Hi, MoonShadow!
The reason why I hadn't posted in this thread (until now) is that everybody else was doing such a good job of making all the same arguments I would have made. Thanks, everybody!
This point, however, has not yet been addressed as far as I know:
But much easier to shrug your shoulders and say, "Eh, that's the way it is," when you and yours are not directly concerned. Yes, humanity will probably survive and adapt. But a lot of misery lies down that path of complacency, which could be avoided or at least mitigated if the response of so many in rich areas that won't be the first to suffer Had a little more humanity.
Maybe it could be avoided, maybe it could not. You seem to believe that mitigation of that outcome is probable; but that is not a common view from either side of this debate. If we take the climate summit results recently out of Paris, the very best we can hope for is about a half a degree Celsius of mitigation over the next century; and even that would come at great economic cost. A cost that, most likely, will have the greatest impact on the lives of the world's poorest people; not the middle class & higher among the wealthiest nations. So suffering may not be avoidable, and by diversion of the capital of societies on the hopes of climate change mitigation might yet end up causing equal or greater suffering via another vector of poverty. Would our efforts & wealth be better spent figuring out how to grow different crops better suited to climate changes in particular regions? Or perhaps (gasp!) genetic modifications of crops to make them more resilient? What about research into cheaper/more effective treatments for the most common causes of childhood death in tropical regions; such as malaria or diarrhea? Or even just premature birth?
You're arguing that the cost of mitigating climate change will have the greatest [negative] impact on the world's poorest people. But I'm sure at some point earlier it was pointed out that the cost of failing to mitigate climate change will also have the greatest [negative] impact on the world's poorest people.
I don't think that was brought up in this thread, but I am aware of it. I mentioned it the way I did because there is a bit of a myth that, if we can just get rich people to pay the costs of shifting away from a carbon based energy economy, then the impact upon the world's poorest would be minimized. This part is the falsehood. The wealthy among modern nations are unlikely to feel the brunt of the
economic costs of a forced shift towards carbon-free energy; that also will most likely be shouldered by the poorest, who typically spend 25% or more of their income/labor on energy sources, even though they typically use very little on a per capita basis.
In fact, failing to mitigate would certainly have a worse impact than mitigating would,
This is a tell. There is no certainty of any outcome. That is part of my complaint.
in part because researching the technology to do so (and paying for that research) is done by wealthy countries,
Which will occur anyway, via the free market forces, with much less economic harm on a longer, more natural, timeline. Hubbert's Peak Theory alone guarantees that wealthy nations will commit resources towards further efficiency gains (LED lighting, high-efficiency refrigeration compressors, etc) and alternative energy sources for intermittent uses. The current state of the cost of oil is only a temporary 'pause' in the overall trend. (see what I did there?) I have an experimental solar photovoltaic controller sitting on my desk right know, that is designed to run a typical household refrigerator directly from a single 200w photovoltaic panel, and then smoothly switch from the panel to household AC as the sun sets, synching the AC output of the inverter to the grid so that the fridge never sees a break in the cycle power. It's slick, patented & I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement just for the option of paying $300 for it. It only requires a 35 amp-hour battery to handle the transitions smoothly, which is where the cost savings come long term, because lead-acid batteries are expensive and don't last nearly as long as the panels themselves do.
and in part because things like the Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement reduce wealthy countries' economic comparative advantage by setting stricter pollution targets (in addition to the explicit transfers of wealth to help poorer countries increase their sustainability).
That's not what happened, and I think you know it. The Kyoto Protocol was a barely veiled attempt to impose an international trade regime, which fortunately turned out to be a failed attempt. The Paris Agreement isn't even that much, because it's not binding so that it wouldn't have to get past the US Senate as an international treaty. It's toothless, and no one with any understanding believes for a moment that China, India or most of the countries in Africa will do any more than gesture toward abiding by it. Even if the Paris Agreement had any useful force, the total impact over the next 100 years would be to reduce the global average climate increase by about three-fifths of a degree Celsius. Far and away not worth the economic suffering such an agreement would be bound to cause just over the next decade, much less the whole century.
As far as transfers of wealth go, this one is relatively legitimate and acceptable -- after all, wealthy countries were responsible for the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions (and other pollution) produced up to this point, so it's only fair that we are mostly responsible for paying to clean it up.
First off, the Paris Agreement isn't about "other pollution", it's about carbon dioxide emissions. And as Music Lover pointed out, CO2 is plant food. There have been numerous studies that show that the pre-industrial atmostpheric levels of CO2 were at barely above starvation levels, and that all agricultural crops' growth rate, yield & resistance towards drought all improve significantly with a doubling of that concentration level. Since most of these very poor nations have agriculturally based societies, many of them are benefited by CO2 emissions from industrial nations, so long as they are not also affected by other forms of pollution. Furthermore, most Industrialized nations
have been helping to "clean up" those CO2 emissions, if only accidentally. The new growth forest cover across the New England states should be famous; and my home state of Kentucky was once, and is almost again, a continuous temperate forest from border to border. This is an unintended consequence of transitioning from a pre-industrial society that heats with wood, to one that heats with natural gas, propane and high-efficiency electric heat pumps (coal, water power, etc). There is one mitigating factor right there.
Also, you seem to think that spending money on some types of research (e.g. increasing crop yields and reducing disease) is valid but that spending on other types of research (e.g. sustainable energy) is not, but have utterly failed to give any reasonable justification for why.
You have misunderstood. A free market demand for research is valid, taxing others to pay for (often pie-in-the-sky) government research is (generally) not. Government funded research has netted mankind very little for the cost, but at least we got nuclear weapons & Tang.
It strongly gives the impression that you just hate anything that might affect you and prefer that the issue be addressed in ways that are only "somebody else's problem."
You just got started here, and already are resorting to the hateful accusations. This is a debate. Your impressions of personalities are irrelevant.
You also exhibit the false dichotomy fallacy, where you pretend that we have to choose what to research
No I don't...
-- we have plenty of money to do both;
...and no we don't! By definition, resources are always scarce! The 'opportunity cost' alone of diversion of resources toward
any new government bureaucracy, even one with a small chance of benefit, is incalculable. And I mean that it's
literally incalculable, because we can't know what we will lose out on over the next several decades because of the diversion of resources.
the only shortage is in the will (namely, the will of you and people like you) to allocate said money to it (which implies that your claim that the situation is inevitable is a self-fulfilling prophecy).
I imply no such thing. That is what the climate doomers imply, I was just summarizing the position. Perhaps you should go back and try to familiarize
yourself with my statements, and argue against those, not your interpretation of what I intended to say.
I have no interest in unfairly burdening anyone with excessive regulation; I simply wish to end the massive subsidies that we give to the fossil fuel industry and other polluters in order to protect the commons.
Okay. So advocate for the end of the subsidies. I have no objection there. But, again, that's not what either Kyoto nor the Paris Agreement even
pretends to accomplish.