Do conservatives think there is something intrinsically good about gasoline/fossil fuel?

Politics & Elections
201

It depends a lot on the “decision” of course.

Consider WWII - you could say that the U.S. “decided” to sink huge amounts of national effort and treasure into forcing Germany and Japan to submit within less than four years. If we had a societal shift on the magnitude of the change in our national consensus after Pearl Harbor, what would be possible?

There’s one article on what such a switch would take:

It’s two years old, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the target was still achievable.

The basic idea is to invest in huge changes to infrastructure and productive capacity for the first 3-5 years, to the point where everything using fossil fuels that wears out is replaced by something using electricity, then those sectors ramp up more slowly and steadily until existing older appliances, autos, heaters, etc. can be replaced proactively.

Generation and transmission infrastructure are also ramped up quickly to start, then more slowly (but still rapidly) as needed.

His solutions rely on no new technological breakthroughs - only deployment of existing technologies at the kind of scale necessary to transition the US to 20% of current fossil fuel use by 2035, and to zero by 2050.

But it does require a mandate - you can’t do it all with incentives. So a command economy, much like in World War II, would be needed. Of course, the invisible hand of the market would not have won the war, either, no matter how many incentives had been dangled in front of people to convince them to make the changes necessary.

On the other hand, it’s a less-costly task than winning WWII - 1.2xGDP, rather than 1.9x for the war. Also, you’d have 25 million people engaged in something fundamentally productive, rather than 15 million people looking to destroy enemy soldiers and industry to bring a war to a close.

Interestingly enough, because of the improved efficiency of electricity over fossil fuels, over half of US energy use goes away completely with no loss in terms of what is delivered - energy that would be used to explore, collect, transport and refine fossil fuels is no longer needed, of course, and using renewables instead of fossil fuels to generate electricity or operate cars reduces losses due to waste heat.

202

And there I stopped reading, because this grossly ignores that the social media, and many other new internet tools we have now, comes thanks in big part to the government telling the AT&T monopoly to get away from the computer business in 1949.

  • [Narrator] So Bell got to keep being Bell for the next few decades. But guess what? Another antitrust suit was launched in 1949 looking to break the vertical link between Bell’s telephone service and its manufacturing arm, Western Electric, which leased telephones to customers to use with its phone service.

  • [Richard R. John] In '56, a consent decree is negotiated. The Bell System does not give up Western Electric. The Justice Department forces AT&T to get out of the computer business. AT&T could have gone into the computer business. But in order to keep them from going into the computer business, guess what? They had to open up their vault, okay, because the business, telephone, and telegraph business in the United States is built around the control of intellectual property, patents. And you know what the jewel of the crown is in their vault? A transistor.

  • [Narrator] Bell had so much faith in the telephone it gave up a bunch of inventions to keep it, including the one that led to the computer business as we know it today. But Bell got to keep its telephone business, including Western Electric.

  • [Richard R. John] This is a cold war. Had Western Electric not been as closely involved with the government, with Sandia and with nuclear weaponry, the outcome might have been different.

Sure, now AT&T and other companies are becoming too big again. But clearly the same arguments that AT&T used to prevent their breakup and earlier government interventions, are being used by companies that nowadays got a better chance to grow when divestment, giving up patents, or breakups of a big company did happen earlier.

Eventually one has to realize that markets can give you things like the automobile, but when one considers regulations that tell the automakers to make them more safe or to stop being gas guzzlers, it is then not good to assume that the marketplace will do that on their own.

203

True.

Makes sense to me also. I just wasn’t designing to that degree of detail in the earlier post.

If you get the money, as cash payment, in a lump at the beginning of the year (said year starting as soon as the fuel cost increases do), but pay for fuel at the pump/on the heating bill/whatever as usual: then however x was decided, it’s sure going to feel like saving $10 if you don’t have to buy a $10 gallon of gas.

And paying it that way seems to me to make it more likely that at least some people, looking at that lump sum once a year, will use some of it to insulate the attic / buy a good bicycle so they only need the car for large loads or bad weather / pay moving expenses to an apartment on the bus line / etc. (whatever actually works for that individual household); while, if it comes in dribs and drabs, it’s likely to be spent in dribs and drabs, and less likely to be used to make it possible for people to adjust their lives so they don’t need as much fuel.

(Will some people just go get drunk till it’s all gone? Yes, I’m sure. Nothing you try is going to fix everything.)

204

Yes, you are quite correct – sorry about that, I did get confused among the multi-quotes. Nevertheless, my basic points remain, and they are the following:

  1. Carbon taxes set at the right level can be effective in discouraging the use of fossil fuels and promoting clean energy. It can also be important to phase them in gradually. As I pointed out in refuting @Sam_Stone’s prediction of gloom and doom, and to which he has yet to respond, Canada’s carbon tax is being phased in (over a ten-year period) precisely to allow the infrastructure time to adjust and avoid the economic calamities he predicts.

  2. Consumption taxes that disproportionately affect low-income earners, such as a carbon tax or just plain ordinary sales taxes, are typically and effectively dealt with through tax rebates geared to income. In fact, in a progressive social democracy, it’s quite possible for a low-income individual to qualify for what is effectively a net negative income tax. But since a carbon tax is a net new tax on top of existing retail gasoline prices, it in no way makes gas “cheap”; it just prevents it from being onerously overpriced for poor people.

205

I was with you until the end. This is the part where the incentive structure matters, but what you’ve described is a bad incentive. I’ll try to illustrate with a not-too-contrived example.

Say you drive an old beater. It runs fine, but is worthless and only gets 20 mpg. You drive 1200 mi/mo, and gas is currently $3/g, so you’re paying $180/mo for gas.

You can get a used Prius for $300/mo, which will improve your mileage to 50 mpg and decrease your gas bill to $72/mo. But $300 is a lot more than the $108 (180-72) savings. The Prius is nicer, and it might even pay for itself eventually, but you have to make ends meet today, so you stick with the beater.

The government announces a gas tax of $7/g, raising the price to $10/g. Your bill is now $600/mo! Thankfully, you get a full rebate of the tax, decreasing your bill back to the original $180/mo. As far as the Prius is concerned, the economic decision is the same: not worth it. It burns less gas, but that also decreases the rebate. You still have to make ends meet, and any possible payoff is years in the future.

But consider a different kind of incentive: fixed, per month. You pay the $10/mo for gas like everyone else, but you get a fixed $420/mo check. Your net gas bill is the same $180/mo. But something has changed: now, with the Prius, your net costs are $300 + ($10*1200/50) - $420 = $120. Awesome! The Prius is actually cheaper per month now. You don’t even have to worry about savings 5-10 years down the line because you can justify it today.

Arguments to the effect of “the poor are already motivated to save gas, so the extra taxes have no effect” don’t have merit, because ultimately they are weighing different economic decisions like anyone. They have more short-term needs, but that just makes the incentive structure even more important. If you totally exclude them from the tax, they will (rationally) make the same economic decisions that they already were. And that’s bad, because we want everyone to emit less carbon.

That was just one example, but the same basic principle applies everywhere, whether talking about someone taking a pay cut to shorten their commute, or using public transit, or upgrading their car. The incentive isn’t there if the rebate is equal to the tax.

206

That’s not how any of the rebate schemes work here. Both the carbon tax rebates and the sales tax rebates are fixed amounts geared to income, because there’s no practical way without enormous paperwork to track the actual amount of fuel that a taxpayer has purchased.

Other than the fact that your hypothetical rebate figures are way out of line compared to the relatively modest actual rebates, the fixed-rebate scheme geared to income is in fact exactly how it works here.

207

Then we are in violent agreement, except for one thing: it’s not a carbon tax rebate at all. It’s more like a form of universal basic income. A carbon tax rebate (as I would parse the phrase) would be proportional to the amount of tax paid. That’s how other tax rebates work, for childcare or education or what not. I suppose this is a rebate in the national sense, in that it pays back some of what got paid in overall. But I would not call it a rebate at the individual level.

208

We don’t need it. We can’t make enough electric cars now to keep up with demand. Car companies are going to be forced to make the switch.

If the Federal government wanted to do something useful it would be to pool resources with other countries to fast track a better battery that is cheaper, charges faster, and is made from resources that are readily available everywhere.

209

Much of the rest of the developed world seems to feel they need a carbon tax to comply with the Paris climate accord. Factoring externalities into the price of gas isn’t just about electric cars – it’s about conservation and emissions mitigation in general. When gas prices have been high for sustained periods in the past, there’s been a notable shift towards more fuel-efficient vehicles. When gas prices are low, gas-guzzlers seem to come back into fashion. It pisses me off when I see someone – sometimes it’s a tiny little lady – picking up a few groceries in a gigantic F-150 pickup or some equivalent monstrosity.

210

So? That is not a rebuttal to what I said. People can’t eat right now because fuel is so high. How do you think they’re going to save for a new car or a more economical used car? Seriously.

There are a lot of people who earn their living with an F-150. Taking money out of their pocket just delays the next generation fuel efficient truck purchase. Believe it or not, they need groceries.

My next car will probably be something like a Maverick Hybrid truck. It will retire 2 vehicles because it gets good gas mileage, fit’s 4 people comfortably, can tow a small trailer and haul stuff. Hopefully they’ll offer a bigger battery when I’m ready to buy.

211

Which non-fantasy/sci fi movie was that?

Because from what we’ve witnessed over the past several years, Republicans not wanting “to be ruled by a technocratic ruling class advised by a ‘scientific’ priesthood” seems a lot like Republicans not wanting educated leaders and experts in their field instituting any policies backed by scientific evidence or data that contradicts Republican’s core ideology.

212

On the one hand, yes, there are a lot of people driving oversize pickup trucks who have little or no need for one; though I suspect a lot of them are younger to middle-aged men.

On the other hand: I am, these days, a little old lady, close to tiny in height if not in girth; and sometimes I’m at the grocery store in a full sized work van that gets terrible gas mileage. What you don’t see inside that closed van is the reason I’m driving it that day: the market stand, including among other things tent and tables, and boxes that took produce to farmers’ market that morning and are taking the leftovers back home. I’m saving gas by not making a separate trip to the nearest actual grocery, twelve miles from home and two blocks from the farmers’ market.

So try not to leap to conclusions – little old ladies sometimes need to drive a work truck, too.

213

There are lots of degrees of conservatives, though, and it’s unfair to put all of us into a single group. Hell, I don’t even identify as conservative, and I only say “us” because I know that you’re going to assign me to that group anyway.

Frankly, I’m not concerned about global warming. Sure, it will happen. Things will die. People will be miserable. But things already die, and people are already miserable, and given the chance, a market will develop that resolves these issues for us. If Florida is underwater, well, that sucks for Florida.

Oh, I have an electric car. And I love it. And I’ve been replacing my gasoline tools with electric. I love them, too. But none of these are political decisions, because I don’t let politics decide my quality of life.

Markets work, but that marks me as an evil conservative, despite my support for drugs, gay marriage, and anti-certificate-of-need stance.

214

No, what marks you as a […] conservative is your apparent belief that markets somehow automatically develop even in the absence of any ground rules, or in the presence of an establishment that has coerced the law to operate in its favor. Also that you think climate change is a “political” viewpoint.

I’m a huge fan of markets as optimization tools. But they only work if the right conditions are there, such laws against fraud or charging for externalities. Otherwise they end up optimizing the wrong thing.

215

Just utter absolute nihilism.

As a liberal I absolutely hate Florida, but it wouldn’t even occur to me to say “who gives a shit if nobody in Florida has anywhere to live.”

When they say “the market will solve the problem”, what they mean is “I look forward to being entertained by people struggling to survive a a crisis that I care nothing about.”

216

Of course markets work: they work to solve small simple problems in the short run, and to solve large and complex problems in the long run.

The trouble is, of course, that in the long run we’re all dead. Woe betide you if you have nothing but markets to depend on when you’re struggling with a large complex problem that you need help with before another five decades or so have elapsed.

Moreover, markets tend to do absolutely jack-shit in preventing those large complex problems from developing in the first place. On the contrary, they tend to cause and exacerbate such problems. Witness the current counterproductive influence of the fossil-fuel industry on society’s ability and willingness to mitigate climate change: it’s market forces that are promoting ignorance and obstructionism about the problem and thereby making the problem worse.

217

That’s absolutely ridiculous fatalism and sounds like just another right-wing excuse for failing to take necessary urgent action. Are you really saying you’re “not concerned” about what may well be the greatest existential crisis that humanity has ever faced?

Markets are always self-serving. Profits are a powerful motivation, but whether that motivation aligns with reality and the public interest depends very much on the specific circumstances. Very often it does not. In fact, in the context of global warming, “free markets” have been responsible for the most virulent campaigns against science and truth ever seen in modern history, all in the interest of denying the reality and seriousness of the climate change problem.

Climate change is not about “politics”; it’s about basic physics, chemistry, and biology. It has become politicized only because powerful commercial interests – your much-vaunted “free markets” – have allied with conservative politicians to make it so, in order to sustain the profits from the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

218

Sorry I took so long to answer some peoole:

No, it absolutely isn’t. Trade happens because value is context dependent. If I have two hammers and you have two saws, we are both better off if I trade one of my hammers for one of your saws. This is not a free lunch. Then there is comparative advantage - I can be better at making both tables and chairs than you are, but if I’m much better at making tables it can still be to our mutual advantage if you make chairs and trade them for my tables. Division of labor and assembly lines are another example of people all being better off by trading labor. That is not a free lunch.

That said, I was a little too categorical about ‘conservatives’ rejecting this. Sometimes I tend to substitute the thinking in my little neck of economic conservatism/libertarianism that I speak too broadly. There are lots of conservztives who think that tax cuts are always self-financing. That is indeed the belief in a free lunch, as opposed to academic supply siders who realize that tax cuts are only self-financing in limited cases, none of which really apply today.

Not at all. The Precautionary Principle is based on an understanding of complex adaptive systems and the features that make them impossible to predict or control. Nonlinear responses, dominated by feedbacks, sensitive to initial conditions, constantly adaptive, and always pushing into unknown unknowns. Using tuned models to predict the future of such systems is especially prone to error.

History is rife with examples of attempts to control societies and economies which went horribly wrong in unexpected ways. We are experiencing it right now with the failure of climate policy - unintended consequences of which include the war in Ukraine, Germany held hostage by Russian oil, European countries restarting coal plants, grid failures looming, China gaining market share in high energy goods while building coal plants as fast as they can, and a possible coming rightward shift that will undo all of it.

In the meantime, after 20 years of climate policy global CO2 has hardly moved, and the world is restructuring in a way that will make global climate agreements next to impossible.

Huh? You’re going to have to explain that one.

But the internet that exists today, despite it being built on DARPA’s TCP/IP stack, is almost 100% privately invented, funded, and controlled. AND at the time the DARPA-based internet won the race there were already multiple competitors springing up: CompuServe had an international network of high speed data lines. AOL was standalone. The Well was a going concern. There was The Source. FidoNet and other networks were linking small BBS’s together into a proto-internet. None of them used on the intermet as a backbone, although they couod inter-operate with it later on.

I was in that business, providing Google-like document search to companies like Microsoft and the US state department for customers and citizens. No internet in sight. I was an ‘ISP’ with a computer system that could handle up to 64 people at a time. They could log in to play games, send emails across the country, chat, etc. We sold our software to other such systems in other cities, and there were thousands of them. The networking between them was growing rapidly when the internet killed the market. Towards the end we didn’t even use the phone system, but CompuServe’s network.

If the government had never built the original network based on TCP/IP, we’d still have the internet today. The protocols might be a bit different, but the functionality would be there. I know, because we were helping to builld it.

219

No one denies that complex, nonlinear systems exist. The question is about how you deal with said complex systems. And instead of dealing with complex systems as they are, trying to learn as much as possible and choosing the approach based on the best current knowledge, the PP just says that change should be resisted as much as possible and that the entire burden of proof is on those proposing change (which is of course impossible).

It’s fundamentally conservative and reactionary. It’s also useless, because it can be applied anywhere without discretion. It can be applied to A when they consider transitioning to B but simultaneously applied to B when they consider transitioning to A. All it does is resist change with no regard to reality.

Nuclear power would be the first to go if we really embraced the PP *. And of course an enormous amount of resistance was based on exactly that. If the PP were legitimate, they would have been absolutely right, and pointing to Fukushima, etc. would be completely vindicating. Complex systems interacting, we get a black swan event, blah blah. All true. And yet the costs of not having widespread nuclear power are now obvious. Furthermore, the fact that nuclear plants have taken an incredibly conservative development path has made them less safe, by slowing down the rollout of new generations of reactors.

What the PP, and conservativism writ large, fails to note is that doing nothing, or doing things slowly, has its own cost. You can’t just count the cost of doing something new; you have to balance that against the cost of doing nothing. And since society is so bad at almost everything we do, the cost of doing nothing is extremely high.

[*] Yes, I know.

220

Comparative advantage is a free lunch. Sometimes literally so–if I outsource my lunchmaking to someone that can do it more efficiently, and I can do something more useful in the meantime, I can more than pay for the lunch with the time I got back. Better than a free lunch; I actually get paid for it.

TANSTAAFL is just another useless aphorism that can be applied indiscriminately. Stop arresting people for shoplifting, and you get more shoplifting. But arrest more people for shoplifting, and you have to build more prisons, creating a prison-industrial complex with huge lobbying power and influence over the laws themselves. It’s TANSTAAFL either way! Again: a useless, thought-terminating cliche.