powerdown", the OP means reducing energy usage, especially of polluting energy sources, mainly fossil fuels.
This doesn't really require a lower population, it just means people need to stop expecting to live in huge McMansions with A/C blasting all the time and driving around in 3-ton SUVs. Living in dense, walkable/bikable city environments in energy-efficient dwellings, people could live quite well with a tiny fraction of the polluting energy usage.
Education, birth control and abortion access, and increased income levels. Each of these is associated with a lower fertility rate.
There is little pushback against the increase of these measures. It would be very interesting though if a fertility rate increase was warranted and folks were arguing against them in order to raise it.
Actually, in many (most?) countries this is already happening, for better or for worse. It's just a limited subset of areas/countries that have quick population growth. This has different causes and the possible solutions are politically, socially, religiously and economically complex. Or rather, getting to a situation where a solution is applied is complex more than the actual solution.
All true but most people in the world are worried about putting food on the table and taking care of their kids. Fix social justice and you get on the road to fixing the costs of unfettered capitalism.
> but most people in the world are worried about putting food on the table and taking care of their kids
People love to repeat this myth, as if most human beings won't care about others or about their own future, as if they can't understand enlightened self-interest, or can't understand climate change. Mostly, it's yet another argument for powerlessness and inaction.
The public has gotten behind so many things now and historically. Right now they are the power behind movements that have nothing to offer but brazen falsehoods, corruption, and hate. And yet all the good people say, mass movements are impossible, there's nothing we can do but suffer.
For me personally it has been very disheartening to see how many people simply don't care about what goes on slightly outside of their immediate vicinity.
The one simple easiest thing you can do to fight environmental disasters is to stop eating meats. Or at least reduce the consumption of the most harmful ones. Try taking up that conversation with people whose opinion on the matter you don't know. Most of the time it's not going to be pleasant, satisfying or leading to much progress.
People like to think about big picture decisions with their taste buds and emotions.
It’s more that change won’t happen until it has serious impact to majority of population.
It sounds cold but food/water/housing shortage will be solved once it starts affecting > 51% of the population. (or at least resources will start flowing towards real solutions).
The sad part is by then there will most likely be irreparable damage (as well as enormous amount of human suffering). That’s at least how the western part of the world sees things
For the record, I care, but there’s only so many people I can convince to stop eating meat
If we've seen nothing else in history, it's how effectively a tiny crust of the population can keep the Orphan Crushing Machine running as long as it doesn't affect them directly.
You are not an observer watching from the Moon, you are an agent, a full participant right here on Earth. Your 'perspective' is the problem, not a third-party observation.
In wars, enemy propaganda says the kinds of things you are saying, to create despair and powerlessness. Look up operations like Tokyo Rose, for example. It's more powerful than any other weapon - it causes the foe to unilaterally disarm. And, as propagandists intend, here you are repeating it, spreading the disease.
Imagine you are working on a team, and someone keeps saying 'nobody cares', it's probably hopeless, etc. That person is the problem, spreading a communicable disease within the team.
The good people outnumber the bad, by a lot. Goodness is not a new or alien concept, but fundamental to humanity and to every culture. Human rights has been overwhelmingly successful and popular across people and cultures. History shows it overwhelmingly. All that is missing is belief in themselves and a way forward.
Instead of this disease, you could spread what people actually need. Hope, courage, belief in what is right.
You can push for change while also recognizing that others don't respond well to it. Why? Because you need to adjust tactics to get the outcome you want.
Blindly "spreading hope" is just as lazy imo as saying everything is futile.
You have to live in the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be.
And let me be very direct: I'm close to positive the approach you've shared will not work. Sorry. It will be too late by the time people get onboard (when it's clear that the medium-term negatives will outweigh shorter term costs).
You don't provide any evidence; you just seem to think your despair is objective reality, not merely your subjective perception, and insist on it. You are following the rhetoric of propaganda.
As I said, there is a long, long history of people doing far more against much greater odds. What many people are doing now is just propaganda and cowardice; nothing is stopping them.
Make the future a bright one, don't drag everyone down and make those bad things happen.
A Pollyanna approach is not the answer (and rarely is.) I believe you've missed my point.
I'll state it again although I don't have good faith in this conversation: because the majority of people don't prioritize (or even believe in climate change), the tactics are going to be different than other social issues.
Literally look up any polling on the matter for "proof."
With what happened to the CEO of UHC, I think we are starting to see society hit a breaking point. Where simply "acting through the process" is no longer acceptable to an increasing minority of people who are getting ready to... well. Best not type it, lest I end up on more watch lists.
I don't endorse that kind of action, FWIW, I've lived through enough historically significant events already and I'm not even forty. But the powers that be seem unwilling to simply make less money, so something's going to give eventually.
IMHO that is the same weird narrative of powerlessness. It talks about events like they are on an empty ship adrift at sea.
You are on that ship. What are you doing? It's not adrift; others are steering it. If you don't also guide it, then the results are your fault just as much as those steering it.
Of course, the environment matters enormously and money is not everything, but to dismiss money like this is an oversimplification of the situation. It's characterizing money in a way that really misleads people. When people talk about, let's say, income or economic opportunity or something like that, they're not just talking about dollar bills in people's hands, they're talking about real economic resources that reduces poverty and empowers people to contend with a wide range of challenges, not just environmental degradation, but the plethora of life-threatening dangers that people are exposed to every single day.
Right now we are experiencing the lowest number of deaths from extreme weather in a century, and that's because despite all of the global climate change and other environmental challenges humanity faces, the rise in productivity, which you're dismissing here as merely dollar bills in people's hands, is making people more adaptable and resilient.
Not only does this ignore what he wrote, it is exactly the cliché he describes.
Parent:
> mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress"
You:
> the rise in productivity, which you're dismissing
What makes people adaptable and resilient is creativity and hard work. Today you can buy that with money but the money itself isn’t doing anything. If all farmers stop farming tomorrow, you die no matter how much money you have.
How money is linked to increase of productivity is still to prove, as well as parent dismissal of the rise of productivity.
> Nobody in power has cared, instead mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress" and so on. All to make more money.
I'm the type of person the Trumpers call a "Soy Boy", and I'm so sick of this hyperbole.
The main solution, if we listened 20 years ago, was that we should all stop using non-renewable energy (basically all energy at the time) and eat bugs.
We are at a point now where if we don't do anything, there's a decent chance current trends take us to a nearly ~100% renewable future in 40 years (if you count nuclear and hydro).
>90% of people on the planet will take the climate change that is most likely to come from our 20-years prior fossil fuel use and the coming 40 years, than to have gone back to living like indigenous people 20 years ago and remained there forever.
There isn't really a world in which we all stopped using fossil fuels and industrial farming and arrived at all the renewable tech we have today, and the ability to produce it at the scale we do now.
Climate change is real, so is progress. Most people are willing to make the trade.
We are so inferior to be able to turn this planet into Venus, like most of the climate Doomers say we're going to.
We likely won't even bring the Earth back to it's typical temperature range - which is MUCH hotter over the last ~450M years than it is now.
If you're telling me we're going to cataclysmically destroy the planet because we might bring temperatures close to their average over the last ~450M, I'm going to be skeptical.
> We are so inferior to be able to turn this planet into Venus, like most of the climate Doomers say we're going to.
This is absolutely beside the point. We don't remotely need to turn the planet into Venus for our civilization to collapse.
The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because that's what seems to be the most likely if we don't magically start giving a shit.
> The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because that's what seems to be the most likely if we don't magically start giving a shit.
That's pretty typical for the global civilization. We have a recency bias to the post-ww2 is the norm. That was a highly atypical peaceful time.
It would be surprising that trend continued - even in a climate vacuum.
How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway just given how many people have been born? How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?
> We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
You vastly under-estimate the problem. We are talking about crop yields going down dramatically. The way we are heading right now, it's completely worthless to talk about livestock: the question is really how many billions will die because we can't grow enough food anymore.
You seem to approach this with extremely binary thinking. Either we all starve or we’re all fine. The Earth is destroyed, or climate change isn’t a problem.
No, we’re not all going to starve to death. But it doesn’t take that much change in agricultural output for some people to starve to death. And it doesn’t take that many starving people to severely disrupt a society.
You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem.
My point is that we have caused a lot of "problems" through burning fossil fuels, and at least up until now, the "solutions" that we've gotten from all the progress we've been able to make has outweighed that cost - massively.
Given that the rate of increase in emissions has slowed drastically and total emissions will likely peak this decade, and then fall pretty rapidly, I don't see any reason to believe that we're digging ourselves into a hole rather than building a better society for everyone.
> You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem.
I haven’t said anything even remotely like that.
Of course the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. The whole thing is just getting started. The costs are nearly zero so far. Total warming was under 1C until a few years ago. We’re looking at something like 4C of warming with current trends. Projected warming with current emissions reduction pledges is 2.8C and it’s very unlikely that those pledges will be met. The harms are almost entirely in the future. Things will get much worse before they get better.
Or as the kids like to say, we were born at the end of the Fuck Around century and now we’re in the Find Out century.
I really hope the choice isn’t between one bleak future and another. I’m losing track of what point you’re making here, but “at least it’ll be better than medieval times” doesn’t seem like much of one.
Hell, people all over the world are already and have been starving for decades, because we don't feed people because people need to eat; we feed them because it makes money. And in the areas of the globe where it doesn't, people starve, while elsewhere people throw away shit tons of food.
We don't know what would happen if we didn't screw ourselves, but we have some idea what will happen from what we are doing.
> How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?
2C? You're being optimistic. We've past 1.5 this year. The consequences of climate change have just started: right now it's minimal (people die from natural disasters, but globally that's minimal). What we see, though, is that "bad things" (e.g. natural disasters, extreme events) are happening faster and worse than what our models predicted.
In other words, every day we observe that the consequences of us screwing the climate is worse than what we thought. Let's now think a bit about that part: the "optimistic" scenario:
* We are now heading towards 4C unless we dramatically change the way we live. 2C is already out of reach, 1.5C is already here.
* At 4C, you have a whole strip of countries around the equator that becomes unlivable for humans: it's too hot and humid, meaning that we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, meaning that we die. We are not talking a few millions refugees, we are talking billions.
* Imagine billions of people, from entire countries, deciding to move to livable territories. We're talking billions of people, with their military, moving into the lands of other billions people with their military. We have never seen that in human history, but it doesn't seem good.
* Apart from that strip of land and the 4C, in a much shorter term we are talking droughts. Imagine first world countries not having enough food for everybody.
* And last point: all of this (and more) happens in a world were the amount of oil is dangerously reaching a peak (in some places it already has: the European economy feels it since 2007 because access to oil has become harder since then). Not only it means more wars for oil, but also it means that globally we will have less oil to tackle those challenges. There is no real alternative to oil, that's just a fact: we will have less energy, whatever it is.
* Of course, in order to tackle all those challenges, we will need energy. So we will be more likely to keep using oil as much as we can, which makes it even more likely that we are going towards a world with 4C.
Last fact: the climate changes that made the dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappear happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are measuring (I'm not talking predictions, but actual measurements). So it's not completely stupid to wonder if our species (on top of the countless others that have already and will disappear in the next few decades) will disappear entirely.
And again: all that I wrote above is the optimistic prediction from our current models. And from what we measure, it's actually coming faster, harder and stronger.
You can rationalise as much as you want: if you are not alarmed, you are either uninformed or irrational.
Anybody saying “destroy the planet” is being silly, but the average temperature over the last half a billion years is entirely irrelevant to the survival of modern civilization, or even modern biodiversity.
How do you know most people are willing to make the trade? People don’t have a choice. This stuff is driven by systems vastly larger than the individual. Nobody can decide to opt out of progress so they can also opt out of climate change. Even if I could opt for a zero-emissions lifestyle, climate change would continue with no detectable difference.
You eat bugs. Be they flour mites, dust mites, eyelash mites, fruit fly eggs, parasitic wasps... your home, body, and food all have a nonzero chance of hosting bugs small enough to escape your attention. They inevitably end up going down the hatch from time to time.
only if "with money" means "with immunity from cost-effectiveness considerations," which is to say: no you can't. Not until we have way, way more abundant energy.
Meanwhile the EROI of petrochemicals continues to fall.
Environmental damage is real sure, but conservation and deprivation inspire nobody and aren't politically practical. The obvious conclusion is that the solution lies in some form of geoengineering, with $trillion budget to modify the Earth to suit billions of humans enjoying comfortable lifestyles.
Until we demonstrate the ability to actually perform meaningful feats of geoengineering and the sustained willingness to commit trillions of dollars to it, this proposal is basically science fiction
No disagreement, but we don't have a choice. Even if every westerner agrees to deprive ourselves of modernity, the rest of the world will not oblige, and they have >5x the population, all demanding smartphones, TVs, meat, AI, fast fashion, imported goods and much more.
Deprivation is guaranteed to fail, so I'm betting on innovation.
Our current way of living is a deprivation. The popularity of homesteading fantasies bespeaks the desire for a very different and less self-destructive way of life.
This doesn't address the ecosystem problems and costs imposed by climate change - but for crops and drinking water, it looks like fresh water created by solar powered desalinization is going to be very inexpensive in the future. [1][2] This is mainly due to the fact that solar power will be almost free in the near future.[3]
As a close follower of Casey, I have become disillusioned with the lack of progress in this space. Certainly solar is cheaper but his own company is very slow to scale up and ignores the logistical challenges of these huge endeavors. The salton sea lithium project should be a slam dunk but is very slow because building big things takes time.
Projects at that scale will never get built - it doesn't matter if it is solar desalination. High speed rail in CA is a perfect analog - way too many ways (regulatory + environmental) to kill projects of this size. The only way something happens at the salton sea is with state mandate to implement it.
Too cheap to meter, as long as you have no SLA. Much like solar-generated heat is "too cheap to meter" in traditional greenhouses.
Desalination is not sensitive to input power fluctuations, as long as you have a large enough reservoir to even out the spikes. The natural desalination cycle, with evaporation of ocean water, clouds, mountains, and rivers, already worrks like that, but probably a more localized setup with electric pumps and reverse-osmosis membranes could bring freshwater more directly where humans need it.
Labor of installation is anywhere from 5 to 25% of the cost, depending on location. Add in any missing parts (wiring, inverters) and permitting costs, and you may find yourself just as well off buying new panels for the added efficiency.
You'll either need less labor and materials, or get more output from the same land space, depending on your needs.
Reusing old cells makes sense in some applications, but for almost anything commercial or not a handyman special, I don't know that the numbers work out very well in their favor.
the article doesn't exactly present data, if someone is talking about the global climate i expect to see sharp quantification and low errors along time series data
> Humanitarian aid should be tied to contraceptive use, World Bank loans as well.
That sounds an awful lot like eugenics, were poor people were paid money to have themselves sterilized. It's also backwards; the best way to get people to stop having kids is by raising their quality of life, at which point they will want to use contraception.
We never hear of encroachment of precious farmlands by sprawling urban areas either.
I was curious - land use stats in the US show agricultural use has dropped from 49% to 45% in the last 60 years, with the majority of the loss in the 90s and early 60s. Basically zero change in the last 20 years. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS?location...
It looks like there's about 20x more ag land, by sq km, than urban land in the US (4M to about 200k). So even if urban areas doubled in size, purely at the expense of ag (and not forests), it would be about 5% loss overall.
I have a feeling these numbers don't account for suburban land use, and that's actually an issue... Not urban use.
> We never hear of encroachment of precious farmlands by sprawling urban areas either.
I hear this a lot and trust it is a widespread occurrence. Here (gulf-coast FL), farms are commonly non-viable when sold to developers. Our tree-based crops seem especially prone to farm-busting economics, diseases and weather.
This is a negligible effect in comparison to those described in the article.
It's a "big" topic here in France, a law recently passed that prohibits mayors from increasing the total artificial surface in their municipalities. I have seen many right-wing politicians wanting to get rid of it.
Whats interesting to me is climate change has been shown to actually increase total annual rainfall on land[1], but I guess this means that its those areas where farming was once feasible and where people now live are becoming more arid?
[1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
> but I guess this means that its those areas where farming was once feasible and where people now live are becoming more arid?
Yep, it's an agricultural catch 22. Arid regions where people live are generally formed by mountains absorbing rainfall. When that water washes down, it carries nutrients and forms very agriculturally productive alluvial plains like in the Nile delta (although the reason for that desertification is Hadley cell circulation, not mountains, iirc). It's both why Egyptian civilization was so successful and why so many artifacts survived as long as they were stored away from the delta. The longer the region has been arid, the thicker the layer of usable nutrients and some areas like California are also on top of ancient oceans with thick layers of fossilized organisms providing calcium carbonate and phosphorus. These regions also tend to have favorable temperatures that support multiple growing seasons per year and without plentiful water, there are far fewer other plant species to compete with.
In wetter regions, that water instead washes most of the nutrients into the ocean to the point where areas like the Amazon are so nutrient poor that organisms evolve unique adaptation like pitcher plants and the whole ecosystem depends on intercontinental dust that's carried all the way from the Sahara (the Bodélé Depression especially) [1]. Farming is still plenty feasible in wetter areas (Brazil and the PNW have plenty of agriculture for example and it's the whole basis for rice farming) but it's nowhere near as productive
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-sat...
Just wanted to say that was a fascinating read thank you.
The issue is that the increased temperatures increase evaporation at the same time that they increase precipitation, and in many places, the net effect on water availability is expected to be negative.
I feel like we get larger weather events, less frequently.
So there'll be extended dry periods where normally rain would have been interspersed.
In some terrain, the torrential rain often runs off too, flowing to rivers, where-as a more moderate rain would get absorbed.
It's ok, humans don't need water.
> "It's ok, humans don't need water."
Yep. Humans only need money.
People don't understand the full impact and consequences of drought.
When you draw down the water table, the ground compacts. You never get that water storage capacity back. There's no way to uncompact hundreds of feet worth of ground across thousands of square miles of earth. There are places in California where the ground has compacted several dozen feet.
When you put poison onto the ground, it usually goes into the ground, and sure, the ground may act like a kind of HPLC column and some of that poison might take years to decades to reach the water table...but then what?
When you melt chunks of the arctic and antarctic, you don't just cause sea water levels to rise. You also reduce salinity, and affect global-scale air and water currents like the jetstream - causing dramatic shifts in temperatures and water content of air.
Indigenous peoples have been warning us for ~10 generations that selfishness will/is destroying the planet. Nobody in power has cared, instead mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress" and so on. All to make more money.
You cannot eat money.
Your friends cannot eat money.
Your children cannot eat money.
Their children cannot eat money.
Agreed. That’s why I’m glad the new administration is prioritizing establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, for when the shit really hits the fan.
(/s if you couldn’t tell)
Your children, however, can eat their friends, and their friends' children.
The three P's: powerdown, permaculture, population control.
If we do not achieve them, they will be done for us, far less pleasantly.
This was possibly an option 30+ years ago, but I think we may have sailed past that point of no return. We will need to double down on human industriousness in order to accomplish massive necessary geoengineering and/or bioengineering feats within the next couple hundred years.
Why powerdown? How do you propose humane population control? I get permaculture though ;)
I assume by "powerdown", the OP means reducing energy usage, especially of polluting energy sources, mainly fossil fuels.
This doesn't really require a lower population, it just means people need to stop expecting to live in huge McMansions with A/C blasting all the time and driving around in 3-ton SUVs. Living in dense, walkable/bikable city environments in energy-efficient dwellings, people could live quite well with a tiny fraction of the polluting energy usage.
Education, birth control and abortion access, and increased income levels. Each of these is associated with a lower fertility rate.
There is little pushback against the increase of these measures. It would be very interesting though if a fertility rate increase was warranted and folks were arguing against them in order to raise it.
> How do you propose humane population control?
Actually, in many (most?) countries this is already happening, for better or for worse. It's just a limited subset of areas/countries that have quick population growth. This has different causes and the possible solutions are politically, socially, religiously and economically complex. Or rather, getting to a situation where a solution is applied is complex more than the actual solution.
All true but most people in the world are worried about putting food on the table and taking care of their kids. Fix social justice and you get on the road to fixing the costs of unfettered capitalism.
> but most people in the world are worried about putting food on the table and taking care of their kids
People love to repeat this myth, as if most human beings won't care about others or about their own future, as if they can't understand enlightened self-interest, or can't understand climate change. Mostly, it's yet another argument for powerlessness and inaction.
The public has gotten behind so many things now and historically. Right now they are the power behind movements that have nothing to offer but brazen falsehoods, corruption, and hate. And yet all the good people say, mass movements are impossible, there's nothing we can do but suffer.
For me personally it has been very disheartening to see how many people simply don't care about what goes on slightly outside of their immediate vicinity.
The one simple easiest thing you can do to fight environmental disasters is to stop eating meats. Or at least reduce the consumption of the most harmful ones. Try taking up that conversation with people whose opinion on the matter you don't know. Most of the time it's not going to be pleasant, satisfying or leading to much progress.
People like to think about big picture decisions with their taste buds and emotions.
> it has been very disheartening to see how many people simply don't care about what goes on slightly outside of their immediate vicinity.
They are disheartened by you spreading this myth. Plenty of people have and do and will do otherwise.
From my perspective, the feeling is people at large don't care. Likely because it's difficult, uncomfortable, expensive, or all 3.
Do I wish it wasn't that way? Yes. But what if it stays that way? Is there a solution then?
I'm not saying the fight shouldn't be had. I am saying that—at least in the USA—change doesn't really appear to be a priority unless the $ is there.
It’s more that change won’t happen until it has serious impact to majority of population.
It sounds cold but food/water/housing shortage will be solved once it starts affecting > 51% of the population. (or at least resources will start flowing towards real solutions).
The sad part is by then there will most likely be irreparable damage (as well as enormous amount of human suffering). That’s at least how the western part of the world sees things
For the record, I care, but there’s only so many people I can convince to stop eating meat
:%s/of the population/of the assets/
If we've seen nothing else in history, it's how effectively a tiny crust of the population can keep the Orphan Crushing Machine running as long as it doesn't affect them directly.
You are not an observer watching from the Moon, you are an agent, a full participant right here on Earth. Your 'perspective' is the problem, not a third-party observation.
In wars, enemy propaganda says the kinds of things you are saying, to create despair and powerlessness. Look up operations like Tokyo Rose, for example. It's more powerful than any other weapon - it causes the foe to unilaterally disarm. And, as propagandists intend, here you are repeating it, spreading the disease.
Imagine you are working on a team, and someone keeps saying 'nobody cares', it's probably hopeless, etc. That person is the problem, spreading a communicable disease within the team.
The good people outnumber the bad, by a lot. Goodness is not a new or alien concept, but fundamental to humanity and to every culture. Human rights has been overwhelmingly successful and popular across people and cultures. History shows it overwhelmingly. All that is missing is belief in themselves and a way forward.
Instead of this disease, you could spread what people actually need. Hope, courage, belief in what is right.
Gross generalization and characterization.
You can push for change while also recognizing that others don't respond well to it. Why? Because you need to adjust tactics to get the outcome you want.
Blindly "spreading hope" is just as lazy imo as saying everything is futile.
You have to live in the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be.
And let me be very direct: I'm close to positive the approach you've shared will not work. Sorry. It will be too late by the time people get onboard (when it's clear that the medium-term negatives will outweigh shorter term costs).
You don't provide any evidence; you just seem to think your despair is objective reality, not merely your subjective perception, and insist on it. You are following the rhetoric of propaganda.
As I said, there is a long, long history of people doing far more against much greater odds. What many people are doing now is just propaganda and cowardice; nothing is stopping them.
Make the future a bright one, don't drag everyone down and make those bad things happen.
A Pollyanna approach is not the answer (and rarely is.) I believe you've missed my point.
I'll state it again although I don't have good faith in this conversation: because the majority of people don't prioritize (or even believe in climate change), the tactics are going to be different than other social issues.
Literally look up any polling on the matter for "proof."
With what happened to the CEO of UHC, I think we are starting to see society hit a breaking point. Where simply "acting through the process" is no longer acceptable to an increasing minority of people who are getting ready to... well. Best not type it, lest I end up on more watch lists.
I don't endorse that kind of action, FWIW, I've lived through enough historically significant events already and I'm not even forty. But the powers that be seem unwilling to simply make less money, so something's going to give eventually.
IMHO that is the same weird narrative of powerlessness. It talks about events like they are on an empty ship adrift at sea.
You are on that ship. What are you doing? It's not adrift; others are steering it. If you don't also guide it, then the results are your fault just as much as those steering it.
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Have you ever lived in any of those places?
As someone who has, the western concept of social justice is a laughable pipe dream.
Of course, the environment matters enormously and money is not everything, but to dismiss money like this is an oversimplification of the situation. It's characterizing money in a way that really misleads people. When people talk about, let's say, income or economic opportunity or something like that, they're not just talking about dollar bills in people's hands, they're talking about real economic resources that reduces poverty and empowers people to contend with a wide range of challenges, not just environmental degradation, but the plethora of life-threatening dangers that people are exposed to every single day.
Right now we are experiencing the lowest number of deaths from extreme weather in a century, and that's because despite all of the global climate change and other environmental challenges humanity faces, the rise in productivity, which you're dismissing here as merely dollar bills in people's hands, is making people more adaptable and resilient.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65673961
Not only does this ignore what he wrote, it is exactly the cliché he describes.
Parent:
> mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress"
You:
> the rise in productivity, which you're dismissing
What makes people adaptable and resilient is creativity and hard work. Today you can buy that with money but the money itself isn’t doing anything. If all farmers stop farming tomorrow, you die no matter how much money you have.
How money is linked to increase of productivity is still to prove, as well as parent dismissal of the rise of productivity.
melting the arctic cannot raise sea levels
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your indifference to potential civilizational collapse is representative of the mass amnesia on this issue
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> Nobody in power has cared, instead mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress" and so on. All to make more money.
I'm the type of person the Trumpers call a "Soy Boy", and I'm so sick of this hyperbole.
The main solution, if we listened 20 years ago, was that we should all stop using non-renewable energy (basically all energy at the time) and eat bugs.
We are at a point now where if we don't do anything, there's a decent chance current trends take us to a nearly ~100% renewable future in 40 years (if you count nuclear and hydro).
>90% of people on the planet will take the climate change that is most likely to come from our 20-years prior fossil fuel use and the coming 40 years, than to have gone back to living like indigenous people 20 years ago and remained there forever.
There isn't really a world in which we all stopped using fossil fuels and industrial farming and arrived at all the renewable tech we have today, and the ability to produce it at the scale we do now.
Climate change is real, so is progress. Most people are willing to make the trade.
We are so inferior to be able to turn this planet into Venus, like most of the climate Doomers say we're going to.
We likely won't even bring the Earth back to it's typical temperature range - which is MUCH hotter over the last ~450M years than it is now.
If you're telling me we're going to cataclysmically destroy the planet because we might bring temperatures close to their average over the last ~450M, I'm going to be skeptical.
> We are so inferior to be able to turn this planet into Venus, like most of the climate Doomers say we're going to.
This is absolutely beside the point. We don't remotely need to turn the planet into Venus for our civilization to collapse.
The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because that's what seems to be the most likely if we don't magically start giving a shit.
> The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because that's what seems to be the most likely if we don't magically start giving a shit.
That's pretty typical for the global civilization. We have a recency bias to the post-ww2 is the norm. That was a highly atypical peaceful time.
It would be surprising that trend continued - even in a climate vacuum.
How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway just given how many people have been born? How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?
Maybe it would happen regardless. Do you think massive disruptions in agriculture would make it more or less likely?
We've had massive distributions in agriculture for the last 40 years.
Are the going to offset productivity gains, and new areas being more productive?
We could almost feed 50% more humans if we had less livestock (or even just more efficient - like more pork instead of beef).
Livestock takes up almost 80% of ag land...
We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
> We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
You vastly under-estimate the problem. We are talking about crop yields going down dramatically. The way we are heading right now, it's completely worthless to talk about livestock: the question is really how many billions will die because we can't grow enough food anymore.
You seem to approach this with extremely binary thinking. Either we all starve or we’re all fine. The Earth is destroyed, or climate change isn’t a problem.
No, we’re not all going to starve to death. But it doesn’t take that much change in agricultural output for some people to starve to death. And it doesn’t take that many starving people to severely disrupt a society.
You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem.
My point is that we have caused a lot of "problems" through burning fossil fuels, and at least up until now, the "solutions" that we've gotten from all the progress we've been able to make has outweighed that cost - massively.
Given that the rate of increase in emissions has slowed drastically and total emissions will likely peak this decade, and then fall pretty rapidly, I don't see any reason to believe that we're digging ourselves into a hole rather than building a better society for everyone.
> You seem to look at it as if we benefit nothing from the cause of the problem.
I haven’t said anything even remotely like that.
Of course the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. The whole thing is just getting started. The costs are nearly zero so far. Total warming was under 1C until a few years ago. We’re looking at something like 4C of warming with current trends. Projected warming with current emissions reduction pledges is 2.8C and it’s very unlikely that those pledges will be met. The harms are almost entirely in the future. Things will get much worse before they get better.
Or as the kids like to say, we were born at the end of the Fuck Around century and now we’re in the Find Out century.
They could've still been born in the dark ages if we didn't go through the industrial revolution and burn fossil fuels.
I'm sure they'd pick this world, with it's future.
I really hope the choice isn’t between one bleak future and another. I’m losing track of what point you’re making here, but “at least it’ll be better than medieval times” doesn’t seem like much of one.
Hell, people all over the world are already and have been starving for decades, because we don't feed people because people need to eat; we feed them because it makes money. And in the areas of the globe where it doesn't, people starve, while elsewhere people throw away shit tons of food.
Depends on who "we" includes. First world, probably not. People doing rainfall based subsistence agriculture, some will.
> How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway
We don't know what would happen if we didn't screw ourselves, but we have some idea what will happen from what we are doing.
> How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?
2C? You're being optimistic. We've past 1.5 this year. The consequences of climate change have just started: right now it's minimal (people die from natural disasters, but globally that's minimal). What we see, though, is that "bad things" (e.g. natural disasters, extreme events) are happening faster and worse than what our models predicted.
In other words, every day we observe that the consequences of us screwing the climate is worse than what we thought. Let's now think a bit about that part: the "optimistic" scenario:
* We are now heading towards 4C unless we dramatically change the way we live. 2C is already out of reach, 1.5C is already here.
* At 4C, you have a whole strip of countries around the equator that becomes unlivable for humans: it's too hot and humid, meaning that we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, meaning that we die. We are not talking a few millions refugees, we are talking billions.
* Imagine billions of people, from entire countries, deciding to move to livable territories. We're talking billions of people, with their military, moving into the lands of other billions people with their military. We have never seen that in human history, but it doesn't seem good.
* Apart from that strip of land and the 4C, in a much shorter term we are talking droughts. Imagine first world countries not having enough food for everybody.
* And last point: all of this (and more) happens in a world were the amount of oil is dangerously reaching a peak (in some places it already has: the European economy feels it since 2007 because access to oil has become harder since then). Not only it means more wars for oil, but also it means that globally we will have less oil to tackle those challenges. There is no real alternative to oil, that's just a fact: we will have less energy, whatever it is.
* Of course, in order to tackle all those challenges, we will need energy. So we will be more likely to keep using oil as much as we can, which makes it even more likely that we are going towards a world with 4C.
Last fact: the climate changes that made the dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappear happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are measuring (I'm not talking predictions, but actual measurements). So it's not completely stupid to wonder if our species (on top of the countless others that have already and will disappear in the next few decades) will disappear entirely.
And again: all that I wrote above is the optimistic prediction from our current models. And from what we measure, it's actually coming faster, harder and stronger.
You can rationalise as much as you want: if you are not alarmed, you are either uninformed or irrational.
Anybody saying “destroy the planet” is being silly, but the average temperature over the last half a billion years is entirely irrelevant to the survival of modern civilization, or even modern biodiversity.
How do you know most people are willing to make the trade? People don’t have a choice. This stuff is driven by systems vastly larger than the individual. Nobody can decide to opt out of progress so they can also opt out of climate change. Even if I could opt for a zero-emissions lifestyle, climate change would continue with no detectable difference.
Do we have to eat bugs? I'm vegan
You eat bugs. Be they flour mites, dust mites, eyelash mites, fruit fly eggs, parasitic wasps... your home, body, and food all have a nonzero chance of hosting bugs small enough to escape your attention. They inevitably end up going down the hatch from time to time.
Obviously not what people mean by that.
You can desalinate water with money though.
only if "with money" means "with immunity from cost-effectiveness considerations," which is to say: no you can't. Not until we have way, way more abundant energy.
Meanwhile the EROI of petrochemicals continues to fall.
Environmental damage is real sure, but conservation and deprivation inspire nobody and aren't politically practical. The obvious conclusion is that the solution lies in some form of geoengineering, with $trillion budget to modify the Earth to suit billions of humans enjoying comfortable lifestyles.
Until we demonstrate the ability to actually perform meaningful feats of geoengineering and the sustained willingness to commit trillions of dollars to it, this proposal is basically science fiction
The same is true for any proposal that involves half of the world reducing their living standard to match those below the median.
For reference, the median per capita household income is a little under $3000/year [0].
[0]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
No disagreement, but we don't have a choice. Even if every westerner agrees to deprive ourselves of modernity, the rest of the world will not oblige, and they have >5x the population, all demanding smartphones, TVs, meat, AI, fast fashion, imported goods and much more.
Deprivation is guaranteed to fail, so I'm betting on innovation.
Our current way of living is a deprivation. The popularity of homesteading fantasies bespeaks the desire for a very different and less self-destructive way of life.
> Indigenous peoples have been warning us
The ones who are descended from the people who wiped out the New World megafauna? Noble savage myths are not going to help you get your point across.
Pointing out that they maybe have experience with this (however you want to phrase it) does sort of lend the guidance some credence no?
Parent is strawmaning. Discrediting someone base on what their ancestors did 70000 years ago is crazy.
This article conveniently leaves out the massive greening the Earth has experienced.
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
This doesn't address the ecosystem problems and costs imposed by climate change - but for crops and drinking water, it looks like fresh water created by solar powered desalinization is going to be very inexpensive in the future. [1][2] This is mainly due to the fact that solar power will be almost free in the near future.[3]
1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/a-vision-for-t...
2. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
3. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/solar-and-batt...
As a close follower of Casey, I have become disillusioned with the lack of progress in this space. Certainly solar is cheaper but his own company is very slow to scale up and ignores the logistical challenges of these huge endeavors. The salton sea lithium project should be a slam dunk but is very slow because building big things takes time.
Also, not everything he says is gospel
Projects at that scale will never get built - it doesn't matter if it is solar desalination. High speed rail in CA is a perfect analog - way too many ways (regulatory + environmental) to kill projects of this size. The only way something happens at the salton sea is with state mandate to implement it.
So, too cheap to meter?
Too cheap to meter, as long as you have no SLA. Much like solar-generated heat is "too cheap to meter" in traditional greenhouses.
Desalination is not sensitive to input power fluctuations, as long as you have a large enough reservoir to even out the spikes. The natural desalination cycle, with evaporation of ocean water, clouds, mountains, and rivers, already worrks like that, but probably a more localized setup with electric pumps and reverse-osmosis membranes could bring freshwater more directly where humans need it.
Unfortunately the massive reservoirs tend to be quite far away from the salt water.
For desalinization plants to operate with the sun entirely new massive fresh water reservoirs would need to be constructed.
Reservoir, solar (floating on the reservoir + ground mount nearby), cheap batteries. Would allow for balancing desal generation with grid needs.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/12/floating-pv-for-desal...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98hZI5CfQXU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzXJJFBEX-g
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy24osti/87698.pdf
Certainly not. But old solar cells that still have a certain lifespan can be obtained almost free of charge by anyone who wants them.
Labor of installation is anywhere from 5 to 25% of the cost, depending on location. Add in any missing parts (wiring, inverters) and permitting costs, and you may find yourself just as well off buying new panels for the added efficiency.
You'll either need less labor and materials, or get more output from the same land space, depending on your needs.
Reusing old cells makes sense in some applications, but for almost anything commercial or not a handyman special, I don't know that the numbers work out very well in their favor.
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And the argument you present in opposition is basically ad hom + appeal to ... folk wisdom?
the article doesn't exactly present data, if someone is talking about the global climate i expect to see sharp quantification and low errors along time series data
what is there to critique exactly?
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> Humanitarian aid should be tied to contraceptive use, World Bank loans as well.
That sounds an awful lot like eugenics, were poor people were paid money to have themselves sterilized. It's also backwards; the best way to get people to stop having kids is by raising their quality of life, at which point they will want to use contraception.
Where did you get the notion that there are too many humans on earth? Is the number of insects okay?
> Is the number of insects okay?
I don't mind the number of insects as long as they don't drive cars or want home appliances and don't need hospitals and schools.