Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumOne Scientist’s Hopeful View On How to Repair the Planet
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/one_scientists_hopeful_view_on_how_to_repair_the_planet/2913/[font size=5]One Scientists Hopeful View On How to Repair the Planet[/font]
[font size=4]Ecological crises may be piling up in a seemingly hopeless cascade, but Swedish scientist Johan Rockström says the next few decades offer an unparalleled opportunity to undo the damage.[/font]
by Diane Toomey
[font size=3]For a researcher who studies how humanity is pushing the earth close to potentially disastrous tipping points, Johan Rockström is surprisingly optimistic. Although he reckons that our species has crossed four of nine planetary boundaries including those on climate change and deforestation he believes there is still time to pull back from the brink and create a sustainable future based on renewable energy and a circular economy that continually reuses resources.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Rockström executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Center and author of a new book, Big World, Small Planet offers his take on the state of the planet and explains why he thinks there has never been so much reason for hope as today. He outlines how humanity can step back inside planetary boundaries, which he calls the safe operating space of the hard-wired biophysical process of the earths system, and describes how an alignment of science, technological advances, and a growing public and political hunger for action will get civilization back on track.
Its not a journey where we are backing into the caves, says Rockström. Its a journey of high technology, good health, of better democracy, and huge, multiple benefits that (go) well beyond saving the planet.
Yale Environment 360: As you lay out in your book, the period of the Holocene basically the last 12,000 years was stable and conducive to the flourishing of human civilizations. Opinions differ on when the earth entered the Anthropocene. Where do you mark the beginning point?
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RiverLover
(7,830 posts)With all the fatalistic "we.are.fucked" posts, I thought I might have to quit this forum.
I love this article...
This is very possible!! No one has the crystal ball on this, even MIT.
THANK YOU!!!
OKIsItJustMe
(19,938 posts)I think part of the appeal of the We.Are.Fucked attitude is that it frees me from responsibility.
Its hopeless, so why should I make an effort to change things?
sue4e3
(731 posts)kristopher
(29,798 posts)I think that is the desired result of those posts. If the desired message can't control the board, the next best outcome is for the board to be useless to those it's intended for.
cprise
(8,445 posts)as the antidote is not the answer. Its re-hashed Natural Capitalism with a new pretty chart.
Investment has been flowing back toward fossil fuels recently. Telling them to "go circular" looked like it might work, but turned out to be a dead end.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)...on the OP and the writings of Amory Lovins, with all due respect, you either haven't read them, can't read with comprehension, or have such a poor knowledge base on the topic that you simply don't understand what you are opining about.
We can start with the fact that you clearly don't understand what "economic growth" means.
cprise
(8,445 posts)But where you see de-linking and efficiency, unprincipled economists and venture capitalists see opportunities for the kind of growth that will handsomely line their pockets.
As for de-materializing: There is only so much bandwidth available in human heads... even 7 billion of them. Further, information science says its impossible to truly de-materialize information (hence, economic activity) because its mass (or the equivalent) will always remain. Something like GG's objections based on "human thermodynamics" applies here, except the outsized entropy isn't built into the species so much as it is built into the business culture that bakes infinities into its forecasts.
If you set expectations for unlimited growth, then at the very least you set the stage for a new generation of businessmen who will rout the old guard who adhere to the principles that make the eco-friendly rules work. They can do this when their cheif organizing principle, capitalism, is revered as the prime mover and source of our solutions.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)gob·ble·dy·gook
ˈɡäbəldēˌɡo͞ok/
nouninformal
language that is meaningless or is made unintelligible by excessive use of abstruse technical terms; nonsense.
synonyms: gibberish, claptrap, nonsense, rubbish, balderdash, blather, garbage;
cprise
(8,445 posts)kristopher
(29,798 posts)Your opinion isn't evidence of your opinion's validity, it's dogmatism.
You wrote:
There is room for discussion on the implicit inevitability in your claim. The forces you observe are there, but that doesn't make them a given.
This is gobbledygook.
Here you are simply wrong. Let me give you some questions to consider. Instead of being dogmatic, consider that your premise is weak and think of capitalism is a tool, nothing more.
Would you expect social change accompany the shift from a centralized fossil/nuclear energy system to a distributed renewable energy system?
If so, how will that social change manifest itself?
Will capitalism under the distributed system work for the 'political economy' as effectively as it has in the past?
Has capitalism under the centralized energy system worked as well for the 'domestic economy'?
Will capitalism under a distributed renewable system give greater support to the domestic economy than the centralized system has?
What would be the consequences of this change in emphasis between domestic and political economies should it occur?
If you aren't well acquainted with those two terms and their context be sure to learn before trying to answer. Reference Marvin Harris and his book Cultural Materialism. It is out of print but still available online or in some libraries.
While you're waiting, you might also reread The Road not Taken by Lovins.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1976-10-01/energy-strategy-road-not-taken
cprise
(8,445 posts)Capitalists would not place themselves under *any* rubric other than capitalism; certainly not "under a distributed renewable system". That kind of rhetorical question (in a whole stack of them) tries to smuggle your assumptions into the conversation.
Capitalism isn't a "tool", it is an organizing principle for a culture. You often point out that the business culture is too corrupt to handle nuclear power properly, but neglect to look at transition away from fossil fuels through the same lens.
You should also be more careful where you link to Lovins' articles. That FP site you linked is a product of The Council on Foreign Relations, one of the biggest lie factories in existence:
There are only a relatively few important domestic institutions not connected or (at least) minimally tied to the Council, Shoup notes, and those are generally on the far-right side of the political spectrum. The most prominent example is the Koch Brothers economic and political empire, which does not share the CFRs faith in a powerful state one that provides the capitalist elite with government protection, intervention, and largess. The CFR has little interest in association with any institutions and actors that are at least a little left of center, such as most of todays labor movement considered irrelevant by the Council.
To be clear, the CFRs ideal powerful state is capitalist-neoliberal and imperial. It is one in which what the left sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the right hand of the state (the parts of government that work to redistribute wealth and power yet further upward, fight wars, and discipline the working and lower class majority) is far more potent and well-funded than the left hand of the state: the parts of government, won by past popular movements, that protect and advance the interests of workers, the poor, and the common good. The CFRs recent and deceptively named Renewing America Initiative for restoring U.S. global power at home advocates federal debt reduction not through progressive taxation or cutting back the giant Pentagon budget (a massive subsidy to high-tech corporations that accounts for 54% of U.S. federal discretionary spending) but through major rollbacks of so-called entitlements like Social Security and Medicare (Shoup explains that both programs are actually not gifts but the earned savings from the millions of workers, held in trust by the federal government). It calls for tying immigration policy more directly to the market needs of corporations, for the rollback of public sector union membership and power, and for increased domestic and eco-cidal oil and gas drilling (including hydraulic fracturing) and strip mining. All of this is contrary to majority public U.S. opinion.
AND
AND
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/06/yes-there-is-an-imperialist-ruling-class/
Its good to know your hero Lovins is cozy with the CFR, who appear to be grasping at straws in the middle of the whirlwind they helped summon.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)You don't have one. You present a hodgepodge of incoherent anger where you invoke a human created legal construct and imbue it with unearthly, uncontrollable powers. There is nothing that ties the diverse elements of the problem together into a unified whole any better than any other dogmatic opinion whether it is dogma from religion or ideology.
Horse to water and all of that... It's obvious you don't want to engage in a discussion or expand your lackluster knowledge base. That's too bad, you seem to have a keen mind.
cprise
(8,445 posts)I pointed out the apparent irony of your policy hero using CFR as a vehicle. They have worked for deregulation all these years ...and they still do. It would be unfortunate if RMI became commonly associated with such an organization in people's minds.
A political revolution needs to occur, taking the oligarchs' hands not just off the levers of official power, but also threatening to take them off their ownership perch. History has shown that is the only way to get capitalists to heed broad community goals, or at least refrain from systematically subverting them.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)As a reminder:
You don't have one. You present a hodgepodge of incoherent anger where you invoke a human created legal construct and imbue it with unearthly, uncontrollable powers. There is nothing that ties the diverse elements of the problem together into a unified whole any better than any other dogmatic opinion whether it is dogma from religion or ideology.
Horse to water and all of that... It's obvious you don't want to engage in a discussion or expand your lackluster knowledge base. That's too bad, you seem to have a keen mind.
"What is the theoretical structure that underpins your claims"
"...your claims"
"...you invoke a human created legal construct"
"...nothing that ties the diverse elements of the problem together"
My conclusion is stated but I describe it anyway: you aren't interested in substantive discussion. I attributed this to the lack of a theoretical foundation on which you can anchor your observations, and go to the extra effort of pointing out I think you Personally are naturally endowed with intelligence.
How is this for lack of substance and "theoretical structure":
Your bud is hangin out with thugs.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)HOME AUTHORS L
Amory B. Lovins
ENERGY MARCH/APRIL 2012 ESSAY
A Farewell to Fossil Fuels
Answering the Energy Challenge
Amory B. Lovins
ENVIRONMENT JULY/AUGUST 2001 ESSAY
Fool's Gold in Alaska
Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins
BUSINESS WINTER 1992/93 ESSAY
Fueling a Competitive Economy
Joseph J. Romm and Amory B. Lovins
ARMS CONTROL & DISARMAMENT SUMMER 1980 ESSAY
Nuclear Power and Nuclear Bombs
Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins and Leonard Ross
ENERGY OCTOBER 1976 ESSAY
Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?
Amory B. Lovins
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_on_Foreign_Relations
This is the first time I've put RMI and CFR together. Thanks for the heads-up cprise!
This creates a very very strong appearance that Amory Lovins has either sold out or been co-opted.
WTF, kristopher? You're the one who is always going on about environmentalists being tarred by the company they keep. This is fucking outrageous. The CFR? The CF fucking R? They sign checks made out to him? This taints his entire body of work, FFS!
I've felt all along that there was something a bit off about Lovins. Now I know where the smell is coming from.
Over to you for the defense, kristopher.
Nihil
(13,508 posts)"You're only making it worse for yourself!"
kristopher
(29,798 posts)By: William F. Jasper 12/05/2012 Print E-mail
The Council on Foreign Relations, which has been in the forefront of global warming alarmists for over two decades, continues to push world government as the "solution" at the UN's Doha Climate Summit.
The UN Climate Summit in Doha, Qatar, (see here and here) is in its second week, headed for completion on Friday, December 7. Most analysts and observers expect little in the way of major developments or breakthrough agreements to come out of it. With the world economy in shambles, and nearly all national governments awash in debt, there is diminishing incentive for politicians to spend scarce public funds on the much-hyped hypothetical future threats posed by global warming especially when there are very real, tangible issues demanding immediate attention and funding.
However, the climate change lobby is not rolling over and calling it quits; they have too much invested to back away now. A tabulation of funding in 2007 by Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, found that the climate alarmists had received over $50 billion since 1990. That was five years ago; naturally, the price tag has gone up considerably since then.
Most of this enormous funding avalanche came from governments, with the biggest chunk coming from the U.S. federal government. State governments have also been big funders, along with foreign national governments, the European Union, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the big tax-exempt foundations, and major Wall Street banks and corporations. This money infusion has launched a huge climate industry, with universities, institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professors, scientists, researchers, and activists all dependent on maintaining the flow of funds. The major banks and investors that have jumped on board the climate change wagon see a great deal of green to be made from the global sale of carbon credits. Trillions of dollars could change hands, but only if a carbon trading regime is forced on consumers by governments.
Foremost among the groups that have been driving the global warming alarm bandwagon is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There are many think tanks affecting national policies, but the CFR, long ranked as the premier brain trust, is still the most influential...
http://www.jbs.org/issues-pages/cfr-pushes-end-to-sovereignty-at-uns-doha-climate-summit
They say 2 decades, so I imagine they missed Lovins' work in the mid 70s (4 decades ago). Since you align your (secret nuclear loving*) self with the John Birch Society as a means of attacking Amory Lovins, here is a snip from a recent work by a (real) scholar that discusses his contribution of that time.
In the course of his work, Lovins repeatedly voiced concern about the prospect of climate change if the hard path were maintained, citing among other sources the major 1971 study Inadvertent Climate Modification (Wilson et al., 1971), which involved an international research team more than forty strong under the auspices of MIT and the Swedish science and engineering academies. Although stressing uncertainties, this study already spoke in terms quite familiar today of the growing urgency of taking action before some devastating forces are set in motion in an irreversible manner. This danger included the real possibility of a global temperature increase some four decades hence because of rising levels of humanly produced carbon dioxide and heat with the consequence of a dramatic reduction or even elimination of arctic sea ice that would initiate a positive feedback mechanism tending to increase the temperature further because of diminished global albedo, or reflective capacity (Wilson et al., 1971, pp. 27, 17, 78; cf. Lovins, 1975, p. 112 n. 19). Lovins went on to speak explicitly in his Foreign Affairs article of virtually unavoidable atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide early in the twenty-first century that would give rise then or soon thereafter to substantial and perhaps irreversible changes in global climate (1976, p. 67). Despite their claims to rationality and expertise, pipeline proponents in industry and government gave no attention to this possibility and certainly did not take it into account in the promotion or design of the pipeline. If federal government moves in 1972 and 1973 had not eliminated opportunities for democratic politics in the form of either public hearings or court action, there would then have been a prospect for the issue of climate change to have become a matter of public deliberation.
In retrospect, we can see that the construction of the pipeline in Alaska was part of a larger pattern of energy development and that an alternative orientation was emerging at the time, informed by a significant insight into the energy problem. That insight, central to Lovinss soft path, involved a reversal in the way the energy problem was defined. To be pursued seriously and thereby tested the soft path would have required both potent political commitment and significant financial investment, sustained over a substantial period. As it happened, Lovins became quite influential after the publication of his Foreign Affairs article in 1976, and some initiatives were begun on elements of his soft path strategy, with President Jimmy Carter going so far as to install solar collectors on the White House. When Ronald Reagan later entered the White House, however, the elements of the hard path were emphatically reaffirmed, and the solar collectors were removed, eventually to become what Carter had feared a museum piece (Green, 2009).
As Lovins in the 1970s had framed the prospect of climate change, the hard path was a key part of the problem, and the soft path was key to the solution. During the decades since then, the prospect of climate change has increasingly come to be perceived not as a speculative possibility, but as an immediate crisis. In regard to Alaska and other northern regions, indeed, the concern has arisen that dramatically increasing temperatures have begun to melt permafrost to such an extent that the melting could release greenhouse gases particularly methane in quantities sufficient to substantially exacerbate the problem of global climate change.
- Douglas Torgerson; Policy Problems and Democratic Politics: instrumental rationality reconsidered;
Social Science and Policy Challenges: Democracy, Values and Capacities;
edited by G. Papanagnou; UNESCO Publishing; 2011; 79-82
What were you doing about climate change in 1976?
*In spite of your attempts to disavow your "previous" love affair with nuclear, your inability to resist attacking Lovins (the nuclear industry's favorite villain) seems to show you're still engaging in your own special brand of clumsy participation in their cause.
cprise
(8,445 posts)So its not all cognitive dissonance on their part.
Actually, CFR is often 'credited' by radicals for framing the issues (and terms) that are taken up by the corporate mainstream. And the corporate mainstream *is* at least staring at the AGW problem now and saying something should be done.
But that mainstream has long taken up the cause of reducing or capturing regulation, and privatizing, having such success that academics now refer to the USA as an oligarchy.
(In my mind and many others, the CFR also drives much of the language and doublethink of American Exceptionalism.)
kristopher
(29,798 posts)confuse cause and effect. You write that "CFR...drives".
It is a platform for open public discussion among 5000 US leading policy experts that provides an extremely wide range of views.
You are participating in a smear campaign, nothing more. Your behavior does indeed send a negative message, but it isn't about your target.
By "others" you are referring to the likes of the Conservative Society of America?
Or perhaps the John Birch Society?
By: William F. Jasper 12/05/2012 Print E-mail
The Council on Foreign Relations, which has been in the forefront of global warming alarmists for over two decades, continues to push world government as the "solution" at the UN's Doha Climate Summit.
The UN Climate Summit in Doha, Qatar, (see here and here) is in its second week, headed for completion on Friday, December 7. Most analysts and observers expect little in the way of major developments or breakthrough agreements to come out of it. With the world economy in shambles, and nearly all national governments awash in debt, there is diminishing incentive for politicians to spend scarce public funds on the much-hyped hypothetical future threats posed by global warming especially when there are very real, tangible issues demanding immediate attention and funding.
However, the climate change lobby is not rolling over and calling it quits; they have too much invested to back away now. A tabulation of funding in 2007 by Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, found that the climate alarmists had received over $50 billion since 1990. That was five years ago; naturally, the price tag has gone up considerably since then.
Most of this enormous funding avalanche came from governments, with the biggest chunk coming from the U.S. federal government. State governments have also been big funders, along with foreign national governments, the European Union, United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the big tax-exempt foundations, and major Wall Street banks and corporations. This money infusion has launched a huge climate industry, with universities, institutions, think tanks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), professors, scientists, researchers, and activists all dependent on maintaining the flow of funds. The major banks and investors that have jumped on board the climate change wagon see a great deal of green to be made from the global sale of carbon credits. Trillions of dollars could change hands, but only if a carbon trading regime is forced on consumers by governments.
Foremost among the groups that have been driving the global warming alarm bandwagon is the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). There are many think tanks affecting national policies, but the CFR, long ranked as the premier brain trust, is still the most influential...
http://www.jbs.org/issues-pages/cfr-pushes-end-to-sovereignty-at-uns-doha-climate-summit
cprise
(8,445 posts)One is "classical liberal" and the other is teabaggers. So what?
And thanks for your opinion on CFR, BTW.
iemitsu
(3,888 posts)BillZBubb
(10,650 posts)Half the country believes the lies the republicans spout. As long as that continues, there won't be much action from one of the biggest polluter and consumer nations.
Duppers
(28,120 posts)Best wishes.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)cprise
(8,445 posts)I sure don't.
The way he depicts the problem space as a shape with sides -- implying we must push on all sides of the problem in order to reduce and contain it -- is apt. I like that part of it.
But he wants us to "re-connect with nature" and also be "very techy" and then he invokes Tesla. We should instead give nature room to live instead of appointing ourselves as its helicopter parents. We should learn to be choosy about technology, instead of framing every eco/tech discussion in terms of black and white, all-or-nothing.
GliderGuider
(21,088 posts)OK here you go. It was
What's "amazing" is that anyone with a brain can think like that.