Implement a carbon tax, and it will happen. The insistence from some that we can just innovate our way out of the climate crisis, when the Industrial Revolution and pursuit of technological expansion for the sake of profit at all costs is what got us into this situation in the first place, is what I find truly “quixotic.” There is no incentive for corporations to improve the climate situation in a meaningful way.
Agree 100%. Tax generation of CO2 at the energy level and all else should follow. Then allow companies to get a tax reduction if they offset their output in some well researched and supported method. Tadaa...
Computed it myself. Direct air carbon startups are advertising $50-$200/ton at scale.
A ton is 2000 pounds. A gallon of gasoline emits 20lbs of co2 when burnt (most of the weight is in the o2, so the emissions are heavier than the gasoline).
Divide the per ton prices by 100 to convert to per gallon of gas, and you get $0.50-$2.00.
The existence of the tax would ensure they all had enough revenue to scale; fund them all initially, then let economics pick the winner.
If you tax generate of CO2 and "all else follows", what "would follow" is that the party that instituted said tax would be voted out and it would be repealed.
I agree full-heartedly as a dutiful member of Citizens Climate Lobby. However, if we can’t pass this legislation with a Democratic political stack in place, then when?
None of those movements required any degradation of the living standards of the majority of people but at most just the elites or a particular class and then not substantially. Climate is a very different fight.
There are countless ways to improve living conditions while reducing emissions.
Free sustainable transport would stop the least privileged from having to fork over a third of their paycheck to auto and fossil fuel companies while freeing up billions spent on roads.
Making landlords accountable for energy wasting housing design would reduce energy bills.
Not invading countries for their gas and mineral reserves is pretty good for the people that live there.
A direct carbon tarriff distributed evenly by population would lift living standards for the underprivileged and give them the resources to make a choice for lower emissions options.
Right to repair, accountability for forced obsolescence or design faults and consumer rights decrease waste and benefit the poor immensely.
And statistically the Justice system still gives minorities harsher sentences for the same crime and are targeted more and union participation is down.
My thinking about carbon taxes is they will just result in political blowback and a lot of the push comes from entities with an interest in the status quo..
Bill gates is right, trying to impoverish people in the developed world would both result in blowback and be a disaster if implemented. I think there is an 80/20 rule with consumption in developed countries. 20% consume 80% of the resources. Getting the 20% to reduce consumption is a won't fix politically. Yet degrowth people think somehow the 80% can reduce their consumption and not go under. Look at the amount of reduction in consumption that triggers a recession, it's 10X less than the shock degrowth people are demanding.
The complicating factor is the upper classes are completely resistant to any sort collective action that benefits lower class people. And they are hellbent to make sure no one ever gets to see a successful example.
I don't see that working globally. It will be near impossible for it not to get distorted by political influence into something that does little to achieve the goals of reducing carbon emissions.
I truly believe our only hope is to innovate our way out of this.
"The present day significance of the impact depends on choice of a future discount factor."
(American Petroleum Institute, in 1980, predicting CO2 emissions would "bring world economic growth to a halt in about 2025", unless minor action was immediately taken back then.)
Anyways, Gates is always preaching about “policy” (The Gates Foundation is about power and getting governments to fund their objectives, ultimately) but never actually sets a good individual example of how to live, like normal citizens.
I mean, it is not coincidental that he is preaching about global warming right after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown, which released an unprecedented amount of methane in to the atmosphere.
The above poster is just suggesting that Bill Gates not be a hypocrite with respect to consuming less.
He consumes way way way more than the average citizen.
I don’t even know why people listen to him.
Shouldn’t we be listening to actual climate scientists in the US government? And not some software CEO who has conflicts of interest? Why are we even platforming this dude and giving him any legitimacy?
If I were Bill Gates it would probably be miserable to take normal flights, can't walk two steps before someone gawks. If anything just reinforces that being famous sucks.
I always feel the talks of private jets are missing the point. (Besides, it's always the private jets of Al Gore and Bill Gates that are in question. People never ask about the private jets of BP execs.)
To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have about 261k pounds, or 118 ton of fuel. Applying jet fuel to CO2 conversion ratio of 3.16 [2], we get about 374 ton of CO2.
If Bill Gates takes this trip every day for a year, we get about 137,000 tons of CO2. Okay, that's a lot! However,
Mankind emitted about 35 billion ton of CO2 in 2020. That's about 66,000 tons per minute. So Bill Gates would have contributed about two minute's worth of global warming in a year.
That's still an extremely large amount for a single person, but the question we should ask is, did Bill Gates's action (such as advocating nuclear power) result in delaying global warming by two minutes? Not one year, not even a day, but just two minutes?
Alternatively, did he speed up mankind's preparation, again, by two minutes?
If the answer to either question is Yes, then I'd argue that it's worth the CO2 spent on it.
Now let's invert the question. What's the justification for people who say "Fuck global warming!" and hop on a trip to Hawaii? Collectively they sustain many more flights per year, and it's not like most of them are doing anything substantial to mitigate AGW.
You have to think of the counterfactual. If 1x emissions are required for, say, government advocacy, that reduces emissions by 100x, you would lose 99x of emissions reductions by avoiding the advocacy. It’s not hypocrisy so much as pragmatism
Can't they just send letter or call on phone? You know minimise the emissions from their own actions. I always wondered why are people flying of all things to these climate conferences, instead of biking or just having them fully remote standing outside in a field...
Telepresence (at least by today's standard) is not the same as being there, and being literally present with decision makers. Overhearing conversations, hallway encounters, inspecting physical infrastructure, having individual agency to move in a space (see things for yourself), being able to 'read the room', and communicating, by your extra commitment, that you are serious not just the decision makers but even the wider public (photo ops), are just the few intangible benefits missing from a zoom call straight off the top of my dome, and that's just scratching the surface. Telepresence is getting better by the day, but let's not pretend it's as effective, particularly in global politics, finance, etc.
So maybe we should permanently lock them in single island and throw some gruel and water at them so they don't starve? They could have all the time with each other they need with minimal emissions.
I'll concede that the square footage seems an extravagance, and it ought not to be a thing, but once again, this is probably table stakes to rub shoulders with people who have power to change things. You don't invite investors to dinner at your down-town hovel
Bill Gates is one of a small group of people I feel should be taking private jets. He and his wife are the world's biggest philanthropists and they do much more good for the world quickly meeting the necessary people to effect change than wasting hours at the airport.
For the vast majority of other ultra rich, they should be suffering through awful airports and airlines like everyone else. Partly just so there's a chance their collective frustration of flying actually results in somehow working to improve the broken industry.
Bill Gates has also built a carbon capture plant. I believe it's still mostly prototype tech, but I have to assume it can capture enough to offset his private plane flight. I feel like if we taxed everyone who buys a private jet 1 carbon capture plant, that would be a good tradeoff.
I deeply believe in leading by example. Anyone demanding others change should be fully committed to those actions and demonstrate them in all aspects of their life. Anything else is absolutely purely hypocritical and person doesn't deserve to be heard and should be mocked out from any polite and non-polite conversation.
I have to disagree. Proposing social change and living the change is better than just proposing social change, but (in many cases) the latter is still better than not proposing the change or actively working against it.
When you use "leading by example" as an absolute stick, what happens is that you end up being more lenient to the more corrupt and greedy. These people propose that everybody should just take whatever they can buy with their money, consequences be damned, and they live the exact same life - no hypocrisy at all! (It's just a coincidence that they have so much money and power that they can fuck over the less fortunate, while others can't.)
I have seen it play out many times in my country (Korea), which is hardly unique in that regard. Once in a while a politician would propose, say, an election reform to cut down illegal funding, and others would attack him "Look at the hypocrite! He says he's against illegal funding of elections, but he used more than one tenth of the illegal funding we did!" True story.
Listen to the anarcho-syndacalists like Chomsky, which demand that companies be owned by workers in that company. There are many proposals for this, but here is an off the cuff one I just came up with:
Every company with more than 100 workers, must have 80% of its ownership by those same workers. The difference between the ownership stake of the top worker and the bottom worker must be no more than a 5x.
Nothing is preventing any group from forming that exact governance structure. The cold hard truth is that nobody wants to do that. You’ll always lose to your competitors. Nobody actually wants to manage the entity that employs them.
You misunderstand. Anarcho-syndacalists like Chomsky demand, that by law, all companies must follow this worker-owned structure. It's a complete restructuring of the economic system.
In the new system there won't be any capitalist-owned enterprises that will burn capital in the short-term, and exploit their own workers to to kill their more ethical competitors.
Also, all workers don't have to manage their company, only some of them. Workers at large just need to be able to kick out any management that decides to exploit their labor. In our current system it is the shareholders decide how much exploitation should be done, and their opinion is "as much as will keep profits high".
Last time I checked one of the market based approaches requires me to start my own bank. In Germany that means you would need 7 million € and hope you get the license at all. Once you add the costs of buying land we are easily in the tens of millions to get started to end capitalism through market competition.
The people with 10 million € would rather keep the system as it is. After all, what if it fails and you become a "peasant"?
How does that affect job mobility? So if I'm a part owner of a company and leave, what happens to my shares? We can't assume all companies have a set number of employees, so number of shareholders fluctuates constantly. If a company lays off or fires a chunk of workforce, do the shares get evenly distributed to the remaining employees? Also, when a hiring spree is needed, are current shareholder shares diluted?
I am not an economist, and I haven't read more on this than Chomsky's books.
> Also, when a hiring spree is needed, are current shareholder shares diluted?
Yes. But I imagine, that it would useful to have a vesting period for new employees, of, say a, year before they get their share of the company. And particularly companies will have to think about whether hiring a new person will increase profits more than their salary.
> If a company lays off or fires a chunk of workforce, do the shares get evenly distributed to the remaining employees?
Ultimately yes. Firing might or might not work the same as hiring, because the fruits of your labor continue to bear profits for a little time after you leave at some jobs at least.
Please note that the answers to your question make much more sense once you understand the philosophy a lot more. Practical answers might not make sense if you continue to interpret them within the philosophical underpinnings and your inbuilt intuitions of the current capitalist system.
Do all employees have the same ownership (i.e. 1 share each or 100 shares each or whatever) regardless of position? Or do those with more specialized knowledge or skills have a larger share of ownership?
If it's not equal ownership, how does it get decided how ownership is doled out? Is it democratic? If so, how do you account for those with the most specialized skillsets likely having a minority voice in the voting? Also, how do you account for unequal distributions if you do have unequal ownership levels? Doesn't this create a "special class" of privileged who end up with more control?
If it is equal ownership, then how do you incentivize people to acquire the specializations needed to manage the more complex tasks? Just spit balling here, not a huge fan of the current system but these are pretty big questions to leave unanswered.
Those are great questions, and I don't think all answers exist or if there is any base level of agreement between major anarcho-syndicalists. At least I don't know them.
Note that there are distinctions between the base salary someone is paid, the share of the profits they get (on top of the salary), and their voting rights. So people with specialized skillsets would likely get extra compensated in salary, maybe in some profits. Otherwise, they can switch to some other firm that compensates them better. Note that the only thing that is being banned is for capital to wholly own the profits emerging from the labor of others. Most other features of the market economy will continue to exist.
I don't expect any society that implements an anarcho-syndicalism to be free of "human" problems. Firms will continue to have drama, and politics, and likely people will band together to screw over other bands of people in the same or other firms. These are not visions of a utopia. The attempt is only to create an economic system that has significantly less fundamental problems than existing capitalism.
You introduce land value taxes and demurrage currency with a citizen's dividend and enjoy your higher standard of living.
But people are so obsessed with capitalism and the socialists so obsessed with a non functioning solution that nothing gets done.
Before you ask why these two policies end capitalism, you must understand that in capitalism there is a profit expectation that is completely independent of market conditions, if you "believe" in markets this permanent profit expectation is irrational but because money and land are effectively monopolies they allow coercive extraction of economic rents and any real business must compete and pay even higher returns just to be allowed to function. As capitalism progresses and growth stops people put more money into extractive monopolies which then paradoxically despite all the wealth makes people poorer rather than richer. This is why capitalism requires the axiom of permanent scarcity as it means people have unfilled needs and would rather spend their money on consumption than monopolies, something that is only true for the poorest in the economy, middle class citizens spend most of their income on a mortgage aka on land which is a monopoly.
Asking? Of course not. There's no incentive to just stop, and 100x more signals to consume.
Instead, apply of concept of capital gains being taxed less than income to consumption and carbon footprint. It works for the behavior of the rich. I'm sure Bill would agree. It can work for the rest of us in the context of climate change.
p.s. Funny how Bill (and then wife) built a massively excessive home. I guess he asked himself and that didn't work. So now he speaks from experience?
I think these mega billionaires do that as a way to park their money, financial advisors telling them to diversify into real estate lol. Just wish they'd do it in a more socially productive way...
Yeah no duh we don’t have any power, and even if I convinced 100,000 people to walk everywhere and never drive, we would only lower gas prices by a fraction of a cent which would result in other people driving more.
Decreasing consumption doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in quality of life. In the West, at least, we generally work too much, have too little social engagement, and spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives. Many things that could actually make us happier don't require much consumption, but they're essentially luxury goods because of the modern lifestyle's high demands. I'm thinking of things like relaxing with friends and/or family, volunteering/contributing to your local community, exercising, eating healthily... even getting enough sleep on a regular basis!
I don't think any of those are mutually exclusive. Choosing or being manipulated into choosing an unhealthy level of social engagement doesn't make it any less unhealthy
Anyone claiming that "we are X and Y" is just an authoritarian in disguise, trying to dictate how everyone else should live.
At some point they should really ask themselves whether "saving the planet" is actually worth it if everyone is locked up in a cage for the sake of controlling consumation. Might as well just kill us all.
You may think that you are maximizing freedom by maximizing immediately visible freedoms but the reality is that you are cutting the freedom of others short and they do the same to you until you end up with much less freedom than if you took the direct hit to freedom. Enjoy living in the actual cage with an open door and never even considering to step out of it.
The word personal responsibility is just an empty post rationalization to say "Haha I won you didn, suck it up"
> You may think that you are maximizing freedom by maximizing immediately visible freedoms but the reality is that you are cutting the freedom of others short and they do the same to you until you end up with much less freedom than if you took the direct hit to freedom.
You're equating the inherent renunciations of living in society (such as respecting others' right to live and personal property) with arbitrary restrictions such as "consume less". Consuming more doesn't lead to direct harm to anyone - it is your hypothesis that everyone consuming more leads to a global issue.
If the problem is human consumption, which grows linearly with the amount of people on this planet, perhaps the problem is that there are too many people. Why does nobody suggest population control in some form? Why is the answer always "let's make everyone's lives miserable so the population can keep growing"? And what happens when population grows so much that even the "lesser" consumption presents a problem? What happens when we reach the lower limit of human consumption requirement, and the number of people is so high that the total consumption still presents a problem?
Or to go even deeper - why even focus on restricting consumption in the first place? Is there any data to suggest that human consumption is actually a problem, compared to the massive amount of energy spent for industrial and military purposes? Without such data, the argument seems like a red herring, shifting the blame to people, while keeping the real culprits in the shadow.
I agree to an extent but a person in North Korea would say they get to decide how brainwashed they are.
Everything's relative. As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies compared to others. By numerous metrics, we do work too much.
Similarly, the US is the poster child of capitism and we do buy tons of things relative to other nations.
>> a person in North Korea would say they get to decide how brainwashed they are.
Nope. If a person in North Korea said they were brainwashed they would be executed at dawn. Sounds like you've been brainwashed. That's OK, they don't kill you for it here.
>> As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies
It most certainly does not, if you don't want to work, don't work. Just don't make it my fucking problem that you don't work and we'll get along just fine.
It sounds like you might not be a native English speaker so let me explain it more clearly.
You said that others can't tell you that you work too hard. You decide if you work too hard. If you lived in North Korea and I told you that you're brainwashed, you would probably tell me that you decide if you're brainwashed. You would certainly also tell me that you are not brainwashed. No one in North Korea would say they're brainwashed. My point is that actual data is more useful to compare work cultures between countries than a citizen's perception.
Next, I mentioned the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies. Policies here refers to official government laws/regulations that would enforce a right to take time off. The US doesn't have a minimum vacation policy and is the only industrialized nation to not have one. What you mentioned about not going to work is not a government policy. It's just a personal decision.
A little aggressive, no? No one's "deciding" anything for anyone in my comment.
You don't get to decide how much work/social engagement/widget purchasing makes you content any more than you can "decide" how many drinks it takes for you to get drunk.
All I'm saying is that many people could both reduce their consumption and improve their quality of lives by optimizing for factors unrelated to material consumption.
> Decreasing consumption doesn't necessarily imply a decrease in quality of life
Decreasing consumption in a more simplified way is just decreasing energy use. For 90% of people on earth this would be worse than climate change. It’s never going to happen.
You need to incentivize more efficient consumption. Whether through technological advances or through policy that “nudges” people to consume more efficiently (e.g. carbon taxes).
But the challenges remains. Severs governments were cutting taxes and handing out cash when gas prices jumped. That’s the exact opposite of what you want to do.
I think people are quite open to many practices that involve reduced consumption, they just don't like the vague idea of reducing consumption because it suggests austerity.
Localize manufacturing?
With those huge cargo ships producing lots of CO2, wouldn't the best impact be to reduce the use of those ships?
Try not to ship parts to get assembled into another part, to get shipped again and again back to the origin, and then final assembly and packaging and shipped to the store?
I know it's naive to think we can build manufacturing plants at the source of raw materials, and near consumers, but there should be a better balance?
> to think we can build manufacturing plants at the source of raw materials, and near consumers
The source of raw materials and consumers may be quite far apart (certainly in the modern world). While it can be argued that maybe they shouldn't be, that is likely to require a significant change in consumer (human?) behavior. And then there is the question of how local is "local" - are you advocating for each city/state to be self-sufficient in terms of agriculture and manufacturing or are you considering a whole massive country like the US as "local".
Bill Gates in his climate book: “geoengineering is the only known way that we could hope to lower the earth’s temperature within years or even decades without crippling the economy.”
Pretty soon we’re going to start seeing authoritarian solutions to climate change. Rich and powerful people aren’t just going to sit around and watch the planet die. I think they’ll do whatever it takes no matter how many people are hurt.
Unsurprising that one of the world's most successful capitalists is advocating for innovation to drive consumerism rather than anti-consumerism.
I'm not saying he's wrong; it's hard to get people to reflect on, and change, their lifestyles.
But it sends a harmful message; it's like saying it's pointless to teach people to swim safely, because staffing better lifeguards would be more likely than changing peoples' behaviour. Then people count on other people to bail them out from their poor decisions and end up drowning (an actually possible scenario with rising sea levels)
Completely agree. Science has to save us here, as it will govern enough time and stability. We need an age of sustainable abundance, not sustainability through frugality.
I see many comments here, in various media, and hear in real world conversations blaming corporations and billionaires. They're not faultless but we should be way more critical of ourselves as average citizens.
Every year we want bigger and bigger cars, particularly in the West, but it's a global long term trend. If you compare pretty much any 2022 vs 2002 model vehicle, say the Honda Accord, you're going to be shocked by the increase in physical dimensions.
How is that not incredibly hypocritical to want ever larger cars (mostly SUVs and trucks now) and yet point fingers at the companies we work for for their poor ESG funding and goals? We aren't even willing to accept cars that remain the same dimensions. They literally have to be bigger. That's despite average family sizes gradually declining for many decades. Climate change matters.. but not enough to give up the chance for a larger car next time.
Bigger vehicles means more materials (plastics, metals, etc), weight that could have been shaved, worse fuel/battery efficiency, and it wouldn't surprise me if it requires signifantly more asphalt and road repairs over time to accommodate the vehicles.
I could keep going about how obsessed we are with more and more horsepower and with lower 0-60 mph times, all of which are extremely excessive wants in the face of climate change.
Bill calls for greater innovation, but as soon as we get more efficient things, we just consume more.
We have constantly gotten better and better tech, and yet our consumption of resources only goes up. It seems that resource usage has nothing to do with how efficient or advanced our tech is, but simply the maximum amount of human labor we can allocate to resource extracting.
So climate change can only really be solved by a lower population.
It is pure consumerism. You can add smartphones, clothes... Many things that we don't actually need to buy every year but yet, companies produce more and more for higher profit.
Blaming billionaires and corporations from brand new iPhone on networks made by big-tech sounds ironical indeed.
Consumerism requires consumers. Companies stop or slow down producing things that consumers won't buy. Here are examples specific to phones and big tech:
100% bullshit and such a typically American way of looking at it (I am an American). Look how fast the world changed when Covid hit. Achieve a change in values and the whole world will turn on its axis.
During covid, climate wasn't issue. People, like Gates, promotes mask, vaccines, antibacterial gels, tests... Which produces millions of tons of plastic waste. And also great income for his business. But who cares, now we need innovations because he loves our planet a people, right?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 200 ms ] threadClearly, that would lead to mass hysteria and societal collapse.
/s
A ton is 2000 pounds. A gallon of gasoline emits 20lbs of co2 when burnt (most of the weight is in the o2, so the emissions are heavier than the gasoline).
Divide the per ton prices by 100 to convert to per gallon of gas, and you get $0.50-$2.00.
The existence of the tax would ensure they all had enough revenue to scale; fund them all initially, then let economics pick the winner.
Free sustainable transport would stop the least privileged from having to fork over a third of their paycheck to auto and fossil fuel companies while freeing up billions spent on roads.
Making landlords accountable for energy wasting housing design would reduce energy bills.
Not invading countries for their gas and mineral reserves is pretty good for the people that live there.
A direct carbon tarriff distributed evenly by population would lift living standards for the underprivileged and give them the resources to make a choice for lower emissions options.
Right to repair, accountability for forced obsolescence or design faults and consumer rights decrease waste and benefit the poor immensely.
Well I guess one out of three isn’t bad.
Bill gates is right, trying to impoverish people in the developed world would both result in blowback and be a disaster if implemented. I think there is an 80/20 rule with consumption in developed countries. 20% consume 80% of the resources. Getting the 20% to reduce consumption is a won't fix politically. Yet degrowth people think somehow the 80% can reduce their consumption and not go under. Look at the amount of reduction in consumption that triggers a recession, it's 10X less than the shock degrowth people are demanding.
The complicating factor is the upper classes are completely resistant to any sort collective action that benefits lower class people. And they are hellbent to make sure no one ever gets to see a successful example.
I truly believe our only hope is to innovate our way out of this.
can't do it in a democracy
(American Petroleum Institute, in 1980, predicting CO2 emissions would "bring world economic growth to a halt in about 2025", unless minor action was immediately taken back then.)
Source: https://insideclimatenews.org/documents/aq-9-task-force-meet...
He apparently has 6 total houses.
See: https://www.velvetropes.com/backstage/bill-gates-house
Anyways, Gates is always preaching about “policy” (The Gates Foundation is about power and getting governments to fund their objectives, ultimately) but never actually sets a good individual example of how to live, like normal citizens.
I mean, it is not coincidental that he is preaching about global warming right after the Nord Stream pipeline was blown, which released an unprecedented amount of methane in to the atmosphere.
The headline says 'no.'
He consumes way way way more than the average citizen.
I don’t even know why people listen to him.
Shouldn’t we be listening to actual climate scientists in the US government? And not some software CEO who has conflicts of interest? Why are we even platforming this dude and giving him any legitimacy?
To simplify, let's assume that Bill Gates has a Boeing 747, which burns about 38 pounds of fuel per mile [1]. Distance between New York (JFK) and London (LHR) is 3,440 mile. For a round trip, double that, so we have about 261k pounds, or 118 ton of fuel. Applying jet fuel to CO2 conversion ratio of 3.16 [2], we get about 374 ton of CO2.
If Bill Gates takes this trip every day for a year, we get about 137,000 tons of CO2. Okay, that's a lot! However,
Mankind emitted about 35 billion ton of CO2 in 2020. That's about 66,000 tons per minute. So Bill Gates would have contributed about two minute's worth of global warming in a year.
That's still an extremely large amount for a single person, but the question we should ask is, did Bill Gates's action (such as advocating nuclear power) result in delaying global warming by two minutes? Not one year, not even a day, but just two minutes?
Alternatively, did he speed up mankind's preparation, again, by two minutes?
If the answer to either question is Yes, then I'd argue that it's worth the CO2 spent on it.
Now let's invert the question. What's the justification for people who say "Fuck global warming!" and hop on a trip to Hawaii? Collectively they sustain many more flights per year, and it's not like most of them are doing anything substantial to mitigate AGW.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_aircraft
[2] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-the-growth-in-gr...
Because the BP execs aren't being hypocrites and telling all the commoners to lower their living standards..
Maybe not directly, but neither is Bill Gates.
For the vast majority of other ultra rich, they should be suffering through awful airports and airlines like everyone else. Partly just so there's a chance their collective frustration of flying actually results in somehow working to improve the broken industry.
When you use "leading by example" as an absolute stick, what happens is that you end up being more lenient to the more corrupt and greedy. These people propose that everybody should just take whatever they can buy with their money, consequences be damned, and they live the exact same life - no hypocrisy at all! (It's just a coincidence that they have so much money and power that they can fuck over the less fortunate, while others can't.)
I have seen it play out many times in my country (Korea), which is hardly unique in that regard. Once in a while a politician would propose, say, an election reform to cut down illegal funding, and others would attack him "Look at the hypocrite! He says he's against illegal funding of elections, but he used more than one tenth of the illegal funding we did!" True story.
How exactly does that work?
Every company with more than 100 workers, must have 80% of its ownership by those same workers. The difference between the ownership stake of the top worker and the bottom worker must be no more than a 5x.
In the new system there won't be any capitalist-owned enterprises that will burn capital in the short-term, and exploit their own workers to to kill their more ethical competitors.
Also, all workers don't have to manage their company, only some of them. Workers at large just need to be able to kick out any management that decides to exploit their labor. In our current system it is the shareholders decide how much exploitation should be done, and their opinion is "as much as will keep profits high".
Corporate politics are already bad as it is, and this is going to make it worse.
The people with 10 million € would rather keep the system as it is. After all, what if it fails and you become a "peasant"?
I have so many more questions..
> Also, when a hiring spree is needed, are current shareholder shares diluted?
Yes. But I imagine, that it would useful to have a vesting period for new employees, of, say a, year before they get their share of the company. And particularly companies will have to think about whether hiring a new person will increase profits more than their salary.
> If a company lays off or fires a chunk of workforce, do the shares get evenly distributed to the remaining employees?
Ultimately yes. Firing might or might not work the same as hiring, because the fruits of your labor continue to bear profits for a little time after you leave at some jobs at least.
Please note that the answers to your question make much more sense once you understand the philosophy a lot more. Practical answers might not make sense if you continue to interpret them within the philosophical underpinnings and your inbuilt intuitions of the current capitalist system.
If it's not equal ownership, how does it get decided how ownership is doled out? Is it democratic? If so, how do you account for those with the most specialized skillsets likely having a minority voice in the voting? Also, how do you account for unequal distributions if you do have unequal ownership levels? Doesn't this create a "special class" of privileged who end up with more control?
If it is equal ownership, then how do you incentivize people to acquire the specializations needed to manage the more complex tasks? Just spit balling here, not a huge fan of the current system but these are pretty big questions to leave unanswered.
Note that there are distinctions between the base salary someone is paid, the share of the profits they get (on top of the salary), and their voting rights. So people with specialized skillsets would likely get extra compensated in salary, maybe in some profits. Otherwise, they can switch to some other firm that compensates them better. Note that the only thing that is being banned is for capital to wholly own the profits emerging from the labor of others. Most other features of the market economy will continue to exist.
I don't expect any society that implements an anarcho-syndicalism to be free of "human" problems. Firms will continue to have drama, and politics, and likely people will band together to screw over other bands of people in the same or other firms. These are not visions of a utopia. The attempt is only to create an economic system that has significantly less fundamental problems than existing capitalism.
Sorry, I don't have better answers.
But people are so obsessed with capitalism and the socialists so obsessed with a non functioning solution that nothing gets done.
Before you ask why these two policies end capitalism, you must understand that in capitalism there is a profit expectation that is completely independent of market conditions, if you "believe" in markets this permanent profit expectation is irrational but because money and land are effectively monopolies they allow coercive extraction of economic rents and any real business must compete and pay even higher returns just to be allowed to function. As capitalism progresses and growth stops people put more money into extractive monopolies which then paradoxically despite all the wealth makes people poorer rather than richer. This is why capitalism requires the axiom of permanent scarcity as it means people have unfilled needs and would rather spend their money on consumption than monopolies, something that is only true for the poorest in the economy, middle class citizens spend most of their income on a mortgage aka on land which is a monopoly.
Instead, apply of concept of capital gains being taxed less than income to consumption and carbon footprint. It works for the behavior of the rich. I'm sure Bill would agree. It can work for the rest of us in the context of climate change.
p.s. Funny how Bill (and then wife) built a massively excessive home. I guess he asked himself and that didn't work. So now he speaks from experience?
I decide if I work too much. You don't get to decide if I work too much.
>> have too little social engagement
I get to decide my level of social engagement. You don't get to decide my level of social engagement.
>> spend lots of money and resources on things that don't really improve our lives
I get to decide how to spend my money. You don't get to decide how to spend my money.
Anyone claiming that "we are X and Y" is just an authoritarian in disguise, trying to dictate how everyone else should live.
At some point they should really ask themselves whether "saving the planet" is actually worth it if everyone is locked up in a cage for the sake of controlling consumation. Might as well just kill us all.
The word personal responsibility is just an empty post rationalization to say "Haha I won you didn, suck it up"
You're equating the inherent renunciations of living in society (such as respecting others' right to live and personal property) with arbitrary restrictions such as "consume less". Consuming more doesn't lead to direct harm to anyone - it is your hypothesis that everyone consuming more leads to a global issue.
If the problem is human consumption, which grows linearly with the amount of people on this planet, perhaps the problem is that there are too many people. Why does nobody suggest population control in some form? Why is the answer always "let's make everyone's lives miserable so the population can keep growing"? And what happens when population grows so much that even the "lesser" consumption presents a problem? What happens when we reach the lower limit of human consumption requirement, and the number of people is so high that the total consumption still presents a problem?
Or to go even deeper - why even focus on restricting consumption in the first place? Is there any data to suggest that human consumption is actually a problem, compared to the massive amount of energy spent for industrial and military purposes? Without such data, the argument seems like a red herring, shifting the blame to people, while keeping the real culprits in the shadow.
Everything's relative. As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies compared to others. By numerous metrics, we do work too much.
Similarly, the US is the poster child of capitism and we do buy tons of things relative to other nations.
Nope. If a person in North Korea said they were brainwashed they would be executed at dawn. Sounds like you've been brainwashed. That's OK, they don't kill you for it here.
>> As a nation, the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies
It most certainly does not, if you don't want to work, don't work. Just don't make it my fucking problem that you don't work and we'll get along just fine.
You said that others can't tell you that you work too hard. You decide if you work too hard. If you lived in North Korea and I told you that you're brainwashed, you would probably tell me that you decide if you're brainwashed. You would certainly also tell me that you are not brainwashed. No one in North Korea would say they're brainwashed. My point is that actual data is more useful to compare work cultures between countries than a citizen's perception.
Next, I mentioned the US has abysmal parental leave and vacation policies. Policies here refers to official government laws/regulations that would enforce a right to take time off. The US doesn't have a minimum vacation policy and is the only industrialized nation to not have one. What you mentioned about not going to work is not a government policy. It's just a personal decision.
Don't do that.
You don't get to decide how much work/social engagement/widget purchasing makes you content any more than you can "decide" how many drinks it takes for you to get drunk.
All I'm saying is that many people could both reduce their consumption and improve their quality of lives by optimizing for factors unrelated to material consumption.
Decreasing consumption in a more simplified way is just decreasing energy use. For 90% of people on earth this would be worse than climate change. It’s never going to happen.
You need to incentivize more efficient consumption. Whether through technological advances or through policy that “nudges” people to consume more efficiently (e.g. carbon taxes).
But the challenges remains. Severs governments were cutting taxes and handing out cash when gas prices jumped. That’s the exact opposite of what you want to do.
I know it's naive to think we can build manufacturing plants at the source of raw materials, and near consumers, but there should be a better balance?
The source of raw materials and consumers may be quite far apart (certainly in the modern world). While it can be argued that maybe they shouldn't be, that is likely to require a significant change in consumer (human?) behavior. And then there is the question of how local is "local" - are you advocating for each city/state to be self-sufficient in terms of agriculture and manufacturing or are you considering a whole massive country like the US as "local".
Pretty soon we’re going to start seeing authoritarian solutions to climate change. Rich and powerful people aren’t just going to sit around and watch the planet die. I think they’ll do whatever it takes no matter how many people are hurt.
I'm not saying he's wrong; it's hard to get people to reflect on, and change, their lifestyles.
But it sends a harmful message; it's like saying it's pointless to teach people to swim safely, because staffing better lifeguards would be more likely than changing peoples' behaviour. Then people count on other people to bail them out from their poor decisions and end up drowning (an actually possible scenario with rising sea levels)
Every year we want bigger and bigger cars, particularly in the West, but it's a global long term trend. If you compare pretty much any 2022 vs 2002 model vehicle, say the Honda Accord, you're going to be shocked by the increase in physical dimensions.
How is that not incredibly hypocritical to want ever larger cars (mostly SUVs and trucks now) and yet point fingers at the companies we work for for their poor ESG funding and goals? We aren't even willing to accept cars that remain the same dimensions. They literally have to be bigger. That's despite average family sizes gradually declining for many decades. Climate change matters.. but not enough to give up the chance for a larger car next time.
Bigger vehicles means more materials (plastics, metals, etc), weight that could have been shaved, worse fuel/battery efficiency, and it wouldn't surprise me if it requires signifantly more asphalt and road repairs over time to accommodate the vehicles.
I could keep going about how obsessed we are with more and more horsepower and with lower 0-60 mph times, all of which are extremely excessive wants in the face of climate change.
We have constantly gotten better and better tech, and yet our consumption of resources only goes up. It seems that resource usage has nothing to do with how efficient or advanced our tech is, but simply the maximum amount of human labor we can allocate to resource extracting.
So climate change can only really be solved by a lower population.
That doesn't seem to be true in terms of C02 output
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+carbon+emissions+per+capi...
A phenomenon known as Jevons paradox.
It sounds like Nazi slogan.
Blaming billionaires and corporations from brand new iPhone on networks made by big-tech sounds ironical indeed.
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/apple-reportedly-wont-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/09/29/google-to-shut-gaming-se...