lpm wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am
For example there's no such thing as natural disasters, they are always poverty disasters. When a hurricane hits New Orleans it's the poorest who die. A hurricane hitting Haiti makes a million people homeless and with cholera, if it hits Dominican Republic then the damage can be absorbed. Which means it's always a valid argument to say that economic development should be the priority. Make a country richer and you reduce natural disasters, even if climate change is creating more natural disasters. A prospering world can lift Haiti out of poverty faster than a world beset by economic stagnation - as demonstrated by the way economic and technological development in the west has led to the basic elimination of extreme poverty everywhere except Africa.
I'm not sure it's that simple. Recent years have seen hundreds die in fires in California, Australia, Greece and Portugal, and hundreds in floods Germany and Belgium. I've not seen much suggestion that casualties have been limited to people in poverty.
Fires and floods also do immense economic damage, of course. Some of the big ones have been estimated at upwards of $10 billion - which suggests rich people are also affected. These kinds of things will depress the local economy for years, along with the trauma and maiming and death.
So at some point, the cost of climate change will outweigh whatever economic gains can be made in the shorter term. A few metres of sea level rise would do it. In individual countries' calculations they need to be considering the risk of damage to major metropoles. It'll be an interesting test of the resilience wealth affords us when tropical storms start making landfall in Europe. Lisbon had a near miss with Alpha a couple of years ago.
But long-term economic growth doesn't matter much if you need to eat today, or your house burned down yesterday.
lpm wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am
Climate policy doesn't happen in a vacuum away from all other policies. There has to be a balance between investing resources in heat pumps and investing in fibre broadband, or between building high speed rail and building social housing. We all accept these trade offs in reality, no matter our rhetoric - I've not seen anyone hear argue that we should rip out all gas central heating boilers by 2025, instead there's an acceptance that we go for more economically efficient wins in the short term and allow ourselves a longer timeframe for more costly switch overs. "I was intending to keep discussion to environmental matters and ignore poverty" simply doesn't work as a way to discuss doom.
I know it doesn't happen in a vacuum, as the many many threads on climate policy I've started over the years will attest. I'm not really sure what you're talking about. Are you seriously advocating for "ignore emissions, focus on long-term economic growth and hope that enough wealth trickles down to mitigate the impacts of global heating" as a policy?
Doom comes before policy. Doom is the certainty that humans have made the climate and natural environment more hostile, in ways that will be disruptive and unpleasant. If we choose to do anything about it, and what that might be, are separate questions. Faith that adequate policy responses were underway would obviously ameliorate that sense of doom, as might the knowledge that gains in reducing poverty can continue.
But we don't really have a long time-frame left. We are burning through the carbon budget for 1.5°C very, very fast. In terms of "fair shares", that's
3 years' worth for the UK, or 9 for an average country. To get to zero.
lpm wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am
Even on the couple of pages of this thread we've got claims that "the right"/capitalists/the enemy are "degenerate c.nts" who are actively working for climate destruction, plus basically an expectation that a bl..dy civil war is going to be needed to sort all this out. Come back to reason for god's sake.
You've conflated various claims, there. We've been discussing hard evidence that the fossil fuel industry are actively working for climate destruction, by suppressing evidence, lying about it, and lobbying for increased emissions despite knowing the consequences. Decades of successive governments have, in the round, let them get away with it. If the term "degenerate c.nts" is too spicy for you, feel free to substitute "naughty boys" or "nice but sadly misguided individuals" or something.
You are the only person who's mentioned the right. Climate failure is very much a bipartisan problem. And I've tried also been pretty specific about referring to fossil capitalists specifically.
You've kind of gone off on one here, I fear.
lpm wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am
It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. In the past month alone we've all got our predictions about Omicron significantly wrong and that should make us pause for thought. One minute we're calling people we disagree with us on pandemic policy Nazi murderers, the next minute their policy is proved OK (even if more by luck than judgement). But does that make us add a grain of caution to our predictions? No, because that would be surrendering to our evil tribal enemies. We're not all that different from people so committed to Trumpism that they'll risk Covid unvaccinated rather than give an inch to the enemy side.
I'm not making any predictions myself - I'm relying on those of academic experts in the climate. They've been pretty well on the money so far (slightly underestimating the responses in certain systems, but not bad). The earth system is much better understood than a novel strain of a novel zoonosis so that shouldn't be too surprising.
I don't really know what you mean by "giving an inch to the other side". Where exactly are people wanting tougher action on climate change not compromising? From where I'm sitting it looks like they've compromised so much they haven't actually achieved anything yet.
lpm wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am
Real advances come from patient political compromises, involving lengthy negotiations and genuine listening to opposing viewpoints, eventually muddling through to an imperfect step forward. That's not happening in the current political landscape. The "you can f.ck right off" approach works nicely if you want attention on twitter or social reinforcement from the tribe on a forum; it works really badly in addressing genuine problems that require a bit of nuance.
The first IPCC meeting was in 1988, before I was born. They've been trying everything you say for a lifetime, and emissions have increased year on year throughout that time except for a minor dip during a global pandemic.
Given the 9 years of 1.5°C's budget left, how many of them should we spend waiting for a big breakthrough in these negotiations? We've seen over the last couple of years that an acute crisis won't focus minds either. From where, exactly, am I supposed to be drawing faith in this process?
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.