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Bridging the gap between left and right. I came across this clip showing Glenn Beck and Samantha Bee, and thought that this SoylentNews story / comment thread should be stickied till the new year so we have an ongoing conversation. It's a short clip from her show where Glenn Beck is a willing guest; the key point is they are trying to find common ground. Beck points out that Bee is following some of his own patterns of crying "catastrophe" but they really don't provide much insight beyond the significance of their little coming together moment.
The divide is clear and present on this site as most everywhere else, I would like to see a meta discussion where we fact check each other and drill down through the rhetoric until we get some straightforward lists and proposals on how we can move forward together. What are the fundamental blockers? Which ideas do we consider to be too outrageous for credibility? Many here are guilty of attacking each other — can we try and Spock it out for about a week?
I'll start us off with my supposition:
Climate change is real and human activity has an important effect on it. We must agree on this point in order to move forward, and social/economic issues must be handled after needed environmental changes."
If you post as AC — try and behave as if you were logged in — reduce the flames for better quality discussion.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 23 2016, @11:01PM
Exactly. Five degrees is neither objectively better nor worse for humanity, unless you define humanity as temperate, coastal cities, which is horribly incorrect.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:28PM
Insurance rates are already going up due to Global warming:
As climate change claims heat up, insurance industry says we need to adapt: Don Pittis [www.cbc.ca]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday December 23 2016, @11:37PM
Insurance is not a fundamental necessity to human survival. And they should be going up in areas destined to become uninhabitable. It's one dandy way to get people to live somewhere it's not insane to live.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:42PM
Gobal warming adds more energy to the system, making more places insane to live in. Fort McMurry mentioned in the article is about 58 degrees north. Do you expect us all to move north of the Arctic (or south of the Antarctic) circle?
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Friday December 23 2016, @11:53PM
Actually, this ties in with Economic migrants already.
People are leaving the middle-east in droves.
It is difficult to pin down exactly how much of the political unrest is exacerbated by climate change.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:21AM
What I expect is that a species as adaptable as human beings will find a way to live on a planet that has supported life quite well at much higher levels of greenhouse gasses than are currently present or even predicted.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:07AM
And of the species that we are dependent on? Are they as adaptable?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:17AM
Doesn't matter. We'll adapt.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Saturday December 24 2016, @02:21AM
I don't doubt that humanity will adapt. However, the likely result is that before that millions if not billions will starve, because the temperature change is too rapid for the ecosystem to adapt and thus for us to maintain our crop levels. If we're really luck we'll manage to engineer around it, but with the amount of denial that we'll even have to do that, and the subsequent lack of focus/investment, I'm not encouraged.
A shortage of food will naturally lead to even more conflict, and this is where I have my beef - I don't want another $!^!# world war. Given the current world "leadership" with their trigger happy fingers and refusal to accept responsibility even for their own direct actions, I'm *really* not encouraged. (Also, I like beef, I'd like to be able to keep eating it now and then.)
On the energy front I am rather encouraged; while political leadership is largely absent, the market forces are starting to swing in and driving down the cost of renewables. Whether one accepts human carbon emissions as substantially influential when it comes to the climate or not, nobody argues that the resulting emissions are bad for human health. Moving off burning fossils is a good thing, regardless. Unless you're one of the elite luckies with only oil up your reservoir, but meh, you'll adapt too.
(Score: 1) by jrmcferren on Saturday December 24 2016, @10:25PM
It is rather important that we reduce our use of fossil fuels, but we MUST ensure that while doing so that we don't cause energy to become so expensive that only the elites can afford to light or heat their homes or take public transport (let alone drive their own cars). At the same time, we can't stop progressing on clean energy. This is a very delicate balance of maintaining and/or improving standard of living (by cheap energy) and reducing our use on fossil fuels.
The key innovation for the near term is energy storage. In order to continue our solar energy buildout, we need to keep the incentive of net metering. To make net metering viable both economically and technically in the long term, we need to be able to store energy. This can be installed by the electric company at key points on the grid, or installed by the people with solar installations to allow for even better demand and generation management. Large scale storage is also going to be needed to continue wind energy buildout.
Renewables and storage alone will likely not be enough to provide the power needed in many countries, especially when heating and transportation is considered. These needs will still need to be handled by fossil fuels (especially for heavy goods long distance transportation) and nuclear (additional power for heating).
This brings up nuclear. There is very promising nuclear technology on the horizon if we develop it. If this technology is developed it will render all existing plants obsolete, in addition as a bonus for the US we would be able to use more of our rare earth deposits as the contamination (thorium) will be usable as fuel.
That leaves the last major use of fossil fuels and actually it isn't for energy. Modern chemistry is reliant on petroleum, by reducing the demand for petroleum energy we should have sufficient oil for these chemicals including plastics.
This is great, and you are now wondering how to get the government to get this moving? This is the answer that will shock everyone here. The government needs to be very selective on what actions are taken. In the immediate term (next 4 years), we need to take efforts to increase production of fossil fuels (sad reality) and to look into changing the nuclear regulations to allow for easier development of new technologies.
What do I dream of the future being like energy wise? By the 2050s (when I hope to retire) I dream of not only having access to clean, reliable, and mainly renewable energy from the power grid, but to be able to store enough to ride through power outages. I dream that electricity will be so cheap and plentiful that consumption will actually be promoted again like it was in the 1950s. Every home will be able to generate power, store power, and if needed buy power. Heating, cooling, and even the car will be fully electric. Fossil fuels will be expensive, not because of carbon taxes, or short supplies, but of low demand. Smart homes will have the choice of demand response options if the grid is overload. They can reduce demand by allowing the heating or cooling to be delayed, use power from the home's batteries until more energy is available, or wait for a better incentive. Speaking of how inexpensive the energy will be, heated sidewalks and driveways will be common, no snow or ice would accumulate, possibly have this technology in the roads too.
In my dream, energy may actually become too plentiful and the grid will need to be able to dump the excess. Imagine incentives for making your home cooler in the summer or warmer in the winter for a few hours, street lights may come on at noon to help reduce the overage. Snow melt systems may activate on mild days. Remember this is with clean renewable and nuclear energy.
TL;DR we need more fossil NOW, but with proper application of government action and more importantly proper application of government inaction will allow for future development of clean energy.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:37PM
I don't see anywhere in your argument why we'd need more fossil fuel right now - the world is happily producing the energy we currently need, and installations of renewables are being added faster than coal fired plants (largely because the former now have a better ROI).
You're spot on both that developing countries are likely to still need to use a fair bit of fossil fuel, and it would be blatantly unfair for the developed nations to deny outright deny them seeing as the developed nations have already had the advantage of said fossil fuel. That said, the need should be a lot smaller, with newer, cleaner tech being available and, many times, even cheaper. We are truly at the dawn of an energy revolution, I believe. Things will massively change over the next decade or so. As you say, the grid will become far more decentralised, and many times quite likely be needed to dump excess energy, as opposed to being the One True Source of consumer electricity.
Nuclear is an interesting idea. I personally like it as a baseload provider in the interim at least, with the longterm hope that we won't need it for terrestial use. The two or maybe three big problems I see are, in order: The NIMBYs, who I have a certain amount of sympathy for, but only because the bureaucracy/beancounter mentality tends to hinder proper engineering/safety. Then there's the financial viability; The last couple of articles I read were claiming that it is not profitable to build new nuclear plants. And finally, there's the thorium tech. It always looks great on paper, but somehow still seems to be 5-10 years away from production.
Energy storage is of course a key component, especially long term. I was reading an interesting article just the other day about a new large solar installation in QLD, Australia next to a disused gold mine, where they were going to couple the solar with traditional hydro storage using a pair of differentially elevated dams at the gold mine. Hydro can easily be used for baseload (and has as good response time as e.g. gasfired turbines), and if the hydro installations can be done in areas already messed up environmentally - excellent!
(Score: 1) by jrmcferren on Monday December 26 2016, @08:55PM
I must have forgotten that key point! The reason we need more fossil fuel energy now is to increase supply and reduce prices. If we concentrate this on the electricity grid we can become a more electrified society (more electric cars, more people using electric heat, etc). We need to move more of the utilization of energy to electricity to increase the impact that renewables will have on our energy grid. You however said something that may actually make this rather unnecessary.
If Thorium is only 5 to 10 years (let's say 15 years to give a buffer) away, we can probably avoid building new coal plants as long as we don't regulate the larger plants to death until thorium is ready to be deployed. In my part of the Mid Atlantic of the US the majority of the coal plant shut downs have been the smaller 200MW or so coal plants that have been running for many decades already. In the short term we need to keep the larger coal plants such as Homer City online though and build natural gas plants for additional capacity.
You mention Hydro, I'd like to see more hydro as well, Hydro is CHEAP power. There are some hydro plants within maybe 50 miles or so, but these are in the 1MW range. Hydro storage will also be a good idea short term until we can get the cost of grid scale batteries down. Like I said though, I eventually dream of a day that on mild winter days I set my heat to 72 and then I get a steep discount to let the utility turn the heat up to 74 (both in *F).
The irony of developing nations is that the masses will probably be using more renewables and fossil fuels will become obsolete long before the masses will need to consume them at the level we do in the industrialized world. Another example is that telecommunications in developing countries is mainly wireless. Another older example. Europe has a newer power grid as they had to rebuild after WWII, while the US stayed at 120 volt for many things, Europe skipped to 220 since they had the technology to adopt the higher voltage easier (EG 1940s vs 1900s).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:30AM
Gobal warming adds more energy to the system, making more places insane to live in. Fort McMurry mentioned in the article is about 58 degrees north. Do you expect us all to move north of the Arctic (or south of the Antarctic) circle?
And so what? Extreme weather is not that big a deal for wealthy societies! The fossil fuel processes that allegedly contribute to an increase in extreme weather also contribute to making societies wealthy and far more capable of dealing with the harm of extreme weather.
(Score: 2) by tathra on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:53PM
the billions in repair costs, maintenance, hospital bills, portable generators, etc, certainly are a big deal. tax increases will be necessary in order to have the funds to cover all those costs, are you fine with that? and thats not even covering the human costs (lost manhours at work, misery and grieving for those killed, riots and looting, etc) that come along with it, especially if the money to effect repairs and keep society stable in the meantime isnt there.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @11:57PM
the billions in repair costs, maintenance, hospital bills, portable generators, etc, certainly are a big deal.
That is pocket change to a developed world country. And note that hospital bills are much lower than in a country that is completely unprepared for extreme weather.
tax increases will be necessary in order to have the funds to cover all those costs, are you fine with that?
Again, keep in mind just how little extreme weather actually costs.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday December 25 2016, @08:30PM
The people living in those once safe places probably won't appreciate watching their property value go poof. Under any reasonable rule of law, they will be within their rights to demand compensation (also known as internalizing externalities). Refusing to take any sort of action is nothing more or less than betting those living in the new danger areas can be screwed over with impunity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 26 2016, @09:35AM
The people living in those once safe places probably won't appreciate watching their property value go poof.
Who are they going to sue when this happens centuries down the road? And will they pay for the positive externalities that fossil fuels generate, you know, to be fair to the fossil fuel users?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 27 2016, @04:12AM
So you're going with the screw 'em over school of thought. Everything's legal if you don't get caught.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:07AM
So you're going with the screw 'em over school of thought. Everything's legal if you don't get caught.
Well, that is your argument. And I don't think it's a reasonable rule of law to be able to sue people of the distant past who actually made your life better because you can show (using the typical low threshold of proof that goes on in civil court) that some real estate you own has lower value because of it.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 27 2016, @06:55PM
Well, that is your argument.
No, it's the upshot of your position on the matter.
Why don't you believe it is reasonable to hold someone responsible when they knowingly take an action that damages others? Are you in general against the existence of civil law? As for benefits to go with those losses, they have already been handsomely rewarded for those through economic activity.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:39PM
Why don't you believe it is reasonable to hold someone responsible when they knowingly take an action that damages others?
A classic counterexample is manual CPR. Even when done right, it'll dislocate ribs and may break the sternum. And the subject is unconscious (CPR is only given to people who are unconscious and not breathing) and thus, unable to consent to the injuries. So how much responsibility does one hold for giving manual CPR when they know they will cause injury?
As for benefits to go with those losses, they have already been handsomely rewarded for those through economic activity.
Not for positive externalities by definition.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:15AM
In the case of CPR, without it death is the result (often even with it). It is reasonable to presume that people will prefer to live even if a broken sternum is a natural consequence. For the people whose property becomes worthless, where is the benefit so great that no reasonable person wouldn't happily take the trade-off?
As for positive externalities, those have never been an excuse in a court of law. If you run a red and cause someone injuries sufficient to put them out of work, do you honestly believe you owe nothing because someone else was happy to fill the vacancy?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @09:54AM
For the people whose property becomes worthless, where is the benefit so great that no reasonable person wouldn't happily take the trade-off?
Their societies become a lot more wealthy with a variety of huge benefits such as reduce or negative population growth, good for the environment, better health, better individual freedom, etc. Further, such ocean-side property still has a long life span ahead of it. The value of it in a few centuries is not the important part.
As for positive externalities, those have never been an excuse in a court of law.
Again, CPR is the obvious counterexample. Having a chance for life is the positive externality. The damaged body parts is the negative externality. Even if we choose not to ban climate change reparation like we do liability for properly done CPR, we still will have a much wealthier society with which to pay such things.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday December 28 2016, @05:42PM
Sharpen your thinking!
Those benefits happened well before liability would begin since we as a species didn't understand the risks at the time.
Liability starts in earnest in the '70s where we have documented evidence of fossil fuel producers who concluded that global warming was real AND they themselves took actions to protect them from at least the more immediate concerns AND took specific actions to deny the problem publicly and retard the development of alternatives that could have mitigated the problems while maintaining all of those beneifis you speak of.
As for CPR, none of that is an externality of any kind. They are a series of benefits and risks that are specific to the recipient. If my CPR on someone somehow caused a 3rd person on the other side of the street to suddenly return to natural circulation, THAT would be an externality. If some guy walking by suddenly had his sternum snap because of my actions, that too would be an externality. It is the consensus of the medical profession that broken ribs are an unavoidable risk to CPR. It's not as if I could have saved the victim without a rib break by performing 'solar CPR'. Note that if instead of standard CPR, I choose to kneel on his chest and bounce because it would make a funnier instagram, I COULD be sued for the rib damage.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:38PM
Liability starts in earnest in the '70s where we have documented evidence of fossil fuel producers who concluded that global warming was real AND they themselves took actions to protect them from at least the more immediate concerns AND took specific actions to deny the problem publicly and retard the development of alternatives that could have mitigated the problems while maintaining all of those beneifis you speak of.
We don't. It is remarkable how much deception there has been on this point. Research into climate change is not agreement on the narrative that climate change requires extraordinary intervention.
Here, we have some evidence that businesses like Exxon did research, came to the inconclusive opinion that there could be a significant harmful effect, but that there wasn't data to support that, and later on, made modest effort to promote thinking that was friendly to their point of view.
As for CPR, none of that is an externality of any kind.
CPR is not a trade so it isn't a perfect analogy. One person's actions affect another without their agreement. That is the core of what externality is.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:55PM
Considering that the oil companies spent money to mitigate the problem, it is reasonable to believe that they were satisfied that there was a problem.
As for CPR, it is an altruistic effort. The essence of an externality is that it is a cost of a desired economic activity that is passed off to others to pay.. Generally those others are unwilling and often unknowing as well.
The difficulty you're having with finding an apt analogy is that we don't generally protect people or corporations from having their externalities internalized.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday December 24 2016, @06:27AM
Insurance rates are already going up due to Global warming
Insurance rates would go up due to the Greys anally probing people, if insurance companies thought they could get away with it.