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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28959 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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A New York Times article currently entitled “The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky” (modern NYT headlines tend to shift with the winds of likes and comments) discusses the innovative corporations and world governments looking to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for profit. On its surface, this is a potentially radical net-positive accelerant for humanity driven by its financial upside, in the same tradition as asteroid mining, child tax credits, and electric vehicle subsidies.

The comment section gives us a valuable insight into how the online progressive retiree set (many of them early architects and evangelists of the modern Left) see this news within the context of their worldview… and here it’s particularly interesting. I want to highlight one comment that’s emblematic of the general tenor there:

People want this to work because they don’t want to do the hard work of changing. That’s a mistake. Aside from the elusiveness of the technology itself, the current fossil fuels system is literally destroying our planet. We have to have the willpower to stop doing that.

Here we see plainly spoken a bedrock concept underlying many political ideologies that rarely breaches the surface: apocalyptic socio-political shibboleths cannot be resolved without the perceived antichrist(s) paying the cost. The motte: “There is a crisis all humanity should unite in resolving…” The bailey: “… only insofar as it upsets people I dislike.”

This response also seems to chalk up another point in favor of the “modern-politics-as-religion” thesis, with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation. Those who circumvent this process are perceived with the equivalent spite of their ancestors imagining a sinner who never feels the fires of hell (or Salem, as it were). As a great Mottizen (@CrispyFriedBarnacles - thanks @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola) once reminded us, “Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban.”

with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation.

The irony here being of course that they themselves are doing the opposite. They support changes that aren't effective at solving the issues at hand but are in line with their aesthical preferences, gives pork to their friends, hurts their outgroup and paints themselves as saviours. This is obviously one of the easy ways.

A pharisaical association, then?

Internet archive doesn't seem to have captured the whole page btw.

Copy pasting my response from a few days ago:

the socially agreed upon consequences

Some people fantasize that such consensus views exist. They then act cheated when someone mitigates or entirely avoids negative consequences. As though cosmic justice has been subverted.

I think this is a real thing. People have some internal sense of justice in which the wages of bad behavior is suitable negative consequences. And then they notice people engaging in "bad" behavior and working sensibly to avoid bad outcomes, like gay men taking PrEP or something, and get offended. The wicked were supposed to get their just rewards, but now some technological solution dodged it.

This article is enormously relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-chump-effect

Maybe it's some deep-rooted primitive instinct. Defectors in the tribe are supposed to end up dead, lest they end up destroying the tribe.

In the prep case it's "wait so I'm paying $20,000 a year just so a gay guy can have unprotected sex for free, but the same people who mandated that are talking about using insurance costs to make driving unaffordable for me?

Insurance and government action have moral hazards it makes perfect sense to get upset about. Like if the government pays a guy to buy solar panels made from coal in China, then pays him a subsidy to make power with them, then pays him to suck the CO2 from the chinese coal out of the air with that power.
Every step of that technological solution makes me poorer for no benefit to anyone except the parasite.

wait so I'm paying $20,000 a year just so a gay guy can have unprotected sex for free, but the same people who mandated that are talking about using insurance costs to make driving unaffordable for me?

To what extent is the health insurance company allowed to tell you what you can and can't do?

Let's assume, arguendo, that eating red meat and animal fat really does cause disease and increase costs. Does the insurance company have a right to drop you for eating red meat or are they obligated to pay for your quadruple bypass?

But we're getting it both ways. They're pushing for "discouraging" activities they oppose while forcing us to subsidize the health risks of activities they support.
Smoking makes your insurance go way up because they specifically allowed it in the ACA, but doing meth and raw dog anal with 20 strangers a week doesn't.

If they get their single payer option you can bet they'll be charging extra for smoking, meat, guns, and weightlifting, but not for obesity, fentanyl, weed, and 1000 man gangbangs at the national bugchaser convention. And it will all be decided by Science™, so disagreeing will make you a science-denying conspiracy theorist.

meat, guns, and weightlifting

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner and determine it is almost nothing. They'll pass that miniscule cost onto their customers. It's not like they're going to fact check you or drop your health insurance because you had two servings of beef rather than one.

To the degree they care about weight lifting or martial arts or other masculine forms of health, I would think they would like it because it makes you cost them less if you are generally healthier.

But sure, they can't discriminate against raw-dogging enthusiasts but can against cigar enthusiasts, so it is a little unfair. But it isn't some insidious plan to punish you for being a stereotypical conservative guy with a weight bench and some guns.

I did say "when they get their public option", which will not be administered by people trying to make a profit. And of course even if it is some public-private abomination like the university system, we've already seen how willing they are to leave consumer money on the table in exchange for other benefits.

Point taken about the lack of profit motive letting government agencies pursue ideological goals rather than finding ways to serve customers while making a profit.

Do you think this public option will refuse to treat me because I own guns and eat meat? What do you think they'll do, have an ideological test to be allowed to buy in and get their medical care?

Opaque metrics filtered through a layer of "equity pricing" for who pays what, justified through procedural manipulation of cost benefit studies. Literally just the usual "make gun and car owners pay for the costs of their abhorrent lifestyles" applied to literally everything.

Isn't it obvious how this sort of thing will work? We've seen so many examples of how this, I can already write the headlines for it (and the National Review's objections as they stumble along behind history, feebly mumbling "slow down")

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner any determine it is almost nothing.

You're talking about things that would happen in a free market economy. Health insurance... is not.

These are private companies and they employ actuaries to do real work. Short of government mandates forcing them to discriminate against stereotypical conservative men, they won't proactively harm their business by dropping you as a customer without financial reasons or charging you wrong.

Sir, over the last decade we've seen private companies ban, debank, and blacklist their customers on several occasions. Doing so either does not hurt their business, or in the event it does, they don't care about it.

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But we're getting it both ways. They're pushing for "discouraging" activities they oppose while forcing us to subsidize the health risks of activities they support.

This doesn't sound like you're getting it both ways. It sounds like it's just one way - that you can engage in just about any activity (except smoking I guess, although I have never revealed my smoking status to my insurer) without insurers taking action.

The hypotheticals are closer to a persecution fantasy than reality.

To be honest, this is a perspective I have never really understood. It just goes at right-angles to me - I don't understand the moralisation of climate change. Kevin Rudd famously said that climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation, and this lens just doesn't make much sense to me.

From where I'm standing, climate change seems like a pretty straightforward engineering problem. There isn't really a hard normative debate about it - we mostly all agree on what we want in terms of the environment. The issue is just how to achieve it, and that seems like a technical problem par excellence.

We can debate culpability or responsibility all we want, and that's fine, but that's also largely irrelevant to solving the technical issue. We can talk about moral transformation or changing attitudes ("the hard work of changing"), but that is also largely irrelevant to solving the issue. It's a technological problem! The value of changing social or political attitudes is only insofar as they might help us solve the technological problem! That's it!

It makes me feel like a lunatic - or else, everybody else is.

It's also an economical and political problem. How are we funding the (technological) solution and who should bear the cost?

Depending on the technical solution the economic and political issues can be minor or major.

Doing carbon capture makes it all a major issue, since that will cost trillions or tens of trillions.

Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions. Which is within the funding range of some existing US billionaires.

Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions.

Do you have a good source for the costs of geo-engineering? Unfortunately, currently the field looks like an absolute shitshow to me. It's at the same time full of taboo and hype, riddled with known/unknown unknowns and (to my knowledge), foundational research is sparse and actually engineering is non-existent.

I'm especially interested in details like the delivery mechanism in stratospheric SO2 seeding. What does the engineering look like? Minor altitude-boosting redesigns of the 737, or is it a from-scratch design of a "U2-cargo"? Do we build 100 or 10 000 new airframes?

Same with marine cloud brightening. Is that 1000 drone boats with a snow-cannon spraying sea water, or 100 000 platforms each carrying a gigantic stack-effect chimney?

Wikipedia article on the topic seems fine. A while back there was a big back and forth between Bryan Caplan and some others on this topic. I've rarely seen anyone question that this is one of the cheapest methods. Usually the complaints are along the lines of "side effects"

Yeah, I don't doubt that it's comparatively cheap.

"Tens of billions" is just... extremely cheap. Since stratospheric seeding involves aircraft development, billions go fast. Both Airbus and Boeing spent between $5B and $10B on their last couple of civilian airframes (and that price just gets you a prototype and a manufacturing line). And since those future stratospheric seeders need to both fly a lot and fly unusually high, I wouldn't expect a civil development budget, I'd expect a military budget - those tend to run 2 orders of magnitude higher (but that gets you a couple hundred airframes and their continued maintenance).

And yes, I consider side effects part of those unknown unknowns.

Two other options:

Artillery and rockets.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but yes tens of billions is cheap when carbon emissions reductions are measured in tens of trillions of dollars

Edit: rereading, it doesn't seem like sarcasm. I do think the estimates are fair. The cost of carbon supression and sequestration is also an estimate. And we are ultimately comparing different climate change proposals.

The costs of global warming have been much debated over, but IPCC estimates of damages overlap with solutions like "do nothing and let economic growth solve the problem".

Everything is in orders of magnitude for these comparisons.

No sarcasm, just a misunderstanding. I assumed we're talking total mitigation costs, you almost certainly were talking about the yearly budget of the project.

I agree, with $10B per year you can design a new airframe, build a few hundred and then fly them around the clock, resulting in a few dozen megatons lifted to the stratosphere per year. That certainly would get some results.

To be fair, this sort of on-its-face won’t work. It’s just basic high school thermodynamics.

The carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere is increasing precisely because creating that carbon dioxide produced usable energy for us. You can’t un-make that carbon dioxide without spending at least as much energy as you put in (and in fact, substantially more).

So either you’re going to produce even more CO2 than you’re eradicating, or you’re simply pursuing non-fossil-fuel energy sources entirely—which would simply have not produced the CO2 in the first place if you’d just done that from the start.

The only way any of this makes any "sense" is if you get the government to write you a check to perform what ultimately amounts to fake work, in the most fundamental sense. Which probably means that’s exactly what will happen.

Yes, but, hypothetically this could let us burn fuel in ships and planes and land vehicles and then remove the carbon with large facilities that don't burn fossil fuels. Not that a coal burning power plant next to a decarbonization facility makes any thermodynamic sense.

Isn't it pretty straightforward that it's hard to turn things from diffuse to concentrated? We've done the energy-releasing transformation turning oil into gas, now it's diffuse and a pain to turn back into oil or any other substance?

With cheap fusion I guess you could brute force it and drain the skies. I guess there's some technical level where he might not be totally right but it seems substantively right.

In theory you're not backing all the way down the entropy graph to create a synthetic fossil fuel, you only want to go as far as some compound where carbon can exist as a solid. But yeah, in practical terms with realistic losses it's obviously not energy positive to burn gasoline to run a generator that pulls the carbon back out of the air.

One potential use is if they could do it at very low capital cost (but high energy cost) would be sucking up all the waste electricity from solar and wind. You could site it anywhere, so putting them at key interchanges where you can exploit transmission bottlenecks for cheap electricity would make them free to run much of the time.

Of course, the actual economic benefit of reducing atmospheric carbon is anywhere between "low" and "negative." And ocean fertilization would do the same thing for free. But when has that ever stopped a subsidy program.

Yeah, the reason behind the left-wing rally behind environmentalism was never about environment itself, but about obtaining another method of doing the Revolution.

If you ever spoke with committed climate leftists, you quick understand that any discourse is not related to the environment, the economic or tech tools to use, energy, consumption etc, but it is about how to change people to achieve their particular brand of Socialism of the day.

Bonus point if you speak with left-wing climate women: At least men will earnestly tell you that is about the Revolution, while women will shut out angry rants about Mother Earth or being attuned with nature or whetever. A telluric and Dyonisian cult with socialist characteristics, made by people that, without modernity and capitalism, would be better doing literally any other job.

I bumped into Can the working class resist “green capitalism”? earlier today, linked from Reddit's Left without edge which seems to confirm what you are saying.

In this context, mere environmentalism, that is, environmentalism without revolutionary will, does nothing more than pave the way for the chaotic management processes implemented by governments at capitalism’s service.

But then @anon_ replied with his experience of people genuinely caring about the environment for its own sake. Err, the article that I linked is full of passion, so much that there is room for its author to genuinely care about the environment. Where I get confused is that the article lacks practical answers. Ordinary people like stuff. Get rid of capitalism and advertising and ordinary people will still crave enough stuff to leave us searching for practical answers. Who will tell them "No!" ? Who will have that power?

The ecological problem we face is not essentially a technical issue, but a political conflict, and it must be treated as such. It is a problem that the people must take into their own hands and hearts.

People will take the problem into their hearts, and then what...

I foresee passion, without clarity or practicality, ending badly, whether the primary goal is revolution or ecology.

I don't have time to write a thoughtful reply right now what with holiday chaos, but thanks for the link.

For what it's worth, they seem much more honest about it these days than they did when I was young. The misanthropic Malthusians have been marginalized on the mainstream left in favor of the honestly-concerned-about-the-apocalypse types, who are, funnily enough, typically more moderate in their views on the matter.

This has not been my experience living in a half dozen left-wing circles. As much as you can't believe it, most of them genuinely care about the environment for its own sake. To the extent that they rant against capitalism destroying the planet, the causality goes the other way.

Of course I disagree, but at least get a handle on it.

I definitely agree on the more reasonable & moderate left-wing groups that dominate the PMC and STEM, but it's not that rare in the social sciences and adjacent university staff.

Climate Change Solutions: An Opportunity To Subvert Capitalism and a million articles like it would seem to disagree. Does anyone have the link with the green party woman talking about how they won't need to abolish money because everything you could use it for will be rationed or banned by the state on environmental grounds, from shower time to travel?
Edit: here

I think the definitive piece written on this is Nadia Asparouhova's Tribes of Climate. Introductory quote:

For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold.

I recommend reading the whole article in full. FWIW, I identify as what Asparouhova calls an "Energy Maximalist" - I regard climate change as a genuine but convenient crisis point that provides incentives for us to transition from the local minimum of fossil fuels to the global minimum of cheap renewable energy. Consequently, for most of the climate activist world, I'm the most despicable class of heretic. This is true despite my acceptance of the general catechism of contemporary climate activism - (i) the earth is warming (ii) it's mostly our fault (iii) this is bad (iv) we can do something about it (v) we should do something about it.

Source of the Massachusetts Taliban quote.

Where does your commenter say that only people she dislikes should have to make any lifestyle changes?

Like anyone, I'm sure they don't mind getting burned a bit... so long as their opponent is the one actually tied to the stake.

Don’t put words in people’s mouths.

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