Climate Change? Nahhh ...

We also probably shouldn't have told ourselves 40 years ago that we had only 10 years to put out the fire.

 

Link, please.

 

Early-1990s environmentalism was literally a good-natured reminder that you could save the ozone layer and the planet little-by-little. A macro problem that could be solved with micro solutions.

It was presented as a multi-decade, winnable fight with little sacrifice.

Alma’s view. Thirty years ago. When we had the money and global autonomy to actually do it. We didn’t even begin to tackle the changes a real response would’ve taken.

We should’ve actually used scare tactics, in hindsight.

 

Stipulating that the headline above the headline in the bottom story is wrong. Story doesn't say nations will be obliterated by 2000. It says they eventually will be obliterated if the warming trend is not reversed by 2000.


My position is the same as always. Clean is better than dirty. Let's do everything we can to make dirty things clean, without forcing people on tight budgets to buy $50K electric cars and without forcing businesses to shut down. Just as the market killed my industry, let the market kill the dirty industries.

 

Been grinding through some high-level naval strategy books the last few months, and one thing of note: Scientists have been telling Presidents since the 50s that rising oceans as a result of climate change is something which needs to be considered.

 

We’re now dealing in Earth time, not our time. I’m not real concerned that a scientist in 1969 or 1989 was 20 years off in predicting when our red line is reached. I’m more concerned that the trends they described are happening.

No one knows if we have the ability to wipe our species off the planet via man-made warming. We don’t know if we’re in an irreversible spiral in which our efforts are futile. We don’t know if there isn’t a coming counteracting climate phenomena or technology that makes our worrying overblown. We have no data on other planets burning fossil fuels and eight billion people living on one planet. All we know is global temperatures are rising, ice is melting and it’s really damn crowded.

Creating a planet that weaned itself off fossil fuels needed to start in the 1990s. All those “this is too hard!” complaints needed a multi-decade runway. Just like businesses that think beyond the next year, we needed to sacrifice a part of our GDP and our growth and brainpower on solutions that yielded a hundred years of breakthroughs. We chose not to do that. No fingers pointed. It was collective failure.

We’re strapped in this roller coaster car and heading up the incline. Good luck to everybody.

 

Having been in this business for 29 years (and counting), it’s amazing and very depressing how easily your final two graphs apply to the newspaper industry as well as the environment, Hermes.

Think beyond the next year? Good luck finding a newspaper in the past three decades that ever thought beyond the next month. Or week.

 

Noted wild eyed libs at the Pentagon have been planning for mass migration and water wars for years. They've also been working on ways to deal with a billion dollar naval base at Norfolk flooding when there is a higher tide than normal to the point that about a third of it is underwater.

 

It's more than governments and companies not looking past the next month.

How many Americans don't/didn't put anything into an IRA or 401(k)?

 

Yep, even though the half we don’t see here is literally on TV all the damn time spewing lies.

 

My take is we've done better on the environment than we'll give ourselves credit for, in part because there's a really, really committed group of religious-natured activists working on the good, guilty hearts of kind people, and there are people who are and will make a great deal of money off of the green economy. (Which, in and of itself, is not a bad thing.)

The idea that, 30 years ago, if we'd only had more windmills and EVs, I mean, politely, no. That's not it. To the extent that we have a serious issue, it wouldn't be mean farm trucks and too much steak, it's the carbon footprint created by free trade. There are nations that now have middle classes because of it, or countries like Ireland that were pulled out of 70s and 80s doldrums by a global economy. People all over the world are living longer because of these advancements, but they have indisputably complicated the environmental question.

And since there's kind of an understanding that those nations aren't going to and shouldn't return to an embrace of abject poverty, there is...what? A severe reimaging of living standards in the West? Car ownership limits in the name of climate? Meat rations in the name of climate? Banks assessing your financial viability based on online E scores?

Many Americans - not a majority, but many - live life according to the harm principle; that is, people can do what they want so long as it doesn't harm anyone. But if the climate thing is as real as activists insist it is, then almost anything you do can violate their idea of the harm principle. And if the answer is, well, these things - rations and personal E scores - will never happen, that I'm catastrophizing, well, then the climate must not be quite the catastrophe people make it out to be.

The building can not be simultaneously on fire, yet magically requiring only a minute of water to be doused.

 

I agree that we have taken some steps toward a cleaner environment in the past 30 years, and that consumer pressure has forced businesses to adjust at least some of their products and practices in the name of marketing/sales.

But two big problems remain: Keeping things at status quo, or just from not getting worse, isn’t enough as scientists say our gradual temperature increases already have adverse consequences, such as more extreme weather.

And secondly, what Alma refers to as the "do no harm" principle sounds like the good old “invisible hand” idea to me. Everybody looks out for themselves, and the economy allows everyone to prosper through a system of mutual independence. But everyone driving, flying, eating, screwing and buying whatever suits them doesn't do much to help the environment (I believe things like pollution and climate change are "externalities" that live outside the realm of supply, demand and costs).

So an invisible hand won't keep us from slowly worsening and eventually destroying our planet. We need forward-looking plans and leaders -- quite the challenge for Americans who, as a whole, enjoying maxing out multiple credit cards to entertain themselves and acquire more stuff than they can store in their home.