Climate Winners and Losers
medium.com
medium.com
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2016.046...
The results are from "a new set of climate simulations."
A simulation can easily be wrong. These results say Ireland's GDP growth per capita will be unaffected by climate change and Britain's GDP growth per capita will increase if temperatures rise 2C, but I find it hard to believe these islands wouldn't be hurt.
Why should we trust these maps?
We're simply too comfortable in our current lifestyles to make any changes that might challenge that comfort. Would you fly less? No, didn't so. Eat less meat? Nope. How about unplugging your smartphone from its charger when not in use? Yes! We'll happily do that, despite being utterly inconsequential. (Like bailing the titanic with a teaspoon, to use a description from the book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air.)
We look to governments for action, but if governments took measures to encourage less flying or reducing the farming of meat, we'd never accept it. Most of our politicians are too weak-willed to enact bold legislation and it's mostly because they know we the electorate won't stomach it.
The truth is we love to point accusatory fingers at others but never lift a finger ourselves. Are we all a bunch of hypocrites and simply not willing to admit it?
But the maps contradict each other nicely.
I'm probably going to see people die from heat exhaustion in front of my eyes if I stay here ~50 years.
I am perhaps a good case study of the shift in thinking that so-called "Winners" need to take. The facts of Britain's (and the rest of the Western World's) history are plain to see. Say in Wikipedia for example, for sure there's bias, but African slavery, Native American decimation, the Opium Wars, the Bengali Famine, the theft of "Commonwealth", to name but a few, are all there. It's that there's simply no impetus to feel any of this, nobody has the power to force us to truly contemplate what we've done, because Britain and its ilk are at the top of the power pyramid.
But travelling suddenly makes all of this personal. "Made in China" takes such a more deeper meaning when you literally made friends with them in their own land. I just can't get so angry about Indian email scammers when I've probably met them or their family and learnt that our Queen wears their precious jewels in her crown like an evil, unfeeling, global bully.
I made these shifts relatively easily, because like most Western people, I have a heart and perhaps ironically I was taught in school to make judgements based on facts. But I needed to be unrooted from my native context, that is just not going to happen on a large enough scale. What if the actual more fundamental problem raised by the Climate Emergency is this large-scale switch in context? What if we put our energy into that instead of reducing C02? Of course that'll never happen, it's chicken and egg, the motivation doesn't come until you understand the bigger picture. What's more the climate serves as a convenient foil for avoiding the existential sea-change by giving us an all too logistical problem to face instead.
I'm glad to see this article on the front page. There is some progress. There are indeed significant seams of Western society which accept such self criticism. Even though most of us did not knowingly cause the damage, we are the only people that can meaningfully take responsibility. It's not fair, but that's the path ahead.
History is fraught with humans exploiting the system, the planet, the masses, their families either through promises like salvation, love, and progress, or through force like imperialism and governance.
There is a running joke among Indians wanting the Simon Commission to come back [0] given the current state of the ruling class.
In the context of climate change; however, it is important for the nations of the world to take drastic measures or suffer consequences never seen before. Though the Tropical countries are both the worst and immediately affected by climate change, the ripples will be felt world-wide, as a changing planet is going to hit everyone hard, eventually, if not immediately. The only worry is if it leads to mass civil unrest among some of the most populated countries resulting in a global military struggle instead of reaching resolution through co-operation and collaboration. As civilians, we hope for the latter, but the power-grabbers / the usurpers might favour the former, and that's nothing new and nothing limited to the Western hemisphere.
If anyone in the East insists on playing the victim and perpetually blames the European imperialistic designs of yesteryears for their current perils, it is lazy ignorance at best and incompetence at worst, imo.
If I don't take responsibility then who will?
Nevertheless, the idea that colonialism is responsible for these countries current woes is misleading. My wife is Chinese and she used to tell me that China was poor because British people took away all their wealth in the 1800s. She can see now that’s not the case. China is a superpower now not because they threw off the yoke of imperialism in the 1980s. They did that in the 1940s. The trouble is they wasted decades on Communism.
Japan got with the modernisation program early and went from medieval backwater to superpower able to go toe to toe with the USA in a couple of generations. South Korea, Taiwan and then China did the same. In my lifetime China has gone from being a backward joke in Russia’s shadow to a globally dominant economy.
Britain narrowly avoided serious economic paralysis with our experiments with nationalisation in the 60s. Fortunately we shook it off in the 80s and got our mojo back.
The point is, it’s incredibly easy to get your economy stuck in a rut for generations, and let the rest of the world pass you by. Alternatively, it’s possible to modernise and get right back up to speed in a few decades, if you have the commitment. Plenty of countries in all sorts of different circumstances have done both.
This is where you lose me..
I am fully supporting of free trade, free exchange of information, making those nations the best through trade and education. Even sending them some aide if needed, wanted and put to good use (not supporting authoritarian governments)
But the sins of the part are not my responsibility at all, dont attempt to foist them upon me
But there's potentially a deeper implication of your position. Can one simultaneously disown the sins of our ancestors whilst being so attached to the benefits they reaped? If there is no moral connection between then and now, why is it so difficult for me to contemplate foregoing the relative wealth afforded to me by my currency, education, medical health and passport, in order to return the trillions of dollars of labour and natural resources stolen from say India and Africa?
Because deep down you know that's silly. Fundamentally, the world is a leveled playing field: Each person is born with a set of internal and external qualities and they do the best they can with the hand there were dealt. You don't feel the need to forgo your (let's say) above average intelligence/good-looks/grit/sanity caused by more or less normal family, etc. Your nationality is just another bullet point on your personal list. If anything, you have moral responsibility to make use of your perceived privileges better yourself and the world around you.
No
>>But you’re profiting off of the sins committed in the past, and somebody else is paying for them.
I do not believe I am, not in the way you are implying. You have no idea what my family history is, or what indivual actions they took, instead you are imparting these historical sins upon me because I may be a part of a nation today or may have part of a race in my genetic make up that may or may not committed what in modern context we call "sins" when we look back upon history through our modern eyes
It also makes many many assumptions about what the state of those nations would have been with out "interference" from the west, Assumption I do not believe you can accurately make
The further back in history you go the worse those assumption get as well.
And I’m not arguing against Western contact with other nations, I’m merely stating that the West profited off of immoral things towards other civilizations that those nations are still paying for. The Dutch extracting oil from the Dutch East Indies by wiping out cultures island to island, laying the ground work for wars to break out in the power vacuum, is hard to see as anything but a crime against the native people, the instability it caused hobbling that part of the world to this day, that was exclusively beneficial for the Netherlands.
That doesn’t mean that the Dutch should feel shame for having been in contact at all with those cultures but a Dutch person who profits off of the business generated by Royal Dutch Shell should probably feel something when they hear about political instability in Indonesia. And when that part of the world becomes uninhabitable because of climate change, and the Indonesian economy can’t handle adapting to that, I think a Dutch person should feel something.
The current generation of politicians around the globe seem content to ignore any sense of responsibility either globally or locally.
Sure there's much to be embarrassed of being British, continuing into the modern era by our status as national laughing stock over the last 3 years. Yet there's much you don't mention, like the African slave trade having hundreds of years of African raids on European coasts, as far north as Britain and Ireland, occasionally Iceland, or the Barbary pirates and millions of Europeans having gone through. The Western Europeans didn't invent that, they continued it in developed markets that were endemic in the local culture.
I wish we hadn't, I wish we had abolished it earlier, but it's not as black and white as you paint it.
The earliest interactions of West and India was much more modern in outlook - intermarriage was commonplace, racism came later as we move well into the 19th century. So commonplace that it was actually encouraged. Many converted too. By the mid 19th century that history was being discouraged and whitewashed out of existence.
We are where we are, and cannot change the mores of English, Indian, or any other nation or continent, but trying to view the whole of history with 21st century outlook is a minefield, fraught with tripwires, "reasons" and exceptions. 300 years of every nation's history will reveal plenty we might wish hadn't happened.
TL;DR Britain and the other developed nations should be doing far, far more to aid the developing world on climate. Simply because we're developed. Britain could start by banning fossil fuel projects in our overseas aid, which is a bloody embarrassment, and replacing with more future oriented projects.
Eventually, hopefully soon enough, we're going to have to accept we can't let the developing world off the hook on carbon treaties. As they develop 10 or 20 years past the treaty to emit like India and China yet still count as developing countries with no commitment to meet. The developed nations will have to accept they're probably going to have to pay for that. Otherwise we're probably screwed, because I doubt anyone is going to accept "well you just have to stay undeveloped for the good of the planet".
Absolutely, they are because the people who vote them in are as well.
Look, at the end of the day, no one is willing to make the sacrifices necessary. At a deeply unconscious level we realize this, but our conscious self has to rationalize it. We cannot admit to ourselves that we are this terrible at an individual level, so obviously it must be someone else's fault:
* That handful of climate change deniers who somehow stop >99% of us from taking action.
* Those evil capitalists who would bend over backwards to charge us more for environmentally friendly products if we were actually willing to pay for them.
* Those careless politicians who could make their career on a long-term issue like environment if that were the deciding issue for people's votes.
* Those evil white colonizers who set this all in motion centuries ago.
* That other country who is emitting more pollution than my country is
And so on.
Because at the end of the day I am the victim in all this. I did my part. I stopped using plastic straws.
But I am not willing to make any meaningful sacrifice towards this, and I know this makes me a terrible person.
That's too simplistic.
I get a choice of the red team, or the blue team, neither of whom are much better than each other in this regard, but actually have a chance of being elected.
I can vote for the yellow or green teams, but they haven't a hope in hell of forming a government. Maybe they'll soon be able to carry the balance of power. Not soon enough for me, so...
Who do I vote for?
Yet electors (in the UK) poll as seeing climate as more important than Brexit (66% IIRC), and that government should be taking far more substantial action, and across the political divide. n.b. Just about no one voted Cameron in to get a Brexit referendum - that was Tory internal shenanigans to manage their extreme fringe, and a fairly fringe issue until it got blown out of proportion. That fringe are now running the country, unelected, without manifesto. Or other countries where they elect whoever because the alternative made themselves unelectable, was too arrogant, complacent, or there was a scandal, etc.
Hence the point about we are where we are - we can only start from there. Events will increasingly force the issue, regardless of the excuse(s) the business or politician wants to hide behind.
Sacrifice is not the solution, it cant be, and never will be accepted
Technology and capitalism is the solution, we must innovate our way out of the problem, not lower peoples standard of living.
When everything is the fault of others, for sure you cannot do anything about it. There is even a sentence about old white men !
He seem to forget about all the good that came of western society. Electricity, cars, Internet, vaccine, solar cells, wind turbine, the list go on, even the computer he use to type that article.
From wikipedia: "Corruption remains a problem in Sri Lanka, and there is currently very little protection for those who stand up against corruption."
"over 12,000 named individuals who have undergone disappearance after detention by security forces in Sri Lanka, the second highest figure in the world"
"26-year civil war, which ended in 2009"
Look, you have much biggers problem in your own country, that are not the responsibility of others, that your people could do something about.
Maybe some of the flood would have been averted if the government had build damn instead of fighting a civil war for 26 years.
The problem is that victim mentality make you feel good. It's not your fault, it's not in your hand, you don't have to do anything, just blame other people.
I am not saying climate change isn't real, but it's a too much convenient scapegoat because it's out of your control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_justice
(Obviously Climate Justice would be if there WERE just distribution of the effects of climate change - the situation now is probably best termed Climate Injustice).