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by mangecoeur 344 days ago
The lengths people go to not to make walkable cities (and insulated buildings, fast trains.. you know, all the stuff that actually exists and works)
3 comments

There is no climate model for less than 2 degrees of warming with decarbonization alone. It's unfortunate but that's where we are today. Large scale decarbonization and removal together are both required, and fast.
You do realize the effects of climate change will not be something for which you can just isolate your bedroom for, then move on.

Everyone needs water. Directly, and for food production. The most populous regions in the world run on meltwater. The Indus Valley. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Indonesia. California. Central China. There are thousands such locations as well, by the way, just smaller. Meltwater that only comes if not only the planet is hot, but is hotter this year than last. If not, ZERO meltwater comes. Not a little bit. Zero. If you stop global warming 2 billion people need to be relocated.

To make matters worse, one of the "points of no return" which is coming global warming will switch from pumping water INTO the atmosphere to pumping water OUT of the atmosphere. This will turn the "inside" (any location sufficiently far from a coast) of countries like India, Africa and China back into the deserts they were 500 years ago. Except, it will do so rapidly. We don't know, of course, but certainly less than 100 years. Potentially much less.

If you calculate energy required, you will conclude that lifting water is a nonstarter. With current energy generation we cannot bring water to these locations. Never mind that most don't even have railway connections, never mind electrical power to the trains. We cannot realistically use desalinated water at elevations above maybe 300 meters. It's just not happening.

To make matters worse, both things are tipping-points. There is very, very little change while you get closer to the tipping point, then all the builtup change happens VERY suddenly. And this will happen twice, a two-punch situation, maybe a decade or two apart. First meltwater will stop, entirely, in one or two years, and it will not come back for tens of thousands of years and then a decade or so later rains will stop.

Walkable cities and isolated buildings do exactly nothing to stop any of this.

Indonesia, a land of 17,000 islands has meltwater on one mountain on one island, not the main one. I doubt it's that reliant on meltwater.
Indonesia is surprisingly big and most of the land is surprisingly far away from the coast. A lot of it will dry out, and effectively cut water supply to Jakarta.
cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.
We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented.

1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund)

2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway.

3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and forever chemicals.

UBI can shift the Overton window from people protesting raising taxes on fossil fuels (eg Yellow Vest protests) to actually embracing them.

Rather than telling individuals they cant have a bag or a straw, the government should put the pressure on bottling companies and clothing companies which continue to use plastics and PFAS everywhere… “recycling” is just another scam to keep individuals distracted. It turns out they were just shipping it all to China for decades.

Any nation that implements a carbon tax will be at an competitive disadvantage, since you're compensating to reduce a global externality. It's a tragedy of the commons.
You could work out a global carbon tax system. Non cooperating nations would get trade sanctions costing them more than implementing the tax.
Just because the US doesn’t recycle/upcycle doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t…
However, there's 2 huge problems with that. First, stopping CO2 additions at this point will just cause a marginal delay in the progress of global warming.

Second adding CO2 will stop. Fossil fuels are finite and will stop this century. All regulation can hope to do is stop it a bit faster. A few decades at best. Which just doesn't matter. Plus oil producing countries, the only ones that have any hope of doing this will never cooperate.

Even nuclear winter will pause global warming, but it won't work to prevent it's consequences, because of water. So will any other mechanism that lowers temperatures.

I'm not saying there aren't other advantages to ecological policy, but stopping global warming just isn't one of them.

Global warming cannot be stopped by regulation. It cannot be stopped by humans at all. That's what the IPCC models say. We need to adapt to it. That means moving billions of people, frankly, out of the way. At an extremely high level what needs to happen is that billions of people need to be moved a LOT closer to a coastline.

Oh I agree with the rest of your assertion, but recycling would be a great idea even without global warming
We don’t have the answers to what?
The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.
Ok… what about the question I just asked you?