Climate change just gets worse & worse as temps go up. Drawing the line at *any* particular temp would be arbitrary. The reason it was done is that policymakers need something firm to work backward from, to gauge & measure their efforts. The political economy needs some kind of anchor. - ThreadSky

volts.wtf • 97 days ago

Climate change just gets worse & worse as temps go up. Drawing the line at *any* particular temp would be arbitrary. The reason it was done is that policymakers need something firm to work backward from, to gauge & measure their efforts. The political economy needs some kind of anchor.

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edwardtoronto.bsky.social•97 days ago

What we measure is what we care about.

volts.wtf•97 days ago

Matt (or the Breakthrough boys he's caping for) rejects the policies required to hold temps to 2 degrees, which is an implicit argument that those policies would be worse for human welfare than the climate change they avoided. OK, fine. How much policy effort *is* justified?

volts.wtf•97 days ago

Saying "climate won't wipe out humanity" gets you nowhere. OK then how bad do you think it is? How do you assess the danger? How much action do you think is warranted? What's *your* temperature target? Quit pompously preaching about trade-offs & actually make some. Show your work.

lvulis.bsky.social•97 days ago

Self plug here but there's a deed on climate risk (aka transition/physical risk posed by climate change) where you can get A LOT of info on how climate change is costing us money beyond the misleading DICE paradigm

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vhdxuavmocowyzo6haijthcb/feed/aaakq43j4cayy

volts.wtf•97 days ago

Insofar as Matt has any concrete policy recommendations, they appear to amount to "anything that's win-win & doesn't disturb any particular constituency." Which, fine. But that heuristic -- "eh, climate's not the end of the world, don't sweat it" -- is a recipe for always putting climate second.

drangundsturm.bsky.social•97 days ago

That recommendation has also been Democrats' approach to labor issues, with similarly catastrophic outcomes.

jefffreyspies.bsky.social•97 days ago

Bronze Age palace economies were perfectly fine if you only care about Pareto Efficiency

volts.wtf•97 days ago

If that's true -- if Matt thinks cost-benefit analysis recommends allowing 2.5 or 3 degrees, because anything lower would be too trade-off-y -- he should *say so*. If he thinks we should, eyes open, allow the extraordinary suffering that will come with that level of warming, he should say so.

dorothy4climate.bsky.social•97 days ago

Agree.
At least Mushy told his followers they will suffer (not him though)with the caveat that eventually (whose lifetime?) it will payoff.

volts.wtf•97 days ago

But this whole species of vague hand-wavey dismissal of climate rests on *not* being clear about this -- not being clear exactly what level of warming is "worth it." It's just, "climate isn't extinction, so let's chill about it," which is a) stupid on its fucking face & b) a recipe ...

volts.wtf•97 days ago

... for always & forever prioritizing status quo interests over the interests of future people, for never drawing any line or making any difficult decision.

Anyway. I'd just love for Matt to tell us a) how bad he thinks climate change is, & b) how much political struggle & effort is warranted.

anderbill.bsky.social•97 days ago

preach it!

joshrosenau.org•97 days ago

And explicitly place a value on the existence of Miami, the Everglades, DC, Manhattan, Boston, Bangladesh, Venice, etc. Going to 3C cedes those places to the seas from which they were born.

dmf84.bsky.social•97 days ago

IPCC reports evidence that keeping warming to 2 degrees would “pay for itself” in the public health benefits alone given death toll of burning fossil fuels but who reads when you can just pop off

peterdebode.bsky.social•97 days ago

http://www.mrdestructo.com/2013/04/destructo-salon-does-matthew-yglesias.html

kawoold.me•97 days ago

It's also especially dumb, because it means he never has to grapple with the knock-on effects. We're seeing global pushback against basically all immigrants that's fueling right-wing gov takeovers. That's just going to get worse as the mid latitudes become more unbearable

noahqkaufman.bsky.social•97 days ago

People who think in terms of cost-benefit analysis often reject the whole notion of long term targets. The tool is about optimizing over incremental changes. 1/x

jmcintire.bsky.social•97 days ago

FYI ... https://johnmcintire.substack.com/p/climate-finance-and-the-world-bank-de8?r=lxiat

noahqkaufman.bsky.social•97 days ago

Which I think misses some of the most fundamental aspects of the climate problem, like how long CO2 stays in the atmosphere and the science of net zero. But…

pyth-of-samos.bsky.social•97 days ago

I have a simple criteria. Any target that allows the coral reefs to go extinct is the wrong target. IPCC says 2.2C won’t cut it. >99% loss by 2100. Yglesias and Breakthrough Bros have no argument to counter this.

pyth-of-samos.bsky.social•97 days ago

I have a simple criteria. Any target that allows the coral reefs to go extinct is the wrong target. IPCC says 2.2C won’t cut it. >99% loss by 2100.

analyzevraething.bsky.social•97 days ago

Any target that overlooks Pollution in existing ecosystems-example Koocanusa reservoir, CDA Lake/WA Rivers - is one worth critique. and the official stance here is "maintain: pop stable" while the fish are inedible in some locs. We haven't even gotten to historic levels in population.

andre-sobolewski.bsky.social•97 days ago

In other words: as long as the structure of our economic systems isn't threatened, then we're good. Puerto Ricans or Bangladeshi may have a bit of a hard time, but whatever.

But if international trade is climate-impacted, then all hell will break loose.

samusishere.bsky.social•97 days ago

It's also increasingly stupid as solar is taking off like a rocket and Obama, Hillary, Biden, and Kamala were extremely deferential to fossil fuels.

Is it going to be a winner for candidate Buttigieg to promise to bail out all the closed coal mines?

kentpitman.bsky.social•97 days ago

Irresponsibly dangerous to talk like survival is assured. We CANNOT prove that. Doesn't seem even slightly implausible we could add several degrees C. Beyond storms, fires, floods, even NOW we're stressing many crops to temperature limits. Drought looms. It'll get ugly fast when food or water fails.

bobinboulder.bsky.social•97 days ago

I, along with 1,100 other families, lost my home to the Marshall Fire in Boulder County almost 3 years ago. Unusual dryness and warmth and 105 mph wind gusts furiously drove the fire through suburban neighborhoods in one day. Climate change is real and consequential. Climate deniers are terrorists.

richardtol.bsky.social•97 days ago

here you are https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AjZwhtwAAAAJ&hl=en

we should aim for 2.5-3.0K warming and work hard to make people less vulnerable to climate change

richardtol.bsky.social•97 days ago

we should not aim for a temperature target, by the way

we should aim for a carbon price

kurjakala.bsky.social•97 days ago

Having lowered the bar to "won't wipe out humanity," it's sort of implied that no action is warranted.

verolynne.bsky.social•97 days ago

Yeah, to me it always reads as the "let 'er rip" strategy for COVID applied to climate change... "we swear there are no harms to be concerned about! Stick to business as usual and let that line go up!"

devon123.bsky.social•97 days ago

Only caring about things that will end all human life puts the bar pretty high. Like even the Holocaust didn’t have the potential to wipe out humanity.

peterdebode.bsky.social•97 days ago

I suppose he doesnt want to challenge the status-quo too much, so he is basically a denialist like people claim he is, he just thinks -incorrectly- he has found a workaround for the accusation.

individkid.bsky.social•97 days ago

Zero effort is called for, because zero effort is needed. Simply delicense an oil major, problem solved. Breakthroughs have even less obligation to follow need than the universe does to make it easy to understand. No one knows how much renewables we will need until there is fossil fuel scarcity.

analyzevraething.bsky.social•97 days ago

Temps aren't even the primary problem, either, Pollution is. I haven't read his article but wanted to add in addendum as I'm on my way to reading it, lol.

cbarcus.bsky.social•97 days ago

What about tipping points where the costs of mitigation rise exponentially?

thurberteam.bsky.social•97 days ago

I get irritated about the inability to deal with the uncertainty about what *could* happen. Every month or so, there's a story that starts "scientists didn't expect this, but..."

binarybits.bsky.social•97 days ago

Why is a temperature target the right way to frame the cost-benefit analysis here? Shouldn’t we do all the policies that have a good cost/benefit ration and not do the ones that don’t?

binarybits.bsky.social•97 days ago

Obviously people aren’t going to agree on which policies have more benefits than costs but I don’t see how introducing a temperature target settles anything. Even with a temperature target you have to choose among many strategies to get there.

volts.wtf•97 days ago

It's an external metric for success, one that resists massaging by interested incumbents. It shows you whether you're doing enough. How is that obvious?

binarybits.bsky.social•97 days ago

I dunno man, I don’t think this is how people think about most other policy issues. During COVID we didn’t set a maximum death target and then work backwards to find the policies that would hit it. We just argued about which policies made sense.

binarybits.bsky.social•97 days ago

If someone said that they didn’t think shutting down schools was a cost-effective way to stop the spread of COVID it would have been a non sequitur to say “are you saying our current COVID death target is too low?” How many covid deaths do you think are ok?

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