what does my sudden dive into climate modeling tell me about my Global Green Communism math?
The planet is warmer because of human activity, and not only because of our CO2 emissions. Humans emit other kinds of greenhouse gases, some of which never existed on earth before, some of which will remain in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years. We've also affected land use in ways that warm the planet, because we've taken over so much of the land for our own purposes (and this is still ongoing, such as in the Amazon). Just one example of many -- cultivating rice changes the land surface in ways that increase methane emissions (another greenhouse gas). Although most climate activists are trying to limit our warming to 2 degrees C, as compared to pre-industrial times, humans probably warmed the planet during pre-industrial times also, by about as much as we've warmed the planet since the Industrial Age began. We've already busted the 2 degree cap over the lifetime of our species, although we've done only half of that within the past 200 years.
By focusing so much on trying to model the effects of CO2, I was putting aside a lot of other ways that humans affect the climate and other species. But that's how science works, you try to isolate one variable so you can measure the effects of changing that one variable. Except in the real world, we cannot do that with greenhouse gases and all the other ways humans are changing the climate -- we're simultaneously doing all of the above, at rates that continually change. All of these variables interact with each other in ways that are terribly difficult to model precisely.
-----
My Global Green Communism math assumed that we needed to get to net zero on CO2 (even though this is only one of many factors), so I assumed a world that gave up fossil fuels entirely, and assumed that our global GDP would thereby fall by the percentage of global energy production from fossil fuels. Somewhere around 82% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. So, presume we've reduced GDP by 82%, then share the remainder equally among the entire global population.
In a way, I'm doing what all the other climate scientists and activists are doing -- I'm assuming that I can pluck a goal out of the sky (net zero CO2) and then get everybody to go along with it, when the reality is ever more emissions (and ever more humans). But I've piled a few extra utopian goals on top of reducing emissions, such as a global democracy movement that, after establishing a World Parliament, elects a government that implements a Universal Basic Income. I don't actually believe this will happen, but in trying to set a long-term goal for my own future, I pretend that all of the above happened -- what would I be left with? $2,200 per year to live on, including government services and capital investments -- typically take-home wages are only about half of per-capita GDP.
Meanwhile I've also indulged my Zero Population fantasy, that if we could voluntarily cut population by 99% then we wouldn't need to worry about trashing the planet or not. By having no kids of my own, and providing donations to contraception and abortion providers, I've worked toward that goal. Again, assuming I can pluck a goal out of the sky and then get everybody to go along with it.
Part of me knows that I wouldn't actually be able to live on $2,200/year, but it could be an interesting game to see how far I could cut my own living standards before I began to rebel against the game. So far 10% hasn't caused me any trouble at all. Next year I'll try 15%. But this has also doubled as a way to prepare for retirement, when my income will have to decrease anyway.
-----
All of these climate models and emissions goals are imaginary, utopian. Sure, a lot of people are trying to achieve them in a coordinated process. But a lot of people have tried to achieve other kinds of utopian goals in the past. How has that worked out? World peace? Getting rid of nuclear weapons? International socialism?
But I wanted to articulate an alternative that isn't usually on the ballot when people line up to vote. What if we really wanted to reverse the human domination that is overwhelming the planet and other species? What would it take? Not "living within our means", which some people think we could do with a lower number of billions of humans. But living with a negligible effect on the rest of the planet. Not driving other species extinct, not changing the climate, and nobody grabbing more for themselves than anybody else gets.
-----
Each major human technological advance has also become a trap, because our descendants found they couldn't go back. After agriculture, we couldn't go back to hunting and gathering. After the rise of machines, we couldn't do without them. After the rise of medicine, we couldn't do without doctors and drugs. After the rise of computers, we couldn't do without them. Now the Internet. When have we ever voluntarily given up a major technology? We can't because they make our lives too much easier, to the point where most of us couldn't survive without them. We couldn't go back to a hunter/gatherer society now, there's at least 100x too many of us to survive that way, maybe 1000x.
That's ... my point with my Global Green Communism. People in the US couldn't live on $2,200/year. Even though that would be fair -- switching immediately to a Net Zero economy and then sharing the remaining production equally. I think my point has always been that we cannot possibly do it, that nobody would join me in this quest. We're stuck here. And not only the US, most of the world lives on more than $2,200/year -- about 160 countries do better than $2,200/year.
Is there a single country in the world whose government has officially decided to stop economic growth? Some on the Left blame capitalism for the never-ending growth game, but socialist countries want to grow their economies also. The Green Party's Green New Deal doesn't say we'll cut living standards to live within our planetary means, nope, the Green New Deal promises both a Net Zero economy and an Economic Bill of Rights, including free health care, higher wages, free college, affordable housing, effective mass transit -- we'll increase living standards while somehow also living within our planetary means.
So we engage in a global conspiracy to expand low-carbon energy production while continuing to expand high-carbon energy production. This way everybody gets a bit more stuff than before, and we fail to solve the problem.
-----
My Global Green Communism math was always arbitrary. Was always meant to make a point -- that we have a fucking long way to go to reach a Net Zero economy, and along the way we'd need to give up economic growth as a goal. We can't have a Net Zero economy without replacing fossil fuels, and replacing them is a zero-sum game. At the very least we have to pause economic growth until we've finished replacing 82% of our energy production. Otherwise we're chasing a moving target, we'll never get there.
And was always meant to make another point -- that the industrialized world is implicitly expecting the rest of the planet to stay poor, so that we can stay rich. To both build a Net Zero economy, and bring the rest of the world up to EU/US living standards ... ... doing the first of these two is difficult enough, but how do we bring along the rest of the world at the same time? So far a global Net Zero economy would only provide $2,200 per year per person. That's how far away we are. Right now a global Net Zero economy would only provide 3% of the current US living standard to each person, if we shared the production fairly. We'd have to increase low-carbon energy production by 33x just to keep the US flat, if we were to bring the rest of the world up to our living standard. How long would this take? Would the US be willing to have a flat economy, 0% GDP growth, for as long as it took to expand low-carbon energy production by 3300%? Nope, never.
-----
So what's the alternative? I never expected my utopia to come true. Does that mean I give up? I find this utopian dream has given me a path to follow, for a while, until I cannot follow it anymore. But this path has given me a sense of meaning. Some people personify their utopian dreams, they imagine God, or Gods, or Gods and Goddesses, imaginary beings who have created a perfect afterlife and have prescribed rules for humans to follow to enter that perfection. Some people wrestle with doubt and faith, perhaps ultimately realizing that their chosen God may not actually exist, but they persist in their faith because they've come to rely on it. They cannot face a life without faith. A life without rules, without a path forward.
Is this what I've done? Have I adjusted to my Global Green Communism like our society has adjusted to the Internet, to the point where I cannot face a life without it? I'll follow this path because I don't know what I would do otherwise. Somebody has to voluntarily reduce consumption or we're not fixing this. We're probably not fixing this anyway, but somebody has to try. I cannot face a life in which I do not even try.
This is how I nudge the universe.
By focusing so much on trying to model the effects of CO2, I was putting aside a lot of other ways that humans affect the climate and other species. But that's how science works, you try to isolate one variable so you can measure the effects of changing that one variable. Except in the real world, we cannot do that with greenhouse gases and all the other ways humans are changing the climate -- we're simultaneously doing all of the above, at rates that continually change. All of these variables interact with each other in ways that are terribly difficult to model precisely.
-----
My Global Green Communism math assumed that we needed to get to net zero on CO2 (even though this is only one of many factors), so I assumed a world that gave up fossil fuels entirely, and assumed that our global GDP would thereby fall by the percentage of global energy production from fossil fuels. Somewhere around 82% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. So, presume we've reduced GDP by 82%, then share the remainder equally among the entire global population.
In a way, I'm doing what all the other climate scientists and activists are doing -- I'm assuming that I can pluck a goal out of the sky (net zero CO2) and then get everybody to go along with it, when the reality is ever more emissions (and ever more humans). But I've piled a few extra utopian goals on top of reducing emissions, such as a global democracy movement that, after establishing a World Parliament, elects a government that implements a Universal Basic Income. I don't actually believe this will happen, but in trying to set a long-term goal for my own future, I pretend that all of the above happened -- what would I be left with? $2,200 per year to live on, including government services and capital investments -- typically take-home wages are only about half of per-capita GDP.
Meanwhile I've also indulged my Zero Population fantasy, that if we could voluntarily cut population by 99% then we wouldn't need to worry about trashing the planet or not. By having no kids of my own, and providing donations to contraception and abortion providers, I've worked toward that goal. Again, assuming I can pluck a goal out of the sky and then get everybody to go along with it.
Part of me knows that I wouldn't actually be able to live on $2,200/year, but it could be an interesting game to see how far I could cut my own living standards before I began to rebel against the game. So far 10% hasn't caused me any trouble at all. Next year I'll try 15%. But this has also doubled as a way to prepare for retirement, when my income will have to decrease anyway.
-----
All of these climate models and emissions goals are imaginary, utopian. Sure, a lot of people are trying to achieve them in a coordinated process. But a lot of people have tried to achieve other kinds of utopian goals in the past. How has that worked out? World peace? Getting rid of nuclear weapons? International socialism?
But I wanted to articulate an alternative that isn't usually on the ballot when people line up to vote. What if we really wanted to reverse the human domination that is overwhelming the planet and other species? What would it take? Not "living within our means", which some people think we could do with a lower number of billions of humans. But living with a negligible effect on the rest of the planet. Not driving other species extinct, not changing the climate, and nobody grabbing more for themselves than anybody else gets.
-----
Each major human technological advance has also become a trap, because our descendants found they couldn't go back. After agriculture, we couldn't go back to hunting and gathering. After the rise of machines, we couldn't do without them. After the rise of medicine, we couldn't do without doctors and drugs. After the rise of computers, we couldn't do without them. Now the Internet. When have we ever voluntarily given up a major technology? We can't because they make our lives too much easier, to the point where most of us couldn't survive without them. We couldn't go back to a hunter/gatherer society now, there's at least 100x too many of us to survive that way, maybe 1000x.
That's ... my point with my Global Green Communism. People in the US couldn't live on $2,200/year. Even though that would be fair -- switching immediately to a Net Zero economy and then sharing the remaining production equally. I think my point has always been that we cannot possibly do it, that nobody would join me in this quest. We're stuck here. And not only the US, most of the world lives on more than $2,200/year -- about 160 countries do better than $2,200/year.
Is there a single country in the world whose government has officially decided to stop economic growth? Some on the Left blame capitalism for the never-ending growth game, but socialist countries want to grow their economies also. The Green Party's Green New Deal doesn't say we'll cut living standards to live within our planetary means, nope, the Green New Deal promises both a Net Zero economy and an Economic Bill of Rights, including free health care, higher wages, free college, affordable housing, effective mass transit -- we'll increase living standards while somehow also living within our planetary means.
So we engage in a global conspiracy to expand low-carbon energy production while continuing to expand high-carbon energy production. This way everybody gets a bit more stuff than before, and we fail to solve the problem.
-----
My Global Green Communism math was always arbitrary. Was always meant to make a point -- that we have a fucking long way to go to reach a Net Zero economy, and along the way we'd need to give up economic growth as a goal. We can't have a Net Zero economy without replacing fossil fuels, and replacing them is a zero-sum game. At the very least we have to pause economic growth until we've finished replacing 82% of our energy production. Otherwise we're chasing a moving target, we'll never get there.
And was always meant to make another point -- that the industrialized world is implicitly expecting the rest of the planet to stay poor, so that we can stay rich. To both build a Net Zero economy, and bring the rest of the world up to EU/US living standards ... ... doing the first of these two is difficult enough, but how do we bring along the rest of the world at the same time? So far a global Net Zero economy would only provide $2,200 per year per person. That's how far away we are. Right now a global Net Zero economy would only provide 3% of the current US living standard to each person, if we shared the production fairly. We'd have to increase low-carbon energy production by 33x just to keep the US flat, if we were to bring the rest of the world up to our living standard. How long would this take? Would the US be willing to have a flat economy, 0% GDP growth, for as long as it took to expand low-carbon energy production by 3300%? Nope, never.
-----
So what's the alternative? I never expected my utopia to come true. Does that mean I give up? I find this utopian dream has given me a path to follow, for a while, until I cannot follow it anymore. But this path has given me a sense of meaning. Some people personify their utopian dreams, they imagine God, or Gods, or Gods and Goddesses, imaginary beings who have created a perfect afterlife and have prescribed rules for humans to follow to enter that perfection. Some people wrestle with doubt and faith, perhaps ultimately realizing that their chosen God may not actually exist, but they persist in their faith because they've come to rely on it. They cannot face a life without faith. A life without rules, without a path forward.
Is this what I've done? Have I adjusted to my Global Green Communism like our society has adjusted to the Internet, to the point where I cannot face a life without it? I'll follow this path because I don't know what I would do otherwise. Somebody has to voluntarily reduce consumption or we're not fixing this. We're probably not fixing this anyway, but somebody has to try. I cannot face a life in which I do not even try.
This is how I nudge the universe.