People's financial incentives are not aligned with the climate's necessary modifications. The two won't be aligned until climate passes over its tipping point and enters an irreversible feedback loop.
Correct. I'd add that I don't think anyone worth listening to has ever really thought this to be true: rather, it is convenient for those with the majority of private capital for everyone to believe it is true so that they don't have to account for how they spend their money.
Or laws/taxes are passed, which incorporate the externalities, and subventions for detrimental efforts are cut.
That is "just" a matter of political will.
How much war are you willing to wage to force other countries to do the same? I think that's really the only question that matters when it comes to the "everybody pass laws" plan.
With just a few big markets making the changes the rest of the world could be steered in the correct direction surely? If the US/EU etc. required that products coming in from China (or other countries where we offload our carbon use to) were created with less than X carbon released (differing per product) and with independent verification then they'd make the changes I'd imagine. Prices would go up of course which is likely why the political will isn't there, but I think it's disingenuous to say that the only way is war.
You could take that further too, say a 10% tariff on products coming from countries that buy beef from other countries who are cutting down the rainforest. I realise it would quickly become legislatively complicated, but isn't this the kind of hard problem we elect representatives for?
This is a very happy path engineering design. What will you do with countries who refuse to comply? Will you bomb them? Will you sanction/starve them to death? Is this really an existential crisis for our species? I want to know what cards you're willing to put on the table.
>What will you do with countries who refuse to comply?
What are you on about? They can't "refuse to comply" in the above scenario, because it's a matter of pricing in carbon on imports. They can either comply with a process to verify that all carbon inputs have already been neutralized, pay the cost to neutralize them, or else America/EU/Japan/whoever else participates will simply slap on a very conservative carbon price themselves. No cooperation is necessary, if they don't want to bother their products will simply be priced somewhat higher than if they had and thus they'll probably sell less.
>Is this really an existential crisis for our species?
Well, yeah, but at this point a lot could be done just by the first world fixing its markets to properly internalize carbon emissions and make all fossil fuels carbon neutral, which will then also help make a path for ramping up of negative emissions. China is certainly one of the biggest economies, but even they aren't in a position to just give up on all exports to the first world without more expense than just participating in a proper free market. It's in their interest too anyway.
They will then create workarounds, as they already do for tariffs. The most common one is to find an intermediary country and ship the goods through there.
Tariff's don't have to be high enough to starve out countries to cause change, most people seem to agree that the Chinese people only tolerate the CCP because their economy is growing, if tariff's slowed that then they'd be under pressure to do something to fix it. There are similar situations in countries all over the world.
Personally I think it is an existential threat to our way of life - if you take the most conservative predictions then at the very least there's going to be disruption to the global food supply (maybe not enough to starve everyone, but there'll be much less choice than now) and mass migration due to drought which could very easily kick off WW3.
I do believe though that if the political will was there in the big Western markets the worst of this could be avoided without it having to come to conflict. Most experts seem to be of the same opinion, the vast majority say a carbon tax is the best method available to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
Major nuclear powers have a significant portion of their economies tied up in fossil fuels. They will not go down without a fight.
China already emits 2x US CO2 and is on track to double its emissions by 2030. There is no scale of trade war/tariffs I can imagine that will derail this.
As the EU has recently hinted, climate may (I'd say pretty much guaranteed, only question is when) become a key point in any trading arrangements. Others will follow. Whether soon enough remains to be seen.
Want to sell to us? Prove your climate credentials, carbon accounting etc. No? Ok, your goods get the carbon levy.
What's eventually left is only the rogue states that refuse where sanctions, blockade or ultimately war may actually be the answer.
Really only comes down to how deep is the abyss we appear to be staring into... Though this can sometimes prompt enough action to get international laws passed.
This is an ineffective approach. No country can assume any other will fall in line to "do the same". This creates a do nothing approach because it turns doing the right thing, by taking the first steps, into a game of finger pointing. War is definitely not the answer and is 100% counterproductive to the end goal.
If all countries, that are supposedly interested in being the best climate change affectors, all competed to truly be the best - we'd be in a far better spot. The war you allude to is not international in nature. It's national. If the US, for example, actually removed campaign contributions and lobbying allowances from organizations responsible for a majority of annual pollution we'd already be down the road. But instead it is national politics, and those legislators, that are the real roadblock to starting the snowball move towards clean technology.
The problem with this approach, which I was trying to highlight, is that as long as "doing better by climate change" implies "economic disadvantage" there will be major polluters who do not get on board. What will you do with them? If you really believe this is an existential crisis for humanity, you must be willing to destroy these countries. Choose your poison: bomb them to oblivion or sanction/starve them to death. That is why this is a failed approach.
Your logic assumes everything in the world to be equal. The world is messy. If we don't start we all lose. The Internet wasn't bootstrapped because the world's countries all agreed on exactly the right way to implement networks and protocols and there are countries that have both contributed very little opposed to those that have contributed a lot. Moving to clean energy has huge economic advantage. So, again, your get on board or be destroyed is counterproductive and irrational. Heavy, one off, polluters can be dealt with after the fact.
I didn't suggest we don't start. I suggested the "everyone pass laws" plan has a fatal flaw the size of China and India.
>your get on board or be destroyed is counterproductive and irrational.
That's not my plan, it's yours. "Laws" are the get on board or be destroyed approach. You can do it domestically pretty easy, but it's much harder across national boundaries.
>Heavy, one off, polluters can be dealt with after the fact.
China already emits more than twice the US CO2. China is on track to double its emissions by 2030. How far are you willing to go to stop them? It's a very simple question.
You can never know when the tipping point is because either you haven't yet hit it, or you already have but don't know at which point in the past the death spiral could have been prevented, if at all.
No war necessary. Make it a condition of trade, a carbon tariff. If a sizable block of countries requires this any country without a carbon tax will be at a significant trade disadvantage.
I'd say another question worth asking is whether waging war, or antagonism of any kind, is the optimal way to approach this problem.
This seems to be the overwhelmingly preferred approach, but my intuition tells me that seeking a mutually agreeable path of cooperation would be a wiser approach. Not that this is easy of course - heck, even getting people to realize that we aren't actually doing this seems fairly impossible.
When will incentives ever be aligned with one's own long term interests?
There is reason for despair, that competition to survive the day to day - everyone needs to get through their week, month and year - will always detract from the larger concerns about long term sustainability of our civilization and prosperity.
I worry that we have removed people's moral agency by normalizing huge debts for life's necessities. We have the technology to make housing and education cheap and plentiful, but instead create scarcities and credit to have leverage over the workforce and keep them working in ways they'd prefer not to. I mean, every day I think "but guys seriously shouldn't we use all these computers to work on the metaphorical asteroid heading for Earth??? guys??" But we don't, myself included, because bills.
> When will incentives ever be aligned with one's own long term interests?
Once we've installed a good global governance system (imo some form of confederation of confederation ala Switzerland) that democratically aggregates preferences and can align the incentives.
People like to act like competition is inevitable, forgetting that the main hegemon of the last 50 years has competition as a large part of it's ideology (and all the runner ups are not democratically legitimised in the sense people in Europe or the US would consider enough). It's not a law of physics, it's part of a system that can be changed.
So I'd disagree. The time for despair is when you are dead, or can no longer try to improve things. Now there's work to do
> Once we've installed a good global governance system (imo some form of confederation of confederation ala Switzerland) that democratically aggregates preferences and can align the incentives.
This is wishful thinking with more than half the world not involved in democratic governance. But be of good cheer. There's profit to be made where there's crisis.
We have in fact already passed a couple of those tipping points, unfortunately. But we can still make a big difference by getting our act together.
But, some of those are already locked in, we might not see the effect for 1000 or even 10000 years, but still.
Thing is the world's climate will not fail us gradually.
Past the 'tipping point' the 'Geo-engineers' will be let out of the asylum and get to deploy their crackpot hail-Mary schemes playing fast and loose with a runaway high dimensional complex feedback system they (or we) barely are beginning to understand.
There is no 'backup' on this planet. There is no 'safety net'. There is no 'oh shit, abort!' button.
An optimist would say we are just going to make sure to speed up the inevitable.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/12/how-the...