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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Incidentally, people have speculated (and I agree with them) that climate change will reduce the US to a regional power at best, that will no longer be able to sustain its status as the world's sole superpower.

How? The northern hemisphere is going to get a boost in crop yields.

Studies that separate out climate change from other factors affecting crop yields have shown that yields of some crops (e.g., maize and wheat) in many lower-latitude regions have been affected negatively by observed climate changes, while in many higher-latitude regions, yields of some crops (e.g., maize, wheat, and sugar beets) have been affected positively over recent decades. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/chapter-5/

The US will likely continue on its trajectory, losing power relative to the rest of the world, but not because of climate change.

The US will likely continue on its trajectory, losing power relative to the rest of the world, but not because of climate change.

The US has a disadvantage in some ways because it has a lot of stationary capital invested. For a concrete example, take coastal warehouses in New Orleans: those are not prime pieces of real estate. Moving those (or, more realistically, building new ones) costs more here than it would in a developing country. And many of the most productive parts of the US lie in coastal areas. Even e.g. the US's high level of current agricultural productivity faces similar challenges; although anthropogenic CO2 will have neutral to net positive effects on theoretical agricultural production, the investments we made in infrastructure for it were made over the past hundred years, not the next hundred years. New infrastructure will face a heavy regulatory burden: imagine a piece of once marginal land that rapidly becomes more potentially productive. Developing it will be more expensive or even impossible compared to a century ago.

Countries that are less hidebound will be able to respond more quickly to changing times. Even if large parts of Bangladesh end up underwater and thousands of Bangladeshi low-skilled workers end up dead, it's easy enough to throw up new shantytowns and factories in unaffected areas.

I thought the progressive line was that the third world would bear most of the cost and that was unfair. The total sea level rise since industrialization is at most a foot (30cm). I don't see this overwhelming the capacity of a country like the US. Likewise, changing the crops and the location of the field will hardly prove a challenge.

Well, I'm not pushing the progressive line here.

But, to state it, the progressive line is that there will be more loss of life in developing countries. This is likely true; in the West, most deaths will be related to vulnerable populations dying off in heat waves, but that will be more than counteracted by fewer people dying due to the cold (which comprise ~90% of temperature related deaths in the West). However, loss of life doesn't mean much economically or in terms of geostrategic power. Bangladesh isn't hurting for unskilled labor, and most of the people who would die aren't especially economically productive.

Changing crops and field locations isn't a game of Civilization; modern agriculture is sophisticated and is integrated with existing infrastructure, policy regimes, and local labor pools. Suppose an area gets the potential for high agricultural productivity, but to actually achieve that productivity needs water rights that are contested by local urban areas and environmentalists. This isn't at all insurmountable, but it's a friction that less developed and sclerotic places don't have to face.

It's not going to overwhelm the capacity of the United States. It will just be a headwind compared to developing countries. Climate resiliency is good, but it also means making it so we can actually respond effectively to climactic changes as opposed to obstinately demanding clearly unrealistic stasis.

Suppose an area gets the potential for high agricultural productivity, but to actually achieve that productivity needs water rights that are contested by local urban areas and environmentalists.

So it's less the environment that's the problem, and more the environmentalists. My point exactly. Their proposed cures, such as their obstructionism and multiple percent of gdp green packages, will do more harm than the actual disease.

I don't know how long your time horizon is, but I think it's just categorically wrong. In fact, it's one of the reasons why I moved out of California to a better area, primarily as a way to hedge against climate risk. Take it from Charlie Hall who pioneered the concept of EROEI. Also recommend the work of the world's leading heterodox economist, Steve Keen and his work on energy. In particular, listen to the episode "Economics and thermodynamics."

The world trends on energy, resource usage and ecological degradation I think tend to support the conclusion.

I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.

The world trends on energy, resource usage and ecological degradation I think tend to support the conclusion.

You mean trends like this:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maize-production?country=~OWID_WRL

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agricultural-output-dollars

https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-production

Are your beliefs falsifiable?

I think The EROEI crowd are peak oilers who couldn't accept that they lost and cooked up some new doomer nonsense.

I mean I don't see any issues with the ROI concept itself. It's a bit of a tautology, but at least it gives us something quantitative that could be updated with new or better data.

In the case of agricultural production, the counterargument to your figures would be that recent increases in crop yields and the green revolution are dependent on artificial fertilizer produced by the Haber-Bosch process, which in turn is dependent on fossil fuel energy that has a decreasing ROI over time. This belief could be falsified by evidence that new sources of oil and natural gas (e.g. shale, tar sands, etc.) do not in fact have a lower ROI than older ones, that nuclear or renewable energy technologies are scalable to the same extent with similar or better returns, or that there are cheaper alternative sources of fertilizer.

The supposedly degradating EROEI has been going on for at least two centuries, and it has failed to affect the continuous growth of world pop and gdp/cap . An englishman in the 19th century may have had access to close-by and better-quality coal (anthracite) and oil , but if he put it in his car, babbage's computer or lamp, he would get far less out of it than we do. In other words, once mined, the return on his energy was terrible, hence why he was so much poorer than we are. As time advances, the mining eroei decrease (getting the energy) is more than compensated by the non-mining efficiency increase (spending the energy). So total EROEI (covering the entire process) is actually increasing.

I'll have to examine your links further, I'm not confident to make a comment about them without looking at it in greater detail. Yes, my beliefs are falsifiable; I'm committed to them quite firmly however, because I've never seen them addressed.

When you linked to the IPCC above for instance, that's something Keen explicitly takes to task, as he knows many of the people behind the data (and in his view, notoriously 'bad' data) and shows how wildly off the mark it is. For additional information on that, I'd recommend you listen to "The mineral supply crisis that's rarely talked about," and "Nordaus Climate Model Debunked," in the MEGA link above. Nate Hagens also has some good data that I think runs contrary to your notion.

Until I see some solid replies to the contrary that don't sideline or ignore the above, I think I'm fairly secure and on firm ground where I stand. The only problem is, a lot of the people on the forefront of the data tend to ignore it; so it never directly gets addressed.

Can you give me something shorter than a book?

My links are just the straight line of constantly increasing food production through time. This is concrete, things you hold in your hand and put in your mouth. Not models and speculation. You say there's erosion, ecological degradation, but it has not seriously affected us . Every year people warn of peak oil and limited resources, and every year the line creeps upwards as always.

Am I understanding you right, you think the IPCC is too optimistic? Because I think it's too pessimistic.

I'll listen to one podcast/youtube vid. Which do you pick?

Eh, were you able to open the podcast link I posted earlier? I was edging you more toward that than the book (which I was just sourcing, more than anything else):

https://mega.nz/folder/MYlFwYpC#ZHmrbskzPgKHq9BGuWjvFg

Let me know if you have any issues opening the folder. It's directly to my cloud account. Some people have said they have issues (like if they're at work), most have no problems.

I know what you're essentially pointing to, and the long-term trends as it relates to those points are something Keen addresses. I can't pick out the various points via transcript and haven't written them down myself in concrete detail. Podcast wise, the three episodes I recommend are:

  1. The mineral supply crisis that's rarely talked about

  2. Economics and thermodynamics

  3. Nordaus Climate Model Debunked

Pick whichever one seems more to your liking. But that's what I'd recommend at a first pass/superficial level. You'll forgive me, but I want to look into your links in further detail. Until then, I have nothing else to add on that side of things.

I went with "1: The mineral supply crisis that's rarely talked about ."

So as I thought, it’s the old malthusians, peak oil, peak copper, Paul ehrlich crowd. I’m sure my grandchildren will be having the same argument against those people, like my grandparents before me, and their grandparents before them.

“That can’t go on forever”

The old argument from infinity at the heart of the doomer mindset. It goes: Limited resources, unlimited growth. The sleight of hand here is that you can’t go from an argument to infitinty to a prediction of the near future. Limited resources, unlimited growth was valid 2000 years ago, 200 years ago, 20 years ago. Does it mean our ancestors were running out of resources and should have embraced de-growth?

“the conventional reserves of oil are decreasing between 5 and 7% per year’

Reserves grow faster than production. In 1980, we had 30 years of oil reserve left. In 2020, so ten years after we were supposed to have nothing left, plus all the increase in consumption, it’s 54 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-reserves-left?time=earliest..2021&facet=none

“Paul Ehrlich was right”

The man who predicted that in the 1970s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death, and all major marine wildlife would be extinguished? Those people will never update.

We shouldn’t have said ‘we’ll have peak oil at a particular date’ . We should say ‘the macro trend shows we’ll have a problem sometimes in the future‘. Instead of focusing on a date, we should focus on a trend.

Ah good, they almost admit they were wrong. Their solution for the constant humiliations they suffer is to make the theory less falsifiable.

Seemed like you had your own set of targets and expectations from the second you went into it. You said you'd listen to one podcast and didn't want book-form resources. You got what you wanted at a first and quick pass. If you were expecting scholarly footnotes in a thirty minute dialogue, I'd suggest calibrating your expectations better in the future. I am left a bit curious though. You seemed to roll right past the point that Simon Michaux brought up about oil reserves. How that didn't land for you is bizarre to me. 'He's produced data on it'. At any rate, be well. ✌️.

This is a pointless comment. Why don't you make the point yourself and cite the data you refer to, and I'll answer that in detail.

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