So, you don’t believe those things are worth the cost, absent the threat of climate change?
You think preventing climate change is more expensive than not preventing climate change? That’s an interesting point of view. I’m not sure the facts agree with you.
Wildfires that burn down houses and gigantic forests every summer, massive storms that take out coastal cities, that kind of stuff tends to have an expensive price tag attached to it.
It’s easy to forget, but the most effective first step for individuals who want to prevent climate change is: Reduce. And that costs nothing at all. It actually saves money. Of course there are many other things that ought to be done as well, but let’s keep in mind the starting point.
So you’re saying our economy is a pyramid scheme based on a flawed system?
You think consuming less would stop the economy dead in it’s tracks. And … Is that a bad thing? As we know, “economy” means “rich people’s yachts”.
And just as obviously, reducing consumption is not binary. There’s no way to go to zero, nor would anyone seriously propose it. But anyway, with an increasing population and limited global resources, it’s inevitable that people will have to reduce at some point, so the disaster you hypothesize would strike us anyway. And in that case, gradual change now is better than catastrophic change later.
More expensive for the rich, yes. The rest of us want to stop having to pay for things we don’t want through degrading our surrounding environment.
Rich people won’t make as much money.
That’s what’s probably held us back the most.
I see three situations among the affluent that created a substantial delay in any “Green” products becoming a thing faster:
In the first case, someone making money hand over fist. They will let someone else take on the risk of research and development, and getting it off the ground. I’m happy with my stock in BP.
The second case, disgruntled owners of shares in companies forced to “be more green” in some way shape or form, like factories that need some post processing of their waste products, or that need to pay for their waste to be processed or disposed of. “The only thing this ‘save the planet’ nonsense has done, is cost me profits” (or whatever).
The last is driven by the numbers. There’s no way to take the plan to go green and turn it into sales/profits. If someone were to propose any “Green” solution with a business plan that results in them making money, they’re on board, but climate activists aren’t necessarily good with business plans.
I mean, look at what happened with EVs, and solar. As much as I’m personally not a fan of musk, he was willing to take the risk to create Tesla. As soon as he started shipping hundreds of thousands of units at $90k+ each, within a few years, other companies had, at least, HEVs available. Solar panel research is starting to push out some pretty efficient panels, those panels are appearing on big retailers stores to offset costs. Solar companies are buying eachother out, it’s a crazy market. The demand, not just from eco-conscious consumers, but from businesses, has exploded. The reason is that the return on investment of solar is very very clearly laid out. Spend some money putting them in, and you’ll pay less in the long run on electricity. Any retailer with any future vision and roof space would be stupid not to put them in.
If you think about what’s important to these capitalists, and adjust to how risk averse they are, this is all very clear as to why this has been moving so slowly. Fact is, if you can demonstrate that the tech works and show the difference, on paper, for operating costs, you’ll easily have more orders than you can handle for whatever green product you can think of.
The main issue right now is getting physics to work with you, in your favor, to get the thing to work. There are some serious engineering and physics challenges when it comes to most green technologies that usually makes them “not economically viable” aka, they cost more than alternatives. Once we figure out how to make them cost less, you’ll be amazed how fast things change.
If things progress as they are, with accelerating warming, in 20 years the economies start to break down and money can’t buy you things anymore. Making money is over by then.
I’ve given this a lot of thought since the comic above was first published, actually. I think it really reduces to the Tragedy of the Commons. This is where everyone involved sees a limited resource and “gets theirs” since there will always be someone else to do the same if you don’t. That explains petroleum writ large, but I think it also explains general wealth hoarding and exploiting market forces for gain. If you don’t, the next guy will.
So if the global economy really is headed for a collapse in 20 years, you can bet these animals will spend 19.5 years making cash that other people can’t. The remaining few months will be spent buying their way out of the hole they dug, assuming they can get the timing right.
But the tragedy of the commons is possible due to other circumstances. One of that is a different model of ownership that is used now. If land is owned, you can use it was you want. That’s your right. Something that’s not owned, like the sea of air, is can be exploited. In the past, there was shared ownership over lands, and if you tried to exploit it you got slapped. Or you only owned something for a time and then came a reshuffle according to their needs. What we have now is en exercise in how far you can take individual ownership until it breaks.
And in the past, there was more a steady state model. Population only grows slowly. Now with fast growing population. Back then you also had money as a hard currency. You wanted more, you had to dig more out of the ground. Now we have a monetary system that gets its value by promising even more value tomorrow. It forces growth on everybody and everything basically as a religion.
Combine the two and things go horribly wrong.
They actually have studies that show they’d make even more, which makes sense when you realize that the economy is designed to make them richer. They’ve had these studies since the mid '70s. Cruelty and head counts are the point, at this point. They know they’d be better off as well, and are just seeing how many of us they can murder before we do something about it.
This comic is from 2009, over 14 years ago. Good thing we took action and have made great strides towards combating climate change during that time. Could you imagine how screwed we’d be if our world leaders had sat on their asses and did fuck all instead? /S
Idk what all the world leaders have & haven’t done, but I know we’ve made great progress in green technology. Compared to 2009, we’re poised to more than double the efficiency of solar panels & the installation price per watt has fallen from $8.50 to $2.77. Bigger, better, better understood…and also cheaper.
This is what you want to see if you want the whole world adopting renewable energy sources.
Okay. We still need to do a lot more. The science is clear that this is the make or break decade. Either we severely curtail emissions now or we break the 1.5C/3F limit for the bad scenarios to happen.
And everything has happened faster than predicted so any millennials thinking this isn’t going to really effect their life is deluding themselves. It’s just going to hit while we have silver hair. We’ll all be hungry, thirsty, and trying to figure out several billion refugees.
I’ve been hearing “it’s make or break right now” for 20 years. I’m pretty sure we were absolutely screwed a long time ago.
In Australia we are moving in the right direction towards more energy efficient houses, solar and now batteries. By no means are we close to the low emission society, but 500Pj of renewable electricity generation in a year is not bad, and increasing day by day
Need to drop meat & dairy consumption in rich nations if we have any hope of managing climate change while we transition out of fossil fuels, which will take time.
Its already too late though. Even if we stopped all emissions suddenly we would still get the increase of 4 degrees
Its a trade off at best. You would need to make everyone poorer and accumulate more power in the government to make it happen. And the biggest issue is if its even doable.
And the biggest issue is if its even doable.
Right we all didn’t think of that, in that case let’s just keep on overexploiting our finite resources and generate as much short term shareholder value as possible, because we don’t know whether a sustainable approach would even fix some things that are possibly already beyond fixing due to overexploitation and generating short term value in the past.
I also want a clean world where everything is renewable and such, the problem is that I dont think it is achievable with our current technology. Take for instance the “Green New Deal” that came out a few years back, it was literally impossible. So personally I dont want to damage people that are doing the work that will get us to the tech we need in order to pretend we are solving the problem.
You mean aiming for perfection ist worse than fucking the Planet a little less?
“Poorer”.
“Everyone”.
You mean the wealthy wouldn’t be as wealthy and everyone else would be subject to strict controls on energy, transportation, and meat consumption. Which describes the lives of our recent ancestors. Air conditioning and heating would be for survival, not comfort. Most people will depend on mass transit and not own cars. And meat becomes a treat you get every now and then. But dairy products and eggs will still be plentiful.
It’s not like we’re going to be eating peanut butter sandwiches and starving while working 3 part time jobs. Unless that’s already your reality. Then it will likely still be your reality because capitalism.
The vast majority of humans could live a perfectly fine, alternative, lifestyle and the planet would be okay.
Yeah fair enough analysis other than blaming capitalism for everything. A thing that you missed was that when people in poor countries get poorer, they can die of starvation or other things. Why do you believe that is worth it?
You missed the point entirely. We don’t need to cut calories produced. The new arable land from not raising cattle and the turn of farm land from live stock feed to human feed will provide more than enough food.
This isn’t a situation where we have to live in some dystopia, as long as we act now.
Mankind has been cheating for decades now, building a super consuming inefficient society without the means to actually do so sustainably.
We failed the Candy challenge, we chose to eat our candy now instead of receiving more candy in the future. We wanted to have new toys constantly, make stuff cheap and throw-away, because we want new stuff anyways. We wanted to eat large amounts of meat every day. We wanted to travel across the world. We wanted to have our own large homes with large gardens and heat/cool them to be perfect for living in all the time. We wanted to have our own personal tanks to drive around in perfect comfort, to use as we wish, to go as we wish. But we wanted it, so we made it so. We used the ultimate cheat code called fossil fuels.
Using fossil fuel is like going to a bar and putting everything on the tab. You can drink and eat all you want, but at one point in the future you are going to have to pay up. Previous generations didn’t really care, they would just pass along the tab to the next generation, they will figure it out. And with technological progress as it was, it would have seemed likely a solution would be found. Especially in the atomic era the solution to a lot of problems was within our grasp. Unfortunately because a lot of reasons that never panned out.
No solution is within sight and the bill is coming due. But in order to at least pay some of that bill, it would mean we are going to have to give up a lot of riches we’ve come accustomed to. With a lot of people it isn’t they don’t want a better future for the Earth and the next generations, it’s that they don’t want to be the one who gives up those riches. They don’t want to give up their car, not even for a day. They don’t want to stop eating meat, even if it’s only half of the time.
So the bar analogy works, and I hate to agree with an idiot, but when the tab comes due, some people just go to a different bar.
Let’s get off planet.
I’d love to do this, but we literally don’t have the energy budget for that. At least, not for everyone. Rockets require crazy stupid amounts of energy for relatively small amounts of mass, just to leave Earth’s gravity well. Nevermind that space is an incredibly hostile environment requiring technology we don’t even have yet, or that our next best bets for settlement (Mars and Titan) aren’t much better. We’d be far better off terraforming the Sahara.
its nicely written, but i think ur wrong abt some of these points.
We wanted to eat large amounts of meat every day. We wanted to travel across the world. […] We wanted to have our own personal tanks to drive around in perfect comfort, to use as we wish, to go as we wish. But we wanted it, so we made it so.
Most of this stuff only got popular bc of mass advertising. For example, the idea that bacon & egg makes a good, healthy breakfast was made up and marketed by paying doctors to say its true (look into Edward Bernays). This ofc helped the meat industry sell their dead animals to more ppl. and yet nearly 50% of our food produce is thrown away bc it couldnt be sold. why do they produce so much??
SUVs were heavily marketed to ppl in the US bc theyre classified as “light trucks”, making them not subject to “cafe” (corporate average fuel economy) standards in the US and were therefore cheaper to produce and sell. Look into what cars are around in europe today; most of them are still small, efficient, and safe.
the real issue of this is that corporations have a need to make more money every year. it all needs to keep growing to please their shareholders.
this means more aggressive advertising; more shit nobody really needs has to be sold to those who can barely afford it bc we need to be paid less for them to make more.
capitalism is the real problem here. and it needs to stop. we need an economic system thats based on ppls necessities, not on making the most money (selling the most stuff).
i think the “we wanted it, so we made it so” implies this is some inherently human thing.
i see it all too often unfortunately, that ppl just think human do bad, therefore human is bad and theres no changing it. we should murder a large chunk of the population or just go extinct entirely.
as if those were the only “solutions” there could ever be.