If you are proposing purely voluntary individual action, then no, that is not a solution to global climate change. If you’re proposing something else, then please clarify.
Is it this thread that differentiated between mitigation and solution? Not sure. But I don’t claim there is any “solution,” only adaptation to the reality we’ve set in motion.
I maintain that the solution to most of our present problems, other than those such as climate shift - for which we’re pretty much just along for the ride, now - lies in substantial reduction in consumption, and that the only workable way to reduce consumption is with individual education and choice.
Don’t in any way think that breezy sentence is meant to conceal the scope of the issues involved. It would take the other 124,000 words to begin the dialogue.
Well, in the example presented of the big change after the sewage and clean water pipes were put in place the sellers of water in the streets lost customers. What happened? It turns out that people that preferred the old local well water next to the Thames usually contracted cholera.
Consumers then did prefer the tap water coming from higher locations.
Me neither, in the past I have clarified many times that it is with regulations and big efforts by government and industry that the main part of the change will come and it will affect the consumption of many.
As I pointed in other threads, indeed individual action is important, as it helps efforts like the development of batteries to deal with the problems of solar power not being available all the time.
Well to do customers are helping in the efforts of industrialists that do know that there is a problem. But individual action with no regulation has a big flaw, it is really inefficient, for example when acid rain was noticed to be a problem it was found that adding a catalytic converter can limit the emissions of the substances related to acid rain from being dumped in the atmosphere. IIRC many cases of fraud and inefficient converters were a problem, but once government regulation in 1975 and industry then put the converters as standard issue in the cars the slight increase in price was passed to the consumer, it was indeed a more reliable and economical solution than attempting to do it on your own.
And so it is with the issue at hand, individual action is good, but not the most important part of the overall solution.
Yeah, sorry, ESL guy here; need to edit more, but I had to be brief for my break time.
The point anyhow is that big changes also do change what consumers will use, and looking at history it is not only consumers that change their ways, but also many jobs are created that many did not expect. I do not dismiss individual efforts at all, to me they are an important part of the overall solution, but the real weakest link is nowadays in congress that is preventing any big concerted efforts to deal with the issue…
You’ve pointed to problems that, in the end, were of relatively small scale and had a simple point at which pressure could be applied through legislation to change them. The problem of air pollution from cars was evident and egregious. The solution was per-car technology to reduce that pollution. There being only a small number of vehicle manufacturers, it was easy to define, implement and enforce a law to make them incorporate these changes, all economic wailing and (idiot) customer complaining be damned.
The problem of overconsumption has no such point - none. It’s many-many to billions, it’s ingrained into every aspect of our society, culture and economy, and it’s generationally reinforced as some kind of “right” (or even, excuse the term, “manifest destiny.”) Even if you were to suspend several parts of the Constitution, beginning with the First Amendment, I can’t begin to conceive of a structure of laws that would effectively reduce consumption. It would be the pointless backfire of Prohibition all over again.
The only way to undo what sixty or seventy years of intense behavior conditioning has done to us is to nullify that conditioning and work on reversing its effects, beginning with indivdual efforts. Cultural integration including legislation can only codify change, never the reverse.
Whether you are talking about mitigation or solution, the proposals for global climate change are pretty much the same.
We’re going through a reduction in consumption of energy for lighting in the US, and it wasn’t because of individual education and choice. It’s because of regulations.
Although, I’m not sure what you mean by “reduction in consumption.” I’m still “consuming” more or less the same amount of light, but I’m “consuming” less electricity to do it, because of regulation.
No, it’s not. The only regulations were a feeble and trivial limit on light bulb efficiency. Something like 20% more lumen/watt efficency? Pfui. The acceptable incandescent bulbs under that regulation are monstrous power hogs compared to LED and CFL, which are being rapidly accepted because of their drastically lower power consumption and a few kicks from incentive programs. *Not *because of any regulation strong enough to force people to use them.
(You do know that they didn’t “ban 100W light bulbs,” right?)
Um, okay.
I meant, “reduction in consumption” in the fairly complex sense of “consuming a lot less.” That you can consume the same number of lumen-hours while consuming fewer watt-hours is on the right track but, well, fairly trivial.
The regulations create incentives towards certain behaviors, which then creates incentives for people to produce more efficient lighting, which then creates a larger supply of lighting, which pushes prices down for more efficient lighting, which incentivizes people to adopt the lighting. This is all basic economics. I don’t like making these econ 101 arguments, but in this case, it’s more or less correct. And in you’re own rebuttal to me, you cite a government incentive program as a contributor. If you want to distinguish between government incentives and regulations, that’s fine, but both are government action and not individual action.
Um, okay. You’re definition of “reduction of consumption” then is so broad as to be a tautology. In the real world, we have to make decisions about what policies we’ll implement to achieve certain goals. If the goal is an overall reduction in CO2 emissions, then that goal is not going to be achievable through purely voluntary action. But it is achievable through government action, whether through regulations or incentives.
Nah. There’s a whole slew of consumer product efficiency regulations which cover a wide range of products. Taken together, these aren’t trivial. I used light bulbs to illustrate a point I was making about how “reduction in consumption” can mean different things and to show that regulation is effective in reducing consumption of a specific type. I certainly didn’t imply that it was the sole regulatory solution.
I agree with the last part – that we don’t need to lower our standard of living or reduce ourselves to poverty – but that’s because the first part isn’t really true. In most cases we don’t need to “lower our consumption” in any meaningful sense of consumer experience or standard of living, what we need to do is lower or eliminate our consumption of harmful commodities. CFL and LED lights are a good example – yes, we needed to lower our consumption of electricity, but we didn’t need to lower our “consumption” of the end product – light.
Some other examples that come to mind – they may not all be possible right away, but they show what can be done. In many areas the largest sources of CO2 and other emissions and pollutants are power plants and cars, #1 and #2 or vice-versa depending on the area. Electric cars and true electric-drive hybrids are coming into the marketplace. Tesla brilliantly showed what can be done, including their free solar-powered Supercharger stations. Don’t want a sports sedan? The Model X will be an SUV. Too expensive? The Model 3 will be half the price. Other manufacturers are coming on board.
So that shifts the load to power generation? Yes, but it’s still a lot more efficient, and down the road we have growing wind, solar, and in at least a few progressive jurisdictions, we have planning for further growth of nuclear, which we really have to start taking more seriously. Cars, power generation, lighting, boating – just about all the things we do have huge potential efficiencies or replacement energy sources that go a huge, huge way to reducing the problem, and I don’t see any of this to be exactly a huge burden associated with a life of poverty!
A point the denialists forget is that PROTECTING OUR PLANET IS NOT A POLITICAL ISSUE!!! Pretending it is one, making opposition to it a cornerstone of ones worldview, is very, very wrong. Catholic or not. This is not religious morality. It is pure morality based on the simple precept that it is good to not destroy things wantonly.
Well, they figured it out 395 years before that, but took their time apologizing. The Church does nothing quickly.
Well, that shows that you did not looked at what Richard Alley and the economists he consulted reported, dealing with the problem will take about 1% of the GDP, just about what it costs now in providing clear water and a sewage system to our cities. It was not a small scale deal really.
Not very convincing, once people found that tap water was hundreds of times safer than the well water next to the polluted rivers customers made the proper choice.
It is also what they see as a right.
This also demonstrates many other goods and services that are becoming available and they will be more economical once better batteries are available.
In the meantime, even conservatives think it is their right to purchase solar panels so as to become independent of the power companies.
Or yours? 
It’s an orthogonal problem the way a house fire is an orthogonal problem for someone worrying about whether or not termites might spread from the next state over.
We can focus on technology to reduce the environmental impact all we want, but our advanced technological society is going to look like one of those cities in Star Wars, spread across the planet.
9 billion times any reasonable standard of living overwhelms every other effort to minimize impact. One guy in a wilderness can leave no trace–sort of. A million guys in a wilderness leave no wilderness.
Of COURSE we need to minimize our destructiveness; our pollution; our general invasiveness. However there is no technology that would allow 9 billion of us to live richly and not consume the earth. Moreover, as the developing world comes online, there is no politics which will put future earth health above our insatiable appetite to progress toward Mr Gore’s lifestyle.
We cannot lift up the poor into a Western lifestyle and preserve the earth with technology. We will always choose to live better, and we will always choose to sacrifice a common future good for a narrow current comfort. Mr Gore will not be giving up a private jet for a public bus; the Cité-Soleil slum-dweller will not voluntarily wait for a greener house prior to getting out of his hell.
But I mean, I’m all for rhetoric around helping the underserved, as long as we recognize rhetoric for what it is: shiny buttons on a fraying coat. Caring for this earth and its inhabitants is a noble aspiration. And at a personal level, I volunteer my own time and expertise on medical missions to the developing world. I’m sure you do a great deal more for causes in which you are interested.
I just don’t think it makes a grand difference, even though it may make a specific difference for a handful (not to mention nourishes me).
There is a perverse fact that the better we take care of ourselves collectively, the more of us there are and with greater total impact. From a purely environmental standpoint, we need to go away as a species, and then hope Nature doesn’t decide to send a comet and make our self-elimination unnecessary. 
Solving pollution of the Thames solves a proximate harm and yields proximate personal gain. This is not an example which should give you much encouragement for solving AGW, and it is not an example of the tragedy of the commons.
In the last few decades Westerners were delighted to solve local pollution by shifting it to the developing world. What they didn’t do was solve it by living sparsely. A visit to Chongqing might put that in perspective for you.
The dilemma for Alarmists is convincing Joe Public that the impending harm is upon him; until it is, he won’t do anything unless the cost is trivial. The reason Mr Gore lives so extravagantly is not because he is an asshole. It’s not because he is a Denialist. It’s because of the tragedy of the commons.
A breathless report that oceans are rising and ice is melting even faster than predicted is worth a deep, deep brow furrow to the average guy. It’s not worth giving up a proffered limo. Not for the poor; not for me; not for Mr Gore.
Most people are not so much Denialists as they are Selfists.
I do not see local, isolated solutions as being very effective in reversing what we have done. I do not see broad solutions being effected if they have a direct cost for the average guy, and I don’t see any low-cost ones.
In short, solutions that would be effective to substantially ameliorate what the AOGCMs predict will always be just out of reach for the Alarmists, most of whom will recognize that and continue to live as well as the rest of us.
Point to the “regulation” that made a $10 LED bulb a fantastic incentive. Since you can’t, I’ll just add that LED bulbs are flying off the shelves for a number of reasons, the gummint regs about modest improvements in lighting efficiency being one pebble in the avalanche of economic, technological, social and individual factors.
(And trust me, you don’t need to speak in slow, patient “Econ 101” phrases to me, unless you’re proud that you recently took it.)
In this thread, trying to stay on track about other topics, yes. I am speaking from a radically different viewpoint and it’s hard to address a debate that straddles two equally irrelevant positions without starting from Econ 101(a), day one. So I try to take it point by point.
And in most cases, the efficiency standards are timid and shot through with loopholes. Other than a few areas where exceeding compliance would cost vast amounts (CAFE, for example), the nudge from regulations tends to be no more than a spark for industries to look at even better alternatives. Light bulbs - there was no reason to change away from incandescent because every change would cost makers quite a bit. Having been bumped off the profitable center point of incandescent sales, there was no reason not to go much further, to technologies that were many times more efficient than being demanded. (That is, it did not cost much more and had far better prospects and ROI to gear up to build CFL and LED bulbs, rather than the marginally efficient-er incandescents being demanded by regulation.)
In any case - and I’m addressing this to several posts and posters - I am not using “consumption” to refer to watt-hours or acre-feet or any such “consumable” commodity. I’m referring to the aggregate consumption of consumer goods, nearly all of which then have their own added “consumption.” Buying a super-efficient LED bulb instead of an old Chinese 100W incandescent is still “consumption.”
I take strong disagreement to this statement… because you didn’t emphasize it nearly enough:
PROTECTING OUR PLANET IS NOT A POLITICAL ISSUE!!!
To which I’d add, no particular emphasis needed, that it’s also not a matter of running around catching carbon molecules with a butterfly net. To feel good about your Prius, LED bulbs and cloth shopping bags is to almost completely miss the point.
This is a bit ignorant because there was a lot of deniers of the problem back then, measures were proposed but virtually nothing was done for decades until parliament itself was affected by the stink.
Indeed even the cholera was blamed on the miasma theory and not a bacterium. The point here is that we have to learn from history and we do have to raise a stink to our congress.
As usual **Chief Pedant **always ignores what Gore actually does. There is indeed a political reason why he is mentioned and it really demonstrates just how out of ideas contrarians are.
This is indeed as effective as pointing out that in the past most members of parliament had a rich lifestyle and polluted more, so therefore they are hypocrites for not doing more on their own against the water pollution.
What this ignores is that it is likely that a few were hypocrites, and a few made efforts to deal with the issue on their own (back then like in Paris when the stink was so bad in the Seine the nobility just went to the countryside, one should notice here that the Chief is doing the equivalent of ignoring what most polluters that fund deniers are doing many times over what Gore is “doing”). But the reality is that the big sewage and plumbing project got started, and maintained and constantly made better; those wealthy parliament members ended paying more in taxes, more than a than a few of them understood that was going to happen and yet they decided (with some pressure from the people too) that it was worth it.
Indeed, it should not be, but it is in the USA.
(Richard Alley (Republican also) on Being a Republican Climate Scientist and how frustrating the current Republicans in congress are.)So unfortunately raising a “stink” to the current congress, as in: throwing the rascal Republicans out of office, is nowadays a way to see progress on this.