Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
The Economist is torn, because on the one hand they try to appear clever, but on the other hand they generally support unrestrained capitalism. It’s not possible to do both at the same time.
Yes, a carbon tax would go a long way, but I think a broader view is to look for ways to use taxes to shift externalities back onto the organizations that created the problem. For example, data centers (a popular demon). The two main externalities are water consumption and power consumption. The tariffs for providing those services to a data center should be high enough to compensate the rest of the community for the impact the data center has on the community.
For example, tariffs could be used to subsidize non-data-center power users. Higher tariffs could also be used to fund community solar and community BESS, helping provide greater local grid resilience. For example, the tariffs should be high enough to subsidize everybody else so they don't have to pay more for their electric service, roughly speaking.
I would also advocate closing the on-prem generator loophole by classifying on-prem power generation services as belonging to or leased from local utilities, and setting the tariff for locally generated power to match the tariff they pay for drawing from the grid.
> I would also advocate closing the on-prem generator loophole by classifying on-prem power generation services as belonging to or leased from local utilities,
Congrats, now all power generation is owned by the power company, including your own solar, wind, and fossil fuel generation.
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
- vote for people who care
- reduce your own CO2 emissions (air traveling, meat consumption, electronic gadgets, textiles...)
It's not going to change anything but at least you can feel that you've done your share and that you're not a part of the problem.
There are three types of people
1. people who just don't care or think that their lifestyle isn't negotiable (this includes people who are in denial, or uninformed, or techno-solutionists)
2. people who care but who blame someone else
3. those who try to do their share
Third category is extremely slim. I have a few colleagues for instance who refuse to fly, don't eat meat. They aren't activist of any sort but just try to do their share even though it's useless. I find that pretty respectable.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
Short of becoming the Luigi of the environmental movement, there is nothing an individual can do. You have to take part in some kind of ongoing collective action. This can include joining a campaign against the oil and gas industry, going door to door for candidates who will reverse climate change, or engaging in direct action against environmentally destructive projects -- or even all three at the same time.
Trying to go it alone is pointless. At best, you'll go down a rabbit hole of becoming the most virtuous consumer alive. At worst, you'll be spend all your time mad-posting on social media.
There’s an interesting study to be made on whether there was a reduction in insurance claim rejections in the aftermath, and what the morbidity/mortality impact was.
Luigi accomplished nothing but folk hero status, United Healthcare premiums increased by double-digit percentages this year. Change requires a pattern not a moment.
Nonsense. This is defeatist talk. This is the logic folks use when they make dozens of small actions that add up, like buying more plastic cuz "it doesn't matter". The honest truth is people who use this logic have made the decision and just don't want to say, "I don't care." Small actions make big differences at scale.
8 billion people all making hundreds of decisions a day make a difference.
Once an individual starts to make those decisions they have a sunk cost, which encourages more action. This leads to voting a certain way, making more sacrifice(giving up excess), encouraging others, etc.
This whole "I'm a victim and have no recourse" benefits the bad actors.
Capitalism has filled our society and expectations with extreme excess. Modern folks eat diets that are insanely luxurious. Giving up our excess is the crux here, and capitalism tries damn hard to give us reasons to justify every little excess. Then those things are accepted and the baseline shifts down, capitalism then gives us more excuses and the baseline drops again.
I was watching an old movie from like 1985 the other day. A character in the movie was a horrible person and part of making that character a horrible seeming person was giving her a small dog as a pet, because it added to her aura of extreme excess. It made me and my friends laugh cuz nowadays that's expected of most people, to have a small dog. The character only had one! Nowadays it's normal to have 2 or 4 small dogs. Lol. Did you know cats/dogs in the US consume more meat than the entire nation of france? Good luck getting anyone to forego their emotional support pets nowadays. The baseline drops.
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
Political participation -- voting, organising for the groups you support, actively engaging in meetings and public forums, building social groups of like-minded individuals. It is hugely effective. The worst doomerism is the idea that politics is ineffective. It is incredibly effective, and only the people that participate in it have any effect on it.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.
Even without the possibility of solving the problem, individuals can still choose to stop contributing to it. You might feel better about the whole thing at the very least. As an added bonus, the more people that choose to stop contributing, the easier it becomes for others to do the same (e.g. less driving --> more cyclists and pedestrians --> better cycling and pedestrian environment).
There's very little to do in Europe. South Korea, Iran, Thailand, Egypt or South Africa e.g. put out significantly more CO2 than say the UK or France (which are towards the top). India and China are higher than the whole EU and are only continuing to pollute more as their standards of living improve. Essentially the only way to stop it is to keep the 3rd world impoverished (in Africa, people often argue that green energy is a Western conspiracy to keep them down). Western economies have already largely stagnated and most of Europe's pollution's fallen to lower per capita than China, let alone South Korea or Russia or... Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and such.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
As a first step, what do you want? Would you rather live your life in peace, bettering the controllable world around you? Or would you rather live your life in stress and action and possibly fixing the problem?
I chose one of those for myself and can't blame anyone for choosing differently. They're both valid.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.
If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Here in America we love to blame the politicians (they do indeed suck). All the while voter turnout is a complete joke. Perhaps this is actually helpful, because we are rife with various subcultures that openly celebrate ignorance, so, yeah. Blame the shitty politicians, speak not of the ignorant and unbothered masses.
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensive - but high ROI - ways to shape voter opinion.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
Politicians can only be held accountable as long as their base is willing to hold them to account. And unfortunately the old and wealthy have practiced the maximal mantra of FYGM. The degree with which not only do they hoard wealth but do everything in their power to ensure the old ways they made their wealth stay empowered tilts politics heavily.
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
> I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
I don't doubt that is your recollection, but nobody back then was predicting it would happen in 20 years. The time frames given were much longer. But, the vibe was definitely that we need to wake up and do something right now, because by the time climate change hits real hard it will be too late to avert the calamity.
> The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"
Saving the ozone layer required changing practices in a relatively small part of the economy (refrigeration, mostly). In 1994, the total cost of the transition in the US was estimated to less than $100 billion [1], about 1.3% of GDP ($7.3 trillion [2]).
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
Yeah ditching cars is very hard in some places where public transport is not good. (US)
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
Yes, exactly, what time do people think they have? It's here, it's now, it's happening, it's all around us. This headline would have made a little more sense ten years ago.
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
> The world’s biggest oil company has withdrawn an advertising campaign that boasted it was “powering a more sustainable future”, after dozens of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
> The adverts appeared in The Week magazine and The Economist online at the beginning of the year. Baines said it was wrong for publications to accept them in the midst of a climate crisis.
> In a statement, the Economist said: “Advertising is not editorial content and does not imply any endorsement on our part. In the case of this particular ad, it was put on hold at the request of the client.”
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
Do they need advertisers for garbage like this? Just another entry in the decades-long disinformation campaign
"Who bears responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint of those products? Shell, the companies that pumped the oil, the carmakers whose engines burn the fuel, or the people who drive the vehicles? The answer is probably a combination of all of them.
To heap the blame for global warming on the oil industry alone would be to oversimplify the emissions problem. True, companies like Shell could have been more open about evidence of the risks from climate change, and they sometimes lobby against steps to reduce emissions. But everyone bears responsibility."
This goes for almost every institution you can think of, save higher education and the field of climate science - and, even then, you can make an argument for lax funding and marketing on their part, in terms of overwhelming politicians and industry with the truth, no doubt at the behest of wealthy donors looking at their portfolios. But journalism, especially: essentially asleep at the wheel, when the gravity of the situation is considered. Too many people obsessed with their careers and with blinders on.
Keeping with the "this is surprising" narrative, or like this title, implying that we have any time at all, is not helping.
I would expect a less naive title from a platform like the economist.
For example, tariffs could be used to subsidize non-data-center power users. Higher tariffs could also be used to fund community solar and community BESS, helping provide greater local grid resilience. For example, the tariffs should be high enough to subsidize everybody else so they don't have to pay more for their electric service, roughly speaking.
I would also advocate closing the on-prem generator loophole by classifying on-prem power generation services as belonging to or leased from local utilities, and setting the tariff for locally generated power to match the tariff they pay for drawing from the grid.
Congrats, now all power generation is owned by the power company, including your own solar, wind, and fossil fuel generation.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
- vote for people who care
- reduce your own CO2 emissions (air traveling, meat consumption, electronic gadgets, textiles...)
It's not going to change anything but at least you can feel that you've done your share and that you're not a part of the problem.
There are three types of people
1. people who just don't care or think that their lifestyle isn't negotiable (this includes people who are in denial, or uninformed, or techno-solutionists)
2. people who care but who blame someone else
3. those who try to do their share
Third category is extremely slim. I have a few colleagues for instance who refuse to fly, don't eat meat. They aren't activist of any sort but just try to do their share even though it's useless. I find that pretty respectable.
Short of becoming the Luigi of the environmental movement, there is nothing an individual can do. You have to take part in some kind of ongoing collective action. This can include joining a campaign against the oil and gas industry, going door to door for candidates who will reverse climate change, or engaging in direct action against environmentally destructive projects -- or even all three at the same time.
Trying to go it alone is pointless. At best, you'll go down a rabbit hole of becoming the most virtuous consumer alive. At worst, you'll be spend all your time mad-posting on social media.
8 billion people all making hundreds of decisions a day make a difference.
Once an individual starts to make those decisions they have a sunk cost, which encourages more action. This leads to voting a certain way, making more sacrifice(giving up excess), encouraging others, etc.
This whole "I'm a victim and have no recourse" benefits the bad actors.
Capitalism has filled our society and expectations with extreme excess. Modern folks eat diets that are insanely luxurious. Giving up our excess is the crux here, and capitalism tries damn hard to give us reasons to justify every little excess. Then those things are accepted and the baseline shifts down, capitalism then gives us more excuses and the baseline drops again.
I was watching an old movie from like 1985 the other day. A character in the movie was a horrible person and part of making that character a horrible seeming person was giving her a small dog as a pet, because it added to her aura of extreme excess. It made me and my friends laugh cuz nowadays that's expected of most people, to have a small dog. The character only had one! Nowadays it's normal to have 2 or 4 small dogs. Lol. Did you know cats/dogs in the US consume more meat than the entire nation of france? Good luck getting anyone to forego their emotional support pets nowadays. The baseline drops.
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. But accepting the supine position of "well I can't do anything" only guarantees your powerlessness. Fight for the future you want! Convince 5 people that something is important, and you're already 500% up. It scales like crazy.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
I chose one of those for myself and can't blame anyone for choosing differently. They're both valid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
You'll just end up in supermax for the rest of your life. Pros and cons I suppose.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
This doesn't seem plausible - the worst-case predictions for sea level rise by the end of the century are around 2m.
That would certainly be bad for Florida, but like 80% of the population lives higher than 2m above sea level, so it certainly wouldn't be unliveable.
I don't doubt that is your recollection, but nobody back then was predicting it would happen in 20 years. The time frames given were much longer. But, the vibe was definitely that we need to wake up and do something right now, because by the time climate change hits real hard it will be too late to avert the calamity.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/al-gores-long-an...
> The then-senator claimed that “according to some predictions”—no specifics were offered—“in the next few decades,” “up to 60 percent of the present population of Florida may have to be relocated.”
It's possible to be right on the substance and wrong on the timing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Burry 's investor revolt.
1. Don't do anything that might interfere with our profits, time is available/needed to consider what to do.
2. Don't do anything that might interfere with out profits, it's too late anyway.
is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
[1] https://cei.org/studies/the-high-cost-of-cool-the-economic-i...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-ins...
[4] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
Same thing happened after Nixon - it led directly to the founding of Fox News (https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2011/memo-from-197...).
It's a very different situation with fossil fuels.
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion_and_climate_ch...
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
For one, they have no advertisers to keep happy.
My Pihole blocks its content, but I have a guess as to what it is.
They seem to think they have advertisers. https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/How-do-I-advertise...
I turned off anblocking and see zero ads on the site.
> The world’s biggest oil company has withdrawn an advertising campaign that boasted it was “powering a more sustainable future”, after dozens of complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
> The adverts appeared in The Week magazine and The Economist online at the beginning of the year. Baines said it was wrong for publications to accept them in the midst of a climate crisis.
> In a statement, the Economist said: “Advertising is not editorial content and does not imply any endorsement on our part. In the case of this particular ad, it was put on hold at the request of the client.”
Inside of the cover (page 2), ad saying portugal is the smart choice for data centres and ai computing. Page 11, two NGO job ads and an ad for timeshare holiday homes. Page 75, ad for Economist Education Online Courses. Page 75 (back cover) ad for a cruise.
Last week's edition: Rolex, page 2. Page 11, executive recruitment network ad, NGO job ad, teaching job ad. Page 11-12, ad for timeshares. Page 15, barclays bank account ad. Page 20: Ad saying amazon employees' working conditions are good. Page 25: Ad for 'securing identity for the ai enterprise'. Page 32, ad for european cybersecurity investments, page 84 (back page) ad for Oracle.
So there are some ads - not many, but some.
"Who bears responsibility for reducing the carbon footprint of those products? Shell, the companies that pumped the oil, the carmakers whose engines burn the fuel, or the people who drive the vehicles? The answer is probably a combination of all of them.
To heap the blame for global warming on the oil industry alone would be to oversimplify the emissions problem. True, companies like Shell could have been more open about evidence of the risks from climate change, and they sometimes lobby against steps to reduce emissions. But everyone bears responsibility."
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/07/06/shells-boss-de...