But there are all sorts of things that individuals can’t do for themselves that ought to be done by governments and others. The US, Canada and Australia all have much the same standard of living as the European Union, but double or more than double the emissions. Bringing in yet another country, New Zealand now has a law that all new houses must have double glazing. Which has a few obvious effects that strike me first up – there are probably a dozen more. The extra expense might make some people choose a smaller house which has some effects on consumption. Regardless of the extra expense, people in new houses will have an advantage in terms of lower heating and cooling needs. It doesn’t immediately affect existing home owners, but providing a compulsory base level for this one aspect of house building means that costs will come down to some extent. The next step in such a scheme would, I hope, lead to requirements that all house extensions would have double glazing (and appropriate other insulation). Then we’d eventually get to the position that double glazing would be the routine supply rather than an expensive option for fussy customers.

Standards for household appliances. European standards are much stricter than those in the USA, I’m not sure about how our standards here stack up against those. Regulating stand-by power consumption all on its own would have a big impact in the USA from what I’ve read lately. Here we’ve had the local power companies come around and instal, for free, nifty gadgets that allow turning off television/entertainment systems without having to find the powerpoint at the back of the cupboards but which are controlled by existing remotes. They also supplied similar power relays for computers to turn off all associated devices just by switching off the computer. (Though I found that it also disabled VOIP so that particular one had to be disconnected – we still have to remember to turn off the printer just as we did before.)

My own view is also that any building closer to the equator than 40 degrees should be required to show cause why it should have any water heating system other than solar. That would make a huge difference in aggregate power consumption without depriving anyone of a hot shower. If the system in question is a large storage system, that would also allow unlimited use of hot water for laundry. (I never understood people rattling on about washing in cold water until I moved to this house which doesn’t have solar hot water.)

There’s a great deal that can be done to reduce power requirements by a third or a half without any effect on standards of living at all. Transforming the power supply itself at the same time gives additional reductions in emissions.

We have to acknowledge that we’re doing all this 30 years late, but that’s no reason not to do it at all.

A coal plant also requires carbon to build the infrastructure, ship fuel to the plant, etc. etc.

Of course we better make sure we are counting that in the cost of coal electric plants.

One of the problems with nuclear, and I think a point jane is making, is that traditionally nuclear promises everything and gives very little; it needs to be properly accounted for just like anything else. Counting the cost of developing the infrastructure, including the C cost is fair, as is counting the health related risks of mining and storing fuel (before and after use) which are usually written off as “oh, everything is fine don’t worry the industry assures us” or “yeah, but COAL!!!!”

Nuclear fission and renewables are “clean” if you don’t count all the carbon that is burned in producing the necessary infrastructure

I wonder why you mention this but not the fact that even if all the necessary infrastructure is produced using fossil carbon then there is still a huge reduction in carbon consumption?

Sorry, it’s not that simple. There’s probably no way to continue consuming energy at our present rate without changing the climate – and many argue that as oil and eventually other fossil fuel extraction rates are destined to decline, we physically can’t keep consuming at the present rate forever even if we don’t give a damn about the climate. Nuclear fission and renewables are “clean” if you don’t count all the carbon that is burned in producing the necessary infrastructure – or the little oopsies like Chernobyl and Fukushima – but the cost of creating a whole new infrastructure on the scale of our present energy use is so huge that it now appears very unlikely that our increasingly limited resources will be used for that purpose. (Likewise, gasoline-powered vehicles are a major contributor to climate change; certainly you can run a car on non-carbon-derived electricity, but the amount of infrastructure that would have to be built to support the present number of vehicles and miles driven is greater than we can afford over a short term.)

I fully support societal efforts to reduce climate change even if I personally suffer for it – I have philosophical values that favor it, and no kids – but my intimation that I might suffer is not because I’m stoopid or a sucker. Let me give you an example: My house is heated with natural gas. By a combination of tactics (replacing inefficient windows, caulking, not heating some rooms, reducing the temperature to as low as 66/58 when my husband, who’s inclined to have respiratory infections all winter, is healthy), I have managed to cut the heating bills to half of the previous owner’s costs. But I still am burning more carbon than I “ought” to be, or than I suspect I’ll be able to afford to burn twenty years from now.

What to do? Just keep turning down the thermostat? While the “granny will diieeee if the heat goes below 70” crowd exaggerates the need for heat, letting it get really cold could affect my husband’s health. I’m no happier with that than he is. Install geothermal? Can’t possibly afford it. Most American housing is inadequately efficient (row houses would be better) and even our modest bungalow has, historically considered, far more space than needed per person. Should we demolish this fundamentally unsustainable infrastructure and rebuild a significantly smaller house, e.g. 300 sq ft, that would be easier to heat? Even if we could afford that – which we can’t – it would be illegal under almost every building/zoning code in America. Of course there are always more things that can be done to make a house more efficient – though beyond some point that creates new problems that must be dealt with – but these too cost money. A large fraction of all working Americans, I heard recently, have less than $1000 in savings. People who are living paycheck to paycheck can’t pay to have a professional come in and do a major insulation project, and nobody has taught them how to do the little things. So to them, “carbon tax” means “turn down the heat and shiver”; it’s pretty much the only option they can afford.

In fact, we can solve the climate crisis without putting working people in an untenable position: all that’s needed is to convert the world’s coal-fired electricity generating plants to anything other than coal. Nuclear fission and renewables are clean, and even natural gas is better than coal.

Converting from coal to anything else, will reduce CO2 emissions by 1/3. That’s enough to put a lid on the emergency and buy us time for additional solutions. We could have done it in the USA for the cost of three years of the Iraq war. For the cost of the rest of the Iraq war we probably could have done it for Europe, China, and/or India.

Iraq was arguably a mistake based on a combination of intelligence errors. (Saddam Hussein sought to convince Iran that he had WMD to deter another war with Iran, Bush Administration staff evaluated the raw intel without proper training and they believed it, whereas experienced CIA analysts were doubtful; the rest is history). But if the US was faced with another 9/11 or other major emergency tomorrow, we would somehow find the money, just as we found the money to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In point of fact, converting from coal to nuclear & renewables would provide enormous opportunities for private investment, and it would create an enormous number of new jobs: solid middle class jobs. The ripple effect through the economy would be more invigorating than the Apollo program was in the 1960s.

The point of this is, dealing with the climate crisis will not harm the already distressed working class (of which I’m a member, BTW). In fact it will be good for us: all of us.

The problem is that entrenched fossil fuel interests view any attempt to mitigate climate impact, as a threat to their primary assets: the oil and coal and natural gas they have in the ground. If someone came along and told you that they were going to make your life savings worth a small fraction of what it is today (you’d think it was 2008 again;-) you’d do everything you could to stop them. So it’s no surprise that the fossil fuel industry is fighting like hell to protect its assets.

Toward that end, they enlist various media personalities and others to promote their views and interests. But simply promoting protection of assets is boring and attracts little support: so they team up their message with other messages such as involving cultural identity issues, to put some “red meat” in it and make it “exciting.” The fact that you and others are afraid that climate mitigation will harm you economically, is the direct result of that effort.

Getting taken in by a con artist is nothing to be ashamed of: just look at the kinds of people who Bernie Madoff conned, they were wealthy and well-educated. Fossil fuel industry sponsored “messaging” is propaganda: it’s a con. But once you recognize you’ve been taken by a con artist, the answer isn’t to defend the con artist: it’s to get mad as hell and not take it any more.

Re. psychologists using internet searches: When someone publishes on the internet, they expose themselves to all manner of criticism and analysis. If they publish an intention to commit a crime, they shouldn’t be surprised if their stuff is analyzed by a police agency and used as evidence to arrest them. If they publish material that shows every sign of psychiatric illness, they shouldn’t be surprised if their stuff is analyzed by psychologists and psychiatrists.

Certainly there are substantial privacy issues for things that people truly believe they are saying in private, that get harvested by Google, Facebook, or other Big Data surveillance engines. But that is not what’s being alleged here. There doesn’t seem to be any issue that what the psychologists who wrote this paper were using, was material found on the open internet in forums intended for open public viewing. That makes it fair game, in the same manner as charging that a network news sportscaster has a bias in favor of a particular team based on a review of his/her broadcasts.

And once one agrees that it’s legitimate to analyze and criticize material found on the open internet, one must necessarily agree that it’s also legitimate for academic researchers to publish their analyses and critiques as well. That’s what’s at stake in the present controversy over the retracted journal article.

Tough cookies on that one, Jane. These are psychologists who study science deniers and climate science in particular. It is their field of study.

G: “Supreme irony: If the Journal publicly accused the authors of unethical conduct, the authors might have a libel claim against the Journal.” Absolutely, I would think so.

Right now these authors have on their record a paper retracted for ethical reasons. They really have no choice but to take legal action, in my opinion.

daedalus2u: I have to tell you that I’ve not seen any evidence of anything like that.

But then again, they wouldn’t leave any evidence, would they!?!?

We have a really bad habit in this country, when for reasons actually based in value judgements we reject the most popular or apparently appropriate conclusions derived from a set of facts, of rejecting the facts themselves. And it’s not limited to the anti-science crowd by any means; you can see advocates of conventional medicine, cornucopian economics, and many other things display the same attitude. The values issues involved here are that almost everyone in America, not just the Koch brothers, benefits from fossil fuel consumption; that the working and middle classes, already pinched by America’s declining economy and collapsing empire, would suffer much more from serious cuts to consumption than the one-percenters would; that for most Americans, a climate-changing level of consumption is effectively or explicitly mandatory, and many have been trained to believe that it is the only thing that gives their lives meaning and saves their children from squalor and early death. Say that they should be forced to cut back by regulations or carbon taxes, and they envision themselves helplessly crushed between forces over which they have no control: the gas and heating and grocery bills that are already higher than they can afford, the job they can’t get to without a car, the roof they can’t keep over their heads without the job, the DCS that might take their kids away if they are found not to be able to maintain “modern” utilities. They are afraid and desperately clinging to what they have, but their values also don’t permit them to say openly, “Let the great-grandkids starve, just keep the party going while I’m alive” – so what they do is deny the existence of the facts that tell us that ugly choice has to be made one way or another.

They’re like people who are diagnosed with a serious cancer, have to choose between accepting early death or accepting horrific treatment and possible death anyway, and respond by sticking their fingers in their ears and leaving the doctor’s office saying “I’m sure he’s wrong, I don’t have cancer at all.” That’s what we’re doing at a societal level. I don’t know how you fix that fast enough to make a political difference, if it’s even possible – but I do know that telling that cancer patient how stupid and crazy he is is probably not the right way to go. He needs emotional support – and more practical support so that he knows the choice to act wouldn’t mean financial ruin for his family. In a society where people have been thrown under the bus one socioeconomic stratum at a time for the past fifteen years or more, do working-class folks have any rational reason to believe that great efforts will be made in future to let their lifestyles down easily? If not, what can be done about that?