This is a classical example of a market failure. The issue is that today, when you you are buying any good, you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process. In other words, everyone of us is enjoying now a large subsidy/handout paid by future generations. This is called a negative externality.
The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.
Note that market failure does not mean that the “market” mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.
This would work, but could only be implemented for longer than a political mandate if all politicians agreed it were a good thing. Today we have politicians that run their campaign promising to cut taxes on gas, and it works, because the average person doesn't care about long term effect on the environment. There are good reasons for this:
- super rich people have super large footprint (extremely large houses, gas guzler vehicles, private jets, etc.... Since humans are humans, they try to imitate people from the top.
- the whole SUV thing (restriction on gas consumption -> people buying trucks with sit in them -> manufacturers started to charge premium for those -> manufacturers made insane profit from those (under 1% profit on a car, up to 50% profit on large SUV) -> manufacturer using ridiculously inefficient vehicles in all their product placement and increase product placements -> people started to buy those exclusively to the point that one manufacturer completely stopped selling car)
- Industries typically pollute a lot than individual, and get away with ridiculously low fines when they do get caught.
> The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.
Sadly, the first blip in GDP growth and this is out the window.
you are not paying for the full end-to-end cost of the item
Dirty little secret: this is deliberate. Why do you think the West closed all its heavily regulated factories and shifted manufacturing to China where environmental protection and workers rights don’t exist?
We should impose tariffs to punish imports from anywhere that isn’t up to Western standards of regulation. That’s the only way for the market to fix this.
I agree this happens for the vast majority of goods today. But does anyone have an example of where end-to-end societal cost is included in an item's purchase price?
Thanks. Great summary. Wish I'd said it so clearly.
The hard part has obviously been justifying government intervention when there's still uncertainty. Or at least, when those with vested short-term interests can make a strong case about uncertainty. I thought at one point that the insurance industry was going to make a difference, but haven't seen much about that lately.
Nuclear plants are a good example of this mentality, cheap power until you have to decommission the plant and suddenly costs goes through the roof.
But I would not say this is market failure, to me this is market working exactly as intended and expected: maximizing profit without caring for the rest.
On the other hand, it is not a question of subsidy/handout paid by future generation anymore, we're now at the point where it is a matter of going over the threshold effect where the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.
Pop bottles carried a .05 charge on each bottle, refunded when the empty bottle was returned to the store. Careless consumers (litterers) might just throw the bottles out. Likewise lazy consumers might decide it's 'beneath them' to bring back the empties. But for hungry young scavengers like myself (had to pay for 'Space Invaders' somehow) it was a great source of income.
I don't agree with you. Let's take Apple products. You are saying that the apple products' price wouldn't cover'the full end-to-end cost of the item, which includes the cost of disposal (collection, sorting, recycling) and the cost of fixing the issues caused by for example, CO2 emitted during the production process'? I doubt it.
I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.
It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.
I'm 24, and two years ago I think I had a full nervous breakdown over climate change. I couldn't stop thinking about it to the point that I stopped sleeping, lost 10 lbs, and almost dropped out of college.
If any train of thought leads you to this point, you have a medical problem, regardless of what you are thinking about.
Fortunately, I was able to get help and had fantastic support from my family and friends.
Today I'm off medicine and therapy. I still have bad times lasting 1 - 2 weeks, but never to the point that I can't live.
The important thing that I'm able to see now (even when my anxiety is back) is that everything that is important without climate change, is important with climate change. Even though the world is ending (I am not hopeful), I can still find love, learn new things, see the world, enjoy good food, risk my life, make money, enjoy art, and play sports. You can substitute into that list anything that brings you joy. You can also include fighting climate change in that list.
I used to feel that way. But now I'm old enough that I'm pretty confident that I'll die before shit gets too bad. I'd feel differently if I had kids, but I don't. So mostly I'm left with ironic amusement.
If I were younger, and/or had young family, maybe I'd be doing more. As it is, I spent maybe a decade working on climate change issues at an NGO. And my carbon footprint is relatively low. I don't commute, or travel long distances, I don't eat much meat, and my home is very well insulated. My main sin is running too many computers. But at least I've switched to SSDs.
If you zoomed us forward a century from today, with present day technology, and assume the worst case scenario for climate models we'd still be perfectly fine. The most impactful practical effects would be the changing of coastlines and more severe weather conditions. It's not the end of the world.
Now enter technology. Think about where we were a century ago technologically. Consider that in many ways technology today is accelerating even faster than it was then. Imagine now where we'll be in a century from now. Nobody would from 1918 would be able to guess what 2018 would look like, from a technological point of view, and I'm certain nobody in 2018 can even imagine what 2118 will look like from the same metric. I mean we are already today approaching the level of technology required to live on other planets which are completely and absolutely inhospitable. In the worst case scenarios of climate change, Earth would still be a utopia by comparison. And then enter in near future ideas like geo-engineering, atmospheric manipulation, and so on.
So I don't think it's smart to run a species level experiment on seeing what happens if we just keeping pumping out CO2, but the worst case scenario is both survivable and improbable. It could even end up changing us vastly for the better. The Black Death is something no one would have ever wanted, yet it paradoxically accelerated, if not sparked, the change that nearly everybody would have wanted of a transition away from feudal society to a more free society.
Nope. Just a strong motivation to get ready.
From where I stand in terms of worldview for my children, the 21st century looks like a race between geo-engineering and forced adaptations, inclusive of genetics, with the lowlands' populations having one chance at armed migration.
So maybe not as bad as the 20th...
The things that concern me about this are:
1. The amplifying impact that the global financial system will have on climate change. When banks feel agricultural loans are too risky, they will pull farmer credit lines, resulting in a halving of yields. This might already be happening in some places.
2. The organizations which have a mandate for resolving this problem are not fit-for-purpose. Big bloated and corrupt beaurocracies - breaking up in disarray: see the Green Climate Fund.
3. Active attempts to frustrate solutions. And I simply don’t understand why people would want to do so. Even if your livelihood is dependent on a petrol company, or similar, your families’ ultimate livelihood will be dependent on a stable climate.
For reference, I don’t think life on earth is threatened (that’s just hyperbole) but there is a high probability that the population will readjust down to 3-4 billion and this readjustment will be a rather painful down-sizing.
Here's my view on this: I've stopped caring. I don't have kids and I don't particularly care about the future of humanity. Humans will most likely ruin the planet and, at some point, due to a lack of foresight, kill themselves to extinction. After a few hundred million years, the Earth will be back in operation.
In my opinion, humans just don't do well with restriction. If politicians focus on restricting consumption of goods and energy, we'll just end up in another "general malaise"[1] like in the 1970s.
The only way this will ever get solved is through enormous amounts of clean energy (nuclear, which nobody wants) and recapturing carbon.
I feel like someone found an asteroid headed for Earth and everyone just shrugged and decided to pretend it wasn't there. People still make plans for retirement, etc. assuming the world will be the same as it is now, and it dumbfounds me. It's not just climate change deniers - it's people who agree with the science and even see that we're not doing enough, and that it may be accelerating. But apparently it's too abstract to consider it in your own life. I kind of wish it were that way for me; it would beat living in dread and fear.
Personally, I worry about a lot. Global warming, not so much. It will have an impact on coasta cities but that aside, it really isn't that big a deal. We have much bigger risks to worry about (both environmental and otherwise).
Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to?
It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything.
Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact.
So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not happen to advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives.
So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.
Could it be that the human brain just cannot relate to or care about large-scale and long-term problems without continually making a conscious effort to?
What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.
One might argue we have a failure of brains together to create responsible organizations and frameworks. But here, we have had quite a few struggles between types of organizations, with some winning and some losing. Perhaps the losers might have done better, perhaps not.
I don't think we've hit a limitation of our brains. We used to be able to build cathedrals that took dozens of years to complete. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and didn't complete its initial mission until 1989. We planted trees that we knew would take a hundred years to reach full maturity.
We don't have a cognitive failure. We have an institutional failure. The corporate system that drives most of human society today is often unable to deliver long-term projects that benefit society. The tragedy of the commons is a viable business model — the way to compete is to exploit as much of the environment as you can before the other guy does.
No, people care. But our governments are hugely messed up. Part of this is that they are still fighting the old fights of the 20th century about racism and classism and so on. In the US we're still struggling to get cities to build mass transit and teach evolution in schools. Generally everywhere in every country is still struggling to get the public to concentrate on problems that matter rather than falling for the classic scam of rallying to the cause of hating people who are different.
Climate change is only one problem, there are so many others that fall under the general outline of "act like an adult and take care of your own problems" that aren't being addressed. Flint, Michigan's water, for example, is the poster child for the fact that across the developed world there has been substantial and persistent under investment in municipal water and sanitation infrastructure. So much of the developed world is coasting along on temporary hacks put in place decades ago that are running on borrowed time. Roads and bridges are also under maintained. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
All of these things, and climate change, are solvable problems, we have the wealth and the technology to tackle these things effectively, we just don't seem to be able to organize the work effectively.
I think constructs of our society, and short-term political leadership in particular, is a bigger problem than the human brain. Politicians can and do make pledges on being committed to "the green shift" while actually choosing easy "greenwashing" solutions that they publicise heavily.
Meanwhile most of the can gets kicked down the road. And the term for a politician, even if it's 8 years, is so short that no single politician gets the blame in 50 years' time.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Motivation on this scale is very hard to manage. The free markets are the best way I know of to motivate people into action. But the best thing motivated people do is they come up with new technologies. This is where I'm pinning my hopes. I don't think this is going to be solved by governments regulating (that is needed however). It's going to be when we hit the tipping point of low carbon energy production being cheaper than coal and when batteries get cheap enough to both buffer the electrical grid and take over the role of energy storage in vehicles. Once that happens I think we'll see an asymptotic reduction in emissions. I just hope things are in a reasonable state when that happens.
I agree. Also, humans are terrible procrastinators. In my experience as a terrible procrastinator, motivation will come only when nothing else could possibly seem more important. By then, the most valuable time and opportunity to solve the problem will be long gone. Humanity will survive after pulling some half-baked solution out of its ass, but it will remember with great pain global civilization's first abject failure. After the second or third abject failure, we might start to wise up and take equilibrium seriously...
(That's one potential outcome. I think it is most likely but I also have high hopes for the tens of thousands of brilliant problem solvers focused on averting catastrophe).
From economic theory, the concept of time inconsistency [1] in my opinion explains pretty well whats currently going on:
For current governments, it is allegedly optimal to not take immediate action but to announce/commit to actions in the future. Problem is, that for the next government, the same result from the optimization problem arises.
A similar pattern can be found with nuclear waste, a problem that is known since many decades, yet there are very few permanent solutions.
The main problem with this situation is fossil fuel interests are in control.
They use tactics similar to those responsible for electing the current president of the United States. The people are not well-informed, they are drowning in misinformation and propaganda.
"someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check"
What about a price on carbon? We should put the most powerful tool created by our civilisation - our free market industrial economy - to work on our biggest challenge / opportunity. Governments need to represent their citizens to the market on this, not the other way around.
> So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.
By the time that happens, it will be decades too late, and we will be committed to several decades of altered climate. Because the atmospheric halflife of CO2 is ~30 years. And there are likely positive feedbacks.
The human animal is not cognitively adapted to cope with the world we have built.
It's quite astonishing actually when you realize how all of our tiny individual inputs made this massive machinery that individuals physically cannot truly understand the impacts of.
This is not a large scale problem, it is an individual problem, when one turns the light on, eats meat everyday, drives a car, watches tv, uses a cellphone, etc. one is part of the problem.
It is not a long term problem either, we're not talking millenia or centuries but decades. And it all started a couple lifetime ago.
A part of the problem, and perhaps a significant part, is that climate science has done a terrible job of selling itself to the public. The history of climate science is 30 years of marketing catastrophe and doomsday predictions, backed by near unanimous support from the scientific community. Sadly, it’s also 30 years of bunk predictions, and scientists appealing to a sense of impending doom, justified by the idea that overselling the evidence is worthwhile due to the importance of the cause. The consequence is that it doesn’t matter to many people whether they’re right or not, because the communication around this science has done such a remarkable job of undermining its own credibility.
How many couples will have more than one child?
How many people eat meat or fish every day?
How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away?
How many people buy huge SUVs and trucks as a status symbol when a smaller car is all they need?
Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck.
I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint to the minimum and guess what? It won't matter because by the time I have saved a few kilos of Co2 there's a douchebag with a hummer driving down the street sucking gasoline like there is no tomorrow!
And to top it off everybody thinks that the world's economy can continue to grow without any limits. I believe that as a species we are simply delusional.
Funny that this would be news in 2018 when a year after the paris COP21, at the 2016 COP22 in Morocco the matter was that we were already past the 1.5° goal and we were on course for going over 2° faster than expected which meant a possible increase of 2.5-3°
These estimation were not even taking into account the full picture and things like positive feedback loops.
That global warming is man made and likely to produce catastrophic results, seems well documented now. (possibly 10s or 100s of millions of deaths over the next 200 years, along with a number of species going extinct).
But any claims of cataclysmic outcomes (collapse of most civilizations or even extinction) seems unlikely, as far as I can tell. There are other possible events that are much more likely to produce that kind of results.
Here is my list of fears:
1. Runaway AI (>40% over the next 200 years)
2. Nuclear War (>20% over the next 200 years)
3. Runaway nanotech
4. Runaway biotech
5. Runaway, cataclysmic global warming effects (full ecosystem collapse, ice age triggered, >5 degree warming, etc)
> A promise by rich nations to provide developing nations with $100 billion a year to tackle climate change is only one part of the huge transformation needed, she added.
This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .
And even the agreed upon measures were criticized as hardly enough to affect the change we really need.
Scientists criticized the governments for making a show out of the agreements despite them being insufficient, and here they’re not even meeting those goals.
Imagine the force required to make governments do their share to prevent >2 degree shift.
There is a cost to compliance. There is a point where the damage is so incalcuable that you are compelled to force compliance on all other governments.
The comments here are so far extremely biased towards panic. It’s worth considering that perhaps the world’s governments aren’t panicking because it’s not warranted.
Climate change, while generally “accepted,” has a pretty amorphous definition and most current research agrees that there has been a pause since 1995 or so. Given that we are in a 20 year “pause,” it’s not entirely unreasonable - though clearly heretical - to posit that the alarm is largely unwarranted.
Year after year we see climate predictions fail to come to pass. Good science is based on hypotheses leading to testable predictions, and global warming predictions have a really poor track record of accuracy.
It might be time for the more scientifically minded among us to start increasing our criticism of climate alarmism.
[+] [-] Discombulator|7 years ago|reply
The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.
Note that market failure does not mean that the “market” mechanism is the cause of the failure - rather the issue is the incompleteness of information. Markets would solve this allocation problem very efficiently once the subsidy is removed. I imagine for example that most packaging using non recyclable plastics would become entirely uneconomical, and the full price of gas would be so high that industry will be incentivized to look for alternative technologies and sources of energy.
[+] [-] dorfsmay|7 years ago|reply
- super rich people have super large footprint (extremely large houses, gas guzler vehicles, private jets, etc.... Since humans are humans, they try to imitate people from the top.
- the whole SUV thing (restriction on gas consumption -> people buying trucks with sit in them -> manufacturers started to charge premium for those -> manufacturers made insane profit from those (under 1% profit on a car, up to 50% profit on large SUV) -> manufacturer using ridiculously inefficient vehicles in all their product placement and increase product placements -> people started to buy those exclusively to the point that one manufacturer completely stopped selling car)
- Industries typically pollute a lot than individual, and get away with ridiculously low fines when they do get caught.
[+] [-] mturmon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titzer|7 years ago|reply
> The straightforward - but not easy - solution is to ask governments to assess a charge on each sold item that brings the price in line with the full cost to society.
Sadly, the first blip in GDP growth and this is out the window.
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
Dirty little secret: this is deliberate. Why do you think the West closed all its heavily regulated factories and shifted manufacturing to China where environmental protection and workers rights don’t exist?
We should impose tariffs to punish imports from anywhere that isn’t up to Western standards of regulation. That’s the only way for the market to fix this.
[+] [-] marmshallow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
The hard part has obviously been justifying government intervention when there's still uncertainty. Or at least, when those with vested short-term interests can make a strong case about uncertainty. I thought at one point that the insurance industry was going to make a difference, but haven't seen much about that lately.
[+] [-] dorgo|7 years ago|reply
Are future generations going to pay same price we would today? Or are they going to get a discount due to more advanced technology?
[+] [-] bigbugbag|7 years ago|reply
But I would not say this is market failure, to me this is market working exactly as intended and expected: maximizing profit without caring for the rest.
On the other hand, it is not a question of subsidy/handout paid by future generation anymore, we're now at the point where it is a matter of going over the threshold effect where the consequence will be no human life possible on earth in a matter of decades.
[+] [-] RickJWagner|7 years ago|reply
Pop bottles carried a .05 charge on each bottle, refunded when the empty bottle was returned to the store. Careless consumers (litterers) might just throw the bottles out. Likewise lazy consumers might decide it's 'beneath them' to bring back the empties. But for hungry young scavengers like myself (had to pay for 'Space Invaders' somehow) it was a great source of income.
I'd be glad to see the same idea scaled up.
[+] [-] easytiger|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fogetti|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pygy_|7 years ago|reply
So we'd keep the "decentralized resource allocation" part of capitalism, but with hopefully better sustainability...
[+] [-] qqqwwweeerrr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awestroke|7 years ago|reply
It's very jarring to read information from experts and scentific reports on where we're heading and at the same time everyone in the media and all people around me just ignore the problem completely except some comments now and then that reveal how greatly they underestimate the problem. If you start trying to talk about how severe our problems are becoming, you may be labeled a conspiracy theorist / "prepper" and your opinion thrown out the window.
[+] [-] hackerbabz|7 years ago|reply
If any train of thought leads you to this point, you have a medical problem, regardless of what you are thinking about. Fortunately, I was able to get help and had fantastic support from my family and friends.
Today I'm off medicine and therapy. I still have bad times lasting 1 - 2 weeks, but never to the point that I can't live.
The important thing that I'm able to see now (even when my anxiety is back) is that everything that is important without climate change, is important with climate change. Even though the world is ending (I am not hopeful), I can still find love, learn new things, see the world, enjoy good food, risk my life, make money, enjoy art, and play sports. You can substitute into that list anything that brings you joy. You can also include fighting climate change in that list.
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
If I were younger, and/or had young family, maybe I'd be doing more. As it is, I spent maybe a decade working on climate change issues at an NGO. And my carbon footprint is relatively low. I don't commute, or travel long distances, I don't eat much meat, and my home is very well insulated. My main sin is running too many computers. But at least I've switched to SSDs.
[+] [-] TangoTrotFox|7 years ago|reply
Now enter technology. Think about where we were a century ago technologically. Consider that in many ways technology today is accelerating even faster than it was then. Imagine now where we'll be in a century from now. Nobody would from 1918 would be able to guess what 2018 would look like, from a technological point of view, and I'm certain nobody in 2018 can even imagine what 2118 will look like from the same metric. I mean we are already today approaching the level of technology required to live on other planets which are completely and absolutely inhospitable. In the worst case scenarios of climate change, Earth would still be a utopia by comparison. And then enter in near future ideas like geo-engineering, atmospheric manipulation, and so on.
So I don't think it's smart to run a species level experiment on seeing what happens if we just keeping pumping out CO2, but the worst case scenario is both survivable and improbable. It could even end up changing us vastly for the better. The Black Death is something no one would have ever wanted, yet it paradoxically accelerated, if not sparked, the change that nearly everybody would have wanted of a transition away from feudal society to a more free society.
[+] [-] polotics|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GreeniFi|7 years ago|reply
For reference, I don’t think life on earth is threatened (that’s just hyperbole) but there is a high probability that the population will readjust down to 3-4 billion and this readjustment will be a rather painful down-sizing.
[+] [-] hfdgiutdryg|7 years ago|reply
In my opinion, humans just don't do well with restriction. If politicians focus on restricting consumption of goods and energy, we'll just end up in another "general malaise"[1] like in the 1970s.
The only way this will ever get solved is through enormous amounts of clean energy (nuclear, which nobody wants) and recapturing carbon.
[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106508...
[+] [-] batiudrami|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalRobert|7 years ago|reply
I feel like someone found an asteroid headed for Earth and everyone just shrugged and decided to pretend it wasn't there. People still make plans for retirement, etc. assuming the world will be the same as it is now, and it dumbfounds me. It's not just climate change deniers - it's people who agree with the science and even see that we're not doing enough, and that it may be accelerating. But apparently it's too abstract to consider it in your own life. I kind of wish it were that way for me; it would beat living in dread and fear.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ummonk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unpopular42|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|7 years ago|reply
It seems that as long as our immediate lives are good enough, we're fine with everything.
Does that make our species incapable of expanding beyond our home planet let alone the solar system? Because those undertakings require a fundamental reconfiguration of how we operate and interact.
So far the best "hack" we've found for keeping things going is money: Someone finds a way to make money from projects that may or may not happen to advance the species as a whole, convinces people to work on those projects with the offer of money, and those people use money to improve their immediate lives.
So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|7 years ago|reply
What we are experiencing is a failure of particular institutions - government, industry, NGOs, Intergovernmental organizations etc. What an average brain might or might not care or related-to is a significant distance from this.
One might argue we have a failure of brains together to create responsible organizations and frameworks. But here, we have had quite a few struggles between types of organizations, with some winning and some losing. Perhaps the losers might have done better, perhaps not.
[+] [-] munificent|7 years ago|reply
We don't have a cognitive failure. We have an institutional failure. The corporate system that drives most of human society today is often unable to deliver long-term projects that benefit society. The tragedy of the commons is a viable business model — the way to compete is to exploit as much of the environment as you can before the other guy does.
[+] [-] InclinedPlane|7 years ago|reply
Climate change is only one problem, there are so many others that fall under the general outline of "act like an adult and take care of your own problems" that aren't being addressed. Flint, Michigan's water, for example, is the poster child for the fact that across the developed world there has been substantial and persistent under investment in municipal water and sanitation infrastructure. So much of the developed world is coasting along on temporary hacks put in place decades ago that are running on borrowed time. Roads and bridges are also under maintained. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
All of these things, and climate change, are solvable problems, we have the wealth and the technology to tackle these things effectively, we just don't seem to be able to organize the work effectively.
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|7 years ago|reply
Meanwhile most of the can gets kicked down the road. And the term for a politician, even if it's 8 years, is so short that no single politician gets the blame in 50 years' time.
[+] [-] xupybd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heurist|7 years ago|reply
(That's one potential outcome. I think it is most likely but I also have high hopes for the tens of thousands of brilliant problem solvers focused on averting catastrophe).
[+] [-] dafrie|7 years ago|reply
For current governments, it is allegedly optimal to not take immediate action but to announce/commit to actions in the future. Problem is, that for the next government, the same result from the optimization problem arises.
A similar pattern can be found with nuclear waste, a problem that is known since many decades, yet there are very few permanent solutions.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_inconsistency
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
They use tactics similar to those responsible for electing the current president of the United States. The people are not well-informed, they are drowning in misinformation and propaganda.
[+] [-] fineline|7 years ago|reply
What about a price on carbon? We should put the most powerful tool created by our civilisation - our free market industrial economy - to work on our biggest challenge / opportunity. Governments need to represent their citizens to the market on this, not the other way around.
[+] [-] mirimir|7 years ago|reply
> So until someone needs to find a way to make money from keeping climate change in check, there's probably nothing to be done about it until it directly impacts people's ability to make money and affects their immediate lives.
By the time that happens, it will be decades too late, and we will be committed to several decades of altered climate. Because the atmospheric halflife of CO2 is ~30 years. And there are likely positive feedbacks.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|7 years ago|reply
It's quite astonishing actually when you realize how all of our tiny individual inputs made this massive machinery that individuals physically cannot truly understand the impacts of.
[+] [-] bigbugbag|7 years ago|reply
It is not a long term problem either, we're not talking millenia or centuries but decades. And it all started a couple lifetime ago.
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdm_blackhole|7 years ago|reply
How many couples will have more than one child? How many people eat meat or fish every day? How many people drive their car to the corner store less than a mile away? How many people buy huge SUVs and trucks as a status symbol when a smaller car is all they need?
Governments won't solve this issue. We the consumers have to solve it, the problem is that nobody gives a fuck.
I have tried to reduce my carbon footprint to the minimum and guess what? It won't matter because by the time I have saved a few kilos of Co2 there's a douchebag with a hummer driving down the street sucking gasoline like there is no tomorrow!
And to top it off everybody thinks that the world's economy can continue to grow without any limits. I believe that as a species we are simply delusional.
[+] [-] bigbugbag|7 years ago|reply
These estimation were not even taking into account the full picture and things like positive feedback loops.
[+] [-] trashtester|7 years ago|reply
But any claims of cataclysmic outcomes (collapse of most civilizations or even extinction) seems unlikely, as far as I can tell. There are other possible events that are much more likely to produce that kind of results.
Here is my list of fears: 1. Runaway AI (>40% over the next 200 years) 2. Nuclear War (>20% over the next 200 years) 3. Runaway nanotech 4. Runaway biotech 5. Runaway, cataclysmic global warming effects (full ecosystem collapse, ice age triggered, >5 degree warming, etc)
[+] [-] zaro|7 years ago|reply
This sounds like a joke when the military budgets are in the trillions. But on the other hand when poor countries become inhabitable and people start moving military will be needed to push them back .
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|7 years ago|reply
Scientists criticized the governments for making a show out of the agreements despite them being insufficient, and here they’re not even meeting those goals.
[+] [-] zaroth|7 years ago|reply
There is a cost to compliance. There is a point where the damage is so incalcuable that you are compelled to force compliance on all other governments.
[+] [-] newnewpdro|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_the_Flood_(film)
[+] [-] wrong_variable|7 years ago|reply
Best way to protect yourself is to invest in real estate up north and in inland parts of the world.
[
The time horizon is too long though, I wish 4 degree warming happened much quicker so that I can reap the rewards of my investment earlier. /s.
]
[+] [-] thenewewb|7 years ago|reply
Climate change, while generally “accepted,” has a pretty amorphous definition and most current research agrees that there has been a pause since 1995 or so. Given that we are in a 20 year “pause,” it’s not entirely unreasonable - though clearly heretical - to posit that the alarm is largely unwarranted.
Year after year we see climate predictions fail to come to pass. Good science is based on hypotheses leading to testable predictions, and global warming predictions have a really poor track record of accuracy.
It might be time for the more scientifically minded among us to start increasing our criticism of climate alarmism.