Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize?

[Farm Boy]

It doesn't need to be. But I can see how someone would be worried that it would.

IMO, switching to a low-carbon economy would be the very opposite of socialism, because it's a clear acknowledgement of the limits of private property and the very limits of being able to use courts to redress torts.

I think a conversation of "what proposed solutions seem 'too socialist' and which proposed solutions aren't?" is a good one.

I view AGW as intergenerational/cross-border property theft. You'd use same models for any shared resource. Aquifers. Caribou. Migrating fish. None of these are 'socialist'.

Not exactly the same, but a lot of the solutions remind me of "Rich man's war, poor man's fight." A little more actually socialist rationing goes over better on the fairness scale with some "conservative" Americans I talk about this with than the more capitalist system of allowing money to purchase relative consumption. If it's a matter of life and death, then everyone being in it and Queens baking crappy birthday cakes is a sign of sincerity. Phasing out low-end affordable vehicles while first class pays some relatively minor tax, oh please. That's just a screw-job.

I understand that's how it already works under your models*, but still. It's there. Even I think the solution model makes it sound like a gigantic lie.

*Even more so.

 

[El_Machinae]

How about large taxes that allow people to upgrade from their low-end vehicles?

I don't yet have a good way of explaining that actually paying for the carbon we consume would lead to better outcomes. The rich consume way more of the carbon buffer and seize the majority of the profits from sloughing off the externalities onto the rest of us. That said, I really do see that we need better explanations of how it should work. People will have more money in their wallets with a proper carbon tax scheme. And a proper offset program uplifts the poor very well.

Earlier in this thread, I was pushing back against an ally who was pondering the idea of taxing poor people in order to reduce Western consumption. It really cannot work that way. The status quo of our current system is to keep the poor as poor and quake at their increasing affluence. That doesn't end well.

 

[Farm Boy]

Government supported infrastructure upgrades, essentially? Hell, I'm used to people working the program and I'll believe it when I see it. My baseline assumption is that such a marketed program would function to put low-capital low-compensation ownership out of competition with and to work for high-capital high-compensation ownership. Like it's an upgrade, but at the end of it you're leasing everything you depend on instead of owning it. And you still cough up for the insurance.

 

[El_Machinae]

Yup, I think you've described the modern farmer's plight. Whenever I ponder it, I think that the modern farmer is the warning of how a free market economy can end up creating surfs out of people who used to own their land. Drive profits to zero. Encourage people to borrow to increase profits. Drive profits to zero again. Use free capital (at lower interest rates) to purchase the assets of newly bankrupted owners. Meanwhile, ever-increasing amounts of food means that everyone is confused except for those who realize that dollars are a legal fiction.

I don't think the solution is to steal weaker people's land. Especially if that just perpetuates the cycle.

Well, some of the structural upgrades need to be with the government blessing. Phasing out CFCs was done with the legal pen. And any systemic change needs government to be onboard for it to work.

I don't have a good way of explaining and that's on me (and my allies). What would you do, if you thought that carbon emissions destroyed the shorelines of poor people and that we've known this would happen for decades now?

 

[Farm Boy]

Well, I do think that, and it's going to cost either way. I'd tax and subsidize, as you mentioned. I pump pink diesel fuel, not green, and the rationale seems fair enough. I pay more relative tax than a parent of three and the rationale seems fair enough unless she makes sixty plus or something*. But I don't know how to sell it. Seems like you need to get people to pay little things that they're willing to pay in order to get actual investment in the fight. And when that's done, the top ends of society damn well better be visibly paying some of those little things too. I think people will accept doing without plastic bags. I think people will accept doing without plastic straws. So long as everyone is doing without. Work it on up.

*Edit: cleaned that up a little, had several different thoughts goo into one sentence.

 

[El_Machinae]

I'm not even in favor of taxing and subsidizing. Except maybe on the larger projects that just make too much sense not to. I'd tax carbon and just redistribute the proceeds. Let the pricing mechanism work to create and reward innovation. Internationally, a system of compensation is necessary in order to compensate those peoples who are having their share of the carbon buffer stolen. That compensation would fall as any specific nation decarbonizes their economy.

The cohort that deserves help in such a scheme would be people who're employed in the polluting industry. Ostensibly there will be more jobs created than destroyed, but that doesn't help the people who're literally put out of work. Part of helping them is putting the writing on the wall now (opposite of Trump's current system). Part of helping them is literally just creating targeted help.

 

[Farm Boy]

That's not enough solution for me to believe in. That's a scheme line all the others.

 

[El_Machinae]

It's not a scheme at all. Once the price reflects the carbon and once high-level consumers are literally giving dollars to low-level consumers, then market mechanisms take over. After that, it's a question of how to help displaced workers. And we have no choice but to displace them. At the very least, we need to reduce the output of what they're paid to make.

The US specifically also lacks a proper top marginal tax rate, but that's a separate issue.

 

[Farm Boy]

It was supposed to be winky. But naw.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, I don't have the words to explain. Your feedback is useful, though. If the better plan cannot be explained, then a subpar plan needs to be designed and rolled out, as long as it can be explained. Until then, we get to mock teens and millionaires who have nicer lives.

 

[Farm Boy]

Oh, I think I get ya. I just don't agree with you on everything even if we agree on the problem.

 

[El_Machinae]

The problem is insolvable. Americans are stealing shoreline from Bangledeshis. There's no politically viable solution to that problem. Our slowness to react guaranteed unnecessary suffering. If you think taxing richer people and use State-driven mandates to force rationing of consumer goods will work ... well, it's worth considering.

 

[Patine]

I would be open to listening to someone who puts the situation into terms that are exclusively environmental and lays out the consequences of current policy vs. their proposed policy and what they believe projected effects would be. This means no "economic justice" points or anything else that raises a red flag to backdoor watermelon socialism.

I must ask this - what the Hell is "backdoor watermelon socialism?" That term is new to me...

 

[El_Machinae]

What's green on the outside but pink on the inside?

 

[Hrothbern]

Regarding Greta and Carbon tax:

Greta does live in a country where the carbon tax is the highest of the world since 1991 with positive effects and no (visible) setbacks on the economy

From Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-pricing-popular

Carbon prices vary widely across existing schemes. Success stories such as that of Sweden – which currently has the highest carbon price in the world at US$139/tCO29 – demonstrate that it is indeed possible to make carbon pricing work: While the Swedish economy grew by 60% since the introduction of the Swedish carbon tax in 1991, carbon emissions decreased by 25%.10 However, the carbon price under most schemes is still lower than US$10/tCO2.

If the better plan cannot be explained, then a subpar plan needs to be designed and rolled out, as long as it can be explained.

For big changes you need a big buy-in. Part of that buy-in can come from specifics like explaining, or better deliberating... part from that buy-in can come from the base level of trust in politicians and government in a country (incl low corruption perception)
One of the golden rules of change management is, for events that need that big buy-in, is that you can never communicate too much.
Swedish culture (in my job experience) can cause callus on your tongue, but that pays back handsomely once you start implementing (as a team).

Four major effects emerge from behavioural science regarding the acceptability of carbon pricing reforms.

• the willingness to pay for climate change mitigation is largely a function of political, economic, and cultural world views. Triggering “solution aversion” – the tendency for citizens to be more skeptical of environmental problems if the policy solution challenges or contradicts underlying ideological predispositions – has to be avoided;
• citizens tend to ignore or doubt the corrective (“Pigouvian”18) effect of carbon pricing but may be mollified if revenue is earmarked for a specific purpose such as green spending or transfers to disadvantaged households;
• the labelling of the carbon price may alter perceptions of its desirability. Something as plain as re-labelling a carbon price as a “CO2 levy”, as done in Switzerland and Alberta, or speaking of “fee and dividend”, could circumvent solution aversion and make the measure more acceptable to citizens;
• increasing the salience of the benefits derived from a carbon-pricing reform enhances acceptability, so that visible revenue recycling may be advisable. Some recycling methods, such as transfers to households or public investment, might be more visible to the public than tax cuts, for instance.

Every country, state, region differing in culture and likely needing different approaches to transitioning.

 

[Moriarte]

Every country, state, region differing in culture and likely needing different approaches to transitioning.

With the unifying factor being the level of wealth in the region in question. Carbon taxation is easier to implement in Nordic countries, where natural resources are abundant, while population is low in comparison to the volume of resources. Where socialist structures within the system help create fair redistribution of wealth and taxes are sky high. Sweden is the exception, a “natural wonder” spawned by virtue of it’s geographical position, history and political, economical structures. Until we lift the world out of poverty they won’t begin considering cutting on emissions. There is no way around this

 

[luiz]

FWIW, the IEA just released the carbon emission tally for 2019. Substantial decreases in the US, EU and Japan. Substantial increase in Asia. Net zero increase from 2018.

Clearly the most advanced economies can and are already cutting emissions. But developing Asia, which on a per capita basis still emits less than the rich world, is ramping up so fast as to negate all the cuts coming from the advanced economies. It's quite a pickle.

 

[El_Machinae]

Luckily, the ability to reduce emissions is a function of technology. Now, a lot of our emissions are exported, but the trade is for hard capital. So, depends on how they spend it.

The biggest fear is that the poor people do what the rich people do. Even bigger, that we choose to force people to remain poor. Western lifestyles are including the exported emissions. So, still outrageously unsustainable.

Regarding Greta and Carbon tax:

Thanks for posting this.

 

[Kaitzilla]

All I am saying is that compared to those for science the bar for the peace prize is laughably low and basically means that it's just a political pat on the back to be issued to who ever is fashionable this year.


Environmentalists are useless in general and in this case just pathetic. At best, they are a bunch of people who can't see that the price of saving the world can not and should not be paid by the common man but by the large capital that actually pollutes it and encourages and indeed forces upon us behaviors that do. So they are happy to oppress the little guy by forcing us to use X type of appliance or Y type of shopping bag whilst blissfully sitting in the dark cloud of thermoelectric plants.

If environmentalists truly cared about the planet they would tackle things like industrial pollution, fight to get more atomic energy plants and fight against the culture of planed obsolescence which forces us to buy appliances and even automobiles every couple years which is the largest source of both resource exploitation and pollution.

But no, we can't do that because that means the people with money won't keep getting more money. What would those poor, desperate apple shareholders do if they had to make their phone last for a decade instead of a year. Or those poor unfortunate automobile manufacturers. What would they do if their vehicles had to last for several decades like they used to? Why they'd not be able to afford that third private island. Tragic that!

So instead they focus on small meaningless gestures like turning your light off for a whole hour a year to virtue signal and pat them self on the back and take selfies while the world burns in the background.

That would probably fix global warming, but a lot of billionaires would be hurt.

Someone would also have to volunteer to be the world's savior and let the waste be stored a mile under their desert for a million years.

Even with reactor designs that can't melt down and don't promote nuclear weapon proliferation, I just don't see it happening.

People are already convinced that covering the world in solar panels and windmills are the solution, when clearly it is not.

 

[Estebonrober]

That would probably fix global warming, but a lot of billionaires would be hurt.

Someone would also have to volunteer to be the world's savior and let the waste be stored a mile under their desert for a million years.

Even with reactor designs that can't melt down and don't promote nuclear weapon proliferation, I just don't see it happening.

People are already convinced that covering the world in solar panels and windmills are the solution, when clearly it is not.

covering the world in windmills and solar panels can certainly be part of the solution and like natural gas before it be a better solution than the prior.