IPCC Report

[7Wannabe5]

so in 10 years petroleum products will only be used in marginal applications anyway.

Care to place a wager, Mr. Simon?

[Campitor]

if the last decade is any indication, the opposite will happen. brute used to be a communist. but who knows. past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Brute I'm with you on this one. Free markets are not perfect but they are the least harmful of all other systems. A free market will always win because people like to make stuff and people like to get compensated for making stuff. And others like to purchase and enjoy the surpluses of production. Individuals know what they want or need and act accordingly. That is basic human nature which is universal. This is what makes free markets work despite its flaws.

I don't think we will get off of oil anytime soon despite any advances in green energy. Green energy will circumvent oil like smart phones and digital cameras circumvented film. Oil companies don't want to be the next victims of creative destruction - they will do whatever it takes to keep their energy market share which is why we're seeing these surges in oil production - it keeps the price low. If oil companies weren't being pressed by green technology, the price of oil would be much higher. But they're feeling the heat hence the R&D dollars being spent on technologies that sequester the GHG from fossil fuel sources. Something which I find funny. This is like horse dealers of the last century researching how to stop horses from defecating and eating in order to compete against Henry Ford's automobile.

[tonyedgecombe]

The free market delivers some things. Cheap food, air travel, iPhones, etc. What it isn't so good at is health insurance, education, prisons, all of these have incentives that don't align between the business and society or consumers. All of them require regulation otherwise you end up with monopolies and distortions that look very similar to communism.

[chenda]

As far as I am aware the energy market is very far from being a free market of any description.

[daylen]

Capitalism and communism are not stable games in their pure forms. The only option is to have a continuous conversation that navigates between them. I do not think this is possible given what we know about human biology (along with the sheer size of humanity). It looks like this game we are playing is becoming increasing multi-polar(*) and heading towards fragmentation.

We are in a game of chess where the pieces are abandoning their teams to form tribes. Each tribe is signaling a different interpretation of the current rule set or attempting to rewrite the rule set entirely. Outrage is being rewarded with attention, and nearly everyone is too busy worrying about how they fit into the current system to care about how that system might change in the future.

As much as I desire humanity to just be one great big happy family, it looks like the only viable strategy left is to start preparing for the end game by developing scale-free production skills and strengthening relations in our immediate social network. Individuals are becoming increasingly vulnerable, it seems.

(*) Driven by fake and/or unimportant dimensions.

[Campitor]

@chenda - I agree. It's run by a cartel.

@daylen - I don't think it's that bad. We have the appearance of extreme tribalism because extremist are always the most vocal. And the internet has given vocal minorities a megaphone which is good unless they are spewing venom. I agree that Capitalism requires some checks and balances otherwise we get runaway externalities like GHG.

[daylen]

@campitor If the general population cannot distinguish extremists from moderates and the extremists start leading(*), then I do not see how people can navigate the problems that lie ahead without fragmentation. I could be wrong, but it seems that people are becoming increasingly confused and disoriented by our rapidly changing world.

(*) Seems likely to be the case given that extremists generate outrage which attracts attention. Politics is becoming more of a popularity contest.

[BRUTE]

Care to place a wager, Mr. Simon?

Simon won the wager.

here's brute's wager: DLj can pick any date at least 1 year from today, and if at that point climate change has ruined everything and humans haven't kept up via economic/technological progress, brute will buy DLj a medium-rare steak at Chicago Cut. 7Wannabe5 can come too.

[tonyedgecombe]

here's brute's wager: DLj can pick any date at least 1 year from today, and if at that point climate change has ruined everything and humans haven't kept up via economic/technological progress, brute will buy DLj a medium-rare steak at Chicago Cut. 7Wannabe5 can come too.

Doesn't that imply that we have done something about this problem? Whatever that economic or technological progress is we would have chosen to take that path rather than relying on doing nothing.

[BRUTE]

yes

[jacob]

I should mention another few issues with the [economic] IAM calculations that are easy to miss due to "standard assumptions" about life as we're used to it.

In all of human experience over the past 250 years, pollution has been seen as a reversible problem. This could very well be the foundation of the whole "lets wait and see [how bad it gets] before we act"-sentiment observed in consumer-voters as well as expert-technocrats. If you know that the problem doesn't show hysteresis then you can push it beyond the edge and if it's bad enough, you can always "pay to fix it insofar you have the monies"/"throw resources at it insofar you have them". An example would be cleaning up Love Canal, dealing with Los Angeles smog, restoring the damage from acid rain, restoring some level of green that's attractive to humans after removing a mountain top, and maybe even the ozone layer.

Nerds: The assumption of reversibility as a key assumption makes the problem linear and mathematically very easy. Basically, you now get to optimize and find optimal solutions. If it was nonlinear, not so much. When you can't reverse, mistakes become more costly because they're now permanent/not payable meaning that the price is infinite.

Double nerds: Economics is well capable of dealing with Knightian risk and reversible damage ... but climate change is a problem of Knightian uncertainty and irreversible damage.

In economics, paying future costs is often reduced to trying to set the proper discount rate---a one (1!) variable problem. What I want to know is whether such a discount rate only makes sense locally (my position) or whether one can really extrapolate and use the same rate "all the way out to children, grand children, and the next seven generations" so to speak, that is, globally in space-time(*). What I do know is that the market doesn't allow me to participate in past economic decisions. OTOH, scientifically I know that past decisions do influence the present and the future. For example, the climate we see today is due to what was economically known/tractable as per market efficiency some 40-50 years ago. But if I don't like the result, it's not like I can go 2 generations back in time and competitively outbid the dumbass choices of my parents and grandparents. It does me no good that I'm now richer (and economically more powerful) than my parents and grandparents who caused the problems I'm suffering because basically it's physically impossible to go back in time and outbid their preferences even as I know have more knowledge and financial power.

Basically, my position is that while I think the free market is the best at allocating resources insofar participants have about the same bidding power and face the same consequences ... I'm far from convinced that the free market is the optimal solution when I have 1000x more market-directing firepower than 90% of the rest of the living population while the unborn basically have no firepower at all beyond what their ancestors can afford/fail to afford.

(*) Going back to the equity problem again. It exists in space and in time (generations). For example, currently (in space), buying a fancy cup of coffee costs more than the survival of the poorest human being currently living. This is because the person buying the coffee has way more money than the poorest human being. Similarly (in time), the current generation can bid and buy stuff ... whereas future generations are temporally excluded from bidding and changing the price according to their preference. Also see "sell down the river".

[BRUTE]

what it comes down to for brute is that even with non-reversible, non-linear phenomena, there is still an opportunity cost to fixing them. plenty of tragedies in human life have these characteristics.

a human child only needs to run into a speeding car once for the non-reversible tragedy to strike. the cost is infinite in the sense that the human child can never be brought back. still, humans do not pay infinite costs to prevent this tragedy from happening. i.e. even a non-reversible event with infinite cost does not necessarily warrant paying X to prevent it, only if X < cost.

so it boils down to "does an individual think that future humans will be able to deal with the climate change damage". simplified, the 2 variables that go into it are human ingenuity + capital, and extent/cost of climate change damage.

brute would agree that both of these are difficult to model and predict, but that does not mean "ergo humanity must pay an infinite amount to prevent them". it just means that it is virtually impossible to determine exactly how much should be paid.

going from "it's hard to determine" to "humanity should pay the maximum (infinite) because it might be the worst case" is a Pascal's wager, which brute considers a fallacy.

[Jean]

I partialy agree with brute, but I find it antilibertarian to tolerate aggressions like cars that might run over kids or burning fossil fuel that change the atmospheric composition. Perpetrator of those action should be shot in a libertarian ideal world.

[tonyedgecombe]

@brute There are plenty of problems that are hard to predict but we accept are worth trying to avoid. We don't know if there will be a flu epidemic this winter but we still vaccinate the vulnerable. The only difference with climate change is the current generation will pay the cost of limiting it but future generations will benefit from that.

[BRUTE]

but presumably tonyedgecomb assumes the cost of vaccination is lower than its benefit. if the cost was higher, it would not be done.

@Jean
death penalty for potential aggression ("might run over") seems excessive to say the least. negative externalities should certainly be handled.

[Jean]

If I start shooting in your general direction, it is an aggression even if no bullet hits you.

[BRUTE]

but if Jean drives a car on a generally accepted roadway in parallel to brute's path of pedestrian travel, where's the aggression?

[Jean]

The atmosphere is partly your property. Unless i confine exaust gaz, I would be dammaging you property and commiting an aggression. Fossil fuels are key here, because taking this carbon out of the atmosphere was neccessary for humans to exists. Normal breathing is just cycling what is left and isn't an aggression (like drinking water and pissing around).

[7Wannabe5]

The Denisovans had mitochondria that were better able to function at lower oxygen levels. So, maybe the humans who still carry this potential will survive.