Looking at what you posted before you are like someone that cuts a guy open only to realize how you got the wrong target and thinking that it can get better by just saying “My Bad”
And you are wrong again (really you are not sounding better, just more ignorant) The plans I have seen do want to start very slow and small with the tax and grow it or modify it if the situation does not change.
Point to order, I have seen most of the experts report that while it is too late to prevent some changes, it is not too late to prevent very bad scenarios. Hence the point that there will be adaptation costs that we can not avoid now, but they can get worse only by not accelerating the rate of change.
And not to press on the obvious but I was referring to experts and scientists, unless you are one I do think that there are also extreme views like the one you have that jump to the worst scenarios and avoid the ones were we do make a concerted effort to control emissions.
Usually these types of ads are sad. This one wasn’t too bad, but still pretty annoying. The development of energy from fossil fuels has been one of the key components of the staggering increases in prosperity we have seen over the last 200 years. Fossil fuel technology has allowed man to protect himself from the elements, and as a result, climate related deaths have plummeted from 100 years ago. For most of human history humans laid waste to above ground energy resources. If smart humans never developed fossil fuel energy, we would never have seen the explosion in population and average prosperity.
You forgot the find and replace rule of translating Conservative rhetoric. In order to to make sense of what they say, every time you hear the word “Jobs” you need to replace it with the word “Profits”.
no the civil war began as non islamist reaction against the Assed regime’s bloody repression of the peaceful protests against corruption and the economic stagnation.
it is only after several years that the Al Qaeda and the DAESH became dominant.
so indeed the impact of drought and the large stress on the Syrian economy (combined with the corruption of the Asseds) are the Cause.
The radical islamist groups were produced by about two years of civil war, they were not in the start.
“Renewables create jobs as well, by some studies more jobs than oil does.”
It’s indeed irrelevant but not for the reason you give which is also basically irrelevant.
The people who fund ads like ‘I’m an Energy Voter’ are trying to protect particular investments they’ve made (or the value of expertise they’ve amassed) in developing particular forms of energy. That’s fair enough to point out, though also obvious, no really serious free market conservative would say otherwise.
However aside from the ads, if low carbon energy were the most efficient, in near term $'s and cents terms, way of providing energy the govt wouldn’t have to subsidize it or force anyone to use it. And the fact it has to force it means there’s a net cost. There’s no point in trying to argue it as ‘jobs’ v ‘profits’. It’s enforced inefficiency v market efficiency.
There could be a good reason to impose that inefficiency now, to avoid the cost/risk of more serious climate effects later the market does not price in. That’s the whole issue. But it’s basically political BS to say green is in favor of ‘jobs’ and anti-green is in favor of ‘profits’.
The Cassandra-esque poster above saying we have to take climate change action now severe enough to cause 10’s millions of American deaths, shooting wars and the end of the polity might be going a bit overboard, I sure hope so anyway. But that poster at least grasps the basic point. Forced green policies make us accept lower average living standards now for an expected future benefit, reducing the risk of future climate calamity, though it’s IMO very difficult to say exactly what that is (in between one worth killing of millions now in order to avoid to the other extreme of not much of a problem). But it’s just obfuscating to argue for green in terms of collectivist redistribution (‘green energy will mean jobs for the people, non green energy means profits for the rich!’). You could do the collectivist redistribution without the green (though also with a likely net cost) if there wasn’t a climate problem. It’s really two different things, and in fact tying them together plays into the suspicion that the climate issue is being deliberately hyped to justify redistributionism that can’t stand on its own feet as a policy.
Of course that is not supported at all. Basically it is the propaganda of the ones denying the issue the ones that claim that this is just redistributionism.
Consider just the example of the ones that do accept the problem but tell us that we will benefit. They might have a point. but that was also the reason why groups like the IPCC allowed for the change to not be made as in “going cold turkey”. But the ones that propose inaction have not thought this properly. The addition of CO2 in the atmosphere is not making the changes to be instantaneous, there is a lag on the temperature that the planet will reach by the end of the century and beyond.
Thing is, that the ones that propose that this issue will be beneficial and do not want to do anything are ignoring that the temperatures will overshot the temperature levels that the lukewarmers think that they want to see. As it is, there are now changes that can not be avoided; unless a sensible mechanism can explain away, or that we should not worry about, the fact is that the ice caps are melting at an accelerated rate and the oceans will rise as a result of it. The very optimists that do not want to accelerate the changes needed to prevent higher levels of ocean rise will cause humanity to overshot the limits that are considered to be safe, and to increase the risks to have an unstable environment. In that case many are bound to die in the unrest caused by the forced movement of people.
What I see is that making the changes needed will limit the ocean rise to manageable levels, not making a concerted effort or to vote for people that support what the ad stands for will only lead to even more expensive solutions and unrest in many regions of the earth.
I think GIGO quite adroitly challenged your post on substance, so I’ll just say that nobody is necessarily demanding that we cease all fossil fuel production. But what harm comes from putting serious resources into cleaner and more permanent sources of energy, like solar, wind, et al? The sooner, the better.
90% of what you said is just about how you believe it’s important to reduce CO2 emissions. That may be true but irrelevant to my point.
I’ll reiterate
“But that poster at least grasps the basic point. Forced green policies make us accept lower average living standards now for an expected future benefit, reducing the risk of future climate calamity, though it’s IMO very difficult to say exactly what that is (in between one worth killing of millions now in order to avoid to the other extreme of not much of a problem).”
As I said earlier in the same post, it’s obvious funding for ads like ‘I’m an Energy Voter’ come from people/groups with a specific financial interest in fossil fuel development. It would be odd if that weren’t true. But let’s take a step back. Those ads are not trying to convince anyone to buy more expensive energy rather than less expensive energy, in terms of today’s $s and cents costs. Rather the ads are trying to generate political will against the govt forcing people to use higher cost forms of energy or less energy than they otherwise would to optimize economics now.
My point was about the irrelevancy of trying to argue that forced-green is ‘creating jobs’ while not forcing it is ‘creating profits’ (in general). That’s just political mumbo-jumbo with no economic validity. The basic economic reality is forced reduction in CO2 emission is going to mean lower living standards unless the reduction is to the most marginal ‘lukewarm’ degree…which would be marginal wrt problem. ‘Jobs’ v ‘profits’ or any other manifestation of ‘inequality’ and collectivism as the proposed remedy is a different issue. I was arguing against the obfuscatory conflation of the two, which is common, and I saw in the posts I responded to.
And, trying to make such a false argument, ‘we can have lots of green jobs but less profits of the rich, and no net economic cost to society doing this, it’s killing all kinds of birds with one stone, win, win, win!’ definitely at least creates the impression that the climate problem is being hyped in order to justify more collectivism. Which impression also tends to be projected by the fact that most very greens are also pro-economic collectivism to begin with.
I think you ignore a major problem in the politics of climate change to brush off this point as ‘propaganda’.
And, as to what it would cost in living standards to really effect climate change much, I would stick with my statement that that’s highly uncertain. I’m sure at least I don’t know with any certainty. And you can’t say nobody in favor of drastic action thinks it would require severe dislocation of society. You have to argue with the pro-green poster foolsguinea on that, see above, not w/ me. That poster is the one saying we have to take action against climate change which would result in 10’s of millions of US deaths to avoid an even worse outcome, or least that’s how I understand that post. What exactly would it cost? Your missive like most political discussion of this from pro-green view doesn’t dwell on that at all, or again implicitly pretends it could be virtually costless to living standards overall, and it’s just ‘special interests’ resisting it.
I do criticize people who deny there’s any problem, because that allows the green side to get away with this ambiguity/fatuousness of just presenting projections of future change without being forced to quantify and justify cost/benefit*. They can just point to the people saying ‘forget it don’t worry’ as being less realistic than they are.
*some stabs at this have been made, but often with highly doubtful assumptions, and it’s very far from the center of the debate, whereas it should be right at the center.
I used to be a lot like Salvor. I didn’t take global warming seriously. I didn’t see how it was a problem.
And being from the central US,* I actually told myself that it wasn’t my problem if coastal cities were flooded.* Eventually I realized* that* at least was pathological on my part.
Then reading about the effects of carbonic acid on coral changed my tune. Then seeing how utterly panicked people in low-lying countries like the Maldives and Tuvalu are. Then polar bears losing habitat, and on and on.
I started seeing what a temperature spike can do. I live in an area where we get heat waves and long droughts. Seeing those two things happen together a few years ago–seeing 114° F temperatures in June and trees dying in the ground–burned away my indifference and my doubts. I now see that even my region is in trouble from this.
If I am an alarmist now, it is because the numbers keep going up. And we keep being in the high end of predictions for a given year. That implies that we’re on track for the high end of predictions for the century. And then we will have a refugee crisis to make the present panic over refugees look like a day in the park
It’s very misleading to say, “2° C temperature rise.” That’s a final measurement of a global average after a huge amount of energy is accumulated in the system that would otherwise radiate into space. The really scary stuff is obfuscated by being described as a temperature rise of a few degrees.
Here’s what that change actually means:
We probably should call this problem “catastrophic surface fluid phase change.” It’s mostly the ratio of ice to liquid water to vapor that’s getting us. Incidentally, also de-alkalinization of seawater, and pests being able to breed more in areas that previous were frozen more of the year.
:dubious: Not really. Pigouvian taxes are a moderate’s attempt to nudge things while not actually doing much. “To do by not doing.” If we had a longer time frame, it might or might not work.
No, given the imminence of the threat, we need a direct intervention–a “Green New Deal”: Confiscation of fossil-fuel power plants, mass pubic investment in solar and wind tech–and possibly a new model of utility ownership.
One reason the existing power companies haven’t yet transitioned to solar is that it’s hard to translate into their fundamental business model. That’s why we get nonsensical statements like “Solar power requires an enormous amount of water”–only true for concentrated solar. Distributed generation systems so far have turned “customers” into “suppliers”–that looks like such a fundamental financial killer to utility companies that they’re clinging to coal and gas even as those fuels get more expensive.
So, we have to change a lot, and apparently we have to change a lot quickly before a cascade of methane into the atmosphere from clathrates in lost seabed ice and…the end of the world of Man, or, maybe, even the end of the age of Mammalia. :eek:
Now, I don’t much care whether the public employees building a new more sustainable power grid have their wages paid for by massive gouging taxes on the financier class, or we raise everyone’s taxes to fill elite mouths with gold and buy them out. I don’t even care if we have to just start mass murdering people, if the alternative is the methane cascade, or “the clathrate gun” as some call it.
How much? I wonder were you were because many many times I pointed to what a conservative scientist and (among the economists he consulted to say the followin) an economist that became President of the American Economics Association told us what was calculated)
[QUOTE]
Some people say transitioning to clean energy will simply cost too much - "leave it to future generations." In Edinburgh, Scotland, Richard Alley explains that if we start soon the cost of the transformation could be similar to that which was paid for something none of us would want to do without - clean water and the modern sanitation system.
[/QUOTE]
About 1% annually of the world’s GDP is how much will it cost if we do a concerted and sustainable effort. Hardly the end of the world.
Of course, the longer we wait the higher the cost, I do think that a lot will not be used in the change so we are headed to a lot of wasted opportunities. The costs will be higher with the efforts to deal with the changes that instead of being smaller and manageable can become much more expensive thanks to inaction.
Just stop. If they were buddhists you would NOT have seen the same sort of death cultist purges. Stop trying to white wash Islam, the murder religion of the world, from it’s wellspring of justifications and amplifications of the darkness of man.