The labeling issue is very real. One helpful step might be to label opposition to the needed small-scale experiments as anti-science, which such opposition is? That is, experiments leading to a better understanding of aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, sequestration of ocean CO2, etc.
People don't like to take responsibility for stuff that's large which they may not be able to fulfill.
People are happy to let stuff get destroyed by neglect. They are unhappy if they take a little bit of action to try to soften the blow and fail. Better not to get involved.
Psychologically it is a sign of strength to ignore problems that you can't do anything about.
The cults of anti-nukism is also a religion. And if you decide that we're always going to use less energy in the future than we used in the past, and then it must be more expensive, than you cannot imagine a way to fix the damage that we've done to the planet. If there's no way to fix it, it's best to ignore the problem. Got to save your sanity.
So I start off by pointing out how easy nuclear fission is. It's an antiquated 50-year-old technology we've been using. It should be 10 times cheaper and 10 times better in every way, if innovation hadn't been blocked by over-regulation for half a century. But even in the 1950s the first reactor we ever built took 18 months. And we didn't have computers. Or automated machine tools. It worked fine. It was called the Nautilus. In that time they also built a submarine. Now it's a museum that you can visit.
No one has ever built a nuclear power module factory! We don't need reactors. We need a factory! It's very simple to build dry small modular reactors. Because they're dry, there's no danger of fallout clouds or any need for containment buildings or worrying about which way the wind is blowing if somebody pokes a hole in it. That safety reduces the cost to 100x.
And you can run them hot. So they can do chemistry and allow your 110% perfect recycling back to pure raw materials.
The real problem is that industry says" we can't afford that! It's too cheap! ".
Capitalism can do wonderful things but it hits dead stop on no profit.
We need some leadership to make and rearrange the financial incentives for utilities and industry so that they're not worried about having cheaper energy.
The most progressive thing we can do for the working class is make energy way cheaper. California's restaurants are going bankrupt and they're bitching about being able to pay minimum wage, because their electricity expense succeeds their rent in many cases. No reason California's energy should cost three times George us. We just didn't build the right clean energy systems. Solar and wind are nowhere near cheap it off and they're incompatible with industry.. Solar comes at a low price tag, but that's because it's not very useful. If it were better it would cost more.
We need somebody with the mindset of a naval admiral to decide what temperature we want our planet to be. They need to hire some ship captains, who hire a bunch of engineers, to make it so. We don't need scientists or anyone else making prophecies of the future temperature of the planet. We need a thermostat that works.
Lawyers are taught that motivated reasoning is the best kind of thinking. The truth is what their client needs. The facts are neatly arranged to support that conclusion.
Unfortunately nearly everyone in our governments and in the political scientific organizations like the ipcc, is a lawyer.
Scientists have a bad habit too. They love to study nature. They aren't the kind of people that do stuff. And nobody gets a peer-reviewed paper written on how they hung out at somebody's farm and made some changes while they were farming. They can only prove they've done something if they believe that they are in a natural environment untouched by human hands. Which is a lie. Our planet is touched everywhere by human hands and is changing rapidly.
I do agree that a bit of Robert Moses energy is needed here.
But Moses could built what he built because the basic science underlying his project had been worked out centuries before. With climate repair, we have to do that first.
The scientists I talk to say Aerosol-Cloud Interaction research isn't "nice to have" if your goal is a thermostat that works. It's — sort of the whole thing.
Greens are almost uniformally the worst people. It's bad enough they fanatically worship poverty, but that's never enough for them. Not only do the want to force poverty on the rest of humanity; they're totally oblivious to the overhelming evidence that poverty causes more environmental damage than anything else in the entire world. We drove most of the Earth's megafauna to extinction back in literal caveman times, before there were even enough humans worldwide to populate a single modern megacity.
A degrowth agenda, sincerely followed, would be nothing short of an environmental Auschwitz.
I'm not here to dump on greens. They're trying their best, like we all are, faced with an exceptionally confusing, unprecedented challenge. They're getting it badly wrong. They're mostly wonderful people.
I personally like the space bubbles idea the most for convincing people. Easily-reversible, pretty cheap, and doesn’t directly contact the earth so it feels less like swallowing the spider to catch the fly.
The cults of anti-nukeism is also irrational and destructive.
This planet has way more energy than we can possibly use. It's true there's more solar than we can possibly use. But it's insufficient for industrial use for quite a while. Nuclear energy hasn't killed anyone in a decade. Whereas millions of people per year die from fossil fuel use. Joe we could save millions of lives per year if we transitioned to nuclear completely.
But that violates the religious belief that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Too good to be true, is a great heuristic for human life. Lots of times when you hear a story that's too good to be true someone is trying to con you. But every honest appraisal of nuclear power is too good to be true.
Alongside the labeling effect is the definition of the problem effect? If we see Net Zero as the dominant problem, that obscures two equally crucial issues. If we were to get to Net Zero CO2 emissions, we would still have two equally serious additional problems:
1. We would still have all the excess heat that the earth has accumulated over the last 100 years, mostly in the oceans. Yes, the temperature would have almost stabilized, but all that heat energy would still be there. The earth would not cool down. The ice would continue to melt. Hurricanes would still be boosted. There is no place for this heat to go, unless it can be radiated back into space. Which brings us to the second additional problem:
2. We would still have the high level of CO2 that we ended up with. This level of CO2 would keep the earth from radiating away its excess heat energy.
All three of these problems interact. It is not enough to attend to only Net Zero.
We can only cool the earth down by either removing CO2 or by reducing the vast amount of new energy that the earth is constantly receiving from the sun. CO2 is removed by processes either on land or in the oceans. Reducing the new heat arriving from the sun can only be done by making the atmosphere or the earth’s surface more reflective. ( 1% brighter, for example)
It seems to me that defining the problem in terms of all three of these effects would be a deeper and more useful way to see things.
Who cares about CO2 in the atmosphere? I'm much more concerned about CO2 in the ocean. Ocean acidification will kill us sooner than remain from the atmosphere. + Blocking sunlight with some kind of dimming is liable to make the ocean acidification worse faster. All it will do is kill us sooner to use stratospheric dimming.
If you want to fix the planet, try ocean iron fertilization. See the climate restoration movement.
Ocean chemistry is close to collapse. If the Plankton changes its way of life and decides to make hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen, All people people will die. But most people have a bias towards paying attention to the above water part of the earth, which is small and insignificant. They don't know what's happening to the biggest habitats on the planet.
The labeling issue is very real. One helpful step might be to label opposition to the needed small-scale experiments as anti-science, which such opposition is? That is, experiments leading to a better understanding of aerosol injection, marine cloud brightening, sequestration of ocean CO2, etc.
Yeah! I mean, calling the people who stopped the MCB field trials on the U.S.S. Hornet "anti-science" is like calling water wet...
People don't like to take responsibility for stuff that's large which they may not be able to fulfill.
People are happy to let stuff get destroyed by neglect. They are unhappy if they take a little bit of action to try to soften the blow and fail. Better not to get involved.
Psychologically it is a sign of strength to ignore problems that you can't do anything about.
The cults of anti-nukism is also a religion. And if you decide that we're always going to use less energy in the future than we used in the past, and then it must be more expensive, than you cannot imagine a way to fix the damage that we've done to the planet. If there's no way to fix it, it's best to ignore the problem. Got to save your sanity.
So I start off by pointing out how easy nuclear fission is. It's an antiquated 50-year-old technology we've been using. It should be 10 times cheaper and 10 times better in every way, if innovation hadn't been blocked by over-regulation for half a century. But even in the 1950s the first reactor we ever built took 18 months. And we didn't have computers. Or automated machine tools. It worked fine. It was called the Nautilus. In that time they also built a submarine. Now it's a museum that you can visit.
No one has ever built a nuclear power module factory! We don't need reactors. We need a factory! It's very simple to build dry small modular reactors. Because they're dry, there's no danger of fallout clouds or any need for containment buildings or worrying about which way the wind is blowing if somebody pokes a hole in it. That safety reduces the cost to 100x.
And you can run them hot. So they can do chemistry and allow your 110% perfect recycling back to pure raw materials.
The real problem is that industry says" we can't afford that! It's too cheap! ".
Capitalism can do wonderful things but it hits dead stop on no profit.
We need some leadership to make and rearrange the financial incentives for utilities and industry so that they're not worried about having cheaper energy.
The most progressive thing we can do for the working class is make energy way cheaper. California's restaurants are going bankrupt and they're bitching about being able to pay minimum wage, because their electricity expense succeeds their rent in many cases. No reason California's energy should cost three times George us. We just didn't build the right clean energy systems. Solar and wind are nowhere near cheap it off and they're incompatible with industry.. Solar comes at a low price tag, but that's because it's not very useful. If it were better it would cost more.
We need somebody with the mindset of a naval admiral to decide what temperature we want our planet to be. They need to hire some ship captains, who hire a bunch of engineers, to make it so. We don't need scientists or anyone else making prophecies of the future temperature of the planet. We need a thermostat that works.
Lawyers are taught that motivated reasoning is the best kind of thinking. The truth is what their client needs. The facts are neatly arranged to support that conclusion.
Unfortunately nearly everyone in our governments and in the political scientific organizations like the ipcc, is a lawyer.
Scientists have a bad habit too. They love to study nature. They aren't the kind of people that do stuff. And nobody gets a peer-reviewed paper written on how they hung out at somebody's farm and made some changes while they were farming. They can only prove they've done something if they believe that they are in a natural environment untouched by human hands. Which is a lie. Our planet is touched everywhere by human hands and is changing rapidly.
I do agree that a bit of Robert Moses energy is needed here.
But Moses could built what he built because the basic science underlying his project had been worked out centuries before. With climate repair, we have to do that first.
The scientists I talk to say Aerosol-Cloud Interaction research isn't "nice to have" if your goal is a thermostat that works. It's — sort of the whole thing.
Greens are almost uniformally the worst people. It's bad enough they fanatically worship poverty, but that's never enough for them. Not only do the want to force poverty on the rest of humanity; they're totally oblivious to the overhelming evidence that poverty causes more environmental damage than anything else in the entire world. We drove most of the Earth's megafauna to extinction back in literal caveman times, before there were even enough humans worldwide to populate a single modern megacity.
A degrowth agenda, sincerely followed, would be nothing short of an environmental Auschwitz.
I'm not here to dump on greens. They're trying their best, like we all are, faced with an exceptionally confusing, unprecedented challenge. They're getting it badly wrong. They're mostly wonderful people.
I personally like the space bubbles idea the most for convincing people. Easily-reversible, pretty cheap, and doesn’t directly contact the earth so it feels less like swallowing the spider to catch the fly.
The cults of anti-nukeism is also irrational and destructive.
This planet has way more energy than we can possibly use. It's true there's more solar than we can possibly use. But it's insufficient for industrial use for quite a while. Nuclear energy hasn't killed anyone in a decade. Whereas millions of people per year die from fossil fuel use. Joe we could save millions of lives per year if we transitioned to nuclear completely.
But that violates the religious belief that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Too good to be true, is a great heuristic for human life. Lots of times when you hear a story that's too good to be true someone is trying to con you. But every honest appraisal of nuclear power is too good to be true.
Alongside the labeling effect is the definition of the problem effect? If we see Net Zero as the dominant problem, that obscures two equally crucial issues. If we were to get to Net Zero CO2 emissions, we would still have two equally serious additional problems:
1. We would still have all the excess heat that the earth has accumulated over the last 100 years, mostly in the oceans. Yes, the temperature would have almost stabilized, but all that heat energy would still be there. The earth would not cool down. The ice would continue to melt. Hurricanes would still be boosted. There is no place for this heat to go, unless it can be radiated back into space. Which brings us to the second additional problem:
2. We would still have the high level of CO2 that we ended up with. This level of CO2 would keep the earth from radiating away its excess heat energy.
All three of these problems interact. It is not enough to attend to only Net Zero.
We can only cool the earth down by either removing CO2 or by reducing the vast amount of new energy that the earth is constantly receiving from the sun. CO2 is removed by processes either on land or in the oceans. Reducing the new heat arriving from the sun can only be done by making the atmosphere or the earth’s surface more reflective. ( 1% brighter, for example)
It seems to me that defining the problem in terms of all three of these effects would be a deeper and more useful way to see things.
Who cares about CO2 in the atmosphere? I'm much more concerned about CO2 in the ocean. Ocean acidification will kill us sooner than remain from the atmosphere. + Blocking sunlight with some kind of dimming is liable to make the ocean acidification worse faster. All it will do is kill us sooner to use stratospheric dimming.
If you want to fix the planet, try ocean iron fertilization. See the climate restoration movement.
Ocean chemistry is close to collapse. If the Plankton changes its way of life and decides to make hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen, All people people will die. But most people have a bias towards paying attention to the above water part of the earth, which is small and insignificant. They don't know what's happening to the biggest habitats on the planet.