Has anybody else read this book? I'm about halfway through and I feel like I've been learning a lot from this. While the book is endlessly critical of the former Soviet experiment and the modern PRC without cushioning it's critiques by acknowledging that much of their problematic climate elements are due to material conditions, I find many of their critiques and ideas refreshing.
I'm a little ambivalent on their information about Nuclear Power too, I personally had assumed that Nuclear tech was brought to an incredibly safe level.
But beyond that I think some of the central thesis of the book of treating nature as a "known unknown", and needing to harness the power of hopeful utopianism while making use of the best elements of scientific socialism, I think these are swell things to adopt. The book is, on the whole, a bit lib in the ways that utopian socialists are, but I do think at the end of the day it prescribes some necessary ideas that are seriously worth engaging with.
Has anyone else read this book and have any thoughts, or ways we can adapt this critique to the struggle of socialism?
There's also a game https://play.half.earth/
It is very cool but very hard.
i didnt really believe you. i just tried it, and jesus fucking christ it is hard. its like, can nothing ever go right?
my first time, i was basically like "ok ill be careful, plan for the future, balance everything, all good" and emissions killed me through political capital by 2040. so on the second run i was like "ok fuck that no compromise we're getting shit done and we're getting it done now" and emissions killed me through political capital by 2050. so i was like "ok fine then fuck it FULL COMMUNISM RIGHT NOW" and died in 2030 lmao
Maybe I was lucky with the random events, but I managed to save the Earth with 12 years left on the clock by immediately turning all the fossil fuels down to zero on the first turn and avoiding putting points into anything authoritarian, Malthusian, or most of the wackier accelerationist stuff. By the end North America was rioting, but the rest of the world was happy and the planet was saved.
The trick is not to make people so happy they end it early, so you get time to do wacky things like import natural gas from Titan
yeah if the game isn't supposed to be a wacky grimdark setting then i just got extremely unlucky with events on all 3 runs. it was literally like every year there were forest fires, floods, and diseases popping up all over the world, from turn 1. there were a comical number of disasters going on
The game is a fairly simple system. I was able to brute-force it with a dozen or so tries. You can clear the game in round 5-8 if you do the following:
Round 1
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Implement: accelerationist curriculum, animal liberationist curriculum, champagne socialism, consumerist curriculum, factory farming reform, stakhanovite workers, indigenous sovereignity, marine protected areas. This wins you political capital in the short term, til emissions come down.
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Go to 'change production': and whack all the fossil fuel sources down to 0% and replace them. Same with fuel sources: everything to 0% except biofuels to 15% and blue hydrogen to 85%. This takes several cycles to implement, but around round 4 you'll suddenly get all the political capital in the world, and then the game is a pushover. The imbalance in the game is they give all the political capital for reducing emissions; shortages and unrest don't matter.
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Implement cloud brightening. The game's win condition is to reduce warming to below 1°, and this does it directly.
Rounds 1 and 2
- After implementing the things in the first bullet point, you have about 32 points to spend. Get an early headstart on useful research and infrastructure projects. There are two ways to get research projects done: spend points (which is costly) or start early (which is prudent). Start on: sewage treatment plants, remediate and protect ecosystems, pedestrian cities, passive building retrofits, recycling, expand public transport, expand nature preserves, energy conservation campaign, electrify road vehicles, direct air capture, co-generation, cloud brightening, carbon-negative concrete, carbon capture and sequestration, battery storage network, automation, next-gen solar, electric aviation, high-density batteries, green container ships
Later rounds
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You'll get mad capital when the emissions come down, and then do what you want.
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Don't spend points without getting an effect. Reducing research time from 7 years to 6 does nothing for you. That's the same planning cycle. If one spend brings research time down multiple years, e.g. from 23 years to 18, then it's worth it.
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Get about 10-20% of your energy from BECCS and use the Cloud brightening process. This will get you under 1° warming and win the game. The BECCS process is overpowered in the game.
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Electrify everything (so fuel isn't an issue) and use vegan mandate (so meat isn't an issue).
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Draconian mandates are worth it: ban cars, impose energy quotas, restrict air travel. The blowback doesn't affect your outcomes.
Don't bother spending points on:
- Anything to do with fuel: 3rd generation biofuels, green hydrogen (just use blue hydrogen)
- Alternative refrigerants (small gains)
- Hempcrete (small gains, and a trade-off in land)
- Desalination
- Low-methane cattle fodder, rotational grazing (small gains)
- Restore desert (increases temperature by decreasing albedo)
- Anything to do with space
- Anything to do with population control
- Anything nuclear
It's a simple game.
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Reducing and keeping power consumption low is key, fuel as the secondary priority. Electrification is bad if you still have to rely on fossil fuels. Thus, do not bother with hydrogen and other replace fuel with electricity consumption projects and switch to biofuels until you have no more fossil energy running.
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Crack down on meat asap. Meat production has huge emissions and takes up a lot of land, especially as QoL improves. Switching to organic production is kinda pointless for it's less efficient while having the same problems. State enforced vegetarianism or veganism cost a lot of political points but are powerful decisions.
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The Ecofeminist (not sure what that ideology even represents IRL, since it seems to be connected with some occult shenanigans etc. Events like "Rise of the Chtulucene" and the like Wicca witches or something? Idk)
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Wooden skyscrapers are OP.
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Wait with FALGSC until the fuel and power issues are fixed. Space is a neat goal for the late game but unfortunately iirc one of the decisions is bugged and adds a number with like 20 digits to your fuel consumption.
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BECCS actively subtract emissions.
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You can redistribute up to 4 bars in power/fuel/farming/animal husbandry per turn each.
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Do small steps, as else the game crashes with non linear effects ruining your run. So don't go as far as possible in one area in other words. Then - and as long as you ensure production security - it is more or less a cake walk.
Start researching a ton of things, but not intensely, do focus on a few light house projects to push through in high impact areas. Time it so that you have the gains shortly before each period. Coal fuel is surprisingly good in the game.
I had so much fun playing that when it came out. IIRC there was some bug though. I forget what it was.
I genuinely do not know how well the critique lands, because I've never read this book, but Max Ajl's A People's Green New Deal speaks decisively about the faults of half-earth theories. I often build up doubts about his critiques (thinking of Nuclear energy, where I happen to have a lot of technical/safety knowledge), but often realize I'm missing his broader critique (here, centralized energy sources in a world that should be better spread among and working with nature). I have felt critical like this about his half-earth critique, feeling that it seems strawmanning, but the broader, more integrated, critique still actually hits astonishingly well. The perspective of nature cannot get over the commodification of that nature and the western cahauvinistic separation from that commodity. His opinion is that this leads to entirely ineffective, imperialistic, and possibly culturally destructive western perspectives that will never leave even if the utopia is close
