A bimonthly open thread for discussions related to climate solutions. Note that open discussions of climate science are here. Possible topics of interest are the trial carbon-capture effort in Iceland and the discussions in the lead up to COP26. Please be constructive and substantive.
I accidentally stumbled across this very good YouTube video on climate change, barriers, responsibility, and what needs to be done. I think it nails a lot of good points, including developing countries, wealthy countries, personal responsibility vs system change. I’d be interested to know what people on here think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc
It’s not mine? It’s trash!
LOL….
I’ll check it out and give you a serious response. (But it may not be much different from the above!)
Cheers
Adam Lea. I thought the video was convincing, clearly stated, maths based and well researched. It echoes some things I have written. Thanx for posting it.
Overall I don’t like it. but it’s unlikely to be harmful counter-productive. while it does explain somethings worth knowing about as to why it;s so hard to fix. so yes it does make some good points. The solutions angle is lightweight and loose imv. What is the take-away message? I think there are better ways approaches. XR Greta kevin anderson Kalmus and https://twitter.com/NJHagens/status/1421928088787734532
this bit shows very distorted (incomprehensible) and therefore (manipulative?) confusing data point. The selected countries really do not belong together as a distinct grouping to make up 63%. a bad way to present information. https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc?t=196
imv it’s not that “simple” at all – iow I think they are cherry-picking and massaging the data they need to shore up the ideology they believe in … want to push. also they ignore cumulative historical emissions by nations and the wealthy/empires in particular. Plus they ignore per capita emission levels, and ignore things like 10% of China emissions are exported to countries wanting to buy what they make. Where USA/EU emissions are effectively about like 6-8% higher due to all the stuff they Import because they no longer make that stuff in their own countries anymore.
consider https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions data presented.
and https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/9/1/014010/meta
RC. Just very briefly, I agree the video posted by Adam Lea was certainly not perfect, but I think it was just making the point that while rich people / countries are the big emitters (about 60% of emissions) poor and middle class people also contribute a lot of emissions, about 40%. And so trying to solve the climate problem largely or entirely by reducing consumption of resources and energy would involve horrendous impacts on poor and middle class people, so therefore isn’t practically viable. Therefore while cuts in consumption by rich people have to be part of the solution, we logically ALSO need a significant new energy grid, transport system, and other strategies.
No big deal overall.
Just note that they said 63% of emissions coming from poor/middle class **Nations** …. not 40% (you got that backwards?)
My point is take out China (one nation) the 63% crashes to ~37% of the total. Using nations for such stats creates distortions which people cannot follow rationally. 1.4 Billion people for China and 1.1 billion in India really screws up national statistics and reader comprehension. (you and I excluded of course)
AS if a villager in China or India has any power whatsoever to change anything while they themselves use next to zero FF energy and not the ones cutting down Amazonian Rainforests every day.
Simplified basic refs to “nations” of the haves vs the have nots isn’t the way to go. I am only saying they should have, could have, been more careful and clearer about which people in the world contribute most to excessive GHG emissions, and it is the wealthy top 10% in every nation.
The very same people predominantly blocking serious action to stop warming, ghg emissions, and climate change. Or making it worse faster than anyone else.
Frequent Flying is an expression of global privilege, of indulgence and of excessive consumption and unnecessary Emissions
https://twitter.com/ClimateHuman/status/1442544654436556803/photo/1
It’s a Matter of Scale
“IF ONLY the richest 10% in the world, that 10% of highest emitters, a mere 700 million people located in almost every nation across the globe, were to theoretically reduce their Individual Carbon Footprint to the level of the Average European citizen, that would be Equivalent to a one-third cut in Global Emissions… even if the other 90% did nothing!”
(edited) original by @KevinClimate
Visual Graph https://twitter.com/LasseClimate/status/1442605891598041091/photo/1
Seeing this for what it really is – in a proper perspective – can only help understanding, and realising where the blockages barriers come from. .
and
Scientists’ warning on affluence, Thomas Wiedmann et al
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Vol. 46:- (Volume publication date October 2021) Paywalled
“a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-011104
PLUS
[Richard Wolffe] says these IPCC reports should name names because in capitalism, very few people are at the helm. “Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the people [about 100,000 people] in the United States make all the major decisions with respect to what gets produced, what technologies are used to produce it, where the production occurs geographically, what is done with the output, if it’s sold domestically or abroad. It’s the same with purchasing,” Wolff explains. … when the report fails to name who is most responsible for the emissions, and corporate media reports only on the report without supplementing it with the history of industry dereliction, “the whole matter can then disappear from the U.S. news cycle with little ado, accountability or action.”
https://truthout.org/articles/mainstream-media-attention-to-ipcc-report-neglected-real-cause-of-emissions/
Hey, it’s tricky and it’s complex, and everyone is to blame (more or less) past and present.
ooops, what was I saying about stats?
make that one tenth of 1% about 330,000 people in the United States – doh!
What utter and complete ignorance.
You just said we can’t solve climate by actually solving climate and must not solve climate because that’s nicer for everyone.
Jesus….
You will not understand this comment. That’s OK. Accept, go drink a beer.
Reality,
Thanks. You just saved me the time it would have taken to watch that video. The comments here indicating, assuming nigel could possibly have gotten something right, simplification is not the pathway are enough to toss it on the heap and burn it.
PS about the video ideas. I have my own particular biases, and these can cloud how I see things too. But I think it is fair to say there are many ways to frame to energy use conundrum.
One way is looking at wealth of countries and other is the wealth of individuals. I don’t think blaming the rich (most successful in a capitalist society) helps one bit, because their energy use behaviour is simply an outcome of the entrenched systems in all our societies.
But it could be useful to frame energy use around opportunities to reduce (excess?) consumption. And for govt policy to be directed in that direction to drive down excessive FF use in sectors. The video misses these issues.
some examples
The wealthiest tenth of people consume about 20 times more energy overall than the bottom ten, wherever they live. It found that in transport the richest tenth of consumers use more than half the energy. and
20% of UK citizens are in the top 5% of global energy consumers, along with 40% of German citizens, and 100% of Luxembourg’s entire population. Only 2% of Chinese people are in the top global 5% of users, and just 0.02% of people in India.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51906530
eg
https://twitter.com/steviedubyu/status/1442240160507248646/photo/1
https://twitter.com/steviedubyu/status/1442237110178574341/photo/4
https://twitter.com/steviedubyu/status/1442247402887335937/photo/1
Kevin Anderson
Damning plot demonstrates why equity is key to meaningful climate policy, yet it remains sidelined by most of us framing the climate debate: academics/policymakers/business leaders/barristers/journalists/etc. Hard to understand why? Anyone would think we’re in the top 10% group!
https://twitter.com/KevinClimate/status/1442264951574470659
This is a tough area. Driving down demand and consumption means decreasing economic activity. Politicians don’t like that. The rich consumers in every country be they people or corporations drive employment and GDP growth and trade and so on.
The UNFCCC system really doesn’t touch on these issues (energy efficiency or reducing demand that drives FF energy use) at all. I have never heard of any Govt doing so either as a plan to reduce emissions.
But just blaming the wealthy, and simply blaming the FF suppliers doesn’t solve anything. They are simply following the way societies and the Systems of the world are currently constructed to behave. Only major paradigm shifts and systemic changes in our thinking and values can change how the world operates.
The current myth / belief that simply replacing FF energy with non-FF energy/renewables and the climate crisis can be solved is the #1 problem in need to upending. The video ignores this issue too.
Why I resigned from my tenured position teaching climate science in college
We (privileged people in wealthy countries) have a very short window of opportunity to take decisive, systemic action to avert the worst consequences of climate breakdown. Not only do our current emissions targets put us far behind where we need to be, our province’s 50-year-old education system lacks the support our students need to face this reality.
Teaching this to an 18 year old is like telling them that they have cancer, then ushering them out the door, saying “sorry, good luck with that.”
“My resignation is my act of conscientious objection to educational business-as-usual with a “green” twist, couched in the assumption of a forever-growing economy on a physically finite planet. The science clearly shows us that the future our students are headed for will be radically different from one that can be met by the incremental changes and technological solutions we are currently engaged in.”
– Dr Heather Short
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/first-person-climate-change-education-support-young-people-1.6186611
now that’s one hell of a reality check.
Sadly, she’s saying nothing that hasn’t been long known. And that’s the tragedy of it. So much pain was avoidable. More still is. But every second of every minute of every day of every week of every month of every year of every decade we delay increases the future pain exponentially.
“Every decision is an ecological decision.” – Me, OccupyDetroit, 2011.
File this headline under futility and ridiculousness: The world’s biggest carbon-removal plant just opened. In a year, it’ll negate just 3 seconds’ worth of global emissions.
So… we only need 10,519,200 of those plants. We’re saved!
(365.25 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes x 60 seconds)/3
I hope you have seen the “Honest Government Ads” from The Juice Media. If not, enjoy.
https://www.thejuicemedia.com/honest-government-ad-carbon-capture-and-storage/
Fabulous! I had known of them but hadn’t yet watched any.
Thanks. Will share.
nigelj says: Victors doomy, defeatist take on the climate issue is understandable up to a point. Mitigating the climate problem is obviously difficult for all sorts of practical, psychological and political reasons, however mitigating the climate problem is NOT impossible . . . etc.
V: I appreciate your sober, balanced response, nigel. But I don’t see myself as doomy or defeatist because, for skeptics like me, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Unfortunately its not that simple, because that “fear itself” which is now running wild all over the world is potentially far more dangerous than any havoc “climate change” might wreak. You yourself allude to the dangers of geoengineering, which might well be adopted out of sheer panic when all other options have failed, and which could well be far more dangerous than anything CO2 emissions could produce. That’s only one of the many ill considered “remedies” that have been offered.
As far as wind and solar are concerned I’ll refer you to the following screed by none other than Bill Gates: https://youtu.be/9xe3BWPsBTU
Of course, Gates has ideas of his own as to what should be done, but if you listen carefully to what he has to say here it’s all basically pie in the sky, centered on a vague plea for the encouragement of “technical innovation” at some time in the indeterminate future: https://youtu.be/oD17uLWd2qA
n: Plenty of properly conducted research studies show mitigation using the safest options doesn’t have to lead to the collapse of the economy or society.
V: What’s being called for by organizations like Extinction Rebellion is a lot more than the “safest options.” They, like Greta Thunberg are insisting on truly drastic measures — and realistically it is only the most extreme measures that could possible make a significant difference over the next 10 years or so, assuming the mainstream view is correct. This is not only my opinion but that of a great many scientists, including climate scientists who have long maintained that “climate change” is real.
Victor, yes there’s a certain amount of craziness and zealotry coming from some people associated with the climate issue, but its important not to use it as a rationalisation to ignore the established science, and to do nothing to change our lifestyles, and to avoid voting for climate policies. Not suggesting we make draconian lifestyle changes that make us miserable, but theres plenty we can do without doing that.
To all and everyone
Are we seeing that Victor is beginning to come to his mind here?
He is too conscistent to be a drunken sailor, and I could not discard him as a hopeless patient either like many have done, and even written his tombstone.
A sceptic, he is not. The widespread and common US- definition of being a “sceptic” is someone who fights Darwin. But that is not what it means to be sceptic.
He is hallucinating a lot due to lack of proper public school and common sense. and common experience.
But that is not scepicism Hr Victor. That rather betrays lack of scepticism.
I try to find it by Google translate. Querkoppf would hit perfectly in German, but that word is not understood by that automatic translation.
Bajass we would say inn Norwegian and that comes out the same both in German and English. Bajazzo is that all- european circus- clown with italian renaissance origin in Comedia del arte. We say it of a hyper- active child who obviously ought to go to school first.
Harlekin might be the Dutch way of labeling him. But in Norway Gale-mattis, Mad Matthias, who was lucky after all. in all his madness and errors. Perhaps that archetyp and fairy tale is what might fit on him.
Being that is really also quite an art, Victor. Look up and listen to Igor Stravinsky Pulcinella- suite in many versions. on Youtube. A masterpiece with many important elements from Stravinskys side.
But we must also be trained, cunning and serious when it comes to chosmology and geophysics.
And Aristophanes` Nephelai maybe…..
They (XR), like Greta Thunberg are insisting on truly drastic measures..
Drastic? Really?
Got some examples of truly drastic measures please.
for example .. Thunberg has avoided getting into the detail of what action should be taken, saying “it is nothing to do with me”.
She has called for nations to abide by their own commitments to the Paris agreement.
To act faster. To do more.
She has called for new UK coal mines not to be started, and for expansion of German coal mines to be stopped, and not destroy 6 local villages in the process.
Hardly drastic or even exceptional.
XR core issues / demands are straight forward. I’d call them BASIC.
Extinction Rebellion is a politically non-partisan international movement that uses non-violent direct action to persuade governments to act justly on the Climate and Ecological Emergency.
We have three demands in the UK:
Tell the truth – Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.
Act Now – Government must act now to halt biodiversity loss and reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2025.
Go Beyond Politics – Government must create and be led by the decisions of a Citizens’ Assembly on climate and ecological justice.
https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/demands/
Hardly that radical, far from drastic.
Well-said, IMO.
I have seen many climate orientated academics saying existing technologies like wind/solar renewables are sufficient to rapidly reduce fossil fuel use to 45% of 2010 ghg levels by 2030 … ongoing to meet the Paris target of “net-zero” by 2050 and of remaining under +1.5C.
I have more or less via different approaches indicated I think that is impossible. Here is at least one recent paper which kind of says the same thing. (unless something else significant is done to change the historical growth story of wind/solar thus far)
To summarize, our research challenges several dominant views about the growth of solar and wind power and their potential role in mitigating climate change. We show the growth in most countries is no longer exponential – rather it stops accelerating at about 1% of total electricity supply per year. While maximum growth differs from one country to another, only in leading countries, like Germany, does it approach the speed that we would need in the world as a whole to reach climate targets. — Overall, the paper articulates the enormous scale of the challenge of replacing traditional energy sources with renewables and the need to explore diverse climate solutions and scenarios.
https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/can-renewables-grow-as-fast-as-in-climate-scenarios
Essentially they are saying the research indicates wind/solar deployment at scale globally including in developing nations cannot be expanded large enough or fast enough to replace fossil fuel energy to meet the Paris 1.5-2C scenarios
From your summary, it sounds rather that deployment *isn’t being* accelerated fast enough at present, not that it *can’t be* so accelerated. We already knew that RE deployment is sensitive to policy choices, and that political will has mostly been inadequate.
But that last seems to be shifting, albeit less rapidly than it should–or should have.
Political will? What fantasy are you still living in? I’m really not meaning to be rude; there is no other explanation! K. Anderson, in an interview I think Reality posted, said the conversation and modes of creative ideas being made needs to change. That is, we can’t keep relying on the powers that be.
I, as all here surely know, have this, and beyond for a very long time now.
Kevin, there is no “political” solution in anything like the modes we have been in during our “modern” era.
Quite simply cannot be done. Einstein and Bucky Fuller said it from different directions. I’m sure you know the quotes I mean.
Please believe them.
Killian,
Politics is the art of the possible. Even Clausewitz said, “War is politics pursued by other means.” When you say there is no political solution, your are admitting the impossibility of your position.
Note the qualifier for no “political” solution was … in anything like the modes we have been in during our “modern” era.
Surely Killian was pointing out the impossibility of the current Mitigation/Economic/Govt/Political/UNFCCC positions? Including Net Zero, NETS, CDRs, mitigation plans, Paris agreements and so on. They offer no valid solutions at all and a 30 year record of failure. They refuse to admit it is impossible to do anything substantive until the real cause, global paradigm / system of the modern era, is discarded or totally reformed.
Which more or less is exactly what the cumulative climate science related knowledge is saying, isn’t it? Kevin Anderson doesn’t make stuff up. He’s presenting the rational evidence based conclusions of THE Science and Knowledge. Surely it’s the Science itself that says the current positions are UNTENABLE.
It’s as simple as the science based Carbon Budget will run out this decade (on bau plans) without any shadow of a doubt – a conclusion also based on the science!!!
( Just saying, but it doesn’t really matter that much. What is going to happen will happen no matter what. )
Reality Check got the response right. Your take is boneheaded, frankly, Maybe due to your own failure to comprehend some First order and First Principles stuff WRT our collective predicament.
My statement on the current political milieu being incompetent WRT solving the multivariate crisis is based on application of First Principles- and First Order-based analysis and is in no way invalidated by saying there is no political solution since there *can’t be* a political solution, I.e., the principles under which the current socio-economic paradigm functions are diametrically opposed to a regenerative system:
Current……………………….Regenerative
self………………………………..community
mine……………………………..ours
subdue nature…………live within nature
nature as capital…….nature as the source of life
growth…………………………sustainability (sufficiency)
wants…………………………..needs
Etc.
These things are incompatible. The former will not beget the latter if for no other reason than it would require the willing abandonment of wealth and power by the top few percent. More and more quite serious and “respected” people are saying similar. But this has never happened in all of history and will not happen now. There is a reason the powers that be want a GND, massive renewables build-out, CCS, etc., and it is because those things cement the current paradigm in place for at least another generation.
@ Killian
As I wrote you earlier, those first principles of yours are not agreed on. And they are not even stated and defined from your side, You only phantacize and deduce from them.
That is what makes your very mission so inefficient.
Take my very cunning advice also on that and think it over.
Threading break:
Carboconfusus said, “As I wrote you earlier, those first principles of yours are not agreed on..”
A First Principle is not something one agrees on. They are not subject to opinion. They are base facts upon which systems are built, non-negotiable.
Thanks for confirming you are prone to barking words.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/09/24/the-record-breaking-failures-of-nuclear-power/?fbclid=IwAR0IWKxAa6IFJvQTVHeLIvUNClT0dpW57zAnmB2KiJkGEBA3Arh__ROgJ0s
BPL on EP: In short, everything you’re saying is factually incorrect. You don’t appear to
Richard: have altered your (EP’s) beliefs since the 1970s even as conflicting data piles high. The guppy bowl hypothesis, as I call it, doesn’t work so well with the sentient.
I just stumbled across this fascinating interactive climate policy tool called “Enroads”. It allows you to play with various settings like the amounts of renewable energy, nuclear power, energy efficiency and economic growth etcetera, and see what it does to emissions and warming depicted in a graph. I haven’t had a chance to use it significantly, or check how robust and accurate it is, but thought I would just post it anyway.
https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=21.9.0
Video explaining Enroads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Muh-eoPd3g&t=520s
I assumed everyone knew about this? It mirrors, but is far less robust than, what I suggested in 2008: http://aperfectstormcometh.blogspot.com/2009/05/perfect-storm-world-simulation-peak-oil.html
short video lecture extract on being Realistic and Resilience, plus a powerful experiment / exercise.
3 Limits to Growth After 45 Years – Dennis Meadows at Ulm University – 7 Jun 2019
https://youtu.be/aRXb4bJhSSw?t=3233
Limits to Growth Revisited: What kind of regeneration is possible? with Dennis Meadows 15 Aug 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVpRJeGjhMQ
D.M. “Technology is not an independent value free force that comes in, looks around, sees a problem and solves it. Technology is value laden tool, developed and wielded by people who in most cases have their own short term interests.”
D.M. “The notion that there is some kind of fairly attractive sustainable society ahead of us if we can only find it is now a fantasy.”
DM: “A central problem of our societies – rich and poor – is that we have developed a set of institutions, expectations and other social mechanism fundamentally based on and dependent on the assumption of continued growth.” … “Another thing to do is to start imagining other indicators of success.”
DM: “What you are asking really is will this growing group of people interested in alternatives rise up in numbers of power quickly enough to enforce proactive limitations on growth, or will they be too late, in which case we will just sit here and wait for nature to decide how it is going to limit our growth.”
DM: … “The planet will have a climate very different from what it has now, similar to what it has in the past. Since our civilisation, our modes of agricultural production, our ways of generating and using energy are all intertwined with the climate, the fact that the climate is changing means that those modes will change. Our civilisation will be very different a hundred years from now. Population will be lower and my guess is that the modes of social organisation will be much more local and […] tribal.”
DM: “I spent 50 years trying to help people understand their realistic options and choosing a bit more wisely for the long-term. I would say by and large I have failed. I don’t think the planet is going to evolve any different from my having been around than it would have if I had not been conceived.”
and my guess is that the modes of social organisation will be much more local and […] tribal. – D. Meadows
Collapse is a choice. – J. Diamond
1. Yup. No other option. 2. Still is. – K.
DM, on tech: Technology doesn’t eliminate limits to growth, it shifts the burden from one limit to another and may push back a little bit the period until things start to go down. But, of course, technology itself doesn’t change the problem.
If people won’t believe me, maybe they’ll believe one of the people who predicted our chaos of today 50 years before it happened.
Dennis Meadows Interview p3/4 (Economics, Globalisation, Responsibilities, Personal Fear)
2017 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AShHb9ME1x8
“My goodness look around. If this isn’t collapse what do you call it? You know the standard of living is going down for many people. The climate is moving in directions which threaten the existence of this country. The US Presidential election is being held between two of the most awful people I ever saw in public life. You know the oil companies are in a desperate rush to pump the last bit of oil out of the ground leaving nothing for the future. Is this collapse? What do you call this if you don’t call it collapse? — We are in a period of collapse now, which will intensify.”
How can humans change an economic system?
“What’s happening now is that the economic system is changing humans. You know we create some indicator in the economic system and then immediately human institutions swing around to try and maximize that indicator . And we we need to get out of that trap.”
“I think an important thing to realize is that the economic system doesn’t exist somehow out there independent of us. We created it. It is a tool for us. By and large it serves the purposes of the people who created it. So rather than asking ‘How do you change the economic system?’, I would say ‘How do you get people to have different goals for that economic system?’ “
“If they have different goals then they will create a new economic system to satisfy the goals that they have. So the problem isn’t the system (per se) it’s the goals. We have a really dysfunctional economic system which is driving us to collapse because we have a set of goals that are dysfunctional and are driving us to collapse. — I don’t tell you which ones to have, but I would say you should at least ask that question for yourself. “
Globalisation
“So I mean, speaking in a kind of funny way, I would say the the goal of global policy ought to be to eliminate that there is any global policy. It should be to break things back up again. You have to give up certain short-term gains but the benefit is you have a (much better) chance to survive long term.”
If it all collapses who fault is it?
“Everybody is involved in this. There’s nobody who is responsible for these things. It’s the collective fault, you know.”
“In English we call this scapegoating. Which means pointing the finger at somebody and saying ‘You are responsible not I, don’t look at me. I know you were the one!’ No, the world doesn’t work like that. “
Is this collapse? What do you call this if you don’t call it collapse? — We are in a period of collapse now, which will intensify.”
Yup. It’s like the discussions I’ve had here and elsewhere with things like the 6th Great Mass Extinction. Some argue it’s not an extinction *yet* because, apparently, everything hasn’t died yet. That’s not how it works. The extinction starts with one species and ends up with a huge portion of species gone. Saying we’re not in an extinction because it’s not finished is just stupid.
The same goes for collapse. An earthquake, for example, is not an eq until the shaking stops? No, it starts with processes we don’t feel or hear and *ends* with a jumble of smashed buildings.
We are deep into both a mass extinction and collapse. They are the same damned thing with the same cause: A small fraction of humans overconsuming since @ 1850.
Collapse? You betcha: https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/big-fish-stories-getting-littler
Seeing those photos is heartbreaking.
The change in landscapes, coastlines, and the forests I knew as child teen and in my 20s versus today, equally so.
Recently I mentioned cascading risks in the near future. Here’s an interesting paper that spells out.
Climate change risk assessment 2021 – Research paper
https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-09/2021-09-14-climate-change-risk-assessment-quiggin-et-al.pdf
In preparation for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), to be held in
Glasgow in November 2021, signatories to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate
change are for the first time revising their climate mitigation plans, or nationally
determined contributions (NDCs).
However, the commitments made in line with current NDCs fall far short of
limiting global temperature increases to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, let
alone 1.5°C.
By 2030, under current policies, the gap in annual emissions compared with
a 2°C least-cost pathway will have reached 14 –17.5 GtCO₂, equivalent to nearly
half of current energy sector emissions.
This research paper highlights the risks and likely impacts if the goals set under the
Paris Agreement are not met, and the world follows an emissions pathway consistent
with recent historical trends. Simply updating – i.e. without significantly enhancing –
NDCs will not guarantee the Paris Agreement goals are met; nor will enhanced
pledges without swift and decisive delivery of those pledges.
Many of the impacts described are likely to be locked in by 2040, and become
so severe they go beyond the limits of what many countries can adapt to.
The paper examines emissions risks, and the most significant direct and systemic
risks in terms of societal impact, drawing on recent research of impact indicators.
Summary
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1442440957295747072.html
The report highlights that failure to act means that “cascading climate impacts can be expected to cause higher mortality rates, drive political instability and greater national insecurity, and fuel regional & international conflict”
The cascading risk most concerning experts: “interconnections between shifting weather patterns, resulting in changes to ecosystems, & the rise of pests &diseases, which combined with heatwaves & drought will likely drive unprecedented crop failure, food insecurity & migration”
Climate breakdown raises the terrifying prospect of simultaneous crop failures “The probability of a synchronous, greater than 10% crop failure across all of the top four maize producing countries is currently near zero, but this rises to around 6.1% each year in the 2040s”
“The probability of a synchronous crop failure of this order during the decade of the 2040s is just less than 50%”
– 10m people a year at risk from extreme temperatures
– Agricultural yields declining by 30% by 2050.
– 700m to be exposed to severe droughts.
“If emissions follow the trajectory set by current NDCs, there is a less than 5 per cent chance of keeping temperatures well below 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, and less than 1 per cent chance of reaching the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target.”
“Physical risk events from heatwaves, wildfires, floods & droughts are of particular concern b/c of their potential to impact food security, energy & water infrastructure, as well as lead to business defaults on a scale that the insurance industry would be unable to cope with”
“direct climate risks will likely drive food insecurity & loss of livelihoods, resulting in displacement of people, & migration pressures… these pressures will likely lead to loss of life, human rights violations, increased pressures on public institutions & infrastructure…”
“developed countries would likely introduce export bans and people would resort to large-scale hoarding. All this would likely result in a negative feedback loop, amplifying shortages and price increases.”
“By 2040, 3.9 billion people are likely to experience major heatwaves, 12 times more than the historic average.”
“…increased urban heat islands, combined with reduced water for cooling within thermal power stations, will likely lead to heightened demand & supply shortages… leading to black- and brownouts and ultimately a lack of cooling services, & thus heat stress & mortality”
The sad thing about this paper, despite my calling for exactly this kind of paper for so long, is how unnecessary it would be if people just thought a little. It’s simple:
Increasing GHGs + nonlinear systems + semi-chaotic/chaotic systems + tipping points + the fastest rates of change outside of a massive bolide impact + BAU = this paper. The problem does not lie in the paper existing, it should exist, along with many more like it, but in the Superman effect: Nobody believes increasing GHGs + nonlinear systems + semi-chaotic/chaotic systems + tipping points + the fastest rates of change outside of a massive bolide impact + BAU = this paper until a scientist says it, but long-tail risk analysis got me to the same conclusions as that paper at least a decade before that paper was published.
We must find a way to get effective risk analysis into the general conversation so we do not continue to lose decades waiting for Superman.
Killian @27th septemeber:
nigel: “simplification forced on us at scale ”
Killian: “The Strawmen will never end with this (ethicless) one. I don’t recall a single person here, there, or anywhere, ever talking about forced simplicity. Sure Deep Green Resistance talks about forcing the shutdown of industrialization, but these are two very different animals. But you, nigel, are as dishonest about solutions as ever. Solutions denial is a terribly immoral thing to do.”
Nigel: Killian seems to think that by forced simplicity that I meant as ordered by some government or other authority, or at the point of a gun or something, even when I said at my comment on september 25th that he is responding to: ”But in more detail, it seems to me that simplification FORCED on us at scale would require massive shortages of materials…”
Killian simply doesn’t understand or read things, and also personalises the issue about my ethics and makes a whole stream of nasty unsubtantiated accusations. This is one reason of many that I largely no longer bother to respond to his posts.
@ Nigel & al.:
I have suggested a short and clear series of things, of what we shall do with the drunken sailor, that can be found on the internet today, if anyone did not learn it from before.
You’re not good at this, nigel. You said forced. I promise you, nobody here or anywhere would read that, or did read that, and think anything other than what I did because to call simplicity “forced” with nothing doing any forcing is just stupid. If you mean uncontrolled collapse, say that, not forced simplification. One would say something like “forced into simplification by our own inaction” and to leave it uncontextualized in that way leaves it to be interpreted the only way an intelligent, high-vebal person would: Correctly.
Having no other choice is not “forced,” it is chosen, it is caused, it is not forced on anyone.
You communicate poorly and every single time try to rationalize it. If you insist on barking words, at lest take responsibility fory our FAIL.
You do nothing but regurgitate or bark words all while blaming and gaslighting others, as you do above.
Just sayin’ here, but that last comment would have been more likely to have the desired effect had the last 2 paragraphs been struck.
No, Kevin, because the rest of you never hold him to account. You had a choice here to let him know he communicated poorly and should have just admitted it and restated what he *meant* to say, or go after me yet again for doing what you are too biased to do: Call him on his poor participation here.
You chose poorly. As ever. Bias is a terrible thing.
What’s New?
Mainstream Media Attention to IPCC AR6 WG1 Report Neglected Real Cause of Emissions
[ and that’s a problem which causes other problems including political inaction ]
[FRANTA] has long been frustrated with the previous IPCC reports as well as the way they’re typically covered, because the reports are largely reiterations of the scientific facts that have been long known, and they consistently omit the social causes of the problem, i.e., the political obstruction, misleading information and distorted framing of the problem. Because these are absent in the reports themselves, the press, adhering to those same strictures, also fails to supply readers with the broader context, or explain “what’s blocking action, what’s slowing things down.”
[Richard Wolffe] says these reports should name names because in capitalism, very few people are at the helm. “Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the people [about 100,000 people] in the United States make all the major decisions with respect to what gets produced, what technologies are used to produce it, where the production occurs geographically, what is done with the output, if it’s sold domestically or abroad. It’s the same with purchasing,” Wolff explains. … when the report fails to name who is most responsible for the emissions, and corporate media reports only on the report without supplementing it with the history of industry dereliction, “the whole matter can then disappear from the U.S. news cycle with little ado, accountability or action.”
“[The IPCC] is still having to exist within the same system that produced those other industries, and that’s problematic.”
https://truthout.org/articles/mainstream-media-attention-to-ipcc-report-neglected-real-cause-of-emissions/
Ben Franta: If we want to fix global warming, not only study it, then we [and the IPCC reports] mustn’t ignore the political dynamics that have created & are exacerbating the problem. Ignoring those realities risks mis-framing the problem. Because the better we understand what hasn’t worked, the better we can develop solutions that do. https://twitter.com/BenFranta
Europe’s [Gas] energy crisis is coming for the rest of the world, too
This winter, the world will be fighting over a finite supply of natural gas. The energy crisis in Europe presages trouble for the rest of the planet as the continent’s gas shortage has governments warning of blackouts and factories being forced to shut
https://twitter.com/i/events/1442533984227893249
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Vol. 46:- (Volume publication date October 2021) Paywalled
“a common thread that emerges across the reviewed literature is the central role of power, manifest in many forms, from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-environ-012220-011104
Frequent Flying is an expression of global privilege, of indulgence and of excessive consumption and unnecessary Emissions
https://twitter.com/ClimateHuman/status/1442544654436556803/photo/1
It’s a Matter of Scale
“IF ONLY the richest 10% in the world, that 10% of highest emitters, a mere 700 million people located in almost every nation across the globe, were to theoretically reduce their Individual Carbon Footprint to the level of the Average European citizen, that would be Equivalent to a one-third cut in Global Emissions. Even if the other 90% did nothing!” (edited) original by @KevinClimate
Then seeing it for what it really is – in a proper perspective.
Visual Graph https://twitter.com/LasseClimate/status/1442605891598041091/photo/1
correction
make that …. one tenth of 1 percent of the people, about 330,000, in the United States
The Data (iow the observations and the models) keep on saying, hey, it’s not working people!
GHG emissions keep on rising. Because the so-called solutions are not really solutions!
“If you’re only paying attention to improving efficiency and investing in renewables, you’re not going to solve the problem.”
The study was published on Aug. 25, 2021, in the journal Global Environmental Change. Karen Xuan Zhang and Brett Clark of the Department of Sociology at the U were co-authors.
Energy efficiency improvement and renewable energy production
article https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/human-behavior-sabotages-co2-reducing-strategies/
study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378021001308?via%3Dihub
Believing switching from a gas car to an EV is a solution for reducing GHG emissions is a Myth. Replacing coal fired power stations with renewables is a solution either. Everything you do, everything Government does, has an effect. Because, as Leonardo Da Vinci said: “Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Holistic, Systemic and Regenerative solutions need to be applied across multiple domains all at once.
But first understand that no one knows what they are doing! Especially the UNFCCC which is being run by Political / Corporatist Self-Interest the world over. It’s impossible for them to care about the state of world, the climate crisis or the people in general. Get real. Seriously.
(my joke for the day)
Great article thank’s RC, and the ones below in your other post as well,
“Holistic, Systemic and Regenerative solutions need to be applied across multiple domains all at once.”
But how do we achieve this outcome? Its easy for the writers to say these things, but they are not new and they need a plan of how to get there.
Regarding changing the overall socio- economic system to something more just and sustainable. Writers demonising rich people will achieve precisely nothing. It will just make them dig in.
I’m not that convinced by grass roots movements like small sustainability groups with community ownership. No sign this is really scaling up significantly in developed countries. I don’t really want to form something like that with my neighbours. The last time I tried sharing things with my neighbours some of them never got returned. You just get a lot of problems.
I tend to think we probably have to hope for a top down approach. A brave governmnet would change the corporate governenace laws to make environmental outcomes as important as profit. That would force change and put the cat amongst the pigeons!
New Zealands government is making tentative steps by requiring government budgets prioritise general well being as well as economic growth. Naturally it got attacked by those on the right, but the government has kept quite good support.
All good nigelj. As to your questions and comments, honestly, I have no idea. Where do we find a brave govt? And of workable solutions do exist they not only need to be simultaneously (imo as said above) but also by a majority of large nations as well.
I do tend to like XR basic premises … of using Citizens’ Assemblies (reflective of the populace make up and values) to advise the Government of the day on next best step on the road to solving the problem. I think that idea is based on sound premises and principles. The Citizens’ Assemblies are advised, informed of the facts, data, problems to solve by experts, eg climate scientists economists and the like … and then they discuss and decide on balance a rational practical path forward. A good Govt would need to convince the electorate they had good reasons to not follow that advice.
Where does one find a good Govt these days? Or at any time is the question perhaps.
The XR ideals were spelled out in the beginning but i think it;s been forgotten and not explained enough since then. The protests is only attention seeking stuff and not their whole approach. Especially the part about it’s the Government itself that makes the final decisions and implements any plans and policies.
I can see where you’re coming from and agree a strong top down approach by Govt is the only way to go. be it an authoritative china or an argumentative “freedom loving” (?) democracy USA type; be it a left leaning citizenry, center or right leaning.
I agree demonising the rich is a waste of time. It;s not that they as a group are bad or evil, they are simply going with the flow provided by the system to drives their behavior as much as it drives fossil fuel companies. We are all kind of sheep in a way. Humans are habit forming creatures from birth.
I am not “blaming the rich” no matter who I quote here from time to time, but I am trying to say look this IS what happens, this is why it happens, and if this could be changed look at the difference it could make in regards to GHG emissions and warming going forward.
But as we know, humans are also focused on the short term versus the long term, and there’s this competitive need to be winners as well. Beating others, iow. I have no idea how to resolve all these competing conflicts. All I do know is so far – nothing is working – and the UNFCCC system and Paris etc, looks a total failure to me.
Not only that but maybe agw/cc really needs to be discussed as a Symptom rather than the cause of a problem in need of a solution? So actually defining the real problem/s in need of being solved (be it Systemic issues and Growth, Values Priorities and LTG issues or whatever) and changed would be a better approach.
Finally may I say, there is far too many studies being published and there to read. Who is reading them? I bet the politicians are not, so why are they being published? The quantity of climate related papers seems to have expanded a 100,000 fold from 20 years ago …. WHO decides which papers are better? WHO is using them besides other people PhDs writing their own papers …. whats the end result? Who decides which DATA, which INSIGHT and what ADVICE to follow?
Remember that one group in New Zealand that got together to look at Regenerative agriculture and what to do about that ONE topic? Hundreds of people were involved. Hundreds of existing papers were read and discussed …. then people were to go out into the world and do more research thinking evaluations to come back together again in the future … and then to advise the Govt … even though the GOVT didn’t actually ask for their advice.
One topic. One group. In one country. And that alone was as confusing as hell, and had no outcomes or answers yet. I post a lot of info from papers especially recent ones here on a range of topics, details …. my take away appraisal from all these last couple pf months is ::
….. first understand that no one (especially our politicians and national leaders – and including those Scientists working on the Climate Crisis issues from causes to solutions to energy use to predictions) knows what they are doing!
And if there is someone in there that does know, then they are finding it next to impossible to find ANYONE TO AGREE WITH THEM.
So I am kind of thinking, hey you know, it really can’t be that complicated, right?
How about just some down to earth common sense, some basic working facts, and applying a bit of decency, some respect and some logic and using the accumulated Human knowledge picked up after 100,000 years of Cooperating together?
It really can’t be that hard, surely!
RC. Yes I see those issues all mostly the same way. Although I’m probably less doomy than you. However we do need a bit of doomerism to remind us of when some strategy is hopeless, and I can’t stand Polyannahs.
Skepticalscience.com do a weekly list of new climate research papers which is quite useful, (you can find it in the list of articles on their home page) however I look at some of this material and I’m in two minds. Some of it you wonder what useful purpose does this really have? Why do they bother? Especially the social science that often seems to state the obvious? Who would even read it other than a few academics? Its like its become an industry.
But the other part of my mind says we just need to let scientists do their thing, and probably useful studies will emerge in a giant sea of less useful studies. And they do emerge. The giant sea of studies is perhaps the price we pay for progress. And the IPCC do work through it all trying to make some sense of it. But the whole thing does sometimes make it hard to see the wood for the trees. Information is great and I’m an information junkie, but society has now got information overload, and that’s before we even get to disinformation and social media drivel. Sigh.
@nigelj let scientists do their thing
Yes definitely. sorry to sound like a debbie downer. Yes seen the sks listings. Something I wished was available a decade ago but the quantity now is very large. No intent to be critical of that. I just wonder sometimes out loud. Not for me to reason why I guess.
Who’s smarter? Thems what needed to do a study or me what needed no stinkin’ study whatsoever?
I vote me!
Killian is smarter! Naturally.
And I also get the joke. :)
It depends on how you define “smart”. I would contend that it has to do with the slope of the learning curve rather than the absolute value.
Just referencing different forms of analysis/learning/knowing. After all, I couldn’t come to the same conclusions via their methods if my life depended on it. The reverse is apparently also true.
The real issue is one is valued by society and one is not – even though the latter got to the same conclusion ten vital years earlier.
I should also point out saying regenerative solutions must be cross-domain is redundant as they are inherently so. Essentially, if you say “regenerative solutions” you’ve covered literally everything. From that umbrella one can then lay out subsets of techniques, methods, etc.
Principle: Design from patterns to details. I.e., big picture to fine details.
Actual, not relative, wealth matters for climate. And actual equity matters for social well-being.
Published: 19 June 2020
Scientists’ warning on affluence, Thomas Wiedmann et al
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y
Abstract
For over half a century, worldwide growth in affluence has continuously increased resource use and pollutant emissions far more rapidly than these have been reduced through better technology. The affluent citizens of the world are responsible for most environmental impacts and are central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions. We summarise the evidence and present possible solution approaches.
Any transition towards sustainability can only be effective if far-reaching lifestyle changes complement technological advancements. However, existing societies, economies and cultures incite consumption expansion and the structural imperative for growth in competitive market economies inhibits necessary societal change.
Intro
The warnings aptly describe the problems, identify population, economic growth and affluence as drivers of unsustainable trends and acknowledge that humanity needs to reassess the role of growth-oriented economies and the pursuit of affluence. However, they fall short of clearly identifying the underlying forces of overconsumption and of spelling out the measures that are needed to tackle the overwhelming power of consumption and the economic growth paradigm.
We provide evidence from the literature that consumption of affluent households worldwide is by far the strongest determinant and the strongest accelerator of increases of global environmental and social impacts. We describe the systemic drivers of affluent overconsumption and synthesise the literature that provides possible solutions by reforming or changing economic systems.
Systemic drivers and possible solutions
As the previous section shows, there is a positive relationship between biophysical resource use and affluence, as defined by income. Adding to this, the most affluent groups have higher incomes than expenditure, and their saving and investing leads to substantial additional environmental impact. Therefore, and due to significant inter- and intra-national wealth and income inequality, we differentiate between globally affluent groups, such as the European Union, and the most wealthy and affluent groups within countries, e.g. the <1–10% richest income segments.
As quantitative research shows, highly affluent consumers drive biophysical resource use
(a) directly through high consumption,
(b) as members of powerful factions of the capitalist class and
(c) through driving consumption norms across the population.
The next sections focus on affluent groups globally and on the intra-nationally most wealthy and affluent segments (hereafter called super-affluent).
Reducing overconsumption
Avoiding consumption means not consuming certain goods and services, from living space (overly large homes, secondary residences of the wealthy) to oversized vehicles, environmentally damaging and wasteful food, leisure patterns and work patterns involving driving and flying47. This implies reducing expenditure and wealth along ‘sustainable consumption corridors’, i.e. minimum and maximum consumption standards.
The avoid-shift-improve framework, coherently applied with a dominant avoid and strong shift, implies the adoption of less affluent, simpler and sufficiency-oriented lifestyles to address overconsumption—consuming better but less
Super-affluent consumers and growth imperatives
Growth imperatives are active at multiple levels, making the pursuit of economic growth (net investment, i.e. investment above depreciation) a necessity for different actors and leading to social and economic instability in the absence of it.
[…] there is a common interest in maintaining the capitalist system and favourable conditions for capital accumulation, e.g. through aggregate growth and high consumption. How this political corruption by the super-affluent plays out in practice is well documented….
Super-affluent consumers drive consumption norms
To start with, individual consumption decisions are not made in a vacuum, but are shaped by surrounding (physical and social) structures and provisioning systems.
Sanne and Alexander discuss several structural barriers to sufficiency-oriented lifestyles, locking in high consumption. These include lack of suitable housing, insufficient options for socialising, employment, transport and information, as well as high exposure to consumer temptations.
Often, these conditions are deliberately fostered by states and also capitalists (the latter overlapping with super-affluent consumers and having disproportionate influence on states) to increase consumption.
This endless process is a core part of capitalism as it keeps social momentum and consumption high with affluent consumers driving aspirations and hopes of social ascent in low-affluence segments. The positional consumption behaviour of the super-affluent thus drives consumption norms across the population, for instance through their excessive air travel….
Solution approaches
(most important part, really worth reading in full, understanding the dynamics involved, and the current barriers in detail)
All these approaches differ from the established green growth (ecomodernism) approach…
these approaches also differ from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The reformist group consists of heterogeneous approaches such as a-growth80, precautionary/pragmatic post-growth52, prosperity42 and managing85 without growth as well as steady-state economics […] These include, among others, stringent eco-taxes or cap-and trade systems, directed investments in green industries and public institutions, wealth redistribution through taxation and a maximum income, a guaranteed basic income and/or reduced working hours42,77. Although these policies already seem radical when compared to today’s policies, the proponents of reformist approaches are convinced that the transformation can be achieved in current capitalist economies and democratic states
The second, more radical, group disagrees and argues that the needed socio-ecological transformation will necessarily entail a shift beyond capitalism and/or current centralised states.
Many degrowth approaches combine elements of the two, but often see a stronger role for state action than eco-anarchists. […] Eco-socialists usually focus more on rationing, planning of investments and employment, price controls and public ownership of at least the most central means of production to plan their downscaling in a socially sustainable way.
Finally, eco-anarchists do not view the state as a central means to achieve the socio-ecological transformation. Instead, they stress the role of bottom-up grassroots initiatives, such as transition initiatives and eco-villages, in prefiguring the transformation as well as cultural and value changes as a necessary precondition for wider radical change.
It is important to recognise the pivotal role of social movements in this process, which can bring forward social tipping points through complex, unpredictable and reinforcing feedbacks and create windows of opportunity from crises.
Table 1 Meta approaches for sustainable prosperity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16941-y/tables/1
Brilliant hey?
PS
These are the things that truly scares the pants off the Victors and Mr KIAs of the world, and the thousands of conservative neoliberal think tanks and banksters. …. not the climate change impacts, It’s as if we are living on TWO very different Planets.
Greta rocks!
‘Blah, blah, blah’: Greta Thunberg lambasts leaders over climate crisis
Thunberg said: “They invite cherry-picked young people to meetings like this to pretend that they listen to us. But they clearly don’t listen to us. Our emissions are still rising. The science doesn’t lie.
“We can no longer let the people in power decide what is politically possible. We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action. And hope always comes from the people.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/28/blah-greta-thunberg-leaders-climate-crisis-co2-emissions
with short video
I was really surprised to even see this info in the article (that’s been ignored in other reports) :
Carbon emissions are on track to rise by 16% by 2030, according to the UN, rather than fall by half, which is the cut needed to keep global heating under the internationally agreed limit of 1.5C.
[ that rise means 16% above the global 2010 levels – which is the yardstick for Paris ]
Glasgow should be ‘fun’ and maybe even ‘fiery’. The protests outside by XR and others will be wild I imagine.
@Reality Check:
This surprises exactly no one who was following The Oil Drum back as far as 2010:
The Fake Fire Brigade – How We Cheat Ourselves about our Energy Future
Revisiting the ‘Fake Fire Brigade’ – Part 1 – General Issues
Revisiting the Fake Fire Brigade Part 2: Biomass – A Panacea?
The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #3 – The Biggest Part of Business As Usual – Electricity
The Fake Fire Brigade Revisited #4 – Delivering Stable Electricity
I used to chide poster HarveyD over at Green Car Congress when he’d trumpet some increase in “renewable” energy consumed as a triumph. I noted to him that fossil carbon emissions are the only valid figure of merit, and they continued to go up! I figure he finally went off to a senile-care home; he showed all the signs.
Judging by results achieved, it appears that France, Ontario and Sweden know what they’re doing. The current regime in France just doesn’t want to admit it.
The direction of human history is often governed by little more than good or bad luck. and a few specific events. Chernobyl and Fukushima were bad luck in a sense and have turned the western world off nuclear energy.
There are some interesting experiments happening with fusion power. Do you think it will become a workable source of electricity?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02338-4
Bollocks.
France, metric tons CO2E per capita, 1990/2018: 8.65/6.32 (-17%)
Sweden, same metric: 7.9/4.56 (-42%)
UK, same metric: 12.9/6.9 (-46%)
fyi, a couple of examples, of things that never stop happening somewhere or other.
Climate change in Brazil: Fire, frost, drought upends global markets
Brazil’s crops have been scorched, frozen and then dried out by the worst drought in a century,
upending global commodity markets.
https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/economy/climate-change-in-brazil-fire-frost-drought-upends-global-markets.phtml
The price spikes are contributing to a surge in international food inflation – a United Nations index has jumped 33 percent over the past 12 months – that’s deepening financial hardship in the pandemic and forcing millions of lower-income families to scale back grocery purchases across the globe.
What’s more, the episode is sending an ominous warning of what’s to come as scientists anticipate rising global temperatures and declining soil humidity will increasingly wreak havoc on farm lands in Brazil – and much of the rest of the world.
‘There’s also drought across the border in Argentina & in Chile, Canada, Madagascar, Mexico and Russia. The U.S. has been cleaved in two this summer’ by heat, fires & drought in the west, flooding in the east.
“The world is on a very dangerous path” – “There is no rain because there is no humidity, and there is no humidity because there is no rain.” Deforestation of the Amazon, which ranchers clear cut to raise cattle and plant crops, is playing a big role, he says. By his calculation, Brazil hasn’t had a normal rainy season since 2010.
Brazil relies on hydroelectricity for more than 60 percent of its power, and the drought has forced the country to increase output of more expensive and carbon-intensive electricity.
2.1 million Kenyans facing acute food insecurity in the next 6 months
https://www.africanews.com/2021/09/28/over-2-million-kenyans-face-acute-hunger-due-to-drought-in-kenya-warns-irc/
“Climate change is the main driver of the erratic and recurring droughts, and has been partly attributed to the recent locust outbreaks in East Africa, causing widespread food insecurity. Climate change also contributes to poor health outcomes. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are likely to exacerbate the spread of vector-borne diseases such as dengue and malaria. Lack of access to clean water will lead to higher incidence of diarrhea, a major cause of death for children under 5. Coupled with the destruction of fragile ecosystems, the changing climate has a profound impact on the occurrence of viruses like COVID-19 that emerge from animals.
“We must prepare for future climate emergencies, with communities given financial support and decision-making power. Local leaders (particularly indigenous populations), smallholder farmers and livestock herders already have the knowledge and experience necessary to confront this crisis.
Soaring pea costs set to hit plant-based meat producers
French supplier warns droughts and wet harvests have led to ‘unprecedented situation’
https://www.ft.com/content/689fe9b6-3b1f-4a19-b917-0546def68371
Prices of peas in Canada have more than doubled as the world’s largest producer suffered sharp declines in production after the worst drought in a century. Alongside Canada, Europe has suffered from low yields and in France, another large pea-producing country, the crop has been severely damaged by wet weather during the harvest, said Roquette.
‘A scorching wildfire season continues to devastate farmers across Washington state, including those who grow & harvest hops, a main ingredient in making beer’ – ‘as much as 75% of the nation’s hops’ come from Washington
https://www.king5.com/article/news/local/seattle/fremont-brewing-seattle-wildfire-impact-hops/281-0f2a5487-5737-4735-bfd6-7b56eff2c2b6
“The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, whether we should put up sea walls to protect Manhattan, or when we should abandon Miami. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, turning off the air conditioning, or signing a treaty. The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”
Roy Scranton. “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene”
You’re contemptible and disgusting.
Your counsel of despair is just as ill-founded as everything else you ever posted, and your flip-flop into “unstoppable climate change” merely makes it even more lacking in integrity than your previous flat denial.
Despair is not an adaptive strategy. It also takes an astounding amount of chutzpah to delay meaningful action on climate change for half a century through lies and disinformation and then say, “It doesn’t matter, ’cause there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.”
Victor
So you are a pessimistic, defaitistic old socialist.
Somehow, those fameous 3 things go harmonically together and can be integrated under one and the saqme skin or fur.
I shall tell that to everyone nhere.. I knew that it is something with you.
But maybe you have too many ideas or “philosophies” that are not progressive and not healthy..
I have had all in all 3 GURUs in my life. The first 2 of them were very inspiring, but I had to keep a bit distance also because much of it was hardly healthy, however funny..
Then the 3rd one was more healthy. There also, I had to go my own ways. But he showed the good example of disqualifying a series of old colleagues and professors and rather live it and doing it his own way, and rather look up for and be polite to the youngsters and youngest. The smallest shall be the greatest in the Kingdom of God, you see. Haven`t you learnt that? and That is the truth.. He showed it by a good exampløe, and from that I lewarnt a lot and do the same.
It secures humor and health and protects against Alzheimer.
“Storm of our grandchildren,….” that will take too long time for anyone to see it, but there a lot can be done today allready, that makes yourself wealthy and happy allready. today
From 2008, image from Elsevier — “we are so very very screwed”
https://twitter.com/ClimateEmergMcr/status/1443264055008010250/photo/1
“Whilst 2050 reductions dominate the target-setting agenda, long-term targets do not have a scientific basis and are leading to dangerously misguided policies.”
Like Doh Homer!
13 years later, and still this Truth, this Scientific Fact, this Knowledge is being ignored.
Unbelievable, except it’s true. Yes, we are so very very screwed.
And what’s the use of 30, 40, 50 years of climate science research if even the scientists as well as the UNFCCC are going to on keep ignoring it?
Like, WTF?
Premier Jason Kenney (with short Video)
Enbridge’s Line 3 [ Tar Sands Oil Pipeline to the US ] is complete!
The world needs Alberta energy – and this important pipeline, the first since 2010, will bring more Alberta oil to the US as early as Friday. This is great news for our economy and our thousands of energy workers.
https://twitter.com/jkenney/status/1443268797889228807
Slick Kenney: “It says to those special interests who have been trying to land lock our energy that we will continue to build, to produce more, to fuel growing demand…” “Line 3 operational by October 3rd.”
Peter Kalmus: Those “special interests” are literally trying to stop the destruction of our planet
And see: September 27, 2021 with Video
Campaign by Alberta’s energy war room aims to promote Canadian oil to Americans
Choose Friendly Oil “This includes informing Americans the U.S. has a choice from where it imports oil and that Canada is a better, closer, cleaner and friendlier option compared to countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia,” the Canadian Energy Centre (CEC).
Its “Cleaner, Closer, Committed to Net Zero” campaign features billboards in New York City and Washington.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8225895/alberta-oil-canadian-energy-centre-ad-campaign/
Welcome to Alberta’s Oil Sands the third-largest proven crude oil reserve in the world, next to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. https://www.alberta.ca/oil-sands.aspx
Ha! People are too smart to be suckered by slick $250,000 worth of advertising campaigns. Right? :)
The above is BAU and it is going on 24/7/365 days per year all over this planet all the time.
COP26 lasts a couple of days then it’s back to BAU on Steroids for all Governments everywhere.
Reality Check: . I don’t think blaming the rich (most successful in a capitalist society) helps one bit,
Richard: I think that defining those who are too weak to do the right thing as “most successful” is counterproductive regardless of a society’s dominant economic paradigm
another Nature study is out on higher income folks. and again it’s not about blame or fault per se, but the reality as it is plus their ability to be positive agents for systemic and political change.
Article The 5 roles you may have to affect climate change
5 key levers: Reducing overconsumption, mobilising people to use their investments, networks, organisational influence and political voice.
This high socio-economic (SES) status group makes up the top 10 per cent of income globally and is responsible for half of the carbon pollution emitted by households. As you ascend the income scale to $109,000 (£80,000), you reach the global 1 per cent, whose individual climate pollution is 30 times above the sustainable limit for 2030.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2291988-the-5-roles-you-may-have-to-affect-climate-change/
Study Published: 30 September 2021
The role of high-socioeconomic-status people in locking in or rapidly reducing energy-driven greenhouse gas emissions
We suggest that future research should focus on strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by high-socioeconomic-status people and to align their investments, organizational choices and actions as social and political change agents with climate change mitigation goals. In this Perspective, we broaden the debate beyond the role of individuals as consumers to consider other social roles.
Kristian S. Nielsen et al https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-021-00900-y
Kristian’s twitter thread
https://twitter.com/kristiansn89/status/1443597003779362817
Through these five roles, they can help shape the choices available to themselves and others, providing options that either exacerbate or mitigate climate change. Currently, they are mostly used to exacerbate emissions, but this can and should change.
If, like us, you’re college-educated, have a white-collar job, live in a prosperous neighborhood, or earn over US$38,000 a year, you also have high SES globally.
The top 10% of income globally is responsible for 50% of the household emissions. The climate pollution of the top 1% ($109,000 a year) equals that of the world’s poorest 4.75 billion people (this is insane!).
We hope that by detailing the potential effects of behavior changes in each of these roles we can finally put the unproductive debate of individual vs. systemic changes to rest. Individuals are integral to changing the system!
“We need both behaviour & policy change … to allow everyone to meet their needs without wrecking the climate.”
PLUS on the benefits of academic science climate energy economic social studies, papers and research
Tim Gore says about this new Nature paper: “Great to see the work we did @Oxfam and with friends at @SEIclimate and as part of the @UNEP gap report team led by @StuartBCapstick helping 2 spark new research on confronting extreme carbon #inequality & the hyper emissions of the global elite.”
Where does it go from here is what I wonder. How and where are these thousands of studies applied? Just an open ended question. Obviously some studies/research end up in the IPCC reports. And things like BECCS ends up in trials and in UNFCCC Paris Agreements, SR1.5 Reports and notions of NETs. Possibly the latter was counter-productive.
I do wonder how many really good ideas and projects get lost in the noise.
I have long related to Monbiot’s framing of the issues. I wish I could articulate what I see and feel half as well as he can. His latest screed again mirrors my recent anecdotal review of climate, energy, ecological, and economics looking at what’s life on planet earth like these days. Quite a few are summing up the climate crisis as merely another symptom of a much large driving cause. I think that’s true, or at least a reasonable way to frame the issues better overall.
Article ‘Green growth’ doesn’t exist – less of everything is the only way to avert catastrophe
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/green-growth-economic-activity-environment
The pertinent extracts & key words imv are:
There is a box labelled “climate”, in which politicians discuss the climate crisis. There is a box named “biodiversity”, in which they discuss the biodiversity crisis. There are other boxes, such as pollution, deforestation, overfishing and soil loss, gathering dust in our planet’s lost property department. But they all contain aspects of one crisis that we have divided up to make it comprehensible.
The categories the human brain creates to make sense of its surroundings are not, as Immanuel Kant observed, the “thing-in-itself”. They describe artefacts of our (personal/individual) perceptions rather than the world. Nature recognises no such divisions.
As Earth systems are assaulted by everything at once, each source of stress compounds the others. It is simply not possible to carry on at the current level of economic activity without destroying the environment.
[….] So you could call the decline of the North Atlantic right whale a shipping crisis, or a fishing crisis, or a climate crisis, or an acidification crisis, or a pollution crisis, or a noise crisis. But it is in fact all of these things: a general crisis caused by human activity.
[…] Combined impacts are laying waste to entire living systems.
What would we see if we broke down our conceptual barriers? We would see a full-spectrum assault on the living world. Scarcely anywhere is now safe from this sustained assault.
The various impacts have a common cause: the sheer volume of economic activity. We are doing too much of almost everything, and the world’s living systems cannot bear it. But our failure to see the whole ensures that we fail to address this crisis systemically and effectively.
When we box up this predicament, our efforts to solve one aspect of the crisis exacerbate another.
[…] Growth is wiping the green from the Earth.
We have no hope of emerging from this full-spectrum crisis unless we dramatically reduce economic activity. Sustaining our life-support systems means doing less of almost everything. But this notion is secular blasphemy.
[END]
@Kevin McKinney:
Right back at you.
Sweden is counting “biomass” as carbon-neutral, which it is emphatically NOT on a scale of multiple decades; its 1500 g/kWh emissions are not only worse than coal, they’re not taken up by new growth for a much-too-long time. When 23% (at the time, probably much more now) of a country’s energy supply is counted as carbon-neutral when it is anything but, you know the numbers are garbage.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953416302793
The UK is also counting the wood pellets burned in the Drax power plant as “carbon-neutral”. The figures from neither country can be trusted.
Sweden was YOUR example of ‘doing it right’, not mine. Or did you forget?
Kevin McKinney: Your counsel of despair is just as ill-founded as everything else you ever posted, and your flip-flop into “unstoppable climate change” merely makes it even more lacking in integrity than your previous flat denial.
V; Sorry Kevin, but YOU and so many of the others posting here are the ones offering the
“counsel of despair,” not me.
After all I’ve posted here over the years, do you really believe I could possibly accept the extremely alarmist view quoted in my previous comment? Scranton’s hand-wringing is based on the “climate change” mainstream’s certainties and have no relation to the radically different views I’ve expressed here and elsewhere. I posted that quote to hold the mirror up to alarmists such as you, to make you aware of how close you are to the total despair now being expressed by Scranton and so many others. While I can’t agree with Scranton’s bleak view of our climate future, I do find his position eminently reasonable as a reflection of the prevailing “climate change” alarm.
Assuming the “science” expressed in the IPCC report is accurate, his conclusion that we must all now “learn to die” seems all too logical. As he so reasonably points out, all the many remedies being offered range from the totally impractical, to the self-defeating, the extremely dangerous, or the hopelessly naïve. As should be clear to anyone with an ounce of critical thinking ability, the IPCC position offers no real hope. To accept it means to accept that “saving the planet” is no longer an option — and probably never was.
Victor. If you read Scranton in detail, Scranton’s “learn to die” statement did not appear to refer to the effects of climate change on our lives directly, but to the collapse of the capitalist way of life, due to a combination of the effects of climate change on capitalism, and the alleged inherent instability of the capitalist system. However I suspect capitalism is a very long way from dying. For example capitalism has survived numerous financial collapses and other challenges. Although personally I prefer systems which incorporate some capitalsim and socialism like Sweden.
Remember the book about the anthropocene by Roy Scranton is just one persons opinion and he is a writer, not a scientist or engineer. His negative views on technology and climate mitigation are very much a writers opinions. Its going to be very hard work mitigating climate change but KM showed above that some countries have made quite significant progress cutting emissions largely by developments of wind and solar power, and the use of coal globally has already dropped off quite significantly. Sure a bit of critical thinking shows that might not spread to all countries, but nobody can say it won’t either. So what happens depends on what we all make happen.
Victor offers a misreading of what is reality.
“the IPCC position offers no real hope. “
Not true. The IPCC is a summarising Best Practice Info Funnel to the UNFCCC system (iow Govts), through which the scientific research analysis of climate / energy dynamics, best conclusions, and best state of the knowledge, and best prognostication of a near term future might be is passed along.
The UNFCCC is a collection of Govts which is simply a collection of Politicians and national Leaders from a range of Democratic systems, Monarchs, and Dictatorships.
It is those very National Govt Leaders and Politicians who have been advised by the best Science on offer, plus by special interest groups, misc. political and economic ideologies think tanks etc., it is those Govts and Politicians who offers no real hope or substantive positive changes to the status quo.
Therefore … To accept what the POLITICIANS & GOVERNMENTS have decided means to accept that “saving the planet” is no longer an option — and probably never was.
No one on Real Climate is responsible for that or can be blamed for that… no one on Real Climate can be blamed for any “counsel of despair” as a result of these totally impractical, self-defeating, extremely dangerous, or hopelessly naïve Govt decisions made within the UNFCCC system.
No one. Not Kevin. Not even you Victor. So there! :)
Hr R. Check
You ought to be more conscious and enlighted, thoughtful yourself.
Victor states “The IPCC position offers no hope”
Forgetful or unable to mention or integrate himself in person: “The IPCC position offers ME no hope.”
That might actually be the elementary truth if I know him right. .And he would not instruct or teach anyone on how to hope.
That vulgar and common use of royal and imperial, anonymeous plural , that talking and writing on behalf of everyone ot The People or “it”, is quite betraying, and can be picked out and pointed at AD HOMINEM where it really hits and hurts..
As King Donald Grozny was elected precident, also Oprah Winfrey did meet him and could examine him. She said afterwards: “We can breathe out… smile smile…”
But had to correct herself, because she is not quite irresponsible and stupid, and no emperess or King on behalf of all the voters or all the people in anonymeous plural.
She did regret and correct that statement afterwards to “I can breathe out!”
And referred to her philosophy religion and character that should have regulated her grammars better than this vulgar and evil, unconscious, royal and imperial and anonymeous plural.
Thus, grasp:
ICH! glaube an den Heiligen Geist
and
JE! pense, donc je suis.
that is much more radical and daring.
Not that earlier, linguistically inferiour and anonymeous Credo in spiritus sanctus and Cogito ergio sum.
That characteristic renaissance Subject, is a most important paradigmatic shift of basic style and individual rersponsibility.and dignity.
Definite personal pronomen you see stands for integrity and responsibility..
See where that is absent, and you have another quite efficient analytical formula.
What a load of tripe!
You can’t even take responsibility for the words you quote with absolutely no context whatever.
There’s no doubt, thanks in part to jerks like you, that irrreversible damage has already been done to various earth systems (including, emphatically, ecosystems and biodiversity around the world). There’s no doubt it’s going to be getting worse for the short term–again, thanks in part to jerks like you.
But it’s a big world, with a lot of complexity still remaining–including negative feedbacks. All of which means that there’s still a lot of leeway between the “bad” we’re committed to, and the “worse” which we can still avoid. There’s no clean binary “saving/not saving the world.”
But the counsel of despair you promulgate–whether you believe it or not, and it’s more contemptible that actually, you say you don’t–will tend to lead to more, not less, loss. It’s likely to have little enough effect at all, to be sure, but why would anyone with a mind and a heart throw even an iota on the wrong side of the scales?
And … that irreversible damage has already been done to various earth systems including the economic system, financial systems, systemic deterioration of standards of living and business losses at global national and regional scales.
People overall are already worse off, lost $, lost their business lost their homes lost their jobs, lost their lives or their self-respect – despite a minority gaining mega wealth and incomes.
Despite apparent GDP growth and all the other stats, humanity is already far worse off than otherwise had the Science been adopted from the early 1990s to slowly replace FF and forest environmental destruction etc … absent the constant unrelenting lies stupidity and push back from arrogant pathological Know It Alls … Misanthropes and Climate science deniers of every kind.
“Assuming the “science” ”
Wrong, it science with no parentheses. After all this time you still do not bother to learn the scientific method (the way all science has been conducted for centuries) which you ought to have learned in grade school. Wow. Hint: Science is not about proof as mathematics is.
Still waiting for yours and KIA’s explanations as to why the stratosphere is cooling when it ought to be warming if climate change in recent decades was simply a natural occurrence. You can’t without violating the basic laws of thermodynamics. Hint #2: Energy can not be created or destroyed.. You don’t know why it is cooling because you have never read the science. Your failure to understand is not an excuse for it not being factual. Busted again, junior.
Your insecurity/cowardice to be unable to admit to being wrong is unsurpassed. Hint #3: You are.
Cold water on fusion prospects from a physicist who knows what she’s talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY&ab_channel=SabineHossenfelder
If one had the patience to poke around in The Oil Drum forums – they are very not user friendly – one could find discussions of hydrogen and why it is not a solution. I can’t recall the argument clearly, but it was so sort of First Principle I considered it definitive: Hydrogen ain’t gonna do it for us. I’ve never give hydrogen another thought.
It had something to do with hydrogen not being a fuel, per se, or not being fungible like the great god of energy, oil is. I wish I could remember it in some detail… Anywho, one might get lucky poking around over there.
I learned a hell of a lot on those forums.
Something she said in the beginning, applicable beyond nuclear research alone, caught my ear:
However, the potential benefits of current research on X have been incorrectly communicated for a long time. Scientists are confusing the public and policy makers in a way that makes their research appear more promising than it really is. And that’s what we’ll talk about today.
But I realize it’s a tough one to crack, to get past.
Classic comedy quote from Sabine in that video talk @10 minutes.
“Of course the people who work on this, some of them physicists some of them human, know the distinction perfectly well.”
https://youtu.be/LJ4W1g-6JiY?t=596
I saw a rebuttal that noted that the components used in these research fusion machines need to be variable as nobody knows what the proper “tuning” is. Once the techniques are figured out more efficient non-variable components will try for a net gain of electricity.
But the numbers, the energies, the machines are huge. It could be a technological triumph that produces electricity at $100 per kilowatt hour.
Interesting little video I thought: “What role for small modular nuclear reactors in combating climate change?”
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/09/what-role-for-small-nuclear-modular-reactors-in-combating-climate-change/
Just some experts looking at the positives and negatives of the SMR idea, compared to renewables and traditional nuclear power.
Professor Kevin Anderson: “To hell in a hand cart”
October 1, 2021
topics – COP26 Glasgow, UK, Human Chaos, Justice & Equity, Net Zero, Psychology & Philosophy, Shaping The Future, Solutions | Interventions, Technology, UNFCCC, United Nations | Net Zero
speaking with Professor Kevin Anderson about his (and colleagues) new paper to be published on the 17th October titled,
Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?
https://genn.cc/blog/professor-kevin-anderson-to-hell-in-a-hand-cart/
See answer further down thread.
That’s why.
The latest on German wind power:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/german-wind-turbine-mysteriously-collapses-one-day-it-was-supposed-officially-be
:)
Yes, it collapsed one day before it was to be officially inaugurated, but it had been in grid-connected operation for six months already. Its operational status is even mentioned in the article you link to.
Uh, that’s not ‘on German wind power.’ It’s ‘on’ a clear failure of one unit. It’s important, it’s eminently in need of analysis & remediation, and it’s certainly embarrassing for the engineers and builders, and by extension to the wind industry.
But the very fact that it’s news means it’s exceptional. Unless and until we find out differently, it still won’t be ‘about German wind power.’
Lecture on climate cognition from behavioural neuroscientist @KateJJeffery of @UCLPALS
The Psychology of Climate Inaction 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R6YMWb0vUA
Sample: from: https://youtu.be/-R6YMWb0vUA?t=790
So we’re really not seeing what we think we’re seeing.
The other way that evolution is shaping our perception
and in some ways limiting it, is that we only perceive
some types of things. We lived in a world that was full
of predators, so we’re very, very good at seeing fast
moving things. We can catch a ball within milliseconds,
we can dodge a tiger, but we’re very, very insensitive to
slow change.
How does this relate to climate change?
There’s an obvious parallel in this slow change insensitivity.
And that is that, because the effects of climate change are
so slow, we don’t really notice them. And we are not very
good at being motivated to act about things we don’t really
notice.
This is an example that might be familiar to some of you who
are old enough to have remembered that a few decades ago,
if you went driving down the road for a couple of hours on
holiday, you would have to stop at a service station every
now and then to scrape bugs off your windscreen.
There’s actually been a catastrophic decline in insect
populations in the last few decades. But collectively, we’re
not really aware of that.
sample: from https://youtu.be/-R6YMWb0vUA?t=980
Another difficulty that we have in perception, as well as with slow things is that we’re not very good with magnitudes. Now, the IPCC have been warning us that we are heading rapidly towards a warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius of the global planetary temperature. Now they tell us that that will be really catastrophic,
we will have massive storms or have wildfires, we will have rising sea levels. We’re going to have this, we’re going to have that and logically, I think we all believe them.
But even I, thinking as much as I have been about climate change recently, I find it really hard to get worried about 1.5 degrees Celsius. I just don’t know what that means. I don’t understand it viscerally. Even though I do understand it intellectually. So there’s another way in which our inability to grapple with magnitudes is affecting how we think about climate change.
Which is why you talk about the long-trail risks and extremes. The extremes = disasters in real-time and long-tail risks = society failing/extinction.
Tell people this.
Tell people this.
I think the only people who would hear it, already know this. And they are already aware at some level of the cognitive behavior aspects too. I’m only speaking out loud, as a reminder. I am not sure I care about the rest. People should work it out for themselves.
You just read the article/paper, dude. And do you think the significant shift over the last few years has been due to talking averages? You even praise Thunberg for her directness, no-nonsense, no BS approach, but don’t think it’s worthwhile?
I am telling you, tell people we’re all gonna go crashing down, it motivates people IF, and only if, they are ALSO given a viable way out. That’s what’s actually missing. The techno future crap is exactly that, crap. It’s illogical claptrap that will not solve any of our problems, and can’t.
Tell the truth: We’re in deep, deep shit. Point to the door: Simplificty. Now. Yesterday.
But so long as people are told they can keep their cars and lattes and plane travel and CAFO meats. etc., that is what they will support. Tell them the truth, that is suicide, in no uncertain terms, show them the better way, as Fuller said one should if one wants a better way, then, when they realize there really is no other choice, hopefully not too late, things will change nearly instantaneously. (Because simplicity is… simple.)
Yes, true. However I’m feeling far less resilient, positive and hopeful than that right now.
and about <i."You just read the article/paper, dude. "
Yes, and I have read / thought of many similar things like that for decades, and I note the experts are saying the same things today still about “how we think about climate change” Then I look around and can only shake my head in disbelief : this is where we are at now – seriously nothing has shifted in 3 decades?
Yes I like Greta, excellent. That she has such positive recognition, and applause, that it took her to get that kind of recognition, to be heard and re-quoted, that it’s Greta at the UN or WEF that speaks truth to power and makes a few people squirm uncomfortably for a few moments before it passes again, that it is ONLY GRETA who can do this, is incredibly depressing to me.
To me it is another thing which proves how hopeless the situation really is. The last 30 years, and now COP26, and this next decade is such a waste of time and effort. Nothing “constructive or positive or real” is happening. imv. That is what is the real BS.
Can I put it this way – imv the only way out is through, through collapse.
Humans only ever truly learn from direct experience and not (if rarely) the sage advice of an “expert community” or elders. It is plain as day the powers that be are simply ignoring the “expert community” hand over fist. Either they do not care, are too dumb, insane or refuse to listen, either way that encapsulates BAU forever. Equals systemic collapse. 1+1=2
I am not buying the current Koolaide being promoted everywhere by pro-climate action people and experts, (eg keep their cars and lattes and plane travel and CAFO meats) that doing whatever we can now so that Bad doesn’t get even Worse is a viable strategy that can or will work. It is fundamentally flawed strategy/ option because it does not address any of the elephants in the room causing the systemic problems …. it’s Bandaid BS. But it is set on Volume 10 everywhere.
It’s Mystical Thinking by so-called Experts, some even Scientists who should know better. It is in fact irrational. Cannot work. It has not worked for 30 years – it will not suddenly work tomorrow.
So why put off the inevitable, why wait and hope small wins might help, when things will be far worse down the track with no real improvements being made at all? It’s going to get far worse not marginally better. No one is recommending nor acting on doing anything that might save any “of the furniture” here.
I say bring it on now, let the entire system breakdown as soon as it possibly can instead. That in itself will stop the rapid decrease in FF emissions faster than anything else being recommended thus far. It might even have the best chance of anything else to save the global ecology and planetary systems from going completely off the rails forever.
I think the expert community would be better off and far more useful were they to do a Pontius Pilate or a John Galt — to take whatever $ and resources they have, turn their backs on everything and go join sustainable self-sufficient communities all over the world to save their Knowledge for future generations… the ones left to start over and possibly do it better next time.
Leave the place to the idiots, and fraudsters, to the Trumps and Musks of this world. Leave them and the blockers, the greedy pathological power-crazed recalcitrants to the Mob to sort out.
One step backwards to make two leaps forward at a later time. It’s worked before successfully more than once. Just a thought. No need to be upset about it. I did say I wasn’t feeling very resilient or hopeful at present. :)
Threading limits again…
Can I put it this way – imv the only way out is through, through collapse.
I suggest by the time we have uncontrollably collapsed enough for it to be admitted by all and sundry – the energy and food crunches in the news this week are just the beginning of a hellish end of empire – temps will be high enough there will be a strong likelihood of going WAY past 3C.
I have tried to make this point about risk for a long time. There is no “through” with uncontrolled collapse, there’s just misery.
It’s controlled collapse or nothing. And that means simplicity.
sample from https://genn.cc/blog/professor-kevin-anderson-to-hell-in-a-hand-cart/
I hear an echo @ https://youtu.be/lnoYIRhUqf8?t=1465
The we are part of a more than human world,
and that we’ve spent years decades centuries
abstracting ourselves from nature.
Which of course we cannot do.
And you know you can sort of see in your
nature reading tooth and claw the idea
that we have some sort of control over
here and nature is there instrumental to
our benefit.
And yet i think that as we’ve learned
more particularly throughout the 20th
century that actually we, the world,
is made up of systems, of which we are
part of a system.
As we’ve got a better understanding
of ecology i think we’ve had to move
away from that more reductionist
approach, that we can separate
ourselves from nature and saying
again that we need to see ourselves
as part of nature, and that’s what
we’re trying to get at here.
We can’t just solve the climate crisis.
That in itself will not overcome these
broader range of ecological crises.
So we have to see these things,
almost like they’re all these ecological
crises of which climate is one, as
symptoms of a much wider malaise
that we’re that we’re suffering.
And i think if we don’t recognize that
if we think we can literally just find a
way out of our current climate
challenges, just through sort of
technocratic means, we would have
locked in ongoing ecological crises.
And so we have to have that humility
of stepping back and seeing ourselves
as part of the system rather than
dominant over the system.
end
ahem, well good luck with achieving that. Anyway KA does touch on some very pertinent issues many to most ignore or cannot see. I highly recommend hearing what he has to say and considering how and why he frames the issues about Power, a shifting Civil Society and the so-called “Expert Community” ….
@Reality Check:
Because our energy policy has been driven by fossil-fuel interests for decades. In California, the Brown crime family worked to suppress nuclear energy so that there would be larger markets for the Indonesian crude oil they were importing.
Because our energy policy has been driven by fossil-fuel interests for decades
Well OK. But isn’t that much like M Mann et al today saying we need to rapidly reduce of GHG emissions to avoid the worst of climate impacts? Both are basically moot nothing burgers, aka Doh, yes?
While I cannot see anything coming of it the notions of cognitive science psychology (effective communications) combined with wholesale systems change thinking seems to be the last, only bastion for any hope to make any difference at all. At least KA wades into the weeds of the swamp occasionally while holding a candle. :)
Genosse E.Poet
I had a hope…
but you disappoint me more and more.
Why can`t you make poems for yourself, and I have seen no engineering from your side yet.
Den der laaner Aand og Sjel
forsriver sig til Fanden.
Thi, den der ikke er sig selv
er heller ingen anden,
SANN!
( Who, borrows spirit and soul
signs under to SATAN
Because, who is not himself
is also nobody else…
AMEN! )
Can you pleace try and improove there?
Ladies and Gentlemen
Adam lea showed us a Youtube d/o that defines the problems in a quite good way.
And Mr Knowitall tells us the latest of German wind power. A largest windmill having collapsed before it even started.
The situation often looks different from my point of wiew, because I am no member of the Party, and thus also hardly believe in the experts. Try the same if that is not too late, my very good advice.
Yesterday and the day befrore we had heavy rain after weeks of draught, and the threatening hydroelectric situation with very high electricity prices repaired in 2 days. At the same time the prices dropped to negative overnight because of storm in Denmark and N. Germany where we are connected by several cables.
Rumors of the Danes being very unsuccessful and knowing nothing about windmills that I have seen here, is rouitine denialist propaganda. What`s not that easy is to secure also storage and stability.
But when I look at it, and I recommend that wiew, is to look at the energy consumption curve for the last 30-40-50 years, and compare to population growth, and the growth of “wealth”.
I am able to think and remember back 30-40-50 years and more and also look at old photos and into 0ld newspapers and ask what was our living standard then?
And it was not impossible at all despite of much less cars and much less luxury. So I look at the % age of windmills solar and other renewables compared to the totals. and see that todays renewables would have delivered is all 30-40-50-… years ago.
It will depend on your lifestyle and where you live. And then you do not have to ask or to believe in any experts at all. Because it is a way to find it out and to try and think for yourself
In addition there are improovements of efficiency. How much iron, how much copper how much aluminium and how much work and investments are needed for product and output so and so. There, improvements have also been made, but not everywhere. Un- necessary consumption, un- necessary weights, volumes and un-necessary finish and luxury is also the case for many things, and that counts negative. So that must be identified, stopped. and resigned on.
That is simply how we build and make good economy at any time.
For instance, if it took 3 sacks of coal, then a jerry- can of gasoline and then hardly a gallon of diesel, then be conscious and orientate by such historical and possible improovements quite in general. Because that is rather a signal of better economy lifestyle and quality, of improovement..
And I can discuss “Burgers” another time. Hamburgers Soyaburgers,..why “burgers” at all?
Fleischlöse- frikadellen, “Met” they call it in Hamburg, from Meat or vice versa. Hakkebøf in Danish.
But “Hamburgers,…”. good greef how dekadent.. even fish and soya- burgers. Proper cooking is being eradicated so they hardly know what they are eating anymore over there in the states.
And that Tesla lifestyle. I would not have it thrown after me.My style is lightweight and with a small simple and efficient combustion engine. Combined with knowing how rather to take the bus or the train and how to resign on having to travel at all.
Again, an English grammar tip: “draught” (American: “draft”) pertains to air currents or beer. The word rhymes with “shaft” and “daft”. The word you want is “drought”, which rhymes with doubt and snout.
And in the interest of highbrow humor: http://www.grootlore.com/thisisgettingridiculous/TIGR1.jpg
“Doctor” ,
that is orthography, not grammars.
Do try and avoid showing to worldwide that you do not know the difference.
My good advice.
Because, both proper engineering and poetry assumes that one is familiar with and masters such things.
No, the error was not orthographic. You spelled the word correctly, it was just the wrong word.
In the case of “I saw a bird. It’s tail was red.” the contraction “it’s” is spelled correctly, but used incorrectly. That’s a grammar error.
Amal goes on at length about the subject, with examples: http://amal.net/?p=957
Hr. Poet
We say Tørk. Germans say Dürre, so what makes you believe that I did not know the very close and similar English word Drought of same etymological origin?
I ought to give some of you a proper and elementary course of grammar, semantics and linguistics different from what they have learnt, believe in, and float on and demand everywhere, when it rather comes to international and interlinguistic, interdiciplinary interfacultary and intercontinental conversation and communication. Things that are not told to children in the ghettos, the provinces, and in the Party.
And neither in those closed “academies” for uniforming and strengthening of your personaities, when proper elementary and higher education and proper behaviours and general social training is first lacking.
I told you clearly that:
“That`s nothing, over there in the states we put on a dime and put our heads into a hole in the wall in the street and get shaved!”
“But, all heads aren`t alike???”
“…..Well, they get alike!”
(Laughter)
That flattening and uniformation of Afganistan was not successful, really.
No, E.Poet
I looked into your reference. That does not keep.
If someone thinks Verbum breathe and writes breath, that is an obvious ortographic error.
your suggestion “Draught” is simply not in my vocabulary, so how could I possibly confuse that?
You are running into the endless and impossible problems of virtual intelligence and reading and translating machines, by virtual intelligence.
You insinuate and believe that you read my thoughts and that I was thinking wrong, but I was writing wrong and I do that quite often, because I have no orthographic correcture machine, and avoid using such machines also for principal reasons.
It takes intelligence and consciousness to write and to read and to understand in any case, thus rather go for that.
I go for that.
Do not believe in and do not sell proteses for consciousness
I had a special training 2 years ago, a Gypsy woman talking Romanian and claiming that she also knew Italian. I checked up, she knew no English, No German No Russian slavonic languages, and no French. Any autentic Italian understands me in French and answer in Italian if nothing else is possible. But she did not.
So I had to take to virtual intelligence Google translate many times.
Being aquainted to inter- linguistics with possible quite nasty ridiculous errors also, , I doubble and tripple checked from Norwegian German English French to both romanian and italian before I could be sure of right translation and understanding, and saw the very obvious fact that even that very good machine, that is todays level of virtual intelligence and robotic grammar, was full of errors in all directions.
Moral: Rather set and train on spiritus sanctus as your reading understanding and translating machine, it is much more safe.
Language is life you see, and cannot be synthetized.
And ERRARE HVMANVM EST.
“A largest windmill having collapsed before it even started.”
Even the article that KIA linked to says that the wind turbine that collapsed had been in operation and connected to the grid for 6 months before it failed. It hadn’t “collapsed before it even started.” It collapsed before its official inauguration.
Shall I allways take Knowitall for quite serious?
There was shown photos of large glassfiber polyester and concrete elements having fallen down.
Are we allowed to think or not? Such large constructional elements should be supposed to work for 10-15 years at least. 6 tiny months hardly means anything.
The real disaster here apart from its early failiours is that when they are worn out or become obsolete, that severely large glassfiber polyester seems very difficult to get rid of again. It is simply being “buried”.
I have it and triede it in the boat. I could most easily get through it with an angle grinder.
The material is quite pure hydrocarbons and glassfiber so it could be milled and burnt mixed with limestone and clay and made new concrete out of it. I can burn it with ease and have it on the apple trees. For new material of that sort In rather preferre deer- antlers that can go the same way.
Or take those large wings, adjust it to size, and make new bridges and houses and constructional parts out of it the way we re- cycle and use wreckwood and fallen antlers..
.
So nothing there that disagrees with what I posted, then?
Yes its difficult recycling wind turbine blades, however I did recall there is a company called Veolia recycling wind turbine blades. Refer:
https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/veolia-ge-windmill-blades-recycling-cement-kilns/
https://resource-recycling.com/plastics/2019/03/27/company-expands-wind-turbine-recycling-operation/
I did also wonder about using the blades to make houses or whatever, although because they are a curved profile joining the sections together would be challenging. However not impossible.
This is an interesting repurposing:
https://www.designboom.com/design/denmark-repurposing-wind-turbine-blades-bike-garages-09-27-2021/
There’s also something I saw about making play structures for kids. And I think some Scottish authorities are supposed to be mulling the Danish idea.
@Carbomontus:
You’re assuming that the buses or trains exist. The nearest rails to my house are some 9 miles away, and there is no passenger service on them. The only bus service that comes down the road which serves my house is school buses; there’s a regional transit service but its nearest stop is a couple of miles away.
In many urban centers, criminals rule the mass transit and it is simply not safe for decent people to ride it. In some places it’s been so dangerous that the bus drivers have gone on strike to protest violent crime against them! Here’s one of many such articles:
https://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2020/10/detroit-bus-drivers-strike-over-violent-attacks
Yes, I understand.
I have seen a glimpse of it in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
There was just a very few buses on the highway, worn down school- buses, and no railroads. The community electical network was also very nostalgic to my eyes.
To do anything at all, we had to go 1 hour forth and 1 hour back with a rent gasguster.
That is lack of society and local infrastructure.
I am quite privileged just here where I live in Oslo sub- urb. I never have to know when the buses are coming, they just come and go in any case . And taxies are cheap enough for special operations. I seldom have to start my own car. Yesterday our son drove us to Askim and back for the apple cider mill.
It mostly goes quicker cheaper and better with manpower and muscular power I think, provided that the arts and the toolos are not directly banned and forgotten. . We found an old and forgotten hand- mill and could mill down all the grapes by hand without any electromotors and leads and washing. of all that afterwards.
They only recommend and sell specialized remedies and robots for clumsiest dilettants.
They are making and selling proteses for out brains, bodies, feet and hands in order to take over our very society. (My very best conspiracy theory. )
Today, proper Poetry and engineering is highly and bitterly needed against all that.
And you are only lazy and cannot see your duties and opportunities..
“One of many such?”
Do they all talk about anti-mask jerks, as opposed to the “criminals” supposedly “ruling” mass transit, as the given example does?
Key words .. simplicity. minimal waste. economical. utility. community. adequate. functional. humility. gratitude. sharing. quality v quantity. self-sufficient re resourceful. industrious. efficient. skillful. family. balance. acceptance.
Dr.R.Check
On minimal waste and reality check:
We are harvesting grapes Vitis vinifera L. on 60 deg Norh, 150 m above sea level. An obscure sort from downtown Oslo on the sunny wall of the old Railway workshop, probably planted there by the swedes and pissed on in order for them to feel at home in Norways hottest hole.
I heard it on the radio and we went down and examined, My wife told that it was the same that Peasant Ziemer had in his sunny wall, That never got ripe because the children stole it like ravens.
It is the fameous Opera wine of Oslo after the Opera came up at sea level just next by.
I thought it was a champagne, but careful examination shows that it may be a Phoenician next to Mt.Ararat down at sea level, a Muscat bianco a petites grains. An autentic Greek from moverseas, and not the best for our utterly limit of possible winery Here, The russian and the north american midwest sorts might be better
We have been eating the best we can, and this year they are especially sweet. The Insuline- reflex says “STOP!” thanks Darwin, GOD and Creation, survival of the fittest. There must be limits also to Vino however veritas..
Thus we came to an old french pourree mill in stainless steel and milled it down there. The juice was served in champagne glasses and was highly appreciated by the youngsters.
But, we have also had it through a higspeed freese and centrifuge electrical mill.
I tried the residuum. , the “Mask”. that is served for animals.
That had the character of modern, higly priced and much too “tart”, red wines. with much too high tannic acids. that bites in the mouth. Also on Biancho really, when the seeds also are milled into it.
So I believe that they rather cheat, boldly, commercially, and secretly..
The “mask” is not given for cows, sheps and swines as it ought to be. It is sugared by cheapes beet- sugar and fermented and destilled,… and becoming the most expensive “Cognacs” and “”Armagnacs”, but actually second hand and severely milled, second extraction ware.
But that is advanced arts of “re- cycling” also of the traditional wastes.
I learnt that there is a pipeline from the pissoirs of Paris recycling it to the fields of Champagne and that the rural fieldes of Champagne are betraying it. Just go and see.
. There may be a lot of other recyclings, They squeeze and destill the most out of it and still thrive for agricultural subventions.
Just take a look. There are not enough wineyards in the world for all those bottled wines.
Someone must be cheating there.
.
and recycling reusing repurposing craft
@ R Check
I wrote a large article on it after having been employed at the restoration of an urban house from 1840. And could use my experience of technical archaeology and possible restoration of a craft that has been lost and forgotten since 1740.
I found for a second time that the necessary theories, thinking and learning of rationality, Stradivarii schoolbooks, are preserved and known indeed and can be found at the University library. Seek rather upstairs, what was common EXAMEN ARTIVM poly- technical highschool of art in those days? and not down there on quite recent factory floors where analphabetism and ignorance , human robotic behaviours by “experience..” exclusive Union and Party membership…came in and entered the high seat.
And found quite a bit more. Those pre- industrial days when rather mastership of craft was needed, they were really very conscious about re- cycling, and of making it also easy and cheap to restore and to repair and to keep. They simply could not afford anything else. But the old masters did fail in one respect. They took it for granted that the adequate tools and methods and solutions that were invested and used… would be known and obvious also in a remote future.
But they were conquered and shown out , banned and ridiculed so that New Age and Modern times could begin to compeat at all on the market.
For instance , when the millimeter comes in, the Inch and Foot gets banned and all essencial technical details that stood on clear and easy proportional formula in the old system, becomes severely irrational in all details for the modern “ecperienced worker”.
And when the electrical high speed freese is introduced for dilettants and the blacksmith next door is banned, people no mor take choisest wood that is easily split by axe and hobbled over by handpower, you must wait a month for adequate prophile- freeses or order it from Japan where they smile of us.
Bricks and constructional wood were obviously re- cycled several times all back to Mideival Oslo.
Bricks and tiles are early industrial ware interchangeable parts all the way down to Ur in Caldea, meant and designed to be re- cycled. So are also the technically essencial stones, it all being especially easy to repair. and to re- cycle.
Arbitrary fashionable shapes and forms are not that easy, and glued with polyester and epoxy and mounted with strong concrete, it becomes impossible.
This is being discussed and some producers and factories are aware of it.
Milling it and atomizing it is especially expensive. They mill wreckwood and sell it as pellets by a very large machine 10 Kilowatt electromotor. I take the same simply with ax and saw and re- cycle the nails, and set aside useful material and burn the rest. Then the materials and paints and glues must also not be poisoneous. Knowing that from Chemistery, I have designed unpoisoneos stains varnish tars and paints…. rather by old fashioned example.
Whatever you buy, think also of how to get rid of it again, and see that you can possibly grow flowers and apples on it by time.
How to get rid of a bitty of concrete?
Do not throw it in nature. It will last forever. Mix and stirr it with enough Humus until the colour changes, pour it out on your lawn and spray after with water. Your rainworms, mushroms, and flowers will adore it.
Concrete hey? That’s a new one. I will look it up.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-10-06/its-meant-to-hurt-allowing-our-feelings-on-climate-will-promote-action-and-reduce-conflict/
While nowhere near as catchy as their previous collaboration, Smooth, this song should be THE anthem of #activists everywhere because you DO #sustainability, you DO #regenerativesystems – you don’t wait for permission of for Superwoman/-man.
MOVE!
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/carlos-santana-rob-thomas-move-video-1238285/
@Carbomontanus: In the interest of improving your grasp of American idiom, I’m going to comment on this.
It’s obvious that you meant “gas guzzler”. Google did not suggest “gas guzzler” when I threw “gasguster” at it, and I found no uses of “gasguster” in English. I put one into Google Translate and it identified the language as Danish. It obviously means “canned air” (which is probably dimethyl ether these days).
If you’re trying to use an American idiom, you might want to search for it first to see if you’ve gotten it right or not.
Only a highly privileged person could believe this. There is a reason that people use oil and electric power; one barrel of oil is the equivalent of 8.6 years of human labor, and one uranium pellet is worth about three times that. Uranium is unique in that the waste from a US citizen’s lifetime energy consumption would fit into a single soft-drink can.
I found years ago that I could not get hired for jobs in my field any longer, and I have bursitis which limits what other things I can do. Fortunately I have more than enough in savings that I don’t have to be forced to take a job.
Which is why I speak truth to hopelessly erroneous romantic ideologies like Greenism.
8.6 or 4.5 years? I do not know for certain. Both are massively large numbers
my alt ref goes
“Our economy is powered by 110 billion barrels of oil equivalents of fossil hydrocarbons a year. At 4.5 years (of work) per barrel, this equates to the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers per Year (compared to ~4 billion actual human workers)”
https://twitter.com/gordonschuecker/status/1264333105088905216
original source?
Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
N.J.Hagens march 2020
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067
and see this other section:
“”Simple arithmetic reveals it takes over 11 years of human labor to do the same work potential in a barrel of oil.””
https://twitter.com/gordonschuecker/status/1264333101108428800
I do not know why, only flagging it.
@ E. Poet
Gasguster- Filibuster ….
those runaway and decadent bluddy brittes over there in the states talk and write of Filibusters, but it is poorly heard and understood Dutch Vrijbeuters! Expelled from home and in the free service of the british american colonies against the spainish d/o. on high sea in international waters.
They did their work, got settled on land in the US after all, and were given seats and privileges in the congress.
And as for manpower, the intelligence of it is also needed for proper efficiency.
Guzzlers- gusters…. you lack the indo- european and germanistic association and autentic feeling for it all.
Guzz- is Ghost- Geist, =Pnevma. Also Gjest, Gast, perhaps even Gustav. Gas is decadent french germanistic, from Chaos in greek, probably the same root..
I could say Gufs. That is probably autentic, Et Gufs (neutrum) is a chill or ugly ghust or blast, but Google Translate does not take it.
But Gufs and Guff gives probably the old norse Guzz in English. So I sit here with the original. Gøyse Geysir Islandsk, is the same. “Ghosh…!”
Verbum å Gyse …. is to chill and shiver of fear. or “ghosts”.
“Gasoline” is a highly volatile Petroleum ETER that needs a “carburetor”, rather low compression, giving less efficient but quite cheap and very flexible lightweight engines.
We say Forgasser for Carburetor. That is more precise.
The Ottomotor 1 cyl 4 stroke low compression with spark ignition was intended to run stationary on coal- gas. It also runs on wood- destillates and on blast furnace gas.
“gasoline” was a substitute for that. In the USA. For that, the “Forgasser” of liquids had to be invented. They suggested also potatoe schnapps “Weingeist” which is spiritus vinæ, and I even heard of “apple- jack” for the T- ford.
Bensin comes from Carl and Bertha Benz.
Benzin is carefully destilled an purified petroleum eters. Benzene or Benzol comes from the same, but rather volatile aromatics, from the Azerbadschan, Baku and Stalingrad- stinky tars, oils, and fuels.
In Germany they simply call it all “Kraftstoff” regardless.
In France, they say and drive on “Lessangsøøøø!” regardless.
In Italia? “Petrol” I think. or Gazolina.
in Russian Bensjine, I can remember.
In Germany , vulgar language says “sprit” for it quite regardless.
We are beginning to fill and to use rather “Fjul” = Fuel in the boat using just a minimum of 1.st sort low sulphur diesel. And I would gladly pay for that also syntetic. “Fjul” is far more safe than “bensin. and “gas-olina” in the boat.
In swedish “Bränsle” for fuel, means what can be burnt. But it hardly warns the same way of gas- explosions.
We do not “give gas” anymore, ( by the old gas pedal) we are “fueling ” and give more or less “Trottel”” after having changed to Diesel. And Bånn trottel or Pinne if Electric.
Before, it was Bånngass. Bottom Gush or Guff.
That must be understood.
Hr.Poet
I found it. verbum gøyse guste to spit and to spray in an ugly or a bit scaring way.
Dragons,… they are gusting or they gøyser.
Gasguster is obvious and original. You write it wrong with zz, an ortographic error of yours!
Surname Guste from Norway is known in the USA. Friedrich Gauss may be the direct German version.
In Gausdal you find the fameous river Gausa, that entails a rushing river.. Quite exactly. A gas- guster was very precisely from my side.
File this one under “potentially wasted opportunities”, or maybe “institutional barriers to change”.
https://news.yahoo.com/puerto-rico-once-lifetime-chance-131052010.html
On a cheerier note, Oregon energy storage outfit ESS is to deliver the first units under a 2 Gwh contract with SB Energy next month.
Of the tech, the story says:
The main ingredients, says here, are iron, water, and salt.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/07/first-ess-iron-flow-battery-to-go-online-this-month/
I really don’t care about any of the other data points as they’ll be bested sometime soon, but the recyclability is a big deal if it’s total. If it’s partial, improvement is good, but not very meaningful.
@Kevin McKinney:
Sweden was Dr. James Hansen’s example, and he spoke from before the Swedish push to turn the world’s forests into ashes and smoke in the name of “renewability”.
@Kevin McKinney:
The first example I ever read came well before 2020 and COVID, so no, they couldn’t possibly. But given the tendency for such violent outbursts to follow demands to follow rules, whether those rules are about masks, about proof of vaccine status, about respecting handicapped parking, about not parking in crosswalks, etc. one can make a generalization.
Mask mandates, OTOH, are silly and counterproductive. Not even N95 masks can stop viral particles, and increased rebreathing of CO2 is harmful to humans. Such demands are literally to force compliance for less than zero benefit, so for compliance’s sake alone.
A report out Thursday from a climate change advocacy group alleges that more than one-fifth of U.S. insurance company board members have worked for the fossil fuel industry, and that two-thirds of all U.S. insurance company board members are “climate conflicted.”
The research was conducted by DeSmog, a network of investigative reporters focused on climate journalism. They looked at 371 directors in 30 of the world’s top property and casualty insurers.
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2021/10/07/635962.htm
The Grand Ship of Economics has a thousand fold torpedoes heading straight for it. Will they strike soon enough to avert the real disaster is the only question.
6 Aspects of American Life Threatened by Climate Change
Two dozen federal agencies flagged the biggest dangers posed by a warming planet.
The list spreads across American society.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/07/climate/climate-threats-federal-government.html
“Under orders from President Biden, top officials at every government agency have spent months considering the top climate threats their agencies face, and how to cope with them. On Thursday, the White House offered a first look at the results.”
“Less food. More traffic accidents. Extreme weather hitting nuclear waste sites. Migrants rushing toward the U.S., fleeing even worse calamity in their own countries. Those scenarios, once the stuff of dystopian fiction, are now driving policy-making.”
RC Note .. and yet he still won’t be able to get anything through Congress to help the situation. And if/when Trump gets reelected in 2024 again or some other gop dweeb know nothing bible-basher, the US will bail out of the Paris accord, and reverse whatever it is Biden did during his term.. which will likely be minimal and ineffectual anyway. In such an extremely polarized country as the US is, nothing is going to stick (except going to war with China as usual)
US-IEO 2021 Highlights
• If current policy and technology trends continue, global energy consumption
and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions will increase through 2050 as a
result of population and economic growth.
• Renewables will be the primary source for new electricity generation, but
natural gas, coal, and increasingly batteries will be used to help meet load
and support grid reliability.
• Oil and natural gas production will continue to grow, mainly to support
increasing energy consumption in developing Asian economies.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/pdf/IEO2021_ReleasePresentation.pdf
Some compelling snippets
EIA’s role is unique. By providing an unbiased view
of energy markets, EIA increases transparency and
promotes public understanding of important energy
issues. (?)
By 2050, global energy use increases nearly 50%, driven by
non-OECD economic growth and population
Energy related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions rise, even as
carbon and energy intensity fall
( from 34 GtCO2 in 2020 to 43 GtCO2 in 2050 equiv to +26% )
Nearly all energy consumption growth occurs in non-OECD Asia,
driven by economic growth
Non-OECD Asia leads growth in liquid fuels consumption
but has limited increases in crude oil production
Electric vehicle stock contributes to reduced emissions and
represents 31% of total passenger vehicle stock by 2050
World GDP-PPP growth estimated from provided graph
From about $120 Trillion in 2020 to $280 Trillion in 2050.
That’s GDP growth of about 233%
Population grows from 7.8 bln to 9.6 bln in 2050, +23%
——
RC: Let that sink in for a moment.
I saw a couple of other things on twitter recently.
There are two equally worrying explanations for the absence
of any detailed or scientifically accurate stories about what a
2050 Net Zero World looks like:
a. No one has any idea what that future looks like
or
b. That future will be so awful no one wants to talk about it.
and
Other forms of nonviolent direct action failed so
#PeacefulSabotage is on the policy agenda now.
Go in Peace :)
Interesting. Nary a word about Africa? Dunno, but perhaps there are going to be a bazillion boatloads worth of spare Nigerians by then.
My guess is that they figure that Africa will go with solar. But Saudi et al are right next door and their oil needs to be sold. And since $15/barrel represents at least some profit, my guess is a tad different. Africa will be offered a long very cheap drink. They gonna refuse? Somebody gonna prevent it (by taking on Russia)?
Eh, two or three internets, economies, civilizations. Given the inevitable S-shape of tech (atoms aren’t getting any smaller and the pace of progress is getting pretty steep) so getting to either lift off via AI or some sort of blockage is in our near future. 2050 is a looonnnnnnggggg ways away.
Exciting times.
“Are we going to live sustainably, or are we going to keep making a mess?
The louder we are in the cosmos, the more temporary we’re going to be.”
-Gavin Schmidt
@ClimateOfGavin speaks to need to co-produce a “sustainable way of
dealing with sustainability” by building systems that are functional & have
practical benefit.
https://twitter.com/hashtag/AlliancesForClimateActionForum
https://www.fema.gov/event/alliances-climate-action-virtual-forum-day-1-our-future-vision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9sD7Wq7108
WASHINGTON— More than 330 U.S. research scientists sent a letter to President Biden today
“U.S. scientists are done speaking calmly in the face of inaction,” said Steingraber. “Terrified by our own data, we stand in solidarity with the People vs. Fossil Fuels mobilization and its demands. President Biden, listening to science means acting on science. It means stopping new fossil fuel projects, opposing industry delay tactics, and declaring a national climate emergency.
“Climate change is genuinely an emergency, and we need to start treating it as such,” said Kalmus. “It does no good to speak of an ‘existential crisis’ while continuing to expand the fossil fuel industry.”
The scientists also urge the president to reject fossil fuel industry delay tactics like carbon capture and storage, blue hydrogen, and carbon offsets that impede the rapid transition to renewable energy and perpetuate a racist fossil fuel system.
“The climate emergency is caused by burning fossil fuels, and the only way out is to quickly ramp down and end the fossil fuel industry,” said Kalmus. “Carbon indulgences and hypothetical tech solutions are dangerous distractions. Far too much time has been wasted already.”
https://biologicaldiversity.org/w/news/press-releases/hundreds-of-scientists-tell-biden-halt-fossil-fuel-development-now-2021-10-07/
TEXT – An Open Letter from U.S. Scientists Imploring President Biden to End the Fossil Fuel Era
October 7, 2021
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/climate_law_institute/pdfs/An-Open-Letter-from-US-Scientists-Imploring-President-Biden-to-End-the-Fossil-Fuel-Era.pdf
(the end of the news, we’re closing down the media office. RC)
Ask the scientists how they expect to feed 8 billion people, get them to work, heat their homes in the winter, power their AC in the summer, and if they think maybe they should stop flying around the world to climate meetings. Ask them how they plan for this to happen without destroying the world economy. See if you get any meaningful answers. You won’t.
“Racist fossil fuel system”? Laughable and pathetic.