Reverend Blair wrote:Okay, first a song, because it's morning and I crave death banjo music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3rVfIBWnDk
Ah, that's better. Now to get caught up.
Fact Man wrote:Your story about Tesla's stick is quite clearly embedded in today economic milieu and I'd dismiss it as being irrelevant because I don't think today's economic milieu will hold up over time. It's already on its knees and no one I know of is predicting that it's oing to regain its former glories any time soon. The prospect of enduring high unemployment is a very big concern right now among our economists, who see it as presenting a huge drag on the one hand and the potential for social unrest on the other.
I hope you are right, and I keep trying to make myself wrong, but I'm essentially fighting the same economic battles my Grandmother was fighting during the Depression, so I don't see the milieu changing anytime soon.
Fact Man wrote:In any case, it does not occur to me that our 17th century economic system is capable of dealing with the fast emerging crisis nature of high GHG emissions ... and hence I'm expecting that some quite fundamental changes in economy will be forced upon us whether we like it or not. Which is to say, in part, that what the "vested interests" think isn't going to matter.
Check the landscape, we have flopped like tunas on this issue for 25 years and made zero progress toward achieving any kind of progress. Instead, we have a monstrous "debate" going on as to whether the science of AGW is correct and valid or it's a "hoax," as some have suggested, e.g., Senator Inhof, a "debate" in which hard won reputations of scientists are being piloried by journos who wouldn't know climate science if it walked up and kissed them on the lips.
Is that not a fair assessment of the present situation?
I think it is.
It's a fair assessment of the present situation, except that you forget the economy failed in the late 1800's, again in the 1930's. again in the 1980's (everybody skips that one, but it was pretty brutal if you look at it) and again now. For each of the first three predictions of a new system were cast and some slow, small progress was made, then clawed back as the robber barons/corporations again gained power. That 17th century system that never really worked for anybody but the very rich is pretty tenacious.
Tenacious is probably an understatement!
I haven't forgotten the history of economy, I just didn't mention those particular failures, which are now essentially irrelevant because we face a situation that's entirely unique and different and affects things much more broadly and more fundamentally than what occurred in those debacles.
The system didn't need a whole lot of rejiggering to get going again after the debacles that occurred before 1929; it needed a fair bit of rejiggering after that one, mainly involving the introduction of credit: before 1929 about the only thing one could buy on credit was land, today we buy almost everything on credit, even what we purchase at the local 7-11.
The New Deal was interrupted by War II and didn't get going until after 1946. Between that year and late 2008 a couple of bubble driven hiccups occurred (1988 S&L, 2001 dot com) and then in October 08 it really collapsed behind a bursting housing bubble and enormous indebtedness among the banks and AIG. To prevent utter collapse, Paulson and Bernanke were forced to do the unthinkable, get $700 billion of taxpayer dollars from the Congress and infuse the banking system with it, along with another several $trillion they made available through the Fed's own lines of credit.
They saved the system but barely and today we're in the midst of the worst economic times since the Great Depression and the future looks anything but bright.
As you noted in your response to JimC's post,
"All of that takes money ... and there simply isn't the political will to produce that money," which is true as far as it goes
... but it doesn't consider the fact that there is no money to be had, assuming the political will was there to seek it (which it isn't, as you note). But I think it's key to understanding what might happen over the coming decade to realize there is no money or very damned little of it, with the US facing an $11 trillion national debt, their Chinese credit card about maxed out, and annual federal budget deficits running around a $trillion.
When I looked ahead to 2020 and thought about what might be done at that time in the face of an overwhelming science case, I didn't see a whole lot of money available for doing anything, all I saw was an empty national bank account and a national debt that'll probably be pushing $20 trillion. There will be loads of private money around, the fossil fuel industry alone stands to earn several $trillion itself between now and then. But of course much of that will have long since been distributed to shareholders and it's doubtful we can expect private money to fund the demise of its own system.
I agree with you that the "vested interests" will fight to the last breath to keep its myriad cash cows functioning, the system is unquestionably, and as you noted, a tenacious beast. But think for a moment what a President and a Congress will be faced with when the science plops a report on their collective desks that says,
'act now or die," or words to that effect.
I call that moment
"crunch time," and for all practical purposes it is inevitably in our future, because, as you know, the physics and chemistry of GW just keep rolling, not caring a whit about what we do or don't do or think, and the temp curve will just keep rising
... until we stop emitting.
The handwriting, as we say, is on the wall, and more than a few luminaries have connected these dots in recent weeks and made some rather surprising and startling comments about the situation, Bill Gates declared in his recent TED speech that we "have to cut emissions to zero by 2050," UNSECGEN Ban Ki-Moon said we "have to go on a war footing," and you saw in my last post what climate researchers at Australia's UNSW had to say about things, and that report had no fewer than 26 co-authors, including
...
Ian Allison, Nathan Bindoff, Robert Bindschadler, Peter Cox, Nathalie de Noblet-Ducoudre, Matthew England, Jane Francis,
Nicolas Gruber, Alan Haywood , David Karoly , Georg Kaser, Corinne Le Quéré, Tim Lenton, Michael Mann, Ben McNeil,
Andy Pitman, Stefan Rahmstorf , Eric Rignot, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Stephen Schneider, Steven Sherwood, Richard
Somerville, Konrad Steffen, Eric Steig, Martin Visbeck, and Andrew Weaver,
all of whom are noted scientists and some of whom are noted climatologists, Mann and Steig in particular.
The war between the science and the vested interests, most notably the fossil fuel bloc, has only continued to gain in intensity, with the latter now engaging in what appears to be criminal activities (CRU hack) to further its agenda and even as liberal a publication as the UK's
Guardian in the midst of publising a series of falsehood-laden articles attacking the science and some of its most noted practitioners.
As a writer, I'd describe this as the "war now being fully engaged."
Where does that war end?
What will it's culminating battle be?
I'm saying it'll be the
crunch time mentioned above, which appears to me to be set for sometime around the year 2020, when the science case has become overwhelming and completely undeniable
... and government will be forced to act by the circumstances, as created by the lack of any further deniability.
Crunch time!
And in that moment government will face a massive project to cut emissions very quickly in very big ways, which means a hugely accelerated transition from fossil to renewable/nuclear that simply could not be tackled within the existing economic structure
... and hence we'll see fundamental economic change, again, whether anyone likes it or not.
When your back's against the wall you do what you have to do.
Otherwise, you die.
Carry on and do enjoy!
)
