US and China have relatively similar land masses, thus arguably similar levels of available resources. China happens to have a population 4.2 larger than US, thus 4.2 lower per capita resources. If US resource consumption is unsustainable, then so is China's.
Not sure what your argument is. We're talking about per capita emissions, not per country emissions, which doesn't even make sense. Why would an arbitrary grouping of human beings like a nation matter in terms of what emissions each individual should be allowed to represent?
We are comparing energy / sqmi. US and China have similar landmass. 3.8M sqmi vs 3.7M sqmi. Comparing their total energy consumption is, up to a constant factor, the same as comparing their energy / sqmi consumption.
Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded, thus per capita energy poor or sparsely populated, thus per capita energy rich.
> Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded
Uh.. How exactly are countries supposed to decide if they'd "like" to be crowded?
By the way, do you think the matter of simply possessing a large, mostly empty area like Alaska should grant the US an additional "quota" of emissions since it technically reduces US population density?
Speaking of US and China, obvious candidates are immigration policy and one-child policy. Other levers: female education, child mortality reduction, shift in cultural norms towards small nuclear families, access to contraceptives. The entire 'western' world is experiencing population decline, and not for lack of resources.
As a curiosity, I saw a few years ago an article from Africa: 'Meet the Ugandan Businessman with 13 Wives, 176 Children'. I hope we can agree that this kind of reproductive behavior is utterly unsustainable in a world that has learned about its limits (and sadly overshot them already).
Edit: Of course landmass is an approximation. Of course Alaska / Arizona are not Iowa. On the flip side, Tibet / Xianjiang are not Guangdong either. The core point that given that TotalEmissions = Population * PerCapitaEmissions and the Earth only cares about TotalEmissions. We've got to price for the Population term somehow, lest it becomes an unaccounted externality.
The paradox of the situation is that population levels is mostly correlated with consumption levels. Which means that lowering population by natural means implies much higher emissions in total. Population levels are tied to economic conditions, and it's a false hope to try to control it through policy alone, which can affect it somewhat in the short term but not at all in the long term.
Population control is a misguided concept, and has a grim history, ranging from mass sterilisation in India to the "lebensraum" idea of the Nazis. It's not a sensible path, and is mostly tied to extreme ideologies and Malthusian pseudo-science.
Pointing to Uganda, whose citizens represents probably about 1% of emissions per capita compared to the west is is crazy to me. How can one even excuse ones own high consumption levels while blaming Ugandans for reproducing, when one represents the same amount emissions as that of a small village in some places?
Malthus thesis was that populations grow exponentially, whereas resources grow linearly, thus population will relatively soon overshoot the available resources. Malthus was also an optimist. We are in a situation where we have a hard limit on the amount of (fossil fuel energy) resources we can globally expend. At least according to the Paris agreement. Take your time to internalize the consequences of this hard limit. Hint: TotalEmissions(fixed) = Population * PerCapitaEmissions.
PS. I pointed to one Mustafa Mugambo Mutone. The future that his descendants will inhabit will hopefully see a convergence of lifestyles across cultures and continents.
The author needs to familiarize himself with the concept of MTBF. It's surprisingly short for high order artifacts. Entropy will introduce errors and break down every single high order system out there. I am aware of two exceptions: the biosphere and, on a much much smaller scope, cloud storage. The core characteristic of both systems is redundancy and repair: every piece of the system is continuously monitored and replaced by a healthy clone before enough errors accumulate to render it inoperable.
Short of developing artificial life, the proposal will not work. Of course, developing artificial life is one of the big existential risks humanity faces. I'd rather we study gardening instead :)
Assuming the problem is that the global energy consumption is too large, the last thing we want is to increase the energy footprint of the people we already have. Moving people from poor countries to rich countries means greatly increasing those people energy footprint. It is in direct contradiction to the stated goal of reducing the energy footprint of humanity, and serves as a strongly visible signal that the ruling class is not serious about reducing global emissions.
If the solution to climate change must involve keeping large numbers of people poor or making existing people poorer, it will fail due to populist backlash and nothing will be done.
There is only one possible solution: replace CO2-intensive power sources like fossil fuels with low or zero CO2 power sources like nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, and solar energy. If that can't be done fast enough, well enough, or affordably, then we should plan and prepare for climate change as a certainty.
We have the technology (solar, wind, nuclear, grid scale batteries, HVDC long range transmission lines, EVs), but do not have the political will. This is largely because the fossil fuel industry is powerful enough to block serious efforts, and because national economic and military competition incentivizes nations to defect from any CO2-reducing strategy and exploit cheap fossil fuels to get ahead quickly.
The solution to climate change requires indeed keeping large numbers of people poor and making existing people poorer. And it will fail indeed because of populist backlash. We should plan indeed for climate change, though not sure what to personally do beyond buying a praying book (100% dead serious).
Sobering: As of 2021, there is no 'western lifestyle' country on the face of the Earth that has emissions in line with the requirements of the Paris accord emissions, which is about 2.5 CO2 t/year/capita for a global population of 10 billion (2050 estimate). Even countries like Sweden, Switzerland of France, which are >90% nuclear & renewable in their electricity production, still have 4.5, 4.7 and 5.1 t CO2 t/year/capita. I have yet to hear concrete proposals of where the 50% cuts should come from, other than large scale technologies that have not been developed yet.
That doesn’t work. Poor people have more children, negating any savings, and as we agree it’s politically a non-starter.
It’s also hypocritical. “Could you do us a favor and stay poor to help solve this problem we mostly created?” That will get a big “fuck you.”
I am curious about the statistics you’re quoting. If 90% of power is electricity they are probably counting petrol cars and possibly the embodied energy in products manufactured abroad. It shows why the entire energy system must be converted and it must be global. If it’s not global rich countries will just outsource polluting industry and poorer countries will be happy to burn cheap fossil fuels to make money selling products back.
… but I am also pessimistic. We may eventually get there but not before serious weather changes that cause a lot of disruption.
The Amazon rainforest is being destroyed to grow more money. Money is fungible, if beef were banned they's cut the forest to do something else with the land.
If it's being cut down for beef it _might_ be cut for something else. You can only control what you can control. Maybe ecotourism would be more lucrative if beef were off the market.
The name sounds nordic. Oslo, Stockholm & Helsinki would end up with a climate similar to Northern Manitoba. I tried to drop a Google StreetView to get a sense of the landscape. It was not possible, there are simply no roads and no cities at those latitudes.
Even the richest of the rich need a supply and support network. Money won't suffice.
While the SUV-driving crowd is stomach churning, it is also small in the big picture. The huge elephant in the room is global population size, moving apace toward 10 billions and possibly beyond. Industrializing 10 billion people turns out to be a very dirty business.
If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world.
We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see:
* World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles.
* World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement.
* Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle.
* Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries.
A. The per capita approximation means the whole world has to be brought at third world status.
At projected 2050 population levels of 10b, and 25GT/year emissions, per capita emissions allowance is 2.5t/year. There is no industrialized country with this level of emissions, the lowest being Sweden, Switzerland and France at 4.5, 4.7 and 5.13. These countries have moved >90% of their electrical production to nuclear and renewables and cut their emissions in half compared to the 1990s. Possibly they are also externalizing their food and industrials production.
B. What is 'fair' share? Population as of 2020? 2050? 1950? Land area? Forest mass?
The most obvious issue is population. Hard to believe, but in 1950, at the beginning of the current Golden Era, world population was a mere 2.5 billion people. At those population levels everybody on Earth could have had afforded the industrialized lifestyle of Japan, Germany or Netherlands, with about 10 CO2t/capita emissions.
The vast majority of companies ask for a 'we own everything you breathe' agreement as a prerequisite for employment. The vast majority of employed software engineers don't have the luxury to work on side projects, unless they relinquish the IP to their employer for no additional compenstation, which renders monetization moot.
I worked with someone who was working 2 full time 9-5 jobs simultaneously for a few months before being found out. When the company did realize what was going on, they quietly parted ways with him without any punishment, because they didn't want it to get around that he got away with it for so long. I think if you're not at a big organization with a proper legal department, that's the most likely outcome.
Even got promoted to management in one of the two jobs! They would sometimes have to take calls from both jobs with one earbud in each ear connected to each laptop.
The industry the companies were in are not known for employing the best and brightest programmers... so I can understand being able to output enough to keep everyone happy. But it still boggles my mind that they never slipped up and got caught.
Most countries I worked in, anything done after hours, not using company resources, and not in the competition space of the employer is simply allowed. No company would be able to enforce that.
In fact (I have had that happen) if the contract tries to over reach, in particular regarding IP, then that clause could just be made void in court.
> Such negative values occurring shortly after the GOE require a rapid reduction in primary productivity of >80%, although even larger reductions are plausible. Given that these data imply a collapse in primary productivity rather than export efficiency, the trigger for this shift in the Earth system must reflect a change in the availability of nutrients, such as phosphorus. Cumulatively, these data highlight that Earth’s GOE is a tale of feast and famine: A geologically unprecedented reduction in the size of the biosphere occurred across the end-GOE transition.
> For blind people, TTS settings are very personal.
Is there a whitepaper that articulates concrete solutions to reconcile the myriad flavors of screen reader configurations with Browser Isolation technology?
the other issue is that while this would work for screen readers, it wouldn't work for me. I can see fine, but I'm losing the use of my arms, so I use vimium with dictation to navigate pages. they'd have to bake vimium into it as well...
...which suggests to me, why not allow approved browser extensions to run on the remote side? you could have a screen reader extension, I could have vimium, it wouldn't be great but it would be secure, and again, better than nothing.
Your suggestion is probably the correct solution technically speaking, as it funnels the screen reader I/O stream through browser APIs.
The immediate objection is that most popular screen readers (JAWS, NVDA) are native apps and not browser extensions, (some?) extension-based screen readers being immature. mwcampbell articulated it as much in a different post, asking for a native desktop client as opposed to a browser based client. Alas, 'native desktop client' is a different technology than Cloudflare RBI, subject to different tradeoffs, which may well be at odds with the goals of Cloudflare RBI as a product.
A hypothetical browser accessibility protocol is likely to prove insufficient, as native screen reader apps will themselves become an attack vector.
Unlocking the situation requires a wider industry buy-in beyond Cloudflare. Screen readers must be rearchitected with security in mind. IT departments must manage accessibility apps. Advocacy groups must commit to roadmaps that include a lot of change, and that may even degrade the status quo for many years to come. Given that existing screen reader apps have decades of engineering already poured in, it will be hard and expensive to enact change. A good early step could be creating an industry standard various entities can rally behind.
I've struggled with security vs. accessibility myself. my work won't allow my dictation software on the secure workstations we have to use, at least for the near future. they allow Dragon, but Dragon sucks for interaction and programming. companies can't just throw their hands up and say "security" though.. or at least they shouldn't. they can and do, I guess.
