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It's funny of folks throw around percentage growth figures and fail to acknowledge the depths of the problem, and how little that actually does to reduce our CO2 output.



Nobody is denying how serious climate change is.  Frankly, it does look terribly bleak.  However, don't disparage me because I choose to believe there is still hope.

As a brief follow-up to my above post: I don't believe the "Green New Deal" as drafted is the right solution, but the concept is the right one: major investment in infrastructure that both creates economic wealth in the Keynesian sense, and addresses CO2 emissions. 

Many of you have put more detailed thought into this issue than I have. My high-level understanding of the issue that faces us boils down to this, I think:

1) We can be certain enough that we (mankind) are causing climate change that we should be obligated to act to address it. As CD says, 90% should do it.

2) While the cost studies are imprecise, there is a very real cost to unmitigated climate change that will likely dwarf expenditures we could take now to attempt to combat it. Among those costs are social instability and warfare that come from dramatically shifting availability of resources.

3) Policy makers rarely seem willing to address those future costs.

4) We, as a people (and probably not just in the United States) seem to have no understanding of how our behavior impacts CO2 emissions. The cost of making and transporting an item is something we have very little concept of even without the inclusion of the carbon footprints associated with those activities. So although we may know the price of beef consumption in dollars, we have no grasp of its CO2 footprint (nor the footprint related to streaming video on our mobile devices).

5) The only currently realistic way to generate enough energy to reduce our CO2 emissions enough is widespread new nuclear production. However, because of the catastrophic risks associated with melt down (and other potential disasters/security issues), and the high capital investment required to build nuclear plants, there is no appetite to build nuclear infrastructure. Moreover, the people who are politically most motivated to address climate change--the Democratic left--are also generally opposed to nuclear energy. That's a difficult hill to climb. Similar to the disposal of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain (or anywhere else like it), there is an ideological purity that makes perfect the enemy of the good, and demands the impossible rather than accepting the flaws inherent what is possible.

6) There are major economic interests in many sectors of our economy that would suffer if we took a serious look at CO2 emission reductions: those include energy production (primarily oil and gas--coal is populist red meat, and already economically lost), transportation, food production, and even manufacturing, because transportation of foreign-made goods is a serious issue contributing to our CO2 footprint.

Which brings me to my final, depressing point. We likely know what we have to do to accomplish the reduction of our CO2 output to a level that isn't extremely dangerous to us as a species, and even more our current cultural identities, but we don't have the political will because it will be very disruptive to our current socio-economic structure. The saddest part about this is that many of the changes we could make--building nuclear power, updating our power grid, updating our transportation infrastructure (including a transition to a bigger rail-hub system and electric vehicles for final distribution), and including CO2 emission in the cost of producing goods (which would assist in returning more manufacturing to the United States), and changing our dietary standards (less meat, fewer processed foods)--would provide overall benefit to us as a nation beyond merely reducing our emissions and addressing the climate crisis.

Nonetheless, marshaling the political will to take on these important tasks seems beyond our current capability. One of the--but hardly the only--reasons for that is the powerful economic interests opposed to what they will lose if we make a significant investment in addressing climate change. While the oil and gas industry leads that charge, it is not alone.

1-5 are absolutely spot on.

6 is a bit more cloudy, but more accurate than I want to admit.

At this moment, I think the only real option is for humanity to find some type of cheap alternate source for energy storage and production. 

Sure, but most people who study leadership believe that mission statements matter. Heck, it's the second paragraph of the Army's five paragraph operations order--it comes before the execution part, because you need to know what you want to do to figure out how you are going to do it.

Sure, but most people who study leadership believe that mission statements matter. Heck, it's the second paragraph of the Army's five paragraph operations order--it comes before the execution part, because you need to know what you want to do to figure out how you are going to do it.

very true, but we've had the mission statement for a while
it's obviously time for execution and we don't even have a plan yet

also, who set the number at 2 degrees Celsius?  Any chance it could be 3 degrees and more achievable?  but still ward off extinction 

1) We can be certain enough that we (mankind) are causing climate change that we should be obligated to act to address it. As CD says, 90% should do it.

2) While the cost studies are imprecise, there is a very real cost to unmitigated climate change that will likely dwarf expenditures we could take now to attempt to combat it. Among those costs are social instability and warfare that come from dramatically shifting availability of resources.

I just want to stop on the bolded part. 

We should only be obligated to act to address it if #2 is true. Unless we can prove #2 at a high confidence level, and that it will dwarf expenditures we can take now to avoid it OR take down the road to mitigate it.

Which means we need to model a range of outcomes and determine probability. If we're talking about extinction-level or mass-starvation disruptions from climate change, then it justifies nearly any amount of effort to mitigate it. If we're talking about economic dislocation spread over the course of a century, but we can fundamentally continue feeding 7-10B people, sometimes you make a choice that the economic growth we generate now will effectively "pay for" the ability to mitigate things in the future.

People talk about all the amazing economic opportunities in green energy, but if we're shuttering useful energy production and claiming the great economic benefit of green energy, it's just the broken window fallacy. That economic activity could go into other things to make our lives better.  

I think that my confidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that we're warming the earth, quite frankly, is a good measure ABOVE 90%. 

It's when you start getting into trying to figure out how bad warming is, economically, and trying to compare that to the economic opportunity cost of focusing on incentivizing green energy over what the world could otherwise inventing to improve the world? I'm not sure I know the answers there.

Therefore I can't say that because we're causing warming, we should be obligated to stop. 

tanks