Posts by Che Tibby
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Gary Young,
good point. you throw away a $3 battery. you don't throw away a $30k one.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
yeah, well out of my depth on that one.
what do you know about using trains for freight instead of big stinky trucks?
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
yeah, i'm convinced that technology will save us, but only if it's focus is shifting behaviour away from, as opposed to mitigating, the bad.
the ETS is at best a mitigation strategy, and at worst a papal indulgence. the sort of strategy politicans love because it has the appearance of action, the somewhat dubious validity of economic theory to underpin it, and the can kicked so far down the goddamn road you'll need a telescope to see it.
now, moving the entire transport fleet to electricity powered from our low-CO2 electricity network... maybe.
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and here, ignoring the slightly elevated rhetoric, is an example of the problem
there is a sliver of hope the world could stay near a 1°C goal if there were a bilateral agreement between the US and China—the world’s two biggest carbon emitters. Such a deal would need to immediately implement a gradually escalating carbon tax, rebate the revenue to its citizens equally per person, and place trade duties on any other country not willing to join in. That could quickly shift the world to a low-carbon economy, perhaps with enough cushion to prevent the most dangerous aspects of climate change. However, the authors dismiss this possibility as extremely unlikely.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Bart Janssen,
the ETS or even a blunt carbon tax as the solution for NZ
yeah, totes legit.
for the doubters here's a question: how much would a carbon tax put up the cost of fuel or fertilizer? 3%? 5%?
how much is that actually going to change behaviour? households absorb that cost every year with minimal grumbling.
so to really drive behaviour you need to either make carbon-based fuel unaffordable, or provide a cheaper alternative. i heard someone say one time, "we didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of rocks"
and those projections for CO2 absorption are estimates. the last i read, scientists actually aren't all that sure how much CO2 the biosphere can sequester. so the policy is largely based on assumptions. worse, it's based on scientific assumptions strung in a causal chain to behaviouristic assumptions!
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Rich Lock,
As soon as all the trapped methane under the artic tundra starts escaping as the permafrost melts, shit is going to get extremely real.
already happening. google reports of "arctic sea methane bubbling". example
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Euan Mason,
According to FAO figures on mean forest carbon storage, reforesting approximately 35% of what humans have deforested would return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels
so let's work that thru for a second. this implies that reforesting >35% of what humans have deforested could return CO2 to below pre-industrial levels.
but the problematic atmospheric CO2 is primarily taken from subterranean sources.
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personally, i've long thought the ETS is a scam. the principle is sound, you put a cost on carbon, which in turn changed behaviour to low-carbon energy.
but it wasn't ever intended to address the tonnes of carbon already in the atmosphere, and was never going to move quickly enough to limit blowing the carbon budget completely.
at its base it's a policy based on quack science* and a reliance on the same market that gave us the GFC.
(more trees = less carbon in the atmosphere, which ignores that you could cover the entire globe in trees and it won't be enough to take out the carbon we've already put up there. at best it is a way to change behaviour, but it waaaay too slowly to stop the change already underway. at best it's a finger in the dike).
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Kumara Republic,
A big, crude oil-powered lie at that.
exactly. the problem ain't the cows, it's the fertilisers.
and the cars.
and the ocean full of plastic.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Russell Brown,
I was astonished at the number of apparently intelligent people in the room (it was at Kiwi Foo) who were lapping it up, regardless of the logical contortions the speaker was expecting people to accept. It was quite an eye-opener.
at the start of this debate, a generation ago, so was i.
then i realised that some smart people just have a vested interest in maintaining their opulent lifestyle - they just like it and don't want to change, and bugger the consequences.
*says che, with his two mobile devices and recent overseas holiday...