Can’t remember if I have posted this before but what the hell…
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Facebook develop a metaverse () and same time call itself meta a few days ago…
Really? That’s possible to steal me a word like that? What a fox trick. No one to object?
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This looks like one of those stupid top model competitions (ntm etc), which try to fulfill professional contracts while using an amateur model (unpaid?).
Or, it’s just a reality check about an activity that sounded nice in theory. To be fair, some people may think they don’t mind heights, because they judge from common situations (balconies, top floors, cable-cars). Result: when they try something extraordinary, they get scared.
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Still, fossil CO2 emissions are slowly decreasing in the US and in Europe, and stabilizing in China, so maybe the situation is not so bad.
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Note that those are per capita emissions. After multiplying by population, we see the actual growth rate.
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The fertility rate is low in these three areas. The population will eventually decline.
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I think they already take into account various things like population dynamics when they make these sort of +2.4C projections.
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I am not sure that anyone can predict what will happen in most cases. I come from a country that has already aged and supporting the social network and pensions and healthcare would have been tough even without the economic crisis.
What will happen when the “1 child per family” generations in China, for example, need to retire and get pensions? A similar thing applies to all the countries with recent large population blooms like India and Indonesia.
I do not think that anyone knows the answer to how those economies will deal with that issue when in will arise in 20+ years, let alone be able to predict how it would affect emissions. We do not even know what else is in store tech-wise. E.g. Here is something great in a video that came out today:
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I’m not saying we will do better than +2.4°, just that things are changing and that we are on the right track. Probably not fast enough, however there is only one really efficient method to reduce global warming and nobody is really talking seriously about it: taxes. People won’t change their behavior unless there are financial consequences. Criticizing governments is easy, but almost nobody says “please double all fossil fuel prices, this will force me to burn less fuel, I’ll be so happy to pay more in order to save the planet”.
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Taxes are used already at least with advantages for who isolate his house, use the right transportation… Ok not everywhere and maybe not with so big consequences on individual lives but it exists.
It’s in fact very difficult to predict anything because it’s a new kind of concern where all the countries have to do something together.
Wars, religion, age of population, access to technologies,values… So many differences and various priorities too.
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I wouldn’t say nobody is taking it seriously. Quite a lot of economists and environmental activists have lobbied for this over the years.
Personally, I would happily pay more than double in energy costs in order to reduce global fossil fuel usage and fund the transition toward sustainable power.
We really need to do much more of the radical changes we need throughout society, from massive deployment of sustainable power generation to electrifying transportation and improving building energy efficiency to disincentivizing wasteful consumption of many forms.
I recognize that there are difficulties in doing something like this. For example, simply imposing a massive fossil fuel tax would reduce fossil fuel usage, but would also (without other assistance programs) disproportionately burden the poorer classes, while the rich might just continue to emit massive amounts of carbon being able to afford that luxury. It is not equitable to just shift fossil fuel use into a privilege for the wealthy. We must transition away from it as a whole society. It’s vital to do this with collective action, rather than leave it to the capriciousness of individual choice.
However we address it, there is going to be significant economic pain, and many policies may be unpopular, making it difficult to governments to adopt. Ideally, we should have less private jets and mega yachts, while striving to even lift up the standard of living for the least fortunate, but perhaps that is all just a pipe dream given how wealth so greatly influences political power.
Just the aspect of leaving fossil fuels buried in the ground is met with intense opposition by the narrow interests that control the economic rights of those minerals. That’s roughly fifteen trillion dollars worth of perverse incentives buried in the ground.
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That’s precisely the point. Left-wing politicians don’t want to talk too much about carbon tax because they don’t want to burden the poor. Right-wing politicians don’t talk about carbon tax because they value economic growth more than the environment. And anyway nobody is going to be elected by saying “I’ll raise taxes for everybody”. People get elected by saying “you’ll get more money, and the group of people you don’t like will get less money”.
However if we don’t impose taxes now, as oil becomes scarce, oil prices will skyrocket in 2040 or 2050 anyway so we’d better prepare the economy in advance.
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They say “taxes”, I hear “tax havens”.
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As a child I got the idea to just raise taxes for everybody, and distribute that equally over the whole population. Since the vast majority of people earn less than the mean income, the vast majority of people will improve their financial situation, so it sounds so easy to get this to work in a functional democracy.
Basically, it’s a form of UBI, of which I also don’t understand why it doesn’t exist in any major form yet.
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Because it would make rich people less rich, and that minority wields a disproportionate amount of power and influence in virtually all political systems, which each have a significant amount of disfunction.
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It might, but there has to be a limit/correct distribution. I mean, the EASIEST deflection that ALWAYS works is that propaganda that goes out and says to the people that have jobs “so, YOU will be working, YOU will be toiling, YOU will live a life of AUSTERITY, YOU will be taxed, so OTHER people can be LAZY and IRRESPONSIBLE and SPLURGE with YOUR money”.
I think we’ve all heard of that tactic and it DOES work, because like any good propaganda it has a ring of truth to it. In order to avoid that, a system has to be excruciatingly well designed to be fair accross the board, and with modern politics being so easily pulled here and there, good luck with that 
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I just skimmed over a large portion of this thread without reading through most of the text walls, but I stumbled upon this. As a (wannabe) mathematician I wonder if I should get this joke … ?
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