Carbon taxes

So both Ontario specifically and Canada generally are having a political controversy over carbon taxes.

I think this is unfortunate, as I do not personally support carbon taxes.

Carbon taxes -- emissions taxes generally! -- would have been an excellent policy in 1980 and a useful policy in 1990.  Today, it's utterly pointless; it assumes there's lots of time for a nice slow status-quo affirming industrial pivot of some kind to using fewer fossil carbon inputs.

That's not the situation we're in.  The situation we're in is that we need to zero out fossil carbon inputs and thus fossil carbon extraction by 2025.  (Well; 2000.  Earlier would have been better.) But 2025 is worth it for limiting-the-damage purposes.  The appropriate policy now is carbon rationing along that decreasing schedule to zero, backed up with whatever level of force is required to enforce compliance.

Yes, that has to go along with "decarbonize agriculture" and "decarbonize core transport" and a few other things.  The point is that we the emergency is now, we cannot avoid it, we don't have the option of not experiencing it, and the certainty of having a sufficient response is not a thing we can get.  Faffing around as though the status quo is durable or desirable isn't helpful in any way, in that sense any talk of carbon taxes is pure political kabuki.  What we need is a full industrial mobilization, tax rates set at "whatever it takes", and a very public approach to meeting the "decarbonize agriculture" and "cease fossil carbon use" by 2025 goals.

#NoPlant19

Anybody remember 2012?  Beef got cheap.

One edge of what we're looking at with the American maize crop not getting planted is chicken getting cheap.

If you're a scientist speaking in a scientific capacity, you're constrained in your language.  Most people don't know how to read it; it's a skill they've never had cause to develop.

I'm not a scientist.  I don't have the obligation of constraint and I'm not trying to get anything through a committee nervous about political responses.

Irrespective of what happens in this year of the Common Era two thousand and nineteen, industrial agriculture is going to break hard and forever by 2030.  This is a combination of dependency on fossil carbon, mass use of bioaccumulating toxins (agriculture that kills all the pollinators is not functioning agriculture!), and needing to know when it's going to rain.

Is this year the year?

Maybe not.

Thing is, the climate is going to get worse for the next couple centuries; the whole truly foreseeable future is the climate getting worse.  It will do that if all use of fossil carbon stopped tomorrow by miraculous means.  It's plausible that the Arctic Amplification feedback tipped in 2005 or so and we're going to get 8 C of warming by 2100.  It's not impossible that we're going to get thereabout of 12 C when all is said and done and the feedbacks have unwound.  It's quite likely that the notion of a temperate zone in the climate is going to go away; whether you want to think of this as Arctic and Not Arctic or Tropical and Not Tropical is much of a muchness.  That means a couple of things; the most important is that absolutely no one knows where it's going to rain how much at a level of detail useful for farming.

(Some of the others are that the direction the weather comes from is likely to change, and over the next little while -- one human lifetime -- lots of places become uninhabitable.  Which is irrelevant; the relevant thing is the first time it goes over 35 C wet-bulb and even the hale and robust and well-hydrated people die.)

What can you do about it?

Bloody revolution is an annoying distraction.  General strikes lack sufficient population buy-in and the brain mangling via media is too effective to expect to change that in a useful time frame.  (The useful time frame was back in about 1980.)

No place in the Northern Hemisphere below 45 North is all that likely to stay habitable; it might, especially at higher altitudes, but it might not, too.  And if it does it might be dryer than a dry dry thing most of the time and food is mostly water.  Plus we're not likely to see the survival of the industrial nation-state able to support major overland transport; bootstrapping one where you've had a credit system and thus a fuel supply collapse, for example, isn't going to be a "everything fine in five years problem", because that'll be the second hard blow to the head of food security.  Any shipping is likely to be by water, and it's likely to be small-scale, slow, and never cross the equator.

So what you could do is to get far enough north somewhere currently wet (and thus likely-ish to stay wet) and vaguely coastal and see about growing food by one of the labour-intensive, high-yield-per-area robust approaches.  Any non-fossil-carbon tech base you can install is likely good; don't forget that you need some kind of sewage handling just after you need food, because sewage handling is what lets you have neighbours in a social way and you need neighbours.

(To tangent on to a go-bag thread; toenail clippers.   You're considering to walk indefinitely off yonder and you haven't got toenail clippers?  Unless you're skilled and flexible enough to trim yours with a knife, this is a bad plan.)

Have we got the whole ten years?

I kinda doubt it.

Necessary and desirable are different

This has many applications, but the one that's niggling at me is wanting to point out that fascism is violent authoritarian corporatism, to the extent that isn't a redundant description.

It's trying to take over because it must; any functioning democratic process tends to get rid of it.  It can only exist at a fairly low level of social organization.  Widespread information flow, strong democratic institutions, and any kind of effective progressive taxation results in a society that doesn't have violent authoritarian corporatism.

If that system of organization wants to copy itself into the future, it has to take over.  Strong central authority under democratic direction will obliterate it.  (An awful lot of work and money has gone into keeping that from happening since about 1980.  There are limits to these things.)

This isn't to say fascism is trivial (no) or that things aren't serious (they are) or the climate isn't making everything else extra-double-plus-hard-mode (it is); it's to say that the whole thing is coming out of a mix of fear (the system they depend on is very, very vulnerable) and incompetence (if the problem is getting copies into the future, oppression is not the answer.  It shouldn't ever be the question.)  Any sense of inevitability or doom is the wrong way around.