Is there a democratic path to civilizational survival?

Nothing about capitalism, amazing. As if it wasn’t behind all of the things you mention. Amazing.

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines should be phrased as, any title that is a question is usually meant to be answered, “No.”

Be that as it may, not sure these threats are perceived by everyone in the same way.

The decline of property value in coasts threatened by sea level rise is not an existential threat to civilization, strictly speaking, though it seems to be perceived as one in most quarters. Radical population declines in equatorial regions are different, since, unlike urban real estate, life is cheap.
Probably the greatest nuclear threats at this moment are posed by India and Israel, though the US may be moving towards implementing its plans for using nukes. The peculiar situation where the Ukrainians, armed by the “West”/Christendom, are attacking a nuclear power plant with full approval suggests that the people in power have no fear at all of limited nuclear disasters. The insouciant surety that Fukushima is over is another symptom of this.
It is likely civilizational collapse that leads to massive loss of life, rather than the massive loss of life turning money into mere paper, or whatever vision of civilizational collapse. It is likely the loss of state capacity, the ability to simply get things done, that will turn a tragedy like an epidemic into catastrophe. Even the Black Death did not destroy feudal civilization in the sense apparently meant. Apocalypse doesn’t look like in the movies, that’s Hollywood wishful thinking.
Nationalistic oligarchies are one form of liberal and democratic institutions. The US has had elections from day one, for one. The whole point of liberal democracy is to protect private property, which is conceived as a, if not the, defining trait of civilization. And the nationalism is conceived as the protection of the nation against its enemies. The hope that the most powerful among the liberal and democratic nationalists either rule the world or force the “fascistic” others to peacefully divvy up the spoils and fairly share the costs seems very modest in its goals for humanity but rather utopian in its pleas to the rulers.
A crisis of insufficiency is a shortage of profits or a falling stocking market or a decline in property values. People going hungry is not deemed a crisis.

The additional remark about insufficient investment in the substance of civilization is sort of correct, but the prevailing opinion is not just that investment should be for profit; that government should be profitable; that government expenditures are theft from civil society; that the government budget must ensure that current expenses must be cut so that government bonds serve as safe liquidity for the financial system. Even more than that, the prevailing opinion is that no sacrifice is too great to prevent the emergence of a government that runs the economy. You know, “Better dead than red!”

But of course not everyone welcomes clarity on their opinions. The tacit premise that “we” are nice and “our” system is fundamentally benevolent in its aims despite flaws in its functioning is a kind of straw man. If you inspect it closely, it easy to see it isn’t a real man. But you can’t possibly kill it for exactly the same reason. Or to change the metaphor, this invincible complacency is a fog, which you can never pin down to say, here it is. Fog is never right in front of your eyes. But you still can’t see very far.

Whether or not Betteridge is correct it is entirely unclear how technocracy can solve any of these problem. Central bankers are the leading examples of technocracy. To me it seems obvious they are part of the problem, not the solution. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future is science fiction.

It is possible that there is no democratic solution. At least, I no longer have much faith that such a solution is forthcoming. However, there is certainly no question of “legitimacy” apart from democracy. We have no other concept of legitimacy unless you want to talk about divine right, or the mandate of heaven, or the coming of the Ubermensch, or another such unlikely proposition. It seems to me that it’s democracy or nothing.

Even if an undemocratic response could be “legitimate”, I find it hard to believe that any such “solution” is any more plausible than a democratic one. If Churchill quipped that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter, the obvious comeback is that the best argument in favor of democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average wealthy elite. I certainly don’t know of any dictatorship with a better record on these existential issues than democracy has, and I don’t expect to see one.

There is a lot to be said about the issues raised here, but a peeve of mine for some time is wobbling between “there’s currently no majority for it, so forcing it through would be undemocratic,” and “there’s currently no majority for it, so arguing for it in public is undemocratic.” (Not to mention “it wouldn’t pass in a popular vote, so the democratically elected legislature voting for it is undemocratic,” which is something that could regularly happen in a legitimate system, I think.)

But we can’t have democracy if large swathes of the culture are committed to never abandoning the unnuanced attitude, “the system is corrupt,” and define progress as more people agreeing with them that everything existing is unredeemable. At best, they don’t really mean it and think they’re not affecting anything in the real world by insisting on it, but that isn’t a very good “best.”

If you haven’t already checked them out, Toby Ord’s book the Precipice and Will MacAskill’s just-released book, What We Owe the Future, are really important books on the topic. I highly recommend them.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by a ‘democratic path’ through the existential risk we face over the next century or so. Is the idea that particular types of existential risks increase the risk of authoritarianism? Could you clarify?

Certainly substantial state funding and work to reduce the threats of nuclear war, future pandemics, artificial general intelligence, and other problems is very important. To date, it seems like much of the serious exploration of the problem of existential risk, and work on ways to reduce it, has come from effective altruists and has been funded by forward thinking billionaire philanthropists (Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna through Open Philanthropy; Sam Bankman-Fried through the Future Fund; along with some others).

“there’s currently no majority for it”

No, there’s not. OTOH, there’s currently no majority for the two basic propositions which power conservative politics; one of which is that mankind ought allow itself to be ruled by a corps of self-appointed specialists in morality, while the other is that mankind ought to be ruled, willingly or not, by hook or by crook, by their natural superiors, whether those superiors are genetic or financial or technological or military or all four. A conversation of five minutes with any voter who actually bothers to vote would convince the the most skeptical inquirer that this is the truth.

So, here’s my question: conservatives (obviously) don’t allow their knowledge that their notions are universally unpopular to stymie them. Why should we? Surely it’s at least as possible to promote a product people like than to flog one they despise.

I’m not trying to be snarky. But, if capitalism is at the root of our problems, shouldn’t it be mentioned?

Since the original question was not ‘What are our problems?’ but ‘What are the remedies?’, the answer to your question is ‘Not necessarily: only if mentioning it contributes usefully to the discussion of remedies, which so far it hasn’t’.

“A few weeks ago, faced with yet another disappointingly cautious announcement from the leadership of Britain’s Labour party, I quipped on twitter that it seemed impossible to get elected in the UK without promising not to do any of the things that are necessary to fix the country and, perhaps, the world.”

Is this true? Corbyn performed strongly especially in his first election, and could have easily won, on a very radical platform, opposed viciously by his own party. Given how close he came the first time round, it’s almost impossible to think he wouldn’t have won had the party been on his side.

Ergo, the problem doesn’t seem to me to be with the electorate.

I don’t know about the first question. But I’m pretty confident, that, if there is democratic path to survival, there is also no way of shifting to a technocratic path. If “we” could be convinced of the need for technocracy, we could also vote for and implement the policies the technocrats would adopt.

There are plenty of possible undemocratic paths (the US is in the process of shifting to one) but these are not technocratic and are less conducive to survival than is democracy.

John Quiggin,

I would agree if sustainability was only about decarbonising.

However, land use, groundwater use, fertiliser use, consumer plastics, fashion, and electronics, holiday travel, and widespread use of variety of everyday chemicals from pesticides to waterproofing are also completely unsustainable. Bringing all this to sustainable levels is not possible without significantly reducing what most people would (I’d argue, incorrectly) call their living standards (e.g., being able to replay a hardly-used wardrobe every year, having non-stick pans, and holidaying in Bali). Hard to see majorities voting for that.

It seems a bit late for all this handwringing. The time to address these issues was 50 years ago if not earlier. Now the cake is baked, cooled and frosted. You know the next step. And you don’t get to have it too. Read your own list. The coming collapse of the human experiment called civilization is at an end. I offer no solution because none are at hand.

Just noticed that the two choices on offer seem to be democracy and technocracy. Surely the idea that these are the choices is a very large part of the problem. Could a dictator impose technocracy effectively? Could people be compelled to accept dictatorship without undermining any technocracy that might actually be effective?

Maybe, a technocratic solution that was already worked out could be put into effect by a dictatorship. One would then want to be very, very sure that nothing had been left out of that solution, however. For example, early opponents of the USSR often noted that technical issues were frequently subordinated to political ones. Possibly they were writing in bad faith. That assumption would seem to rely on a belief that people just don’t do things like that, in which case one’s mileage may perhaps vary. At any event, at present, our choices in the US seem to be: (1) progressive Democrats, who are well-meaning and like to think of themselves as technocrat-humanists, and who believe in deferring to the scientists and experts but are reasonable, not absolutists, (2) techno-libertarians, who are proudly absolutist and believe the methods and personnel of a small sector of the commercial economy can be extended to run all of society, and (3) a sector of conservatives pushed off the cliff, from anti-vax to anti-medicine, by the Republican response to the pandemic, who will do whatever their “betters” tell them (including suffering) so long as their “betters” don’t claim to be acting on knowledge and science, with a smattering of (4) more or less progressive or leftist thinkers who believe science (whether in principle or as currently constituted) is unreliable and should always and in every instance take a back seat to politics, morality, or something else more “human.” The second and third are forming a coalition, but the first and fourth are still constantly at odds and therefore we can’t oppose conservatism effectively. Maybe the UK and Europe are luckier than we have been.

“I would agree if sustainability was only about decarbonising. However, land use, groundwater use, fertiliser use, consumer plastics, fashion, and electronics, holiday travel, and widespread use of variety of everyday chemicals from pesticides to waterproofing are also completely unsustainable.”

Disregarding decarbonization, where do you see the unsustainability? Water is a problem, but a surmountable one. Pesticides and other chemicals are used far more cautiously than they were in the past, even in relatively poor countries. Planes are problematic mainly because of carbon dioxide emissions, other issues are secondary.

To clarify, I am not saying things can’t be done, I was responding to the idea that they can be done without reducing perceived quality of life, which is difficult to get a democratic mandate for.

Land use: Natural areas get smaller and smaller, which leads to erosion, reduced soil quality, long-term extinction of most species as isolated remnant reserves aren’t large and connected enough to maintain sufficient genetic diversity, and collapse of ecosystem services such as pollination. Much of our best agricultural land is disappearing under concrete, because large cities tended to start where farming was possible (exceptions apply to some port and mining towns). Will only get better if we effectively switch to vegetarianism and build denser cities (and reduce population). People used to steak and large suburban homes and gardens will see that as a reduction of their quality of life.

Transport: We will have to see if it can even be decarbonised without ruining significant parts of the planet with lithium mining and waste. Compared to public transport, cars waste enormous space in roads and parking, so land use again. The only solution may be to vastly reduce the number of cars, which people used to them will see as a reduction of their quality of life.

Chemicals: See recent news items about forever chemicals already pushing rain water (!) above the threshold where it becomes technically non-drinkable because it contains high levels of substances recognised as carcinogenic and sterilising. We can filter our water, but animals don’t. Also, accumulation of microplastics in the food chain. We have put so many new substances out into the environment that science hasn’t kept up at all re their effects, and now they are so well-established in everyday life making things non-stick, water-repellent, soft, etc, that it will be very hard to outlaw all this convenience again even if it turns out, as I suspect, that this complex of issues is behind decreasing fertility (not so problematic if it were just us humans, admittedly) and decreasing insect populations.

As an aside, if current use of pesticides is cautious then I really don’t want to see incautious use. My complex has an exterminator come twice a year to generously spray the entire courtyard against “ants and spiders”, and I have yet to figure out what the problem is with those critters living in the lawn. Most parts of the planet won’t even ban neonicotinoids, although it seems fairly well established that they threaten pollination services (at least that is my understanding?). Admittedly, this more about inertia and ignorance than quality of life, thus only an aside.

Planes: Hard to see how they can be decarbonised, from what I have read so far. Maybe concentrated, liquid fuels could be made from renewable energy sources, but I expect that would still multiply the cost of flying compared to current oil-based fuels. People used to flying around all year for meetings or holidays will see that as a reduction in their living standards.

General resource use by consumer goods ranging from plastic toys to fashion to electronics: Reduced levels of consumption will certainly be seen as reduced living standards.

I admit that some of these items become non-issues if one assumes that a loss of >80% biodiversity is both acceptable and unlikely to have negative effects on humanity. I assume, however, that widespread ecosystem collapse would have unacceptable negative effects on humanity, and that informs my perception of unsustainability.

I think we are talking past each other. I completely agree that we should focus on issues proportionate to their immediacy and severity, and e.g. peak phosphate is rather lower down the list than phasing out black coal.

But a variety of less immediately threatening habits we have are also unsustainable, changing them for the better would be perceived as a reduction in living standards, and this means finding a democratic path to those changes will be challenging. The OP itself did not only mention carbon, after all. It is also possible that whereas several of these problems are manageable or tolerable in isolation, they become unmanageable by compounding each other (e.g., water desalination is much more affordable if we don’t have an energy crisis at the same time as a water crisis).

Two quick responses to details: You will know, of course, but Australia, for example, has the land with most reliable water supply along the east coast, and it also happens to have the most urbanisation in those same areas, wasting valuable agricultural land for everything from suburban lawns to golf courses. Re fashion, I was recently surprised to learn that at least a third of microplastics come from textiles, and some estimates are higher.

What really confuses me about your comment, however, is “Biodiversity is also a big problem, largely arising from our failure to deal with global poverty”, and this is where we may have different interpretations of what standard of living means, or even poverty. To me, lifting people out of poverty means increasing their level of consumption; in fact, I find it difficult to visualise how becoming wealthier can be quantified otherwise. In other words, the end of global poverty equals turning currently unsustainable consumption of energy, water, land, etc., plus waste production, into even more unsustainable consumption and waste production.

The solution is the exact opposite: to reduce living standards in wealthy countries to where the median European or Australian family doesn’t have even a single car but uses tram or bike, doesn’t have an oversized house, doesn’t holiday in Tenerife via plane, doesn’t buy hundreds of dollars worth of plastic and entertainment electronics each children’s birthday and Christmas, etc. And that is an impossible sell, so nobody wants to say that out loud. Much more comforting to think we can have our sustainable civilisation cake AND eat it up through not changing our standard of living.

I agree that some currently wasteful production processes could be made sustainable. But I would argue that current affordability and convenience is often based on being wasteful and unsustainable, because that is cheaper*. Recycling, using only regenerative energies with lower ROI, insulating better, using less pesticides, all of that either costs more effort per output that is then not available to provide luxuries. And other items, such as billions of people all desiring a suburban mansion as the benefit of having left poverty behind, cannot possibly be made sustainable.

*) This is also where capitalism enters the argument. I do not buy that our problems are all due to twenty billionaires, as many leftists argue. But a problem is that many of us buy what is most convenient and cheapest, and in fact many of us have no choice due to their limited budgets. And that means that the market signal is to go cheap instead of sustainable. Only unpopular regulation could solve that, by directly outlawing certain packaging types or entire product lines.

Alex: Comments threads aren’t the right place for this kind of discussion. I’ll try to write something more comprehensive later.

Z: There was a thing called the Technocracy movement popular in the US in the 1930s/ Some remnants survive, but it’s of purely historical interest. Otherwise, technocracy is a general term for putting decisions in the hands of (supposedly neutral) experts rather than having them made through political processes. A related idea is restricting voting to well-informed people “epistocracy” which I criticise here
https://crookedtimber.org/2017/07/06/against-epistocracy/
Searching, it looks as if this book would be interesting and would probably have plenty of useful reference https://academic.oup.com/book/33623?login=false

Chris: That’s right, but the problem is mainly in poor countries not in rich ones. Forest cover (not exactly the same thing as natural habitat, but a reasonable proxy) is increasing in Europe.
It’s declining in poor countries largely because of the need for firewood, which would be obviated if people had access to cheap solar or wind energy.

More generally, better human development goes with more forests and less loss of biodiversity.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196248

That’s a comments thread oversimplification of a complex topic, neglecting things like palm oil exports, but it’s still broadly correct.

I think the biodiversity crisis could be the biggest crisis we face. It attracts less public attention than climate change, perhaps partly because it’s a somewhat more complex phenomenon (climate change is quite easy to get a handle on, for most people). But, being more complex, it may also be harder to solve. The point also goes for political theorists, who have written vast reams on CC, just responses, etc. Biodiversity loss suffers from a striking comparative neglect here.

Chris Armstrong,

I am saying this as a biodiversity researcher myself, with a lot of extinction grief, but I actually disagree. Warming the planet by 5C will collapse civilisation and crash our population to a fraction of what it is now. I am not sure driving 80% of all species extinct would do the same, by itself. It would still be A Very Bad Idea, of course.

IMO we face two main crises: (1) climate, and (2) we are taking up too much of everything on this planet, to a completely unsustainable degree. The biodiversity crisis is largely caused by the second and could therefore largely be solved through a combination of thrift and population decline. The extinction risks caused by invasive species is the main factor that would still require ongoing management.

It is illuminating to look at the stats such as what percentage of animal biomass is livestock, what percentage of annual global primary production is consumed by humans (e.g., DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211349110), or how little natural habitat is left. We are but a single species, and we are squishing millions of other species into an ever-decreasing corner of our shared ‘space’.

It seems to me in facing climate change there are 3 options:

1) We go all in on renewable and battery technologies and get to net zero carbon emission without reducing standard of living. This will be expensive and there will be environmental impacts from mining for various necessary materials such as lithium and rare earth metals.
2) We continue business as usual with adaption to global warming. This means eventually abandoning the current coastline and large chunks of the warmer parts of the planet. Eventually it will require replacing significant chunks of the ecological services provided by nature with technological alternatives and an eventual transition to renewable energy as fossil fuel supplies become too expensive to extract. This will be a nasty and brutal process. We’ll end up significantly poorer and lots of innocent people will die in the process.
3) We adopt a degrowth agenda that gets us to what we can support with a low tech net zero carbon emission economic system. I figure this will require only an 80-90% reduction in human population. This probably requires some sort of super-plague cooked up by a secret conspiracy, because I don’t see how any government could steer a course towards self-genocide on this scale much less all of them.

I think option 1 is the clear winner and I think it’s a plausible option. We have the technologies to replace almost every major source of carbon emission. Yes, some cost significantly more currently than the carbon emitting option (steel and concrete production for example), but none of them are so expensive as to render our civilization impossible. There will probably be changes in how we live our lives as relative costs for goods and services shift significantly. I don’t think that’s a deal breaker, people are adjusting all the time to major societal trends driven by policy and technological changes that that get little or no discussion.

How do we get to option 1 under democracy? I think the solution is to go big and not sweat the small stuff. In each wealthy country, we actually propose a plan that will get that country to zero emissions on the necessary time scale. Not setting a goal or commitment or a good start. We bring the voters a plan that will solve the actual problem. The plans will have to be flexible as we don’t know what the most efficient way to do some things as we advance in technology, renewable percentages get high, etc… The plan will also need to include plenty of pork to buy off current interests and make it palatable, but such is politics. I see a mix of subsidies and direct investments, backstopped by hard cutoffs of when certain technologies can no longer be sold, followed by no longer used.

Once the wealthy countries have their plans in place, we’ll have basically forced the hands of the poor countries. Without the investments of the wealthy countries, maintaining the fossil fuel infrastructure will likely be more expensive than transitioning. Ideally, we’d support them out of good intentions, but self-interested ones are okay too.

Here’s a piece from 10 years ago, making the case that , given political will, we have the technological capacity to decarbonize the economy and end poverty, while improving living standards for everybody. On the whole, technology has surprised on the upside since then, politics on the downside

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-end-world-poverty-without-destroying-the-planet

A partial draft of this was posted here and led to some lively discussion

https://crookedtimber.org/2011/02/12/can-we-feed-the-world-will-we/

Alex S

Tasmania is an anomaly. The rest of Australia does not have the typography or climate for extensive hydro power? (Realising there are Snowy Mountains project plus presumably Queensland). Tasmania has (relative) mountains and lots of rain.

Australia’s blessing in the past was vast amounts of thermal coal. To move to a post Carbon world the vested interests that creates are a major barrier (your PM and his lump of coal in Parliament).

The good news is that you have solar, where Australia has one of the highest takeups of residential solar in the world. The climate would support a mass move to heat pumps – goodbye gas heating.

Australia has lots of space & lots of sun. It also seems to have decent onshore wind – although I am unsure as to what the opportunity is in offshore wind (it should be good, but may require floating turbines due to a narrow continental shelf?).

So there’s no difficulty getting Australia to 100% renewables some of the time. There’s a practical need for huge transmission corridors, but again it’s a country with a lot of space. (I am sure you have your own NIMBY issues like the rest of us – or you wouldn’t have the housing prices you do).

The problem is what to do if the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining? Pumped storage hydro for some, and there must be a market opportunity for battery storage.

To deal with multi-day lulls in wind, I suspect you are going to need hydrogen. The “brown/blue hydrogen” programmes are a trap, locking you into further supplies of fossil fuels. But green hydrogen must be possible given the amount of sunlight you get.

Three thoughts:

Green New Deal-type proposals seem to address exactly the kind of issue you are concerned with – as in, not just how to address climate change equitably, but also (and largely, as a result) in a way that might reasonably gain democratic support.
Relatedly, it largely boils down to what a “democratic path” is: if you mean something akin to what we actually have been calling democratic in the real world, it might involve framing issues in specific ways, and indeed even some borderline lying. Democratic politics has been doing this all along. Even Green New Deals, say, will plausibly involve some contraction in living standards, but they promise job security and equity. Democratic leaders can choose what to emphasize…
My own conviction is that a democratic path out of this mess also requires some cross-border mobilization, but that is a huge Pandora’s box so I am just going to mention it and search for cover :)

Humanity has a long history of coming up with technology that seems great at the time but turns out to be a disaster later on. Starting with weapons that gave us plenty of food, but made us so good hunters that we wiped out easily hunted megafauna, irrigation that destroyed soil through salination, and in the last century stuff like leaded gasolene, DDT, CFC:s etc.

What are we doing today that we will find out in a decade is a big problem, and how do we stop causing new environmental problems that we don’t even know about yet?

ALex SL, lots to discuss, more than I can deal with at the moment. But you don’t need to worry about energy return on energy invested (EROEI). Here’s some calculations from 2015

https://johnquiggin.com/2015/08/04/eroei/

https://johnquiggin.com/2015/08/12/eroei-batteries-now-included/

Things have improved a lot since then, not only because of tech progress but because a growing share of the energy used to produce solar PV is itself derived from solar PV or wind.

steven t johnson,

Yes and no. Many previous civilisations collapsed due to unsustainable practices, mostly, I believe, land use (soil salinisation from irrigation, erosion, nutrient depletion, deforestation). But others, and I believe this includes the Roman empire, were weakened by some combination of institutional weakness, infighting, and plagues, and then given the coup de grace by external enemies. I think those two scenarios are very different, and only the former is directly comparable to our most urgent current crisis.

For the same reason I also wouldn’t count the end of a nation or dynasty if it is merely part of a much larger sphere of civilisation that happily continued on. The end of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation doesn’t really matter if German principalities directly continue the previous trajectory of technological and economic development. Pre-industrial China may have been sustainable on the scale of tens of thousands of years in the sense of its rice- and wheat-based village agriculture being sustainable on that scale, even as ruling dynasties rise, become stagnant, and are replaced by the next dynasty in a bloody civil war. This political turnover is much different than finding that the entire technological and economic system underlying the daily life of all the people in a civilisation, and thus its population density and prosperity, was a terrible mistake all along and was never going to work long-term because it exhausts some non-renewable resource within two to three centuries.

Sorry for commenting so often on this particular thread. This topic is important to me, and I hope my comments have at least always been respectful and relevant.

I think the assumption on which the dilemma is based, that democracies can’t be trusted to do the right thing because they’re beholden to “the more prosperous among the electorates of the wealthiest countries on earth” but technocracy won’t suffer from this problem, requires more interrogation.

Alex SL@52 is thoughtful. One thing though I have to strongly disagree with is the implication that plague is some sort of external factor. Plagues are in every way an outcome of environmental change and population distress. The oppressed are weakened even against disease. The ability to maintain state order within and state integrity against enemies without is not so deeply implicated (I think?) but I suspect state capacity is also related to environmental factors.

I can’t be so vehement in arguing that “the previous trajectory of technological and economic development” is what matters. I’m not sure that it is quite so factually true, or else as I already hinted Bokhara and Samarkand would still be great centers of learning and research and cultural innovation?

Nor am I quite so sure that the shifts from Byzantine to Arab or Persian to Seljuk or Ottoman were quite so superficial. Or, to look east of Asia instead of eastern Mediterranean, that the shifts from Zhou to Warring States to Chin/Han to Three Kingdoms to Sixteen Dynasties to the northern and southern dynasties to the Sui/Tang to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms to the Song/Yuan/Ming/Qing. The notion of a real China at village level while meaningless names were plastered over the top hiding a technological and economic trajectory from Qing to Republic to People’s Republic isn’t so obvious to me? It seems that the Buddhist China of the Tang is just different from the syncretic state sponsored Confucianism of the later Ming and this difference matters. Alex SL mentions that continuity of the Holy Roman Empire with modern Germany, but isn’t the very notion of a continuity between the (west) Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire is vehement assertion of a nonexistent continuity, an appropriation disguised as an inheritance?

Apologies for the potted history of China but sometimes details are needed to adequately convey complexity, especially by an unskilled writer.

Sorry to be so late to the party, but I just got back from a camping trip, where I was blissfully out of cell coverage.

Very briefly, my book Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them: Science, Economics and the Challenge of Catastrophic Climate Change, which has just/finally been published, goes into a lot of detail about what it would take to keep warming to 2 degrees C and what such a program would entail economically. The bottom line is that it would be difficult, but if there is sufficient will we can do it. John Q and others who think the low MC of renewables means the cost of rapid, large scale decarbonization would be minor ought to examine Ch. 5 of this book or at least take a look at the mitigation pathway model intercomparisons curated by the IPCC.

I adopt an upbeat tone in the book, and in fact, when I wrote it I was cautiously optimistic. The gross failure almost in most countries (including the US) to sustain cooperation for public health purposes in the face of the Covid pandemic has now made me much more pessimistic. If slipping a mask on when you go into a store is such a big deal, how will societies manage the vastly greater inconvenience of a breakneck energy transition?

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with the “degrowth” (Hickel et al.) delusion, which I spent many pages tearing apart.

I don’t know what alternative there is to acting as if we could be optimistic about a democratic path to climate sanity, but at the moment it feels rather like a performance.

Peter D @58 Thanks for this. I’ll try to get the book, but in the meantime I just looked at the chapter outline, and some extracts. I agree that early scrapping of existing capital stocks is the big issue in the transition. On my analysis, that cost is big (several % of income annually) but not overwhelming. I also agree that we probably need Direct Air Capture starting 2050 or early, but not clear why you describe this as “yet to be developed”. It exists, and I’ve seen cost estimates as low as $100/tonne, which would be a bargain.
Our collective failure on masks etc is discouraging. But a more relevant example is the German Energiewiende. I think the early phase-out of nuclear was and is misguided, but it shows that prematurely scrapping a large part of the capital stock is politically feasible.

On the history (Alex SL and steven t johnson) – the Western Roman Empire was definitely weakened by soil depletion. In particular, areas near Rome became malaria-infested swamps, and key regions in Italy became much less productive. Western Europe has been de-forested three times and then, after population collapse, re-forested twice: in the neolithic, in the late Roman Empire and from late medieval times.

On plagues – there is a connection between social disruption and their impact. In the Americas, many populations suffered minimal loss until invasions or raids were added to the mix of stresses. War spreads disease, weakens resistance and erodes the ability to take counter-measures (eg quarantine). Probably true for the Antonine plague as well, although we lack the sources. Certainly true for the Black Death.

Corbyn performed strongly… Ergo, the problem doesn’t seem to me to be with the electorate.

Rather surprised no one else mentioned this (I probably shouldn’t be).

“the poorest 50% of the US population emit about 10 tonnes of CO2 per person, while the richest 10% emit 75 tonnes per person”

Sure but in international comparison, those 10 tonnes emitted by the “poorest Americans” are way above average. Per capita emission France, Italy, UK are 5-6 tonnes, Indonesia, Brazil about 2 tonnes. Of course we need to “take on inequality” (both within and between countries) but we can’t pretend that the mass consumerism in rich countries doesn’t matter.

This is both an informative and also a depressing thread – I am not an optimist by nature, but so much hope that John Q.’s optimism is right.

John @60 – could you share a link/some links to papers/reports that show that exists and can be done for $100/tonne? I’d like to understand the technological feasibility issues here.

Peter Dorman – your book got advertised earlier this week in a CUP direct mailing, I’ve just bought an e-copy and am looking forward reading your book.

Hi Ingrid,

A couple of links, one on a plant under construction in Iceland

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/29/23188164/mammoth-direct-air-capture-plant-climeworks-groundbreaking-iceland

and one claiming a feasible cost of $100/tonne

https://carbonherald.com/new-direct-air-capture-method-could-bring-costs-down-to-100-t-of-co2/

I agree with the points Peter Dorman makes. The issues of scale are unresolved, and we shouldn’t let this possible backstop slow down the process of decarbonization.

Replying to MFB, the costs are nowhere near those of WWII, at least as a share of income on an annual basis. We are talking about maybe 3-4 per cent of total world income. That’s still a huge amount of money, of the order of $100 trillion between now and 2050, and there’s no guarantee that we will deliver it. We could wipe out global poverty much less, and we haven’t got anywhere near doing that.