The climate change thread

[Sandman]

I dispute D because it would render humanity fat and stupid.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Az
Why is it "rise"? Why is it considered ethically superior?

Because, all things being equal, it eventually preserves more life (and more happiness even), human and non-human.

What use is being sentient if we remain selfish biological machines?

A tool of survival. duh. But besides that, what use is it to become "gardners" as you've said?

You miss the point. We already have survival. We have had survival for maybe a million years. We aren't going anywhere. If as sentient beings (and conquerers of the world) we can't alter our mindset regarding existence from that which our non-sentient ancestors had*, then it is wasted - we may as well be apes. Goodbye dignity of man.

(* or rather, behaved as if they had)

What use maintaining a diverse geosystem? It gives us something to do. Merely striving to exist is tedious, and I think this is a major problem for society.

Neither I, nor Eli, support the last option, because this option will lead to our own demise. However, not all drastically altered enviroments are unsustainable. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't change anything, it just means that we should change into other enviroments that are both sustainable, and more suitable to us.

I would agree with this, with the additional clause "and no less suitable for its original inhabitants". This may be impossible, but again I think it comes down to a fundamental disagreement over the relative value of humans.

[Immortal Wombat]

Originally posted by Sandman
I dispute D because it would render humanity fatter and stupider.

fixed
Welcome to the future.

[Flip McWho]

Eli, Az

It seems that you're missing the pleasing element of these natural resources. A lot of people get off on the fact that we have nice big beautiful rainforests and bush areas that are all nice and lovely for the occassional trip through. Basically something in nature may hold no intrinsic value besides that fact that it causes people happiness to know that it is available and there.

[Eli]

Sandman:

Originally posted by Sandman
But they're not using the same considerations. Building a home is perfectly reasonable under virtually any ethical system, whereas annihilating an entire ecosystem for some mechanical conception of utility is not.

Building a home is perfectly reasonable under any ethical system because it has to be so. An ethical system that opposes building homes will not go beyond the paper it was written on.

I didnt say that whenever people decided to build homes it was after a utilitarian man/nature "calculation". Building a home and a metropolis, if you're taking my approach to nature, uses the same system of consideration but on a different scale. While your downloads&murder example works differently.

Another analogy: A town with a historic centre. You can renovate the buildings so they have modern amenities... or bulldoze the whole lot and put up a larger shopping centre instead. The same system of considerations?

No, since the same system of considerations would've achieved an identical result. This analogy is false because you dont even work on two different objects(meadow and forest, for example).

You can have more people without using more land as well. Improved farming techniques and skyscrapers and so on. Or you can have more 'natural' farming techiques that leave less of an ecological footprint.

It would be great, since it would mean that we could increase our population even more.

Whatever technological efficiency we have, however low our ecological footprint is, D should always push towards using more land.

Year Zero. Pol Pot's plan. Your one won't be much better.

You'll need to disperse or exterminate the inhabitants of the rainforest, since they won't take kindly to their livelihoods being destroyed. So that's a nasty guerilla war right away. I suppose the remaining natives will get re-educated.

Your plan is also involves massive expenditure - subduing the natives, subduing the popular outcry, building farms for no reason, building cities for no reason and finally finding enough people to live in the money-sinks that have been created.

You're arguing against a strawman.

When I say that the rainforest should be removed and replaced with a large population of humans, I dont intend it to be done in the worst conceivable way.

Of course there is no point in a huge Manhattan Project style campaign to pave over the entire rain forest and build cities that will stay empty.
As soon as technology renders the rain forest obsolete you'll have a gradual process of removing various laws than forbit cutting it down, people(or the government) will start buying land tracts for their use, building factories or summer homes or whatever, eventually towns and cities will appear. Just like it's always done whenever humanity settles new areas.

And those CO2 converters won't come cheap, either. Let's hope they don't fail.

Of course there is no point using the CO2 converters until they become reasonably cheap, it's just another factor in the decision.

Immortal Wombat:

but again I think it comes down to a fundamental disagreement over the relative value of humans.

Yeah, I think that this is the core of our disagreement.
If you dispute D then there is no point in arguing over more specific points.

Filip McWho:

Eli, Az

It seems that you're missing the pleasing element of these natural resources. A lot of people get off on the fact that we have nice big beautiful rainforests and bush areas that are all nice and lovely for the occassional trip through. Basically something in nature may hold no intrinsic value besides that fact that it causes people happiness to know that it is available and there.

Actually Az already mentioned it earlier. Eventually we'll need to reach a compromise over how much of nature to use and how much to leave for the stuff you mentioned.

[Az]

Eli, Az

It seems that you're missing the pleasing element of these natural resources. A lot of people get off on the fact that we have nice big beautiful rainforests and bush areas that are all nice and lovely for the occassional trip through. Basically something in nature may hold no intrinsic value besides that fact that it causes people happiness to know that it is available and there.

And that's why I support having abundant preserves, etc.

We already produce more food than we use. With even better agriculture through technology, we could support more population, from smaller patches of land, and even allocate currently agricultural land to be natural preserves.

This doesn't change the basic fact that humans comes first, AT ALL!

The last sentence is the basic premise. It don't mean we have to make earth a huge pavement, because that would be unsustainable, and ultimately deeply antiutilitarian, and anti-human.

[Sandman]

Originally posted by Eli
Building a home is perfectly reasonable under any ethical system because it has to be so. An ethical system that opposes building homes will not go beyond the paper it was written on.

I didnt say that whenever people decided to build homes it was after a utilitarian man/nature "calculation". Building a home and a metropolis, if you're taking my approach to nature, uses the same system of consideration but on a different scale. While your downloads&murder example works differently.

If you break one law, break them all. If you damage one fragment of an ecosystem, destroy them all. It's that simple.

The law is an abstract concept, as is your concept of 'nature'.

No, since the same system of considerations would've achieved an identical result. This analogy is false because you dont even work on two different objects(meadow and forest, for example).

What do 'two different objects' have to do with anything? There are plenty of aesthetic and cultural considerations to take into account in both cases - not just 'land'. Any utilitarian has to, by the virtue of the fact that such things are the source of much happiness.

It would be great, since it would mean that we could increase our population even more.

Whatever technological efficiency we have, however low our ecological footprint is, D should always push towards using more land.

An actively and stridently anti-utilitarian view. Burden humanity with a load of useless subsidy-sucking farmers engaged in economically worthless activity. Why not just build pyramids or palaces or stone heads?

It's not even true that D should push humanity towards using more land, since if tech X doubles the yield of farmland, it's wasteful to keep farming marginal land.

You're arguing against a strawman.

When I say that the rainforest should be removed and replaced with a large population of humans, I dont intend it to be done in the worst conceivable way.

Of course there is no point in a huge Manhattan Project style campaign to pave over the entire rain forest and build cities that will stay empty.
As soon as technology renders the rain forest obsolete you'll have a gradual process of removing various laws than forbit cutting it down, people(or the government) will start buying land tracts for their use, building factories or summer homes or whatever, eventually towns and cities will appear. Just like it's always done whenever humanity settles new areas.

There is no 'good' way to bring your project to fruitition. The free market won't work. The natives, who presumably own their land, will not give up their way of life. And if they don't, then you will have to violently expel them. Environmentalists will buy up the land, blocking it from development. No-one with half a brain will build a factory away from the existing infrastructure.

Cities and towns normally only appear because of government activity, especially in this case, since there's no compelling economic reason to live there. You're going to have to tax everyone else to pay for something which will never pay for itself, that will just keep eating up money that could be better spent on art or science or anything.

Of course there is no point using the CO2 converters until they become reasonably cheap, it's just another factor in the decision.

It's difficult to see how anything could be cheaper than a completely upkeep-free forest that sits on infertile land that's not much good for anything else.

[Eli]

Originally posted by Sandman
If you break one law, break them all. If you damage one fragment of an ecosystem, destroy them all. It's that simple.

The law is an abstract concept, as is your concept of 'nature'.

But breaking the law is not your goal. That's why the analogy was wrong. Both building a house and building a metropolis are decisions whose ultimate goal is doing good to people. While pirating software or murder are not done for the sake of breaking the law.
So if:
A= Paving over a meadow and building a house there does more good than damage to one person and therefore it should be done.
B= Cutting down a forest and building a small city causes more good than damage to one hundred thousand people and therefore it should be done.
C= Downloading music to avoid paying for CDs and thus breaking the law.
D= Killing your wife because she's cheated on you and thus breaking the law.

Then you cant say that concluding B(supposedly unacceptable) from A(something acceptable) is the same as concluding D from C.

What do 'two different objects' have to do with anything? There are plenty of aesthetic and cultural considerations to take into account in both cases - not just 'land'. Any utilitarian has to, by the virtue of the fact that such things are the source of much happiness.

We were arguing over your download&murder analogy, I claimed that it's wrong and you brought up another analogy.
In the original there were two different objects, a meadow and a forest and you're trying to show your point by comparing them to something else.

Now, I take two different objects and apply the same system of considerations on them and see what happens.
While you, when talking about the city center, take only one object(one city center), look on two possible ways of action and ask whether they use the same system of considerations. The answer to that is obviously not since you cant use the same system on the same object twice and get different results.

There is no point in looking on the conclusions of the analogy since it's not even an analogy. The two examples simply dont compare, it's apples to oranges.

A correct analogy will be two different cities, with different circumstances. For example, one with a unique city center with great tourist attractions, etc and the other with a boring, shabby lot of old buildings that even the residents dont care about.

Or even better, two different cities with crappy city centers filled with boring, identical soviet style homes whose only claim to fame is age. But in one city there is only one such building(a meadow) while in the other there are tens of them(the forest).

An actively and stridently anti-utilitarian view. Burden humanity with a load of useless subsidy-sucking farmers engaged in economically worthless activity. Why not just build pyramids or palaces or stone heads?

Why would "more" humans neccesseraly be "useless subsidy-sucking farmers engaged in economically worthless activity"? Maybe they'll be "a new generation of great artists and scientists bringing joy to the hearts of all men"? Or "just another 10 million people working from 9 till 5 and living a regular average life"?

It's not even true that D should push humanity towards using more land, since if tech X doubles the yield of farmland, it's wasteful to keep farming marginal land.

Yes, but two generations later the population will double.

D is not a law of nature, it's a general trend than can be slowed down or even reversed at times.

There is no 'good' way to bring your project to fruitition. The free market won't work. The natives, who presumably own their land, will not give up their way of life. And if they don't, then you will have to violently expel them. Environmentalists will buy up the land, blocking it from development. No-one with half a brain will build a factory away from the existing infrastructure.

If you can invent hypothetical problems, I can invent hypothetical solutions.

What if the natives see that modern life is better and not resist? What if Bill Gates buys up the land before the environmentalists do?

What if there's a recession and population growth declines and there will be no point in building new cities? But what if there's an economical and a baby boom and you suddenly need a lot more land for people to live on and feed and get their new shiny toys from?

Cities and towns normally only appear because of government activity, especially in this case, since there's no compelling economic reason to live there. You're going to have to tax everyone else to pay for something which will never pay for itself, that will just keep eating up money that could be better spent on art or science or anything.

I'm not saying that as soon as we get the technology we'll have to run and get all that done as soon as possible, it's stupid, it's anti-utilitarian as you said. But remember D. A world with 6 billion people might not find it economical to develop that land, a world with 12 billion will probably have no other choice.

It's difficult to see how anything could be cheaper than a completely upkeep-free forest that sits on infertile land that's not much good for anything else.

When you need that land because your cities are over crowded and when 1 acre of converters, while costing money, does the job of 1000 acres of trees, it suddenly becomes economical.

[Sandman]

But breaking the law is not your goal. That's why the analogy was wrong. Both building a house and building a metropolis are decisions whose ultimate goal is doing good to people. While pirating software or murder are not done for the sake of breaking the law.

...

Yes, but it's still an illustration of why your claim that 'scale doesn't matter' is wrong. And whilst in the legal case you're not doing it for the sake of breaking the law, similarly in the case of destroying eco-systems you're not doing it for the sake of disrupting nature.

I don't particularly agree with Aristotle's virtue ethics, but the idea that it's virtuous to find the mean - in this case, balancing development with conservation, certainly has merit.

We were arguing over your download&murder analogy, I claimed that it's wrong and you brought up another analogy.

...Or even better, two different cities with crappy city centers filled with boring, identical soviet style homes whose only claim to fame is age. But in one city there is only one such building(a meadow) while in the other there are tens of them(the forest)

You are the one that brought up the forest and the meadow and I still don't know why you did. I thought you were talking about the 'object' that is your conception of nature. As for ethical systems, you can apply the same system to one thing and get different results. Example: Human life is sacred, therefore we should fight in self-defence. Human life is sacred, therefore we should NOT fight in self-defence.

Why would "more" humans neccesseraly be "useless subsidy-sucking farmers engaged in economically worthless activity"? Maybe they'll be "a new generation of great artists and scientists bringing joy to the hearts of all men"? Or "just another 10 million people working from 9 till 5 and living a regular average life"?

Yes, but two generations later the population will double.

D is not a law of nature, it's a general trend than can be slowed down or even reversed at times.

What if the natives see that modern life is better and not resist? What if Bill Gates buys up the land before the environmentalists do?

What if there's a recession and population growth declines and there will be no point in building new cities? But what if there's an economical and a baby boom and you suddenly need a lot more land for people to live on and feed and get their new shiny toys from?

I'm not saying that as soon as we get the technology we'll have to run and get all that done as soon as possible, it's stupid, it's anti-utilitarian as you said. But remember D. A world with 6 billion people might not find it economical to develop that land, a world with 12 billion will probably have no other choice.

When you need that land because your cities are over crowded and when 1 acre of converters, while costing money, does the job of 1000 acres of trees, it suddenly becomes economical.

The most economical and utilitarian solution to overpopulation is to reduce the population, not to take ever more marginal land areas under the plough. The more marginal land you take up, the greater the % of the population taken up by farming. So the average wealth of the society goes down. Not to mention the ever-increasing overheads associated with overpopulation.

You seem to be retreating from your previous position, whereby the rainforest should be destroyed to make way for farmers and the people they feed, to one of letting the market decide. That's OK with me. The population of Earth will probably start declining by about 2050, and there'll be no incentive to engage in uneconomical activities such as building farms and cities on the destroyed remains of a rainforest. Especially when you consider that tourism contributes about the same to the global economy as agriculture, and will probably have overtaken it by a substantial margin in 2050.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger

How could you tell if something else is not beneficial to us? Tangle with something you don't understand often ends up with disasters.

BINGO!

A strong biosphere is what keeps the earth habitable. F*ck with the natural world at your peril

[chequita guevara]

I'm with the Israelis.

[Eli]

Originally posted by Sandman
Yes, but it's still an illustration of why your claim that 'scale doesn't matter' is wrong. And whilst in the legal case you're not doing it for the sake of breaking the law, similarly in the case of destroying eco-systems you're not doing it for the sake of disrupting nature.

Ugh. That's why I hate using analogies to prove a point, it just turns into a useless argument about the finer points of the analogy. Can you explain why you think "scale doesn't matter" is wrong without analogies?

I don't particularly agree with Aristotle's virtue ethics, but the idea that it's virtuous to find the mean - in this case, balancing development with conservation, certainly has merit.

Well, that's what the argument is all about. I dont believe in conservation for the sake of it.

You are the one that brought up the forest and the meadow and I still don't know why you did. I thought you were talking about the 'object' that is your conception of nature. As for ethical systems, you can apply the same system to one thing and get different results. Example: Human life is sacred, therefore we should fight in self-defence. Human life is sacred, therefore we should NOT fight in self-defence.

No, that's impossible. Both the "should" and the "should not" versions are paradoxical.

The paradox comes from treating them as simple "if then" statements.
For example, if I choose to act according to "should" pronouncement and kill the aggressor it would result in violating the "assumption" of the sacredness of human life.
The same goes for the "should not" pronouncement which will get myself killed.

In reality these two views are not simple "if then" statements but have additional different assumptions. For example, you can make the "should" version consistent(or at least make the paradox harder to find ) by adding that the lives of aggressors are not sacred. You can do the same to the "should not" version by adding some sort of "turn the other cheek" philosophy.

The point is that the ethical systems are not identical, they only seem to be so because you simplified them to similar(and misleading) "if then" statements, and therefore it is not surprising that their conclusions are different too.

The most economical and utilitarian solution to overpopulation is to reduce the population, not to take ever more marginal land areas under the plough. The more marginal land you take up, the greater the % of the population taken up by farming. So the average wealth of the society goes down. Not to mention the ever-increasing overheads associated with overpopulation.

I agree that keeping the 6 billionth human alive is harder than keeping the 5 billionth, but there are two factors than need to be considered.

The first is that humans have value in themselves. So we should keep more humans than striving for 100% efficiency would allow, as long as it is not too hard.

The second is that while keeping the 6Bth human alive is harder than keeping the 5Bth, a world with 6B people offers more options for technological improvement than a world with 5B people.
In the same way that you cannot really have expert carpenters in a nomad hunter-gatherer tribe, you could not sustain, say, our electronics industry in Imperial Rome even if the technology was available.
As our science and technology improve, specialization increases and smaller worlds will suffer because of that.
Another good example would be a space program.

So while in a 6B people world it will still be harder to sustain the 6Bth person than the 5Bth person, it will be easier(or at least, not much harder) than to sustain the 5Bth person in a 5B people world.

You seem to be retreating from your previous position, whereby the rainforest should be destroyed to make way for farmers and the people they feed, to one of letting the market decide. That's OK with me.

Then either you misunderstood my original position or I explained it badly.

My original point is that anything other than humans has no intrinsic value. That all our acts should be considered only in respect to their influence on humans.

The rain forest example was meant to illustrate that in a scenario where the rainforest is no longer needed to do whatever it does now, we should not accept and act according to green arguments that assume a greater than 0 intrinsic value to nature.

There could be other, human centered arguments like those you brought up in earlier posts and they and only they are the ones that need to be considered.

I guess the misundestanding arose from my deliberate vagueness concerning the mechanisms which would be employed(whether it's the free market, a huge state project or something else). I wanted to avoid a capcom debate.

The population of Earth will probably start declining by about 2050, and there'll be no incentive to engage in uneconomical activities such as building farms and cities on the destroyed remains of a rainforest. Especially when you consider that tourism contributes about the same to the global economy as agriculture, and will probably have overtaken it by a substantial margin in 2050.

Well, that's bad. A small world misses out a lot of the fun.

[Az]

What Eli said.

[chequita guevara]

Actually, humans have no intrinsic value. Value is something we place upon ourselves. If there were no humans, the world would not be poorer for it, except from our point of view. It is therefore as logiocal for humans to place vbalue upon nature as upon themselves.

For me, nature is where we live, our home. It provides us sustenence. So it's in our best interests to protect it, cuz we can't live withtout it.

My objection to a lot of environmental devestation is that it is unnecessary. People don't need to destroy the rainforests for crop or herd land. Countries like the U.S. are agriculturally productive enough to feed everyone on the planet if conducted in a rational, planned method. It is inefficient and short-sighted to destroy wilderness that we may need and enjoy later. But that is the nature of our society.

I would also prefer less people on Earth, but only because it would make it easier to enjoy the wilderness and get a beach house.

[Odin]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
Actually, humans have no intrinsic value. Value is something we place upon ourselves. If there were no humans, the world would not be poorer for it, except from our point of view. It is therefore as logiocal for humans to place vbalue upon nature as upon themselves.

For me, nature is where we live, our home. It provides us sustenence. So it's in our best interests to protect it, cuz we can't live withtout it.

My objection to a lot of environmental devestation is that it is unnecessary. People don't need to destroy the rainforests for crop or herd land. Countries like the U.S. are agriculturally productive enough to feed everyone on the planet if conducted in a rational, planned method. It is inefficient and short-sighted to destroy wilderness that we may need and enjoy later. But that is the nature of our society.

I would also prefer less people on Earth, but only because it would make it easier to enjoy the wilderness and get a beach house.

This world needs a LOT less people, I'm thinking as low as 500 million.