💾 Archived View for idiomdrottning.org › relative-degrees captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:53:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Relative degrees

India had 45˚ degrees a few weeks ago 💔

Consumtion-based CO2e footprint per capita in Sweden: 7.14 metric tons. In India: 1.67 metric tons.

They’re suffering for our shopping and travelling.

Shouldering our externalities. Market capitalism’s wealth is borrowed and stolen, built on unaccounted for externalities.

Worst economics system ever tried. Seems pretty difficult to get rid of, too.

Even in the context of shitshows like The Great Leap Forward, and in by no means a defense of those atrocitities (let’s try to do better), market capitalism is the worst by a huge margin. If it hasn’t doomed the Earth, it has at least risked it. It has directly caused the death of millions. It also caused CAGW. There’s a good argument for the case that the war in Syria, as one of many examples, was climate/famine related.

The horribly wrong-headed policies (such as, but not limited to, the “Four Pests” theory that wrecked the ecosystem) exacerbated the 1958–1961 China famine to almost rival the famines in neighbouring market capitalist (colonially exploited) India, and that’s not OK.

People wrote in suggesting “patches” on capitalism like internalizing emission costs, and that’s not an argument against my position, it’s a vindication of it. I’ve been kvetching about capitalism being broken for 20 years and if they can finally patch it, then that’s cause for celebration. I’ll believe it when I see it, but I do want it.

What we really need is a complete halt on new oil, coal and gas. But that risks becoming as disastrous as China in the famine years or Śrī Laṅkā now, since market capitalism’s cushiness is so foundationally predicated on the faux cornucopia named “waste”.

We need to go to zero extraction of new fossils. These systems are like murder licenses, i.e. pretty short-sighted. I worked with sims with a Swiss climate org a few years ago (one year BP—before pandemic) and it was frustrating because no matter what their sims forecast (every run a failure), they were hesitant at measures they considered too severe—I asked for an example and they said going to a plant-based diet. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Cars and planes and animal ag and fossil fuels are some pretty low-hanging fruit here and people don’t even wanna fix them. One of the reasons the pandemic was so panic-inducingly frustrating is that globabally (not so much here in Sweden, land of ättestupa) people did make some pretty huge changes. I’d wanna see the same urgency applied to CAGW mitigation and adaption.

It’s… how slow is even possible to go since too slow = failure?

For humans, the slower the better, but the operative parameter is that we can’t let the slowness exceed the slowness-threshold of CAGW.

Decreasing human suffering is fantastic but there’s no point to having the least human suffering on the cinder.

There is a singularity problem in the math of c-tax + div (and an even worse one in cap & tade). A division by zero–level borkage once the acceptable levels of fossils reach zero the tax reaches infinite.

Taxes can compensate for problems, like a tax on cars can promote safer traffic etc but when the problem is a very ultimate ultimatum the idea kinda breaks down. So while I’m not gonna stand in the way of c-tax + div, I might even celebrate it (since it’s action and we do need action), I also urge y’all to remain at the drawing board, and keep green hatting this 🐝 until we figure something good and sustainable and lasting out. And that’s gonna have to include zero (or negative) net fossils.

Externalities

Most blank on the cinder