We are still screwed: the coming climate disaster

No, because carbon emission is not fundamentally driven by inefficiencies in how many dollars it takes to make food; it's driven by there being no price on carbon emissions.

Other than that, all of your assertions are "well maybe this will work" highly controversial simple-model economics.

By itself, yes, but the idea If you enough people do them there's a social opinions angle where it becomes a lot easier to coordinate and get political change pushed has some merit.

Trying to impose "reasonable" solutions which contradict basic human nature from above will be no more successful in this century than it was in the past, and I suspect trying would lead to similar conclusions - the need for a vanguard, the suppression of basic liberties and a lot of gulags and firing squads.

The same way "restricting ability to dump poison into the water" was a contradiction of basic human nature, I guess.

Basic environmental regulations along the lines of "we do this or company A dumps toxic crap into lake and people die" is a tad different than essentially abandoning capitalism in the name of a threat most people don't even understand.

I don't recall "abandon capitalism" being in the "tax carbon and go nuclear and renewable" fairly-cheap solution.

I'm sorry I assumed you knew that, like all sane people, I am on board with taxing carbon emissions or regulating their output. I don't care which, it's sound policy to force generators of negative externalities to compensate others for their action. Even Friedman was on board with government doing that kind of stuff.

No, my assertions are standard economics. You won't find anyone in the field -- ok maybe you will this year since a number of economists have gone batshit crazy -- who disputes that greater trade liberalization is a good thing on net, and that more efficient agriculture is better than letting shit like this happen:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...s-politicians-steal-14-5-billion-of-food.html


All sectors contribute fairly equally to emissions barring the outsize role of energy. More competition (with a carbon tax that I assumed was implied because duuuuuuuuuuuuuuh) will mean a reduction in emissions. Do you really dispute the importance of competition and ensuring disruptive new entrants? Or are you just fussin because I didn't explicitly call for a carbon tax.

I mean the EPA
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/science/earth/epa-emissions-rules-backed-by-court.html

won their fight, so we've got regulatory oversight of carbon emissions as a thing by an agency that gives a shit about it if the Pres ever lets them go through with it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/s...n-epa-rule-on-cross-state-pollution.html?_r=1

This is just an interesting article.

1) There is a large number of ways to reduce carbon emissions.
2) One of them is lowering carbon emissions from the agriculture sector
3) One of them - which is controversial from any angle other than "well it'll increase average will being with a completely unspecified effect on distribution and second order effects" - is to massively increase international trade in agriculture.

And two and three are, you know, sort of linked.

Agriculture was hardly the only thing I talked about. You'll note -- if you peek through my replies -- that I mentioned every single one of those other sectors and ways we could improve their efficiency that are pretty much bog standard so long as you're not a locavore with delusions of composting.

I can't speak for the European model, but here in Canada we overwhelmingly rejected the environmentalism of Stephane Dion and soon after a majority to a man whose motto might as well be "drill baby, drill". I would argue that oilsands development and resource exploitation in general reflects our economic model - produce goods (in this case energy) for which the demand is effectively infinite, and in so doing generate wealth not just directly for those who control the resource being exploited but indirectly for the country as a whole. That wealth stimulates our consumption of other goods and services, and that is the engine which drives our economy. To not exploit such resources, to instead promote less consumption and less efficient energy usage* does not make sense within our economic system. This of course is true for the Americans as well, except multiplied many times over.

* You could make a case for nuclear power if it could be considered purely in terms of efficiency, but in light of last year's disaster that seems even less realistic to me as a matter of public policy.

I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about has to do with anything.

People die constantly from routine resource extraction. Coal alone does more damage, both to people and the environment, than all of the non-Chernobyl nuclear plant failures in history.

Nuclear fuel can be reprocessed and reused* to such an extent that waste nearly becomes a non-issue...and that's just using current breeder reactor tech. Add in thorium reactors and you can directly use 'waste' from Uranium/Plutonium/etc. plants as your 'spark plug' for the subcritical thorium.

*Unless you live in a country which bans reprocessing because nukes. Like the USA.

I'm just trying to say that I don't believe environmentalism fits well within a capitalist economic model. How do you convince Alberta to abandon oil sands development when there is endless demand for what they can develop and sell? The science may be clear, but the consumption drive is fundamental to our economy, and it's driven by resource exploitation.

Of course, but public policy isn't just driven by facts, but public perception. After the Fukushima disaster I think it's unrealistic to expect that there will be much public support for nuclear power.

There's endless demand for what they sell because no one has to pay the externalities for all the carbon emission. As soon as that happens, problem solved.

James Hansen says that initiating a runaway Venus-style greenhouse warming effect on Earth is a real possibility.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/AGUBjerknes_20081217.pdf

I don't know how plausible it is - he's a Real Scientist (tm) but I don't feel qualified to evaluate his argument, and I haven't seen any counter-arguments beyond the kind of dismissive "that's so extreme that it can't be true" banalities that were advanced when I mentioned this on The Other Forum. Nonetheless, based on what I've read, I'd call it a real but remote possibility - a "worst of all worst case scenarios". Combine accelarated burning of known stores of fossil fuels with a PETM event and a reduction in stratospheric sulfur aerosols (when we run out of coal to burn) and pessimistic assumptions about the size of the effects of all these and you get an outcome which really does end life on this planet, not just human life.

A less extreme scenario is that we radically reduce the carrying capacity of the Earth for human life - even if it were reduced to 4bn or thereabouts it would precipitate a global catastrophe that would put every other historical catastrophe put together in the shade.

I may be wrong about either of these scenarios being in the "plausible" range of what is predicted by the scientific evidence, and I am open to being persuaded - with evidence, please! - that I am wrong. But if I'm right, then the "costs" of our present course of action go beyond what can be accounted for with a dollar number, no matter how large.

I would just like to point out that, the deaths of billions of people aside, coffee is in danger.

That's right, extinct. Do we really care about the fate of the Human race if there is no coffee? I'll answer that for you, no.

Hell, if you told me that in order to save coffee we'd need to doom the planet, I'd take that deal. Save both? Win fucking Win. As long as we don't start until around 11am.

Who's no?

I clicked "like," but I really, really don't like. :(

THIS SHIT NEEDS ACTION, LIKE, NOW.

Coffee should be the wake-up call we all need!

But there's worse to come--- chocolate is threatened!!

http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/10/global-warming-will-make-chocolate-luxury-item/

The study is about indigenous coffee, not domesticated stuff. According to a Kona coffee grower who responded to this article in the r/science thread the indigenous coffee is horrible and slutty and gives terrible diseases to the domesticated coffee.

It's quite likely that the domesticated stuff would either be engineered to deal with the changes or greenhoused.

The article points out, in the second paragraph, that wild Arabica is important not because we want to drink it, but because the genetic diversity that it provides is a huge help in fighting pests and disease in crop coffee. It additionally points out that although crop coffee growers can somewhat combat changing climate conditions by relocating growing areas, changing climate is still likely to have a huge effect on yields and the taste of crop coffee.

Terriore is a big part of coffee. Pretty much every single-origin coffee is made from the same species of bean; the wide variety of flavors all come from where the coffee is grown. You can't just move it all into greenhouses. Well, you could, but what you produce there isn't going to be anything like what is produced in the current growing areas. It is certainly possible that many of the unique varieties of coffee that we have today could disappear forever. No more Kenya AA, no more Hacienda la Minita, no more Tanzanian Peaberry... and no more Kona.

Just tell me who I have to kill and point me in the right direction.

Like, about four billion people long.

I know you think reddit is the best source of information on the planet, but this is one of the reasons you should apply your critical thinking skills equally as strongly to what you read there as to the posts you read here.

Arabica plants are incredibly fragile, finicky, bitchy things that, if aren't out-right killed by climate change, might start rendering beans that taste bad enough to make us wish they had been. They are that sensitive. It would take years of development to engineer a hybrid arabica/robusta plant that contained the desirable traits from both, probably starting today and ending sometime around when naturally occurring wild Arabica died out from climate change, and then you're lookng at deploying a patented plant product on a global scale, one that won't render product for nearly half a decade, when it does it'll render enough to last Ben Sones or myself a week (1lb/year yield, and that's if it isn't lowered by climate change, even with the engineering), before you will even see if it fails the taste test en masse, let alone if it fails to adapt properly.

GMOs or otherwise "engineered" plants are the solution to a lot of things, and I am sure it will be the answer to the coffee crisis if it comes to it, but acting as if it is as easy as engineering a new soybean and then letting it rip is incredibly naive. That Kona farmer should know better.

When I criticize an article on a study, it's because I read through the abstract and at least poked at the paper. Also I link the abstract and paper.

Abstract:

Paper link: http://www.plosone.org/article/info...RI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0047981.g006

Relevant section from paper:

Note how this paper is about farming in Ethiopia. Note how extinction never comes up, and that the big claim is that arabica is climate sensitive. Coffee quality does, but it's difficult for anyone to out and out declare that X will happen because Y when the human element is included. The two of us can bloviate about how successful or otherwise rolling out a new crop variant would be, but I honestly have no idea about that shit and I kind of doubt you do either.

This guy does!

http://www.reddit.com/user/KonaEarth

Here's the coffee farmer. Feel free to poke through his comments to get at what he thinks about the topic. He's got a climate denier bit in his submission history that sucked, but also an IAmA (meaning one of the mods/admins of IAmA verified it all) about farming coffee:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/alful/iama_kona_coffee_farmer_i_used_to_be_a_computer/

So he believes stupid shit but also isn't full of shit. And he's engaging in light SEO to get people to buy his coffee online since that's how he makes a living. It's a different coffee variety, but I'd bet dollars to donuts there are shared elements. And he also mentions being worried about climate change. So there's that!

Finally, I was being silly which is why I called the coffee slutty.

tl;dr DO NOT FUCK WITH ME I WILL SCIENCE YOU IN THE BUTT AND DEFEND THE HONOURE OF REDDIT!

Aeon is a slutty contrarian who gives diseases to 70% of the world's penguins.

We deserve to lose coffee from the planet at this rate. The irony is, where global warming is concerned, this might be what gets people to wake up and....

Ah crap....better switch to drinking tea.

I've been trying to find a caffeine bearing plant I can grow in the Central Valley of CA. Stevia is "ok" for a sugar substitute and grows here, along with honey, but so far no dice on caffeine. Chocolate either, other than "chocolate" mint.

Stealing this line for various purposes.

Ha. I don't drink coffee at all so bring it on. I will rule over you all!

If you think an unhappy population lashes out at it's rulers, you should see what a population with a wicked caffeine headache will do.

Fortunately, we'll all be dead by then.

Theda Skocpol wrote a 140 page report on what went wrong with cap and trade.

If that's too long for you to read (and I don't blame you; I'm just skimming it) there's this interview with Brad Plumer, where he discusses the highlights. Especially interesting is the comparison between the failed process to pass cap and trade vs. the success in passing Obamacare. Short version:
1) The people behind Cap and Trade were focused on building a bipartisan coalition and were having success....
2) Until 2007 when the GOP electorate took a hard right turn against any and all environmental regulation.
3) In 2009 the inability to attract any GOP members of Congress to a cap and trade bill threw them for a loop...
4) At which point infighting amongst various pro-environment groups led to failure. Contrast with Obamacara, wherein the various grassroots stakeholders were able to put aside their differences and hold their nose for a compromised bill.