Being crude, the politicians need to grow a pair and put their jobs at risk to fix this issue. But these days that will not happen, so off to mad max I guess.
I doubt it will ever happen with our system of electing new people every 4ish years, with no consequences after office. That system might work on a small scale for a small time, but not in a global economy like ours.
What we need is a system to tie the direct effects of the actions of politicians to the personal lives of politicians. For example, like doctors, they should be held liable for political malpractice.
We also need to find a way to get people into office who aren't as hungry for wealth and power like most politicians are. Seems like from the start we are setting ourselves up for failure if we elect people who are good at being elected.
Perhaps politics should be like jury duty: it should be more distributed and citizens should have to serve in it.
I had a friend attempt to run for congress ~10 years ago. It eventually got to the point where he had to take ... um, not bribes? investments, yeah, that's the word, in order to continue. There was no other way to afford the marketing required to pull it off.
If you really want 'free' elections, you need to make it so that literally anyone can run instead of only rich people.
That is the issue, no one whats to change their life style and people do not like change.
MAGA people will not change, even the many environmental left wing people will not change their life styles all that much. Never mind changing your life style is difficult in many places due to Infrastructure in the US.
So, unless politicians make the hard choices, nothing will be done to address Climate Change in time to even keep under 2C.
My opinion is speculative and not well-informed, but if I had to guess I would say 1) our governments are more or less defacto oligarchies (or at least the politicians are generally on the upper end of the economic spectrum), and 2) because of many social factors this seems to be a real uphill climb, so I can actually sympathize with politicians who on one hand have maybe a vague sense that they won't suffer the worst effects of climate change and on the other don't necessarily have a clear or great path to produce the needed changes.
The (crude) analogy that comes to mind is something akin to the "checks and balances" of U.S. government, with the head of one checking the ass of the other, but instead everybody's head is under everybody else's ass.
It's a meme, but not really true. Those in power rely on economic growth, and economic growth relies on population growth.
To keep this going, you need ever more people but for this to be sustainable, they now need to be confined to tiny boxes in megacities, fueling the economy mostly by producing and consuming virtual items, and keeping their physical consumption to a bare minimum.
Meanwhile, the billionaire class has the rest of the world as their playground, and can happily get around by supercar or private jet.
The inertia of 7 billion people and their systems that were created on a much smaller scale is huge. How the devil can we effect change with such inertia?
We have extreme wealth concentration effected by advanced technology, a hugely complex global economy with immense inequality, and a failing biosphere... I agree with you that the whole system is the problem but is there any hope beyond a massive reform caused by devastating ecological disasters?
Personally, I am not too worried for myself. I am sure I can live out the rest of my life in relative comfort, but what about a couple generations down the line?
The only chance we have is to fix everything at once, as soon as possible. The big rewrite or the really hard crash.
The more complex the system you have (and our civilization is pretty complex), the less is enough to take it out of balance, and to cause complete collapse. Those 'devastating ecological disasters' might not give us any time to fix anything then (large scale crop failures, for example).
The data shows that the changes in the environment are starting to speed up. The changes will be faster and faster, and nobody knows how fast it will deteriorate. Cascading tipping points make predicting the future extremely hard.
I'm also scared for future generations. But I think that those who'll be there when the shit hits the fan were already born.
It's fascinating that it's the left that has stepped into the role of standing athwart history yelling stop.
I think it's a matter of refusing to believe that the disease and the cure can be the same. The realization that the industrial revolution was the root cause of climate change creates an aversion to believing that we can solve it scientifically, and a push toward demanding we slam the brakes on industrial society and move in reverse.
It's a fundamentally conservative stance. And one that's clearly wrong. The only way out is through. We're only going to solve the problem by accelerating toward a future of clean energy.
The old adage that people become more conservative as they age, I think, has a fundamental truth to it, but every generation finds a new and unique way of expressing that conservatism. With degrowth, we're seeing a blossoming of one of these odd paths in real time.
The comment appears to be a sort of strawman intent on blaming the left without sourcing any thoughts from the article, so was just trying to make sure.
The article is entirely about reduction of consumption, and the strings like "electri" "invest" "density" do not appear anywhere within it.
It is self-flagellating for self-flagellating's sake without understand there actual material basis of modern society. This is extremely common in the environmental movement and for decades has been a massive political failure except for empowering perl-clutching NIMBYs.
I would be a lot more sympathetic if consumption reduction was the only way to go. But it is not. Abundant apartments without parking, abundant e-bikes, abundant transit are feasible, get the job done, and way more popular. (People love to romanticize low density, but rents reveal different preferences.)
>The article is entirely about reduction of consumption, and the strings like "electri" "invest" "density" do not appear anywhere within it.
I mean a writer needs to actually say something in order for you to criticize it, failing to mention something or focusing the article on a particular topic of discussion isn't a position.
Is the goal decarbonization or is the goal something else? If that is the goal and it's that important, I think errors of omission as as bad as errors of inclusion.
For decade environmentalists have asked for political martyrdom (por political petard). It's never worked, unless you count Putin pissing off his natural gas customers (lol). Acting like that is the only strategy again and again is just irresponsible.
While oppposing nuclear power can certainly cause more CO2 emissions, I doubt it's #1.
I would like to see an analysis of how much CO2 emissions could be reduced if 30 years ago there were, say, 500 more nuclear power plants than now. What about cars and trucks? According to the EPA.gov website, transportation is still the #1 cause of greenhouse gases.
Rail of various sorts fixed the transit problem. If we had abandoned our suburban failed experiment the same time nuclear was built out, I fully believe cars would die a natural death as all the gasoline infrastructure would cease to be profitable.
So basically it is a combination of no nuclear power + severe restrictions on density (zoning most famously, but also two-track building codes) that prevented this "natural solution".
I put nuclear first because it is much more global, while the problems of suburbs + NIMBYism is most pronounced in American. (Still a problem elsewhere but never quite as bad.)
Instead, we abandoned many rails lines. Just ion my area of the Midwest there are two lines that were unused in the 70-80's. In the 90's they were converted to bike trails. Now the rail companies wish they had those rights-of-way's back to relieve rail congestion in the area.
It’s 25 vs. 28 for transportation, but abundant nuclear could have made commercial and residential heating all electric or through district hot water heating, which is 13%.
On transportation, I’m reminded of old popular science mags where the cars were predicted to have mini reactors in the trunk. obviously with 1970s tech that’s much too dangerous to be viable, but maybe we would have developed nuclear batteries over time to skip over our porches with EV batteries.
I agree with some of your points...but I do have a question for you. I believe that clean energy definitely has some advantages, of course I do.
But clean energy cannot be the whole solution. What happens in even the best-case scenario when everyone uses clean energy like solar/wind for everything? It will make humanity even more efficient and give us even more space to grow, but the biosphere will still be in trouble and all that clean energy will make people consume even more of earth's resources.
So, it's clear that while clean energy is a start, it is not even close to an end to get people to be in equilibrium with the rest of our planet.
> It will make humanity even more efficient and give us even more space to grow, but the biosphere will still be in trouble and all that clean energy will make people consume even more of earth's resources.
The global population will soon be contracting. The UN puts the bump somewhere at the end of the century but their hypothesis are completely crazy and most specialists think it will be sooner.
Yes, even if we remove carbon emissions entirely, if we continue to grow at a modest 2.8% a year energy usage or whatever, then in around 400 years we’ll boil the surface of the earth just from emissive heat without any additional greenhouse effect at all.
Eventually humanity’s energy usage is going to have to flatline. And people really really don’t like that idea, but even solar energy has this problem. That’s still energy being captured that mostly would have reflected back out into space.
This is a very interesting observation, thank you.
I find degrowth arguments that call on governmental power to limit demand worrying. Application of force there is artificial and goes against what people naturally do. It's particularly distasteful to people who value life with limited government intrusion - and this is a very large cohort, so taking this avenue is going to have a lot of friction.
A future where these problems are solved by voluntary adoption of superior technology is so much brighter!
These limp attempts to limit demand are exactly what people naturally do, and so is ignoring them.
Some environmentalists might say that our power is unchecked because we've killed our last predators and destroyed all the other checks on our resource consumption, but they just aren't looking far enough in the future or with a wide enough view at the system. The checks are there, and they will check us since we're incapable of checking ourselves. And it's gonna hurt my kids.
You’re right, but using single use plastic and manufacturing products forever that will end up in landfills won’t work, you’ll eventually end up as the planet in Wall-E. We need to invest in renewable energy and reducing the amount of waste we generate. Making things that last a long time is also a good idea.
As long as people vote right/conservative this is all going to tank. Right will never care about anything but themselves (and thus, money and power). You see it everywhere they are and where in power. Which means we have huge issue as the underbelly votes right and the right vote right.
Even another Hn post saying the US needs more/better defence is just priming the public for republican propaganda to get votes and move the spending to ‘real things’ instead of the pesky planet; ‘it’s been here for 6000 years, why worry?’.
Perhaps not, but at least they aren’t actively working to take rights away. In the world where you have to vote in favor of lesser of two evils, it’s sadly the best option. That is, until they too start taking rights away…
No, “the left” did not. They had upper 50s in terms of number of votes that would probably go along with the party, but they were shy of the 60 votes needed, hence the various compromises such as grandfathering old non ACA compliant plans, lack of public option, and “religious” exemptions for plans that do not insure anything.
And they only had that for 6 months in latter half of 2009.
Also it is important to note is that Democrats are the left but they're a center-right party. They're not leftist at all. They're merely to the left of the ultra-conservative party.
The days of Democrats being progressive are over if they existed like we pretend. The President that was most left in this country was FDR and he pulled us out of the Great Depression and set us up for an era of excellence. Democrats ran on left-adjacent policies and held Congress for decades.
Modern Democrats, 1970s forward really, keep rushing to the "center" that doesn't exist to capture imaginary voters as a result of Right-Wing propaganda (Intentional Overton-Window shifting, Two Santa Claus Theory, PR games).
Republicans, and most other morons, think that Democrats had a functional majority starting in 2009. However, Republicans intentionally held up the 60th seat for months. Then Kennedy died not long after Al Frankin was seated. That broke the supermajority.
Democrats have several conservative members (who I think should be expelled from the party but whatever) which resulted in us getting right wing healthcare policy and nothing meaningful being done. You can tell the people who fell for the RNC/Fox News PR campaign as they think Democrats had a supermajority for years rather than weeks.
I think it's easy to blame our inaction or weak policy on our political structures. While the American system certainly isn't perfect, we must work within it to address climate change urgently. Concluding that change cannot happen without replacing the system is nearly as bad as just ignoring the issue in the first place. There are plenty of examples of radical change in the American political history (suffrage, civil rights, slavery - although that one caused a war ;-) and that's what we need badly again today.
Well, a lot of that half live in places that have been massively impacted by drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other things that are made much worse by climate change.
This year is the first year I’ve personally been impacted by wildfires (4000+ hectare fire on the edge of my town), and it made climate change 10x more real for me than it was before, and I was fully on board before! How long can the right stay on the wrong side of history with respect to climate change when they are losing their homes and farms and dealing with one thing after another?
To butcher a perfectly good quote: It is hard to get a man to understand something when his personality and all of his social connections depend on his not understanding it.
Conservatives make up ~30% of the population. The so called "independents" fall for Conservative propaganda because that's all of our media and here we are.
Obama got punked big time by Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel. Biggest wasted opportunity in modern political history. Thank goodness COVID gave us a second at-bit, shit would be really fucked if that hadn't happened.
See the part at the end about Krugman "tearing his head out", and also
> It was also obvious to me, although apparently not to Obama officials, that they had only one shot at getting it right — that if the plan failed to produce a vigorous recovery, Republicans would say, “See, stimulus doesn’t work,” and nothing more would be done.
One of Obamas many weaknesses as president was that he was incredibly way too open to letting republicans gut the democrat agenda just to appear bipartisan.
Keep in mind that somehow, it’s fascism for democrats to ignore republican input, but when republicans steal Supreme Court appointments, it’s just “how the government works”.
At that point, democrats were still very much playing “if we take the high road, people will see republicans for what they are”, but the problem is that this didn’t happen at all, and it fact, all it took was reinvigorating public displays of racism to fire up their base.
It was democratic/independent Sen. Joe Lieberman who killed the public option.[0]
Party is an abstract to these people, it's all about interests. In Lieberman's case, one of his interests was to protect the health insurance industry which contributed more than $1M to his campaigns over the years. [1]
Al Franken was sworn in July, 2009. Ted Kennedy died in August 2009. That narrow window intersecting with the August recess was the first leg of the super majority and then again from the end of September to January 2010 with Ted Kenney’s temp replacement.
The Democrats did mess up by not taking that 3-4 month window more seriously, but they thought they had Massachusetts in the bag.
There's a page on Wikipedia about what the Obama administration did on energy. A few examples:
- $3.4 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), which would affect 49 states and has the potential to reduce electricity use by more than 4% by 2033
- The recovery act included more than $70 billion in tax credits and direct spending for programs involving clean energy and transportation.
- The launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) project under the Department of Energy
- New efficiency standards for home appliances
- Extending the investment tax credit for solar energy
- Extending the production tax credit for wind energy,
This isn’t a left vs right issue especially in an American context where the left is basically center right and has entirely abandoned its historical ideas in favour of other fights. The left has been entirely as bad as the right when it comes to the environment.
Might be, from what I read it is. The republicans, but correct me if I am wrong, do not even pretend to care. Just jobs >> environment, wealth >> environment, USA >> planet etc. If that is not true, please enlighten me what the Bush dynasty (isn’t that oil?) or Trump ever said about the planet. I mean sure many Clinton and Obama did nothing but at least they appeared worried; the former is worse.
Unless they said it but messed up more, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The main issue is not that the Republicans pretend they barely care about the environment and I’m not here to defend the awful bilan of the Republican party. The issue is that despite a lot of posturing amongst some of them the Democrats do exactly the same thing when they are in power. For all his worries, the US went from producing less and less oil to the world first producer while Obama was president, something he actually takes credit for.
Democrats aren’t really “the left” in the first place, there’s a left wing within the Democratic Party but it also includes a much larger neoliberal wing with the manchins and schumers of the world.
Which of those wings do you think has been bad on the environment?
Personally I’d say it’s the “pro-economy” neoliberal wing more than the left. Say what you want about how effective or practical the left has been, but generally they’re not the ones stripping regulations on hazmat trains or signing off on drilling in nature preserves or building pipelines across crucial aquifers.
> Right will never care about anything but themselves
Never is a long time. Richard Nixon's administration accomplished quite a bit.
Nixon created the EPA and signed the endangered species act. Why couldn't environmentalism become an issue for the Republicans in the future?
Do you know what came immediately after Nixon's impeachment?
Fox news. The right wing in the US could never do what Nixon did because they'll get hung in the media machine designed to protect them (and keep them in lockstep)
The error I often see when comparing past presidents to current ones is that both the D and R parties are hardly the same from those even 20 years ago. Nixon, even Reagen, would have a hard time passing so e of the stuff they passed in today's world.
The Hastert Rule in the 90's heralded a new kind of politics where allegiance to & helping the party became more important than helping America. "Never call a vote unless your side would pass it themselves", became the bleak dark worst form. If America suffered, that was fine, so long as the party won. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastert_Rule
What a sad emboldened new era that was. It was fueled by bold new levels of manufactured consent & spin doctoring. And the result of this ungamesmenly Hastertian dark-realpolitick has been a near collapse of any bipartisanship, and a decay of our union.
Democrats are willing to talk about mitigating climate change, and Republicans aren’t, but the vast majority of Americans aren’t willing to actually incur decreased quality of life. Gas needs to be like $10+ per gallon. But even when it hit $4 last year, Biden was calling to suspend the gas tax to make it more affordable.
You’re correct that, on this issue, the right cares only about themselves. But so does most everyone else. Even most Biden voters want to be able to take their SUV to the beach this summer without high gas prices. Biden won traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia blue, because Biden voters are leaving urban areas in the northeast and Midwest for places like Arizona and Georgia where they can afford bigger houses, more cars, etc.
One could argue that Biden is not really left at all, and a true leftist like Sanders or Warren would have gone to the billionaires' pockets to fund all kinds of progressive policies. But since Biden won, it's up to all Americans except for the billionaires to pay.
It depends if “left” refers to a set of policies, or generally the left-leaning half of the country. The latter includes a lot of people who, like Biden, aren’t that liberal. Apart from white moderates, you have a lot of black people and immigrants for whom upward mobility-a big house and nice cars—is a major theme.
Warren barely finished ahead of Michael Bloomberg (2.8 million votes to 2.4 million votes). Sanders did better, but note that he’s extremely careful on environmental issues, since a large share of his support comes from working class hispanics.
Politics aside, “billionaires will pay for it” is the ultimate cop out for the left these days. Reaganism has won so completely that it’s unthinkable that any viable party could ask the middle class or even the upper middle class to pay for anything. They must maintain the illusion that we can have our cake and eat it too—we can mitigate climate change, but we don’t need to make any change to our standard of living or pay higher taxes because billionaires will pay for it.
Biden isn't really left at all, and one reason nobody goes to the billionaires' pockets to fund all kinds of progressive policies is that there isn't enough money in those pockets. To do major new social safety net services, you need ongoing (large amounts) billions of dollars. European-style social spending is funded by drastically higher tax rates on the middle class; the top marginal rate often kicks in at a CPS teacher's salary there.
I am all for taxing the hell out of billionaires, but deference to their interests isn't what's keeping you from having free grad school and high-speed rail; it's deference to the interests of ordinary people living in suburbs holding that back.
> 68% of Americans wouldn’t pay even $10 per month more to mitigate climate change
The average American has zero savings and is living hand to mouth. If we hadn’t spent the last four decades hollowing out the middle class, maybe people would have the luxury of being able to look past their next paycheck and consider spending extra to avoid ecosystem collapse.
Median household income on its own is an irrelevant fact. It is only relevant in context of median household expenses. By the fact that household debt has never been higher, I think my point stands - even people earning $70k/year are living hand to mouth because their expenses have risen to $69,500/year, if not higher.
1) Note that I indicated that the 20% increase was a real increase and not a nominal one. That means that to the extent that household expenses have increased, it's because households are using their newfound wealth to purchase more/better stuff! That's not a hollowing out of the middle class, that's a prospering one.
2) Household debt has declined significantly over the past 15 years:
>"As long as people vote right/conservative this is all going to tank. Right will never care about anything but themselves (and thus, money and power). You see it everywhere they are and where in power. Which means we have huge issue as the underbelly votes right and the right vote right"
I do not have any sympathy to right but I have big doubts about left being those warm and fuzzy creatures that are "for the people". I do not think they give a shit. Only difference in my opinion is whom do they fuck the worst.
> I suppose the first question is, why are people voting for your opponent? Probably because they don't like you or your solution.
So, we need a party that solves world hunger, keep us safe, I want iPhone etc etc and the right gives a window for that in the coming 4 years, while the left has nothing but pain. If you believe in a party that has short term (<30 years) solutions, you are already lost. We left it too long for fast grabs. And almost no one looks beyond their own life or maybe their kids.
Real solutions are not short term or simple and they won’t be nice at first. If you don’t suck it up, this time the world is at stake.
People don’t vote for anything beyond their horizon and many will openly tell you, and I am 100% trump would and does, that after their death, who gives a crap.
Perhaps the left is more inclined to take some sort of marginal actions, but I don't think they are willing to do what it takes to make a difference. Everybody would like to "save the planet", but when the the tradeoff is to renounce to our individual comfort, there are less volunteers. How many people would agree to significantly reduce their consumption habits (e.g. flying, driving big cars, eating meat...)?
I don't think the article addressed one of the most important points: the U.S and EU are only a portion of global emissions. If they're the only ones to seriously contribute to climate change they will essentially be subsidizing the developing world. That's why Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. Should they do it anyway? Maybe, but it seems more likely that the self-interested choice is to give up and focus on making the U.S and EU resilient to climate change. Either way this is fundamentally different from a bank bailout.
> If they're the only ones to seriously contribute to climate change they will essentially be subsidizing the developing world.
Or they're finally doing the right thing and fixing the negative externalities of industrialization that they've been passing off to everyone for about a century?
No one cares to "do the right thing", but that's not even the problem. The developing world is producing their own externalities now. People won't accept that the developing world is allowed to pollute, while the developed world is not.
Even if you were OK morally with "just ignore the problem and let most of humanity die so long we can keep burning oil", it's not an option in the first place. You just don't get to keep burning oil, one way or another.
As long as the pollution isn't stopped, environmental conditions will never stop getting worse and do so at an accelerating pace. You cannot "just become resilient and deal with it" indefinitely. People in the US and Europe also need food and water, for which it's great to be able to work outside without dying and also great to not have never ending droughts, floods and hurricanes.
What's actually your proposed solution? Nuclear genocide anyone who won't take the same steps as you on climate change?
What do you do when China just outright declines to swap all the way to renewables?
And when you go down this rabbithole and you go back to pandemic level people-never-traveling and emissions are STILL only down 6%.. what then? Rolling blackouts? No meat ever again?
At some point the angry mob will simply correct the situation back to the mean.
China also restarted several coal plants after rotating blackouts caused some domestic issues.
You can replace China with Russia or Venezuela.
And it is caring about the future of humanity. You can give up eating meat, dairy, driving, planes and go live in the woods and we may still have the exact same problems.
If you want to propose a solution, it's on you to show it works.
What is an abstract far away problem for other countries is more of a concrete immediate “we are screwed if we continue to YOLO“ problem in China. And even they can only move so quickly in their renewable energy build out.
If you just want excuses not to change your lifestyle and effect political change, both of which are required, no amount of "showing" will ever convince you of anything. Do you enjoy saying: "I'm not convinced this will work, so screw everyone, I'm not helping (and thus actively preventing a solution)"?
The solution is to stop burning fossil fuels and this will happen one way or another. Maybe it happens through international cooperation following political initiatives, maybe it happens once civilization collapses across the globe.
I have a strong preference for the first scenario. The vibe I get from you (maybe by mistake?) is that you just don't care very much. The way how to get there is abundantly clear. It just sounds so inconvenient. So, you ask, can't we just blame someone else and hope it won't be that bad after all? That kind of thinking has never solved any problem. Predicting the future to say "this won't work anyway" is incredible arrogance. Noone knows what will happen. People have abolished slavery and monarchies before.
Of course the outcomes aren't good, but we're in a prisoners dilemma were it would be better to burn coal and oil than cripple our economy and have the climate be destroyed anyway by developing countries. There needs to be a climate agreement that everyone will sign on to, but that will never happen.
Articles like this that obsess over consumption curtailment and ignore everything else are beyond foolish. Please at least mention the Inflation Reduction Act in passing.
Also the irony is that the "bank bailout" was a failure too! The 2010s were a lost decade because the politicians were afraid to adequate stimulus, the Europeans are still afraid!
So the idea that the politicians are afraid of doing unpopular things is also dis-proven --- avoiding recessions would also be popular.
There was a fear of doing anything at all, and now there is less of that. The IRA is very much a political theory that:
- Green male jobs in red states will stave off fascism
- Green suburbia is necessary because we can't get our shit together on density/transit fast enough.
These environmental types need to becomes aware of the massive era-demarking shifts we've seen in policy in politics in recent years. And they better also support way more multi-story housing because giving people cheap apartments without parking spots is far more popular than directly curtailing driving / ICEs.
Also do nuclear power but the brits already have some decent plans there.
Eliminating 'suburbia' is even more distasteful to voters than forcibly taking away meat.
While city life can be attractive to young and single people, people don't want to be forced to live in Mega-City One, especially as they grow older and have families.
We don't need to eliminate suburbia by fiat, we just need to build way more urbia.
See https://www.niskanencenter.org/sprawl-can-be-good-actually-e... where calling it "sprawl" is actually a massive troll because promoting walkable small towns connected by rail as they have in Europe (or America in the ~1920s) is nothing at all like our car-oriented sprawl.
I don't think you're wrong about the optics or political viability, unfortunately, but there's a million urban designs in between Kowloon Walled City and "I have to drive twenty minutes through a wasteland of lawns and detached houses to go to Starbucks".
Europe has 'suburbs' that are not suburbia. The idea that everybody would be forced to live in a mega city that is just a single skyscraper is just suberia imagination of what the world be like if not 90% of the land was zoned single family.
I'd start with the trillion spent on wars we didn't need. Holding an empire together is expensive. If Trump hadn't tied Biden's hands, we would still have troops in Afghanistan.
* No meaningful regulation of banks and definitely no attempt to charge bankers for fraud. Dodd-Frank was emptied of most meaning rather quickly, and no other steps were taken to prevent 'too big to fail'. Only very recently has Anti-Trust finally recalled its mandate.
* American life expectancy rate of increase slowed down since the Great Recession, to the point that life expectancy went down between 2014 and 2017 and only then recovered. 2019 life expectancy was still slightly below 2014. And then COVID arrived...
(There are slight changes due to various data issues and slightly different definitions, but the general shape of the graph is identical everywhere you'd look)
* Foreign policy far too desperate to woo every US adversary, starting with the famous 'reset' with Russia and turning a blind eye towards Putin's crimes. That worked out really well, didn't it?
It's not an accident Obama was followed by Trump, or that the D primary was so savage that year - the failures of 'moderate' 'responsible' technocracy were already showing themselves, the voters wanted it to change. Fortunately, Biden is smart enough to understand that he must be the change the voters want. He just needs to put this into practice more.
If we managed to enact the most dramatic proposed climate austerity policies in the US and UK, what kind of dent would we be talking about in the global climate change timeline? The developing world will continue to develop, as they should.
> As the rapid responses to the global financial crisis of 2007-09 and the Covid pandemic proved, governments can act speedily, collectively and decisively if the crisis is deemed big enough.
We have been, currently are, and will be feeling the negative repercussions of the government’s “speedy” and “decisive” actions for several decades. This is not a very good comparison.
> It is a similar picture in the UK, where the Conservative party’s surprise victory in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection was in large part due to the plans by London’s Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, to expand the ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) to the capital’s outer boroughs.
> Put simply, the Ulez seeks to improve London’s air quality by placing a charge on the use of older petrol and diesel vehicles, which tend to be not just the most polluting but also the most likely to be owned by poorer households already struggling with Britain’s cost of living crisis.
Tangentially but still related, but taxing anything with negative externalities without compensating is absolutely stupid, and regressive - hurting the poor the most. A bachelors economic student will tell you that, and I know it because that was the level that I learnt at. For the mayor('s party) to plan such a thing, that's on them. But, carbon taxes themselves needn't be bad if you also provide say a per capita dividend.
I'm not entirely sure I understand you. Are you saying that sales taxes can be reduced to compensate for carbon taxes?
If so that may also have side effects as sales tax can be distortionary and may be more difficult to control (as you'd need to change sales taxes whenever you change carbon taxes.) Not saying it's necessarily bad, it'll just be important to take care of side effects to make it a good idea.
Yes, reduce sales tax enough to offset new revenues from a carbon tax.
This may start a philosophical shift from the type of tax to the total revenue needed, which I think would be helpful. That would give increased room for flexibility in the form of taxation, which might give easier paths to address legitimate concerns with tax types.
One thing I have found being poor is that the poor pay more for absolutely everything. It's insidious. Everything is affected by it. Even buying a hamburger at McDonald's - it'll say "You can get two-for-one if you use the app". But app requires phone. And phone requires plan. And you need a debit card too. Or I'll regularly see "Buy one, get another 50% off" on something essential like soap, but I can barely even afford the one, and certainly not the second one at 50% off. Most of these offers are out of reach for those that need them most.
Absolutely not. BUT, you can be poor and happy. I am probably the poorest I've ever been in my life, but I'm also perhaps at one of the happiest points, so there is that? I'm alive and seemingly healthy. Someone gave me a roof over my head, and an Internet connection, and food pantries are a godsend for someone who is not legally allowed to get any welfare support from the government.
I've been a very, very selfish, very rich prick in my past, so this is probably a good experience for me!
This is such an insightful comment - it’s exactly the kind of examples that wealthy (or even regular) people wouldn’t grasp without having lived through it themselves.
The real problem is that banks, the 0.01%, and megacorporations have effective rights and representation in government, but the people, as in the Spanish word “pueblo” do not.
Short of eliminating FPP voting and overhauling campaign finance and government-industry revolving doors, (which we should do but will not because the current issues are a feature, not a bug, for the people in control) we need some kind of a people’s mega-PAC to wield effective power in the government and restore some sense of actual democratic control.
I keep thinking about what a people’s mega-PAC could look like, but I get stumped every time. The US is designed for corporations to easily be the best way of organizing people together, due to the incentives (make profit).
We need to figure out a way to organize people together in different ways, so they can get a seat at the table. The closest I can come up with are unions, but they struggle enough just to exist. Non profits and charities work (they make money), but they are corporation adjacent.
Hopefully technology can make this possible. Imagine a people’s PAC, where participants pool $10 a month to fund it.
Well he has a point: at least the fallout of the financial crisis was somewhat quantifiable, whereas the fallout of the climate crisis is not because it is wholly dependent on theological exegesis of the fear du jour; if there is one thing solved there’ll be the next thing at hand to continue the program.
If there was even a quantum of honesty from the climate fear mongerers they would first and foremost insist on significant tariffs against the polluting nations.
But all they insist upon is lowering the living standards, purchasing power and upward mobility of the masses within their countries.
Gee, who would have thought that upper class kids could have something against the plebs surpassing them on the social ladder?!
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
> who would have thought that upper class kids could have something against the plebs surpassing them on the social ladder
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadWhat we need is a system to tie the direct effects of the actions of politicians to the personal lives of politicians. For example, like doctors, they should be held liable for political malpractice.
We also need to find a way to get people into office who aren't as hungry for wealth and power like most politicians are. Seems like from the start we are setting ourselves up for failure if we elect people who are good at being elected.
Perhaps politics should be like jury duty: it should be more distributed and citizens should have to serve in it.
If you really want 'free' elections, you need to make it so that literally anyone can run instead of only rich people.
That is the issue, no one whats to change their life style and people do not like change.
MAGA people will not change, even the many environmental left wing people will not change their life styles all that much. Never mind changing your life style is difficult in many places due to Infrastructure in the US.
So, unless politicians make the hard choices, nothing will be done to address Climate Change in time to even keep under 2C.
The (crude) analogy that comes to mind is something akin to the "checks and balances" of U.S. government, with the head of one checking the ass of the other, but instead everybody's head is under everybody else's ass.
To keep this going, you need ever more people but for this to be sustainable, they now need to be confined to tiny boxes in megacities, fueling the economy mostly by producing and consuming virtual items, and keeping their physical consumption to a bare minimum.
Meanwhile, the billionaire class has the rest of the world as their playground, and can happily get around by supercar or private jet.
> economic growth relies on population growth
No it doesn't.
> they now need to be confined to tiny boxes in megacities
Completely wrong.
We have extreme wealth concentration effected by advanced technology, a hugely complex global economy with immense inequality, and a failing biosphere... I agree with you that the whole system is the problem but is there any hope beyond a massive reform caused by devastating ecological disasters?
Personally, I am not too worried for myself. I am sure I can live out the rest of my life in relative comfort, but what about a couple generations down the line?
The more complex the system you have (and our civilization is pretty complex), the less is enough to take it out of balance, and to cause complete collapse. Those 'devastating ecological disasters' might not give us any time to fix anything then (large scale crop failures, for example).
The data shows that the changes in the environment are starting to speed up. The changes will be faster and faster, and nobody knows how fast it will deteriorate. Cascading tipping points make predicting the future extremely hard.
I'm also scared for future generations. But I think that those who'll be there when the shit hits the fan were already born.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNYp6oc37ds ;)
I think it's a matter of refusing to believe that the disease and the cure can be the same. The realization that the industrial revolution was the root cause of climate change creates an aversion to believing that we can solve it scientifically, and a push toward demanding we slam the brakes on industrial society and move in reverse.
It's a fundamentally conservative stance. And one that's clearly wrong. The only way out is through. We're only going to solve the problem by accelerating toward a future of clean energy.
The old adage that people become more conservative as they age, I think, has a fundamental truth to it, but every generation finds a new and unique way of expressing that conservatism. With degrowth, we're seeing a blossoming of one of these odd paths in real time.
Where does the article suggest this?
It is self-flagellating for self-flagellating's sake without understand there actual material basis of modern society. This is extremely common in the environmental movement and for decades has been a massive political failure except for empowering perl-clutching NIMBYs.
I would be a lot more sympathetic if consumption reduction was the only way to go. But it is not. Abundant apartments without parking, abundant e-bikes, abundant transit are feasible, get the job done, and way more popular. (People love to romanticize low density, but rents reveal different preferences.)
I mean a writer needs to actually say something in order for you to criticize it, failing to mention something or focusing the article on a particular topic of discussion isn't a position.
For decade environmentalists have asked for political martyrdom (por political petard). It's never worked, unless you count Putin pissing off his natural gas customers (lol). Acting like that is the only strategy again and again is just irresponsible.
A stylistic choice like scope is not an error, so neither.
>Acting like that is the only strategy again and again is just irresponsible.
The article did not, you are attacking a strawman.
I would like to see an analysis of how much CO2 emissions could be reduced if 30 years ago there were, say, 500 more nuclear power plants than now. What about cars and trucks? According to the EPA.gov website, transportation is still the #1 cause of greenhouse gases.
So basically it is a combination of no nuclear power + severe restrictions on density (zoning most famously, but also two-track building codes) that prevented this "natural solution".
I put nuclear first because it is much more global, while the problems of suburbs + NIMBYism is most pronounced in American. (Still a problem elsewhere but never quite as bad.)
On transportation, I’m reminded of old popular science mags where the cars were predicted to have mini reactors in the trunk. obviously with 1970s tech that’s much too dangerous to be viable, but maybe we would have developed nuclear batteries over time to skip over our porches with EV batteries.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
But clean energy cannot be the whole solution. What happens in even the best-case scenario when everyone uses clean energy like solar/wind for everything? It will make humanity even more efficient and give us even more space to grow, but the biosphere will still be in trouble and all that clean energy will make people consume even more of earth's resources.
So, it's clear that while clean energy is a start, it is not even close to an end to get people to be in equilibrium with the rest of our planet.
The global population will soon be contracting. The UN puts the bump somewhere at the end of the century but their hypothesis are completely crazy and most specialists think it will be sooner.
Eventually humanity’s energy usage is going to have to flatline. And people really really don’t like that idea, but even solar energy has this problem. That’s still energy being captured that mostly would have reflected back out into space.
I find degrowth arguments that call on governmental power to limit demand worrying. Application of force there is artificial and goes against what people naturally do. It's particularly distasteful to people who value life with limited government intrusion - and this is a very large cohort, so taking this avenue is going to have a lot of friction.
A future where these problems are solved by voluntary adoption of superior technology is so much brighter!
Some environmentalists might say that our power is unchecked because we've killed our last predators and destroyed all the other checks on our resource consumption, but they just aren't looking far enough in the future or with a wide enough view at the system. The checks are there, and they will check us since we're incapable of checking ourselves. And it's gonna hurt my kids.
It's written by their economics guy and even in the sub-headline he's calling for government investment.
Even another Hn post saying the US needs more/better defence is just priming the public for republican propaganda to get votes and move the spending to ‘real things’ instead of the pesky planet; ‘it’s been here for 6000 years, why worry?’.
Still would not vote people that are openly and actively against most of humanity.
I'll be real, if you want things to get better you gotta get rid of first-past-the-post voting.
And they only had that for 6 months in latter half of 2009.
The days of Democrats being progressive are over if they existed like we pretend. The President that was most left in this country was FDR and he pulled us out of the Great Depression and set us up for an era of excellence. Democrats ran on left-adjacent policies and held Congress for decades.
Modern Democrats, 1970s forward really, keep rushing to the "center" that doesn't exist to capture imaginary voters as a result of Right-Wing propaganda (Intentional Overton-Window shifting, Two Santa Claus Theory, PR games).
Republicans, and most other morons, think that Democrats had a functional majority starting in 2009. However, Republicans intentionally held up the 60th seat for months. Then Kennedy died not long after Al Frankin was seated. That broke the supermajority.
Democrats have several conservative members (who I think should be expelled from the party but whatever) which resulted in us getting right wing healthcare policy and nothing meaningful being done. You can tell the people who fell for the RNC/Fox News PR campaign as they think Democrats had a supermajority for years rather than weeks.
This year is the first year I’ve personally been impacted by wildfires (4000+ hectare fire on the edge of my town), and it made climate change 10x more real for me than it was before, and I was fully on board before! How long can the right stay on the wrong side of history with respect to climate change when they are losing their homes and farms and dealing with one thing after another?
In other words, I wouldn't hold my breath.
See the part at the end about Krugman "tearing his head out", and also
> It was also obvious to me, although apparently not to Obama officials, that they had only one shot at getting it right — that if the plan failed to produce a vigorous recovery, Republicans would say, “See, stimulus doesn’t work,” and nothing more would be done.
Keep in mind that somehow, it’s fascism for democrats to ignore republican input, but when republicans steal Supreme Court appointments, it’s just “how the government works”.
At that point, democrats were still very much playing “if we take the high road, people will see republicans for what they are”, but the problem is that this didn’t happen at all, and it fact, all it took was reinvigorating public displays of racism to fire up their base.
Party is an abstract to these people, it's all about interests. In Lieberman's case, one of his interests was to protect the health insurance industry which contributed more than $1M to his campaigns over the years. [1]
[0]https://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/27/health.care/inde...
[1]https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2009/1211/Healthcare-holdouts-...
The Democrats did mess up by not taking that 3-4 month window more seriously, but they thought they had Massachusetts in the bag.
- $3.4 billion Smart Grid Investment Grant (part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), which would affect 49 states and has the potential to reduce electricity use by more than 4% by 2033
- The recovery act included more than $70 billion in tax credits and direct spending for programs involving clean energy and transportation.
- The launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) project under the Department of Energy
- New efficiency standards for home appliances
- Extending the investment tax credit for solar energy
- Extending the production tax credit for wind energy,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_the_Barack_Ob...
Unless they said it but messed up more, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Which of those wings do you think has been bad on the environment?
Personally I’d say it’s the “pro-economy” neoliberal wing more than the left. Say what you want about how effective or practical the left has been, but generally they’re not the ones stripping regulations on hazmat trains or signing off on drilling in nature preserves or building pipelines across crucial aquifers.
No, they are not. "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/26589529219124838...
This is what the leader of right wing thinks about global warming.
Never is a long time. Richard Nixon's administration accomplished quite a bit. Nixon created the EPA and signed the endangered species act. Why couldn't environmentalism become an issue for the Republicans in the future?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon#Governmental_ini...
Fox news. The right wing in the US could never do what Nixon did because they'll get hung in the media machine designed to protect them (and keep them in lockstep)
What a sad emboldened new era that was. It was fueled by bold new levels of manufactured consent & spin doctoring. And the result of this ungamesmenly Hastertian dark-realpolitick has been a near collapse of any bipartisanship, and a decay of our union.
Democrats are willing to talk about mitigating climate change, and Republicans aren’t, but the vast majority of Americans aren’t willing to actually incur decreased quality of life. Gas needs to be like $10+ per gallon. But even when it hit $4 last year, Biden was calling to suspend the gas tax to make it more affordable.
You’re correct that, on this issue, the right cares only about themselves. But so does most everyone else. Even most Biden voters want to be able to take their SUV to the beach this summer without high gas prices. Biden won traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia blue, because Biden voters are leaving urban areas in the northeast and Midwest for places like Arizona and Georgia where they can afford bigger houses, more cars, etc.
Warren barely finished ahead of Michael Bloomberg (2.8 million votes to 2.4 million votes). Sanders did better, but note that he’s extremely careful on environmental issues, since a large share of his support comes from working class hispanics.
Politics aside, “billionaires will pay for it” is the ultimate cop out for the left these days. Reaganism has won so completely that it’s unthinkable that any viable party could ask the middle class or even the upper middle class to pay for anything. They must maintain the illusion that we can have our cake and eat it too—we can mitigate climate change, but we don’t need to make any change to our standard of living or pay higher taxes because billionaires will pay for it.
I am all for taxing the hell out of billionaires, but deference to their interests isn't what's keeping you from having free grad school and high-speed rail; it's deference to the interests of ordinary people living in suburbs holding that back.
(tptacek lives in the Chicago area as I recall.)
The average American has zero savings and is living hand to mouth. If we hadn’t spent the last four decades hollowing out the middle class, maybe people would have the luxury of being able to look past their next paycheck and consider spending extra to avoid ecosystem collapse.
$10/month would represent 0.17% of that income.
2) Household debt has declined significantly over the past 15 years:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HDTGPDUSQ163N
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
I do not have any sympathy to right but I have big doubts about left being those warm and fuzzy creatures that are "for the people". I do not think they give a shit. Only difference in my opinion is whom do they fuck the worst.
I suppose the first question is, why are people voting for your opponent? Probably because they don't like you or your solution.
That's the whole problem of democracy to some people - you have to actually convince others and get them onboard instead of forcing your way.
So, we need a party that solves world hunger, keep us safe, I want iPhone etc etc and the right gives a window for that in the coming 4 years, while the left has nothing but pain. If you believe in a party that has short term (<30 years) solutions, you are already lost. We left it too long for fast grabs. And almost no one looks beyond their own life or maybe their kids.
Real solutions are not short term or simple and they won’t be nice at first. If you don’t suck it up, this time the world is at stake.
People don’t vote for anything beyond their horizon and many will openly tell you, and I am 100% trump would and does, that after their death, who gives a crap.
Or they're finally doing the right thing and fixing the negative externalities of industrialization that they've been passing off to everyone for about a century?
As long as the pollution isn't stopped, environmental conditions will never stop getting worse and do so at an accelerating pace. You cannot "just become resilient and deal with it" indefinitely. People in the US and Europe also need food and water, for which it's great to be able to work outside without dying and also great to not have never ending droughts, floods and hurricanes.
What do you do when China just outright declines to swap all the way to renewables?
And when you go down this rabbithole and you go back to pandemic level people-never-traveling and emissions are STILL only down 6%.. what then? Rolling blackouts? No meat ever again?
At some point the angry mob will simply correct the situation back to the mean.
You can replace China with Russia or Venezuela.
And it is caring about the future of humanity. You can give up eating meat, dairy, driving, planes and go live in the woods and we may still have the exact same problems.
If you want to propose a solution, it's on you to show it works.
If you just want excuses not to change your lifestyle and effect political change, both of which are required, no amount of "showing" will ever convince you of anything. Do you enjoy saying: "I'm not convinced this will work, so screw everyone, I'm not helping (and thus actively preventing a solution)"?
The solution is to stop burning fossil fuels and this will happen one way or another. Maybe it happens through international cooperation following political initiatives, maybe it happens once civilization collapses across the globe.
I have a strong preference for the first scenario. The vibe I get from you (maybe by mistake?) is that you just don't care very much. The way how to get there is abundantly clear. It just sounds so inconvenient. So, you ask, can't we just blame someone else and hope it won't be that bad after all? That kind of thinking has never solved any problem. Predicting the future to say "this won't work anyway" is incredible arrogance. Noone knows what will happen. People have abolished slavery and monarchies before.
Also the irony is that the "bank bailout" was a failure too! The 2010s were a lost decade because the politicians were afraid to adequate stimulus, the Europeans are still afraid!
So the idea that the politicians are afraid of doing unpopular things is also dis-proven --- avoiding recessions would also be popular.
There was a fear of doing anything at all, and now there is less of that. The IRA is very much a political theory that:
- Green male jobs in red states will stave off fascism
- Green suburbia is necessary because we can't get our shit together on density/transit fast enough.
These environmental types need to becomes aware of the massive era-demarking shifts we've seen in policy in politics in recent years. And they better also support way more multi-story housing because giving people cheap apartments without parking spots is far more popular than directly curtailing driving / ICEs.
Also do nuclear power but the brits already have some decent plans there.
While city life can be attractive to young and single people, people don't want to be forced to live in Mega-City One, especially as they grow older and have families.
Why can't we have environments that are somewhere between dystopian 'mega-city one' and unsustainable Las Vegas suburbs?
See https://www.niskanencenter.org/sprawl-can-be-good-actually-e... where calling it "sprawl" is actually a massive troll because promoting walkable small towns connected by rail as they have in Europe (or America in the ~1920s) is nothing at all like our car-oriented sprawl.
Animal agriculture is 35% (80% of all agriculture lands).
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
Both are destructive for our environment. But one is worse that the other.
This is the first time I've ever heard this, how do you even begin to justify this claim.
* American life expectancy rate of increase slowed down since the Great Recession, to the point that life expectancy went down between 2014 and 2017 and only then recovered. 2019 life expectancy was still slightly below 2014. And then COVID arrived...
(There are slight changes due to various data issues and slightly different definitions, but the general shape of the graph is identical everywhere you'd look)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2021...
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819...
* Foreign policy far too desperate to woo every US adversary, starting with the famous 'reset' with Russia and turning a blind eye towards Putin's crimes. That worked out really well, didn't it?
It's not an accident Obama was followed by Trump, or that the D primary was so savage that year - the failures of 'moderate' 'responsible' technocracy were already showing themselves, the voters wanted it to change. Fortunately, Biden is smart enough to understand that he must be the change the voters want. He just needs to put this into practice more.
—Kurt Vonnegut
We have been, currently are, and will be feeling the negative repercussions of the government’s “speedy” and “decisive” actions for several decades. This is not a very good comparison.
> Put simply, the Ulez seeks to improve London’s air quality by placing a charge on the use of older petrol and diesel vehicles, which tend to be not just the most polluting but also the most likely to be owned by poorer households already struggling with Britain’s cost of living crisis.
Tangentially but still related, but taxing anything with negative externalities without compensating is absolutely stupid, and regressive - hurting the poor the most. A bachelors economic student will tell you that, and I know it because that was the level that I learnt at. For the mayor('s party) to plan such a thing, that's on them. But, carbon taxes themselves needn't be bad if you also provide say a per capita dividend.
Or offset by reducing other taxes, like sales tax. This would be more of a tax-shifting strategy.
If so that may also have side effects as sales tax can be distortionary and may be more difficult to control (as you'd need to change sales taxes whenever you change carbon taxes.) Not saying it's necessarily bad, it'll just be important to take care of side effects to make it a good idea.
This may start a philosophical shift from the type of tax to the total revenue needed, which I think would be helpful. That would give increased room for flexibility in the form of taxation, which might give easier paths to address legitimate concerns with tax types.
I've been a very, very selfish, very rich prick in my past, so this is probably a good experience for me!
Short of eliminating FPP voting and overhauling campaign finance and government-industry revolving doors, (which we should do but will not because the current issues are a feature, not a bug, for the people in control) we need some kind of a people’s mega-PAC to wield effective power in the government and restore some sense of actual democratic control.
We need to figure out a way to organize people together in different ways, so they can get a seat at the table. The closest I can come up with are unions, but they struggle enough just to exist. Non profits and charities work (they make money), but they are corporation adjacent.
Hopefully technology can make this possible. Imagine a people’s PAC, where participants pool $10 a month to fund it.
If there was even a quantum of honesty from the climate fear mongerers they would first and foremost insist on significant tariffs against the polluting nations.
But all they insist upon is lowering the living standards, purchasing power and upward mobility of the masses within their countries.
Gee, who would have thought that upper class kids could have something against the plebs surpassing them on the social ladder?!
https://i.imgur.com/LaEFQmV.png
> if there is one thing solved there’ll be the next thing at hand to continue the program
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshoot_(population)
Climate change, resource depletion, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, pollution, overpopulation, soil erosion, and overfishing are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.
> who would have thought that upper class kids could have something against the plebs surpassing them on the social ladder
:)