So, is there any convincing reason to think that any emissions targets will be met?
Does anyone buy the line in
the article about India? Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China.
Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change?
> Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change?
No. The numbers have been crunched. Averting climate change is much cheaper than dealing with the effects.
Even if that wasn't the case, you don't just deal with the effects and then get on with civilisation. You still have the effects, and you're still faced with the same problems in the future.
In case that didn't persuade on an emotional level, here's an analogy for that last point: a doctor points out to you that you're putting on weight at a dangerous rate. Sure, you could manage it by buying bigger clothes and taking medication for blood pressure and cholesterol, but if you're still overeating (and accelerating the rate at which you're gaining weight) then you haven't solved the problem. You have all the inconvenience and expense of dealing with the effects, and the problem is getting worse.
There is no reason to think they will be met, on current trends -- global output is still increasing, and new "green" energy seems to just come on top of fossil fuel energy, not replacing it.
But it makes no sense to spend money on the effects while the rate at which they're getting worse is still increasing. Like starting to repaint the house while the fire is still blazing.
We just need to do a lot more, keeping fossil fuel in the ground forever will always be more effective than any measures to live with the consequences.
even if we miss a target, more emissions beyond that target still make things much worse. it's not like we can just declare bankruptcy or something.
ultimately we have to reduce emissions as much as possible while preparing for their impact -- and I am not an expert, but I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.
> I suspect reducing emissions is cheaper in the long run than dealing with the effects.
I'm not entirely sure. People seem to be convinced that climate change will destroy all civilization, but in the distant past the earth has flourished with significantly higher temperatures than what we have today. Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.
And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.
It's not just higher temperatures. Ocean acidification is a major issue as well, and that threatens to completely upend the entire ocean ecosystem. Drinkable water will be reduced. Less farmland will be viable. Glaciers melting threaten to disrupt ocean currents which would completely change our weather patterns, and not likely to be for the better.
>And we can be certain that there will be a new equilibrium, otherwise life wouldn't have lasted for hundreds of millions of years.
Basically every time something this major changes, the dominant species does too. We're smarter than previous dominant species, but since 'not having to deal with all of this bullshit' is far smarter than 'scrambling to come up with solutions that may or may not work and are unlikely to be cost effective even if they do', maybe not as smart as we think.
The climate has never before changed as quickly as it is changing today. It seems likely to me that major ecosystems will collapse completely because they can't adapt quickly enough. It is doubtful whether our technological civilization will survive the intense struggle for food and water that is too come. Look what a measly million Syrian refugees did to the European political landscape. Climate change will likely lead to a hundred times more refugees.
> Once our climate reaches a new equilibrium, humanity will adjust and everything will probably be OK.
Whatever remains of humanity will adjust and live the medieval or pre-medieval lives for the next many thousands of years.
The most fragile component of the climate change issue is human technological civilization. Once it breaks, it's game over. Most of us and most of our families won't make it. Current level of technology is maintained through a complex global supply chain involving millions of people. When that breaks, humanity will regress. Devices will die, there won't be a way to repair them. Survivors will regress maybe to early industrial era for a while, but since all easily accessible dense energy sources have already been used up, this won't last and the remnants of humanity will regress further, and stay there for God knows how long.
It's not a fate I'd wish on worst enemies.
As for how this collapse would happen? All the climate change-related "small" issues increasingly clogging our economy. More expensive food, more expensive water, less arable land, less habitable land, unprecedented migration. Eventually, there will be war. Or the global economy halts, and then there will be war.
All but one major extinction event in the past was because of global warming. What you are missing is that during those times , the temperature change was over a much longer period of time than now. What we are doing is unprecedented and there is little reason to believe anything will flourish.
But not all instances of global warming caused mass extinction events. I think that there is a correlation here rather than a causation. In fact, looking at historical charts the earth's temperature undergoes a relatively significant change every few 100k years at least. So extinction events are only a tiny minority of those events, around 5/5000
i think the idea of reducing emissions is to reach a new equilibrium as quickly as possible, and one as close as possible to our current climate which we know is pretty good.
climate change is likely not going to destroy all civilization (notwithstanding sensationalistic New York Magazine article) but adding decades or centuries of "adjustment" -- droughts, floods, crop failures, less predictable extreme weather, displacement of people in coastal regions -- is likely to be very expensive.
hard to imagine that all this cost over several generations is outweighed by oil and coal being somewhat cheaper than renewables/nuclear.
The issue is not that we all face a catastrophic cataclysm but that climate change makes the earth significantly less amenable to us. Cropland destruction, lack of drinking water and relocation of population centers due to changing coastlines are extremely expensive and preventing that would be advantageous. The earth will be just fine without us.
Regarding China: "It’s the world’s biggest burner of coal, but it’s also the biggest global investor in renewables."
Keep in mind that China is the world's factory and a lot of services (IT etc.) are performed in India, so they are not just national emissions but emissions that we have offshored.
As long as GDP is related to emissions and globally advanced countries engage in zero sum competition, exploiting others by pressing their historical power advantage, there is a very strong incentive for China, India and the rest of the developing to catch up by any means necessary.
What's wrong with the line about India? It's absolutely correct - per capita emissions from India are very small.
> Surely they will become an emitter at least as significant as China.
Looking at a country's total emissions makes no sense because the population needs to be taken into account. India will eventually have the largest total emissions, which is fine because per capita is really low.
What Earth does care about, is when you decide that's a good idea to have on average more than 4 children per couple over the last 2 generations in India [1] instead of only 2 or even less children per couple like in USA or the EU [2].
Every country has a set of natural resources at its disposal. It should manage and cherish those resources and not overtax them. If a country decides it's a good idea to perpetually grow their population when all they have are the same set of natural resources available, then well, the onus is on them to figure out how to do it without destroying everything.
You're making my point. The US went through the same process, with the same birth rate interrupted only by the great depression until two generations ago.
There aren't countries, there are humans responding to the same conditions similarly. Economic development will slow their reproductive rate, like clockwork.
If you point to a family in the 60s in the US and a family in India today and find only one of them irresponsible, your thinking is flawed.
I assume you're following through with your convictions and will remain child free?
> I assume you're following through with your convictions and will remain child free?
No, I will remain with my child at replacement rate (a little below actually), like my parents and my grandparents did (and all parents and grandparents on average here), and I expect them to be entitled to a lot more resources than someone who lives in a country where (on average) their parents, grandparents and themselves didn't follow the same principle.
As a fact, India's CO2 emissions per unit area are almost the same as EU. We are using the same share of ecological resources (assuming roughly they are equivalent on average per area), so there is nothing to give or to take from both sides.
P.S.: A family in USA in the 60's, 1st: didn't had any idea that there was such thing as a catastrophic global warming incoming, 2nd: had a 4x smaller population density than India has today. But sure, go ahead and keep pretending that Earth's resources magically increase anytime someone decides to have a new child, so that you can tell yourself we are all entitles to the same amount of resources, no matter the size of our immediate family.
I have no ideological agenda other than not engaging in casual racism to construct a boogeyman to point at to absolve myself of the substantial impact I've made to the climate.
It's not your racism that has you stating that someone in a country with a very good track record when it comes to CO2 emissions (and a number of other environmental aspects) should stop having children, so that someone in a overly populated country, with an appalling record when it comes to all kinds of pollution can have even more children?
If it's not racism from your part that makes you ask for that, than you should clarify what it is. But one thing is for certain, it's not environmentalism for sure.
I'm not telling you not to have children, but it does make you a hypocrite.
I'm accusing you of casual racism for drawing a false distinction around the behavior of Indians. They are doing what everyone else has done in the same circumstance. Just because we have gotten our growth spurt and dirty economic development out the way doesn't entitle us to waggle our finger at those that took longer.
It's on the first world to fix things first. The wealthiest should have the lowest per capita emissions, not the highest. Shouting at the third world for their high population count isn't environmentalism, it won't work, and it doesn't give you the moral high ground.
> They are doing what everyone else has done in the same circumstance.
We already established those aren't the same circumstances at all:
- 1st: we didn't have even 1/4 of the Indian population density when we were having the same birthrates.
- 2nd: When global warming became clear and urgent action was needed, we started reducing our emissions while India during that time already increased them by 400%, and is going to increase them by another 100% in the next decade.
It's not by keep repeating the same lie that you are going to make it a reality.
We didn't establish anything. You grasped at the density straw in order to intellectually justify your prejudice.
The poor in India should increase their emissions, because otherwise they'll die. Life expectancy has risen from 40 to 68 years since the 60s. Would you halve your life expectancy to fix global warming? I don't think so.
In any case, the births have already happened, and India is now barely above replacement rates, which you've conveniently overlooked. You want them to die because of the choices their parents made.
If you excuse me, I'm going to go take a shower. I honestly can't believe I'm having this conversation on HN.
You crossed badly into flamewar in this thread, which breaks the site guidelines regardless of how right you are or feel. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do that on HN again; it's strictly destructive here, and someone else behaving badly is no justification.
I agree. The trouble is that we don't see everything that gets posted here; there's too much. So sometimes when there's a repeated pattern of abuse, it takes longer than we would like to notice it. Users can help by flagging comments (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html for how) and by emailing hn@ycombinator.com about egregious cases.
Ah, I specifically picked a comment that had been killed by repeated flagging. I assumed that there'd be a human reviewing by that stage.
I've been under the impression for a while that it takes quite a bit more to be banned these days than five years ago, but that might just be nostalgia.
Anyway, I know you're volunteers and it's not really appropriate for me to be complaining about the dress code after fighting in your bar. I'm sorry for causing trouble.
> The poor in India should increase their emissions, because otherwise they'll die. Life expectancy has risen from 40 to 68 years since the 60s.
So, you are saying that CO2 emissions are actually good for the population and the way forward is to actually increase them even more. Interesting turn of events from an environmentalist.
> You want them to die because of the choices their parents made.
Funny thing to say, since you want the West to pay for the choices our grandfathers made and descend into deprivation, so that the rest of the world can go on polluting even more.
Here is the thing, people with your discourse aren't interested in saving the planet but into forcing your ideological agenda - which is got nothing to do with environmentalism but with your personal concepts of morality - upon the rest of us under the threat of environmental catastrophe. And the worst part of it? It does nothing to tackle climate change.
P.S.: > If you excuse me, I'm going to go take a shower. I honestly can't believe I'm having this conversation on HN.
Go easy on that shower, it's a big toll on the environment and, after all, you just spent the last 24h telling us all how those resources actually should belong to be used by people in India and not selfishly by me or by you.
> Earth doesn't care about "emission per capita" though, it just cares about the total sum of emissions...
True. How about reducing the extremely high per-capita emissions of developed countries? That will result in a huge drop in the total sum of emissions.
I was referring to the article's claim that because India is "emerging as a leader in renewable energy" we can expect it to contribute significantly less to climate change.
Isn't our money better spent preparing for the inevitable effects of climate change?