> Accusing the IEA of behaving like a "climate advocacy organization," Wright urged it to focus on "energy security."
Sure seems pretty insecure to shackle yourself to a finite resource that is harder and harder to obtain while producing more and more toxic pollution. Even if you literally don't believe that the climate is real, the endless free and easy to obtain energy from the sky is simply a more secure source, followed closely by the endless free energy blowing around in the air.
Also, if you want the booming, futuristic metropolis experience that doesn't exist in any comparable way in the US, China now offers visa-free travel for Canadians[1].
ok thats interesting, wonder how they take to overlanding?
drive west the whole way accross Canada, ship the rig, fly over , keep driving west till the atlantic shows up, ship the rig , fly home.
> that's because FSD gets 1/2 the number accidents per mile.
I call bullshit and I bet Tesla is quietly paying Lemonade.
FSD is primarily used on highways, and the accident rate on highways is significantly lower per mile which results in FSD appearing to have a lower accident rate per mile.
Meanwhile Musk has a trillion dollars riding on them hitting 10 million FSD subscribers[1], so (past behavior being the best predictor of future behavior) he's obviously going to be committing whatever chicanery is required for him to get that money.
FSD automatically shuts off and relinquishes control to the user in an emergency. I bet the real number of FSD accidents is far far higher, but they're using this loophole to claim it's lower than it is. If you call them out on it, they just hide behind their "the driver must be in control at all times" legal shield.
Whenever there is a massive paradigm shift in technology like we have with AI today, there are absolutely massive, devastating wars because the existing strategic stalemates are broken. Industrialized precision manufacturing? Now we have to figure out who can make the most rifles and machine guns. Industrialized manufacturing of high explosives? Time to have a whole world war about it. Industrialized manufacturing of electronics? Time for another world war.
Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence will certainly lead to a global scale conflict to see if anyone can win formerly unwinnable fights.
Thus the concerns about whether you have a job or not will, in hindsight, seem trivial as we transition to fighting for our very survival.
To me global rise of full blown authoritarianism in every corner seems more plausible than a shooting war. The tech is very well suited for controlling people - both in the monitoring sense and destroying their ability to tell what’s really.
ie new stalemate in the form of multiple inward focused countries/blocs
Yeah LLMs complete the surveillance state. It adds the patience to monitor, analyze, de-anonymize all the data. The industrial revolution and its wealth temporarily disrupted civilization, but we're regressing to the normal state of global authoritarianism again.
The internet and mobile phones weren't paradigm shifts for warfare. There were already mobile radios in WWII, so they fall under the 'industrialized manufacturing of electronics' bucket.
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples.
> Industrialized manufacturing of electronics?
Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we haven't been in any actual wars for a while, though.
> Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence
I don't think we've gotten far enough to discover how/if this is effective. If GP means AI, then we have no idea. If GP means fake news via social media, then we may already be seeing the beginning effects. Both Obama and Trump had a lot of their support from the social media.
Having written this, I think I flatly disagree with GP that technology causes wars because of its power. I think it may enable some wars because of its power differential, but I think a lot is discovered through war. WWI discovered the limitations of industrial warfare, also of chemical weapons. Ukraine is showing what constellations of mini drones (as opposed to the US' solitary maxi-drones) can do, simply because they are outnumbered and forced to get creative.
how do you not think the internet is a military technology? i mean (waves hands) like it's from ARPA, the military paid for it, it integrated cold war air defence, it made global comms resilient to attack, and made information non-local on a massive scale
GP's assertion about tech revolutions making wars doesn't make any sense to me on any level, but it's not just because the latest revolutions were 'not military tech'
i'm liking william spaniel's model : wars happen when 1 - there is a substantial disagreement between parties and 2 - there is a bargaining friction that prevents reaching a less-costly negotiated resolution.
I don't see how a technical revolution necessarily causes either, much less both, of those conditions. there sure is a lot of fear and hype going around - and that causes confusion and maybe poor decisions - but we should chill on the apocalyptics
Yugoslav civil war and Bosnian genocide. Rwandan civil war and Tutsi genocide. US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Syrian civil war and Yazidi genocide. Russian invasion of Ukraine. Ongoing genocide in Palestine suddenly becoming more intense in Gaza.
Future generations will call this ongoing conflict starting in the 90s the Eugenics Wars.
All our human history is a tiny speck on astronomical timescales. The timescale of life itself, on the other hand, is quite significant. Just from this we can somewhat deduce that life might be common in the universe, but sentience might be rare.
It doesn't matter if he's known to meddle in the affairs of the companies in which he owns equity stakes. Owning the stake means he could meddle.
Peter Thiel's personal brand and Palantir are so toxic and creepy in the eyes of most of the public that you can basically just substitute 'Satan' in any statement involving them, and that's how it looks to regular people. Try it:
"The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to [one of Satan's companies] or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to Satan"
So for anyone who cares about PR at all, the immediate instinct upon discovering you might be linked them is to reverse course and apologize profusely to your users.
> Peter Thiel's personal brand and Palantir are so toxic and creepy in the eyes of most of the public that you can basically just substitute 'Satan' in any statement involving them, and that's how it looks to regular people. [...]
Which is very funny and ironic given Thiel's weird ass personal beliefs.
The irony is not lost on me. Thiel's political activism on the side of people who will immediately give him the Alan Turing treatment the first chance they get is a howler for the ages.
And Golden Dome is just the reheated leftovers of the 80s Star Wars space-based scheme literally dreamed up by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller, and promoted by the Heritage Society as a way to get past MAD and allow the US to start and win WWIII. These clowns will absolutely kill millions if they’re not put in check.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
- Voltaire
The fact that the most elite judges in the land, those of the Supreme Court, disagree so extremely and so routinely really says a lot about the farcical nature of the judicial system. Ideally, these people would be selected for their ice-cold and unbiased skills in interpreting the law, and the judgments would be unanimous so frequently that a dissent would be shocking news.
Law is complicated, especially the requirement that existing law be combined with stare decisis. It's easy to see how an LLM could dog-walk a human judge if a judgement is purely a matter of executing a set of logical rules.
If LLMs are capable of performing this feat, frankly I think it would be appropriate to think about putting the human law interpreters out to pasture. However, for those who are skeptical of throwing LLMs at everything (and I'm definitely one of these): this will most definitely be the thing that triggers the Butlerian Jihad. An actual unbiased legal system would be an unaccptable threat to the privileges of the ruling class.
The law isn't a series of "if... then..." statements. It's a collection of vagueries and categorizations that are wholly open to interpretation of when and who they apply to. Add to that, sometimes they are in conflict with each other.
It's not currently, but if we were able to use AI to generate laws in an objective and logically sound way based on general principles like "don't harm others or their property", we'd be much better off.
> if we were able to use AI to generate laws in an objective and logically sound way ... we'd be much better off.
A major role of judges is specifically to not do that because there are circumstances that will not have been thought of at the time of a law being written, new laws will be written that interact in unforeseen ways with existing laws and/or common views on justice can change over time.
It may be technically illegal to destroy a person's property but no judge is going to convict someone who breaks down a person's front door because they heard someone crying for help inside. That's a simple example but there would have to be enumerable exceptions to every single law for an objective/logical AI to do justice.
Rather than try to enumerate the enumerable, we let judges judge.
> It may be technically illegal to destroy a person's property but no judge is going to convict someone who breaks down a person's front door because they heard someone crying for help inside.
> we let judges judge.
The role of a judge is to interpret and apply the law, including applying existing legal standards and precedents. They are referees in the adversarial judicial system and it is unethical legal malpractice for them to apply their discretion in places where the law does not allow for it. Your hypothetical situation doesn't help your argument: if the judge in question is not applying the law as it is written and as the precedents dictate, they are violating their oath.
Original, far more detailed article that techcrunch is just regurgitating[1].
> Testers have also reported accuracy issues, as well as a bug that causes Siri to cut users off when they’re speaking too quickly. And there are problems handling complex queries that require longer processing times.
> Another challenge: The new Siri sometimes falls back on its existing integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT instead of using Apple’s own technology. That can happen even when Siri should be capable of handling the request.
Honestly seems crazy that Apple hasn't seen a class action suit. They were promising features and selling expensive hardware on those promises back in 2024 and they have yet to deliver anything nearly two years later. Huge black eye for a company that has built a reputation for doing demos and then immediately having the product ready to ship.
Google recently shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
The number of people who bought an iPhone because of a promise of improved SIRI is less than negligible. Apple didn’t mention AI anything in the marketing for the latest iPhone and they saw record sales that could have been larger if it weren’t for chip shortages that are affecting them, Microsoft and Amazon according to their respective earning reports.
Of course the only people who make anything from class action lawsuits (snd there were) are lawyers
And the 3rd and 4th place apps are “Freecash” (some kind of get paid to take surveys app) and the Peacock streaming app. These may be the most downloaded by rank, but we have no idea what the actual numbers are, or what period of time this ranking covers, which makes it a poor metric of popularity imho.
What more concerning than the lawsuit is they have all the money in the world and can’t execute on getting Siri working right. That is not a good predictor for how well engineering is at Apple. :/
It's possible they're being conservative because whatever they launch they're going to be stuck with for a very long time. Things are shifting so quickly in the space that they could very well launch the greatest horse and buggy today, and next week everyone's shipping fusion-powered teleportation devices.
Then again it's very possible they are just flailing. I don't have strong beliefs either way.
Yeah you could be right. We never know. Though that they haven’t built out their own mega data centers means they are basically having to use models from the others. I think they should just buy Anthropic. Too late now that they awarded Siri to Gemini but idk I hope they pull this off cuz I love my iPhone.
Apple won't ever allow anyone else to own and control their core technologies (as we saw with Google Maps back in the day). We can safely assume their deal with Gemini is for Google to sell them a model-as-a-service component that can be swapped out at any moment, with either another model like Claude, or with Apple's own future models.
I would say Apple's original exclusivity deal w/ AT&T shows they're comfortable letting a 3rd party control some of the user experience if that's the only way they can get to market.
Sure, but that same deal was also unprecedented in how much less control the carrier got, and marked the beginning of the end for carriers owning the user experience on phones.
Define what “working right” means? I think that’s the core of the issue with rolling out Siri as an LLM. People trust answers that Siri gives them. LLMs hallucinate… that a problem. To me, a hallucination means something isn’t working right. That’s not just an Apple problem, it’s an industry problem that everyone mostly tries to whitewash.
> each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
I have to disagree here.
This idea of a consumer-level personal responsibility for the fossil energy industry's externalized costs is a lot like the plastic producers shifting blame for waste by saying that it's the consumers' fault for not recycling. It's transparent blame-shifting.
The fossil energy industry pulls the carbon out of the ground and distributes it globally. Then it buys and sells politicians and, through mass media, votes, to ensure they maintain the industry's hegemony.
You only have to look at the full-blown slide of the US into a despotic petrostate to understand the causes of the climate crisis.
TL;DW: It is important that individuals show that there is a real problem and that they perform actions that address the problem. This demonstrative behaviour leads to social dynamics where more people feel encouraged to perform actions and to drive larger change.
We know there is a real problem, awareness is not the issue. (I've been aware of it since the mid 90's) It is ignored by large industries and governments. The incessant pounding of the useless drum of individual action continues to go absolutely nowhere. We need government and industry to take action not individuals. I will no longer placate this idea that individual action is at all useful.
> The incessant pounding of the useless drum of individual action continues to go absolutely nowhere. We need government and industry to take action not individuals.
It's the incessent pounding of your drum that goes nowhere, of course. Lots of people acting individually is what makes things happen - including in government. They won't act unless people demonstrate they are serious about it.
> I will no longer placate this idea that individual action is at all useful.
The problem is not that individual action is not useful, it’s that governments and companies are actively discouraging it, because every success for climate change is a bad news item. People buying less cars? Climate change win, economic problem. People buying less stuff, consumption down? Huge climate change win, very bad economic news. Even on progressive news outlets they’re doing it.
Here in Europe even before Trump’s second mandate it was clear governments didn’t really want individual action to take off. And it’s even worse now. Because short and mid term it’s a choice between climate and GDP. And western governments and companies are fundamentally incapable of long term action that is painful short term.
I would agree with you, except that the government (eg. in Germany) even battle climate tech when it’s good for the country and the economy. WHO wouldn’t want to be energy independent?
And yet, the Conservative Party in germany once killed the entire solar industry (who then moved to china); and is about to do it again, now! Both times we are losing about 50k jobs in that sector.
The question is: why would they do that, if the economy is oh so important to the conservatives?
That puts recycling on the "I'm helping to spread awareness by temporarily adding a note to my Twitter bio" tier of action. It's better than nothing, but it's only a little better.
I don't agree. Doing something that's makes very little difference makes you feel better, like you've solved the problem, and soothes the urgent need to actually fix the problem. The city gives out recycling cans, and the populace feels confident that the city is doing something, but that takes pressure off of things the city could do that would actually help but are unpalatable, like shutting down the chemical plant pouring stuff into the river, or banning cruise ships.
It does make a difference if lots of people do it. Nothing in the world makes a difference if only one person does it.
> recycling
Because something exists that you don't think makes a significant impact is not evidence that other things don't make an impact. It's an absurd statement to say nothing people do makes an impact - look at almost everything in the world. Look at the Internet, built mostly by self-organizing people and groups.
That dogma does shift power to corporations - then they can claim to be the only ones that can do anything.
It becomes moderately better than nothing when “everyone” (not even close to everyone) does it. And there are some decisions (taking fewer/no flights, no fossil-fueled car, etc) that are a lot more effective than others. Personally I try to do my best! But in general, individual actions are dwarfed by systems bigger than them. Even being able to shun cars is only feasible if you live in a city with good public transport, for instance.
I agree with you that consumer-level personal responsibility is absolutely not the way to go. To a certain extent I try to non-dogmatically "do the right thing", but I know it's simply a cute hobby.
The only solution is systemic. The incentives need to be in order for businesses and consumers to do the right thing not because it is the right thing, but because it's cheaper or more convenient. That can only be implemented via legislation and investment of public resources, hence from the political level.
And what determines whether the politicians in charge are ones who will implement the changes needed to mitigate the problem, rather than ones who will keep alive the system which is intensifying it? Well, we're back to square one: each and every one of us contributes to its intensification or mitigation through our decisions.
For how long though? Solar and wind are very competitive now, electric cars have been good enough to transition to for over a decade, other industries can be decarbonized with the right incentives and enough investment. It's not like there aren't any ideas for how to farm or produce steel cleanly. And nuclear reactors can be made safer and cheaper now.
Seems more like a lack of political will with powerful lobbying interests opposing it and misleading the public. Fossil fuel companies could have listened to their scientists in the 1970s and changed their business models for a transition to cleaner tech a lot sooner.
For a long time to come. The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries), there's a ton of infrastructure for handling and transporting them and a ton of infrastructure for using them.
They get turned into plastics and energy, two things which civilization feeds on voraciously.
> The energy density of fossil fuels is very high (about 50x higher than that of lithium ion batteries)
That doesn't make sense. Batteries are an energy container, they're not energy itself. How can it be compared to a fuel? The direct counterpart to oil or coal is wind or solar radiation itself, batteries are used to amortize the supply and store an excess for emergency use, but otherwise those types of energy just immediately go into powering the grid.
The economic case for renewable power is actually extremely good, because unlike fossil fuels, they're effectively infinite and don't need complex infrastructure to extract. They're free. You only need a power plant that directly converts them into power. If we were just able to shift fossil fuel demand towards producing goods like plastics, this would already be massive. However, a lot of powerful people are deeply invested into fossil fuels and will do anything to tip the scales into their favor, despite gradually losing in the energy sector.
You're the one looking at it in a vacuum. Engineering is all about looking at it in context and the main context where density of energy is important is in vehicles of all shapes and sizes. That's where the rubber quite literally meets the road. You can then theorize about what the 'weight' of the electrical energy is but it is pointless: the weight of container dwarfs the weight of the energy carriers (effectively the electrons) themselves. In the case of fossil fuels the ratio is more balanced, the container will weigh a couple of kilos and the fuel will way a bit more (say 10:1 or 20:1). So to compare the one with the other we weigh the batteries and ignore the electrons and we then compare that with the fuel because that is the dominant factor.
Solar + electricity are not directly suitable for powering electric vehicles, that's where the batteries come in.
Comparing apples (transport of electricity via wires) with oranges (transport of energy via liquid or gas) misses the elephant in the room: you are not going to be able to use those electrons without a suitable temporary storage medium unless you plan on carrying a very long and impractical extension cord behind your now very light EV.
Why? In the context of the electrical grid, has the amount of storage you can have in the backburner ever been a choke point? If anything, fossil fuel power plants have the very same batteries to buffer some energy. But for the vast majority of power consumers that can just exist on the grid, power storage is nearly irrelevant because it can go directly from producer to consumer. Even in places where storage is relevant (anything that can't be tethered to the grid, like vehicles) the equation is different because the infrastructure you need to convert fuel to power (engines vs electric motors) don't weigh the same. Yes, even with that, pure electricity still falls behind somewhat, but it's getting better. And I was mainly talking about the power grid anyway, with how universal and important it is. Fossil fuel straight up loses in that sector, like what I said before, so replacing it is an easy choice... and yet we don't do that.
It's an immense uphill struggle if you tried to get people to adjust to where transport is less available, and encourage living or working at closer ranges or conversely long range shipping/travel/vacations seen as more of a luxury. Just thinking about it I'm reminded of the outrage that was fabricated/stirred up over "15 minute cities" in the UK where the idea that you'd be able to get to most things you need day-to-day in a 15 minute walk was warped into a scare of state checkpoints, fines and surveillance. Or the retreat from working from home.
It's a huge adjustment from how the past few decades have established expectations, and it'll take a big force to change quickly, similar to covid even though that was short term in hindsight.
And yet, we're not completely stuck. It is absolutely clear that not enough has been done to reduce our carbon emissions, and we're on a bad path on track to ~2.5°C warming in the next century. However, something has been done, and if nothing had been done we could easily be on track to >4°C global warming. That would be much worse.
So, how did we achieve what little we have? Well, because many people have cared, and have made the right decisions. Not enough people, or maybe not good-enough decisions, but some people, and somewhat good decisions.
So, what were the decisions which brought us down from an apocalyptic +4°C to a very bad 2.5°C path? Was it enough consumers making environmentally conscious choices, even if they were less convenient or more expensive. No. It was enough voters wanting their leaders to do something, even if it wasn't quite enough, but it was something. And something isn't nothing.
We will never have enough people voting with their wallet to fight climate change, because our rational understanding of the big-picture cannot overpower our intuitive day-to-day choices. However, we may have enough people voting with their ballot to fight climate change, because the rational big-picture can, sometimes, decide whom we vote for.
Considering that current energy usage of AI is very likely to plummet in the coming years due to efficiency gains (which we've seem massive improvements on in the last couple years) and most of these large companies building datacenters are looking for and investing in specifically clean energy sources (nuclear) I don't think AI is a meaningful contributor compared to all the other high causes of global emissions.
Sure, but I meant consumption on a per-task basis. I would also add that at some point building new software is going to become rather valueless as society trends towards building effectively any variant of software anyone could want relatively instantly and cheaply.
There is also a finite number of consumers of AI content on the planet - sure maybe everyone want 4k-per eye live feed video of anything they want 24/7, but once you accomplish that for all 8 billion humans, there is no further demand for it.
Generation costs are very likely to continue to trends rapidly downward and there is a likely final wall of saturation of demand.
I don't expect fusion to make a difference in either direction.
For big reactors: At current aluminium prices, the bill of materials for a global power grid with 1 Ω resistance the long way round is only about 10x the cost ITER (the organisation) expects ITER (the reactor) to be. Plug in your own numbers for target resistance as desired, halve resistance needs double the material.
With such a grid, you can put the PV in Angola and still get useful output in mid-winter nighttime in Anchorage.
For potential small reactors like Helion's "shipping container" target size, I won't say it can't work (I don't know enough to be confident), but I will say that we immediately find we have bigger problems because any hostile actor can simply choose to run them in neutron-source mode and turn everyday cheap depleted uranium* into weaponizable plutonium.
* I note that eBay still clearly has a dictionary merge on all nouns, given my search results came up with this:
Get the best deals for Depleted Uranium Metal at eBay.com. We have a great online selection at the lowest prices with Fast & Free shipping on many items!
Also be aware that US restrictions on sales aren't particularly relevant to this, as the moment this Columbus' Egg** gets solved it rapidly becomes a global problem.
Completely agree with the outlook ("fusion power irrelevant for climate change in every realistic scenario").
But where did you take those grid cost numbers from? Iter costs are <100bn AFAIC; and Germany alone (!!) projects more than that (top end) for grid expansion/operation within 2040 (mainly north/south and offshore connectivity).
Putting this note first, because it's probably the main point of confusion/surprise: I did say "bill of materials"; the estimated full cost for European and US grid upgrades that we need anyway for other reasons, with far less material, is order-of a trillion or so for US, half a trillion for EU.
For scale, this is about what China makes in 2 years; if this is rolled out over 30, which would be optimistic but plausible, it's within the realm of just how much China increased production between 2023 and 2025, being spent every year.
To get to 10x ITER's own estimate for ITER, the wikipedia page says the organisation estimates the reactor will cost about €18-22bn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
There are a lot of reasons not to do this as a single big 1m^2 "wire", amongst them being that the surface magnetic field is strong enough to be dangerous to approach with ferrous materials.
The "square meter of aluminium" is an interesting take. Not sure how much power you'd get over that thing; extrapolating from existing HVDC systems (Inga-Shaba is 1GW over 2x520mm²), I'd expect around 1TW, so twice the US demand?
But because Nimbys have no appreciation for beautiful pylons, projects in that direction are doomed for now anyway and everything needs to be buried underground at extra cost :(
Losses are I^2 R, which has the annoying consequence that % loss depends on how much juice you put through it, it isn't a constant percentage.
Pylons… eh. Doing this realistically rather than my napkin-maths, it would be a mix of many different solutions in different parts of the world, from competing environmental issues. Some would be pylons, some underground cables. Is the Sahara dry enough to run it on the ground, or in a concrete trench? I have no idea.
As a side note, every so often I keep being surprised on here by Americans who can't rely on the grid in winter because snow disables it, and some Californian forest fires are attributed to unmaintained pylons failing, dropping live wires onto the forest where they spark and light up the dry wood. These could both be resolved by burying more cables. Likewise within urban areas: here in Europe it's rather rare to see overhead lines in urban or suburban areas, unless they're over a tram/railway line.
IMO the real killer of any project like this, is geopolitics, not local politics. EU doesn't trust China, the US, or Russia; the current US administration doesn't trust or doesn't like basically everyone; Russia kinda gets along with China but few else; China would like to sell stuff to everyone but also have border disputes and other friction with many of their neighbours.
I do agree that politics is a big enemy here (with nations historically being most willing to spend big on energy when reducing interdependence, like the french Messmer plan, instead of the reverse).
Honestly the "1m² around the world" is probably a pretty good proxy for what we would need to solve intermittency problems exclusively by boosting grid connectivity (instead of storage), rescaling this to 4m² cumulative cross-section could probably transport the total global electrical energy consumption over ~10000km (but the losses would get uncomfortably high from an economical point of view after crossing the 1000-2000km distance threshold, so you might want even more aluminium when you desire connections that long).
Btw: Underground cables instead of pylons are absolutely a nimby thing. Not only is it much more expensive, because you pay for the earthwork and additional insulator, but it also limits your voltage (to avoid overpaying for insulation even more).
Return current is typically free, either from balancing 3phase AC or because decent electrodes get you <1Ohm over any distance thanks to math for the DC case. Just talking high voltage here; for short range, lower power residential connections the situation is different.
While arguments can be made at the futility of individual action against a system action, it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash. There are consumers of what is being produced!
Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
There are quantitative arguments against many silly consumer-focused initiatives. In aggregate tho companies aren’t burning fossil fuels for fun. Burning fossil fuels costs money, and a lot of people would rather not spend that money!!
> it’s not like companies are making a bunch of product just to throw them in the trash
Sure they do. You even mention one in the venerable plastic bag. Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not. Is it the cheapest bag to produce? You betcha.
> Is it the best bag? No, of course not. Is it a good bag? Absolutely not
Plastic is absolutely the best packaging material ever created, it's so good, it feels like magic. It's light, it's cheap, it's waterproof, it's durable and doesn't just decompose, it comes in a miriad shapes and forms and so on. There is a reason it's everywhere
One of those adjectives describes the plastic bag I'm familiar with. Sometimes it lasts long enough to get the food in the house without spilling through a hole which spontaneously appeared in the bag.
I remember when that switch at grocers from paper to plastic was taking hold, and you could choose. "Paper or plastic?" was the question asked. Some comedian (probably) had a good one liner: "That'll be 42.39. Kill a tree or choke a fish?"
The plastic bag is sold to businesses! If every supermarket in the world decided to never buy another plastic bag then they would no longer be produced!
There can be a futility to it all in that the “ideal option” simply isn’t produced of course.
I find boots theory is often a bit too convenient in this topic though. There is unlikely to be magic structural solutions that allow every part of your life to remain as convenient. At one point our lives will have to change in structure.
EDIT: to be extra clear, I think systemic coordinated changes is needed. I just think the “it’s the corporations doing this!” narrative to obscure the needs for reorganization of daily life on top of systemic change
Many cities have banned plastic bags, and the results have been miraculous for waterways and wetlands. It turns out that shore animals don't benefit as much from "hope a few customers choose the better thing, but otherwise let them take home single-use crap that immediately blows off into natural settings."
Would you be ok if stores offered the option between a cheap plastic bag and a more expensive non-plastic one? (All the stores here already do it, btw).
I think the externalities of plastic recycling must be internalized economically by requiring all manufacturers of items to pre-pay for the recycling of said items up front, as part of the manufacturing cost. Similar to how bottle returns are managed, which has been very successful. Items which are provably biodegradable or designed to facilitate repair may be exempt.
Plastic bags are already taxed where I live. Consumers pay that tax, obviously. Other costs imposed on producers of plastic items will just be passed down to consumers.
Exactly. The point of this sort of tax should not be to collect revenue, it should be to ensure that non-biodegradable bags are being disposed of correctly. To the extent that this is not happening, any bag tax is malfunctioning. Such a tax is either insufficient or poorly-designed. (Our city just banned chain stores from giving out plastic bags under 4 mils thick, and stores now give out paper and sell re-usable bags.)
Even if that state is just straight up burning all the tax income from single-use plastic bags, by taxing them you incentivize consumers and distributors towards untaxed, ideally more sustainable alternatives, like single use paper bags or robust multi-use bags.
> Our city just banned chain stores from giving out plastic bags under 4 mils thick, and stores now give out paper and sell re-usable bags
I don't see how this is not a massive win? Paper bags are significantly more sustainable, and multi-use bags are more durable and thrown aways less simply from being more expensive alone.
People are much more wasteful with things they didn't pay for, regardless of "inherent" value.
We’re not disagreeing. I’m saying that the tax should be set high enough that it creates the desired behavior, which is to disincentivize the widespread use of polluting plastic bags AND/OR ensure that they’re recycled and don’t wind up in the environment. If you’re charging $.05 per bag and people are just eating the tax and the bags are winding up in wetlands in similar amounts, that means your tax regime isn’t effective. You should either increase the tax or improve the system. My city’s absolute ban is equivalent to setting the tax to infinity, which is one solution that seems to work well.
That ain't working. A plastic bag discarded in a ditch by the side of the road, or blown by the wind from the landfill, is still going to end up into the ocean. No amount of prepay recycling is going to take back that plastic from the ocean.
This presupposes that consumers have infinite capacity to ingest the minute details of every single product they come into contact with.
Yes, the plastic bag has users. Do you really expect every single shopper to investigate how the bag at <grocery co> was made and if the plastic is recycled? What if they also have to do the same for every single thing they interact with every single day?
It's much easier to ask the people that work with the minutia of plastic bags every day, namely the people who make them, to maybe fix this problem.
> Society’s choices and lifestyles are the cause of fossil fuel consumption, at a very high level. The plastic bag exists because it has users.
Society's choices and lifestyles don't exist in some rational-individualistic vacuum. Companies advertise products while hiding known risks and side effects of what they're pushing. Cigarettes. Oil. PFOA/PFAS.
They all knew, and they did and continue to do it anyway. Regulatory capture solved all their problems by removing accountability.
Let us not pretend that the billions and billions spent on advertising by corporations leveraging deep knowledge of human behavior means the lion's share of blame goes to the victims of said advertising behmoth.
I never understood this. The companies sold you fossil fuel, you burnt it and got benefits out of it: transportation, energy, heating, constructions, fertilizers and food, etc. You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption while you keep all the generated benefits?
> You want them to pay for the negative consequences of your fossil fuel consumption
No I want them to pay for the negative consequences of the lies they spread. I paid them for fuel, and I got fuel. I did not think I was paying for lies and I never wanted them.
No, what we wanted for decades is for cars to shift to the free market of electric energy, just like every one of our other appliances have for decades. Electricity is a free market - can be generated by hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, even nuclear. If tomorrow they invent clean fusion power then electric cars would be able to benefit.
The cars being locked into fossil fuels is the result of fossil fuel subsidies from the government. Otherwise, OPEC raising prices would have long ago led to improvements in battery technology and electric cars. But the federal government shields the fossil fuels companies to make sure the “price at the pump” is small.
We should be raising pigovian taxes on fossil fuels at the point of extraction, and redistribute it to all our citizens as a UBI. Alaska has been doing this for decades and they have almost the lowest GINI index of all states year after year.
Just like we want bottling and clothing companies to shift from plastics to bidegradeable materials. But you like to keep individuals distracted and blame them for using a straw and a bag, as if THAT is the main cause of pollution. And plastic recycling was a total scam designed to keep people distracted from forcing change on corporations pollution and unsustainable practices upstream.
Where does the chain end? I burn diesel in my tractor to harvest corn. Should the feedlot that buys my corn pay for the tractor’s emissions? Should the slaughterhouse that processes the cattle pay? Should the supermarket that stocks the beef pay? Should the family who grills the steak on Sunday pay? Or just the one who eats the largest portion?
You either tax the fuel and pass the cost down to the consumers, or decide as a society to share the cost of the externalities and use general taxation for that.
Here, in the first scenario it directly punishes consumers for consuming more. In the second, it punishes everyone equally on everyone's consumption, which is unlikely to lead to behavior change. So yes, we should tax fossil fuels much more.
However, the first scenario will pass the increased cost of fuel down to the consumers affecting poorer people disproportionately. Example: some good that is produced with fossil fuels (including food) will become too expensive for low-income people, while richer (and more polluting) people will not feel the difference that much.
If you go for general taxation, you distribute the cost proportionally to income, making rich people pay more. Probably the ideal is a mix of both.
Ideally in the first scenario where we have well-functioning government, necessities like food and low-income housing would be well subsidized. Other things like random junk from Temu and large gas-guzzling trucks will be less accessible to poorer people by design.
Why should all of society pay for these externalities? If some people manage to improve their energy supply and don't require dirty fuels, why should they be forced to subsidize those who won't?
Taxing the carbon at the source is simply correctly pricing it, and because it makes it impossible to shift the externalities away from the producer it fixes the accounting problem that falsely makes fossil fuels appear cheap.
So… it’s like you completely understand the issue :)
And obviously, you tax the fuel at the source, right when it comes out of the ground. Higher prices get passed down, changing behavior because the products externalities are priced correctly from the start.
To be clear, the source would still be the consumer. Hydrocarbons can be used for non-CO2 emitting purposes such as chemical feedstock for pharmaceuticals, solvents, etc. We should only be levying a tax upon uses that emit CO2 into the atmosphere, i.e. burning them in your ICE vehicle. It’s not the fracking company that’s emitting the CO2 (unless they’re gas flaring or similarly emitting carbon during extraction but this is a rounding error on total emissions).
You can. Everything- including basic things like food, transportation, construction, healthcare- will become more expensive, of course. My objection was to ask fossil fuel companies to pay after you already bought and burned your fuel cheap.
I want the emitter to be taxed however much it would cost the market to put the carbon back.
Obviously in such a system there wouldn’t be any fossil fuel companies so it’s a moot point.
But this isn’t purely economic. Fossil fuel companies are paying top dollar to ensure we destroy the climate. Just look at all the batshit propaganda around climate change. People genuinely believe it’s not a problem. It’s wild how effective the fossil fuel industry has been in convincing people the sky isn’t falling
I'm an environmentalist and I agree with this framing. The solution is going to be painful and must increase prices on products and services that fossil fuels are currently the cheapest solution for. If you're not willing to personally sacrifice anything to reduce fossil fuel consumption you can see why carbon taxes are not popular, right? France's protests against them, for example, are a good example of a populist reaction against attempts to regulate the economy to have less emissions.
The amount of fossil fuels that a working class individual burns are a rounding error compared to what big companies burn. How many private jets are in the air right now? Even if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced, run your home HVAC at max, and buy gasoline just to burn in your back yard, you will never measure up. It's like saying we need to dry the oceans, so you should stop peeing in it.
> if you drive the most energy inefficient truck ever produced
Sorry, but how was that truck produced? Where did the energy to make it come from? How was your home built, where did the energy come from? Where did the materials come from? How did the workers come to the job? What did they eat, and what do you eat? Do you go to an office? How was it built? How do you and your colleagues get there? Do your children go to school? Do you go to hospitals when you're sick? Etc.
Its a case of prisoner's dilemma. Individuals making the proposed lifestyle changes in order to make a genuine dent in AGW amount to jumping on the tracks in order to stop a freight train.
This is the one issue where I feel some sympathy with the right. I hate "Virtue signaling" about as much as they do. I'm sorry, but if you are going to snap at people over eating beef, while you fly/drive all over the country/world unnecessarily, you are absolute full of shyte.
I am not a vegan. My social world in D.C./NYC has many secular, left-wing, vegans. Many of them are friends or loved ones. They demonstrably speak their mind in front of me on countless issues on which we disagree.
I have dined with them countless times at restaurants where they order vegan and I don't. I have never once been "snapped at" about my dietary decisions. Some of these people have dedicated years of their life to non-human animal rights activism.
So I am very skeptical that this shaming occurs at any appreciable scale. I suspect it is mostly psychological projection: one doubts the morality of one's decisions, judges oneself harshly, but experiences this as the judgement of others.
You are correct that this is not a prisoner's dilemma, it is a tragedy of the commons[0]. However, if a wizard could magically control the "personal decisions of 99% of Earth population" and make them optimal for reducing CO2 emissions then, believe me, climate change could be trivially solved.
It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.
Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.
If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).
If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).
People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.
The assumption here is that fossil fuels are actually cheaper. But an electric car pays back the higher upfront cost in fuel savings in significantly fewer miles than most cars will have put on them. Solar generates power at a lower cost per kWh than coal.
The fossil fuel industry has to be actively sustained through subsidies and government regulation hostile to alternatives. Maybe that wasn't true 50 years ago before the alternatives got viable and cheap, but if it's not true now then why did we stop subsidizing electric cars while we still subsidize oil companies?
WDYM personal decisions don't matter? Industrial and agricultural sectors, which both in sum contribute 50% of total greenhouse gas emissions, produce what is in demand from consumers. Another 15% of emissions is from personal vehicles. Changing personal habits is the only way we can ever reach some utopian climate targets. Utopian because old habits die hard.
Once again, personal decisions on the consumer side doesn't matter here. Unless all consumers cooperate to force a ban on practices that are bad for environment. However that basically means forcing specific decisions on the 1% that control laws and business.
If consumers stop buying gas guzzlers, the impact of personal transportation on the climate will reduce. Are you suggesting the 1% controls the minds of the 99% to do things that are harmful to the environment? Past some point, there is at least some level of personal responsibility?
Several car companies had plans to stop making ICE cars at some point in the near future. Everyone stopped buying their cars and they have had to backtrack (e.g. Porsche). We have all collectively decided that environmentalism is hot air (tee hee) and we'll just continue with business as usual.
I gave up driving in the 1990s because I knew back then the situation was untenable for the climate. I chose to try to live a life that contributes less to the destruction of life as we know it. Life without a car has brought sacrifice, but I'm glad I did it. No, my single sacrifice won't save the planet, because far too many people are addicted to cheap energy, and free movement. Blaming the oil industry is like blaming the cows because you ate too much cheese. Now there are electric cars, but unless you are charging it up every day from solar/battery (along with your house), then you're still only helping a little.
Suppose the fossil fuel lobby disappeared tomorrow, along with government subsidies and any hegemony you think exists - people are still going to be addicted to cheap energy. Only when the forms of energy they currently rely on really starts costing what it would cost to save the planet from climate change will you and others realize that every decision has a consequence. You want to drive 2+ hours in traffic every day? That has a real cost for the environment to do it with fossil fuel.
Maybe try changing your life so that you don't spend 2+ hours every day driving around in traffic. That's what I did, I got a job locally, got rid of my car, and started riding my bike everywhere. If it was far, I planned ahead take the bus/train. I do this in Los Angeles, since the 1990s - not exactly a bike-centric place to live, but it is entirely possible to do. Of course it's more difficult to do this in rural areas, but maybe that should be the exception.
Corporations do whatever is in their financial interest, provided it is legal. They're neither good or evil. (If they were DnD characters their alignment would be "lawful greedy".) What is legal is determined by governments, who are elected by individuals like you.
This is why people need to be reminded of the impact and causes of climate change. You can't just say, "Oil corporations are evil" and absolve yourself of responsibility. That's how nothing gets done. Corporations are not going to stop being "evil" of their own accord. They're going to obey the laws and regulations set forth by the governments they operate under.
Americans elected a president who openly campaigned on bringing back coal and said, "Drill baby drill!". Oil executives made campaign donations but, ultimately, this is the fault of Americans. They're not educated enough and they tolerate too much money in their politics. Scapegoating oil companies does nothing to solve these problems.
I hear what you're saying but also have lately felt a lot of frustration with this framing. I definitely agree that large corporations share an outsized portion of the blame; they have misled and misdirected us past the brink of crisis in pursuit of profit. And as you point out, one of the special cruelties of their system is that it prearranges individual consumer options so that we have the illusion of choice, but ultimately wind up complicit no matter what we choose. Thus its incumbent on us (collectively) to make a decision that's not on the menu we've been handed. But (critically) its still going to be individuals making that choice. It's not enough to merely topple Big Oil at a social scale, we will also have to give up our F-450s and sprawling SFH tracts with four car garages. It's not necessarily fair, and it's not necessarily our fault, but it's still our responsibility (because it's ultimately our future that's at risk).
Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
In fact the reason it's so easy to find others to blame is that the responsibility is a shared one. Holding consumers responsible doesn't absolve producers, or governments for their participation. All have to be held responsible for their actions. That's the only way forward.
> Problem is that we if we all stand in a circle and point fingers at the next guy who is to blame, that doesn't really move us toward any sort of solutions.
Because of the power of lobbyists and their war chests full of cash, even if we made that circle surrounding our congress critter so everyone was pointing at them, we'd still have no effect. Our shame circle would only be uncomfortable for a short time which would quickly be assuaged by the soothing feeling of another large donation from a lobbyist.
Most people would agree that drug dealers hold more moral responsibility for delivering a product that they know is highly addictive but on the other hand no one would absolve an addict of any responsibility. Even you think addiction is a illness, we still expect people to help themselves by deciding to get help/seek treatment to fight the addiction.
This sounds sensible in isolation, but the real analogy is that the drug dealers have spent billions of dollars convincing the general public that drugs are healthy and better than the alternative of sobriety.
And also, when I go to the store to buy my daily needs like food and soap, they’re all packaged in the drugs.
Oh and I have to consume the drugs to get to the store because there’s no safe way to get there on foot or on a bike, and there’s no bus or train service because someone at GM/Ford paid my representatives to not fund that.
Then when I take my used drugs to the drug recycling center, they don’t actually get recycled because it isn’t profitable. But my recycling agency tells me that all my drugs get reused.
Seriously, just watch a paper towel ad or something. They act like it’s impossible to clean up a spill with something reusable.
Enjoyed reading your comment but the fact that it's more environmental than it is biological (is it though ? Isn't comfort appreciation biological too ?) doesn't change the moral calculation of my analogy which imho still holds: Quitting drugs is hard but it needs the addict's involvement
It’s government’s fault for not regulating it properly. You can’t give individuals choice and then blame them. Just like you can’t give industry the ability to mass produce these things that are so inherently bad for current but especially future humans. Only governments are responsible for playing that kind of long game.
> It’s government’s fault for not regulating it properly.
Who is government responsible to and responsive to? Individuals.
> You can’t give individuals choice and then blame them.
That is exactly how the world and responsibility works. You have the choice to do right or wrong, and are responsible for the consequences - in Abrahamic religions, it goes back to Eden.
You personally have endless choices every day where you can do wrong with no penalty to you. Unless you are sociopathic, you generally do the right thing.
This was a tailored response to this context. You trying to apply it generally is quite ridiculous.
Governments exist so that individuals can function as a society. Your point is circular (Government<->Individual). Governments are responsible to a collection of individuals, a society. We enable our governments to oversee safety of toys, vehicles, toxic materials, etc. because it is quite inconvenient to make those evaluations at a individual level on a daily basis. We are also human who have short-term value systems, governments are supposed to force us to act with a longer-term outlook. Eg. caring about the next generation.
Indeed, the biggest personal responsibility is to make this a top political priority when deciding who to elect. Nothing will change until we consistenly fire leaders who refuse to act decisively on this.
There is nothing g to “disagree” about.
Of course systemic changes are required.
But if the individual improve their actions it will have a meaningful impact too
Without systemic change the impact of individuals wont be meaningful. Maybe on a spiritual level but they won’t contribute meaningfully to the climate change (or non-change)
It won’t and believing it will is part of ensuring nothing changes. All energy you spend on personally changing should be instead spent lobbying, organizing, and otherwise working politically to effect systemic change. There is no value in individual change. It’s worse than doing nothing.
If you drive a fossil fuel vehicle, you have chosen to buy into this. If you drive it 3 blocks when you could walk, you've chosen to go the way the fuel company wants you to. That's you.
Plastic is a bit different, you didn't choose the packaging. And you probably don't have the option to recycle anyway. Putting in a special bin doesn't change the fact that it's probably going to a landfill anyway.
Some of it's consumer level. Do what you can. Don't whatabout it.
Plastic is a fantastic material, that's why it's chosen for the packaging. I also don't see the problem sending it to a landfill as long as it stays there.
Every industry ever is going to externalize all the costs you allow it to externalize.
The individual responsibility is to vote for representatives that prevent such externalization through regulation, and to stand behind such regulation even if it is slightly inconvenient (plastic drinking straws) or somewhat costly (gas, flights).
The biggest problem is that a significant part of the global population is not willing to make even the smallest sacrifice in lifestyle towards such a goal (=> this is often difficult to see if you are in a more left/green bubble, but i absolutely true of the average citizen).
We, as voters, have expressed so little care for climate and environment sustainability that politicians don't even bother catering towards that niche any more.
In the US there was an super obvious choice 25 years ago in the US between genuine, ambitious sustainability and some generic politician not even half as competent as his father, and we all saw the outcome; politicians since barely even bother pretending to be concerned about climate sustainability because voters just don't care.
It's another claim of powerlessness, which is exactly what the 'fossil energy industry' wants people to say - it's demoralizing, paralyzing, and like any disinformation it's a distraction from actually doing something; now we're debating this stuff instead of doing something. So is the victim debate - who is at fault, assessing blame, etc.
Nobody, as a single human being, can accomplish much in any field. Every significant thing humanity does happens in large groups. The good news is, we are hardwired to work in groups - you see it all over, all the time. People naturally organize and work together; think of FOSS projects, for example. And that is what democracy is, and democracy is the most dynamic, effective, changeable method of government in human history.
Let's stop wasting time debating it and get to work. A simple thing to do is to reduce personal climate output. Again, you can't have much effect alone, but humans act together, and we all can do our part. That's why there isn't trash covering the streets - one person can't prevent that, but everyone is putting their garbage in the bin.
I am responsible for the consequences of my actions and words, and for my community - we all are, of course. The victim / blame perspective is the opposite of that - victimhood is a justification / rationalization for a lack of responsibility, for inaction. As anyone with experience of decent management knows, that is the last thing you do. The problem needs to be solved.
Merchant shipping contributes around 3% to CO₂ emissions. That is smaller than, e.g., electricity and heat generation, road transportation, manufacturing, construction, and agriculture.
It’s funny that this is always ignored or downvoted when consumers are a relatively small part of the problem. Surely shaming people harder will fix the problem, this time.
If everyone chose to eat veggie burgers and seitan steaks instead of using beef, the climate's trajectory would immediately improve. For all the responsibility of industry, many individual world citizens could, and many have, changed their lifestyle due to the moral issue of climate-changing emissions.
Sure seems pretty insecure to shackle yourself to a finite resource that is harder and harder to obtain while producing more and more toxic pollution. Even if you literally don't believe that the climate is real, the endless free and easy to obtain energy from the sky is simply a more secure source, followed closely by the endless free energy blowing around in the air.
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