I liked the book, but it had flaws. The various imagined scenarios and options discussed to address Climate Change was nice, but character development left a lot to be desired - I just couldn’t relate much to Frank or Mary. I initially did relate to Frank, especially at the start of the book, but then it’s as if the author dropped the ball and when Frank returns the author now has lost interest and the character that appears is a shell - in terms of character development - of its earlier self. The author also did a lot of handwaving with description of evolution and adoption of technology. The use of decentralized currency and peer-to-peer was very cartoonish. There’s also very little mention of how energy consumption is impacted with use of crypto.
Some ideas described: - Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: being able to create a large enough area, even a corridor west to east that allowed wild life to thrive and create a sustainable ecosystem. This would help with reducing carbon emissions. This is similar to the plan wooly mammoth back. - https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_why_we_should_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth - https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.1113442 - Figuring out a way to slow glaciers melting. The melting is accelerated by the movement as there’s higher temperatures at the bottom as the glacier plates slide. If that meltwater is pulled/pumped up to the surface quickly it can slow things down. - Carbon coin: it’s like carbon tax but helps reimburse people to avoid adding to the carbon in the atmosphere. - Global citizenship to help migration of those unevenly affected by climate change.
And a wet-bulb temperature of 35 will kill humans, even if unclothed and sitting in the shade; the combination of heat and humidity prevents sweating from dissipating heat, and death by hyperthermia soon results.
Thus, 500 gigatons; but meanwhile, the fossil fuels industry has already located at least 3,000 gigatons of fossil carbon in the ground. All these concentrations of carbon are listed as assets by the corporations that have located them, and they are regarded as national resources by the nation-states in which they have been found. Only about a quarter of this carbon is owned by private companies; the rest is in the possession of various nation-states. The notional value of the 2,500 gigatons of carbon that should be left in the ground, calculated by using the current price of oil, is on the order of 1,500 trillion US dollars. It seems quite possible that these 2,500 gigatons of carbon might eventually come to be regarded as a kind of stranded asset, but in the meantime, some people will be trying to sell and burn the portion of it they own or control, while they still can. Just enough to make a trillion or two, they’ll be saying to themselves—not the crucial portion, not the burn that pushes us over the edge, just one last little taking. People need it.
Their idea is to shape the discount rate like a bell curve, with the present always at the top of the bell. So from that position, the discount rate is nearly nothing for the next seven generations, then it shifts higher at a steepening rate. Although they’re also modeling the reverse of that, in which you have a high discount rate but only for a few generations, after which it goes to zero. Either way you remove the infinities from the calculation, and give a higher value to future generations.
“The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value. So “the euthanasia of the rentier class” was Keynes’s way of trying to describe a revolution without revolution, a reform of capitalism in his time, toward whatever subsequent post-capitalist system might follow. It was his evaluation of the parts of the already-existing system, for their possible use value in a future civilization. He did not suggest ending capitalism; just end rent, and rentiers. Although that very well might come to the same thing in the end. He might have been using a euphemism to conceal the shock of his suggestion.
Again, these land taxes could be set progressively such that larger properties, or more valuable properties by way of location, or land not lived on by its owner, got taxed at a higher rate.
Note: Glen Weyl’s Radical Economics suggests an alternative where the property can create a value and ownership is changed if it doesn’t.
Also, Mary went on a little nervously, the upcoming COP was going to propose a detailed refugee plan that used some of the principles of the Nansen passports of the 1920s. Some kind of global citizenship, given to all as a human right. Agreement had been signalled by all Paris signatory nations, which meant all the nations on Earth, to grant legal status to this global citizenship, and share the burden equally, with the historical disparities in carbon burn factored into the current assessments of the financial and human burden going forward. Some kind of climate justice, climate equity; a coming to terms at last with the imperial colonial period and its widespread exploitation and damage, never yet compensated, and still being lived by the refugees themselves.
The carbon coin had played its part in all of this. For a while, in its earliest days, it had looked like the creation of carbon coins would simply make the rich richer, as some of the largest fossil carbon companies declared their intention to sequester the carbon they owned, and took the corresponding pay-out in carbon coins, and then traded most of those coins for US dollars and other currencies, and then made investments in other capital assets, in particular property, thus becoming richer than ever—as if all their future profits were going to be paid to them at once, at a hundred cents on the dollar, even though their assets were now stranded as toxic to the biosphere and thus to human beings. But the central banks had worked out a scheme to deal with this. The fossil fuel companies were being paid, yes, and even at par, if that meant one carbon coin per ton of carbon sequestered, as certified by the Ministry for the Future’s certification teams, just like any other entity doing the same sequestration. But pay-outs above a certain amount were being amortized over time, and would be paid out, when the time came, at zero interest; zero interest, but not negative interest; and with guarantees, thus becoming a kind of bond. And then the companies were required by law and international treaty to do carbon-negative work with the initial use of the carbon coins they were given, in order to keep qualifying for their pay-outs, because if they merely invested in other biosphere-destroying production, especially carbon-burning production, then they wouldn’t be sequestering carbon at all in the larger scheme of things. The upshot of these policy implementation decisions was that the oil companies and petro-states were being paid in proportion to their stranded assets, but over time, and only for doing carbon-negative work, as defined and measured by the Paris Agreement standards and certification teams. The young staffs of the central banks were all quite proud of this arrangement, which they had concocted over the years in an effort to save the carbon coin, and then watched as their bosses approved and implemented it. Those staff reunion parties were raucous to the point of almost scandalizing staid old Zurich.
“Overcome difficulties by multiplying them.”
maybe try fishing for plastic rather than fish, at least in the big areas left alone;
Note: The context here is ocean and issues we’ll face with ocean as we’ve had to deal with with atmosphere. Fishing for plastic is an interesting idea. People fished for fish for food, but now they do it for money. So it could be same for plastic as people do with recycling on land. In essence a transfer of food system.
It was so hard to imagine that a mind could be gone. All those thoughts that you never tell anyone, all those dreams, all that entire pocket universe: gone. A character unlike any other character, a consciousness. It didn’t seem possible. She saw why people might believe in souls.
As she stood there above the little marina she heard a roar, saw smoke across the lake to the left. Ah yes: it was Sechseläuten, the third Monday of April. She had completely forgotten. Sachsilüüte, to put it in Schwyzerdüütsch. The guilds had marched in their parade earlier, and now a tall tower erected in the Sechseläutenplatz had been set on fire at its bottom. Stuck on top of the tower would be a cloth figure of the Böögg, the Swiss German bogeyman, his head stuffed with fireworks that would explode when the fire reached them. The time it took for this to happen would predict whether they would have a sunny summer or a rainy one; the shorter it took, the nicer the weather would be.
Note: Every culture seems to have a routine like this, just like Groundhog Day in the US
The narcissism of small differences. That’s an odd name. It’s Freud’s name. Means more regard for yourself than for your allies or the problems you both face.
Note: Not surprised to see a phrase even before “bike shedding”
Of course I am old now, but there is no changing that, except by death. At least I have this day, and these days.