this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Just Stop Oil protester convicted over M25 protest (www.bbc.com)
submitted 9 months ago by silence7 to c/climate
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[–] perestroika 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

An exercise in game theory:

  • first protester: blocks the road personally
  • state: sends the protester to jail
  • second protester: drops caltrops, hopefully on a slow-driving road
  • state: huffs and puffs, but won't find the person

That wouldn't be a smart way to play this game. :( As long as civilized protest gets the goods (or has some effect), one should always prefer that. It's short-sighted to remodel the playing field to make it dangerous.

I hope the sentence will be something ridiculously small, because otherwise state is sending out a signal "you shouldn't get caught, consider real sabotage instead of civilized protest".

[–] x_cell 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Since we're talking game theory, a basic rule in any competitive game (from chess to League of Legends) is that focusing on loss prevention is a losing tactic.

We've been doing peaceful protest since the beginning of the environmental movement. It's not getting the goods and the earth is dying. What we need it's a diversity of tactics.

[–] hex_m_hell 1 points 9 months ago

Exactly. While the majority of human social games are nonzero sum, playing against the oil industry is zero sum. In order for human life to continue to exist, the oil industry must not exist. This is an extermination game.

Within a zero sum game, there's no room to deal or ask for concessions because the survival of each side depends on winning. Corporations focus on immediate profits, so they don't account for the long term. It's useless to think about them as rational actors, because they are not. They have one objective and they are not capable of accounting for the long term effects of that because if they did, they couldn't exist anyway. If the political system is poisoned by the oil industry, then protests can't really work. This game is the same game as nuclear war, after the war has started. Asking to stop the war at that point wouldn't make any sense. The only way to survive is to destroy the enemy, as fast as possible, by any means necessary. To not do everything possible to end petroleum is to accept death.