I lucked into a detailed (as detailed as a Unitarian gets) tour of the Tabernacle and attended a choir rehearsal. I didn’t do the whole Temple Square tour, but I did make a point in my week there to walk around some neighborhoods away from downtown, and visited the lake once, which upset my sinuses badly. Probably logged 30 miles on foot in 4-5 days. Everyone was very nice. Good coffee was scarce (the 90s, no yelp), but I did enjoy the hostel. Well run. I’d visit again, there really is an intensity in SLC, at least to my experiences there. Memorable.
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Speaking of carbon bubbles, how are the inversions this year? I’ve heard awful things about the air quality there at times?
There haven’t been any noticable improvements in the inversions, but there were a few more snow storms this year than last, and they do clear the smog temporarily.
Air quality was a big topic during this legislative session. Hopefully something good comes out of it.
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The premise of the OP seems to be a desperate attempt to cling onto the obviously-failed idea that somehow market forces will save us from climate change without requiring any major revision of capitalist business-as-usual.
Ain’t gonna happen.
OTOH…
Despite what some argue, we don’t need to revert to 18th century subsistence agriculture. Not only is that unnecessary, it wouldn’t work: low-tech low-density living is nowhere near as environmentally “clean” as it appears. A thousand individual cookfires put out more carbon than one big power station.
But we do need to stop pissing energy away with waste and inefficiency, and we need to do it now. We’re past the time when we can wait for market forces to catch on; command economy solutions are required at this stage.
And yes, it’s going to cost us. Avoiding global catastrophe isn’t something you can do on the cheap.
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Yup. That’s one of the few climate change scenarios that makes me think this could lead to human extinction, and not ‘just’ global war and a drastic reduction of the future potential of human civilization.
Just pointing out that most likely those cookfires back in the day were burning wood. Wood from trees that grew recently, not coal from plants that grew tens of millions of years ago. That system doesn’t work in a world of seven billion people (not enough trees, no control over other kinds of air pollution) but it doesn’t add net carbon to the atmosphere over time.
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So long as there’s zero net deforestation. That hasn’t been the case since prehistory, apart from in the immediate aftermath of population-crash events (Mongols etc.).
Sustainable hunter-gatherer population densities are very low, and historical agriculture has been a substantial user of energy. Plows and horseshoes are made of coal.
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True. Sometimes I lapse into thinking too long term - that “eventually” such a world would have to settle on a “sustainable” level of wood burning - without thinking about how that level could be “zero, once all the trees are gone.” You know, like on Easter Island. Thanks for the reminder.
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Is … is that true? My understanding is that the people who know WTF they’re talking about are shit scared of the rising wealth in Asia and Africa precisely because it leads directly to surging demand for power. An agricultural economy with everyone cooking over open fires isn’t great, but net per capita energy consumption (and therefore net per capita CO2 emissions) is trivial when compared to G20 residents.
When the G20 becomes the G196 … hooo boy.
I don’t know if it’s as true as it used to be in the 1980s. A village can easily charge their phones off a communal solar panel. If the village is in a climate zone where they don’t really need things like central heating, they might be able to stay low-impact.
It’s why Canada always comes out worse than the US on per capita energy use comparisons. Most of our climate zines are at least as cold, if not colder, than the American Midwest.
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At any given standard of living/tech level, high-density urban life is less environmentally damaging than low-density rural life per capita. It’s just that the impacts are a lot more concentrated and visible in the cities and towns.
Yes, if you lower standard of living you can also lower greenhouse emissions (although not always; it depends on exactly how you do it). That’s orthogonal to the urban/rural thing, though.
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