"climate adaptation"
February 5, 2023 10:52 AM Subscribe
African Shifts Report has extensive data, projections, stories, and even a documentary about climate forced mobility in Africa. "By mid-century, under the high emissions and inequitable development scenario, internal climate mobility is predicted to reach [between 88 and 113] million people on African continent", despite mobility being universally "a response of last resort" (tweet summary).
It's an order of magnitude fewer people projected to migrate between African countries, but those numbers represent much more traumatic moves.
It's an order of magnitude fewer people projected to migrate between African countries, but those numbers represent much more traumatic moves.
Good to know, derrinyet.
posted by doctornemo at 1:53 PM on February 5, 2023
posted by doctornemo at 1:53 PM on February 5, 2023
By mid-century, under the high emissions and inequitable development scenario, internal climate mobility is predicted to reach 88 million people on the continent. Taking account of existing uncertainties, it could reach as high as 113 million people.
This is one of the major effects of climate change.
And we are so not ready for it.
posted by doctornemo at 1:54 PM on February 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
This is one of the major effects of climate change.
And we are so not ready for it.
posted by doctornemo at 1:54 PM on February 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
The absence of reference to the main things that are actually going to be needed to maintain the population of an ACG-impacted Africa - massive increases in power and utility capacity for desalinization and air conditioning, conversion to high-temperature-suitable industrial agriculture from current low-productivity models - is striking. Do they not actually realize this, or would it displease their grantmakers to see them acknowledge those realizations?
posted by MattD at 2:17 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by MattD at 2:17 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
massive increases in power and utility capacity for desalinization and air conditioning, conversion to high-temperature-suitable industrial agriculture from current low-productivity models
You're assuming this is what Africa needs.
What Africa needs is for people outside Africa to stop assuming that they know what Africa needs.
posted by happyinmotion at 2:41 PM on February 5, 2023 [7 favorites]
You're assuming this is what Africa needs.
What Africa needs is for people outside Africa to stop assuming that they know what Africa needs.
posted by happyinmotion at 2:41 PM on February 5, 2023 [7 favorites]
Massive increases in desalinization and air conditioning capacity are what everywhere south of Canada and Russia is probably going to need, not just Africa.
posted by MattD at 3:04 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by MattD at 3:04 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
This is one of the major effects of climate change.
And we are so not ready for it.
Not to be too cynical here, but many large, wealthy nations seem to be working very hard to get ready for it—to judge by the rise, use, and iteration of drone and robot warfare, to say nothing of growth industries like private prisons, concentration camps, and ubiquitous surveillance. There are many ways to respond to instability, not all charitable or communally minded.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:16 PM on February 5, 2023 [14 favorites]
And we are so not ready for it.
Not to be too cynical here, but many large, wealthy nations seem to be working very hard to get ready for it—to judge by the rise, use, and iteration of drone and robot warfare, to say nothing of growth industries like private prisons, concentration camps, and ubiquitous surveillance. There are many ways to respond to instability, not all charitable or communally minded.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:16 PM on February 5, 2023 [14 favorites]
And we are so not ready for it.
I suspect that, in the wealthy countries, the hardening of already hard borders, the ubiquity of unavoidable surveillance and the increasing authoritarianism of almost every government suggests that someone is getting ready for it.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:17 PM on February 5, 2023 [7 favorites]
I suspect that, in the wealthy countries, the hardening of already hard borders, the ubiquity of unavoidable surveillance and the increasing authoritarianism of almost every government suggests that someone is getting ready for it.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:17 PM on February 5, 2023 [7 favorites]
Afaik India, Pakistan, and likely Africa mostly need the US, China, Europe, etc. to stop burning coal, oil, and gas, and stop eating meat.
A desalination plant needs "$25,000 of electricity per month to produce enough water for 1,200 [coastal] homes" at 2015 prices in CA, so way more now, and way more if you pipe it inland. Africans paying $1000 per person per month for water is laughable, even assuming cheaper local labor in the power plant.
Agriculture needs vastly more water than people of course, so desalination cannot feed agriculture even in rich western countries, except maybe the personal green houses of a few billionares.
After some renewable energy transition then yeah maybe we'd have excess daytime solar power for limited desalination and air conditioning, but our only viable near-term desalination tool is biotic pump effect of large dense forests. We either save those big forests, or else billions of people die.
Will Steffen has helpful remarks in his talk on the planetary boundaries update about the land-use boundary and which large forest matter most for our water cycle.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:44 PM on February 5, 2023 [8 favorites]
A desalination plant needs "$25,000 of electricity per month to produce enough water for 1,200 [coastal] homes" at 2015 prices in CA, so way more now, and way more if you pipe it inland. Africans paying $1000 per person per month for water is laughable, even assuming cheaper local labor in the power plant.
Agriculture needs vastly more water than people of course, so desalination cannot feed agriculture even in rich western countries, except maybe the personal green houses of a few billionares.
After some renewable energy transition then yeah maybe we'd have excess daytime solar power for limited desalination and air conditioning, but our only viable near-term desalination tool is biotic pump effect of large dense forests. We either save those big forests, or else billions of people die.
Will Steffen has helpful remarks in his talk on the planetary boundaries update about the land-use boundary and which large forest matter most for our water cycle.
posted by jeffburdges at 3:44 PM on February 5, 2023 [8 favorites]
Afaik India, Pakistan, and likely Africa mostly need the US, China, Europe, etc. to stop burning coal, oil, and gas, and stop eating meat.
India burns more coal than every country except China. That's partly because their population is so large. Per capita, they are not even in the top 30. (South Africa is #7 on the list no matter which way you look at it. )
I'm not sure what that means--certainly every country should burn less coal, oil, and gas, and maybe India should try to stem its population growth.
Where I live, California, we've banned coal plants. But in terms of water, most of the public is pretty clueless and people continue to move to LA, despite the fact that the entire area is basically a desert and getting drier every year.
(This year seems to be an exception--let's hope the rain continues for a while).
posted by eye of newt at 4:28 PM on February 5, 2023
India burns more coal than every country except China. That's partly because their population is so large. Per capita, they are not even in the top 30. (South Africa is #7 on the list no matter which way you look at it. )
I'm not sure what that means--certainly every country should burn less coal, oil, and gas, and maybe India should try to stem its population growth.
Where I live, California, we've banned coal plants. But in terms of water, most of the public is pretty clueless and people continue to move to LA, despite the fact that the entire area is basically a desert and getting drier every year.
(This year seems to be an exception--let's hope the rain continues for a while).
posted by eye of newt at 4:28 PM on February 5, 2023
We'd a thread about billionaire prepers last September btw, cupcakeninja & thatwhichfalls. Yeah, there is "government continuity" preparation I guess, but they'd do this anyways I think. We'll see cleaverer decisions when governments really prepare, but some US actions fit, like disentangling themselves or kneecapping rivals.
posted by jeffburdges at 4:33 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by jeffburdges at 4:33 PM on February 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
On the European side, the oh-so-enlightened leaders of the EU are preparing by creating a massive web of agreements with non-EU states and private military contractors to prevent refugees and migrants from reaching the promised land and claiming their legal right to asylum there.
posted by derrinyet at 5:56 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by derrinyet at 5:56 PM on February 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
air conditioning
Eh, there are building techniques in the Sahel using banco (more or less mud bricks) that is similar to adobe, and it creates spaces that are downright chilly when it's 100+ degrees out. Air conditioning is only needed when you build with concrete and other materials less suitable to the climate.
Anyway, out of curiosity is anyone else having trouble navigating the site? A lot of the pages won't load for me - but looks interesting, thanks for posting.
posted by coffeecat at 6:42 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
Eh, there are building techniques in the Sahel using banco (more or less mud bricks) that is similar to adobe, and it creates spaces that are downright chilly when it's 100+ degrees out. Air conditioning is only needed when you build with concrete and other materials less suitable to the climate.
Anyway, out of curiosity is anyone else having trouble navigating the site? A lot of the pages won't load for me - but looks interesting, thanks for posting.
posted by coffeecat at 6:42 PM on February 5, 2023 [4 favorites]
You're not going to get high population and energy densities without air conditioning. There's no lost art of construction that lets you build anything even as dense as a midrise apartment building in high-heat, high-humidity, low-wind areas without some way of moving heat in ways heat doesn't naturally want to go.
Which is fine, really, because we're pretty good at refrigeration and have been making it increasingly efficient for well over a century. The advantages of density, in almost every environment on the planet, outweigh the downsides, which is why people are moving to cities and will continue to do so over the coming decades.
If there's one use for hydrocarbon gas that's a reasonable excuse for pumping it out of the ground, it's as a refrigerant. (Propane works surprisingly well. There's an argument—that I am not well-read-up on enough to judge—that it's only not widely used in the US because the companies that make refrigerants want a market for the synthetics they spent a lot of money developing, and natural hydrocarbons will probably take over in the long run.) And refrigeration systems scale well enough that there's probably a density level where 'district cooling' systems start to make sense, just like district heating.
Energy usage and technology are not intrinsically bad, and minimizing energy use for the sake of minimizing use can be shortsighted; there are situations where expending energy should be seen like a capital expense, allowing a return-on-investment (to the community) in the creation of urban environments that allow for activity that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
This is, IMO, the most salient reason why market-based solutions to drive energy conservation aren't enough. They tend to push the cost and responsibility down to the lowest level—the consumer—where all someone can do is flip a switch on and off, and has no realistic ability to participate in economies of scale.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:53 PM on February 5, 2023 [5 favorites]
Which is fine, really, because we're pretty good at refrigeration and have been making it increasingly efficient for well over a century. The advantages of density, in almost every environment on the planet, outweigh the downsides, which is why people are moving to cities and will continue to do so over the coming decades.
If there's one use for hydrocarbon gas that's a reasonable excuse for pumping it out of the ground, it's as a refrigerant. (Propane works surprisingly well. There's an argument—that I am not well-read-up on enough to judge—that it's only not widely used in the US because the companies that make refrigerants want a market for the synthetics they spent a lot of money developing, and natural hydrocarbons will probably take over in the long run.) And refrigeration systems scale well enough that there's probably a density level where 'district cooling' systems start to make sense, just like district heating.
Energy usage and technology are not intrinsically bad, and minimizing energy use for the sake of minimizing use can be shortsighted; there are situations where expending energy should be seen like a capital expense, allowing a return-on-investment (to the community) in the creation of urban environments that allow for activity that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
This is, IMO, the most salient reason why market-based solutions to drive energy conservation aren't enough. They tend to push the cost and responsibility down to the lowest level—the consumer—where all someone can do is flip a switch on and off, and has no realistic ability to participate in economies of scale.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:53 PM on February 5, 2023 [5 favorites]
We should adapt to exploit energy whenever available from solar and wind, but not use much energy otherwise, and not from fossil fuels, so air conditioning, trains, factories, server farms, etc. run when the sun shines or the wind blows, but all shut down when power becomes scarce.
We do need some refrigeration run all the time, like medical supplies. We must stop eating meat anyways though, which makes food refrigeration much more flexible. It's enough for vegetables if a small grocery in your apartment building's basement has some horizontal coolers, which store owner only open when making sales, and only when power is cheap. It's resource sharing like this which makes cities more efficient.
prompt: "post apocalyptic city of Berlin in ruins, surround by a desert."
posted by jeffburdges at 4:08 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
We do need some refrigeration run all the time, like medical supplies. We must stop eating meat anyways though, which makes food refrigeration much more flexible. It's enough for vegetables if a small grocery in your apartment building's basement has some horizontal coolers, which store owner only open when making sales, and only when power is cheap. It's resource sharing like this which makes cities more efficient.
prompt: "post apocalyptic city of Berlin in ruins, surround by a desert."
posted by jeffburdges at 4:08 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
Eh, there are building techniques in the Sahel using banco (more or less mud bricks) that is similar to adobe, and it creates spaces that are downright chilly when it's 100+ degrees out. Air conditioning is only needed when you build with concrete and other materials less suitable to the climate.There’s some truth to this and we should definitely be using things like passive cooling where possible, but it’s also important to remember that we’re heading into uncharted territory for a lot of places with a lot more people than there used to be.
For example, a lot of the traditional construction using thick earthen walls depends on releasing stored heat overnight, so that doesn’t work if overnight lows stop reliably being under the threshold where there’s enough time; if a warmer climate brings considerably more moisture than it used to, that strategy will need adjusting either because the air stores more heat and sheds it slower or because packed earthworks are harder to keep stable with significant rainfall. Even if there’s a straightforward solution, that doesn’t mean there are people with time, skill, and supplies to do the work.
Similarly, the global population growth has coincided with the population becoming more urban and climate problems have a history of exacerbating that as subsistence farmers are turned into refugees. Traditional techniques often require fair amounts of space and even if that’s available it doesn’t mean there’s an easy way to convert the kind of structures millions of people are living in now to something better suited to the changing climate, especially if you consider the number of people who are especially vulnerable. If keeping your parents alive requires AC, people are going to get one if they possibly can.
That doesn’t mean giving up on smarter building design, of course, and one nice thing here is that a lot of the most affected regions have favorable solar conditions while modern heat pumps keep getting more efficient. It should be easier to cool a better adapted building than the kind of inefficient tract homes the U.S. carpeted the Southwest with during the era where it was assumed that cheap AC was a birthright.
posted by adamsc at 10:33 AM on February 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
"conversion to high-temperature-suitable industrial agriculture "
See also
Faster than light space ship.
Time Machine.
Does not exist. Really. People seem to think that naming a thing means that thing can exist or does exist.
I suppose if you mean crop with optimums of 30C replaced with 34C... then ok. But crops with optimums of 34C replaced with 38C 40C and at what humidity? We don't have a large palatte of species that even survive at the conditions we are creating let alone actually grow during those conditions to produce useable nutrative biomass.
Nature didnt have to produce high-wet bulb temp crops, the "tropical" crops and "desert" crops of yesteryear also die in heatwaves and droughts. No useable crops live in autoclaves.
When the weather forecaster says "record high temps" that also means unprecidented heat for the domesticated and wild plants that spent the last 10,000 years acclimatizing to a stable climate that is gone. GMO all the heat-shock proteins you want, make all the drought "resistant" crosses you want.
/rant
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 11:57 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
See also
Faster than light space ship.
Time Machine.
Does not exist. Really. People seem to think that naming a thing means that thing can exist or does exist.
I suppose if you mean crop with optimums of 30C replaced with 34C... then ok. But crops with optimums of 34C replaced with 38C 40C and at what humidity? We don't have a large palatte of species that even survive at the conditions we are creating let alone actually grow during those conditions to produce useable nutrative biomass.
Nature didnt have to produce high-wet bulb temp crops, the "tropical" crops and "desert" crops of yesteryear also die in heatwaves and droughts. No useable crops live in autoclaves.
When the weather forecaster says "record high temps" that also means unprecidented heat for the domesticated and wild plants that spent the last 10,000 years acclimatizing to a stable climate that is gone. GMO all the heat-shock proteins you want, make all the drought "resistant" crosses you want.
/rant
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 11:57 AM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthermophile
OK, i stand corrected, theres some bacteria that can survive and grow. So we maybe "impossible burgers" and quorn will be the new swarma.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:03 PM on February 6, 2023
OK, i stand corrected, theres some bacteria that can survive and grow. So we maybe "impossible burgers" and quorn will be the new swarma.
posted by anecdotal_grand_theory at 12:03 PM on February 6, 2023
As for California, cow feed like alfalfa is the top cause of water shortages around the Colorado river, much of which gets exported to feed cows in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
We're burning the Amazon primarily for cow feed too, which'll destroy South America, so really we need to end meat consumption now.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:10 PM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
We're burning the Amazon primarily for cow feed too, which'll destroy South America, so really we need to end meat consumption now.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:10 PM on February 6, 2023 [2 favorites]
We should adapt to exploit energy whenever available from solar and wind, but not use much energy otherwise, and not from fossil fuels, so air conditioning, trains, factories, server farms, etc. run when the sun shines or the wind blows, but all shut down when power becomes scarce.
There are lots of ways to store energy, and even with current-generation solar cells, it's pretty easy to end up with an energy surplus at peak insolation during the day. Time-shifting that surplus to align with energy demand is one of the major challenges of renewable/zero-carbon energy, but I think it's a tractable set of problems. Depending on the amount of energy and duration you want to store it, there's everything from heat or cold traps, to mechanical pumping (pumped hydro, compressed air), electro-mechanical systems (e.g. raising and lowering weights in a deep shaft). Many of them have significant economies of scale that can be realized if you do them as community-owned systems rather than individuals. That's without even getting into electro-chemical batteries.
This is stuff we know how to do. The reason we don't do it has more to do with market conditions and the low price of carbon-sourced energy, not the underlying engineering.
I think it absolutely sets the wrong tone to tell people that they're going to have to live like a 17th century peasant and put their book down when the sun sets. Moreover, setting aside any issues of "should", I don't think that approach will work. People will murder each other (probably via supporting government policies that result in professionals doing the murdering at scale) in order to keep the lights and the AC on at night.
I cannot overstate that. Because we murdered a shitload of people to build civilization the way it is right now, and people today haven't changed or become suddenly nicer than people a century or two ago. (I submit into evidence: the entire 20th century.) Social progress is an illusion built on comfort, which is largely built on energy availability. Anyone who doesn't think we—meaning the participants in high-energy, high-technology civilization collectively—won't do a lot more murder, up to and including a genocide here and there, to keep it ticking along is horrendously naive.
There's no gently unwinding civilization at this point. Either we figure out how to de-carbonize while still providing the billions of people who've grown used to a high-energy lifestyle, plus the people who are clamoring (and are willing to keep burning coal) for it, that lifestyle or a close simulacrum of it, or the whole thing is going to end extremely badly for virtually everyone.
It's critically important that we find solutions that at least provide a plausible path forwards de-carbonization, before either (1) carbon emissions collapse the biosphere, or (2) some part of global society feels like they're up against a wall and doesn't have much to lose by tossing around some neutron bombs or a nasty virus to take out some competition.
I hope that we can do that before there's mass human migration, because I don't have a lot of hope that those migrants are going to be welcomed or treated very well. Migrants have not, historically. (The big exception being migrants from Europe to the Americas, which was conveniently depopulated prior to their arrival in a nuclear-war-scale megadeath event that's visible in polar ice cores.) Trump's dumbass "build the wall" posturing aside, the US is already militarizing and building a vast sensor network across the southern border; by the end of the decade you'll basically have to do the Fremen sandworm-avoidance-walk across the desert to avoid being picked up by seismic sensors that will be capable of dispatching an armed drone to see what you're up to. (And I'm not sure how you'd avoid the IR and acoustic and trace-chemical sensors. Good luck.) The pieces are all in place to do some really ugly stuff, and I doubt the US is at the forefront of this sort of thing. We're laggards in the dystopia space right now.
But the reason I can drag myself out of bed every morning and not go suck-start a handgun in the woods is because I'm cautiously optimistic that we actually do have the tools to avoid the really awful scenarios, if we realize pretty quickly that it's time to pull out all the stops and use them.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:33 PM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
There are lots of ways to store energy, and even with current-generation solar cells, it's pretty easy to end up with an energy surplus at peak insolation during the day. Time-shifting that surplus to align with energy demand is one of the major challenges of renewable/zero-carbon energy, but I think it's a tractable set of problems. Depending on the amount of energy and duration you want to store it, there's everything from heat or cold traps, to mechanical pumping (pumped hydro, compressed air), electro-mechanical systems (e.g. raising and lowering weights in a deep shaft). Many of them have significant economies of scale that can be realized if you do them as community-owned systems rather than individuals. That's without even getting into electro-chemical batteries.
This is stuff we know how to do. The reason we don't do it has more to do with market conditions and the low price of carbon-sourced energy, not the underlying engineering.
I think it absolutely sets the wrong tone to tell people that they're going to have to live like a 17th century peasant and put their book down when the sun sets. Moreover, setting aside any issues of "should", I don't think that approach will work. People will murder each other (probably via supporting government policies that result in professionals doing the murdering at scale) in order to keep the lights and the AC on at night.
I cannot overstate that. Because we murdered a shitload of people to build civilization the way it is right now, and people today haven't changed or become suddenly nicer than people a century or two ago. (I submit into evidence: the entire 20th century.) Social progress is an illusion built on comfort, which is largely built on energy availability. Anyone who doesn't think we—meaning the participants in high-energy, high-technology civilization collectively—won't do a lot more murder, up to and including a genocide here and there, to keep it ticking along is horrendously naive.
There's no gently unwinding civilization at this point. Either we figure out how to de-carbonize while still providing the billions of people who've grown used to a high-energy lifestyle, plus the people who are clamoring (and are willing to keep burning coal) for it, that lifestyle or a close simulacrum of it, or the whole thing is going to end extremely badly for virtually everyone.
It's critically important that we find solutions that at least provide a plausible path forwards de-carbonization, before either (1) carbon emissions collapse the biosphere, or (2) some part of global society feels like they're up against a wall and doesn't have much to lose by tossing around some neutron bombs or a nasty virus to take out some competition.
I hope that we can do that before there's mass human migration, because I don't have a lot of hope that those migrants are going to be welcomed or treated very well. Migrants have not, historically. (The big exception being migrants from Europe to the Americas, which was conveniently depopulated prior to their arrival in a nuclear-war-scale megadeath event that's visible in polar ice cores.) Trump's dumbass "build the wall" posturing aside, the US is already militarizing and building a vast sensor network across the southern border; by the end of the decade you'll basically have to do the Fremen sandworm-avoidance-walk across the desert to avoid being picked up by seismic sensors that will be capable of dispatching an armed drone to see what you're up to. (And I'm not sure how you'd avoid the IR and acoustic and trace-chemical sensors. Good luck.) The pieces are all in place to do some really ugly stuff, and I doubt the US is at the forefront of this sort of thing. We're laggards in the dystopia space right now.
But the reason I can drag myself out of bed every morning and not go suck-start a handgun in the woods is because I'm cautiously optimistic that we actually do have the tools to avoid the really awful scenarios, if we realize pretty quickly that it's time to pull out all the stops and use them.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:33 PM on February 6, 2023 [3 favorites]
17th century peasants did not have an education or libraries or good hospitals or electric trains or computers or bicycles or even a shared fridge. We'll fail if we attempt technical solutions for everything because humans can always find more usages for high grade energy but doing so is unsustainable.
We do not necessarily have to give up personal fridges of course. A Tesla powerwall has only 2-3 times the power required by a fridge over 24h, but costs $11500. A Goal Zero 6000x has exactly the power required by many fridges over 24h, but costs $6000. And competitors hide their prices better. It'll all improve, and the fridge could be less cold if not eating meat or dairy, but fridge costs still increase several fold when you give them a battery. It's affordable here, but not everywhere.
> Social progress is an illusion built on comfort, which is largely built on energy availability.
I agree. Yet, the real innovation would be to tell people they cannot have meat, flights, personal cars, and must reduce their overall energy usage, and reduce how many children they raise.
We'll even be happier if we consume less energy! It's bad that factories have night shifts. We'd prefer time with family instead of work travel. etc.
> some part of global society feels like they're up against a wall
We'll imho likely pass this point before carbon emissions decline. I suspect societies obey the maximum power principle so that one single society cannot stop itself consuming ever more energy and resources until they hit physical limits, or go extinct if they're cleaver enough, but multiple adversarial societies could stop one another doing so, and thereby save everyone from extinction. We've kinda built one global society now, but as it decays towards a zeitgeist of emissions being zero sum or whatever, then it'll hopefully fragment and real ecological progress becomes possible.
We should promote degrowth and post-growth now so that future us understand they can be happier using less energy. In turn, this'll help them reach a peace of sorts: All large scale emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and some others become acts of war.
I fear two-ish scenarios more: First, our current selfishness zeitgeist winds up too powerfully corrupting, so leaders always choose personal escape over defending their own people, and carbon emissions "never" decline. Second, we're surprised first by some other planetary boundary less studied than climate, and maybe its violation cannot be so easily codified as acts of war, ala ecosystem collapses.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:03 AM on February 7, 2023
We do not necessarily have to give up personal fridges of course. A Tesla powerwall has only 2-3 times the power required by a fridge over 24h, but costs $11500. A Goal Zero 6000x has exactly the power required by many fridges over 24h, but costs $6000. And competitors hide their prices better. It'll all improve, and the fridge could be less cold if not eating meat or dairy, but fridge costs still increase several fold when you give them a battery. It's affordable here, but not everywhere.
> Social progress is an illusion built on comfort, which is largely built on energy availability.
I agree. Yet, the real innovation would be to tell people they cannot have meat, flights, personal cars, and must reduce their overall energy usage, and reduce how many children they raise.
We'll even be happier if we consume less energy! It's bad that factories have night shifts. We'd prefer time with family instead of work travel. etc.
> some part of global society feels like they're up against a wall
We'll imho likely pass this point before carbon emissions decline. I suspect societies obey the maximum power principle so that one single society cannot stop itself consuming ever more energy and resources until they hit physical limits, or go extinct if they're cleaver enough, but multiple adversarial societies could stop one another doing so, and thereby save everyone from extinction. We've kinda built one global society now, but as it decays towards a zeitgeist of emissions being zero sum or whatever, then it'll hopefully fragment and real ecological progress becomes possible.
We should promote degrowth and post-growth now so that future us understand they can be happier using less energy. In turn, this'll help them reach a peace of sorts: All large scale emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and some others become acts of war.
I fear two-ish scenarios more: First, our current selfishness zeitgeist winds up too powerfully corrupting, so leaders always choose personal escape over defending their own people, and carbon emissions "never" decline. Second, we're surprised first by some other planetary boundary less studied than climate, and maybe its violation cannot be so easily codified as acts of war, ala ecosystem collapses.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:03 AM on February 7, 2023
I wish I could be optimistic, but examples of even single societies successfully organizing themselves against selfish interests for their own collective benefit seem rare, never mind globally.
Meanwhile, today’s Guardian has this piece of garbage stoking climate optimism by amplifying some random physicist’s proposal to blow up the moon to create a solar shield of moon dust to block sunlight.
(I can’t help noting this was basically the premise of Highlander II: The Quickening, which, of course, happens to be set in 2024.)
posted by mubba at 2:49 PM on February 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Meanwhile, today’s Guardian has this piece of garbage stoking climate optimism by amplifying some random physicist’s proposal to blow up the moon to create a solar shield of moon dust to block sunlight.
(I can’t help noting this was basically the premise of Highlander II: The Quickening, which, of course, happens to be set in 2024.)
posted by mubba at 2:49 PM on February 8, 2023 [1 favorite]
Ted Nordhaus and Mike Shallenberger arguing that environmental degradation is *good*
posted by jeffburdges at 8:00 AM on March 4, 2023
posted by jeffburdges at 8:00 AM on March 4, 2023
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posted by derrinyet at 1:21 PM on February 5, 2023 [9 favorites]