• EU nations are living far beyond the Earth's means: report
    50 replies, posted
This is a disgusting sentiment. You're trying to excuse the destruction of vast swathes of our natural landscapes because we can provide a poor replacement of mechanical alternatives and lumber forests. You say our "knowledge will always be expanding" and it has, to recognise that we have destroyed countless environmental systems and led our planet to the brink of collapse due to selfishness and shortsightedness, and a vain delusion that mystical human ingenuity is going to save us from the consequences of our actions. It was that same "ingenuity" that led us to this point. It doesn't matter what unproven technologies achieve in small-scale tests, if the social will isn't there to actually solve the problems in any meaningful way. And as long as people like you delude yourselves into thinking that nature is so within out control that climate change is a non-issue to be solved at leisure, we aren't likely to accomplish anything in the next eleven years. Sorry if I seem combative, I'm just passionate about saving life on this planet.
So what you're saying, then, is that better living conditions for two centuries was worth civilisational collapse and possible human extinction? Nothing about what I said is melodramatic. The anthropocene has already started, it's only a matter of how much impact it will have now. Even if we suddenly stopped emitting CO2 altogether, we'd still see significant changes in climate by the turn of the century. If we go beyond a certain threshold by continuing to increase our annual emissions like we're currently doing, the climate will reach a point of instability due to feedback loops that scientists say they won't be able to predict. Modern civilization hinges on generating a food surplus, and climate instability may affect farming yields and lead to crop failure, and so will the extinction of key species. There's also the geopolitical instability that will stem from the rarefaction of drinkable water and cross-border water sources. If you care about the millions of people who died prior to the industrial revolution, then surely you should care about the billions that will die if the world at large doesn't start taking this global crisis seriously. And, by and large, it doesn't. Even in the most progressive nations, tackling climate change remains subservient to economic growth, the very mechanism that led us to this problem in the first place. The truth is that, even if we're very optimistic regarding technological development in the coming decades, the modern western way of life is unsustainable, and should be drastically reduced if we want our species to survive. But our political system isn't built for this. It only works to serve key private interests and the short term satisfaction of a majority of the electorate somewhat. So, yes, if we could've seen that coming, it would have been more responsible to hold out on unsustainable industrial development before coming up with a political system that can prioritize sustainability over economic growth. Instead, we're now stuck in a race against time, having to fight those systemic issues every step of the way for a chance at limiting the consequences of our unchecked growth enough to preserve modern civilization and our species at large. So no, there's nothing inherently wrong with industrialization as a principle, that holds true for any scientific and engineering technique. But the political structure within which it is brought matters. You don't build a nuclear power plant only to hand the keys to a crew of monkeys.
Humans aren’t facing “extinction” from climate change. They literally just straight up aren’t. Not that climate change isn’t bad, but if you think that the extinction of the human race is right around the corner, you have a warped perception of the consequences of climate change. Our political systems serve the short term interests of the majority of the electorate because, well, that’s what people want, by and large. People don’t want to see a reduction in their standard of living.
lol good luck buddy our current prez wants to cut down the amazon to make factories and shit because having a huge rainforest that is very important for the world's ecosystem is communism
Putting aside the old growth forest stuff (I think it's important but it's only one minor facet to this discussion) For a long time Europe has enjoyed a high standard of living at the expense of other places (ie places with comparatively lower standards of living), we have protections and safety nets such that even our poorest have some modicum of protection compared to other countries. Lenin (just because he's an authoritarian POS doesn't mean everything he wrote was nonsense) wrote about the "Labor Aristocracy", as a form of "exporting poverty", where workers in more developed developed nation (eg a warehouse worker in the UK) are paid more (whilst enjoying cheap goods and services from) compared to a workers in a less developed nation (eg a factory worker in china or indeed a coltan miner in the Congo). This was considered a way of placating the working class in developed countries and inhibiting worker solidarity across borders. Ultimately this is to stop workers in developed countries demanding change which might threaten the systems/people/corporations exploiting people (both in the developed and developing countries). This isn't to say there aren't poverty issues in Europe and America, austerity in the UK has killed 100000+ and in the US a 1/6th of people are classed as food insecure. Comparatively this is better off than slave labour elsewhere though. I believe this is an act of complacency or betrayal almost, ordinary people were given lots by previous governments as part of a deal "the government gives you ____ in return for your support" (literally called the new deal in the US) - now unions have collapsed and new means of misdirecting people's efforts (surge in right wing populism and/or social media bubble literally giving each person a different "reality") have emerged governments are retracting their bribes. Despite those issues listed people in Europe and America enjoy a fairly high standard of living. When someone says "capitalism exploits workers" people in Europe and America look at themselves, likely with clean water, a car and think "we'll there are flaws but this isn't too bad" so those people in Europe and America are less likely to support change. When they hear about slaves in China it's considered a Chinese issue and when hear about 35000 children working in mines in the congo it's considered an African problem; despite both of these problems being necessary for our current system. The current free market/neoliberal form of capitalism is part of the issue here. When we lower tariffs with countries which exploit workers more than we do we are effectively just outsourcing slavery/exploitation. Advocates for capitalism in a neoliberal framework will argue for "vote with your wallet" type sentiments, I argue these do not work. For any of the following reasons I think this does not work: We are (willfully or accidentally) ignorant to the exploitation of others We "bribe ourselves" by paying a little extra to a charity to "repair" the damage done We think ourselves too poor to buy stuff from places with fairer trade practices Places with fairer trade practices close down because they're out competed by more exploitative places We want to boycott big businesses but cant (eg how do you boycott Koch? you'd need to boycott every company which uses oil provided by Koch pipelines) This sort of systematic problem needs systematic change, the government (or ideally groups of governments like the EU) needs to enforce/raise tariffs/refuse trade with more exploitative places, creating economic pressure to change. Union/advocacy group members should recognise outsourced workers not as competition but as fellow exploited, this would help recreate worker solidarity across borders. I think it's a trap to think of it as "developed world vs devloping world" because it creates antagonism between those two groups, ie citizens in those well off developed countries might be reluctant to advocate for better standards in developing countries because they see it as a zero sum game whereby they surrender their comfort for another. I think it's better to consider the super rich exploiting people in both those countries, removing some of that inequality will help to improve the standards in those developing countries (and probably in developed countries too). I also think this leads to lots of migration, people from poorer areas (which genuinely suffer from war, famine, extreme poverty) seek to make their way to better off areas - don't blame the people trying to improve their lives, blame the system which fucked them in the 1st place. Blaming the poor for the system pushed upon them is incorrect. Also we should not blame ourselves as beneficiaries of the "labour aristrocracy", we should blame the system which put the labour aristocracy in place, we shouldn't accept the bribe (that being they give us a slightly larger slice of the pie in return for our being complicit in the exploitation they do), rather we should question why the pie is sliced up in such a way that regular people, both in developed and developing countries, are being given the leftovers by the super rich. So long as we accept our "slightly larger than a guy in the congo's" sliver of the pie will be not solve the actual issues. I don't think huge sacrifices in standard of living (for the working and middle class in developed nations) would need to be made, I believe that a fairer distribution of wealth from those at the top to those at the bottom (via fairer trade practices and stuff like Cooperatives where workers keep their profits of their labour) would go a long way toward a better system. I also think some "commons" problems (like the climate change, sea pollution, fish stocks, drinkable water, fertile soil, anti biotic resistance, destruction of natural ecosystems) cannot be tackled by individuals, cooperatives or even national governments, there needs to be a large scale collective effort between governments.
Okay, then tell me how exactly do you interpret scientists claiming that feedback loops, such as reduction of the planet's albedo and release of ice sheet methane, will lead to climate instability that would make long term changes too extreme to predict? How to you figure humanity will be fed once droughts and other extreme weather events start routinely wrecking crops, on top of a significant reduction in arable land area? What do you think the rarefaction of drinkable water will lead to in terms of human impact, let alone geopolitical instability? How do you think chain extinction of various species through the destruction of or severe change in their natural habitat will affect us? Do you genuinely believe that, once faced with such diversity, nations will constructively cooperate, or will they, as history has shown, descend into war and struggles that will make humans and their environment suffer even more? I don't see what's so extreme about considering that the combination of all these events can lead to civilisational collapse or even human extinction afterwards. It might have been unlikely if we made strong efforts to curb climate change and guarantee only a moderate increase in temperature, which would have caused a lot of damage nonetheless. But it doesn't look like we're headed down that route so far. And please, don't serve me the usual "humans are resilient, we'll figure something out" spiel. Worship of science and technology completely ignores how these things actually develop, it's nothing more than baseless belief. Which is ironic, considering that science is based upon continually challenging beliefs by confronting it to experience. I don't know of such a system. That's the entire point. Nobody so far has designed or put in practice a political system that would foster economic growth through industrialization while remaining sustainable. That's why industrialization happening before such a system was devised is a curse more than it is a blessing. It's why we now have to go against the flow to tackle the problem.
Thank you for this. Our current standards of living in so called "first world" countries, are literally built upon the exploitation of the rest of the world. This is the real reason there is no ethical consumption under our current capitalist system. It is basically impossible to live in one of these countries and be a consumer without indirectly benefiting from virtual or literal slave labor in other countries. Even if we weren't facing climate change, this alone should be reason for us to overhaul our entire world economic system - because as it stands, it is the single greatest injustice in the world.
Despite everything, countries around the world are actually working towards addressing climate change. In many countries, it’s actually one of the foremost concerns. The idea that “literally nothing” is happening right now is just wrong. It’s lethargic, but we also live in a time where the effects are yet to be very visible. While you can postulate that things will simply devolve when the effects become more apparent, I think it will spur more action. Not enough to avoid consequences (we are already seeing those, after all), but enough to limit them. Aside from that, what I commented on is extinction. The nature of tipping points is that, well, we don’t really know where they are, when they occur, and what their effect will be exactly. It’s true that things could end up catastrophic, and I suppose with a bit of nuclear war on top, things would be pretty bad, but human extinction is gonna take A LOT of effort. The earth is pretty big, not everywhere is gonna become an inhospitable hellscape overnight. Even then, humans can survive hellscape. Will climate change lead to droughts that might kill millions of people? Sure. Will it lead to starvation in areas? Sure. Will it lead to human extinction? Very unlikely.
Even most philosophers of environmental ethics don't think it there is any chance it will lead to extinction. Will it potentially fuck up society to the point of requiring decades to recover? Possibly. Will it kill all humans and erase the scientific achievement we have gain thus far? Very Unlikely. The trick is not to focus on the extinction aspect, but rather focus on all the loss of biodiversity and consider that the scope is to balance that with diversity of human experience. It seems that people, if we are to generalize across the whole globe, will have to lead lives that are more simple than those lived now in the west. We are in effect trading that diversity in order to stabilize it with the biodiversity.
I've yet to see a country purposefully set out to tackle climate change in a way that would lead to economic devolution. As I said, environmental concerns remain subservient to economic growth, when they are incompatible at this point in time. The nature of climate change and the delay between causes and consequences are such that if we only start taking it seriously once things have significantly devolved, then it's already too late to stop things from becoming utterly shitty in the long run. At this stage limiting the consequences might very well be the difference between species more resilient than us surviving or not. Exactly. So what makes you think that you can claim with such confidence that: When scientists have pointed out, as I mentioned, that if global temperatures increase beyond a certain point, feedback loops will mean we'll reach a stage of instability that is such that we have no clue how things could evolve past that point? Through what scientific thought process can you claim that Earth being "big" means that temperatures can't possibly reach a point where no place on the planet remains hospitable to humans? I've told you to spare me these platitudes. Humans can't survive "hellscapes" when they're no longer part of a civilisation, where division of labor allows them to be far more productive. In the absence of a food surplus (which would be exacerbated by the wrecked environment), more humans focus on scavenging food and less humans work on ways to better living conditions. Even then, technology that allows survival in very hostile conditions may be out of reach then or simply impossible due to physical constraints. Humanity has narrowly escaped extinction a few times before, it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility that we won't be so lucky next time. I don't see much data to back up such a conclusion here. Until the consequences of extreme temperature increases due to insufficient measures being taken to tackle climate change are more well-known, you can't possibly infer with certainty that such an outcome is "very unlikely". And until proper studies demonstrate such a conclusion, I don't see a reason to believe that industrialization happening prior to an adequate political structure was a net benefit to humanity.
Those mechcanical trees do not hold soil down, do not replish the soil for plants and insects, do not provide shade which is incredibly important to cooling the planet, do not provider shelters and homes, do not, when they die, provide the forest floor with new nutrients needed for life cycles. They don't even hold the soil down to prevent fucking erosion.
Please point to the scientific publications where human extinction is presented as a realistic scenario. Just saying tipping points exist and therefore anything can happen is borderline not an argument. The earth is not gonna turn into mars or Venus because of anthropogenic climate change. I’m on my phone for the foreseeable future, so I really can’t be bothered to write a long response. I also can’t really search around too much. Have this, though: https://archive.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf (Page “90”, paragraph 2) ”For instance, a “runaway greenhouse effect”—analogous to Venus-- appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities. So our focus will be on those events that the literature suggests have a non-negligible chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.” Yes, it’s not a peer-reviewed paper, but if the IPCC finds this kind of focus silly, and then mentions a bunch of far, far-less devastating scenarios as “dangerous” (not that they aren’t), I’m likely to go with along with that. I really dislike the term “alarmist” when it comes to climate change, because it is a very urgent issue - but listing human extinction along with actually realistic scenarios is just a good way to be called exactly that. It doesn’t accomplish anything else.
Mate this literally 10 years old, this also flys against the dire warnings from more recent reports such as the UN's reports.
Well, could you, you know, actually show that things have changed since that report with regards to that exact quote? It was the most authoritative source I could find on the subject in a jiffy, so you’ll have to excuse me when it comes to it being moderately old. Again, we’re arguing near-Venus scenarios here, not the general picture of climate change being bad (because spoiler: it is).
The greenhouse effect doesn't have to be on the scale of Venus to make Earth uninhabitable by humans. All it needs is to increase temperatures and wreck the environment enough for food sources to become too scarce for humans to sustain themselves. I also have to question why you'd consider that humanity eventually having to concentrate in the few remaining inhabitable zones if global warming stops short of that point, with the massive population decrease it entails, and being stuck in such a state for thousands of years at best, is preferable to living in a somewhat stable environment in the pre-industrial world.
Well, first of that’s very unlikely to happen, and second of all... wait no, that’s it actually. I also think you’re seriously underestimating how shit the pre-industrial world was for many, many people. But obviously if the industrial revolution leads to the extinction of mankind (or something comparably shit), it was a net negative. But that’s unlikely to happen. I guess what I’m saying is that you’re argument is a straw man - no, the industrial revolution wouldn’t be good if it gave everyone super-AIDS, but I happen to believe it didn’t and also won’t. You seem to argue from the POV that climate change not resulting in the worst imaginable result is basically impossible. You also don’t see an alternative political system that could prevent that from happening, in which case I have to ask - why do you even care? Personally I care because there’s something to do about it. I’m not generally an optimistic person, and I don’t think I am in this case either, but you really strike me as incredibly pessimistic person. Not sure that’s healthy.
Please, tell me where I advocated for destruction of forests and implied that us controlling our environment is easy? I never said anything like that. In fact I said we should conserve things as much as possible - because while it is possible for us to control our environment, it's much harder than just letting it be and especially time consuming than letting it be. There are people's whose entire jobs and life's work are to ensure an ecosystem we have destroyed is, with the help of what we know about ecology, reborn and revitalized. Just because we've destroyed forests doesn't mean our knowledge is only about destroying life. The past 100 years of conservation efforts where we have actually rebuilt ecosystems lost to time should tell you that. Nothing about climate change is easy. There is no one bullet answer to it. It won't just be human knowledge that stops it, but it does help alot. In fact it was human knowledge that lead us to be able to realize this catastrophe is waiting to happen, but to blindly cast it back just because part of it lead us to this place is just as stupid and wasteful as the people before us. Those mechanical trees talked about before? Of course they're no substitute for an actual forest of trees with all that life can bring, but they are useful as a method of quickly removing atmospheric carbon. Why don't we build them in combination with reforestation of trees? People get so quickly caught up in finding certain specific solutions that they don't look at the bigger picture. Sure in theory if the social will existed for everyone to just abandon all of our progress and go back to a pre-industrial society, our climate change problems would disappear overnight, just like in theory if we have the knowledge to build a massive fuck huge machine that scrubbed greenhouse gasses from our atmosphere, climate change wouldn't be a problem, but both of those are incredibly unrealistic. Climate change is a massive and intricate problem that we need to use everything we have to try and fix, and you're not going to fix it by just telling people to never turn on lights in their house.
Based on nothing but gut feeling. Got it. But those of us who are honest with ourselves admit that we have no idea what exactly the worst increases in global temperature entail for our planet and the species that live in it, and neither do climate scientists. Professor Richard Betts from the UK’s Met Office is the coordinator of a new international project called Helix, which looks at the impact of very high levels of warming. He tells us: “[I]t’s very difficult indeed to know what a two degree world will look like, let alone four degrees or even six.” [...] “With increasing warming, some physical systems or ecosystems may be at risk of abrupt and irreversible changes. Risks increase disproportionately as temperature increases between one to two degrees Celsius of additional warming and become high above three degrees Celsius” [...] “For sustained warming greater than some threshold, near-complete loss of the Greenland ice sheet would occur over a millennium or more, contributing up to seven metres of global mean sea level rise.” [...] “Most life on Earth tends to be adapted to its current conditions, so if conditions change then species either need to move … or adapt to new conditions, or die out. [The] resilience of the natural world seems to be being reduced as a direct consequence of other human actions, through land use and habitat loss, so it’s a double-whammy for ecosystems.” Understanding how rising global temperature translates to risks for society and natural ecosystems is critical to prepare for, and strive to reduce, the scale of impacts. But predicting consequences for different regions is difficult because while global temperature is a good indicator of global change, local impacts can be much more pronounced, Levermann says. The higher the temperatures, the more unpredictable the results are. Unlike you, I cannot in good faith claim that civilizational collapse or human extinction would be an unlikely consequence of some of the worst case scenario. No. Kind of a bold claim for someone who asserts I'm making a strawman. I'm saying human extinction, the worst imaginable result, is not out of the realm of possibility. You're the one making claims about things being impossible. Try to read what I write next time. I'm not a pessimistic person. I simply don't rule out worst case scenarios on the basis of nothing but sheer optimism. Human extinction is not the most probable outcome, but as of right now it's not out of the realm of possibility. And until we're firmly certain about which path we're going to take regarding temperature increases, and are knowledgeable about the exact nature of the risks we face as a result, I'm not going to be as eager as you are to unconditionally worship the event that started it all just because it gave us a good couple of centuries.
Because its a machine and like every machine we've made, even fucking sonar, it will fuck with the natural habitats around it.
Mechanical trees are necessary to capture carbon, they are in no way a substitute for real trees. We need to replant forests in on as much unused land as possible.
Yeah and you know what else fucks with natural habitats? Climate change, and that's on a global scale. Even if we stopped using every single thing that produces atmospheric carbon, there's still literal tons of it that are up in the air. Trees take years to plant and grow to a stable enough state to actually provide a significant amount in reduction of greenhouse gasses as well as provide habitats. Set a bunch of these up in places where habitats wouldn't be screwed with, like deserts, or lands already developed by humans, and power them with solar or wind power, and you've got a very sustainable and energy efficient system that takes a few months to build at most.
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