Well, we're the dominant species on this planet, and it looks like we're on our own with this problem, so what actions, if any, do you think that human civilization should take regarding climate change?

our species = EXTERMINATE

tobe bryant

Legislation to force companies to reduce emissions and become more efficient. Because they sure as **** won't do it on their own.

Reducing emissions does not help. Partly because it's actually impossible, mostly because the damage has already been done. A grassroots movement is even less effective. Those 'green' products are no better for the environment - some of them hurt it in a different way; some of them just hurt it somewhere else. The only viable solution is some form of Enviroengineering.

yes

The title, of course, refers to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8yHguvYYyQ

+1

Complete extermination of the species Homo sapiens. Problems will self-correct in a few thousand years.

Where is the option where we let the planet get hotter and hotter? This is an option I am for.

I don't know of a practical solution to the problem.

Our only option is clearly to migrate into orbit.

Now, do we want the collars on our new spacer uniforms up or down?

Clearly we have to find this.. Tobe, and stop him!

Where is the "I'm not qualified to have an opinion" button?

Atomic bomb!

Other:

What should be done:
Research and Develop "Cleaner and Greener" technologies that are more energy effecient. This would actually help not only to reduce our contribution to "Global Warming" (far more then regulations ever could because it's a permanent fix and not a band-aid), but also reduce our dependency on the dwindling supply of fussel fuels and other resources. Along with economic benefits.

What shouldn't be done:
-Regulations to reduce emissions. This hurts small business and developing nations. It also hurts the world economy as it reduces or at least stagnates the competition.
-Government Programs (carbon credits, etc). While these may look like good incentives on paper, they're really not enough to make manufactures want to switch (mostly because it's only short-term). Also, somebody's still paying for it. Researching and developing energy efficient "Green" technology would be a long-term cost savings to companies and would be a much greater incentive.

Do you really think we can research, discover, build new infrastructure, and adopt this new technology across the world in the next 50 years? It takes something like 20 years to build a single nuclear reactor. Of course your proposals are right in the long-term, but we need to cut emissions right now. We need to balance long-term solutions with short-term needs (as we often do, in many situations).
And of course the burden is upon the biggest polluters (the US, EU and China), we can't expect developing countries to take the hit - though we should expect them not to make the same mistakes we did in our industrial revolutions.

A carbon tax is the simplest and most effective way to do that. You pay $x for every kg of CO2 your business emits. Will it hurt small businesses? Probably. Will it hurt big industries? Only if they continue to emit. What's more important? Small businesses, or preventing dangerous climate change?

Researching new technologies is all fine and dandy, but how are you going to get people to adopt them? This is a global problem, and people don't have global mindsets. Businesses are not going to invest a lot of money in alternate technologies if their competitors are not. There needs to be a financial incentive.

I think carbon credits is a messy idea, allowing businesses to trade their emissions and creating an emissions stock market. There's no guarantee that emissions will reduce.

An interesting question, though. If we don't prevent climate change, sea levels rise and there is massive human suffering as a result - what should we do then? Is it the 'fault' of the biggest polluters? Is there a burden upon those countries to take responsibility and provide aid and accept climate refugees into their countries? Should there be a legal agreement on this?

METAPOST: For the purposes of this thread, lets 'assume' that the IPCC and thousands of scientists are correct in their assessment of anthropogenic climate change. That discussion belongs in the other thread. Let's take the statement of the problem as a given, and then consider the multitudes of possible solutions. I imagine we'll get more done in this thread than at Copenhagen.

Sadly I think we already have.

[NOTE: I had to move Mort-Hog's quotes around because they were a little displaced. No other changes were made.]



[And...]

Actually, many of the technologies already exist and are already being implemented. As I stated above, the financial incentive is actually higher than carbon tax, carbon credits, etc.

Only if they continue to emit? So, in other words, not only are they required to come out of pocket for using a cleaner solution, but we're going to hit them up for money until they do? You do realize that taxes are passed on to consumers, right? Many companies already see the financial benefit of switching over and have begun setting aside funds for it. If you hit them with a tax, they're just going to take it out of that fund (if they can't pass it on to consumers to remain competitive) and it'll be that much longer until they can switch over.


Okay, I'll bite just for the sake of a "worse case scenario, how do we deal with it" type of thought exercise.

1. You're not going to get any kind of international legal agreement for this sort of thing. It's just not going to happen.
2. As things get worse, and we see the economic impact, companies will adjust and reduce their waste. How will they be motivated to do this precisely? This is where it can break down into several more scenarios. But it really doesn't matter. Companies will be compelled by "some means" to change. I really don't think they'll wait 50 years to do that. We should know within the next 5-10 years if the IPCC's prediction is right or not. At that point, people will begin reacting based off of those results.

[NOTE, I'm not disputing the IPCC's findings per se, just their predictions.]

I think Joncy explained cap and trade a while back and it made perfect sense. Maybe he will drop in here.

Anyway, I voted other because it's probably already too late.

Let's also try and look at this from a positive perspective. Like Mort says, for hopefully an easier and more civil debate, assume that all the global warming stuff is correct. But also, let's rather try and argue about what method is more efficient, rather than the normative values behind them about whether you think government should force business to pollute, force private people to do X, whether the govt should provide the machines for cleaner tech on micro/factory scales, etc.

Personally, I've always been with Mort on this one and I think the tax works best, along with strong R&D bonuses for energy firms. I see no problem in giving immunity to an energy firm from taxes for a time period if for instance somehow they came up with some solution that drastically reduced emissions. Talk about profit motive right there. I've investigated certain other carbon tax/cap and trade hybrid theories that I actually like as well (McKibbin et al, 2002) that deal with emissions almost like long-term T-Bills with long term permits but also yearly short term permits to adjust for exogenous energy shocks, but I don't quite think people would be able to wrap their heads around it and therefore the tax would get the message across better. It seems like a lot of people don't get cap and trade either :/ .

The problem with pollution is that we really don't know how much the marginal cost is of reducing it is. The danger with going strictly cap and trade or carbon taxes is in the cases where we predict the costs either to low or to high. A permit policy where marginal benefit of abatement is steep and the marginal cost is flat, permits work better as they better allocate the amount of abatement. If cost of abatement turned out to be 10$ in the future, and the tax was 9$, everyone would just pay the tax and continue polluting. Situations different and costs are lower than taxes, then emissions will all drop to zero and we won't technically have an efficient level of pollution.

If the benefit of abatement is rather flat but the costs are very steep, then taxes work best. For example, let's say the government capped off emissions at some point because it found out the cost to be 10$. At that price, there is a certain amount of emissions that is abated. However, let's say the cost actually is higher. Then the price of the permit will rise substantially, and the cost of abatement would also rise as well, reducing the amount of it, and resulting in a large welfare loss whereas a tax would more closely approximate in this situation the level of abatement without a large reduction in welfare.

As you can see, a big problem in determining how to solve the climate change also involves figuring out some accurate cost, and for me the way I lean is still the tax (I'd go with the hybrid theory, but not sure if it's political feasible). To me I see at this stage in time fitting into the taxes scenario rather than the permit scenario, as at this point in time the marginal benefit of abating emissions is quite low and the cost is high (despite what you believe will happen in the future). The world operates on incentives, and the tax is probably the most efficient way at not only making those incentives painfully clear, but also a fair way to internalize a negative externality and not put the burden completely on government funded research with tax payer money. The only problem with the carbon tax is also political liability with large transfers in income from business to government and might end up costing a lot depending on where we calculate the benefit equals the cost of abatement, hence businesses wouldn't support it.

The biggest problem with emission reduction is that we still need some means to clean up the junk that's already in the atmosphere. Further, it assumes that there is some acceptable level of emissions above zero. Reducing emissions does not solve the problem, it only delays it. We will have to solve the bigger problem (The damage is done. How do we fix it?) eventually, no matter how much we cut emissions, and no plan that does include a way to clean up what's already in the atmosphere can succeed.

there is only one solution to this problem...

sorcery

everything that could help in a reasonable amount.

You could compare the amount of required effort to meat. Eating only meat from the meatindustry is bad. Eating biological meat is good. Becoming a vegetarian is worse than eating from the meatindustry. Being a vegan sucks...

So, just watch out with your fossil fueled car until they invent efficient solar panels, shut down all devices you aren't using etc. etc. Use some common sense, that's all

Won't do anything but cause undue pain without accompanying economic reform.

Fahrenheit sucks.

Fahrenheit has twice the precision in the comfortable scale.

Fahrenheit is a much more common-sense practical every-day measure. For scientific stuff, I'd think that Kelvin would be the best way to go...celsius just seems a bit useless to me.

Isn't kelvin the same scale as celsius, with zero at absolute zero instead of at the freezing point of water?

Yes.

Which makes it wonderful to convert to.

How is Fahrenheit common sense? 32 for freezing and 200-whatever for boiling? 0 and 100 make more sense to me.

It's more practical because most things I do in my life have nothing to do with the freezing and boiling point of water, so basing the scale around those values is fairly irrelevant to my life, and in fact results in less precision in temperatures that DO matter in my life. Celsius would give a scale of common temperatures of something like...what..-5C to 40C or something close? There's nothing WRONG with it, of course, but I find a scale of 0F to 100F to be more useful in everyday life, as it's based roughly around human definitions of "cold" and "hot".

It's more practical because it's the American Way!

The logical process is to stop the bleeding and to stabilize the patient. Then you worry about healing the wounds.

In any large/critical task, the above is always the most prudent course of action. At least by slowing emissions, we theoretically buy ourselves more time to solve the overall problem. After all, solving the problem is going to be far more difficult then slowing the growth of it.

if emissions caps and taxes are the path that is going to be taken the government had better be prepared to deal with HUGE amounts of blowback. already in california there have been huge job losses because of new diesel engine regulations, not to mention the amount of jobs that have simply left the state in other sectors. if you pass punitive legislation on a national level you will be looking at millions of jobs lost, not thousands, millions. the government is not going to be able to compensate for this. if you try and replace these lost private sector jobs with "public" ones it will quickly become unsustainable.

I hear you there. It's hard for me to think of a 40°C day as being a pretty hot day. If I grew up on the Celsius scale, yeah, it'd probably make sense.

Celsius makes much more sense, because you'll know when it will be freezing. And yes, 40' is very hot.

But we're going seriously off-topic now.