Thread by @leashless

The thinking-too-hard insomnia thing. I went down to visit XR this evening: they're spread thin, not many people. Rain is not their friend, and this week is wet.

I stood and thought "this is our response to climate change?" and then thought about the burning refineries in Saudi.

Anybody who has thought about this knows that we run out of stuff and a lot of people die. But very few people in the Climate space really understand global poverty: the climate crisis *spreads* poverty, but it's not like people aren't already dying of collapsed global systems.

There's really a limited amount I can do here. I mean, I am not short of reach, but my god: the lies are piled so deep in this culture that keeping your mouth open on the "hard truths" setting gives you a "time to exile" measured in days.

No, you *cannot* fix this with tinkering

To fix this, like *really* fix it, you'd have to admit that all humans have equal rights, and the *enormous* injustices of the past (i.e. "kill people and take their stuff" *at best*) built the world we are in. Real justice would level everything, both within and across societies

What does it look like? Every human being gets the same right to emit carbon: a quota. It shrinks every year. People sell these quotas to rich people who want to burn more. That process moves *a ton* of money from rich to poor. It also caps our global emissions. End of story.

People have known this approach could work for decades. Most of the fighting at the UN level has been about avoiding this solution. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_em… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cr… note the total lack of discussion of this argument in Wikipedia. It's zeroed

Look how far the academic rabbit hole we have to get before we start to see some real discussions of the issues onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.111… the amount of burying which has happened over this perfectly reasonable and easy to explain stance is *staggering*. It has no homepage. *Gone*

It's not coincidence that the entire climate debate is framed as "government must do something" without getting into the fundamental issues involved in "doing something."

When you actually start talking about things that one might do, people freak out, panic, and vote for Trump.

"Doing something" from reasoned first principles: ecocivilization.info/three-tons-car… 3 tons per person per year goal state, but realistically poor people use far less, and auction their consumption credits to the rich. That's pretty much how you fix this: the atmosphere is a limited commons

So underneath all of the bullshit, remember this: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradable_… it's not very complicated, unless you've got a massive vested interest in keeping it complicated, WHICH LITERALLY EVERYBODY HAS.

That's why the climate thing appears complicated: contradicts existing lies.

But, actually, when you get right down to it, this is simple. The atmosphere is a global commons. All humans have an equal right to the air. The poor sell their excess capacity to the rich, at a price the poor choose freely. If you want less carbon emitted, allocate less per head

The Free Market will sort it out: the poor will charge what it's worth to them, and whatever global scientific panel is setting the carbon goals will handle the political questions.

Once the quota per person is set, if you use more, you buy more. Can't afford? Stop consuming!

This makes the right to emit carbon a human right: one planet, one atmospheric commons. It posits a scientific panel which sets global emissions limits. It lets the free market operate to efficiently allocate capital in a period of scarcity. It command nothing: markets run free.

Everybody that is trying to complicate this is lying to you: they want this to seem huge and impenetrable and impossible. It's not impossible: if you're willing to treat human beings like human beings, climate is as easy as anything else is, when you start from that foundation.

Just in case this goes viral (har, har) medium.com/humanizing-the… here's some reasoning about how we can start to cut consumption at a practical, technical, engineering level while also increasing quality of life pretty dramatically for most first world consumers. A rare deal! Read