A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

[slsdly]

The trouble with the shoe analogy is that the people who bought the shoes already wanted them. Tom's provided them a solution they felt provided them additional value for the money -- social status via virtue signaling. Insofar as we can keep consumption to its current degree, yes, we can maybe get creative and produce products from 100% recycled parts, promise to plant trees, or buy carbon offsets.

This is exactly how we solved past environmental issues. The old refrigerants created holes in the ozone layer. Okay, let's create an equivalent product without the issue, and phase out the old ones. The critical part of the success is that no one had to give up refrigerators.

On the other hand, if you believe consumption is the problem, and it must be reduced, then it gets more tricky. We cannot simply substitute for an equivalent but more ethical product. We would need to convince people that they don't need the product in the first place. There are huge cultural pressures preventing that attitude from being adopted. Harnessing the power corporations wield may be difficult since such a shift would probably hurt the bottom line.

Maybe technology can solve all problems given sufficient time and resources. I think we've run out of time for that to happen. A cultural revolution is a necessary ingredient, and it needs to happen now. Greta toured the world trying. People gladly marched in the streets. And then they went back to living as they always have. Flight shame didn't catch on -- okay maybe a little bit in parts of Europe, but again, they could substitute with trains and still get what they wanted.

[7Wannabe5]

@MI:

There have, of course, been many instances where second order effects of well-meant top down policies have caused worse problems. This also happens when we as individuals make decisions about our own lives. I am currently reading a great book (recommended here) entitled “Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work” by the Heath brothers. One tactic they recommend for situations where you want debate, but not endless entrenched dissension is to ask all parties to answer the question “ What would need to be true for you to change your take on this issue/decision?” I have long been in the habit of reading books with opposing takes on issues, and lately I am veering back just a bit towards rational optimist from rational pessimist. For instance, I don’t think any long term prediction about human population and average/median standard of living/technology described as being like unto some previous historical era is likely to be accurate. As the Heath brothers note, experts are fantastic at providing accurate baseline trend information in their fields , but terrible at making predictions, and amateurs are even worse.


This article I recently happened upon does a good job of linking up how/why your desire for a beautiful wife has anything to do with climate change:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/1 ... trump.html

There is also an obvious generation gap, as described in article on young Republicans’ take on the issue. In my purple state, it would be almost impossible for me to find a man in my age range to date whose politics were as progressive and/or green as those of my younger sisters/kids. I have dated men in their 60s who voted for Hilary but still don’t believe in climate change. I think there are also a lot of African and Middle-Eastern American men who would vote more conservative for the same reason as the Hispanic men, if it wasn’t so clearly against their self-interest for other reasons. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but obvious point for OP question would be if you want to sell “green” to conservatives, you should maybe try to make it seem more macho. Unfortunately, there is a lot of macho association with brown tech, because “powerful”,”muscular”, “dirty” , so might be hard to overcome. In fact, one of the reasons for my recent move away from low-tech is that in reality it almost always eventually defaults to brown-tech.

[Hristo Botev]

Oh man, I'm getting caught up on the conversation that happened overnight, and a few things:

First, @CL, certainly no need to apologize to me, and apologies to you as I know some of my posts can come off as defensive and thin-skinned (b/c, well, I tend to be thin-skinned sometimes--and that's my problem, certainly not yours.).

Second (and third, and fourth),

tl;dr I always try to advocate ideas and ideals I'm personally undertaking in the sense of progress, not perfection. Using personal influence to try to advocate change can backfire. This is probably why the stoics advocated for slowly but steadily increasing circle of control, also integrity as a critical part of that process.

This is a pretty spot on encapsulation of Burkean conservatism: it's not that conservatives are anti-progress, it's that they recognize that real, authentic, and effective progress only happens when that progress happens naturally (or, dare I say: organically). That is, the progress must be initiated from the bottom-up; and the utopian, carte blanche, top-down progressive initiatives towards perfection will ALWAYS fail. This is indeed my worldview.

BUT, the problem with my worldview in the context of CC is that, from what I'm understanding from everything that's been said here, if we are going to address CC in a way that won't require (or result in) a drastic reduction in the global population, a Burkean, bottom-up, gradual, "organic" policy solution just ain't going to cut it--the policy solution HAS to be top-down and pretty damn drastic, and top-down at a global level. And I share the sentiment expressed here by a few others that this latter solution scares me to my core.

At the risk of over-simplifying all of the market/economics discussion here (which, admittedly, I don't really "grok" at all)--and assuming there will be no magic, technological fix that will allow us all to continue consuming resources at levels consistent with our collective human nature--my boiled-down takeaway from the discussion here over the past few days is that collective humanity has a choice between: (a) a Brave New World-type World State, which will be able to effectively "solve" the CC problem; or (b) national and tribal warfare for the next 100-200 years over limited resources (with perhaps some "token" national-level policy attempts to address CC), until the world population gets to be some fraction of what it is now and is no longer environmentally unsustainable, no matter the individual consumption levels.

If this is a false dilemma, I'm all ears. But given these two choices, I'll take (b) every time.

P.S., as I see 7W5 posted while I was writing this,

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but obvious point for OP question would be if you want to sell “green” to conservatives, you should maybe try to make it seem more macho. Unfortunately, there is a lot of macho association with brown tech, because “powerful”,”muscular”, “dirty” , so might be hard to overcome. In fact, one of the reasons for my recent move away from low-tech is that in reality it almost always eventually defaults to brown-tech.

I don't quite get the distinctions you're making between low-tech and brown-tech, and the correlation with "green"; but my own anecdotal experience is that my group of 35-45 year-old conservative friends--with their pickup trucks, and their power tools, and their guns--are significantly "greener" (from an actual carbon footprint standpoint) than my group of liberal/progressive friends in the same age range. Certainly the liberal group of friends are much more likely to do the virtue signaling stuff like driving Teslas, or posting yard signs about the composting service they use, or buying whatever green-chic product is currently in vogue (until the next one comes along and they throw the old one in the trash). BUT, the group of conservative folks just consume significantly less and "do" significantly more than the liberal/progressive folks (again, I'm just talking about my own two distinct groups of friends, who I've regularly commented on on my own journal).

I don't have to sell "green" to my own conservative friends, because if we view "green" as somewhat equivalent to the Renaissance man ideal, they get it intuitively. These are guys who, to paraphrase Jacob, just instinctively understand that spending money is a failure to solve a problem by smarter means. They would be ashamed to have neighbors see a pile of Amazon boxes stacked up on their front porch; and a lot of that has to do with their Catholic understanding of gluttony. Yes, they do their own virtue signaling (and definitely not-green) stuff by doing things like driving an F-250 to drop their kids off at school; but, they also think it's absurd to hop on a plane for a European vacation, or take a week-long Disney cruise to Alaska--they'd rather just spend a week at the lake a couple hours away.

[jacob]

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...

(*) Of course we're not picking any two at 100% with the third being 0%. In practice, we'll squabble over the exact ratio. Suffice to say, I think most disagreements boil down to having a different desire for the ratios. The other thing is that by not making the choice (which we clearly haven't) the ultimate ceiling will get exponentially (not just linearly) lower due to the overshot effect. This means that the "percentages" don't add to 200% ... rather they add to a number that is currently ratcheting downwards year by year. Thus ultimately, we might only be able to pick one out of the three.

1) If you want the ability to have as many children as you want AND for you and them (and their children and so on) to have a decent level of consumption (standard of living), you have to surrender some or increasingly many of your freedoms. This is essentially the choice of the "elites". Note how it maximizes business income by not limiting the number of consumers nor how much these consumers can buy.

2) If you want the ability to have as many children you want AND your liberty, you'll have to accept that your standard of living will be decreasing and that the living standard of your children and their children will get lower and lower. In practice this means accepting poverty at an increasing scale which some day or perhaps already will include your children. This also means increasing levels of refuges and war once people start being unable to afford food. I associate this position with the "right". There's more tolerance for poverty in that it's believed to be an individual problem/responsibility as long as it's happening to "the other". There's also more willingness to fight or build fences.

3) If you want to ability to live free AND maintain present standards of living, you have to reduce population like yesterday (ideally starting 2 generations ago). China tried this but eventually realized just how difficult this is to manage in practice. This is also the position of the "left" who are more used to money appearing out of nowhere. The beauty here is that it avoids conflict and future suffering. The bad this is that it will suffocate the current economy during the transition. This is why the elites don't like it and also why China ultimately gave up.

Of course, this is ultimately complicated by the fact that everybody (many) is both still/mostly free to make their own choice (if you're globally poor, the choices that matter are largely made for you) and the fact that your choice impacts my consequences, etc. The failure to agree on a global scale is largely why we've wasted 40 years on taking action and why we're now 35 years into the overshot. For example, the conflict between (3) and (1+2) complete illustrates why "North" and "South" blame population and consumption respectively and why they each want the other side to take the hit.

[Hristo Botev]

At the risk of over-simplification, I choose (2).

2 things:

First, I think you've just outlined what would be a really effective survey question to identify political leanings.

Second, realistically, choices (1) and (3) can only happen with top-down implementation/enforcement (i.e., this was my World State option (a)), no? As in, options (1) and (3) both run contrary to human nature, and thus can only happen by force.

[7Wannabe5]

@Hristo:

I think we are in more agreement than I managed to communicate. My social circle is also divided liberal/conservative, but one difference might be that majority of my liberal friends are more artsy/bohemian/self-employed/student/female/young than “suburban technocrat”, so my more conservative friends make more money, spend more money, and save more money on average. So, for instance, frugal liberal bohemian female solution to “something broke” might be duct tape, find new one in alley behind studio, or recycle into art-> cost = zero to change found under sofa cushion, whereas frugal older conservative male (of any ethnic heritage) solution to “something broke” would be more like get out the tool box, yell too much (IMO), drive truck to Harbor Freight ($2 gas), dig around in glove box for coupon, yell too much again (IMHO), spend .27 on item needed for repair, and $27.99 on some other tool, forget to use coupon for free measuring tape, yell too much, by now it is time for lunch, grumbles “make me a sandwich”, fixes the thing that is broken, whew...

What I am proposing is a solution that would be like unto a morph of the frugal Bohemian solution, the frugal Conservative solution, and the frugal tech Nerd who knows how to 3D print that .27 item needed for repair. IOW, no disrespect intended, I think you are missing at least 2/3 of the qualities of Renaissance lifestyle with just the frugal, rugged, Conservative solution, although it obviously is an improvement over “click to order new one delivered from Amazon. Donate 1$ to rainforest charity.”

[7Wannabe5]

@jacob:

Neat description. Obviously, I choose 2/3. All favors of freedom and just 2 kids. Since my sisters on average are more left leaning, we only had 5 kids between the 4 of us total, and my expectation is only 1.5 grandchildren.

@Hristo:

It’s not against human nature to have fewer children if you let the humans take care of pets or gardens or FITB. Also past some number, more autonomy starts seeming like real fair deal.

[Hristo Botev]

What I am proposing is a solution that would be like unto a morph of the frugal Bohemian solution, the frugal Conservative solution, and the frugal tech Nerd who knows how to 3D print that .27 item needed for repair. IOW, no disrespect intended, I think you are missing at least 2/3 of the qualities of Renaissance lifestyle with just the frugal, rugged, Conservative solution, although it obviously is an improvement over “click to order new one delivered from Amazon. Donate 1$ to rainforest charity.”

This is absolutely brilliant; and "fair enough," as my annoying tween cousin likes to say.

It's funny that, for me, it's my conservative friends that are the artists and bohemian types (and small biz owners), whereas my liberal/progressive friends are the stereotypical (though I'm sure they'd balk at this characterization) Fortune 500 corporate wage-slaves who have no choice from a job security standpoint but to buy in to and signal their adoption of the progressive (social and economic) agenda (or, just keep their head down and their mouth shut).

So, the trend I see between our respective groups of friends is that the (partial) solution may lie in just really aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws (combined with other anti-big-biz policies), to knock down the oversized influence of large corporations in the US, with its obvious inclination towards pushing for MORE consumption and MORE waste.

Now there's a Burkean/Kirkian conservative CC policy I can totally get behind (and one that the libertarian wing would absolutely hate).

It’s not against human nature to have fewer children if you let the humans take care of pets or gardens or FITB. Also past some number, more autonomy starts seeming like real fair deal.

Can you explain what you mean by the humans taking care of pets, etc.; I don't follow.

On the number of kids thing (and perhaps this is what you're talking about), I agree that under the right economic conditions human nature will dictate fewer kids (i.e., 1-2 vs. 3+) without China-style top-down "comply or else" enforcement. Indeed, I think most of the developed world is currently living in those economic conditions, which is why (or part of why) we see declining birthrates, even in the U.S. I certainly saw this when I was teaching in a poor village in the Balkan mountains, where it was pretty rare for me to have students with siblings. But, with Jacob saying we're 2 generations late in managing birthrates, I interpreted that as meaning it's too late now to allow market forces to dictate how many kids folks choose to have; at this point we have to have top-down policies restricting child births in order to get to sustainable population levels (i.e., China). And that is against human nature, and therefore can only be implemented by authority figures with guns.

[slsdly]

I'm not necessarily advocating for this policy change. But let's be clear, many governments encourage the populace to have children. Before guns in people's faces, one could easily start there. My property taxes that I pay indirectly through rent, as a childless person, go towards funding schools in my community. Income tax breaks and/or refunds are offered to parents with children. Subsidized and/or public daycare for very young children. If it was more difficult to afford a child, and the government instead just gave away all legal forms of birth control for free, well, I'm pretty sure there will be less children... just by necessity. Free (and accessible, even by the poor) birth control is key to that.

[jacob]

We're two generations late in terms of using reduced birth rates to prevent 3C because all the girls who will grow up to become women and maybe only have 0-2 children have already been born while the present population is large enough to commit the world to 3C. We're not too late in using that method to reduce the amount of people suffering in that 3C world (which will happen 30-40 years from now) or take some of the pressure/speed away from going to 4C and beyond. Playing around with demographic transition tools, the only way to reduce population at the present point is substantially higher death rates because the young population is already too large.

It's my understanding that the biggest impact would be boosting female literacy/education. There's a strong statistical correlation between how educated a woman is and how many children she will have. "Human nature" thus changes, at least statistically, depending on the amount of education. However, while things are moving in this direction, they're not moving fast enough for this to be a complete solution.

[Hristo Botev]

Well, without getting into an argument about whether "human nature" is or is not mutable, certainly there's all sorts of ways you can affect human behavior, as it concerns procreation and everything else. My concern is that, short of a true World State dictate restricting childbirth, there's nothing to stop Country/Tribe 1, in the face of coming warfare over limited resources, from actually encouraging procreation (as many countries try and do now), for no other reason than for a numbers advantage with respect to Country/Tribe 2. I.e., to fall back on my crutch of dystopian literature, Orwell's 1984 world of perpetual war between continental superstates won't save us from climate change, only Huxley's global World State can save us, if the goal is to stop CC.

ETA: To get a bit more homespun in my analogy, in a prolonged war over limited resources, the Hatfields will have every incentive to try and out-procreate the McCoys.

[Mister Imperceptible]

@7
I know we’ve sparred but the paradox has been that the higher education levels for women required to achieve lower birth rates require a high-consumption corporatized globalist Western standard of living. Women being in the workplace makes them able to achieve independence from men and hence the widening gap in voting preferences. Once again a case of the power process. If living standards were lowered and the world’s economy de-globalized/localized I would expect more women to return to traditional roles and a reversal of those trends.

Of course my point was never that women should be held down. It is that even at age 33, and not being “globally poor” I have never felt I have had a choice. The high student debt burden, and the exorbitant costs of living in cities where opportunities are, have meant that the only thing that has mattered has been “get money.” The only choice was made at age 17 (when I didn’t know anything and parents and society put a lot of pressure on me to make a decision) when I applied for college and everything else has been necessity.

When Jerome Powell and the IMF do their bailout-and-loan-to-own thing, it is the macro equivalent of rolling coal. Of course I have never voted, and am not registered to vote, because I refuse to be complicit in my own domination. It is obvious that it had to be Putin that told the truth about Thunberg’s speech, because unlike the other politicians, it is not required of him to hypocritically virtue-signal to maintain his position in power.

[7Wannabe5]

@Hristo:

The bottom up solution would be to just stop buying stuff from mega-corporations.

The funny thing about the suburbs is that they were invented with the well meant intention of bringing the best of city and country living together for people with modest incomes, but within a generation or two they became more like worst case scenario mix, both in terms of quality of life and black hole energy suck.

Even though the U.S. has relatively low population density, our overall CO2 emissions per square mile would have to be cut to 1/4 current levels to effect climate change trajectory. Ergo, roughly equivalent to $7500/capita vs $30,000/capita spending give or take for fossil fuel intensity of spending.

So, does it make sense on national, regional or household level to burn more fossil fuels now in attempt to lower fossil fuel intensity later? I think the answer is still “Yes”, but the question is in what ratio and manner.

The Heath brothers noted that when business executives made decisions during a recession those whose plans proved to be most successful coming out of the recession were those who simultaneously cautiously retrenched and invested forward in balanced measure. Analogy might be that saving $40/month by getting rid of cable is not as good a plan as saving $30/month by getting rid of cable and buying monthly regional theater tickets.

Mostly I’m tired of reading some books that say it’s all about the energy/sink reserves and other books that say it’s all about innovation. The best plan would encourage thrift and innovation, even if encouraging innovation is relatively expensive per unit in the moment.

[Mister Imperceptible]

Mostly I’m tired of reading some books that say it’s all about the energy/sink reserves and other books that say it’s all about innovation. The best plan would encourage thrift and innovation, even if encouraging innovation is relatively expensive per unit in the moment.

So maybe bailing out Carnival and Boeing after they issued debt to buy their own stock was the worst possible idea? And maybe ripping the middle class people trying to keep their heads above water about their carbon footprint is a far distant second to how the technocracy is allocating the overwhelming lion’s share of society’s resources?

(Not targeted at you 7, just snark in general)

[fiby41]

There’s well over a billion people in China and India

Another way to visualize that is a circle drawn on a globe with both countries inside it actually also has more people living inside the circle than outside of it.
I don't think wanting an indoor toilet so that your family doesn't have to walk 200 m to the village's common outhouse everytime they want to drop a turd is an unworthy goal to have or quite fits the definition of wanting to be rich and prosperous. For comparison, India has a lower toilets per capita than what the excavators estimate for the Indus Valley Civilization, and the IVC already had tiled and tilted flooring for drainage and underground sewage, so we have a lot of catching up to do.

I found this interesting

[7Wannabe5]

@MI:

The phrase “job creator” makes me puke a little bit in my mouth every time I hear, even though I have been a nominal employer myself.

That said, no excuse for not engaging in bottom up innovation ourselves.

[jacob]

FWIW, my original calculation of my target spending was based on the global footprint (based on Wackernagel's work which shortly thereafter become that Global Footprint Network) in 2001 insofar spending was distributed equitably and sustainably among all humans, that is, how much could each person spend so as not to make someone else living either presently or in the future have less? The answer back then was $6000/year/capita. I reran the calculation in 2018 as inflation, footprint (remaining ecological and resource reserves), and population had all changed and the answer was $6750/year/capita.

Figuring out how to live well on that eventually become ERE. The ERE solution was intended to fit both the moral issue of what would happen if the world didn't act (you get to retire extremely early with future generations taking most of the damage) and what would happen if the world did act (you would be ahead of the curve and not experience any sacrifices or change in lifestyle as everybody got to work including yourself on avoiding the damage).

PS: Note that having a few extra children to "boost" the family allowance is entirely within the rules of this calculation if and only if the kids (and their kids and so on) stay under that ceiling for all future generations. This is similar to the idea of dividing up the farm land to the sons. If you have more than one son and one daughter (which goes to someone else's son's land), the lots will eventually get quite small. Historically this was solved by having the younger sons join the military and die [earlier]. Obviously this model covers gender equality without loss of generality. Now the current system is not set up to respect existing plot size. Instead people get to compete for resources. So much of this would just be moral squabbling ... of the kind with actual consequences though.

[7Wannabe5]

@fiby41:

I almost bought a cabin with an outhouse. Of course, attempting to keep your housing costs down to less than $170/month in the U.S. is probably pretty much like living in India, except you have to search a whole lot harder to even find a cabin with an outhouse that hasn’t been condemned by the Power Elite.

IOW, it’s basically illegal to attempt to live at that level in the U.S.

[Mister Imperceptible]

Dr. Fisker, that has always been so admirable. It is a sink or swim world but maybe we just need to realize how hard it is for people playing against a stacked deck. But if everything boils down to entropy it’s going to be painful no matter what.

[Mister Imperceptible]

@7

Kinda like when the assistant manager at the Cracker Barrel “evicted” me from the parking lot behind his store where I parked my RV.

“Dude you can’t just live here!”