This is the basic premise behind cap + trade, is it not?
Well neither of them matter at all individually but both of them matter a lot in aggregate. “Trying to exert influence or gain power over the decisions of others is more effective than agonizing over your own decisions” is obviously true in both cases.
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Gotta say I am on Team Wife here, this guy sounds insufferable.
Peter and Sharon’s friends came over to meet and bless their baby, Braird, shortly after he was born in June 2006. All the guests went around the room offering wishes for the child. When Peter’s turn came, he said he hoped that his son didn’t get shot at in climate-induced barbarity and that he did not starve.
Peter and Sharon rented a house with a big avocado tree when they moved to California, in 2008, for Peter’s dream postdoc studying gravitational waves at Caltech. Braird was 2 and Sharon was nursing newborn Zane. Peter and Sharon had both come from families with four kids, and they didn’t want Braird to be an only child — and having a child when you want one is also immeasurably wonderful, too wonderful, in this case, to give up. (They did later decide to forgo a third.)
So you’re putting two entirely new developed-world carbon footprints on the planet, even after developing climate wokeness, and your plan for offsetting this is to shit in your backyard. Fuck off.
The real giveaway of a messiah complex is here:
In 2012, Peter switched fields, from astrophysics to earth science, because he just couldn’t stop obsessing.
You’re obsessed with climate change and your plan is to study earth sciences? Why? Seems to me like the only answer to this that you think you’re going to change the world with the fearsome power of your mind. If you feel like you want to devote your life to climate change the answer is activism and/or politics, but this guy can’t do either because he is a miserable shithead who does things like this:
He organized climate cafes, modeled on death cafes, places for people to gather to share grief
And this:
Before the pandemic, Peter stood on the sidelines of Braird’s soccer games when it was 113 degrees. “And I’d be telling the other parents: This is climate change,” he said. “And, you know, they don’t want to hear that during a soccer game. But I can’t not do it. I can’t.”
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It’s not even close though. You can probably easily cut your carbon in half and cut something like 1/50 millionth of Australia’s emissions. Or you can vote and there’s a one in my calculator literally won’t go that high a chance in being the deciding vote between some options that probably don’t make a very big difference.
What you’re arguing here is that 2 x 10^-50 is a larger number than 1 x 10^-50. I agree with that. It’s just that they’re both still basically zero.
Again, yes individually, no in aggregate. Personally boycotting a company does nothing. Successfully organising a larger-scale boycott is potentially useful.
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I don’t get this line at all. 1 out of 50million is not zero. It’s just not. It’s what you are and what you can do. Collectively? Well, it’s your share. It does a bit and you’re one out of a lot of people. I mean you could install devices that make energy from the sun for a living and do a bit more, but still, cutting your footprint in half absolutely is not nothing.
Very interesting read and it really gets at the core of the struggle we all face. As one person I have little or no real impact on the environment. So we all choose to ignore it to one extent or another. It’s too hard to really bear the reality of what is happening.
I spent 5 days on Santa Rosa Island in Channel Islands NP this last week. There were less than 60 humans each night tent camping on a 53,000 acre island. You had to hike your trash out which encouraged us all to be very conscious of what we took and used. We had well less than a pound of waste in that time period. At home we routinely have much much more. Also comparing this:
To this on a mainland Cali beach a few days later:
was really stunning and scary to me.
I’ll let you guess which one had an abundant ecosystem of all kinds of animal and plant life and which one didn’t. They were literally less than 100 miles apart.
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Well, you got me playing the picture game, but I can’t name that pier.
My wife grew up going to Pismo Beach. So she wanted to go there for a day. I was not a fan although we had a nice day.
Thanks for this! I joined a “CSA” (community supported agriculture) initiative with a small local market by my place. I’ll be picking up curated veggies and fruits every Thursday for the remainder of the spring/summer. All from local farms. I ended up paying $200, which doesn’t seem like a bad deal at all.
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Or communism
The reason I didn’t say that is that you’re about to get no true Scotsman’ed to death and I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. Besides I’d argue that what we all called communism in the 20th century was really just authoritarianism, which to be fair is alive, well, and probably going to ultimately triumph. Actual communism breaks as soon as the organization becomes large enough to attract people with personality disorders to it like bees to pollen. Then it turns into a communism flavored authoritarianism almost immediately.
Authoritarianism vs Democracy is one of the major conflicts we’re going to see resolved over the next hundred years or so. Right now I think Authoritarianism is a heavy favorite. Democracy is just way too slow for the pace of the modern world I suspect. Slow is weak in 2021.
The big thing that needs to happen wrt capitalism is that people need to accept that it has major flaws that require a major government role to make functional. Everyone can see that now, and it’s time to stop arguing about whether the government should be involved and start arguing about what that involvement should look like. If someone wants to have the old argument about whether the government should be involved anymore I pretty much nope out. I just can’t take them seriously anymore.
I am still reading through the thread, but my take on 20th century communism being uniquely authoritarian is a feature not a bug of the system.
This is it. And as soon as people realize (I would say now-ish) that what they actually want and need right now is sustainability that will lead to what we are already seeing the seeds of: Ford committing to all-electronic production by 2030, for example.
What happens to prices when nothing is developed to scale for billions of people?
It’s not just climate change though. We have been underpricing raw materials for generations. What we need is for the whole civilization to start optimizing supply chains around the efficient use of matter. It’s doable to have standards of living in the same band we occupy now, but it is going to require figuring out how to pay the people at the bottom well enough to live a sustainable life. I think the answer is just UBI. We’re in the process of getting rid of every job that is repetitive task oriented, which is a large portion of them. We know that in the future there are going to be more people than there are ‘productive’ jobs to do, and we also know that people go completely insane when they don’t have something to feel productive doing… so I suspect there’s going to be a lot more hand crafted shit in the world, and that shit needs to be created not because it’s worth what was put into it, but because the person who crafted it felt good crafting it. In that universe a minimum wage isn’t going to work.
So we just give everyone enough money to enjoy the normal standard of living. The people with ‘productive’ (read at a production bottleneck that still requires humans) jobs still get to have an even plusher lifestyle because that’s what motivates a lot of people to do something that isn’t anywhere near as fun as the barely for pay competing to be fun jobs.
And that would be a perfectly acceptable world. It’s where I think we almost have to be headed at this point. Continuing to pay people peanuts to do back breaking labor isn’t necessary or sustainable. We could pay them pretty well and still have a good sized profit. The way to force employers to pay them well is to remove the boot from their neck and allow them to just walk away from the pay negotiation if it isn’t worth what they’re being offered (and it isn’t).
There’s really no remotely defensible reason for there to be poverty in a nation that produces 65k per capita in GDP… and the real reason we have it is so that employers can have a labor force that has no choice but to run a brutal race to the bottom with the other normies judged solely on who will do the most for the least and shut up about it.
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What do you think about seeding the initial funding for UBI from a carbon tax levied on producers? Kind of a backdoor corporate tax.
I want to see it as a full bore VAT honestly. I also want to see carbon taxed at 200/ton and paid out in addition to the VAT paid basic income. Both the VAT and the Carbon tax are naturally regressive, which is why the best way to make them not regressive is to pay out everyone exactly the same and have it be enough money that literally zero people are living in what we would call poverty today.
Then from that base individual citizens can venture forth and figure out what they want to do with their lives. Expect a lot more robots in contemporary service jobs, and be happy about it instead of worried about what those people will do for food and shelter now.
Actually I tried to work out how much of an average American’s carbon footprint this saved and came up with some astonishing number like 20%. Maybe I screwed something up. I’d always understood that car choices matter less than it feels like they should because of how much of the transportation sector is stuff other than personally owned cars, but maybe I’m wrong about that.
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