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Scylla and Charybdis were mythical sea monsters noted by Homer; later Greek tradition sited them on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was rationalized as a rock shoal (described as a six-headed sea monster) on the Italian side of the strait and Charybdis was a whirlpool off the coast of Sicily. They were regarded as a sea hazard located close enough to each other that they posed an inescapable threat to passing sailors; avoiding Charybdis meant passing too close to Scylla and vice versa. From Wikipedia.
By now, some of you may have already read the Rolling Stones' excellent article on global warming. For those who haven't, here is the argument in a nutshell:
We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. [...] Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it's already economically aboveground – it's figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. [...] Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you'd be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren't exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won't necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater.
I'll say it here: before I read this article, I was a mild skeptic on global warming. Given the inherent nature of weather simulations, it is very difficult to conclusively link micro-scale weather effects (a mega-hurricane or an extended drought) to a macro-scale climate effect--which is why I sometimes found doom-and-gloom predictions by climate scientists to be PR stunts.
This article (and follow-on reading I was inspired to do) changed my mind.
I think that it makes sense that pumping an additional 5x of the carbon we've already pumped would create unacceptable risks to the global climate and weather, because we're not talking percentage increases anymore--we're talking nearly an order of magnitude here. The problem is that our global economy already has borrowed and IPO'd on the basis that we will use that additional 2795 gigatons of carbon. Oops. This is like someone telling you that you will probably get busted by the cops for dealing out the rest of the coke stash you have at your house, but you've already maxed out all your credit cards on the assumption that you can sell the drugs.
But the solution the article proposes bothers me too. Bill McKibben (the author) seems to think that we should just go cold turkey on carbon emissions and bite the 20 trillion dollar bullet early, before more damage is done to the global climate. (That, and tar energy companies as public enemies.) I think this is a bad idea, because 20 trillion dollars is a lot of money. This is an amazingly simple argument, but due to how the world economy is structured today, one that also carries quite a number of complex consequences.
To put this in perspective, let's look at how a similar asset forfeiture impacted the global economy: the subprime mortgage crisis.
The subprime crisis was triggered by an uptick in default rates among US housing mortgages from about 5-7% from 2004-2006 to 14.4% by 2008. US housing mortgages are a ~$9 trillion dollar market by asset value. So when 9% of a 9 trillion dollar market--around $800 billion of assets--went up in risk profile from prime or subprime to "default", it was enough to trigger an implosion in the global financial system.
The underlying asset decline that triggered this was around a 3 trillion dollar decline in home equity values from 2006 to 2008 (we are not considering the further 2 trillion dollar decline that came after the financial system had a Minsky moment, as those would fall into "follow-on" effects rather than triggering causes.)
So a 3 trillion dollar asset write-off, or a reclassification of risk across $800 billion in assets, was enough to send the world economy into a tailspin that dragged down the US and the EU, and forced China to sink to its eyeballs in debt to keep its economy afloat.
20 trillion dollars is around 6.6 times 3 trillion dollars. The asset writeoff by expunging carbon assets from the world's balance sheet would strain the world financial system, and by extension the world economy, more than 6 times as much as the housing bubble. This is crazy--it would be a 1929-level event, made all the worse because unlike investment into economically useless paper assets or empty houses, investment into carbon energy produces real economic benefits. (Think of all the possible uses of an additional barrel of oil--now think of all the possible uses of an additional ranch house on the outskirts of Las Vegas.) Put simply, an action like this would cost the world a decade, if not more, of depression, possible hyperinflation, and severe risks of economic collapse and political instability (read: riots, revolutions, and Lil' Hitler.)
But then this got me thinking as well: 20 trillion is a lot of money. Doesn't that mean there should be plenty of reasons to tax carbon production to a certain extent, and then divert that to funding projects which offset global warming? Planting trees could be one, but I was thinking large-scale mega-engineering projects which generate new technologies and actually offer a third way out of the impending crisis.
If Odysseus had used one of these things, Homer could have shortened his story by 2/3rds, and I wouldn't have nearly failed AP Junior English.
It really boils down to two questions here:
- Out of that 20 trillion in carbon assets, how much are willing to tax against it to invest into geo-engineering mega-projects?
- What are the chances that one of the mega-projects will succeed in making a meaningful impact on global warming?
I'm a tech optimist at heart, which means my gut feelings towards both these questions are pretty sanguine. But I also realize that this topic is extremely complex and ripe for discussion. Given how many smart/educated/just plain opinionated people browse this forum every day, I want to pose the question to all of you, in addition to the two specific questions above:
Could we do it? Could we find a third way out of the crisis, or will we have to choose between the Scylla of another Great Depression and the Charybdis of climate change? And if we have to choose, which would you rather have?
Poll: Can we find a third way out of the carbon asset crunch?We can't do it, but I'd rather have a Great Depression (69) 55% We can do it/I have an idea as to how (31) 25% We can't do it, but I'd rather have a six-degree shift in the world climate (25) 20% 125 total votes Your vote: Can we find a third way out of the carbon asset crunch? (Vote): We can't do it, but I'd rather have a Great Depression (Vote): We can't do it, but I'd rather have a six-degree shift in the world climate (Vote): We can do it/I have an idea as to how
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I'm not an expert on these subjects, but as a piece of advice towards anything in life, anything is possible, and everything has a solution, some are just harder to find.
I hope we don't destroy this planet
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This is a problem of psychology. Specifically, it's a problem of incentives. Too many people gain too much by denying global warming, or by affirming it but continuing to act (and vote) as if it doesn't exist. And these same people lose too little. As the thinking goes, "Who cares if the planet goes to shit in 100 years? I'll be gone long before then. Better have fun while I can!"
Think about it -- average people are too short-sighted to wear seatbelts, eat healthily, do good in school, get checked for colon cancer, drive slowly, wear condoms, etc. And these are all things that will help YOU in YOUR lifetime. There is absolutely no way we're going to get people to make large personal sacrifices to curb problems that they likely won't live to see the effects of. No way, period. People aren't going to pay attention to this kind of shit until the effects of global warming are so bad that they counter-balance the benefits of using energy like it's limitless. And, of course, at that point, it will be too late.
It's worth speculating on how we got to this point. I blame evolution. Compared to the scale of macro-changes on the earth, we're a short-lived species. Natural selection only helped us get to the point at which we could reproduce and raise a kid, which is about 20 years of life. So we're biased to worry about immediate dangers like tigers and bears. If we were a longer-lived species, maybe we'd have a chance of caring about things as long-term as healthy eating and global warming. But we're not. Evolution was good enough to get us to the point where we can take over the Earth, but not good enough to get us to the point where we can leave the Earth.
The other thing to blame is democracy, or -- as Winston Churchill put it -- the worst damn system except every other system. If the world was run by one all-powerful dictator, or family, or dynasty, they could just decree that we're going to pay attention to this shit. And their word would be law. Theoretically, they could also have enough power to help curb the significant economic side effects. But of course, the danger if giving this much power to any one individual is that they could use it to do significant harm as well. A democracy is only as smart and responsible as its people. I've always said the best government would be a benevolent dictatorship...
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On July 26 2012 14:45 Courthead wrote: This is a problem of psychology. Specifically, it's a problem of incentives. Too many people gain too much by denying global warming, or by affirming it but continuing to act (and vote) as if it doesn't exist. And these same people lose too little. As the thinking goes, "Who cares if the planet goes to shit in 100 years? I'll be gone long before then. Better have fun while I can!"
Think about it -- average people are too short-sighted to wear seatbelts, eat healthily, do good in school, get checked for colon cancer, drive slowly, wear condoms, etc. And these are all things that will help YOU in YOUR lifetime. There is absolutely no way we're going to get people to make large personal sacrifices to curb problems that they likely won't live to see the effects of. No way, period. People aren't going to pay attention to this kind of shit until the effects of global warming are so bad that they counter-balance the benefits of using energy like it's limitless. And, of course, at that point, it will be too late.
It's worth speculating on how we got to this point. I blame evolution. Compared to the scale of macro-changes on the earth, we're a short-lived species. Natural selection only helped us get to the point at which we could reproduce and raise a kid, which is about 20 years of life. So we're biased to worry about immediate dangers like tigers and bears. If we were a longer-lived species, maybe we'd have a chance of caring about things as long-term as healthy eating and global warming. But we're not.
Long-story short, our evolution was good enough to get us to the point where we can take over the earth. But not good enough to get us to the point where we can take over the universe.
Perhaps. But evolution was also what gave our ancestors enough of a sense of social responsibility to raise each others' kids and not auto-kill a neighboring tribe when encountered, even if the neighbors were strangers. It is also what gave us enough of a sense of moral responsibility to come up with religion and society-wide standards of conduct, and adopt crazy self-sacrificing behavior--think charging across artillery bombardment as a 16-year-old virgin and dying like a maggot atop a firecracker.
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As long as companies continue to play for the quarterly report and politicians continue for the next election cycle, none of this will happen.
The concept of an investment that pays long after death is still an alien concept to people.
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It's preposterous to think that we will destroy the planet. Yes, global warming will have an immense effect on agricultural yields. Yes, quite a few species will become extinct. Many human populations will suffer from its effects, but there are too many humans on Earth anyway.
But life on Earth has endured much greater challenges than the Holocene extinction. Events such as the Great Oxygenation or the Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out almost all the life on Earth. Nothing happening now or in the near future will come close to approaching those events.
The only concern here is weighing the costs of adapting to global warming versus the costs of mitigating it.
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To prevent this thread from derailing as extremely as every other climate change thread on TL, we should get either a mod note or an OP edit that explicitly states that this thread is exclusively for discussing a cost benefit analysis that assumes the correctness of the science in the Rolling Stone article.
There is already a thread for the deniers, and if we let them in here it will be the only thing discussed.
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I'd suggest people read about our options in terms of altering the climate with macroengineering.
My main concern with these projects is how little we understand the climate. We can hardly agree on the magnitude of the effect of global warming, so trying to engineer something to counteract it is even harder.
I'm not really happy with any of the proposed solutions, but in my opinion, the best chance we have is a biological approach. We know that life has had a huge impact on the climate, so it's sort of "proven" to be effective on a global scale, and the cost is more attainable than some of the other solutions (especially the space-based ones). We have a huge number of natural experiments to look at. Genetics and computing power is at a point where we can make reasonably informed adjustments, and those are some of the fastest-growing fields.
There's one side effect of a global engineering project that I think is unavoidable: a lot of things will die. Species are already going extinct at a rate of 150-200/day, last I heard, and wrenching the climate around is not going to help matters at all. We're probably going to have to accept that the animal world will end up pretty boring, whether we succeed or fail.
In any case, I think it's something we will be forced to do eventually, if we want the growth of civilization to continue. We might be able to ignore the issue and survive, but that's hardly a long-term solution. And geoengineering is pretty much the key to being able to colonize another planet, if we ever get there.
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In my own opinion, the safest, most cost efficient way that can satisfy both sides of the argument would be to create machineries that can either react to carbon emissions and change it to something harmless to the environment.
To modify the economy or to completely ignore the issue are the last thing you want to do tbh. Either way, you will end up with a loss, monetary or environmental wise.
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One of the wonderful things about world economics is that they are (for the most part) self righting
At some point in the future, >we know< that energy is an issue, and as a public we have pretty much forced (whether correct or not) the idea of greater externalities onto the world of the energy industry (which is what allows the great monstrosities that are wind farms to even exist)
One would hope that a great technological push towards energy generation is clearly the path for the future. Though of course, in some ways we are also being held back by the public who in general, doesn't know shit. For a start, nuclear energy is probably the most shunned of all energy production, yet it is the only form of energy where every externality ranging from potential risks, costs, and all waste and emissions produced, are directly factored into the cost and production of the plant and into the energy it produces.
Eventually, if there is a shortage, some forms of energy become more and more expensive, and simply too unwieldy, making more technologically efficient solutions (such as nuclear and fusion) more commercially viable
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The big problem with a gradual change driven by appropriate taxes and investment in new technologies is that we probably should have started 20 years ago.
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On July 26 2012 14:26 Shady Sands wrote:By now, some of you may have already read the Rolling Stones' excellent article Yeah I like to get all my science knowledge from a music magazine too unoriginal to even think up its own name.
I'm amazed to learn we really have the point where many are increasingly of the opinion that we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place and some say that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
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On July 26 2012 15:50 dvorakftw wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2012 14:26 Shady Sands wrote:By now, some of you may have already read the Rolling Stones' excellent article I'm amazed to learn we really have the point where many are increasingly of the opinion that we all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place and some say that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. While that's a great book, what does that quote have to do with global warming?
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On July 26 2012 15:43 BrTarolg wrote: One of the wonderful things about world economics is that they are (for the most part) self righting
At some point in the future, >we know< that energy is an issue, and as a public we have pretty much forced (whether correct or not) the idea of greater externalities onto the world of the energy industry (which is what allows the great monstrosities that are wind farms to even exist)
One would hope that a great technological push towards energy generation is clearly the path for the future. Though of course, in some ways we are also being held back by the public who in general, doesn't know shit. For a start, nuclear energy is probably the most shunned of all energy production, yet it is the only form of energy where every externality ranging from potential risks, costs, and all waste and emissions produced, are directly factored into the cost and production of the plant and into the energy it produces.
Eventually, if there is a shortage, some forms of energy become more and more expensive, and simply too unwieldy, making more technologically efficient solutions (such as nuclear and fusion) more commercially viable the way that the Mayans or the Easter Islanders, once they exhausted their resources, just got together and invented a whole new mode of economic growth right? People can lock into an economic cycle out of which they exit only after the collapse, but the actual collapse is so devastating that they are never again able to rebuild any kind of semblance of growth.
But still, we all live in the moment and the future is difficult for most people to image so why bother? The world is doomed. At least we all go out together. Of course 'we', we all know that the developed world citizens will still come off better than their developing world counter parts but that is the price of victory in the real game of civilization. Actually -- I am kind of waiting for some nut to come out and say the logical interpretation of the observation that 7 billion cannot live the way the developed world lives now: that for the developed world to continue to enjoy the standard of living we do now the 6 billion in the developing world should be...de-industrialized...
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im not very familiar with how magazine articles work, but at the end of the reading it said
This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
when its only 7/27/2012, is that intentional? great read though. im passing this along to some other friends
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I dunno how practical this idea is - but we could try to terraform the Earth as a way to both solve the climate issue and develop resources for expansion to other planets and satellites in our solar system.
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On July 26 2012 16:03 FinestHour wrote: im not very familiar with how magazine articles work, but at the end of the reading it said
This story is from the August 2nd, 2012 issue of Rolling Stone.
when its only 7/27/2012, is that intentional? great read though. im passing this along to some other friends
Yeah - periodicals frequently release the next months issue at the end of the current month. I remember I used to get my GameInformer like almost a whole month in advance sometimes.
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If we burn all the global reserves of hydrocarbons, the world will be hotter than at any period in known geological history. Although historic CO2 levels in the atmosphere were higher in the Carboniferous period (i.e. all that excess carbon is now in the form of coal), and the climate was significantly warmer then, the sun was only outputting approximately 75% of the energy then that it is now. People don't even know if giant swathes of the earth will become completely uninhabitable if this happens or not.
On July 26 2012 16:04 Arghmyliver wrote: I dunno how practical this idea is - but we could try to terraform the Earth as a way to both solve the climate issue and develop resources for expansion to other planets and satellites in our solar system.
We don't have the technology to 'terraform' the earth in a reasonable amount of time, in any sense of the word terraform that I've ever heard. But presumably 'terraforming' would entail making it such that the atomspheric co2 levels are manageable. The easiest/best way to do this and avoid worst case scenarios it to transition into renewables ASAP. There are orders of magnitude more than enough renewable energy potential to do this.
tldr; if we burn it all, conditions on the earth will be hotter than at any time in geological history when life existed on this planet. we don't have a clue what will happen, we just know it will be very bad. leave it in the ground, anything else is basically insanity.
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On July 26 2012 16:09 caradoc wrote: If we burn all the global reserves of hydrocarbons, the world will be hotter than at any period in known geological history. Although historic CO2 levels in the atmosphere were higher in the Carboniferous period (i.e. all that excess carbon is now in the form of coal), and the climate was significantly warmer then, the sun was only outputting approximately 75% of the energy then that it is now. People don't even know if giant swathes of the earth will become completely uninhabitable if this happens or not.
tldr; if we burn it all, conditions on the earth will be hotter than at any time in geological history when life existed on this planet. we don't have a clue what will happen, we just know it will be very bad.
But it goes back to that cocaine analogy. If we don't burn it, a substantial part of the world asset base suddenly becomes worthless. We've already borrowed against that money to fund our current lifestyles. What do we do?
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On July 26 2012 16:11 Shady Sands wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2012 16:09 caradoc wrote: If we burn all the global reserves of hydrocarbons, the world will be hotter than at any period in known geological history. Although historic CO2 levels in the atmosphere were higher in the Carboniferous period (i.e. all that excess carbon is now in the form of coal), and the climate was significantly warmer then, the sun was only outputting approximately 75% of the energy then that it is now. People don't even know if giant swathes of the earth will become completely uninhabitable if this happens or not.
tldr; if we burn it all, conditions on the earth will be hotter than at any time in geological history when life existed on this planet. we don't have a clue what will happen, we just know it will be very bad. But it goes back to that cocaine analogy. If we don't burn it, a substantial part of the world asset base suddenly becomes worthless. We've already borrowed against that money to fund our current lifestyles. What do we do?
honestly, who the fuck cares. we burn it all, there won't be a human society left to care about the money. I'm sure there will be roving bands of humans in a road warrior type scenario or something, but they'll pay for shit with sharpened scrap metal blades and scavenged sawed off shotguns or somethin (tongue partly in cheek)
Puts the 'economy' into perspective doesn't it.
And besides, the profits from burning it largely won't go to society anyways, they go to the corporations that own the reserves. The economy is currently stagnant as a result of profit hoarding and growing wealth inequality, so any economic arguments about it hurting the economy is at best a obfuscation to get us to hesitate rather than putting our efforts into changing shit.
widescale micro-generation handled by co-ops or privately owned small scale projects on the other hand infuses local economies with cash.
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