11 July 2009

Cataloguing Our Predictions & Bets

This doesn't really count as a post, but I felt the need to make a quick note of it after Geoff's last post.

The Arena for Accountable Predictions: Long Bets is a website so obviously in tune with the spirit of this blog that I'm not sure how I forgot about it until now. It too shall join the RSS links to the side of this site.

A prediction that I find completely unlikely and would bet against if I had the money? Prediction 241: The End of State Sovereignty by 2030. World governments are probably much harder to get rid of than we think, or even impossible. This person's idea of a historic trend toward larger and larger forms of government is flawed; the nation-state is dissolving and will be replaced, if it ever truly is, by corporate entities.

A significant Bet that I would back? Bet 20: By 2020 the USA will no longer be the worst contributor to Global Environmental Degradation. Obviously China and India are going to oust us from this one. China is addicted to coal and to a certain extent, you cannot avoid degrading the environment with such high population densities/numbers. Unless I am more forgetful than I think, the People's Republic has already passed the states in terms of CO2 production. The voracious industrializing appetite of billions attempting to sustain a western vision of life will prove the most damaging phenomenon of the early half of this century short of grey goo, and the autocratic government of China at least will prove an impediment to its correction. War may follow.


6 comments:

Chris B. said...

I don't think they have passed us in CO2 production per capita. Of course they will outright burn more however... they have a 6th of the world population and we have I think like a 20th.

Geoffrey Wykes said...

Jesus, apocalyptic much? It's pretty damn far from gray goo!

I would quibble with the use of 'corporate;' Oligarchy is probably more descriptive, as many corporations at least have some public stock, and the only stock that would be available in a government completely given over to the powerful would be that which is possessed by their families...

Anyways, China has a ways to go to capacity; even if they use the greenest of green technology there'd be a rise with that much potential, and, well, the chicoms only care about catching up, as well they might.

Adam Wykes said...

It turns out they do produce ALOT more CO2 than us, and they started doing so in 2006. Even I didn't remember it being that early. And of course it's not per capita, but that measure is immaterial as far as the well-being of the environment goes. Sure, we consume gross amounts of practically everything, but focusing on that fact isn't going to save the biomass covering this planet.

And as for Geoff's injunction that I'm being apocalyptic, yes and no. Yes because short of the planet being eaten, a runaway greenhouse effect that turns our world into a second Venus would be pretty damn apocalyptic. No, because there are plenty of reasons to doubt Grey Goo would be nearly so all-consuming as it has been hypothesized to be. Early nanomachines, at least, will probably prove unable to reconstruct the molecular structure of every material. So between rampant, uncontrolled pollution/population growth and the eating of everything this side of Earth's crust by nanomachines, we are looking at an essential parity of catastrophe - the destruction of the biosphere as we know it.

Chris B. said...

US CO2 production from last year: 6.1 billion tons.

China's CO2 production from last year 6.2 billion tons.

Per capita we are still far worse.

Adam Wykes said...

"And of course it's not per capita, but that measure is immaterial as far as the well-being of the environment goes. Sure, we consume gross amounts of practically everything, but focusing on that fact isn't going to save the biomass covering this planet."

If you had read what I already wrote you would know that I care very little about that guilt trip.

The problem with China's pollution is twofold as I see it: firstly, the fact that their pollution now eclipses our own threatens to demoralize would be practitioners of Green thinking, secondly that they are building awful, awful coal plants when they could be working on solar, wind, and nuclear power instead.

You'd think that they could at least learn from our mistakes; their population dies by the hundreds every year from blacklung while they spout hypocrisy about our environmental standards.

Chris B. said...

Actually China is slowly working on wind and solar in the west of the country. It's not moving as fast as god knows they could. But they are moving.

Secondly per capia does matter; while I understand that the total matters to the planet as a whole, but if we poluted like china does we would polute much less. It is still an important measure.