UKH

Well it was no Gettysburg Address, no Fight them on the Beaches, no I have a Dream, but it did have some emotive power. Was she just 'pissing in the wind' or is she a crackpot? I certainly admire her spirit but  I imagine we will only know the effect her words will have sometime in the future hopefully when we are not really up shit creek. Is she too late, are we all too late?

I f we avoid catastrophe people will say there was never a threat and that whatever steps we took were unnecessary (qv. the Y2K issue). We're unlikely to hear that though as, by most projections we're f*cked.

As to her speech, I was pretty moved by it and I'm a cynic (not of climate change, just everything else).

Really? My immediate reaction was that it might have been.

Yes.  That's why she was so very cross.  "All you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth".  

+1

She was absolutely right and isn't a crackpot. We might be too late, but it's possibly best to aim not to be, a belief that we are could make it a certainty. 

She makes me feel ashamed. Trump stands in front of her, adopting his silverback power stance and his mouth opens and shuts. Some words come out of his mouth. His he a crackpot, are we feeling the effects of his words? Is he pissing on us from a great height. Will we know "some time soon"? 

The issue I have with that view was portrayed in the BBC. After reporting on the Trump/Thunberg " story. They then reported that  the USA was the only country where CO2 output was falling!! It was shown on big maps of the USA v Europe.

It destroyed the Trump/Thunberg story and made me chuckle.

The issue is of course is that whilst Trump is burying his head in the sand, the rest of the USA is getting on with addressing it.

Its the one issue I have with Thunberg.

Oh the irony of someone who is pi$$ing all over the world when in private all he wants is to be pi$$ed on.

Please don't compare this to Y2K - which was a horribly overblown exercise in consultant profiteering

If you mean a decade-long exercise in identifying and pre-emptively fixing every single thing that would have gone wrong then yes it is nothing like the climate...

It’s falling in 18 countries, 17 of which are in Europe. https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/climate-change-co2-emissions-fall-in-18-...

and as you can see, Europe’s output is falling from a figure which was already around half of the US figure. 

.. and a masterclass of shit engineering/programming in the years before. Who could have known beforehand that we would enter a new millennium within a few years, and designed time and date formats accordingly?

CB

Its genesis was a hardware issue from the 60/70s.

You have no idea what you are on about.

Wonder where BBC got their figures from......

Were it a masterclass, people would have learnt.

They didn’t... The first Ariane 5 rocket was lost to a rollover bug.  Accuracy was well off with Patriot missiles in the first gulf war due to a rollover bug in a timecode, and old GPS receivers had a similar issue in April this year.

In large part the problem isn’t programming but both in the specifications that programs are implemented to, and in the way physical units are managed “on paper” when coding and not integrated into the work - see the Mars Global Surveyor for a $200M example of that.

Such issues are numerous!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/10073951/2-billion-...

The problem is more complex with mainframe legacy software. Lots of business logic can be wrapped up in the code. That's before we get to the mythical man-month.

https://news.sky.com/story/donald-trump-appears-to-mock-greta-thunberg-afte...

No surprises from the orange flatulence. 

Climate change is a major issue. Hell, I worked on it for nearly 8 years.

I fear however that the 'movement' is beginning to overplay its hand with speeches such as the one by Thunberg, and will cause sensible people to start battening down the hatches against change because there is too much drama and not enough pragmatism. 

In some ways the sad fact is that her speech was relegated to a minor news item, and yet if we don't act soon it may be too late to make a difference. 15 minutes devoted to Labour party infighting. And as for being stranded somewhere hot & sunny, am I really bothered. Come back Al Gore...

Being involved in a local campaign I can testify to the fact that people just go off the boil and get fed up of, as they see it, being harangued. This is why we rely on our politicians and administrators to maintain focus on crucial issues. We really can't afford to elect morons and gangsters and let them fart around and waste time for a few years while the environment is degraded irrevocably. I'm not persuaded that Greta has done anything wrong. People really ought to just pay attention to what she says. She is a power for good. 

both of you are wrong about Y2K and the complex reasons why we had those legacy systems to fix and it just being an exercise in consultancy.   I speak from intimate experience

I didn’t know that valves and gas discharge tubes were bothered by Y2K...

I jest, I jest!

Yep.  We're not doing the right things.  The main thing we need to do is put a vast investment into new sources of energy and more energy-efficient ways of doing things.   That means "Iraq war" quantities of money.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/a-climate-of-burning-money/news-s...

"are we all too late?"

I think so. Essentially emissions targets are under threat as increased energy consumption in emerging markets will be linked to GDP growth and the energy production is expected to come from coal. As the developed market transitions to electric vehicles, this will push legacy fleets into emerging markets. Very little change in aviation and commercial transport emissions as there are no meaningful alternatives for at least 15 to 20 years.

My time in Computing began with the Apple II! (48K)

So in the 70s it was impossible to foresee the century ending at some point? 

CB

So sensible people will use the fact that a 16 year old girl is bemoaning the lack of pragmatic action to tackle climate change as reason to not take pragmatic action to tackle climate change? Yep, that's definitely the sensible people doing that.

This reasoning is like asking, "Why have an NHS, we're all going to die anyway?"

I don't get that analogy. Makes no difference for the chip in a wrist watch, and having some centenarians asked to attend kindergarten a couple years later was mildly funny. However, for any databases or electronics expected to still be of relevance 30 years later (e.g., controls of nuclear power stations, train controls, medical equipment and patient databases) allowing the Y2K bug to crop up was rather careless even decades earlier. 

CB

It's a bit like asking "why didn't humans evolve more sensibly and not get allergies?"

One should always look at the reasons behind statistics.

US industry used to put out 22% of all carbon emissions (the other main players are electricity 28% and transport 29%)

Asia, a long-time recipient of outsourced American manufacturing, has been growing in recent years. A study by the universities of Cornell and Massachusetts-Amherst found that India alone may be responsible for up to 700,000 outsourced jobs. China has also received hundreds of thousands of outsourced jobs and they are on the up.

America's manufacturing and thus its carbon emissions has fallen.

So in reality the USA is shifting its carbon footprint on to China and India and then blaming them for having a growing carbon footprint.

This. As an aside, it is not New York but a German university town, but I am so proud of my daughter who just sent me a video of her addressing more than 4000 people at the local FFF rally she had organized!

CB

This comparison does not make sense. As a scientist I know and have worked with legacy systems such as microscope drivers and data handling software that have evolved over years into an inscrutable mess (and I have started programming using hex code on a 6502, probably betraying my age) but adopting a date format that could not handle the Y2K transition as an industry standard was not evolution (which is driven by random errors) but a deliberate decision that was wrong from the moment it was made. 

Anyway, I am out of this discussion as it is not really important and deflects from the main issue of the OP.

CB

edited to make sense

Just like Europe is doing then. Hardly rocket science.

Fascinating stuff on it in last weeks the Economist which did a special edition on it. UK being a global leader in off shore windfarms and the lessons from that. Also the amount of money that the wealthy are spending on to find solutions  is truly phenomenal.

So we are in agreement then?

The rest of the Western world is pushing its shit onto China and then sitting back and saying "Hey it's not us!"

Of course China doesn't have to take it but then they wouldn't have loads of money and we wouldn't have those nice iPhones we like.

I still say that the world governments are playing a game of smoke and mirrors

She's not bemoaning pragmatic action, she is catastrophising and demanding emergency war footing action.

The CO2 atmospheric curve continues its inexorable rise upwards. She might be seen to be 'over playing' her hand, but she's 16 for goodness sake. She's genuninely angry for good reason and has to watch Trump walk past her braying nonsense.

By the way - on the computing subtext - handtyping hex into a ZX81 (1kb RAM) for Z80 machine code. Any advances!

Of course its smoke and mirrors.Its a con to say that the West is reducing its emissions when all we do is shovel our manufacturing off to China for commodity stuff.

Wasn't it more that computer memory and CPU was hugely limited then, so storing every time entry with a couple of extra digits that would not do anything for 30 years was not thought sensible?  And of course they weren't really envisaging that their code would still be used 30 years later anyhow.

Imagine being so insecure that you don't dare make eye contact with a sixteen year old.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!

What's FFF?  Glad to hear it.  

Fridays for Future

Catastrophizing in what sense? Nuance can be lost on the internet.

Yes - it was byte saving.

But the issue was only "real" in very few systems by 2000; we found *none* in the systems of a manufacturing organisation turning out £5bn/year of end product.  That was also the experience of everyone I knew in the sector (pharma).

Very few coded systems from 1970 were still operating in 2000.

So, vast swathes of the consultant feeding frenzy were misplaced - and could be stood down by a few well-targeted questions.  yes, there was some systems reviewing to do, but t was a fraction of the effort the hysteria would have had us do.

She may be 16, but I've been wondering for a while how we're going to look children in the eye when explaining lack of action on climate change, with the need to act being known about for 30 years (plus). 

You may well be right, but in the absence of pragmatism (especially in the media, government and arguably education), then drama is all that there is left.

'Movements' develop when those who should be listening, stop listening. Thunberg is amplifying a very important message, and using drama in order to reawaken the old notion that governments actually work for people and the greater good - not vice versa.

What about the offshored carbon production?

There was I thinking it was 4,095.

<Swift edit to avoid system crash>

I detest Trump and I welcome any measures to clean up the environment(don't get me going on ghastly ski resorts and the associated deforestation, denuding of mountainsides and ugly infrastructure) but all I saw was a petulant child pulling stroppy faces because somebody ignored her.

Who's pulling her strings?

I worked on MVS, an IBM mainframe operating system in the late 1980s, early 90s.   When I was learning the horrendous Job control language (JCL) the trainer made much of the convolution that arose from IBM's wish to serve its customers with older systems such that even some software written in the 1960s could run on later hardware.   I was working on IMS databases for BA during their Y2K "remediation" (ugh) programme and the full horror of that ancient hierarchical database system was matched only by the speed it worked compared with relational databases.  We also had to work on a programme called loosely "the million hours problem" as no one who wrote the 1970s engineering systems envisaged that the original 747 airframes would require more than 9 digits to hold cumulative flying hours values - but they did - a tribute to the airframe.

what cbnnn does not seem to understand is that it is not a single decision/format problem but one which grows as organically as an organisation, its people and its technology within the technological development and culture of society and it is often management constraints with in which People, many of whom would much rather be free-thinkers, perform their assigned tasks.

replied to you as he tried to shut down dispute of his "shit engineering" comments belittling people of unknown to him talent or abilities.

I can tell you that far from hysteria it was many many months of hard work and in many cases we were fixing problems caused by management retaining old systems for economic reasons.   I worked on fixing a large system, again hierarchical,  for another employer who simply did not have the courage to replace it before Y2K for "business" reasons so it had to be fixed (and I identified and fixed and tested many many programmes that would have failed catastrophically without the fix.  Result - it all worked smoothly rather than not working AT ALL in any way.  It had to be replaced within 4 years as ICL/Fujitsu removed support for the ICL hardware the managers had kept to run their systems on.  Not shit engineering at all - people forget that the largest mainframe DASD drives in the 80s were little over a gigabyte and shared by many systems and many many users.  I remember creating a 400Mb Artemis database in about 1990 and people's jaws dropped at the file size.

People were proficient at using limited hardware to achieve the goals set by management

I built my computer with a soldering iron (6502 based and lots of TTL ICs, 1 K of RAM) and it only had a hex keypad.   You had to buy an expansion board to acquire a cassette storage and retrieval facility and even then the eprom that held firmware was extra so you began by typing in routines to save programmes (having saved the "save" routine on tape of course so that only had to be done once) - there's one in a museum here (Wigton, in Cumbria) https://t-lcarchive.org/tangerine-microtan-65/

I built a veroboard version of the same machine from information fragments gleaned from the internet around 2010 and it even read an original tape from 1981!

Well said that man.

Legacy programmes have stuck around way longer than people predicted...for a classic example take COBOL

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL

These people:

https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHFX_enGB524GB524&biw=1502&bih...

There's definitely a lot to be learned from the cynical political manipulations of the last two centuries' killer industries but here what you see is not another example of that. This is largely what it looks like, organic fury, and in the coming years it's going to break like a wave over all of us with a force we can barely begin to imagine.

jk

I wasn’t making any great claims about what Europe or the US we’re doing, I was just disputing that the US is out performing other countries. The 500m+ people of the EU use about 2/3rds of the carbon that the 300m+ people of the USA. And EU carbon use has been falling faster. There is still much more to do. 

Edit: I have some agreement with the view that US states or companies are making progress despite the president. 

What proportion of those carbon savings have really just been offshored by manufacturing moving east? Germany just announced it won't even meet it's 2020 carbon goal, so it's bumped the target to 2030. 

A better analogy might be the lack of urgency around anthropogenic climate change. Plenty of people still driving, flying, and, generally consuming, because climate change is a pay forward kind of thing.

I worked for a major blue-chip company whose 1980s mainframe has outlasted TWO replacement systems because they don't understand the code and daren't turn it off. The original coders have retired and managers are.....well, you know.

I understand it has now been virtualised. 

Being green(er) and economising can go hand in hand quite nicely I've found - re consuming, like buying second hand things and freecycling.

I just find her really annoying. I can't get past it. Even tho I fully support what she stands for and what she says. 

Again, I’m not making any great claims for European countries, just questioning other claims. 

But the main saving is meant to be due to the move away from coal, mainly to gas but also renewables. There are also significant cuts due to waste management. Not one I was expecting to see, but makes sense if we are reducing methane.  

That's annoying. I thought I was going to win that game with an RM380Z but I can't compete with that!

Sure.  And I was pointing out that this isn't a universal experience.  I was rather reluctantly put in charge of it for our organisation and we found nothing.  Sorry you had a bad time - but plenty didn't and there was lots of hysteria in places where nothign was found.

Has she said anything not supported by the science? Has she demanded anything that is not absolutely required?

A bit of a generalization.. we're seeing the impact of Obama. The 'rest' of the US, you mean about 50%? Well I'd say 75%, at least half of republicans realize we need to do something, but also realize it makes sense to develop renewables. The US is shooting itself in the foot not trying to be world leaders.

Quite soundly, I think, considering that methane is already starting to emerge from under the ice in Greenland, a Tibetan glacier which feeds China's rivers is retreating at 50 metres a year too. It's about trying to limit the degree to which we're fucked*, making a war footing rather apt (I think).

* In New Scientist, I read something about how if left to the general population, people basically do about half of what is needed, meaning that top down 'nudges' or similar will be needed to be built into society - unless reactionary types talking about 'Nanny States' scupper things, in which case we'll definitely have problems.

Politically trump is daft for not taking a lead especially when us  business is moving forward and grading the nettle ( well most are). 

There is still plenty coal and lignite burning around the eu. Especially in Germany and eastern Europe. Perhaps Greece too. 

Same here! First thing I programmed it to do was to act an alarm clock, IIRC.

EA was no operation in 6502 hex code, the only bit of trivia I seem to remember. 

CB

OK - building it wins (although I did quite a bit of soldering on my BBC)

6502 was a much nicer machine language than Z80

I mean I’ve seen some tosh on UKC over the years.  Or I thought I had...

C9

It's a fair question.  Few kids her age could credibly claim to understand the climate science or be able to make an objective judgement on whether AGW proponents or the nay-sayers are correct.  They can only go by what they are being told.  Its not difficult afterall to turn kids into anti-vaxers or bible-bashers and she's probably only a few years past believing in Santa Claus. 

What is a worry is that these kids are being presented doomsday scenarios sufficient to have them terrified that their existences are going to be snuffed out in a few decades.  If they are being terrorised by inaccurate predictions, because some adult activists are impatient with the pace of change and know that any politician who challenges the children will be automatically viewed is reprehensible, then it is pretty damn cynical.  

In any other circumstances, would it be acceptable to tell an autistic teenager that the adults are destroying her world and doing nothing to stop it?  That seems to be her heart-felt belief and she clearly got that view, devoid of nuance, from somewhere.

I think you maybe should, like Greta, let the acknowledged experts tell us what's likely to happen, rather than using your own prejudice or political slant to presume you know better.

I dunno Ron. I'd say these kids watch weather forecasts and can see that more extreme weather events are making the news...

Its cool how all you right wingers are hating on climate change campaigns out of concern for her well being. All heart.

You don't have to challenge the children, challenge what they are saying. Unfortunately they are just echoing the view of the credible scientific community so good luck winning that argument with some shit you've read on Jeremy Clackson's twitter feed and some bollocks from conspiracy theory blogs.

What exactly is my prejudice and what do I presume to know?

When I was a kid a year lasted a long time.  But every year I got older they went by quicker.  Perspective is a funny thing.

And as an adult there have been ever more TV channels and ever more news.  Cameras have become cheaper and there were more people around the world to capture things on those cameras.  There are now satellites telling me what is going on in places where there is nobody else to see.  There is more reporting of everything.

If you are using the fact that there are more disasters presented on TV now than there were before, I'd argue you are using a heavily biased sample to base your judgements on.

I'm not really sure I'm a right winger or that I necessarily hate climate change campaigns.  I do view them as increasingly hypocritical and misguided though.  Am I allowed to say that?

Ok.  I challenge the fact that we "aren't doing anything", that my parents (or myself) have "stolen her childhood", or that the adults are doing a worse job of this than 16 year old kids would.  Or that those 16 year olds a decade or two from now would be doing any better than us today with the resources we currently have.  

As someone else (a nasty right-winger) said, it's all very well complaining about a lack of action....but how many of those climate striking kids are willing to walk to school, go without a new mobile phone or have no Christmas presents this year?  Talk is easy.  Hurling abuse at everyone else for what they aren't or are doing is easy.  Action is less so. 

And you wonder why mass scepticism exists of the climate-change movement when you react like that to anything that doesn't sing kumbaya to your own narrative?

PS. you posed a question on the other thread of "What is it about recognising a existential threat that runs contra to right wing views? I don't remember being right wing meant debunking science".  Look at your own responses and see if you can detect why left-wing arguments might not be seen as trustworthy or attractive.

I would say that someone who battens down the hatches against change purely because they object to the manner of someone else's protest is being neither sensible nor pragmatic.

The only people who have stolen Gretas childhood are her parents. 15year old decides to start climate protests at exactly the same time her mother publishes climate book and a national press photographer just happened to be there to meet her. All chance of course.

That doesn't mean I'm a climate change denier, I just see the whole picture. 

I think it's human nature, folk like to at least feel they have a choice, some free will. Not be constantly told from all directions what is good for them and what you should do. You sell the concept, the idea, not ram it down their throats. In the long run just as in group or team management you get more people on your side who will be willing to do more than the minimum. The is critical because much of what impacts the climate is hard to legislate against, holiday habits, diet, travel in general, clothes shopping etc.  You need a willing population on your side. 

I think your argument is undermined when you look at other young activists at that age. William Hague at 16 was well known. You surely must have heard of  Myla from Pakistan and her campaign against violence. 

You do know that climate change is taught in geography at school?i think it is even taught at primary school level. 

So it’s hardly surprising that a 16 year old is able to articulate their views. 

If that were the case I'd agree with you. But, no.m, I'm using the fact that there are more severe & extreme weather events.

It's not taught as a subject directly. Only elements that might correlate in each given subject are referenced. They are no options in Swedish education until aged 16, so everyone are taught all 3 sciences and so on. Which means it's 'possible' on average science knowledge 'might' be higher with a 16 yr old here than in a country where they dropped out of individual science subjects at an early age.

What differs more is just a general environmental awareness, it's just cultural from when they start nursery. The scale of recycling, or little things like 1 or 2kr back when you recycle plastic and aluminium drinks containers. It all builds up. UK and Swedish nurseries are vastly different in so many respects. It's impossible to list.  

The ability or confidence to stand in front of your class and speak, do mini presentation, music or theatre etc is just part of certainly our kids school culture from pre school age. It's just something you do. 

The difference is most other kids don't have parents who also publish a climate change book. 

What I like about here is it is mentioned in relevant subjects and on the kids tv news programmes if there is a bad typhoon in Asia as much as a bad hurricane in the USA. There is a danger we look west too much and never eastwards. 

This must be the most brain f*cked post on here ever.

The generation of my children must live with the consequences of the criminal inaction of our leaders and our insustainable consumption.

The pertinent question you should ask who pays criminal politicians like Trump, Bolsonaro, Morrison to abuse their power to deny the scientific consensus.

CB

edit: I also feel personally insulted by your post. My own daughter spends a large part of her time as an environmental activist. I assume you would accuse me of "pulling her strings". I accept that only insofar as I tried to teach my children to think for themselves rather than uncritically worship poundshop Mussolinis like your hero Peterson.

I definitely agree that there was a lot of very silly coverage in the media - the problem was at its worst wherever organisations had large bodies of in house written systems used over many years.   I think management were definitely scared in those cases while the rest of us had the dyspepsia of having to do the work

I don't understand why in Europe we can't cut fuel waste at a stroke as was done in Britain at the time of the 1973 oil crisis and cut motorway limits to 50 mph/kph equivalent.

I know this saves fuel as when I was having to save fuel in the 1990s because my job didn't pay enough sticking to 50 gave me an increase of range from a tank from about 420 miles to over 600 on several occasions.  It didn't make much difference to my journey times

At a stroke we could end private motorists right to burn fuel unnecessarily fast

yes, I find that remembering hex machine code routines makes a very useful long password sequence if you can remember which routine you used

there was one in the office in 1979 but I only got to use the Apple II

I really like 6502 code but but at the same time it imposes a straitjacket with its limited index register size.    I spent some time developing a comms interpreter on a Z80 (Comart communicator) at Kishorn and chose to use the 8080 subset of commands due to learning time constraints with an unfamiliar processor and really got to love the elegance of the 8080 instruction set.  Very nice.

In all honesty it  is no different to the education system in the UK. Recylcing drilled into them etc etc.

You are obviously way out of date. But I can easily remember my 20 and 23 years olds having that sort of thing taught at UK primary school level. I can remeber their grandpa getting annoyed about being leectured on the subject when they were younger , it was just not them, but his other grandhildren as well. he quickly changed his tune.

Its hardly particularly  unique in Europe these days

The German government just passed a climate package based on emissions trading, but setting the price per tonne so low that it will have no guiding effect. You don't even need to go back to the 1970s to show that price is an extremely efficient tool: Fuel consumption dropped significantly (IIRC 15%) when oil prices shot up during the second Iraq war. 

Other aspects can only be achieved by direct regulation. The market driven trend to ever bigger and more powerful cars offset all efficiency benefits in engine development.

CB

Simply insulting anyone who doesn't toe Greta's line is likely to be counterproductive.

Yes, Thunberg is right on the climate-change science, and the urgent need for action.  But she is also wrong on lots, for example she's wrong on her far-left, anti-capitalist analysis of the problem.  It isn't a few rich capitalists burning all the fossil fuels, it is people -- the broad mass of people, both in the developed countries and the developing rest-of-the-world. 

If we are to solve the problem, we will need to develop alternative forms of energy and energy use (much more so than we currently have done) and to do that we need big corporations and a a functioning market/capitalist economy.

This needs a partnership between the politicians (incentivising a carbon-neutral economy), the people (voting for politicians to do that), and corporations (actually developing and creating the carbon-neutral economy).

Well that's a matter for your own self-inspection. But focusing the discussion on the messenger rather than the message is a good indication that there's more than an impartial reading of the science going on.

Looking at the litter on every UK street and road verge it's not working, if it's been taught that long.  But without directly comparing precise details it's impossible to know. It's not just recycling, it's just a whole vibe or sentiment and all the other aspects of the environment that are covered. The UK goes into melt down every time something changes with their recycling collection. 

The issue in dealing with CC is that the impact of it will not be spread equally and really will massively only effect poor people and poor countries. Yes there will be more frequent extreme weather events in the global 'north' but these countries will be able to get by without too much trouble.

However, the cost and action to deal with climate change is expected to be broadly shouldered by those countries and individuals who will be least effected by it (the wealthier populations in those wealthier countries).

This is obviously an exceptionally difficult circle to square.

p.s. yes I am aware there will be exceptions and counter factuals to the above, and note that everything I have just said is relative not absolute. 

Less of that sort of comment on here please  

You do come across as distinctly anti UK from this paragon of Swedish virtue. Lol

Hell of a lot of hyperbole and pure bollocks here I’m afraid. Outside of the most deprived areas or busy city centres, most towns and villages are fairly litter free, enough so that a discarded can or fast food wrapper stands out and I’ve never experienced ‘meltdown’ over recycling changes.

Well I didn't leave because I thought everything was right, especially in education. As is often the case many people move away from what they dislike, not because they were certain elsewhere was better. We had to make a decision and commit before the kids were school age, often the committing rather than dithering can be a decider on how successful moving is. Imho. If I didn't support or agree with where I live that's probably a sign I should move. 

I prefer the general environmental ethos, open access, work life balance, kids or families first, no religion in schooling, the support for kids sports clubs, less testing of kids in school and so on.

And it's got nothing to do with the eu either (before anyone leaps onto that), it's cultural, what the majority of the population wishes, votes for and it steers political policy. I imagine from what I now know of it's neighbours, Norway or Finland would be fine too. 

This is true, but it's a few rich capitalists  - mainly those involved with fossil fuel industries - who have been leading the way in attempting to discredit climate science over decades, and who have, by their actions, been successful in delaying any meaningful action to a point where it is now too late to prevent many of the damaging effects of climate change. Has these rich capitalists acted on the science 30 years ago and undertaken the kinds of actions which are only now coming to the fore, we could be a very different place to that in which now find ourselves. 

I think you credit them with way too much power to influence things.  Just because: (1) they campaigned against climate science, and (2) there has been no meaningful action, does not mean that the former is primarily responsible for the latter. 

The main reason there has been no meaningful action is that, with current technology, there is no way of reducing CO2 enough without drastically affecting people's lifestlye and standard of living, and people do not vote for that, because they tend to vote for what's in their interests over the next 10 years, not what is in everybody's interests for 50 to 100 years into the future. 

Blaming the rich captialists is a cop-out, it's a "not me guv", an "I don't have to take responsibility and change" line.  It's also counter-productive. 

She doesn't claim to, she explicitly says she doesn't not least because she's still a child! She's asking legislators and regulators to listen to those that do understand the science then to act on that information.

Given it's essentially true I have no ethical issues whatsoever with it, she's as free as you evidently are to latch onto denial bullshit instead, it's hardly hidden.

jk

You are right that all sectors of society, and individuals with few exceptions, share the blame for inaction.  However, it is capitalists in form of fossil fuel industries, largely, that have actively obstructed measures too mitigate climate change by denying it, funding groups to undermine the science, and so on.   This activity continues to an extent, notably in the form of personal attacks of 16 year old activists currently

Its a thread about Greta Thunberg.  I responded to a message about Greta Thunberg,  Seems a bit presumptuous to assume I'm prejudiced because I stayed on-topic.

I disagree. I do believe that they have been very successful in stalling meaningful action. We know that Trump still refuses to believe the science, allied as he is to fossil fuel industries, and we know that Bush withdrew from the Kyoto agreement, Bush of course being an active fossil fuel industrialist, and the Bush administration acknowledged the role of Exxon and the Global Climate Coalition in guiding the Bush climate policies - the Global Climate Coalition being an industry lobbying organisation that opposed measures to reduce GHGs and tried to challenge the science of global warming.  

I note you stress current technology. Had the fossil fuel industries engaged constructively from the time when they knew about the dangers of climate change (in the late 1970s, in the case of Exxon), we might be somewhat further along the road to successful CCS implementation than we are now, we might have made different advances in low-carbon technologies, and we might be a very different state. Instead, their business-as-usual attitude has led to our current parlous state. That may be one reason why the likes of Thunberg are so angry - that rich corporations have knowingly prioritised their own financial well-being over the well-being of the environment.

Not accepting that rich capitalists have played an immensely unhelpful role in keeping us on an unsustainable trajectory would seem to me to be a denial of the obvious. 

OK, but have all the other politicians across the world taken effective action? Did Obama? Is Europe now net-carbon-neutral? Is China? Is India?

You're pointing to one small part of the overall picture, and saying that that is the cause, when it's only one small factor. 

Except that the way things work, new technology and new ways of doing things tend to come from new companies. So, for example, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon are not continuations of companies dominant in the 1950s.    It's thus the wrong model to look to fossil-fuel industry for the major changes.

But, again, you're pointing to one part of the overall picture (fossil-fuel industry) and blaming everything on that.   The blame is society-wide.  The public at large still puts petrol and diesel in its cars and commutes to work, and burns fossil fuels to heat its homes, and flies off on holiday, and uses electricity produced from fossil fuels, etc.    To a large extent, inudstry responds to customer choices.  

But the way things work is that *governments* set the regulatory regime and rules for protecting the environment, and then the companies operate within that.  (It's not sense to expect anything else from such companies.). 

And the reason that governments have not done that is not "because they've been lobbied by the fossil-fuel industry" (at least, that's only a minor, tertiary reason), the reason they've not is because voters have not demanded it -- and voters have not demanded it because there is no way of reducing CO2 enough without drastically affecting people's lifestlye and standard of living, and people do not vote for that.

If you said that "some rich capitalists" have played "... a minorly unhelpful" role, then you'd have a point.  But it seems to me that you're letting an anti-capitalist attitude colour your analysis, and that's unhelpful.

Hard to keep track of who posted what in two parallel threads, but here goes:

What you wrote (cut and rearranged)

essentially makes the point why we need to move away from the capitalist way of resource allocation.

CB

I believe the young people would say 'duh!' As you well know, CO2 emissions come largely from fossil fuels. Where else does the blame lie for the lobbying and influence? 

The public at large have not been given the option to make different choices. It has not been possible until recently to buy low-carbon anything. 

And hence it has been a massive failure on the part of government to incentivise the right things. Governments have to share the blame for the business-as-usual approach which has got us to where we are now.  Governments have a duty to lead, and they have failed miserably. 

Where have I argued an anti-capitalist attitude? I have argued, for many years, that climate change represents a massive set of business opportunities, for those entrepreneurs and industrialists who are sufficiently awake to realise that the future is a low-carbon future and in the same way as vast fortunes were made in the early part of the 20th century by the fossil fuel billionaires, vast fortunes will be made in the 21st century by those who deliver low-carbon alternatives. Elon Musk is the obvious candidate with his large-scale battery developments, but there may well be others. 

The blame lies on the populace at large who want to burn fossil fuels to maintain their lifetyles and standard of living!  Double-Duh!  

They are not being forced to buy petrol at gun-point by those wicked fat-cats!

Exactly.  And everything else is secondary to that.  Given that, we'd still be pretty much where we are even had there been no lobbying from fossil-fuel firms. 

Yes, exactly! 

Governments by necessity are responsive to voters, and if governments have not done the right thing then that's largely because voters have not demanded that they do.

An interesting, yet evidence-free assertion. If the fossil-fuel industries had recast themselves as energy industries and identified that the future would need to be a low-carbon future, who knows where we'd be? 

That's an interesting, yet somewhat naive view of government. Look through any party manifesto and consider how many items are there because of voter demands, and how many are there because of political ideologies. 

What specifically are you suggesting should have happened?

1) Such companies refuse to produce or sell fuel.  What happens? Other companies would move in to produce and sell fuel.  The price of what fuel there was would sky-rocket.  This would hit the poor hardest.  Every left-wing pressure group would start yelling about "fuel poverty". Overall, voters would scream at the government to do something! to get their supplies of fuel back on-line.

2) Such companies both continuing selling fuel, and use their profits to invest in alternative energy.  (Actually, what's much like what has actually happened).  What happens?  The public continues buying the fuel, so we'd be much as we are.  Because adding fuel-company profits to money invested into new technologies would likely not have made that much difference. 

And anyhow, why should the onus to develop better technology be specifically on fuel-company shareholders, rather than on society at large? 

Yes, we as a society should be investing heavily in better technology.  But blaming the fossil-fuel companies specifically for the lack of action is a bit lame.     I'm willing to bet that the big fossil-fuel companies have indeed put more money and effort into developing newer technology than most people!

Quite specifically, fossil-fuel companies should have been future-proofing themselves by reinventing themselves as energy companies, with low-carbon energy as the goal. It's not exactly rocket science - anyone who has been awake for the last 20 years or so should have realised that the future requires low-carbon energy, and failure to recognise that is a failure to safeguard the future of the industry. 

Really? They know their products have a finite lifespan and they fail to adapt? Is that an entirely sensible corporate strategy? 

They may well have done. Then again, they have most to lose.

Well, they have been trying, to quite an extent, but don't pretend that if they'd done a lot more of this we'd now have a carbon-neutral economy. 

BP has put billions into biofuels. Irrespective of the details of the sustainability of specific products and projects, they are spending the cash.

No its called facing the truth.

So first lets set the parameters of this debate right now; The global catastrophy or climate change and the 6th mass extinction of the species are the most important matter because if not then this beautiful planets breathaking lifeforms are no more.

It always made me smirk when anti-socialists like you would put up the meme on facebook forums of a night time satellite picture of East Asia ,specifically the DPRK and it would be practically black and all the capitalist countries around there would be glowing with lights. They would proudly put this up to show how terrible the economy must be in the DPRK whilst not noticing that it was the only country not wasting tons of energy 24/7.

The per capita CO2 emissions for the DPRK is 1.6 metric tons.
The per capita CO2 emisions for capitalist South Korea is 11.6 metric tons.

Thats 10 times more than socialist DPRK.

You see in socialist countries and former socialist countries they cared about over production (Obviously) of goods and made products that were built to last as long as they possibly could( of course there would be the exceptions) as it was a huge part of cost saving.

Socialist society was not a consumer society it was based on need and equality amongst other things so products were designed to last a life time ideally which is the opposite of a free market capitalist based society which needs constant purchasing of new products.

Also the vast majority of transportation done in the USSR was done by rail and not road.
There was no ideal that everyone should have a car as the ideal was for practically free public transport for everyone and not cars for everyone.

In capitalism we throw away 1/3 of all food produced . That was not a facet of socialist society.

Capitalists it can be argued are also victims of their own system and we are all victims of ourselves for keeping it going but you reap what you sow and now the fruits of the centuries of capitalism are oblivion for life on earth and who knows maybe this is the only life in the universe in this epoch.

Which is fine, if you're happy with a starving population and a non-functioning economy with a medieval standard of living.  But it's not surprising that people won't vote for that.

Out of interest, perhaps you could quote per-capita CO2 emissions for the USSR in its later period? 

The economy in the DPRK is functioning fine although due to its terrain and location it is always prone to floods and droughts which make it precarious for food sustainability which is no fault of their own.

The facts are there that socialist DPRK has 10 times less CO2 emissions per capita than capitalist SK.

In the 1990s CO2 per capita for the USSR was 4 metric tons which was the highest they had.

Yet you would have everyone believe that capitalism and capitalists have nothing to do with the climate catastrophy which is obviously untrue and im being generous there.

This really does read like you are pointing to the grand achievements of German engineering between 1939 and 1945 and overlooking the negatives that came with it.

How many people do you think would be satisfied with the sacrifices required by DPRK life if that is what was required to achieve greenhouse gas emissions?  And if the average North Korean was able to purchase the food and consumables they desire, what do you suppose their emissions would become?

This is the crux of the issue in the capitalist G20 countries.

I know my solution and its the same tired one I've been banging on about for about 13 years on here but no one is interested in socialism on this forum so as capitalistas you are the ones that need to find your own solutions, but you better be quick.

Ps. I know next to nothing about German engineering during the fascist war period. 

Which was about half of Europe's at the time, while producing a much lower standard of living and with a malfunctioning economy that caused their whole system to collapse not long after.

In 1980/1990 British per capita CO2 emissions was 10 metric tons, Finland was 12 MT's, France 9 MT's, Belgium 13.7 MT's, Austria 7 MT's, Denmark 11 MT's, Luxembourg 30 MT's etc so much much higher than the USSR per capita.