I really think people are sleeping on the AMOC. The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments, to say nothing of the fact that almost no European homes can handle this level of cold.
And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.
They're pointing out that stupid short-sighted reactionary tendencies on the part of the farmers is directly contributing to the problem that will make their livelihood impossible in the future. It's ironic, if nothing else.
no, he's engaging into a classical "tu queque" that adds nothing but noise to the discussion, maybe except some division between classes and pointless finger-pointing
I wish it were the case that class warfare would be sufficient to solve the climate problem. But I don’t really see any alignment between economic class and ecological consciousness where I live. Are all the poor and middle class folks walking and biking in your part of the world? I mean for sure there are some such places but in most parts of the US you’re no less likely to find a pickup in the garage of someone at the median income than a rich person.
Which is why it's a coordination problem that requires a motivated leader like the government instead of throwing our hands up and saying "gee it sure sucks that everyone has revealed they like will buy the products on the shelves".
First we have to convince people that they will be better off if they have to pay a lot more for their toy trucks. That is the step 0 that nobody seems to know how to solve. Hollering about how the oil company CEOs are evil is not going to be the thing. It's already been tried. People will nod right along until you get to, "and that's why your gasoline needs to cost $7/gallon."
Trucks are 3.4% of US GHG (~60m trucks at 3.51 megatons CO2/yr is ~211 megatons CO2/yr out of 6,266 megatons from the US total). If we never started another pickup truck ever again we're still 96.6% away from zero emissions. It's also worth saying those people would probably still drive something and the odds of that car being zero emissions is very low, so this is pretty charitable. Anyway, this kind of finger wagging--bordering on contempt--is exactly why this has become a political issue. These are collective action problems. We're not going to solve them by asking/forcing people to take tremendous individual losses, no matter how repugnant you think their way of life is.
Trucks are just an illustrative point. Substitute for whatever trivial thing it is that people like and would not be willing to give up. {Beef, air travel, fast fashion, 69 degree interiors during the summer, etc.} Each one of these things only contributes a little on their own but if you add them all up it sums to a large fraction of overall US emissions.
Also not sure where you got the 3.7% number, but light duty trucks overall contribute around 10.4%. This includes some fraction of SUVs (those with truck-like drive trains weighing over 6000 pounds GVW) and minivans.
That being said, decarbonization of the truly necessary energy consumption is also a requirement, and that is expensive too. You need to convince people that they should want to pay for it -- no the billionaires cannot pay for the whole thing, for inflation-related reasons that are too complicated to get into right now. (The basic thrust of the argument is that US construction and industrial capacity is already highly utilized, and that allocating more workers to decarbonizing will necessarily drive up the cost of everything else, regardless of who nominally pays for the work.)
69F interiors would be no problem if powered by solar. The government massively subsidizes oil, it could have been subsidizing solar for decades instead but didn't because of how powerful and profitable the oil industry is.
Nobody gives a shit how the factory that made their toy was powered. Top-down approach forcing industrial changes could nearly solve the whole problem without individuals needing to change much of anything.
But entrenched interests will propagandize and say "the hippie whackos think you shouldn't be allowed AC" (like you kinda seem to be doing, frankly) when that isn't and never has been the only option.
I am interested in your implication that European farmers would have someone other than themselves to blame for this outcome. As a whole they are at least as backwards as American farmers. They are largely deniers of climate change either as a thing altogether or as something attributable to man, or are prone to believing it helps them with longer growing seasons, and their main political activity is protesting any changes in their diesel fuel subsidies.
I remember a ted talk about climate change denial, and the speaker humanized the other parties beautifully.
On engaging with deniers, he realized that denial was the only rational choice those people had. Climate change meant that their way of life, their livelihoods, history, homes, family and more, was gone.
Disbelief was a way to have control over the impossible.
> Who do you think will MAGA blame for the consequences of climate change?
They'll blame the people measuring the temperature, just like the did with covid when they blamed the testing for the rise in infection. They are, as a whole, very stupid people who really don't have the mental flexibility required to handle nuance.
So they'll do what small-minded people always do - they'll shoot the messenger, then when that doesn't work they'll start blaming everyone who looks, lives, or believes differently from themselves.
There's no referees in politics, and no rule that anyone's positions have to be consistent. You can complain about it the entire time farmer after farmer leaves shit pile after shit pile in the highways.
I don't see any point in blaming individuals and small businesses when wealthy investors and politicians aren't even pretending not to be giddy about all the new trade routes that open as sea ice melts.
Nobody should ever adopt sustainable practices from which you only benefit when everybody else does, in which case a minority of people who didn't adopt sustainable practices also benefit. That's just bad economics.
And then there's all the wealthy hypocrites who criticize the middle class while they make weekly flights with private jets. And dont forget the coal powered data centers, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some hypocrisy there from the epstein class too.
I do kinda wish the european farmers would "declare war on the governments" so the governments can win and end this way too powerful lobby once and for all.
i get the sense that its probably overblown, sicne we've only got a couple years worth of measured data on it.
we're jumping to a catastrophe when it might just ring, and whatever the environmentalists who prioritize it qant to do about it might change something that doesnt need changing, and result in actual catastrophe when the ringing stops
I mean the collapse of the AMOC has been a hypothesized consequence of climate change for at least many decades. I was taught about it as something scientists think could happen in primary school; it's not new (tho it was framed in terms of the gulf stream, since that's the part of it which would affect Europe). Those fears were also founded on data-based climate prediction models.
"The first season there isn't European wine/cheese/olives because of climate change is the first season European farmers probably literally declare war on their governments,"
Unlikely. The government will be the only one who can bail them out.
And for some perspective, this is only one of many other huge changes that huge populations will react violently to in the next 20-50 years. Good luck to us all.