Dilbert_X
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We've done this before, so if Australia let in 25m Indians then suddenly our industrial emissions would be OK?

Nothing would change except this per capita thing, when its actual emissions that matter.

Sanjeet and his ten kids emit less per capita but more in total than Dilbert but Dilbert is the bad guy?

If Dilbert invited Sanjeet and his ten kids to live in the shed at the end of the garden suddenly Dilbert's emissions would be OK?
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uziq
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yes, you can twist and bend statistics like that if you want. you're focussing on manipulating co2/capita as if that's the only salient metric here. it obviously is not. once again, australia's co2 emissions are world-offendingly bad in almost every single metric. yes, you could 'game' the co2/capita metric if you suddenly increased your population two-fold: but you'd still be in the world's top 15 most polluting countries.

again, you're not the falklands islands here with an outlier tiny population. you're not even one of the gulf states who top the co2/capita tables because of their huge oil and petrochemical industries. you're a populous first-world nation with an advanced and diverse economy. the fact you appear alongside qatar on co2/capita and nations like the UK or south korea (both of whom have more than double your population) on total emissions is a fucking travesty.

my post literally just said that, if you focus on domestic/household emissions and 'personal carbon footprints' above all else, you get a distorted and unhelpful picture. now you're trying to counter-argue that the co2/capita stat can similarly be distorted beyond any utility. good job, i guess? you're an expert at sticking your head in the sand and refusing to see the actual picture for what it is: at present the world is racing towards a climate meltdown and at present australia is one of the WORST offenders.

instead you keep invoking population explosions, as if bottom-of-the-table african nations spell our doom. talking about medium- or long-term demographic shifts is really pretty fucking indulgent when the time for climate action is NOW, and right NOW it's the western industrial nations who are contributing an awful lot to the picture.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-09 05:17:29)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Said already, China and India are the problems, with colossal populations all wanting first world lifestyles.

China already has 24 times the emissions of Australia, India 6 times, but thats OK - Australia is the bad guy because our population is small.
If we boost our population presumably you'll go bother someone else.

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2021-11-09 05:42:50)

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uziq
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china is in a good position to transition to a green economy. of all the nations on the earth with the political werewithal to enact a post-ww2 style 'green new deal', china's one-party-system is probably the best equipped to do it. they have the bulk of their economic and technological development behind them, after rapid industrialization in the last century.

china's population growth is lower than australia's and only projected to decline. are there 'too many chinese'? well, the moral calculus is a little compromised when you consider that you consume 15x as much as an average chinese person. who should sacrifice their parents first, i wonder?

the real issue with china, as i mentioned right at the start, is that the world system is based on fossil fuels, and china has as much of a geopolitical interest in them as does russia: which is to say, we're all still busy in capitalist-acquisitive neo-imperial mode, and a superpower like china or the USA is unlikely to give up control of the spice (and so the universe). ubi sunt the eco-leninists?

india is more problematic and is lagging behind, like russia. their climate pledges afaik were set to 2070, which seems woefully inadequate, yes. however, i'm still not onboard with this 'why should we do anything when india exists?' argument. it seems badly insufficient. and, in which case, why the fuck are you trying to make me feel bad for taking a flight every 5 years, dickhead? you aren't even committed to your own position. gloating over your own personal carbon footprint one minute; pointing and saying 'but india' as soon as someone points out that, actually, your contribution on a national- or even class-based level is way, way above the norm.

you have never quite answered the question to me why and how, exactly, the west is self-evidently the world's best civilisation, and yet should eschew its world-leading role when it matters. as soon as someone raises the possibility of your own national wealth or prosperity being affected, you enter into a narrowly competitive way of thinking in which all you can focus on is other nations 'getting ahead'. shouldn't the west be the moral exemplar here? we are already significantly post-industrial and materially wealthy.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-09 05:55:12)

uziq
Member
+492|3423
andreas malm has in the last few years written 3 very good books on this sort of thinking about climate crisis, accounting for the wider political totality (that is, the political economics and power dynamics of climate change). much higher-level analysis than 'personal carbon footprints' and 'but india'.

Malm’s recent work builds on the arguments of Fossil Capital (2016), in which he showed that Britain’s embrace of coal came relatively late – water power remained dominant for decades after Watt’s invention of the steam engine. Fossil capitalism arose from a desire to concentrate industry in cities, thereby avoiding the complex engineering needed to sustain water-powered production, which would have necessitated co-operation between mill owners; it also allowed for a greater concentration of labour, more easily disciplined and exploited. It’s possible to imagine an alternative industrialisation, based on wind and water (but today including solar power), but it would have required far greater diffusion of production and thus resulted in greater bargaining power for industrial workers. Instead, a particular social configuration, stained with smoke and soot, became the pattern of modernity, with fossil fuels powering not only the expansion of capitalism but the political settlements, from imperialism to modern globalisation, built on it.

This historical understanding of climate change has led Malm to some specific conclusions: capitalism, not human beings, is changing the climate; industrialisation itself is less of a problem than the fossil system that powers it; the overwhelming focus of climate activism must be on dismantling fossil infrastructure; the chief problems with technology are the exploitative conditions of manufacture and the destructive ends to which it is put, rather than any more general concern about its destructive attitude to nature. Malm tends to focus on Europe and the US, as the architects and beneficiaries of fossil capitalism – and as polities that are both hugely influential and susceptible to popular pressure. His most recent book, White Skin, Black Fuel, written with the Zetkin Collective, a group of anti-fascist researchers based at the University of Lund, broadens this perspective, using particular historical or national examples to look at the entire fossil system from a new angle.

Consider the Amazon. During the Brazilian dictatorship of 1964 to 1985, the ‘green desert’ of the rainforest was opened up for speculators, gold-diggers and rubber-hunters, who brought chaos and destruction to the forest ecosystem, and everything from disease to torture to its indigenous peoples. The speed and scale of deforestation became a matter of international concern. By the 1990s, ‘cattle capitalism’ had led to more deforestation, with swathes of the Amazon felled for pasture. To follow the supply chains out from the ranches is to see much of the world become implicated in every razed square metre: the beef itself is served on tables in Russia or Italy, but the hide turns up in baseball gloves in the US and dog collars in Sweden, the tallow in shaving cream sold in Tokyo, the guts in the strings of tennis rackets, the hoof or horn in the keys of a piano, or rendered to thicken lipstick. The commodities that have their origin in the destroyed forest criss-cross the globe, each freight journey belching carbon into the atmosphere.

There is a perverse, monstrous sublimity to this vision. The Amazon, as a historic carbon sink, should feature prominently in any serious climate politics. Unlike the examples in Malm’s earlier work, however, the depletion of the Amazon is not directly connected to fossil fuel extraction (the most destructive mining in the Amazon is for minerals, especially iron). Cattle capitalists, like other pillagers of the green desert, are part of a vast sphere of secondary industries that are dependent on fossil capital, and share its rapacity and drive to expand. How far these industries can be divorced from their fossil predicate is one of the more awkward questions for mainstream climate politics; it’s hard to see how the destruction of rainforests, vast rare-earth mines or accelerating soil depletion could be justified even if powered purely by wind or sun.

Some politicians are unfazed by such issues. Jair Bolsonaro pledged during his campaign for the presidency that he would reverse the ‘industry of fines’ with which the Lula and Dilma governments had slowed the destruction of the Amazon. There was, he said, ‘still space for deforestation’: indigenous peoples could ‘adapt or vanish’, and he promised to proscribe the Landless Workers’ Movement. Anticipating his victory, the rate of deforestation spiked by 50 per cent. Five days after his triumph in the first round, Bolsonaro’s choice for foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, declared climatism ‘a globalist tactic to scare people and gain more power’.

Over the past decade, Germany has been the world’s leading producer of brown coal. In 2019 it accounted for 21 per cent of emissions in the EU; in 2018 it was the world’s sixth biggest emitter of CO2 from fossil fuels. Germany’s lignite mines account for seven of the ten largest point sources of CO2 in Europe. Almost no single action would yield as significant a reduction in European emissions as the closure of these mines. But Lusatia, where many of the lignite pits are found, is also a stronghold of the far-right AfD: in 2017, the same year the Grosse Koalition contemplated closing these mines, the party won more than 30 per cent of the vote in the region. In the Bundestag, the AfD climate spokesman, Rainer Kraft, attacked what he called ‘eco-populist voodoo’; the party castigated Merkel for both a ‘disastrous asylum policy’ and a ‘left-green ideologised climate policy’. Under pressure from the AfD, the coal exit commission set an end date of 2038. This concession only emboldened the far right: in 2019, the top AfD candidates for Saxony and Brandenburg (neighbouring lignite states) met at their common border to declare their intention to mine coal for another thousand years – a duration not lit on accidentally by German nationalists.

[...]

These two stories form part of the dossier of evidence amassed in White Skin, Black Fuel. Subtitled ‘On the Danger of Fossil Fascism’, the book asks a deceptively simple question: why do so many parties and politicians of the far right traffic in climate denialism?† In Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński referred to alien Muslim-borne ‘parasites and protozoa’ while authorising the construction of new coal plants as a central platform of the Law and Justice party; his defence minister, Antoni Macierewicz, visited Europe’s biggest lignite facility to declare: ‘Poland stands on coal.’ In Hungary, Orbán’s Fidesz Party has promised undying loyalty to BMW and eternal vigilance against the Muslim migration supposedly sponsored by George Soros. In Finland, the Finns Party combines baseline anti-migration policies with warnings about the illness-inducing properties of wind turbines. In France, Marine Le Pen has claimed that ‘migrants are like wind turbines, everyone agrees to have them but no one wants them in their back yard.’ There are many more examples.

[...]

Justin Trudeau told a gathering of oil and gas executives that ‘no country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there.’ Yet this is exactly what must happen. Few states have gone as far as Denmark and begun to end licensing rounds for hydrocarbon exploration. Trudeau’s line neatly articulates the logical position for any developed state enmeshed in global competition and trade. If it strikes us as irrational, it’s because the whole system is irrational.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22 … y-wildfire
the LRB dedicated a few pieces in its last issue to timely writings on this topic, to coincide with cop26.

you never want to look beyond the economics or politics of your household/domestic budget. anything that involves a painful reckoning with the politics of your own citizens or nation involves feeble gestures towards 'brown people' or 'overpopulation', which sounds remarkably aligned with the far-right on this topic.

They see ‘fossil fascism’ as an emergent political formation, linking ‘primitive’ fossil capital – direct extractors, which can’t survive divestment – with racist politics. Aware of the slipperiness of definitions of fascism, they stick with the term because their new postulate has many of its hallmarks: fantasies of a nation purified of parasitical degenerates and outsiders; an indifference to mass death; emergence in an emergency where significant established economic powers are threatened.
sound familiar?

at the same time, you chide people for taking plane flights, as if the climate crisis can be averted by western consumers making better buying decisions – whilst their own states put their feet down on massive fossil-fuel expansion, often motivated by electoral politics and right-wing populism.

you are totally incoherent, in other words.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-09 06:40:41)

uziq
Member
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man like yanis in his star wars fashion.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr … d-net-zero
uziq
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+492|3423




interesting that australia are mentioned as a big 'barrier to progress' at these talks, alongside saudi arabia, brazil, the US and china.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-12 01:22:59)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6077|eXtreme to the maX
Whats interesting is the Australian states are doing far more then the federal govt - which doing literally fuck all.

Australia can fairly easily go carbon negative thanks to a small population and unlimited sunshine.
PV+H20->H2 H2+C02-> Methane or Methanol for example.

If you want a fight over who is the bigger luddite - Johnson or Morrison - Bring it on.
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uziq
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i think that's a rather unedifying contest and i will not be buying PPV tickets.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6077|eXtreme to the maX
It would have been short, I would have thrown in the towel for Morrison in round 1.
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uziq
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modern conservatism across much of the advanced west seems to have a death wish. whether it's tied to mythic visions of the past, outmoded and vicious nationalism, evangelism and world-religious fuckery, or a lethal addiction to the riches stuck in the ground, it seems to have lots of rhetoric, lots of emotional animus, but few good answers or constructive proposals to today's predicaments.

'business as usual' when we're way into overtime and are borrowing heavily from all our tomorrows.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-12 22:21:20)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Nonsense, the free-market will fix it.

Also property values will rise as rising sea-levels reduce the available land according to the rules of supply and demand.
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uziq
Member
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the global north's pluralistic democracies are going to be put under huge amounts of pressure from mass migrations from the equatorial regions and global south due to domino-effect climate change devastation; meanwhile, the vast expanse of asiatic russia, as well as china, will become mild and habitable and more amenable to resource extraction.

22nd century russia/china no. 1, let's gooooo.
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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We can send all the migrants there then.

If there's one thing Chinese aren't its racist.
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Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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As expected China and India blocked limits on coal at COP26 and will continue building new coal plants which have a typical life of 30-50 years.

US Congress will block any progress there.

So really nothing at all has been achieved.

Otherwise CO2 abatement projects will have billions thrown at them so coal, oil, gas etc can continue as normal in countries which did sign up, but will deliver nothing except to make a few people very rich.
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uziq
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it is a continuing travesty that so many lobbyists from the fossil-fuel industry are allowed into conferences like that.

the general population are outside in the cold waving placards whilst the very richest lobbyists on the planet are working the floor. quite an odd spectacle.

china and the US at least signalled the desire to work together on these goals; whether empty rhetoric or not, we'll have to hope.

i really don't know what it's going to take for people to hard-commit to giving up coal. people say they're going to pursue the objective at the next one, as if repeating the exact same process over again is going to suddenly produce drastically different results.
unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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Best projections in the mid aughts placed US among the top expected performers for the next potential pandemic. We did horribly. Climate change projections are not very optimistic. Will we do better than modest expectations, or even worse?
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
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Its a fact that the modern world owes everything to coal and more so oil, so oil companies are rich.

At the top end its going to take 10-20 years for the US congress to even start doing something, if they ever do anything it will be much too little and too late.

At the bottom end the average american is going to have to be torn kicking and screaming from his gas-guzzling truck, beef diet and cheap air travel.

I don't really see either happening.
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uziq
Member
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saying the 'world owes everything to oil companies' is a bit much. you're glossing over an entire ideological power struggle between free-market/private interests and the state, there. there was nothing to say that world governments had to kow-tow to mega-corporations in order to extract fuel and run their energy grids. this stuff should, and already is in some places, in the purview of state power.

on that stroke, reticent states like saudi arabia and, yes, australia and canada do further complicate this picture. these states could decide to leave things in the ground where they are, but they don't. the close alliance between state-enterprise and private corporations needs some unpicking. the post-imperial british state and BP were pretty complexly intermingled in their rapaciousness and geopolitical finagling, for instance.

at the 'bottom end' of consumer choice, your average australian nearly consumes as much co2/capita as an american. i don't know why you relish punching down so much on the 'gas-guzzling, beef-eating yanks' when you are literally right up there with them, statistically speaking. a strange form of denialism. australians might have to look at pivoting away from a fossil-fuel-funded national exchequer and a concomitant sacrifice to their own living standards, too.

Last edited by uziq (2021-11-15 03:00:32)

unnamednewbie13
Moderator
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No, other countries have to depopulate, and then Australia can continue business as usual guilt-free. /s
uziq
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remember, australia has loads of empty land, yuuuuge amounts of empty land, in fact. their co2/km2 is so low that every australian could practically build a coal-powered substation in their own (very large) back yard.
Larssen
Member
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It's not as simple as a relationship between state enterprise and corporations, it's that the entire national economies and the geopolitical power of these countries often depend on fossil fuel extraction, refinement and sale. Asking the saudis, australians, russians for example to cease all resource extraction is asking them to enact very wide ranging economic reforms (and to give up crucial political/international power). These reforms are sure to put a lot of people out of work, diminish these countries' control of their regional partners, and unsure of providing suitable alternatives. In the best case, countries like these will commit to very long term, slow, gradual shifts. In the worst case they'll actively work against you. Not just because of practical & coldly rational reasons - ideology will follow suit or even act as a starting point. The argument will be that western powers mean to undermine the economic/political prosperity of these countries, that it's a new attempt at colonialism, that climate change is either a hoax, not that bad or uncontrollable anyway, that it won't affect them, that they may even gain from it, etc. Disinformation and even manipulation of energy pricing will follow suit.

You'll also find countries that will make empty promises. Sign the document, and either structurally underreport emissions & do some accounting magic, or ignore the deal and move on. Fact is coal and oil can still be profitable for a very long time.

Honestly these agreements will be about as respected & honoured as most UN dictated international norms/laws/rules are. Considering the stakes, no chance we'll reach the Paris accords' lowest target, probable we'll also miss the second target.

Last edited by Larssen (2021-11-15 03:43:42)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6077|eXtreme to the maX

uziq wrote:

saying the 'world owes everything to oil companies' is a bit much.
Thats literally not what I said.


on that stroke, reticent states like saudi arabia and, yes, australia and canada do further complicate this picture. these states could decide to leave things in the ground where they are, but they don't.
If they did they'd be invaded in a matter of days. The various oil crises never triggered any structural changes, people just like oil too much.

at the 'bottom end' of consumer choice, your average australian nearly consumes as much co2/capita as an american. i don't know why you relish punching down so much on the 'gas-guzzling, beef-eating yanks' when you are literally right up there with them, statistically speaking. a strange form of denialism. australians might have to look at pivoting away from a fossil-fuel-funded national exchequer and a concomitant sacrifice to their own living standards, too.
We have a lot of energy intensive industries, 70% of our agricultural produce is exported. I guess we could stop that and let people starve, that would cut the per capita emissions which are so important to you.

Bottom line is most countries are overpopulated, a country shouldn't have more people than it can feed, supply with power from its own resources etc.
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SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3690
I don't think the world is overpopulated but Dilbert has a point regarding carrying capacity. We already have a crisis housing, educating, and keeping safe the people we already have.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6077|eXtreme to the maX
Without oil for farming and gas for fertiliser the whole world would be in starvation.

But yeah, the Saudis should just turn the taps off.

These things run in lockstep.

https://www.resilience.org/files/images/figure9.JPG
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