A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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jacob
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by jacob »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 3:24 pm
The (perennial) problem is how do you make ERE-level spending a status symbol?
By FIRE'ing in your 30s and showing how it's possible to live reasonably well. That's the selling point which I figured would be appealing to far more people than sacrificing to save the planet. Most people care more about FIRE than reducing their footprint, but FIRE'ing coincidentally (clever that, ha!) reduces the footprint. That's the beauty of it.

Obviously I had some marketing issues early on what with the lentil soup and the RV but I think I'm doing much better these days with the house, the DIY, and the garden. Others do the travel or van thing in a more attractive way than I cared to. The FIRE movement has had a significant impact in diverting resource transformations (spending) away from what they otherwise would have been---if nothing else then from people no longer spending 40 years of their life making widgets for WhoCares Inc. It's obviously not enough, but we've made enough of an inroad that the IPCC put in a couple of lines about voluntary consumer changes in the last report in 2014.

Add: In that regard, ERE serves more to drag the rest of the FIRE movement along while the great mass of people would be more likely to copy someone like MMM. In short, ERE inspires people who in turn inspires others, etc. Wheaton levels all the way down.

Riggerjack
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

I am not a civil engineer, but, instead of bailouts, why don’t we start building Roman-style aqueducts? You know, sustainable infrastructure? RJ?
You mean like NYC, only with more lead? Just how appealing do you find that idea?

My main point is that we have known that people moving themselves in a direction they want to go is easier than herding humans since "the pied piper" was published.

Unfortunately, it's just not as easy to come up with tempting ideas as it is to just blindly insist that others conform to one's values, as they currently stand. (See all of social media.)
in any case are you generally talking about this?
Sorta, though I have a hard time thinking positive thoughts towards the Espresso Gestapo. But yeah, look at what they did with a pretty low level virtue signal. They did it in a horrifying corporate way (hinted at in the video) that ground out all their virtue in exchange for market share, but compare today's coffee markets to how coffee farming operated under General Mills, and even with as bad as today's markets are (fair trade :evil: ) they are better than the commoditized versions of the 80's.

classical_Liberal
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by classical_Liberal »

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Last edited by classical_Liberal on Fri Feb 05, 2021 2:32 am, edited 2 times in total.

Hristo Botev
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Hristo Botev »

classical_Liberal wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 3:48 pm
If you go around touting frugality to your neighbors, then your kids complain to their kids about how they never get to go out for ice cream anymore, they have a certain opinion of you. If your kids tell their kids how much fun family ice cream making day is, then they have a different opinion.
You do read my journal! In a couple of weeks DS and DD went from whining about wanting to go to the ice cream shop to now being universally known in the neighborhood, their school, and their soccer academy for making (and selling, ha!) homemade ice cream and candy bars, respectively. DD alone has made over $70 selling candy bars, and she's currently trying to decide where to donate the money (her decision, not ours). Neighborhood kids are now coming over to the house just to help DS and DD make their respective treats.

Contrast that when, after a few (homemade) beers with buddies, I start raging against Amazon and Apple and the throw-away culture; my buddies just tend to ask me where my tinfoil hat is.

ETA: @CL, In the past week DW has had several of her former direct reports secretly express to her how impressive they think it is that she had the freedom to step away from management and a higher salary, in exchange for less stress and more time with family. These direct reports are mostly about 10-15 years younger than DW, and as a manager DW has always been pretty vocal about the importance of saving for retirement, taking advantage of your pre-kid/family earning years in your 20s to set yourself up later on, NOT living paycheck to paycheck, etc.; and so they all know that DW was able to make the decision she made because of spending decisions she's made.

Now, is that sufficient sufficient to stave off CC?
Last edited by Hristo Botev on Thu Oct 22, 2020 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

daylen
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by daylen »

classical_Liberal wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 3:48 pm
Also, we should try to make sure there aren't gaping, hypocritical holes in our lifestyle lived vs what is being proposed to others.
So you are saying Jacob shouldn't start an online ERE shop selling cheap merchandise with a cheesy logo? This would be a great facebook prank. :lol:
Last edited by daylen on Thu Oct 22, 2020 7:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I still don’t get how to account for transformations like being taken out for dinner. Is my spending $0, half the bill, or the $2 I would have spent on cabbage soup ingredients otherwise?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by daylen »

@7w5 Maybe there is some way to extend that tool to replicators (i.e. services people offer or labor based on skill/personality). This sounds like an interesting problem, so I might work/think on this later.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

@ Daylen,

Wait. Are you saying it's going to be a while before I can get my monogrammed custom ERE billfold? I understand sacrifices will have to be made, but let's not get crazy here. :lol: ;)

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by classical_Liberal »

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

Riggerjack wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 3:38 pm

Sorta, though I have a hard time thinking positive thoughts towards the Espresso Gestapo. But yeah, look at what they did with a pretty low level virtue signal. They did it in a horrifying corporate way (hinted at in the video) that ground out all their virtue in exchange for market share, but compare today's coffee markets to how coffee farming operated under General Mills, and even with as bad as today's markets are (fair trade :evil: ) they are better than the commoditized versions of the 80's.
i really don’t know how coffee markets work, but what žižek is pointing at there is at the impossibility to fix a broken system with “price included” fixes or whatever. of course he’s not a conservative, so his illustrated cartoon doesn’t apply to the original question of this thread either way.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

Oh, I got his point, and to a certain extent, I agree with him.

If that were the only trend I was working with, I anything I created would follow the pattern he is talking about. And I agree, that won't work. But it's a small part of a solution.

I'm afraid I am not conveying how far I am thinking of diverging from present day norms. This is my problem in communicating abstractions, I believe.

But that's OK, my plan was always show, not tell. Telling just doesn't seem to work very well, for me.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Hristo Botev »

jacob wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 8:58 am
In terms of dilemmas, the constraints are set by the (liberty, consumption, children)-trilemma (pick any two(*)) which follows from the IPAT formula. I'm not sure that these are the "best words", but overall...
Back to the population "problem"--perhaps culture is already solving this problem for us. From New York magazine (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10 ... trump.html), which I came to via Rod Dreher (naturally, https://www.theamericanconservative.com ... zimmerman/):

According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent.

I'm aware that identifying as LGBT doesn't necessarily mean no procreation, but I'd guess we can assume we'll see birthrates continuing to fall in the US, and it probably won't make much difference what the federal/state governments do to try and prop up those numbers.

Edit to ask: Does anyone know whether the various CC projections out there factor in the declining birthrates in the West? I'd imagine they do, but I don't know--and if they do, I wonder if any factor in that the declining birthrates may not be a linear decline, but a more exponential one.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Hristo Botev wrote:
Fri Oct 23, 2020 10:24 am
Edit to ask: Does anyone know whether the various CC projections out there factor in the declining birthrates in the West? I'd imagine they do, but I don't know--and if they do, I wonder if any factor in that the declining birthrates may not be a linear decline, but a more exponential one.
I'd imagine they are swamped by the effects of the poorer parts of the world moving out of poverty and immigration to countries with a low birth rate.

The interesting question is what happens in Africa. They are set to increase to 4 billion but will also be feeling the biggest effects from climate change. My guess is it will become quite difficult for them.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

re population, africa, etc: it’s hard to predict the future but nevertheless some interesting/important observations here

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2LyzBoHo5EI

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by jacob »

CC projections generally (IPCC) operate under a shared set of parametric trajectories for the future. This means these inputs (a time series) is taken as a given and various climate change outcomes are calculated accordingly. The purpose of doing it this way is to be able to say "if we go down X socioeconomic pathway, then climate changes like Y". We thus have a bunch of (X,Y) pairs. The reason it's done this way is two-fold. First, having climate change feed back makes the simulation much more complex. It is done and these are called Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) but the problem is that the parameters entering these models are not known because we don't know exactly how humanity will respond. The second reason is that climate change simulations are very computationally expensive. Thus if everybody is looking at the same [socioeconomic] input, it becomes possible to test the models against each other by comparing the output.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_So ... c_Pathways for the work-in-progress set to be published in 2021 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Represent ... on_Pathway for the set published in 2014.

Demographic models are generally ignorant (they ignore) external input. IOW, demographers think that things will just evolve as they have been. The keyword here is demographic transition. As people get richer/educated/industrialized they have fewer and later children because children become more of a liability than an asset. Basically quality over quantity. This is the general trend. Europe is ahead of the US in that regard and Japan is ahead of Europe. Basically, you'll get a society of old(er) people. E.g. median age in the US is 38 but IIRC it's 45+ in Italy and 48 in Japan. In contrast, many African nations have median ages under 20! They're basically full of children/teenagers.

This in turn creates some problems for governments who operate under the assumption of exponentially growing populations for e.g. paying pension liabilities and having a sufficient worker/retiree ratio to run society in the current fashion. Also sufficient number of teenagers to send off to war. This is why politicians will sometimes lament the declining birth rates. Ditto manufactures of toys, etc. Special interests ... There is of course always immigration to solve these problems. This is one of the reason that the US is younger than Europe. Immigration, however, only works to solve the "governments' problems" insofar integration happens as well.

In terms of not knowing the parameters, the only good example of what will happen in the West during the collapse is perhaps post-USSR in Russia in the 1990s. Here death rates (and emigration) actually increased to the magic 5%/year. Health care systems collapsed and infectious diseases became more important (sounds familiar?). Being generally depressed (job loss, etc.) people also started drinking/drugging themselves to death (also familiar).

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Hristo Botev »

jacob wrote:
Fri Oct 23, 2020 11:12 am
In terms of not knowing the parameters, the only good example of what will happen in the West during the collapse is perhaps post-USSR in Russia in the 1990s. Here death rates (and emigration) actually increased to the magic 5%/year. Health care systems collapsed and infectious diseases became more important (sounds familiar?). Being generally depressed (job loss, etc.) people also started drinking/drugging themselves to death (also familiar).
Perhaps this is an ugly and inconsiderate thing for me to say (it's admittedly ignorant), but this ↑ is pretty much the only thing that is giving me comfort in this whole CC discussion. I had the privilege of living in this world (sort of, post-communist Balkans country) in the late 90s, early 00s, and as I've said elsewhere on this forum before, my experience living in this village was pretty positive. Granted, I was an outsider in this village (and an American one at that!), and there's only so much insight a person can gain in 2 years living in a place where he doesn't have a really firm grasp of the language and lacks a lot of cultural competency, but there's a lot I preferred in this way of living as compared to how I live now in the US. Just as an example, I can get a tomato from a grocery store 12 months a year here, but in a second I'd give that up for the taste and crunch of the tomatoes I'd get in my village in May. I liked that what you ate and drank changed (drastically) by the season. I liked that "market day" was just once every other week, and the whole village came out for it. I liked that the movie theater was only open about once a month, and only during the warmer months--and the whole town would go out and watch whatever POS American movie the theater guy brought us. I liked that the whole town basically shut down (well, there wasn't much to shut down) whenever there was a wedding, or a funeral. I liked that the most common pastime was hiking up to the top of the "mountain" peak in the evenings after dinner. I liked that everyone just assumed they'd have to handle problems themselves, with nothing but their own ingenuity and tools, or those they could borrow from a neighbor.

Anyway, I know I'm SERIOUSLY romanticizing my 20-year-old experience, but when I read JMG et al. about the post-industrial/post-CC world, this is the image I have in my head, and it's not awful.

This of course assumes me and mine survive.

ETA: I also enjoyed all the drinking and smoking.

ETA ETA: I also liked that there were pretty drastic differences between one village and a neighboring one; to the extent that, by the end, even I could pretty much tell what village/town someone was from based on how they talked and what they wore. Contrast this to the US where regional differences are mostly a thing of the past--I mean, my kids are growing up in the Deep South and won't ever have even an inkling of a Southern accent. This kind of diversity is very much a tenant of Burkean/Kirkian conservativism.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Fri Oct 23, 2020 11:12 am
IOW, demographers think that things will just evolve as they have been. The keyword here is demographic transition. As people get richer/educated/industrialized they have fewer and later children because children become more of a liability than an asset. Basically quality over quantity. This is the general trend.
i have a hard time believing that you know this and actual demographers don’t 🤔

maybe you meant the general public/activists/something?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by daylen »

@Alphaville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

Just a heuristic but still useful/explanatory. Probably lost influence due to the gene-centered selection movement yet fits well into a multi-level selection paradigm. Most demographers aren't exactly trained in evolutionary game theory, I imagine.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by jacob »

@alphaville - I meant the field of demographics as a whole. While there would be a few considering CC or resource impacts on demographic evolution it is not a foundation of the field. Similar to how there are some economists looking at CC interactions while most are blissfully ignorant. Interdisciplinary work between CC and other fields really only started 10 years ago or so which is a very short time in academia. Otherwise the demographic models are rather self-referential and mostly involve counting people and registering death, birth, and migration rates. As mentioned in my previous post to HB, IAMs are complex. Professionals are rarely more informed about things outside their expertise than non-experts and that's not saying a lot.

FWIW so far this thread has been pleasantly free of the "Based on my largely uninformed opinion/some article I just googled/read, I believe ..."-internet debate style, so lets please stay away from lazy incredulity-type arguments. Find me a textbook that confirms that CC is widely incorporated in the population models if you want to stand on your claim. Otherwise, just presume I know what I'm talking about. I have spent a lot of time on this :geek:

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

r/K selection theory is archaic and it is both insulting and wrong to apply it to humans. Even if it wasn’t archaic, it would clearly place the entire human species waaaaay over on the side of K strategists. I mean, one of the reasons human population didn’t explode until modernity is that relatively huge size of every human brain led to huge risk of death in childbirth. And there has absolutely not been enough evolutionary scale time since, for instance, the entire court fretting about whether Queen Victoria would survive her first lying in to change this by an iota. Obviously, all the women in the U.S. giving birth during the Baby Boom were also quite affluent. Modern human females, no matter their class or continent, are making intelligent individual decisions in the moment based on their own best judgment of the opportunities and technologies available to them.
Last edited by 7Wannabe5 on Fri Oct 23, 2020 1:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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