This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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:
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.”
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link