Conversation

made up a climate discourse term: charismatic mega-emissions they distort priorities in climate just as charismatic megafauna do in biodiversity and ecological preservation work because they're useful for raising money through PR at the cost of creating misguided populist rage
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the charismatic megafauna big 5 game species of africa: lion, leopard, cape buffalo, rhino, elephant big 5 charismatic mega-emitters: nuclear power,* bitcoin, billionaire space flights, plastic waste, cheap things made in china * this is called a "joke"
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If you hit electricity and heat production, transportation, and buildings, you'll be halfway done. Industry is interesting. What's easy will be done fast, but what's hard is really hard (blast furnaces etc). I suspect ag and forestry is the hardest.
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The three big motives I see among people who get climate-active are: 1. Being against capitalism, billionaires/right-wing politics (70%) 2. Having a very strong social service/justice orientation (20%) 3. Being interested in technology of surviving into the anthropocene (10%)
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If you're in category 1, it's 50-50 whether you're part of the problem or the solution If you're in category 2, you're part of the solution, but to sideshow problems (tough to hear but true) If you're in category 3, you have a shot at being a serious part of the solution
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My planning scenario: we've already effectively signed up for some significant transient climate change >1.5, to let significant populations die (10x covid toll at least), and take on a tech-stack transformation to unknown-unknown state equivalent to terraforming.
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This is a max-likelihood prediction/bet. Not a desired scenario. I try not to waste time on wishful thinking about how the consciousness of 7 billion people might get transformed fast enough to open up weird options. In the time-frame of relevance, people aren't going to "change"
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So things are going to get acutely bad for a couple of decades (think perma-Covid x 3), starting in the late 2020s/early 2030s probably, completely restructuring civilization. So working with shallow layers like politics and corporations is sort of irrelevant.
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I don't think it's a doomsday scenario, but it's definitely severe rewriting of civilizational firmware, with only 2-3 comparables in history. Bronze Age collapse maybe.
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There's probably a non-zero chance (notionally ~1% chance) of catastrophic changes that destroy all life or something (like those shellfish that got cooked alive in PNW in current heatwave), but those are probably not super survivable except by bottleneck populations.
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I’m not wasting time thinking about those 1% Noah’s ark scenarios even though they’re the most fun as stories. Its the boring mild-to-medium catastrophe scenarios that are in the likelihood band worth prepping for.
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I’d really like to develop a course titled something like “Climate preparedness: a fermi estimation approach” Starting where I am now it would take about a 3-4 months of full time research and thinking. Or a year at a realistic 25% effort.
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