Super typhoon Haiyan slams the Philippines

[notyoueither]

The best way to get around this would be to demonstrate that it is possible to have a standard of living like the developed world without high levels of carbon dioxide emissions.

Good luck with that.

[Krill]

Is Lancer dead?

[regexcellent]

The best way to get around this would be to demonstrate that it is possible to have a standard of living like the developed world without high levels of carbon dioxide emissions.

Good luck with your fantasy world.

[MrFun]

Yeah the biggest problem with carbon credit stuff is that even if we hamstrung our economy to the point where we were environmentally neutral or whatever, we'd still have to tell the Indians and the Chinese and the Africans **** you, you don't get to live in the modern world with reliable electricity and motor transport and clean water etc etc because of global warming. They're going to say **** you right back and keep on trucking, as they have every right to.

Those countries can modernize to the level that they want, in a more environmentally sustainable and responsible manner than the way United States and European countries did so, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I don't think environmentally responsible people are saying that countries such as those in Africa cannot have any type of energy for residential and economic purposes.

[regexcellent]

No, they can't, because that would be prohibitively expensive.

Dirty-ass coal power plants are still the cheapest option available for electricity, although fracking has the potential to change that. Something like a third of India's population doesn't have power or running water. The changes to life expectancy and productivity from the mechanization of farming, reliable power, and running water far far far outweigh the environmental impact.

[Dinner]

I hear the main reason for coal's decline isn't the EPA (what Republicans claim is "Obama's war on coal") and instead it is that natural gas prices have collapsed. Fracking has created a glut of cheap natural gas so it is simply cheaper to use natural gas rather than coal. Sure, EPA regulations about coal plants needing scrubbers plays part of the equation but they only raise coal plant prices by about 5% (or so I've heard) and the main bulk is that coal is now more expensive than dirt cheap natural gas so power companies are switching to the cheaper fuel which just happens to also be cleaner (no mercury, way less soot, less CO2 emissions, no acid rain, etc...).

[Aeson]

Yeah the biggest problem with carbon credit stuff is that even if we hamstrung our economy to the point where we were environmentally neutral or whatever, we'd still have to tell the Indians and the Chinese and the Africans **** you, you don't get to live in the modern world with reliable electricity and motor transport and clean water etc etc because of global warming. They're going to say **** you right back and keep on trucking, as they have every right to.

There's a lot of room for improvement of standard of living in the third world and decreased environmental impact at the same time. They aren't always mutually exclusive.

Like here ... everyone cooks by burning wood. It makes the ground less fertile over time, has a lot of other pollutants than just CO2 that are health hazards and/or greenhouse gases, destroys the forests and replaces them with grasslands over time, which harms the watershed and makes all agriculture less efficient. These things are often in a negative feedback loop, and the reason for it is people are poor and can't afford the up-front costs to do things the right way... even though it ends up costing them more over time to do it the wrong way.

Much better would be to compost the organic matter, harvest the methane, cook with the methane, fertilize with the resulting compost. If the populace were more affluent and able to cook with natural gas, they could reduce their environmental impact in their most common activity and everyone could enjoy cleaner air and better health.

Transportation here is also very inefficient. Engines often run very dirty because it's difficult/expensive to fix. Sure it would be economical over time to do so as it would save in gas and oil and extend the life of the engine, but you need that up-front money to ever do it. Another negative feedback cycle.

These types of inefficiencies and negative feedback cycles are very common, and if you spent any time in these sorts of situations you'd see how standards of living could be increased dramatically while actually reducing environmental impact.

Sure, not everyone can be one of us fat Americans driving fuel inefficient vehicles to move our lardass around one by one ... but we'd all be better off not achieving those "heights" of consumption anyways.

[regexcellent]

I hear the main reason for coal's decline isn't the EPA (what Republicans claim is "Obama's war on coal") and instead it is that natural gas prices have collapsed. Fracking has created a glut of cheap natural gas so it is simply cheaper to use natural gas rather than coal. Sure, EPA regulations about coal plants needing scrubbers plays part of the equation but they only raise coal plant prices by about 5% (or so I've heard) and the main bulk is that coal is now more expensive than dirt cheap natural gas so power companies are switching to the cheaper fuel which just happens to also be cleaner (no mercury, way less soot, less CO2 emissions, no acid rain, etc...).

The EPA has been doing everything in its power to **** up coal but yes, fracking means there's a crazy amount of natural gas available (**** you should know more about this than me aren't you a petroleum geologist?). The thing is, environmentalists hate fracking too.

A 5% increase in cost is pretty goddamn huge. That could mean the difference between being competitive and being out of business.

[notyoueither]

There's a lot of room for improvement of standard of living in the third world and decreased environmental impact at the same time. They aren't always mutually exclusive.

Like here ... everyone cooks by burning wood. It makes the ground less fertile over time, has a lot of other pollutants than just CO2 that are health hazards and/or greenhouse gases, destroys the forests and replaces them with grasslands over time, which harms the watershed and makes all agriculture less efficient. These things are often in a negative feedback loop, and the reason for it is people are poor and can't afford the up-front costs to do things the right way... even though it ends up costing them more over time to do it the wrong way.

Much better would be to compost the organic matter, harvest the methane, cook with the methane, fertilize with the resulting compost. If the populace were more affluent and able to cook with natural gas, they could reduce their environmental impact in their most common activity and everyone could enjoy cleaner air and better health.

Transportation here is also very inefficient. Engines often run very dirty because it's difficult/expensive to fix. Sure it would be economical over time to do so as it would save in gas and oil and extend the life of the engine, but you need that up-front money to ever do it. Another negative feedback cycle.

These types of inefficiencies and negative feedback cycles are very common, and if you spent any time in these sorts of situations you'd see how standards of living could be increased dramatically while actually reducing environmental impact.

Sure, not everyone can be one of us fat Americans driving fuel inefficient vehicles to move our lardass around one by one ... but we'd all be better off not achieving those "heights" of consumption anyways.

It is unpossible for billions of people to go from less than a thousand dollars per year of income to a lot more to do so while consuming less.

That's the problem that the math can't solve.

[notyoueither]

Those countries can modernize to the level that they want, in a more environmentally sustainable and responsible manner than the way United States and European countries did so, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I don't think environmentally responsible people are saying that countries such as those in Africa cannot have any type of energy for residential and economic purposes.

Nice feel good statement, now outline how it is possible.

[C0ckney]

It is unpossible for billions of people to go from less than a thousand dollars per year of income to a lot more to do so while consuming less.

That's the problem that the math can't solve.

aeson provided some concrete examples of how certain things can be changed to improve people's lives and reduce environmental impact. if you lived in the 3rd world, you'd see examples of this kind of thing too.

[Aeson]

It is unpossible for billions of people to go from less than a thousand dollars per year of income to a lot more to do so while consuming less.

That's the problem that the math can't solve.

The question isn't necessarily about the amount of consumption, and it's especially not about the monetary value of the consumption ... it's about environmental impact from consumption. Not all consumption is created equal.

There are ways we can increase consumption rather dramatically while decreasing environmental impact of consumption at the same time. Sadly both sides of the environmental debate tend towards absurd extremist positions wherein we shun the technology that can reduce environmental impact (Nuclear power, GM crops/modern farming) or simply abandon all hope before even looking at the actual issue ("OMG, 3 billion people might not continue to live in huts/shacks!" anic: )

[regexcellent]

Fundamentally they're not pulling themselves out of poverty without massive and dirty industrialization. It just won't happen. "Clean" stuff is by its nature more expensive and usually requires more technical know-how. There are shortages of qualified high-skill workers all over the third world. The magical fairytale land of clean renewable energy for poor as **** people drinking **** out of the Ganges river is a pipe dream.

There are certain individual examples of how things can be made more efficient while also reducing environmental impact. But that is not the case when you're taking people who live in darkness and squalor drinking their water out of wells filled with fecal coliform bacteria, and plowing their fields with planks of wood pulled behind draft animals. You pull them out of poverty by giving them diesel-burning tractors, building coal-fired power plants, constructing roads for gas-powered vehicles, etc.

[Aeson]

Here all the garbage is burned or just tossed. Batteries, CFLs, plastics, and perfectly good organic matter are constantly burned just to get rid of them. Metal lies around corroding away. There's no such thing as recycling. No one can afford to conceive of such a thing. Even garbage dumps are too expensive.

So you get burning piles of refuse. It's not even being burned to generate power. Just burned. Pollution a hundred years ago was maybe worse than it is now on a per-person basis in the US. Rivers caught on fire. Whole forests disappeared. We do much better now in most regards. But much of the world is still scrambling without the means to match our efficiency.

There are countless examples.

The rope used here is terrible, plastic, wears out too fast. The sacks used too. But they're cheap. So you find old remnants of plastic sacks and rope all over. That which wasn't burned of course. A high quality rope will last years and years, and be more useable.

Twine is the same thing. We're stuck using plastic twine because so far no coir industry has started up on this island. I want to do it, maybe next year I can. $2k or $3k and maybe not so many coconut husks need to be burned, or cheap plastic rope/twine brought in to eventually be burned (or clog things up).

The packaging on sachets ... compared to buying in bulk. Few can afford to buy in bulk, so everything comes in sachets. By the time you use as much product as would have been in the bulk container, you've used several times as much packaging! Not only that, but the sachet packaging is useless garbage that will only be burned. A bulk (or even normal) container may be reused for many purposes. Most of our containers we use around the house and farm were originally packaging of something we've used. But most people here can't afford to do that.

It's so out of whack, that the sachets often cost less per volume of product than the bulk. Manufacturers know that the people who buy the sachets can't afford much. The people who buy bulk can afford more. So often even more affluent consumers will avail of the sachets because it's cheaper, and thus use more packaging that has less potential for reuse. Remove abject poverty from the equation, and more sane economics will naturally decrease the environmental damage of the packaging per product volume.

(At very high levels of standard of living this flips around, and you get people being wasteful. Throwing away perfectly good items just because they can afford a new replacement. Somewhere in the middle, where people appreciate what they have and take care of it ... is where we should try to end up.)

Another example is agriculture here. I've gone over it a few times before. More land used, less production from it, more environmental harm. Not to mention the farmers living in shacks and their children raised in poverty.

Even I'm stuck in situations where I have to do things that are absurdly inefficient, just because I can't possibly afford to do it right. We truck in water now since the power is out. It may be out for a few months, we don't know yet. Water pumped from a well powered by a 3KVA generator. The pump is 1 HP, and for half a second draws 3x the running amps. So the rest of the time we're wasting most of our petrol.

A few years ago we had to truck in water for 6 months. Something on the municipal pump had burned up, and it took that long to get a replacement. A decent municipal water system costs a lot, but over time would save everyone a lot of money. But with most people living in shacks and having no disposable income there's not much chance of getting a high quality municipal water system.

So instead you have everyone pitching their own water much of the time. I probably use more power in pitching water (multicab, generator) and operator time than a decent municipal water system would take to maintain! But no one has the money to do it right.

Economy of scale ... can make things more efficient. You just won't find them developing when people live in shacks and grass huts.

[Aeson]

Fundamentally they're not pulling themselves out of poverty without massive and dirty industrialization. It just won't happen.

We're missing the boat because of this type of thinking. The US (and the West in general) is the world's supply of high quality, efficient industrial products. Instead of having the world as our customer base, we're just going to let half of it make all the mistakes we made.

"Clean" stuff is by its nature more expensive and usually requires more technical know-how. There are shortages of qualified high-skill workers all over the third world. The magical fairytale land of clean renewable energy for poor as **** people drinking **** out of the Ganges river is a pipe dream.

We could do it. It's sad to see how little imagination we have collectively.

$37k could build a greenhouse. They'd use 1/10th the land to produce the same amount of food. The greenhouse would be paid off in just a couple years and represent an income middle class (US) lifestyle to the workers.

Yah, you'd have to train them a bit. Most jobs I have to show the guys once or twice. They pick it up fast. It's not like they're stupid. They just never had a chance.

There are certain individual examples of how things can be made more efficient while also reducing environmental impact.

I could go on all day. Essentially everything that's done here could be done more efficiently, with less long-term cost, less material use, far less time/work on the part of people, and less long-term environmental impact.

The things required to do so would result in higher incomes. Those higher incomes would feed back into the world economy as more demand for our goods and services. It's win/win. (And even win for the environment in many cases.)

But that is not the case when you're taking people who live in darkness and squalor drinking their water out of wells filled with fecal coliform bacteria, and plowing their fields with planks of wood pulled behind draft animals. You pull them out of poverty by giving them diesel-burning tractors, building coal-fired power plants, constructing roads for gas-powered vehicles, etc.

Diesel burning tractors are useful. They are actually less environmentally harmful than the carabao and low yields. Please pay attention.

Coal fired power plants may make sense in some cases. But we could certainly do better.

Roads are another thing that are less environmentally harmful than the alternative. You're going to have to find some other example to hang your "give up before we even try" hat on.