It seems to me that most consensus climate scientists view themselves as the ones who are fighting the good fight, and that others (whether on the right or left) should fall in line with their way of thinking, with regards to systemic solutions to climate change. While I actually do respect consensus climate scientist; I point out that if their 'systemic solutions' are not implemented, then they are not actually 'solutions' at all.
Unfortunately, one of consensus climate scientist do not appropriately convey true climate risks to the public, nor to policy makers. For example, they hope to get climate denialist to shut-up by claiming that only consensus climate science (CMIP5, AR5, etc.) represents facts (truth) and that both right-tailed and left-tailed PDF extremes should be ignored or treated as 'unknown unknowns'. Unfortunately, right-tailed climate change extremes carry many times the climate risks than do left-tailed climate extremes; so ignoring this reality represents both bad science and bad public policy.
For instance, CMIP5/AR5 assumed that characterizing cloud feedback carried so much uncertainty that they would ignore the 'known unknows' as well as the 'unknown unknows'; however, the preliminary findings from CMIP6 indicate that advances in characterizing the 'known unknows' of cloud feedback mechanism now allows them to be considered in their models, resulting in projections of average ECS well over 5C. By the time that consensus science gets its collective act(s) together; the ensuing increase in climate risks may well invalidate most/all of their currently proposed 'systemic solutions'.
Title: "Lifestyle Changes Aren’t Enough to Save the Planet. Here’s What Could"
https://time.com/5669071/lifestyle-changes-climate-change/?xid=tcoshareExtract: "If nobody is without carbon sin, who gets to cast the first lump of coal? If all climate advocates were expected to live off the grid, eating only what they could grow themselves and wearing only the clothes they’d knitted from scratch, there wouldn’t be much of a climate movement. That level of sacrifice is unacceptable to most.
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The bigger issue is that focusing on individual choices around air travel and beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions. We need systemic changes that will reduce everyone’s carbon footprint, whether or not they care. The good news is we have tactics to bring environmentally friendly (and non-lifestyle-disrupting) options to fruition: pricing carbon emissions and creating incentives for renewable energy and reduced consumption. By putting a price on carbon, people can actually make money by reducing emissions, selling their services to corporations that are always looking for ways to cut costs. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of Americans when there’s a dime to be made! But a price on carbon needs to be designed such that marginalized communities most at risk from climate impacts aren’t adversely impacted economically as well.
This is why we really need political change at every level, from local leaders to federal legislators all the way up to the President. We need change not just at the breakfast table, but at the ballot box as well."
Edit: For a brief discussion of climate risks see Reply #1558; and I note that as most people are risk adverse it would help their case for consensus climate scientist's call for action, if they would publicly acknowledge that right-tailed risks are several times to many thousands of times greater than left-tailed risks.
Edit 2: To me it is unfortunate that the climate change issue has been caught in the 'culture wars' between the increasingly polarized right and left political wings. To me it seems that both the extreme right and the extreme left are fundamentally exploitative (the extreme right thru 'crony capitalism' etc and the extreme left thru unending 'war communisms', see the linked article [from strategy for revolution in 21st century] below on 'war communism'). As the conflict/dynamic between the extreme right and the extreme left over who gets the right to exploit is not likely to be resolved anytime soon, this indicates to me that a true solution to climate change is not likely to be implemented before we have reached a tipping point w.r.t. the instability (MICI-type abrupt collapse) of the WAIS this century.
Title: "Lenin on War Communism, 1921-2"
http://sfr-21.org/war-communism.htmlExtract: "At the time of the October Revolution in Russia, Lenin and others had hoped that workers throughout Europe would overthrow capitalist governments and achieve socialist revolutions. But when that did not take place, the Soviet Union found itself economically isolated and attacked on all sides by the invading armies of imperialism. Winston Churchill described the purpose of the attacks, involving over half a million soldiers, as "strangling" the revolution "at its birth."
While the Soviet Union fought back and defeated the invading armies by the end of 1920, the damage was done. Industry and machinery, already largely destroyed by the capitalists who fled during the revolution, were in shambles, many of the best workers had been killed or maimed at the front, agriculture, already hurt by war and demoralization of the farmers, was further damaged by crop failure in 1920. The people in the cities were starving.
To feed people in the cities, the Soviet government confiscated grain from the farmers without having money to pay them. As Lenin explained in his pamphlet, The Tax in Kind, "It was the war and the ruin that forced us into War Communism," and "Under this peculiar War Communism we actually took from the peasant all his surpluses - and sometimes even a part of his necessaries - to meet the requirements of the army and sustain the workers."
Lenin saw "war communism" as a temporary policy that must not be continued. At the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March 1921, he called for a new policy: "Up to now we have been adapting ourselves to the tasks of war; we must now adapt ourselves to the conditions of peace. The Central Committee is faced with this task - the task of switching to the tax in kind in conditions of proletarian power ... With the Civil War on, we had to adopt war-time measures. But it would be a very great mistake indeed if we drew the conclusion that these are the only measures and relations possible. That would surely lead to the collapse of the Soviet power and the dictatorship of the proletariat ... We must recognise the need to grant concessions, and purchase machinery and equipment to satisfy agriculture, so as to exchange them for grain and re-establish relations between the proletariat and the peasants which will enable it to exist in peacetime conditions.
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But with Lenin's death in 1923, war communism became the permanent policy of the Soviet Union. Already, Leon Trotsky had called for the "militarization of labor," organizing the entire country like the armies he commanded in the civil war. For example, in his 1920 book, "Terrorism or Communism", he argues that people are naturally lazy and strive to avoid labor and therefore the Soviet Union needed to base its economy on obligatory labor service, supplemented by compulsion to the point of "extremely severe." "No organization except the army has ever controlled man with such severe compulsion as does the State organization of the working class in the most difficult period of transition. It is just for this reason that we speak of the militarization of labor."
In the end, although Trotsky did not triumph, his policy of coerced labor was firmly established by Stalin, to the point of mass labor camps. Then, during World War Two, the entire country had to be mobilized for war once again, and afterwards, with the Cold War, the militarization of the society continued. The country was run in military fashion: hierarchical and authoritarian, secretive, exploitative (of people and the environment) and male-dominated, justified by the enemy which was Western imperialism. And, of course, the capitalist West did all it could to be such an enemy. The Soviet economy was dominated by the military and military production, as the country matched the West in military strength on the basis of an economy only half as large.
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Discipline as strong as that of war communism will be needed to defend the revolution of the 21st century against the inevitable counter-revolutionary attacks of the capitalists. Gandhi and King teach us that active nonviolence requires and promotes such discipline. Time will tell if it can meet the challenge."