[One Degree]

@Wellsy
The human population can be stabilized in 20 years without killing anyone.
It could probably be reduced by half within 3 to 5 generations without too severely upsetting age distribution.

How many of your options could work in 20 years?

[SolarCross]

Also how does one significantly reduce carbon emissions without causing proportional deaths? Most people are taking about pushing people to be more green through taxing carbon usage. So that will make fuel and everything that depends on it, which is everything including food, more expensive, and if it is to be effective unaffordably expensive.

A hypothetical case study: I'm a taxi driver and carbon tax doubles my fuel cost. Now my fares have to be more expensive to cover my increased costs which means I have fewer customers who can also afford to hire me. So my profits are down considerably, even while the stuff I buy with my profits: food to eat, clothing etc are also getting more expensive as the carbon tax is factored into prices just as it is with my fares. At some point my life becomes uneconomic and I starve or commit suicide along with the family I support.

Luckily unlike 95% of the UK population I live in a rural location and consequently have a decent sized garden. It's just barely kept grass at present but I could turn it over to food production. I don't know much about agriculture so I don't know if it is enough land to produce with just hand tools a crop that will be sufficient for my family and myself but it will probably be carbon tax free and so perversely economic given the warping effect of the carbon tax. But then I am spending even less of my time driving a taxi and more digging in the dirt. Electricity is unaffordable so that is off most of the time, not much internet or light. Maybe candles can be substituted. Wood burning stove to replace the electric one?

Effectively I will be converted from an post industrial person who never worries about starving even while he might worry about paying for luxuries to a medieval person always inches from starvation.

I'd guess if I lived in the city I would have no hope of continued existence.

[Wellsy]

@Wellsy
The human population can be stabilized in 20 years without killing anyone.

How many of your options could work in 20 years?

I don't know, seems folks be thinking more 30+ (2050) years when thinking in terms of not any particular radical change but within the confines of capitalist economy, market mechanisms and certain notions of technological development.
http://theconversation.com/how-fast-can-we-transition-to-a-low-carbon-energy-system-51018
http://theconversation.com/australia-can-get-to-zero-carbon-emissions-and-grow-the-economy-32015

More significant interventions could probably speed things up some, though as we're both prone to believing, such an outcome isn't readily foreseeable.

[One Degree]

@Wellsy
Are you still planning on moving to the US? I will vote to exempt you from my immigration ban.

[MememyselfandIJK]

net worth

Eww.

I would go with education and ability to run things rather than exploit others

[Wellsy]

@Wellsy
Are you still planning on moving to the US? I will vote to exempt you from my immigration ban.

Yeah, I am.
In fact, might be coming over as soon as this November.

[skinster]

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

[One Degree]

Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

It seemed like a reasonable argument until I got to...

New ties are being drawn to Black Lives Matter, immigrant and Indigenous rights, and fights for better wages. On the heels of such movements, political parties seem finally ready to defy neoliberal dogma.

Translation: We don't care about the environment either, we just want to keep the Democratic party base together.

[skinster]

[Dave]

Air and water quality have also improved a lot in Western countries since THATCHER'S BLOODY BRITAIN mercilessly murdered the entire population of Wales in order to pay bonuses to banksters.

More land is returning to nature as well.

On the metric of climate change carbon emissions have probably peaked in all the advanced countries (except maybe Canada and Australia) and are likely even to peak in China soon. Even without a nuclear shift carbon emissions should start falling even in the USA.

There's much more work to be done, but it doesn't seem like environmental progress has stopped because of "neoliberalism" at all. Corporations are just cashing in on environmental consciousness and selling bird brained liberals products which make them feel good.

[Pants-of-dog]

....Corporations are just cashing in on environmental consciousness and selling bird brained liberals products which make them feel good.

If that what it takes to get white people to do something about it.

[One Degree]

If that what it takes to get white people to do something about it.

Wow! Your slip is showing again. You normally are a lot more careful than this.

Edit: Goodnight @Pants-of-dog

[Pants-of-dog]

Wow! Your slip is showing again. You normally are a lot more careful than this.

Edit: Goodnight @Pants-of-dog

I have no idea what you are talking about.

[One Degree]

I have no idea what you are talking about.

, but I will pretend you don't. "your slip is showing" means you have exposed a part of yourself that you normally keep out of view. This is in reference to your racist comment that 'white' people need to do something about the environment. Since white people are a minority in the world, this seems not only a silly comment but a racist one. Is the earth the 'white man's burden' also?

[Pants-of-dog]

I inow what the expression means, even though women do not wear them any more.

Do you think the phrase "white people" is racist?

Lol.

[Suntzu]

I have no idea what you are talking about.

I do!

[QatzelOk]

(I just read this text)

I'm a taxi driver and carbon tax doubles my fuel cost. Now my fares have to be more expensive to cover my increased costs which means I have fewer customers who can also afford to hire me. So my profits are down considerably...

I think I know why Westerners are loathe to admit that climate change is real and is caused by human activity.

It's because we can't admit that our system sucks. We've destroyed virtually every other alternative system to our own (growth-addicted consumer capitalism) with warfare and economic blockades.

So to realize that our system (the one that our armies and buffoon politicians have rammed down the billions of throats of the Earth's people and other species) is going to wipe us out forever... is too much for us to take.

We aren't even allowed to imagine this to be true. Our Disney media-minds have been programmed to block any real feelings of fear that ecocide might provoke.

We lie through our teeth about caring about our natural life-support systems. We hate them, we hate nature and our own natures, and just want to fly to exotic locales and drive bigger SUVs than our co-workers - like our TVs tell us to do.

[SolarCross]

I think I know why Westerne
It's because we can't admit that our system sucks.

Well all value is subjective so it is fair for you to cry about how everything sucks but on the other hand it is a system that allows silly and ineffectual people such as yourself to live. If we go back to a medieval level of industrial output you will be amongst the first people to starve to death. Your bicycle that you love to wave around as a hipster status symbol was produced in a fossil fuelled factory by people that don't have to spend most of their time growing veggies. Consequently a medieval bicycle will cost 100x as much and you won't be able to afford it.



Bring out your dead!

[Pants-of-dog]

.....except bicycles exist in such profusion right now that they will not magically become insanely expensive if we move towrds a cleaner world.

[SolarCross]

Yes because entropy is a thing and because as many of them as you think there are there aren't enough when you consider most people don't have them they have cars instead and if fuel becomes prohibitively expensive the demand from them will grow.

Sooner or later the "profusion" you imagine exists will wear out and rust away, that's entropy look it up, and so new one's will have to be made and the raw materials for them sourced. If you can't use fossil fuels they will have to be made with hand tools with raw materials found with hand tools (unless we go full nuclear or cover the entire world in solar panels) powered by muscle: animal or human. Made in this way is the pre-industrial way as in the middle ages and yes it will cost the 100x as much as such methods are only 1% as productive.

Fancy a job mining for iron ore to make bicycle frames using only hand tools? Or are you too "intellectual" to do that kind of work? Maybe in a world without fossil fuels you won't have the choice, someone will make a slave of you or you will starve.