Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to David Haywood,
What about BECCS? It struck me as a reasonably good idea.
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If they reclassify substances with existing legislation on them, alcohol would surely fail. Perhaps that explains why no politician would dare open that door.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Peter Green,
They look reasonable consistent over shorter periods (an election cycle), although I haven’t formally tested this.
That does make sense, since until an election they don't have any information upon which to judge their house bias for any methodological change. I'd hope they'd want to stick to a methodology throughout the cycle, otherwise comparing a result to the previous one becomes suspect. They wouldn't want to report a surge in support that was really just them changing their methodology. I don't know if my hope is the truth though.
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Actually further to that, it's pretty much morally indefensible, from an air miles POV, to live in NZ at all.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Martin Roberts,
My wife is an Australian. Our families live in different countries. It's rather hard for me to decide that it's morally indefensible for one of us to not be able to regularly see our family. If it was, it would probably be morally indefensible to marry anyone from more than an acceptable number of air miles away. And that's the closest country! Imagine the moral horror of marrying someone from Europe!!
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Actually, Tom, thinking even further with that. Such a discovery would send a massive shockwave through the NZ economy. It's hard to be certain what would happen. Prices would probably shoot up. Unless those riches started getting shared out fast, it's possible that a large majority of people would quite rapidly wish that the oil had never been found.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Question. If we were to strike a Saudi sized gusher off the NZ coast, who would win the election:
Whoever credibly promised to share the riches the most. Party A may lack credibility on that front, especially since they're backed by banks, which have zero interest in everyone in the country being able to suddenly pay their mortgage off. They'd be wiped out. It might actually be Party C, who promise to nationalize all that oil that get the thumbs up. But you're right, I'd say the discovery of such a cache would not help the NZ Green movement. The spilling of any of it might, which would happen with high probability if we're really talking about a Saudi sized field. But that would happen later.
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The climate change debate seems to have a whole bunch cascading conditional questions:
1. Is climate change even happening?
2. If it is happening, are humans responsible?
3. If humans are responsible, is there anything they could do about it?
4. If they could do anything about it, should they?
5. If they should do anything, what should it be?
6. If there is something we should do about, how can we do that?I think we've only got high certainty about 1 and 2. Then we start hitting the hard questions.
Tackling 3: Whilst there are clearly things individuals and even large organizations right up to the level of governments can do both on the reduction of contribution to CC (such as reducing greenhouse emissions), and on active negative contribution (various sequestration possibilities), it is not clear that the species can actually cooperate at a global level. But nor is certain that we can't.
Tackling 4: Given that we can actually do something, that it won't just be a bunch of people ineffectually trying whilst the rest either do nothing or even increase their contribution due to the opportunity being given by the others who are doing something (in other words, in a market situation, opportunities will be taken cheaper if there are people deliberately refusing to take them), should we do anything? This is one of the hardest questions. Essentially, we do not know exactly what the consequences of CC will be. It is possible that it might even make the world a better place (on average).
It's a hard question because it's not just one about the facts any more. It's also a moral judgment. Even if we can show that CC leads to weather patterns that have negative consequences for many, they may also have positive consequences for others. Futhermore, the negative consequences might not even outweigh the cost of doing something, which certainly does have some negative consequences (eg higher prices for energy and the products of energy (which is just about everything)).Tackling 5: Since this is a "should" question again, it's also a moral one. Having presumed (remember, this is a conditional question), that we should take meaningful action, there is the huge question of which actions, amongst the practically infinite number of possibilities. Our choices there will be based on how we decide who loses and who gains. In the interests of fairness, we'd probably only be able to settle on actions in which everyone loses, to prevent the negative consequences that are most likely not going to be shared equally (I think this is what Kyoto did). But it might be difficult for groups that feels they're already in an unfair position to then accept a fair loss. Essentially, will undeveloped nations agree to something condemning them to poverty? The insistence on an unchanging world is seldom something people at the bottom want, and frequently something those at the top do. Is that actually fair?
Tackling 6: I think this is where I came in. Russell's question around how can the language move so that progress could be made, given that we have an answer to 5.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Bart Janssen,
At present compliance (not safety).
OK, so you're saying that compliance related to making sure the stuff can't get out of the lab/test farms accidentally is not a particularly significant part of the overall compliance?
Sure sounds frustrating.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Would a more likely political compromise be that we'd fund and own the research, but it wouldn't actually physically happen in NZ? Then the research could be conducted to the ridiculously high biosecurity standards we already have?
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