💾 Archived View for sdf.org › mmeta4 › Phlog › phlog-2018-12-09.txt captured on 2024-05-10 at 11:30:23.
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
December 09 2018 Recently came across a post by Albert Bates on his The Great Change[1] blog referencing a 2018 Climate Emergency Plan[2] put out by the Club of Rome. This paper is a good example of the drastic measures that need to be taken and why humanity is more of less fucked. One only needs to briefly scan the 10 point plan at the beginning of the paper to see the degree of deviation from our current reality and consider just how unlikely any of these suggestions will be implemented. One might as well call for violent revolution against the power elite. That said, some of these points, in my opinion, could be improved upon. Number 9 for example; why not simply pay women not to have as many kids? Perhaps once a woman reaches menopause she could be compensated for each kid she did not have, with the amount dependent of the likely lifetime resource savings of a person in their respective country. As residents of countries like the US use substantially more resources than someone residing in, say India, it makes sense to pro-rate the compensation. Currently population reduction is pursued by encouraging the education of women and of course that's a worthwhile goal all its own but it also takes a while to see results and arguably is more costly than the more direct proposal outlined. Number 8, agricultural and land use reform, should include programs promoting de-mechanization (and thus de-carbonization) by encouraging a more back towards horses and human powered farming. This is the most likely future for humanity and how things looked before fossil fuels entered the picture. Might as well start transitioning now as it takes about 5 years for people to get the hang of growing food in any particular place. At least we have working examples like the various small organic farms and the Old Order Amish to re-learn the finer aspects from. Some of the other points, like trying to ramp up the build-out of wind and photovoltaics (number 2) and trying to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in manufacturing (number 7) are simply unrealistic; the former require huge amounts of upfront fossil fuel and resource inputs which contradict points 1 and 3, and the latter is pretty much wishful thinking as these processes, concrete production for example, are about as efficient as they are ever likely to be. It's not that small incremental improvements aren't possible, but rather that big jumps would require new technologies (number 6) whose development require significant financial and energy investments which appear to be growing increasingly scarce. Supposedly wealthy countries like the US can't even find the funds and political will to repair their basic infrastructure like water, sewer, roads and bridges. Lastly, I am rather skeptical of AI producing significant breakthroughs (again, number 6), and certainly nothing that looks like exponential improvement. If AI ever gets to that level of big-picture analysis I think it much more likely to conclude the simplest, least-cost solution to all these human-caused problems is to get rid of the humans. -- [1] http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/ [2] https://www.clubofrome.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/COR_Climate-Emergency-Plan-final-pages.pdf