Conversation

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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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Technology really is the only way out. Nothing else acts fast enough. If you're trying to start some sort of religion of post-capitalist sustainable permaculture, good for you, but religions take centuries to establish, not decades.
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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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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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Does corporations being “shallow layers” mean that real/relevant contribution to reductions comes largely from companies that don’t exist today?
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I mean if you invent a technology to replace airline fuel with renewables, that will be a big deal and more important than whether or not airlines survive... in the future, maybe there will be no airlines and it will all be autonomous planes that own themselves on the blockchain
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In all environmental scenarios I've worked out for the past 20 years, politics/cognitive change is the rate-limiting step. We have ample tech out to unknown-Unknown limits. Human behavior under pressure is the hairy problem.
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Charismatic mega is a good heuristic. The fastest path to getting the big new tech to “better and cheaper” often requires work in the politics & corps layer. i.e. across the whole lifecycle of tech RDD&D - research, development, demonstration, & deployment.