People give up a resource, of any kind and with any burden, only under a few
conditions (not in any order): 1 - rigorously enforced government mandate, be
it taxes or regulations (but remember prohibition which failed as no viable
option was offered) 2 - buy out, 3 - existence of a preferable
Dear all,
Carbon budgets over 30-50 years or longer are indeed a recipe for disaster, if
they were simply sliced up by governments as emission rights with the next
evaluation to follow in 30-50 years.
However, if carbon budgets inform the debate from the geophysical side, they
can be a very
it might be that for the middle classes of the industrial world that
climate change is really a secondary issue and they'll still have their TV
sets and their McBurgers and McNuggets to eat and life would go on
- thus spake Ken Caldeira, discussing his Sept 2012 Scientific American
The line that David Lewis quotes was intended to represent a dystopian view
of the future in which biodiversity has been depleted and many people in
the developing world are pushed over the edge, but the middle classes of
the industrialized world still have their minds anesthetized by television
