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drethelin comments on Open Thread for February 11 - 17 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think it is amazingly myopic to look at the only species that has ever started a fire or crafted a wheel and conclude that
The idea that climate change is an existential risk seems wacky to me. It is not difficult to walk away from an ocean which is rising at even 1 m a year and no one hypothesizes anything close to that rate. We are adapted to a broad range of climates and able to move north south east and west as the winds might blow us.
Running out of fossil fuels, thinking we are doing something wildly stupid with our use of fossil fuels seems to me to be about as sensible as thinking a centrally planned economy will work better. It is not intuitive that a centrally planned economy will be a piece of crap compared to what we have, but it turns out to be true. Thinking you or even a bunch of people like you with no track record doing ANYTHING can second guess the markets in fossil fuels, well it seems intuitively right but if you ever get involved in testing your intuitions I don't think you'll find out it holds up. And if you think even doubling the price of fossil fuels really changes the calculus by much, I think Europe and Japan have lived that life for decades compared to the US, and yet the US is the home to the wackiest and ill-thought-out alternatives to fossil fuels in the world.
Can anybody explain to me why creating a wildly popular luxury car which effectively runs on burning coal is such a boon to the environment that it should be subsidized at $7500 by the US federal government and an additional $2500 by states such as California which has been so close to bankruptcy recently? Well that is what a Tesla is, if you drive one in a country with coal on the grid, and most of Europe, China, and the US are in that category, The Tesla S Performance puts out the same amount of carbon as a car getting (WRONG14WRONG) 25 mpg of gasoline.
It's not difficult to walk away from an ocean? Please explain New Orleans.
Tesla (and other stuff getting power from the grid) currently run mostly on coal but ideally they can be run off (unrealistically) solar or wind or (realistically) nuclear.
<i>It's not difficult to walk away from an ocean? Please explain New Orleans.</i>
Are you under the impression that climate change rise in ocean level will look like a dike breaking? All references to sea levels rising are reported at less than 1 cm a year, but lets say that rises 100 fold to 1 m/yr. New Orleans flooded a few meters in at most a few days, about 1 m/day.
A factor of 365 in rate could well be the subtle difference between finding yourself on the roof of a house and finding yourself living in a house a few miles inland.