Planning to survive climate warming 'doom' — is probably more effective than trying to persuade people to (large scale) decarbonize

11 January 2018

Am I too cynical?

Let's take the following as paradigm for the way many climate activists think:

The only path towards saving our planet from climate change at this point, is for the equivalent of the retooling the American economy went thru from peacetime to wartime production in 1941-1944 to be applied to the goal of more or less immediate decarbonization of the entire economy.

This can only be done with an unequivocal political mandate a crisis exists, and a suspension of the free market to ensure all resources go towards the critical goal of decarbonizing the economy.

An explicit goal of removing most of the consumption we undertake now would be essential in order to power down the world’s energy requirements to something renewable energy could scale up to in a short period of time.

Very likely rights to sue for lost profits for now banned fossil fuel production and for lease holders would have to be suspended. Ditto for investor dispute clauses in trade agreements. Ditto for the need for planning permissions for renewable energy. Sovereign debt repayments would have to be suspended so that such funds can go into renewable energy deployments.

Token carbon prices of $15-$35/tonne will not get you there near quick enough. European emissions trading prices are and have been at the pathetically low levels of around 5-8 euros/tonne for years now.

Anyone who thinks that Mr. Davis's proposal has a gnat's chance of actually happening anywhere, raise your hand.

Davis is scientifically right, of course — but . . .

Being right about the cure is different than being realistic about human beings and our species-specific tribal penchants for:

consistently exhibiting rank stupidity

and

constantly parading gory destruction.

What then?

It would be wiser to plan for the effects of global warming. Rather than to seek optimum and overly optimistic solutions to prevent or significantly ameliorate it.

Swimming upstream against the deluge of Our Brothers and Sisters in Corporate Dopery seems unlikely to be successful. At least, not on the scale necessary to cause meaningful policy changes anywhere significant enough to matter.

Smart people (with resources) and intelligent businesses (with money) should, instead, plan and spend for the worst that global warming foreseeably is going to dispense.

The rest of us — meaning those who lack the resources to protect ourselves by making changes in geography, structure, and resource supply — should be aiming to endure the added unpleasantnesses that we are going to suffer, as the planet probably begins to resemble a stormy sauna.

Recognizing what should be done — is different than seeing the limits of what can be done

Realistically, humanity has a long demonstrated low potential for exhibiting actively intelligent organizational behavior.

The Avaricious Capitalism that roams the globe is merely one manifestation of Homo sapiens' complacence with regard to Greed's unopposed attack on the Commons. All that has changed over the centuries is that the accumulated total (of one aspect) of humanity's resource-consuming waste has begun to catch up to our profligately selfish ways.

Not everyone is going to be bothered as the planet heats, flesh cooks, water dries, food withers, species vanish and 'tribes' battle each other. But many of the 'poorer we' eventually will be.

It is, survivally speaking, good to be rich.

The moral irony is that it is usually the ethically questionable people among us, who gain the insulation against Reality that is provided by owning many boxes of delusion-sustaining lucre.

Looting pays.

Knowing this, we should abandon hope of soon changing the prevailing gas-spewing, forest-chopping economic construct. History indicates that appealing to those who most richly manifest Capitalism's Jesus-defying self-enrichment paradigm is unlikely to work.

When rapaciousness faces a (genetically unrelated) group survival interest, rapaciousness almost always wins.

The moral? — Overturn capitalism and decarbonize on a mammoth scale? — Ain't gonna happen

Not soon and not massively enough to matter one greenhouse whit (or wit, for that matter).

In most geographies, plan to endure (or succumb to) global warming's variously delivered, often unpleasant changes.

PeteFree.com

Planning to survive climate warming 'doom' — is probably more effective than trying to persuade people to (large scale) decarbonize