One of the reasons why the Left (as opposed to Left-leaning liberals) prefers to ignore many aspects of history, is because they just can’t bear the truth that their envisaged systems for delivering utopia failed, whilst the Western Enlightenment delivered humanity from the depths of brutal poverty to our current soaring heights of material abundance. They cannot stand that each of the 42 times full Socialism has been tried, it not only collapsed, but also proved itself to be congenitally predisposed towards totalitarianism and prone to delivering wave after wave of State imposed mass murder and famine.
Of course the counterargument that Capitalism has killed people as well is certainly true- but when one examines the ledger then one finds that it has saved more people than it has disposed of for the simple reason that we live longer lives, no longer have to bear long periods of malnutrition and are far more peaceful now- for the simple reason that trade delivers more wealth in free market systems than war does. The Enlightenment has raised roughly 85% of the world’s population up out of absolute poverty, an achievement amply demonstrated by the fact that if we somehow transported a sampling of the 18th century population to today and attempted to provide them with the lifestyle to which their impoverished world had accustomed them, it would only cost us roughly $1.90 a day per person.
Some may be forgiven for believing that Race and Gender Equity is the only front in this war to dismantle the most beneficial system of ordering human affairs in human history, but by far the more decisive intellectual warfare is being fought on is the front of climate alarmism. This is not to say the man-made climate change is not a serious problem, because it is- albeit a more long-term, rather than immediate, problem than most realise. Many in legacy media have relied on the fact that most people have not actually read any of the IPCC’s voluminous reports and of those who have, many have lacked the critical or scientific acumen to understand that, especially with the most recent IPCC report, far from being a cause for further alarmism, in many ways it is grounds for cautious optimism.
For those unaware of The Honest Broker on Substack I would heartily recommend reading Roger Pielke Jr, and for those who may be sceptical, he has not only penned pieces for Nature, but has also been sourced by them as an expert on climate change, specifically with regard to extreme weather and the extent to which man-made climate change has played a role. I mainly quote him as a source because he demonstrates through his lucid arguments that our most recent progress on climate change shows that the worst case scenarios for climate change by 2100 are no longer plausible and the upper limit of our worst case possible impact on climate probably resides somewhere around the Rocky Road Scenario (SSP3) detailed in this Nature article.
This, in itself, may seem alarming- but one has to consider the basic premises of this scenario. First, it would require all or most economic growth in the Developing World stop, as well as efforts at healthcare, access to birth control for women and childhood education (especially of girls) in the Developing World to cease. Most or all areas of the Developed world would have to largely abandon Green Innovation or Green Infrastructure, most particularly in areas like small modular nuclear reactors or projects similar to the Three Gorges Dam. Generally, it posits a world in which countries are no longer able to cooperate on matters of climate change (even though they may be antagonistic in other areas) and where they are forced to opt for more and more coal plant power provision through an inability to afford other forms of energy investment.
And this is the crux of the matter, because although material abundance and the pursuit of wealth may be a cause of climate change, it is also the only viable solution. Despite the recent reduction in carbon emissions due to the pandemic, the delayed recovery from COVID scenario puts us further behind our climate goals by 2030, for the simple reason that we won’t have as much money to invest in alternate energy sources or other forms of climate innovation.
But by far the worst impacts of the pandemic have been felt in the Developing World where over 150 million people have been plunged into the absolute poverty of living on below $1.90 a day. The consequences of this global slowdown can have effects a far ranging as poorer childhood nutrition, reduced crop yields and a general slowing of regional economic growth. Some have argued for a renewed commitment to foreign aid, especially in the from of cash transfers, others have suggested other mitigation strategies- but all of this ignores the simple fact that although the $2.4 trillion plus contributed by the world’s wealthiest nations accomplished many things, most notably in the areas of clean water provision, access to medicines and childhood education, the effects of foreign aid on raising people out of poverty were almost negligible.
Instead it was a set of innovations powered by the free market which raised over a billion people out of poverty between 2000 and 2012. First, was the precipitous decline on global transport costs, particularly in the area of labour reductions caused by the automation of many loading jobs in ports. More importantly, the innovation of access to incredibly cheap banking systems via mobile phones allowed subsistence farmers to invest in ways to boost their yields, and this was even one area where even governments and charities were finally able to bear down on poverty through ground-up rather than top-down investments.
There are many valid criticisms which the climate movement can legitimately levy against Capitalism and free markets. Yes, consumerism is needlessly wasteful and we need to transition more quickly to consumer goods which are longer lasting and more sustainably sourced. Yes, capitalism does produce gross wealth inequalities even though it simultaneously solves the far more important problem of poverty and much of the capital is productive working capital which operates far more efficiently and less wastefully than government allocations of resources. But what we really need to reconsider is the canard that we could ever enter a sustained period of economic austerity, energy poverty or slower economic growth without the catastrophic impact of plunging billions of the world’s most vulnerable people back into the worst kind of poverty.
Ultimately the only force in human history which has sustainably raised people up out of poverty is the ability to generate surpluses and then trade them. No other force has even come close. Remove that facility from those countries which have to transition to largely post industrial societies, and their economic fall is all but guaranteed. Yes, there have been redistributive policies which reapportion resources to a society’s most needy, but as the recent experience of the Developing World during the pandemic should teach us, one can only really provide these redistributive social safety nets when one has the horn of cornucopia which the free market provides.
As a final note we should also consider the moral implications of capitalism vs. socialism in terms of our ability to tackle climate change. If we look at the history of the failed states of Socialism then we can quickly see that the imperatives of state-run industrial efforts operating in the interests of the common good often cause environmental disasters every bit as shocking as those found under the auspices of capitalism- the Aral Sea Disaster caused by the Soviet Union is but one of many such examples of mismanagement and landscapes best characterised as unliveable toxic waste dumps.
In Democratic Capitalist societies it is at least far easier to legislate against the excesses of the greedy capitalist than it is to argue against a socialist leader supposedly operating for the common good (because the secret police and the firing squad are always on call in such systems), and we should bear that in mind when telling ourselves the sweet but repeatedly disproven lie that more socialist systems might somehow help us tackle climate change.
I always enjoy your writing, Geary. This one is a topic close to my heart. I've been reading the various IPCC summaries since before AR5, along with selected original academic research. A few years ago I was so perplexed by the mismatch between what the science actually says and what the media reports, that I set about reading the papers behind the headlines (in those cases where any were cited). The distortions are frightening. Some months ago the Guardian splashed a headline that 20 feet of short term sea level rise was all but guaranteed (which was nothing like what the background paper said). There are regular alarmist reports on the BBC and elsewhere about sea level rise when the subjects are actually coastal cities on the worlds major river deltas which are subsiding due to river culverting and unsustainable groundwater extraction.
The linkage of singular climatic events to climate change is likewise misleading in the extreme. In many cases, rates of burning, flooding, storms etc. are the same as historical norms. In ALL cases, the toll on human life is a tiny fraction of its historical impact, and that's even before allowing for population increases. Just look at the last thousand years of flooding in the North Sea basin. Regular concurrences of onshore winds, high tides, and low pressure systems have produced devastating storm surges with decadal frequency. The impacts on low-lying coasts are horrific -- up to a hundred thousand deaths from some single events, and an average of ten thousand deaths each decade. As you will know, the barriers in the Thames and Rhine estuaries and other coastal works have made this mostly a thing of the past since the last killer floods of 1953.
In short, the effects of climate change -- while significant and certainly not to be ignored -- will be best mitigated by affluent societies capable of responding appropriately. The very last thing we need is to be starved of the energy on which modernity utterly depends. The irony is that the technologies best suited to the task are with us now: natural gas as a transitional fuel and Gen III and IV nuclear in the long run. Unfortunately we risk being the victims of Green ideology which has favoured unsuitable and unworkable solutions. Countries like my own (Ireland) now face an energy crisis due to reliance on wind which has failed to produce the goods for much of this summer.
Yet we seem determined to double down, going from 40% of power from renewables to 70% by 2030. That means that wind will be expected to provide 95% of power much of the time, to hit a 70% average. It will also have to cope with increased demand from EVs and electric heating if the Greens get their way, and with the complete retirement of coal and oil-fired generators. Meanwhile all new offshore gas exploration has been banned, and the Greens have shot down a much needed LNG import terminal because of their antipathy towards US fracking. We are a high tech country, with data centres expected to consume over 25% of power by 2030. But we have now been told we face grid instability for the next five years because of lack of investment in baseload power. We are also reliant on gas and electricity interconnectors to the UK which is facing its own energy cliff.
Worst of all is that a significant segment of the population is convinced that the world will literally burst into flames in the foreseeable a future. Adults decide not to have children, and children suffer from debilitating anxiety, all because of a fabricated horror story that has been concocted by a media seeking to attract more eyeballs.
Scientists are not immune either. I have been reading academic papers for long enough to see that there have been inexplicably bad predictions even for short term change. One "Ehrlichian" prediction from 2009 was that West African crop yields would fall by 25% by 2020 due to seasonal shift in rainfall patterns and other effects. In fact, crop yields rose by around 15%. Especially in Africa, the potential for better land management to increase yields is enormous.
Another paper reported that 50% of the worlds grain belts would be affected by climate change by 2100. This was dutifully reported in the press as a loss of 50% of the worlds grain. Of course, the paper says nothing of the sort -- northward shifts of grain belts into the Canadian prairies and Siberian steppes could increase the worlds available arable land. Needless to say such changes could be disruptive, but they are not the civilisational catastrophes (let alone extinction level events) that are being touted.
As you pointed out, the economic impact of climate change is barely a rounding error compared to the growth in global GDP by 2100, as long as we don't shoot our own feet off. Again, this is all available in the IMF's own modelling from the last two years.
I wonder if a backlash from a duped public is overdue. I somehow doubt it. The man in the street is not going to suddenly start reading academic papers. And yet, the UK's recent energy concerns just in time for COP26 later this month seem like an interesting opportunity for a clash of ideas.
Great comment, mate. We sound quite similar in our research habits. On a personal note, I spent decades with the persistent worry of climate change nagging away in the back of my brain, before finally coming across some of the lukewarmers and going direct to the source to allay my fears.
Here are a couple of gems from Helen Dale, an Aussie journalist and commentator here in the UK. In 2019, the internet (and particularly in relation to smartphone usage) had a larger carbon footprint than all air travel globally- so perhaps we should ban all social media, and introduce a time limit per day on smartphone usage of one hour (for mental health reasons).
It might be possible to return to a pre-intensive model of crop farming here in the UK, but it would require a shift in the labour inputs from 1% to 2% of the working age population to around 30%! Given that young people should be fit enough to handle farm labour (I certainly was, decades ago) we should shorten the academic year for all students in higher education (other than STEM) to six months and ask the students to work the farms for the rest of the year!
I totally agree with you on the agriculture. Coming from an agricultural region of the UK, I was perhaps better equipped to dismiss some of the more preposterous claims in relation to soil sequestration and the like. Steven Pinker briefly covered it in Enlightenment Now!, but not at anywhere near the resolution level the topic deserves. I think the Economist on YouTube might have covered the recent research paper, which showed that higher yields could account for up to 20 years worth of carbon sequestration in terms of global carbon emissions through fallow land returning to forests and woodlands- here in the UK, the wilded lands can often create more economic value than the farms did- through shooting, private angling and nature tourism.
One of my real pet hates is the classification of wood pellets as a green technology. Many of the forests being displaced are not slated for regrowth, but more often will slated for palm oil plantations. According to a friend of mine who received a degree in Environmental Science from the UEA, it was bad policy when it was a biofuel subsidy, just as it is bad idea now- rainforest depletion does eventually get paid back in palm oil production, but only after 690 years! Plus, it's an unfair competitive advantage and has forced far more benign forestry in other parts of the world out of business completely (which could also be made more climate friendly, through brush burns and the biochar it works into the soil).
Have you been reading about the NEOM project and the work that Cranfield University have been doing in association with Saudi Arabia? Here is YouTube video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFIHecZDfc&t=366s . It all has profound implications for desalination technologies- if it bloody works! Here is the thing, if people actually did their research and trained their YouTube to look for climate and engineering, they would shift straight into the techno-optimist column.
I think a lot of it is the psychological effects of petrol cars on modern societies- it creates the illusion that nothing is being done about climate change. There seems to be a tendency to anthropomorphise Mother Nature and feel as though we should all somehow be punished for our crimes against nature. There is something akin to an ecological puritanism which runs down the middle of the more dark green elements of climate activism.
I still think there will be tragic consequences. Many species will die out through habitat loss, especially through human activity. Tropical diseases and parasites have the potential to migrate. Our oceans are a complete bloody mess (Carnegie science did an experiment with an inland seawater island lagoon- and found that reefs can handle either acidification or temperature rise, but not both- they used hydrogen peroxide to change the pH). There a couple of really interesting research projects on coral reef replenishment which only need combining and an investment from a billionaire philanthropist to work- plus, there are early signs that reefs are moving to what were once slightly colder waters.
Onshore Wind does actually rate as a contributory solution with both Bjorn Lomborg and the Drawdown team, but what people forget about solar is the installation cost, which is static- unless you locate it in poorer countries, or make the cells longer life/more efficient. I have had several greenies start to get really annoyed with me when I start talking about base load energy, seasonality, battery charge decline and the difference between green and grey hydrogen!
In terms of our leaders and scientists, one of things which I am really concerned about is bias lock. They ran an experiment on scientific information and biases with two types of information source- one which detracted from the need for urgent change and one which supported more drastic action. Smart people were no different from those who were less so, in terms of motivated bias, but they did have the ability to create a longer list of excuses for ignoring the science which they didn't like. A bit like the pandemic, really...
I used to be more tolerant of Green initiatives. After all, who isn't concerned about environmental issues. Then I realised that the lunatics have literally taken over the asylum. My first inkling was when I attended a Green party-sponsored meeting twenty years ago that discussed the then popular topic of Peak Oil. It was the bête noire du jour, the thing that was going to kill off billions of people. How did the Greens react? With something approaching glee -- people would have to cycle to work and a bunch of other things that fitted in with party policy.
Roll forward to today, and oil's refusal to die is now what's allegedly going to kill billions. The Greens continue to push remedies that are worse than the ailment. They seem truly incapable of reasoning about consequences. Or rather, they are running a balance sheet that has only one side. The logic seems to be that the implications of climate change are so dire that there is no need to consider the costs of addressing it, as every cost is obviously justified.
There are three problems with the approach. The first is the basic question of whether current policies are actually effective. They are not. Look at OPEC's latest projections of demand growth for oil and gas, and they see usage continuing to rise through the 2050s. The Green's look the other direction -- at spectacular growth rates for renewables. But when you are starting from a small base and energy demand is growing far faster than renewables can keep up, it means that fossil usage is also increasing. Oil demand continues an inexorable 1.5% annual increase, apart from brief interludes such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic. It was 80 million barrels per day when I went to that Green meeting, it is 100 mmbbl/d now.
Renewables could catch up if they continued on an exponential adoption curve, but they will not. Any technology maturity curve will turn out to be a sigmoid, not an exponential. And in mature markets we are already seeing the curve flattening out for wind and solar.
The second problem with the Green approach is technology overoptimism. It seems like a strange criticism, because they are Luddites with regard to technologies they don't like. But since they have placed all their eggs in the basket of intermittent renewables they are forced to rely on the promise of grid-scale storage technologies. This is one of the biggest lies being peddled. Look anywhere on the internet and you will find tales of upcoming battery revolutions, green hydrogen, algal biofuels, flywheels, solar-heated molten salts, compressed air, cryogenic air, cranes lifting blocks, and so on and on.
Only a basic level of science literacy and numeracy is needed to explode most of these ideas. A single large city has a time-averaged electric power consumption of several gigawatts. The world's largest grid storage battery could power the city of Los Angeles for five minutes and the state of California for twenty seconds. Basic chemistry rules out the possibility of more than a couple of hundred kWh per tonne of batteries. Millions of tonnes of them would be required to power a city for a week. The largest pumped hydro facility could run LA for ten hours, but places that are geographically suitable are few and far between. Hydrogen is beset by storage and handling problems, and let's not forget that today's oil handling infrastructure cost $6 trillion and took 120 years to build. Tomes could be written about the infeasibility of all of the energy storage solutions that are supposedly just round the corner. In 2050, and in 2100, the vast majority of electric power consumed will still be generated on demand.
The third problem is cost. Whether you invent a storage system or need reliable backup power supply, you are doubling up on costs. Add another large whack for increased transmission infrastructure. And it is not just capital costs that will be doubled. Nobody builds power generation capacity without a guaranteed return on the investment. That means you are guaranteeing power purchase agreements for all that power whether it is needed or not. It's the same deal that wind generators get today. There is a myth that wind power has recently become cheaper than conventional power. New farms like Hollandse Kust Noord will be "subsidy free". What that actually means is that they will get a standard wholesale price for power. The problem is that you pay for it even when it is curtailed. If all the planned new North Sea offshore wind comes on stream, it will regularly produce excess power that will be essentially worthless. But producers will still be paid.
The public are taught to distrust the corporate behemoths known as "Big Oil". But nobody's asking any questions about "Big Wind". Those people are in it for guaranteed big returns. In the public mind it's as if beautiful wind turbines sprout like saplings from the land, relying only on nature's bounty to produce endless green energy. In fact, their builders have locked in decades of returns at public expense. Their green credentials deserve scrutiny also. Wind power needs many times as much copper and rare earth elements as more power dense generators. Onshore wind uses more than three tonnes of copper per installed megawatt, solar uses five, and offshore wind nearly ten. They also use close to half a tonne of rare earths, neodymium and praseodymium. China has the current stranglehold on rare earths, and Russia may well become the swing supplier for new copper from the Udokan prospect near Lake Baikal, owned by a Russian billionaire.
In Ireland there is a growing demand for government to explain the cost implications of 70% renewable power by 2030. The government won't comply because it is carrying out a several year "energy review". The likelihood is that we'll see a doubling or tripling of electricity prices. That won't be a problem for me, or for middle class greenies. But for the 20% of the country already in energy poverty it could mean a choice between eating or turning on the lights. In the wider economy, everything that manufacturing industry produces has embodied energy costs. Unfortunately I think we are sleepwalking into energy shortages and high inflation.
Pumped hydro is useful for peak demand- in the UK it is reliably just after Strictly Come Dancing, when the nation collectively goes through to the kitchen and switch on their kettles. We have a big pumped hydro facility in Wales which fulfils the extra demand, but there are also a few interesting projects which utilise defunct stone quarries.
Most people miss the one really cool thing about Tesla's Big Battery- despite only having about 6 hours of storage, its power management significantly cuts customers bills! I do like some of the super grid projects. There is a German company utilising solar around the Sahara and given the reduced labour costs, it will be a cheap source of electricity for European consumers.
The main thing is people are just hysterical about nuclear- or disingenuously argue about its cost. The Swedes and the French seem to have managed the cost burden, and from an engineering/economics perspective although the initial outlay is high and it takes a long time to break even, from that point onwards it's pretty close to free. Of course, the American market baulks at standardisation, but in some areas it's entirely necessary. Hitler might have won the war, had it not been for the difference between Russian and European rail gauges!
Yes, it always fascinates me that the climate alarmists prattle on and on about "denialism" and the imperative to "follow the science", but then the most generally-accepted, best-resourced "science", the IPCC reports, do not in any way justify the kinds of policies they propose.
Too true! I have no doubt that most who want drastic action on climate change are simply misinformed and are largely unaware that significant shifts in the economy could be very harmful globally, but at the same time there are those who would like to see a shift towards more socialist societies and the seizing of great control over the economy. Where do they think the money is going to come from- seizing everything American billionaires own (even if that were possible) would only run existing American government for six months.
Instead the money for their plan would have to come from taxes on ordinary people and a major reduction in Medicare, the Military and Social Security. I wish they could train their YouTube to watch out for climate and engineering- it's what makes me so optimistic- the market solving the problem through venture capital and visionary engineering.
The Chinese are the ones playing it really smart- with the cheap new energy they have developed and are developing they've given themselves a competitive advantage in energy costs for industry which will last well into the next century. They see climate change as one of many serious problems which needs solving this century, and are intent upon being the ones to furnish the solutions at a significant profit.
“This is not to say the man-made climate change is not a serious problem, because it is- albeit a more long-term, rather than immediate, problem than most realise.”
I see no reason to concede this point. We have a poor understanding of the causes of changing climate patterns which predate the industrial revolution by centuries, if not millennia.
My dad always used to say opinions are like arseholes- everybody's got one! On a more serious note I've read the literature quite thoroughly and not found much which isn't easily debunked. I've seen plenty of areas where the climate types get it wrong in terms of impacts, and human adaptability. Of course, the models are completely shit- but modelling is at best a mugs game as are economic projections.
Plus, there ae plenty of reasons why we would want to shift away from petrol cars- at least in cities. For a start there is the fact that catalytic converters don't work anywhere near as efficiently as anyone thinks, and much as many will try to deny it petrol fumes are carcinogenic. Coal burning power plants emit radioactive waste in the form of coal ash. The one thing we should be doing more of is fracking and using more gas. There really does need to be more materials research into coal- with the right science and fabrications philosophy you could set-up high value manufacturing right next door to coal mine. Adani recently got criticised for setting up a PVC facility in India with Australian sourced coal. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/17/adani-blasted-over-toxic-4bn-plan-to-use-australian-coal-to-make-plastic-in-india
From a commercial perspective it's a shite plan. The lead times are too long, for an industry prone to mis-measures and the extrusion process is incredibly sensitive to temperature. Plus, you really want to be close to you market in terms of vertical integration.
Of course, with cars the dynamics are different in rural areas. The technology simply isn't there yet to satisfy most road users, especially in colder climes.
“All models are wrong, some are useful.” Too many are completely fraudulent.
Thanks for the coal to pvc link; interesting.
I’m a believer in keeping coal in the fleet to keep the lights on when the sun don’t shine. Lots of good technology available and likely more to come. Coal to gas has been a bust so far but might get cracked one day.
I agree with everything here, Geary. Very well said. Huge fan!
I do, however, have a question. What do you mean by this phrase…"capitalism does produce gross wealth inequalities."?
I am reading it as that you believe that the inequalities created by voluntary market exchanges is a bad thing. But is this really your view? If so, why?
My take on the issue is that inequality of wages, profits, wealth and so on are absolutely necessary for the market to signal and incentivize change (in behavior, products, labor, etc). Inequality is thus not a bug, but a feature, and a necessary one at that. When markets are combined with a modern state with social safety nets and redistributive features (something true in all developed nations), the extremes of poverty are corrected, and are done so by tapping into the wealth generating power of markets.
So, my question is this… is inequality generated by properly functioning markets really a gross problem?
'I am reading it as that you believe that the inequalities created by voluntary market exchanges is a bad thing. But is this really your view? If so, why?' Well, like all matters of importance, it depends. I don't see a problem with wealth inequality provided we are talking about inert legacies or productive wealth, but there is an extent to which accumulated capital can be used in what can only be described as game rigging.
The obvious example is Gamestop, but it speaks to a broader problem that until recently few within the financial industry knew about 8 year and 80 year debt cycles. Now the knowledge is widespread, and aggregated capital can push the phenomenon to the extent that it controls the timing of market resets. This gives them an inherent advantage over the pension funds and insurers, as well as for many smaller investors.
There is also an extent to which creative destruction is pushed beyond what is rational. Recently there was a fairly big engineering company, with little in the way of paper liabilities and a great balance sheet. Then an American finance company with experience of taking over engineering firms with a view to removing structural costs and spending no money in capital expenditures (to prevent share price depreciation) got involved. Despite any financial gains which may have made in the short-term, there were many smaller investors who were royally pissed off that finance could buy shares it didn't own, and leverage a takeover, simply because everyone knew that the shares would become worthless as service, quality and value declined.
Generally, I'm for productive capital, but there is an extent to which many of the market incentives have become structurally perverse. I can't remember the name of the UK firm, but they were relatively big and had a number of high value, high margin service contracts. Their customer base specifically utilised them because they had reputation for all weather 24-7 reliability.
Again I agree with your examples. I would clarify that I read your concerns as being not with inequality of outcomes, but with unfairness of process.
My issue is that the term "inequality" is being widely used in more than one way, allowing it to work as a "Motte and Bailey" in discussions. Most of us are put off by "unfairness" of rules and systems, but the term "inequality" is much wider than this, and includes legitimate variances in outcomes within a fair system.
Some types of inequality are not just good, but great and necessary. Some types are bad and damaging to the health of the system. However, many voices — especially from the left side — have combined them into a short cut of evidence of inequality is evidence of a problem. This is then used rhetorically to undermine merit and competition and the system in general.
Hope this clarifies rather than muddies the discussion….
Actually, that's a very insightful way of putting it. Fairness vs. Equality. Have you read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, by any chance? If not, then get it- it's probably one of the two books which have influenced me the most heavily in the past decade.
Generally, people further down the socio-economic spectrum, especially those without highly educated parents or outside of the cosmopolitan liberal bubble tend to think more in terms of fairness. Equality is found most heavily in Left-leaning liberals. Here is the Moral Foundations test if you are interested: https://www.idrlabs.com/morality/6/test.php .
It's also why Democrats more wacky ideas don't tend to play well with many of their core constituencies, unless they directly impact on their communities specific interests. The inequality mantra is even worse when it is phrases as equity- that's a direct translation for socialism, especially when tied to opportunity distribution.
What they really need to do is fix the pipeline of K-12. The discussion about charter vs. public whilst valid, is a distraction from the key flaw in education over the last forty years. Postmodern thinking has devalued the notion of knowledge. Even Foucault (or possible Lacan?) complained bitterly about students who weren't sufficiently grounded in science and Western culture in order to sufficiently critique it- so how on Earth educational theorists expect to know how to apply postmodernism to children's education when they don't their Bayes from their Bernoulli, I'll never understand.
What they should be applying is cognitive load theory- it explains how the human brain learns and has the merit of working in practice. Educators are now beginning to use it- it's becoming quite the fad- but yet again they've stripped out the really important bit, which is getting kids to commit vast tracts of useable knowledge to long-term memory.
It's simple- our working memory is puny. In order to perform anything beyond relatively simple cognitive tasks, one needs to be able to draw upon your long-term memory store with ease. It is not enough to be able to work out 9 x 7, you have to have 63 flick up from your memory without even thinking about it. This is why so many kids suffer from Maths trauma and why so few read for pleasure- because they haven't been equipped with the basic building blocks which allow these things to be done with ease.
Some schools use these techniques- they also tend to be the ones which insist upon strict low-level discipline such as detentions, and consistency across every class in relation to the disciplinary code. Using this approach a state-run school in the second poorest borough in London managed to send more kids to Oxbridge than Eton- it's also high crime and predominantly Black, and here in the UK we still mainly select on the basis of grey matter: https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/education/east-ham-school-praises-pupils-for-oxbridge-offers-7821746
Yes, I have read Haidt and taken his test. I am a big fan of his too.
Well said, and thanks for sharing your institutional knowledge from across the Atlantic. Always insightful.
Trying to look for a silver lining to the US problem with education, perhaps the kerfuffle over CRT can embolden the wiser voices to demand that parents be given a paid waiver to the school of their choice if their public school embraces the "neoracism" of CRT. In other words, any school not specifically forbidding CRT in any and all of of its neoracist guises (as defined by critics, not adherents), should lose any right to demand parents take their children there. This would either break the public school monopoly or at least force parent driven common sense reform.
Well, I'm not a teacher- but I do come a family of teachers, and have taught line workers how to use computers from scratch (if that counts). I also taught progress chaser how to stand up to senior managers armed with nothing but a pack of multicoloured highlighter pens and a recent printed tracking report (which I designed)- they do so love to see problems structuralised.
I like reading research across a broad range of topics. On the education topic I would highly recommend John McWhorter on phonics. When my mother was a senior teacher (she is retired now) she had a teacher trainee who told her phonics was all wrong- it was news to her, she had been using it successfully for decades. It's actually both phonics and whole word/language- we sound out the word first and then look at the broader context, if it's a word with which we are unfamiliar.
Climate change is only one of the many problems we would need to deal with.
There's also mass life extinction, mass pollution of the air, water and soils, the coming energy crisis, etc. And we're going to have to deal with everything, at the same time. Which is why it seems impossible to do so.
Increased difficulty to access clean water, for drinkink and food production, the increase of droughts in many places such as the Mediterranean periphery will undoubtedly throw millions on the road for their survival. Crises will make countries more unstable, especially those which already don't enjoy full stability.
The destruction of forests all over the globe, in Amazonia, Africa, on Sumatra, Java, Borneo, etc will only make things worse.
When I heard that Elon Musk was offering a $100M prize to anyone who'd find the best carbon capture technology, I couldn't help but think that was the most stupid idea I had ever heard.
Techno-fascination leads intelligent people to completely lose track of reality.
The best CO2 capture technology already exists and always has, it's called trees and plants.
If he really wants to help, he should use his billions to buy all primal forests on the planet to put an absolute stop to deforestation, and buy back the land claimed for intensive farming, palm oil and soy growing to let the forests regenerate. But then that's a lot less "sexy" than connected toys and gadgets.
Something that the article does not take into account is that, considering that growth keeps on being our motivation and objective, if we postulate that in 20, 30, 40 years time, millions more human will have access to what the West has enjoyed in terms of goods, equipment, infrastructures, whether it being medical, educational, urban, etc and all the wealth and comfort that goes with it, where will we find the resources to make everything we need for an ever growing number of people living by Western standards ?
In 40, 400, or 4,000 years, the earths will still be 13,000km in diametre. All the resources we would need to sustain billions living like Americans or Europeans won't just magically appear, out of thin air, just because we need them.
I'd like to point out that I am not a "socialist", not by American standards in any way, and I am a fierce opponent to the whole woke madness engulfing the world right now.
Yet I think the limits imposed by physics should help us understand that capitalism as it is today cannot go on sustainably, whether we like it or not. We're in for a diet, either planned wisely, or forced upon us by the reality of physics.
Forever chemicals are a worry, as is the erosion of coastal nurseries through unsustainable fishing practices (always buy you scallops dive caught). The mass life extinction and deforestation you speak of is as a result of human activity and is a byproduct of economic desperation. It turns out when a country reaches about $5,000 per person per year, they end-up caring about things like air quality and the environment- which is one of the reasons why China is now devoting resources to recovering vast areas of what were once deserts into forests and productive farmland.
Where the West has singularly failed was in substituting foreign aid for genuine free market opportunity, because when people earn more they have fewer kids and treat the environment with more respect. Coal-fired power plants in the Developing World may be bad, but they are far less worse than using kerosene for cooking, which was, until quite recently common practice in many regions.
Here in the Northern hemisphere we now have more trees and natural forest than we did one hundred years ago. People make better custodians of the planet when they have relatively more wealth than our predecessors. If the current population were forced back to the late 19th C or to pre-industrial lifestyles, then it be game over instantly because everyone would have to burn trees to stay alive in winter.
'The best CO2 capture technology already exists and always has, it's called trees and plants.' Great point. It's already happening. Higher yields through more intensive farming have led to huge tracts of land being put back to fallow through the process called wilding. A recent YouTube source from the Economist highlighted a study which showed that optimally this process could lead to around 20 years worth of carbon sequestration through reforestation.
You should claim Elon Musk's prize. However, one other thing we could do is reverse the drainage channels which currently make farming possible in places like Louisiana with a view to making the area a huge onshore fishery/shrimp farm very much like the one is Spain. Not only would this sequester a huge amount of carbon, but it would also critically ease ocean fishing. Fish are an incredibly important part of the marine life cycle. Without the remains left by the predation of other species, marine plant biomass begins to decline. By creating onshore fish resources where possible and protecting their nurseries, countries can make a huge impact in terms of replenishing the marine life cycle.
Shellfish farms, especially of mussels, clams and the like should be promoted as a part of every Westerners diet once a week. It's the shells you see. It's a perfectly natural way of stripping carbon out of the oceans, reducing acidification. If you do decide to submit the idea to Elon Musk then please remember me when you're allocating shares.
On energy, the only answer is nuclear- to at least 40% to 60% of base load energy. Sweden and France are the two prime examples- France in particular has proven far more successful in tackling climate change than either Germany or California, and their energy is cheap. A maximum of 3,000 people have been killed by nuclear power, and countless millions have been saved by it, from not having to breathe in radioactive coal ash.
You are right about Western levels of consumption. But this is changing. Within 20 years our methods of consumption will have changed. We are already dematerialising significant segments of our economy. Do you want to know the one thing which would make things change more quickly. Start a consumer pressure group to make Amazon allow users to search by length of guarantee or warrantee. A computer screen which lasts 20 years rather than five, massively eases the consumption of raw material. How about T-shirts that last 10 years. I met a guy in a fish restaurant once who started the trend towards using used clothes in airplane seats, and even in the Ford Focus.
We do need to change, but they need to be sensible changes. A movement towards more sustainable forms of sourcing materials and goods. High quality wood furniture which lasts for example, is a great way of sequestering carbon and a relatively good investment over time.
The other thing to remember is that we are not replacing our populations anywhere except for in Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East- even India is slightly negative now. We just don't see it yet because people in the developing world are living much longer. For the moment, this trend will be largely invisible- but by 2050 the reversal will be evident, because even with modern medicine people can only live so long. And the other thing to bear in mind is that as people become older, they naturally become more frugal and less consumptive, unless we're talking about restaurants, gardening centres, home improvements and Viking river cruises.
You are right to be concerned. But I wouldn't worry or panic. Plus, it's always best to remember that any proposed solutions will have trade-offs. The one thing to consider is that EVs still have a way to go in reducing their green premium, and there is ample room in the current price profile for significant improvements. When the price comes down, sales will shoot up. Especially in Europe, where car journeys tend to be more local, there is real demand for cheaper EVs. The smart thing to do would be to introduce congestion charges in every major city- as well as parking options exclusive to EVs. This is a very specific form of carbon tax I am heavily in favour of, because it has all manner of life-saving and improving potentials.
When I say I am a techno-optimist I'm not talking about gadget or toys- I don't own a mobile phone and I built this PC in 2012- the only things I have changed are the graphics card and moved to a SSD. But there are really great project out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFIHecZDfc - this is the NEOM project with technology developed by Cranfield University in the UK, and could have profound implication in terms of regreening like tracts of high population areas which are basically deserts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4 This is from Ocean Cleanup and it will make you cry (or at least it did me). You seem like a nice person. I would heavily recommend training your YouTube to give you climate and engineering content. For me, it happened purely by chance- but it certainly helped me feel a good deal more optimistic about the world we live in. I would also recommend Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now!
I can't help but think that you tend to ommit limitations imposed by physics and the earth's natural resources potential output.
As for energy, I agree that nuclear is the way to go. I am French so I do enjoy cheap and reliable electricity. Yet the French nuclear industry has been declining in the past 20-30 years, as we have been relying on our existing nuclear plants and pressure from ideologically driven green parties and NGOs has made it difficult to support the industry. Still, out electricity is over 90% carbon free, but for how long if we do not build new nuclear plants? We were world leaders of this industry in the second half of the 20th century, it is no longer the case.
I agree that we need to make more durable things.
Yet, I do not see how we can enforce this when the whole system is built on growth, making new things at an ever faster pace and selling ever more units of everything, trying to conquer new markets, etc.
Some people may decide, individually, to live a more sustainable life, but they represent a tiny fraction of the Western civilisation, and numbers increase slowly.
That has close to zero effect on the economic system, still designed to make more, sell more, etc. Plus the fact that it is a global system, in which almost every country is involved. How to you plan to convince 150+ countries and thousands of corporations to cease operating in a way that has made them rich for decades?
As for world population, I wasn't talking about gross population increase, only about those who are already here and striving to catch up with us.
Even if world population caps at around 8 billion, there will still be resources problems.
Even if we managed to lower our resources consumption, say by 25% in a short period of time - which I consider unrealistic - , when hundreds of millions of people currently in relative poverty reach 75% of our current level of wealth and development, there will still be a resources problem.
Recycling is of course necessary but has limitations, for example plastic cannot be reused more than a few times. And overall levels of recycling are shockingly low.
You might say we should recycle more. Sure! But I doubt we'll reach 70%+ levels of recycling worldwide quickly enough before there's more plastic than plancton or fish in the oceans.
Again, things are moving, they always are, but far too slowly relatively to the urgency of the many problems we are facing at the same time. Hoping that, without changing the current system too much, we will somehow find magical solutions to solve our problems isn't the best bet I wouuld make.
As for dematerialsation, you seem to forget that a "virtual" anything relies on concrete, material things, data centers, infrastructures, more computers, tablets, more power plants to power more of everything related to it. If they are carbon free, that would be better, but I am not sure the current general trend is in favour of more nuclear.
Over 25% of CO2 emissions worldwide come from coal fired plants, and coal has never been in decline for decades, contrary to what many people think. I don't think we're going to stop building new ones tomorrow morning.
It will take time, time we no longer have.
So more dematerialisation means more resources pumped out of the ground, more stuff manufactured and more energy demand.
Not to mention the fact that everything in our daily lives is becoming "connected" or autonomous.
That's 10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, +10% every year on average. And there's no sign it's going to stop anytime soon.
Your point seems to be - correct me if i'm wrong - that, whatever happens, the current economic system will manage to produce viable solutions, mostly technological, or through marginal adjustments, and that the current system does not really need structural reforms.
I'm not an anti-capitalist, I have enjoyed the fruits of it as anybody else in the West, I just feel that this won't be enough.
Most of the time, when a factory is built for example, the best solutions available regarding the environment are discarded because "it's too expensive" and would impair competitiveness and profits. I am not blaming a company for seeking profit, i'm only saying that with this system, outside of any personal judgement, our grand-children will be dead when we are still struggling to decide and do the best things possible to save what can be saved.
I think I understand your point, and my take on it is that business as usual or almost as usual won't be enough.
I know about the Ocean Cleanup project (and many others such as this one). It's great, but its scale is a minuscule fraction of what it should be have a sicgnificant impact quickly. Again, Musk and his colleagues in mega-wealth should give them millions to buid more of their machines to speed up the process. But they are not doing so.
So in 5, 10 years, millions of tonnes of plastic will still have been dumped into our oceans, and the Ocean Cleanup will still be painstakingly trying to get funds to do more. Not enough, not quickly enough, which is my main point about the whole issue.
There seems to be an invisible hand of the market whereby the more a country's population becomes wealthy the shoddier the longevity of the goods sold it. I can vouch for this in a trivial way. In 2000, I bought socks from a store specializing in Indian imports. Today I still have those socks, a few of which are finally wearing out. In those 21 years, I have bought innumerable pairs of socks made for the U. S. market that last at most a year. Reversing this trend, as you point out, would make great strides towards reducing waste and resource depletion.
Forever chemicals are a worry, as is the erosion of coastal nurseries through unsustainable fishing practices (always buy you scallops dive caught). The mass life extinction and deforestation you speak of is as a result of human activity and is a byproduct of economic desperation. It turns out when a country reaches about $5,000 per person per year, they end-up caring about things like air quality and the environment- which is one of the reasons why China is now devoting resources to recovering vast areas of what were once deserts into forests and productive farmland.
Where the West has singularly failed was in substituting foreign aid for genuine free market opportunity, because when people earn more they have fewer kids and treat the environment with more respect. Coal-fired power plants in the Developing World may be bad, but they are far less worse than using kerosene for cooking, which was, until quite recently common practice in many regions.
Here in the Northern hemisphere we now have more trees and natural forest than we did one hundred years ago. People make better custodians of the planet when they have relatively more wealth than our predecessors. If the current population were forced back to the late 19th C or to pre-industrial lifestyles, then it be game over instantly because everyone would have to burn trees to stay alive in winter.
'The best CO2 capture technology already exists and always has, it's called trees and plants.' Great point. It's already happening. Higher yields through more intensive farming have led to huge tracts of land being put back to fallow through the process called wilding. A recent YouTube source from the Economist highlighted a study which showed that optimally this process could lead to around 20 years worth of carbon sequestration through reforestation.
You should claim Elon Musk's prize. However, one other thing we could do is reverse the drainage channels which currently make farming possible in places like Louisiana with a view to making the area a huge onshore fishery/shrimp farm very much like the one is Spain. Not only would this sequester a huge amount of carbon, but it would also critically ease ocean fishing. Fish are an incredibly important part of the marine life cycle. Without the remains left by the predation of other species, marine plant biomass begins to decline. By creating onshore fish resources where possible and protecting their nurseries, countries can make a huge impact in terms of replenishing the marine life cycle.
Shellfish farms, especially of mussels, clams and the like should be promoted as a part of every Westerners diet once a week. It's the shells you see. It's a perfectly natural way of stripping carbon out of the oceans, reducing acidification. If you do decide to submit the idea to Elon Musk then please remember me when you're allocating shares.
On energy, the only answer is nuclear- to at least 40% to 60% of base load energy. Sweden and France are the two prime examples- France in particular has proven far more successful in tackling climate change than either Germany or California, and their energy is cheap. A maximum of 3,000 people have been killed by nuclear power, and countless millions have been saved by it, from not having to breathe in radioactive coal ash.
You are right about Western levels of consumption. But this is changing. Within 20 years our methods of consumption will have changed. We are already dematerialising significant segments of our economy. Do you want to know the one thing which would make things change more quickly. Start a consumer pressure group to make Amazon allow users to search by length of guarantee or warrantee. A computer screen which lasts 20 years rather than five, massively eases the consumption of raw material. How about T-shirts that last 10 years. I met a guy in a fish restaurant once who started the trend towards using used clothes in airplane seats, and even in the Ford Focus.
We do need to change, but they need to be sensible changes. A movement towards more sustainable forms of sourcing materials and goods. High quality wood furniture which lasts for example, is a great way of sequestering carbon and a relatively good investment over time.
The other thing to remember is that we are not replacing our populations anywhere except for in Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East- even India is slightly negative now. We just don't see it yet because people in the developing world are living much longer. For the moment, this trend will be largely invisible- but by 2050 the reversal will be evident, because even with modern medicine people can only live so long. And the other thing to bear in mind is that as people become older, they naturally become more frugal and less consumptive, unless we're talking about restaurants, gardening centres, home improvements and Viking river cruises.
You are right to be concerned. But I wouldn't worry or panic. Plus, it's always best to remember that any proposed solutions will have trade-offs. The one thing to consider is that EVs still have a way to go in reducing their green premium, and there is ample room in the current price profile for significant improvements. When the price comes down, sales will shoot up. Especially in Europe, where car journeys tend to be more local, there is real demand for cheaper EVs. The smart thing to do would be to introduce congestion charges in every major city- as well as parking options exclusive to EVs. This is a very specific form of carbon tax I am heavily in favour of, because it has all manner of life-saving and improving potentials.
When I say I am a techno-optimist I'm not talking about gadget or toys- I don't own a mobile phone and I built this PC in 2012- the only things I have changed are the graphics card and moved to a SSD. But there are really great project out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFIHecZDfc - this is the NEOM project with technology developed by Cranfield University in the UK, and could have profound implication in terms of regreening like tracts of high population areas which are basically deserts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4 This is from Ocean Cleanup and it will make you cry (or at least it did me). You seem like a nice person. I would heavily recommend training your YouTube to give you climate and engineering content. For me, it happened purely by chance- but it certainly helped me feel a good deal more optimistic about the world we live in. I would also recommend Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now!
I agree wholeheartedly. If we destroy the engine of technological progress, we won’t be able to use it to solve the very real challenges we need it to solve. And on the whole, technological trends are decidedly good for the environment. Look at dematerialization for instance.
I’ll have to check out the Honest Broker. I’m not familiar with his work.
Some humility, please, Mr. Johansen. There are some things that we humans cannot comprehend: climate change being one. There are simply too many variables, too many unknowns to make meaningful predictions hundreds of years into the future.
My point would be that the actual science of the IPCC is far removed from the climate alarmism that we read about in the media and hear from our politicians. Best estimates place the annual economic impact of climate change on the economy by 2100 will be around 3%, set against a backdrop of 300% to 1000% of GDP growth predicted, primarily in the Developing World.
And with the possible exception of China, who are keen to exploit new markets, it is market innovation which is transforming our world for the better, not governments (although they could do more by assuming the sovereign risk of nuclear power, with its cheap and safe base load energy). It's not by accident that Sweden and France are leading the world in producing a carbon free energy sector, vastly outperforming Germany and California. Top estimates of deaths from nuclear power hover around the 3,000 mark, whilst the cleaner air it allows has saved millions.
I agree with you about models and predictions- but on a positive note it now appears that the potential 'Black Swan' of methane hydrate release is less of a risk than initially feared. Recent monitoring of methane release in coastal areas has shown that it is governed by the tidal cycles of the moon- slightly higher water levels, means far less methane release. https://www.livescience.com/moon-trigger-methane-release-arctic.html . It's also worth noting that more methane release from seas than previously estimated in the 2018 IPCC special report actually makes the immediacy of the problem less, not more (because it shows a greater impact in the climate in response to human activity).
If you look at this graph: https://www.realclimate.org/images//sr15_spm_fig1.png , you'll find it places the central line of ACTUAL change through human activity, lower down the graph range of possible scenarios for external mitigation or exacerbation of man-made climate change, pointing to a problem which becomes less worse (within the possible range) over time.
Plus, its worth revisiting what we know about methane, despite being a gas 30 times more potent than CO2 as a global warming agent, it breaks down in the upper atmosphere over 15 years through hydroxyl interaction. My point would be we need leaders who are willing to take the sensible path towards energy infrastructure investment and innovation, rather than spending all our money on wind and solar, which may be crowd-pleasing, but can only be a small part of the solution for our energy sector and by no means decisive in tackling climate change- especially as the slowly reducing green premium on EVs comes down and our energy sector demands significantly rise.
And do a valid government role of taxing negative externalities that free markets do not take into account. Taxation for winning political points against others is no way to run a nation.
I have never quite understood the equation of socialism with environmental friendliness. Certainly capitalist greed produces some true horror stories but it also has the capacity to create some incredibly advanced sustainable exploitation mechanisms. Socialist systems offer no such advantage. I can only think that the constant propaganda 'socialism is modern therefore it is good' pulls the wool over peoples eyes most effectively. Perhaps abandoning the shibboleth that socialism is a modern system is the way forward.
Well, I think part of its appeal comes from attracting people who live in the world of ideas, and therein lies a susceptibility to desire to see the world as the way one wants it to be, rather than the way it is. Blank Slatism and Lysenkoism are other examples, but the more powerful appeal of Socialism is that it comes with ready-made villains and an invitation to personal heroism. To be sure, Capitalism does produce a small percentage of villains sufficient to confirm the legend to budding Socialists, as all good legends contain a small element of truth, but as for its promises they can be considered little more than a myth and a harmful one at that.
I am however considering writing an essay on the Basque worker owner model of Mondragon, if for no better reason that it provides an alternate solution to Capitalism in that its community capitalism provides workers with owning the means of production without inviting the State to own everything. Perhaps if I provide a positive example, with none of the glaring inequalities which drive cosmopolitan liberals crazy and prods them to want to invoke State force and coercion, it might provide them with a more libertarian and community orientated vision, people not to their liking might be able to live with- at a distance.
That will be interesting. My personal take, for what it's worth, is that socialism exploits the innate sense of fairness we all possess. This then feeds into equality of treatment or equality of opportunity. The former is the socialist approach and can safely be summarized as free lunches for everyone for ever. But this is significant, it is successfully marketed as fair. So when a socialist state boasts of having eliminated poverty what they really mean is that everyone is poor. Government action is sometimes necessary but it needs to focus on what is necessary for society's benefit whilst allowing freedom.
If you accept liberty, then people are free to trade for "greed" or for "community." The key is the trade is voluntary, it's not propped up by the state, and negative externalities are addressed. Capitalism doesn't reject coops.
I largely agree- with one exception- law relating to third parties. Here in the UK, we have fairly strong laws which make it clear that if you buy a property from a seller, you also buy any contractual obligations which may be attached to the business or property in relation to third parties.
This works as well for employee pension rights as it does for owners of static homes whose lower housing costs are dependent upon the previously negotiated rents and utility charges. Probably one of the worst examples of American laxness in terms of third party standing was when the government itself sold people's mortgages through the FDIC (Freddie and Fannie) at terms which allowed for repossession, even when there were no arrears and the repayments were close to the end of the payment schedule.
This allowed the mortgage companies to sell out the house from under the mortgage holder and then repurchase it well below market value in what was, in effect, an auction with only one bidder. Several brave judges at various levels actually denied standing to the companies in court, in what can only be seen as a brave stand against the diktats of federal government. Needless to say, it was not broadly covered by legacy media- although a few local news stations did pick it up.
That's just nasty and I didn't realize it ever happened. But I'm not sure how breaking any contracts by government force is an "exception" unless it was somehow tied to bankruptcy.
Sure. But say I sell you my ride-on, but neglect to mention I've got a standing contract with my neighbour to rent it out once a fortnight. Would you then be responsible for ensuring the neighbour had access to the lawnmower? Of course you would- it's caveat emptor. But you would also be perfectly free to sue me.
The thing is in America these sorts of third party obligations are rarely insisted upon in a court of law.
Not sure what a "standing contract" is but if it's like verbal/handshake, that is unlikely to protect you if the asset is sold. That would be a bad scenario, to be sure, without a written agreement, and of course the seller would have sold it without proper disclosure of the "standing contract" if it were to remain in effect as new owners are typically free to change any future rental agreements.
Capitalism has no way to force anything. If it does, it's likely fascism is at play (cronyism of the right) or socialism (cronyism of the left). The excesses of capitalism are only a real issue of there's a negative externality that isn't being addressed. The speed and power of free markets is great so long as it's tempered against those externalities, just like liberty must be tempered by the rights of others.
I always enjoy your writing, Geary. This one is a topic close to my heart. I've been reading the various IPCC summaries since before AR5, along with selected original academic research. A few years ago I was so perplexed by the mismatch between what the science actually says and what the media reports, that I set about reading the papers behind the headlines (in those cases where any were cited). The distortions are frightening. Some months ago the Guardian splashed a headline that 20 feet of short term sea level rise was all but guaranteed (which was nothing like what the background paper said). There are regular alarmist reports on the BBC and elsewhere about sea level rise when the subjects are actually coastal cities on the worlds major river deltas which are subsiding due to river culverting and unsustainable groundwater extraction.
The linkage of singular climatic events to climate change is likewise misleading in the extreme. In many cases, rates of burning, flooding, storms etc. are the same as historical norms. In ALL cases, the toll on human life is a tiny fraction of its historical impact, and that's even before allowing for population increases. Just look at the last thousand years of flooding in the North Sea basin. Regular concurrences of onshore winds, high tides, and low pressure systems have produced devastating storm surges with decadal frequency. The impacts on low-lying coasts are horrific -- up to a hundred thousand deaths from some single events, and an average of ten thousand deaths each decade. As you will know, the barriers in the Thames and Rhine estuaries and other coastal works have made this mostly a thing of the past since the last killer floods of 1953.
In short, the effects of climate change -- while significant and certainly not to be ignored -- will be best mitigated by affluent societies capable of responding appropriately. The very last thing we need is to be starved of the energy on which modernity utterly depends. The irony is that the technologies best suited to the task are with us now: natural gas as a transitional fuel and Gen III and IV nuclear in the long run. Unfortunately we risk being the victims of Green ideology which has favoured unsuitable and unworkable solutions. Countries like my own (Ireland) now face an energy crisis due to reliance on wind which has failed to produce the goods for much of this summer.
Yet we seem determined to double down, going from 40% of power from renewables to 70% by 2030. That means that wind will be expected to provide 95% of power much of the time, to hit a 70% average. It will also have to cope with increased demand from EVs and electric heating if the Greens get their way, and with the complete retirement of coal and oil-fired generators. Meanwhile all new offshore gas exploration has been banned, and the Greens have shot down a much needed LNG import terminal because of their antipathy towards US fracking. We are a high tech country, with data centres expected to consume over 25% of power by 2030. But we have now been told we face grid instability for the next five years because of lack of investment in baseload power. We are also reliant on gas and electricity interconnectors to the UK which is facing its own energy cliff.
Worst of all is that a significant segment of the population is convinced that the world will literally burst into flames in the foreseeable a future. Adults decide not to have children, and children suffer from debilitating anxiety, all because of a fabricated horror story that has been concocted by a media seeking to attract more eyeballs.
Scientists are not immune either. I have been reading academic papers for long enough to see that there have been inexplicably bad predictions even for short term change. One "Ehrlichian" prediction from 2009 was that West African crop yields would fall by 25% by 2020 due to seasonal shift in rainfall patterns and other effects. In fact, crop yields rose by around 15%. Especially in Africa, the potential for better land management to increase yields is enormous.
Another paper reported that 50% of the worlds grain belts would be affected by climate change by 2100. This was dutifully reported in the press as a loss of 50% of the worlds grain. Of course, the paper says nothing of the sort -- northward shifts of grain belts into the Canadian prairies and Siberian steppes could increase the worlds available arable land. Needless to say such changes could be disruptive, but they are not the civilisational catastrophes (let alone extinction level events) that are being touted.
As you pointed out, the economic impact of climate change is barely a rounding error compared to the growth in global GDP by 2100, as long as we don't shoot our own feet off. Again, this is all available in the IMF's own modelling from the last two years.
I wonder if a backlash from a duped public is overdue. I somehow doubt it. The man in the street is not going to suddenly start reading academic papers. And yet, the UK's recent energy concerns just in time for COP26 later this month seem like an interesting opportunity for a clash of ideas.
Great comment, mate. We sound quite similar in our research habits. On a personal note, I spent decades with the persistent worry of climate change nagging away in the back of my brain, before finally coming across some of the lukewarmers and going direct to the source to allay my fears.
Here are a couple of gems from Helen Dale, an Aussie journalist and commentator here in the UK. In 2019, the internet (and particularly in relation to smartphone usage) had a larger carbon footprint than all air travel globally- so perhaps we should ban all social media, and introduce a time limit per day on smartphone usage of one hour (for mental health reasons).
It might be possible to return to a pre-intensive model of crop farming here in the UK, but it would require a shift in the labour inputs from 1% to 2% of the working age population to around 30%! Given that young people should be fit enough to handle farm labour (I certainly was, decades ago) we should shorten the academic year for all students in higher education (other than STEM) to six months and ask the students to work the farms for the rest of the year!
I totally agree with you on the agriculture. Coming from an agricultural region of the UK, I was perhaps better equipped to dismiss some of the more preposterous claims in relation to soil sequestration and the like. Steven Pinker briefly covered it in Enlightenment Now!, but not at anywhere near the resolution level the topic deserves. I think the Economist on YouTube might have covered the recent research paper, which showed that higher yields could account for up to 20 years worth of carbon sequestration in terms of global carbon emissions through fallow land returning to forests and woodlands- here in the UK, the wilded lands can often create more economic value than the farms did- through shooting, private angling and nature tourism.
One of my real pet hates is the classification of wood pellets as a green technology. Many of the forests being displaced are not slated for regrowth, but more often will slated for palm oil plantations. According to a friend of mine who received a degree in Environmental Science from the UEA, it was bad policy when it was a biofuel subsidy, just as it is bad idea now- rainforest depletion does eventually get paid back in palm oil production, but only after 690 years! Plus, it's an unfair competitive advantage and has forced far more benign forestry in other parts of the world out of business completely (which could also be made more climate friendly, through brush burns and the biochar it works into the soil).
Have you been reading about the NEOM project and the work that Cranfield University have been doing in association with Saudi Arabia? Here is YouTube video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFIHecZDfc&t=366s . It all has profound implications for desalination technologies- if it bloody works! Here is the thing, if people actually did their research and trained their YouTube to look for climate and engineering, they would shift straight into the techno-optimist column.
I think a lot of it is the psychological effects of petrol cars on modern societies- it creates the illusion that nothing is being done about climate change. There seems to be a tendency to anthropomorphise Mother Nature and feel as though we should all somehow be punished for our crimes against nature. There is something akin to an ecological puritanism which runs down the middle of the more dark green elements of climate activism.
I still think there will be tragic consequences. Many species will die out through habitat loss, especially through human activity. Tropical diseases and parasites have the potential to migrate. Our oceans are a complete bloody mess (Carnegie science did an experiment with an inland seawater island lagoon- and found that reefs can handle either acidification or temperature rise, but not both- they used hydrogen peroxide to change the pH). There a couple of really interesting research projects on coral reef replenishment which only need combining and an investment from a billionaire philanthropist to work- plus, there are early signs that reefs are moving to what were once slightly colder waters.
Onshore Wind does actually rate as a contributory solution with both Bjorn Lomborg and the Drawdown team, but what people forget about solar is the installation cost, which is static- unless you locate it in poorer countries, or make the cells longer life/more efficient. I have had several greenies start to get really annoyed with me when I start talking about base load energy, seasonality, battery charge decline and the difference between green and grey hydrogen!
In terms of our leaders and scientists, one of things which I am really concerned about is bias lock. They ran an experiment on scientific information and biases with two types of information source- one which detracted from the need for urgent change and one which supported more drastic action. Smart people were no different from those who were less so, in terms of motivated bias, but they did have the ability to create a longer list of excuses for ignoring the science which they didn't like. A bit like the pandemic, really...
I used to be more tolerant of Green initiatives. After all, who isn't concerned about environmental issues. Then I realised that the lunatics have literally taken over the asylum. My first inkling was when I attended a Green party-sponsored meeting twenty years ago that discussed the then popular topic of Peak Oil. It was the bête noire du jour, the thing that was going to kill off billions of people. How did the Greens react? With something approaching glee -- people would have to cycle to work and a bunch of other things that fitted in with party policy.
Roll forward to today, and oil's refusal to die is now what's allegedly going to kill billions. The Greens continue to push remedies that are worse than the ailment. They seem truly incapable of reasoning about consequences. Or rather, they are running a balance sheet that has only one side. The logic seems to be that the implications of climate change are so dire that there is no need to consider the costs of addressing it, as every cost is obviously justified.
There are three problems with the approach. The first is the basic question of whether current policies are actually effective. They are not. Look at OPEC's latest projections of demand growth for oil and gas, and they see usage continuing to rise through the 2050s. The Green's look the other direction -- at spectacular growth rates for renewables. But when you are starting from a small base and energy demand is growing far faster than renewables can keep up, it means that fossil usage is also increasing. Oil demand continues an inexorable 1.5% annual increase, apart from brief interludes such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic. It was 80 million barrels per day when I went to that Green meeting, it is 100 mmbbl/d now.
Renewables could catch up if they continued on an exponential adoption curve, but they will not. Any technology maturity curve will turn out to be a sigmoid, not an exponential. And in mature markets we are already seeing the curve flattening out for wind and solar.
The second problem with the Green approach is technology overoptimism. It seems like a strange criticism, because they are Luddites with regard to technologies they don't like. But since they have placed all their eggs in the basket of intermittent renewables they are forced to rely on the promise of grid-scale storage technologies. This is one of the biggest lies being peddled. Look anywhere on the internet and you will find tales of upcoming battery revolutions, green hydrogen, algal biofuels, flywheels, solar-heated molten salts, compressed air, cryogenic air, cranes lifting blocks, and so on and on.
Only a basic level of science literacy and numeracy is needed to explode most of these ideas. A single large city has a time-averaged electric power consumption of several gigawatts. The world's largest grid storage battery could power the city of Los Angeles for five minutes and the state of California for twenty seconds. Basic chemistry rules out the possibility of more than a couple of hundred kWh per tonne of batteries. Millions of tonnes of them would be required to power a city for a week. The largest pumped hydro facility could run LA for ten hours, but places that are geographically suitable are few and far between. Hydrogen is beset by storage and handling problems, and let's not forget that today's oil handling infrastructure cost $6 trillion and took 120 years to build. Tomes could be written about the infeasibility of all of the energy storage solutions that are supposedly just round the corner. In 2050, and in 2100, the vast majority of electric power consumed will still be generated on demand.
The third problem is cost. Whether you invent a storage system or need reliable backup power supply, you are doubling up on costs. Add another large whack for increased transmission infrastructure. And it is not just capital costs that will be doubled. Nobody builds power generation capacity without a guaranteed return on the investment. That means you are guaranteeing power purchase agreements for all that power whether it is needed or not. It's the same deal that wind generators get today. There is a myth that wind power has recently become cheaper than conventional power. New farms like Hollandse Kust Noord will be "subsidy free". What that actually means is that they will get a standard wholesale price for power. The problem is that you pay for it even when it is curtailed. If all the planned new North Sea offshore wind comes on stream, it will regularly produce excess power that will be essentially worthless. But producers will still be paid.
The public are taught to distrust the corporate behemoths known as "Big Oil". But nobody's asking any questions about "Big Wind". Those people are in it for guaranteed big returns. In the public mind it's as if beautiful wind turbines sprout like saplings from the land, relying only on nature's bounty to produce endless green energy. In fact, their builders have locked in decades of returns at public expense. Their green credentials deserve scrutiny also. Wind power needs many times as much copper and rare earth elements as more power dense generators. Onshore wind uses more than three tonnes of copper per installed megawatt, solar uses five, and offshore wind nearly ten. They also use close to half a tonne of rare earths, neodymium and praseodymium. China has the current stranglehold on rare earths, and Russia may well become the swing supplier for new copper from the Udokan prospect near Lake Baikal, owned by a Russian billionaire.
In Ireland there is a growing demand for government to explain the cost implications of 70% renewable power by 2030. The government won't comply because it is carrying out a several year "energy review". The likelihood is that we'll see a doubling or tripling of electricity prices. That won't be a problem for me, or for middle class greenies. But for the 20% of the country already in energy poverty it could mean a choice between eating or turning on the lights. In the wider economy, everything that manufacturing industry produces has embodied energy costs. Unfortunately I think we are sleepwalking into energy shortages and high inflation.
Pumped hydro is useful for peak demand- in the UK it is reliably just after Strictly Come Dancing, when the nation collectively goes through to the kitchen and switch on their kettles. We have a big pumped hydro facility in Wales which fulfils the extra demand, but there are also a few interesting projects which utilise defunct stone quarries.
Most people miss the one really cool thing about Tesla's Big Battery- despite only having about 6 hours of storage, its power management significantly cuts customers bills! I do like some of the super grid projects. There is a German company utilising solar around the Sahara and given the reduced labour costs, it will be a cheap source of electricity for European consumers.
The main thing is people are just hysterical about nuclear- or disingenuously argue about its cost. The Swedes and the French seem to have managed the cost burden, and from an engineering/economics perspective although the initial outlay is high and it takes a long time to break even, from that point onwards it's pretty close to free. Of course, the American market baulks at standardisation, but in some areas it's entirely necessary. Hitler might have won the war, had it not been for the difference between Russian and European rail gauges!
The cost of decommissioning is nearly as much as commissioning. This issue needs to be dealt with better to make nuclear a slam dunk.
The whole point of summer holidays was that older children could be home to help with the harvest. That is their historic origin.
Agree on wood pellets. PT Barnum would salute the guy who foisted that hoax.
Science is hard, and probably racist.
Interesting on reef migration; hadn’t seen that.
Yes, it always fascinates me that the climate alarmists prattle on and on about "denialism" and the imperative to "follow the science", but then the most generally-accepted, best-resourced "science", the IPCC reports, do not in any way justify the kinds of policies they propose.
Too true! I have no doubt that most who want drastic action on climate change are simply misinformed and are largely unaware that significant shifts in the economy could be very harmful globally, but at the same time there are those who would like to see a shift towards more socialist societies and the seizing of great control over the economy. Where do they think the money is going to come from- seizing everything American billionaires own (even if that were possible) would only run existing American government for six months.
Instead the money for their plan would have to come from taxes on ordinary people and a major reduction in Medicare, the Military and Social Security. I wish they could train their YouTube to watch out for climate and engineering- it's what makes me so optimistic- the market solving the problem through venture capital and visionary engineering.
The Chinese are the ones playing it really smart- with the cheap new energy they have developed and are developing they've given themselves a competitive advantage in energy costs for industry which will last well into the next century. They see climate change as one of many serious problems which needs solving this century, and are intent upon being the ones to furnish the solutions at a significant profit.
“This is not to say the man-made climate change is not a serious problem, because it is- albeit a more long-term, rather than immediate, problem than most realise.”
I see no reason to concede this point. We have a poor understanding of the causes of changing climate patterns which predate the industrial revolution by centuries, if not millennia.
My dad always used to say opinions are like arseholes- everybody's got one! On a more serious note I've read the literature quite thoroughly and not found much which isn't easily debunked. I've seen plenty of areas where the climate types get it wrong in terms of impacts, and human adaptability. Of course, the models are completely shit- but modelling is at best a mugs game as are economic projections.
Plus, there ae plenty of reasons why we would want to shift away from petrol cars- at least in cities. For a start there is the fact that catalytic converters don't work anywhere near as efficiently as anyone thinks, and much as many will try to deny it petrol fumes are carcinogenic. Coal burning power plants emit radioactive waste in the form of coal ash. The one thing we should be doing more of is fracking and using more gas. There really does need to be more materials research into coal- with the right science and fabrications philosophy you could set-up high value manufacturing right next door to coal mine. Adani recently got criticised for setting up a PVC facility in India with Australian sourced coal. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/17/adani-blasted-over-toxic-4bn-plan-to-use-australian-coal-to-make-plastic-in-india
From a commercial perspective it's a shite plan. The lead times are too long, for an industry prone to mis-measures and the extrusion process is incredibly sensitive to temperature. Plus, you really want to be close to you market in terms of vertical integration.
Of course, with cars the dynamics are different in rural areas. The technology simply isn't there yet to satisfy most road users, especially in colder climes.
“All models are wrong, some are useful.” Too many are completely fraudulent.
Thanks for the coal to pvc link; interesting.
I’m a believer in keeping coal in the fleet to keep the lights on when the sun don’t shine. Lots of good technology available and likely more to come. Coal to gas has been a bust so far but might get cracked one day.
I appreciate your writing. Thx
I agree with everything here, Geary. Very well said. Huge fan!
I do, however, have a question. What do you mean by this phrase…"capitalism does produce gross wealth inequalities."?
I am reading it as that you believe that the inequalities created by voluntary market exchanges is a bad thing. But is this really your view? If so, why?
My take on the issue is that inequality of wages, profits, wealth and so on are absolutely necessary for the market to signal and incentivize change (in behavior, products, labor, etc). Inequality is thus not a bug, but a feature, and a necessary one at that. When markets are combined with a modern state with social safety nets and redistributive features (something true in all developed nations), the extremes of poverty are corrected, and are done so by tapping into the wealth generating power of markets.
So, my question is this… is inequality generated by properly functioning markets really a gross problem?
'I am reading it as that you believe that the inequalities created by voluntary market exchanges is a bad thing. But is this really your view? If so, why?' Well, like all matters of importance, it depends. I don't see a problem with wealth inequality provided we are talking about inert legacies or productive wealth, but there is an extent to which accumulated capital can be used in what can only be described as game rigging.
The obvious example is Gamestop, but it speaks to a broader problem that until recently few within the financial industry knew about 8 year and 80 year debt cycles. Now the knowledge is widespread, and aggregated capital can push the phenomenon to the extent that it controls the timing of market resets. This gives them an inherent advantage over the pension funds and insurers, as well as for many smaller investors.
There is also an extent to which creative destruction is pushed beyond what is rational. Recently there was a fairly big engineering company, with little in the way of paper liabilities and a great balance sheet. Then an American finance company with experience of taking over engineering firms with a view to removing structural costs and spending no money in capital expenditures (to prevent share price depreciation) got involved. Despite any financial gains which may have made in the short-term, there were many smaller investors who were royally pissed off that finance could buy shares it didn't own, and leverage a takeover, simply because everyone knew that the shares would become worthless as service, quality and value declined.
Generally, I'm for productive capital, but there is an extent to which many of the market incentives have become structurally perverse. I can't remember the name of the UK firm, but they were relatively big and had a number of high value, high margin service contracts. Their customer base specifically utilised them because they had reputation for all weather 24-7 reliability.
Again I agree with your examples. I would clarify that I read your concerns as being not with inequality of outcomes, but with unfairness of process.
My issue is that the term "inequality" is being widely used in more than one way, allowing it to work as a "Motte and Bailey" in discussions. Most of us are put off by "unfairness" of rules and systems, but the term "inequality" is much wider than this, and includes legitimate variances in outcomes within a fair system.
Some types of inequality are not just good, but great and necessary. Some types are bad and damaging to the health of the system. However, many voices — especially from the left side — have combined them into a short cut of evidence of inequality is evidence of a problem. This is then used rhetorically to undermine merit and competition and the system in general.
Hope this clarifies rather than muddies the discussion….
Actually, that's a very insightful way of putting it. Fairness vs. Equality. Have you read Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind, by any chance? If not, then get it- it's probably one of the two books which have influenced me the most heavily in the past decade.
Generally, people further down the socio-economic spectrum, especially those without highly educated parents or outside of the cosmopolitan liberal bubble tend to think more in terms of fairness. Equality is found most heavily in Left-leaning liberals. Here is the Moral Foundations test if you are interested: https://www.idrlabs.com/morality/6/test.php .
It's also why Democrats more wacky ideas don't tend to play well with many of their core constituencies, unless they directly impact on their communities specific interests. The inequality mantra is even worse when it is phrases as equity- that's a direct translation for socialism, especially when tied to opportunity distribution.
What they really need to do is fix the pipeline of K-12. The discussion about charter vs. public whilst valid, is a distraction from the key flaw in education over the last forty years. Postmodern thinking has devalued the notion of knowledge. Even Foucault (or possible Lacan?) complained bitterly about students who weren't sufficiently grounded in science and Western culture in order to sufficiently critique it- so how on Earth educational theorists expect to know how to apply postmodernism to children's education when they don't their Bayes from their Bernoulli, I'll never understand.
What they should be applying is cognitive load theory- it explains how the human brain learns and has the merit of working in practice. Educators are now beginning to use it- it's becoming quite the fad- but yet again they've stripped out the really important bit, which is getting kids to commit vast tracts of useable knowledge to long-term memory.
It's simple- our working memory is puny. In order to perform anything beyond relatively simple cognitive tasks, one needs to be able to draw upon your long-term memory store with ease. It is not enough to be able to work out 9 x 7, you have to have 63 flick up from your memory without even thinking about it. This is why so many kids suffer from Maths trauma and why so few read for pleasure- because they haven't been equipped with the basic building blocks which allow these things to be done with ease.
Some schools use these techniques- they also tend to be the ones which insist upon strict low-level discipline such as detentions, and consistency across every class in relation to the disciplinary code. Using this approach a state-run school in the second poorest borough in London managed to send more kids to Oxbridge than Eton- it's also high crime and predominantly Black, and here in the UK we still mainly select on the basis of grey matter: https://www.newhamrecorder.co.uk/news/education/east-ham-school-praises-pupils-for-oxbridge-offers-7821746
Yes, I have read Haidt and taken his test. I am a big fan of his too.
Well said, and thanks for sharing your institutional knowledge from across the Atlantic. Always insightful.
Trying to look for a silver lining to the US problem with education, perhaps the kerfuffle over CRT can embolden the wiser voices to demand that parents be given a paid waiver to the school of their choice if their public school embraces the "neoracism" of CRT. In other words, any school not specifically forbidding CRT in any and all of of its neoracist guises (as defined by critics, not adherents), should lose any right to demand parents take their children there. This would either break the public school monopoly or at least force parent driven common sense reform.
Well, I'm not a teacher- but I do come a family of teachers, and have taught line workers how to use computers from scratch (if that counts). I also taught progress chaser how to stand up to senior managers armed with nothing but a pack of multicoloured highlighter pens and a recent printed tracking report (which I designed)- they do so love to see problems structuralised.
I like reading research across a broad range of topics. On the education topic I would highly recommend John McWhorter on phonics. When my mother was a senior teacher (she is retired now) she had a teacher trainee who told her phonics was all wrong- it was news to her, she had been using it successfully for decades. It's actually both phonics and whole word/language- we sound out the word first and then look at the broader context, if it's a word with which we are unfamiliar.
Thank you Geary, insightful and interesting as usual.
Climate change is only one of the many problems we would need to deal with.
There's also mass life extinction, mass pollution of the air, water and soils, the coming energy crisis, etc. And we're going to have to deal with everything, at the same time. Which is why it seems impossible to do so.
Increased difficulty to access clean water, for drinkink and food production, the increase of droughts in many places such as the Mediterranean periphery will undoubtedly throw millions on the road for their survival. Crises will make countries more unstable, especially those which already don't enjoy full stability.
The destruction of forests all over the globe, in Amazonia, Africa, on Sumatra, Java, Borneo, etc will only make things worse.
When I heard that Elon Musk was offering a $100M prize to anyone who'd find the best carbon capture technology, I couldn't help but think that was the most stupid idea I had ever heard.
Techno-fascination leads intelligent people to completely lose track of reality.
The best CO2 capture technology already exists and always has, it's called trees and plants.
If he really wants to help, he should use his billions to buy all primal forests on the planet to put an absolute stop to deforestation, and buy back the land claimed for intensive farming, palm oil and soy growing to let the forests regenerate. But then that's a lot less "sexy" than connected toys and gadgets.
Something that the article does not take into account is that, considering that growth keeps on being our motivation and objective, if we postulate that in 20, 30, 40 years time, millions more human will have access to what the West has enjoyed in terms of goods, equipment, infrastructures, whether it being medical, educational, urban, etc and all the wealth and comfort that goes with it, where will we find the resources to make everything we need for an ever growing number of people living by Western standards ?
In 40, 400, or 4,000 years, the earths will still be 13,000km in diametre. All the resources we would need to sustain billions living like Americans or Europeans won't just magically appear, out of thin air, just because we need them.
I'd like to point out that I am not a "socialist", not by American standards in any way, and I am a fierce opponent to the whole woke madness engulfing the world right now.
Yet I think the limits imposed by physics should help us understand that capitalism as it is today cannot go on sustainably, whether we like it or not. We're in for a diet, either planned wisely, or forced upon us by the reality of physics.
Forever chemicals are a worry, as is the erosion of coastal nurseries through unsustainable fishing practices (always buy you scallops dive caught). The mass life extinction and deforestation you speak of is as a result of human activity and is a byproduct of economic desperation. It turns out when a country reaches about $5,000 per person per year, they end-up caring about things like air quality and the environment- which is one of the reasons why China is now devoting resources to recovering vast areas of what were once deserts into forests and productive farmland.
Where the West has singularly failed was in substituting foreign aid for genuine free market opportunity, because when people earn more they have fewer kids and treat the environment with more respect. Coal-fired power plants in the Developing World may be bad, but they are far less worse than using kerosene for cooking, which was, until quite recently common practice in many regions.
Here in the Northern hemisphere we now have more trees and natural forest than we did one hundred years ago. People make better custodians of the planet when they have relatively more wealth than our predecessors. If the current population were forced back to the late 19th C or to pre-industrial lifestyles, then it be game over instantly because everyone would have to burn trees to stay alive in winter.
'The best CO2 capture technology already exists and always has, it's called trees and plants.' Great point. It's already happening. Higher yields through more intensive farming have led to huge tracts of land being put back to fallow through the process called wilding. A recent YouTube source from the Economist highlighted a study which showed that optimally this process could lead to around 20 years worth of carbon sequestration through reforestation.
You should claim Elon Musk's prize. However, one other thing we could do is reverse the drainage channels which currently make farming possible in places like Louisiana with a view to making the area a huge onshore fishery/shrimp farm very much like the one is Spain. Not only would this sequester a huge amount of carbon, but it would also critically ease ocean fishing. Fish are an incredibly important part of the marine life cycle. Without the remains left by the predation of other species, marine plant biomass begins to decline. By creating onshore fish resources where possible and protecting their nurseries, countries can make a huge impact in terms of replenishing the marine life cycle.
Shellfish farms, especially of mussels, clams and the like should be promoted as a part of every Westerners diet once a week. It's the shells you see. It's a perfectly natural way of stripping carbon out of the oceans, reducing acidification. If you do decide to submit the idea to Elon Musk then please remember me when you're allocating shares.
On energy, the only answer is nuclear- to at least 40% to 60% of base load energy. Sweden and France are the two prime examples- France in particular has proven far more successful in tackling climate change than either Germany or California, and their energy is cheap. A maximum of 3,000 people have been killed by nuclear power, and countless millions have been saved by it, from not having to breathe in radioactive coal ash.
You are right about Western levels of consumption. But this is changing. Within 20 years our methods of consumption will have changed. We are already dematerialising significant segments of our economy. Do you want to know the one thing which would make things change more quickly. Start a consumer pressure group to make Amazon allow users to search by length of guarantee or warrantee. A computer screen which lasts 20 years rather than five, massively eases the consumption of raw material. How about T-shirts that last 10 years. I met a guy in a fish restaurant once who started the trend towards using used clothes in airplane seats, and even in the Ford Focus.
We do need to change, but they need to be sensible changes. A movement towards more sustainable forms of sourcing materials and goods. High quality wood furniture which lasts for example, is a great way of sequestering carbon and a relatively good investment over time.
The other thing to remember is that we are not replacing our populations anywhere except for in Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East- even India is slightly negative now. We just don't see it yet because people in the developing world are living much longer. For the moment, this trend will be largely invisible- but by 2050 the reversal will be evident, because even with modern medicine people can only live so long. And the other thing to bear in mind is that as people become older, they naturally become more frugal and less consumptive, unless we're talking about restaurants, gardening centres, home improvements and Viking river cruises.
You are right to be concerned. But I wouldn't worry or panic. Plus, it's always best to remember that any proposed solutions will have trade-offs. The one thing to consider is that EVs still have a way to go in reducing their green premium, and there is ample room in the current price profile for significant improvements. When the price comes down, sales will shoot up. Especially in Europe, where car journeys tend to be more local, there is real demand for cheaper EVs. The smart thing to do would be to introduce congestion charges in every major city- as well as parking options exclusive to EVs. This is a very specific form of carbon tax I am heavily in favour of, because it has all manner of life-saving and improving potentials.
When I say I am a techno-optimist I'm not talking about gadget or toys- I don't own a mobile phone and I built this PC in 2012- the only things I have changed are the graphics card and moved to a SSD. But there are really great project out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFIHecZDfc - this is the NEOM project with technology developed by Cranfield University in the UK, and could have profound implication in terms of regreening like tracts of high population areas which are basically deserts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4 This is from Ocean Cleanup and it will make you cry (or at least it did me). You seem like a nice person. I would heavily recommend training your YouTube to give you climate and engineering content. For me, it happened purely by chance- but it certainly helped me feel a good deal more optimistic about the world we live in. I would also recommend Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now!
Thanks for your reply.
I can't help but think that you tend to ommit limitations imposed by physics and the earth's natural resources potential output.
As for energy, I agree that nuclear is the way to go. I am French so I do enjoy cheap and reliable electricity. Yet the French nuclear industry has been declining in the past 20-30 years, as we have been relying on our existing nuclear plants and pressure from ideologically driven green parties and NGOs has made it difficult to support the industry. Still, out electricity is over 90% carbon free, but for how long if we do not build new nuclear plants? We were world leaders of this industry in the second half of the 20th century, it is no longer the case.
I agree that we need to make more durable things.
Yet, I do not see how we can enforce this when the whole system is built on growth, making new things at an ever faster pace and selling ever more units of everything, trying to conquer new markets, etc.
Some people may decide, individually, to live a more sustainable life, but they represent a tiny fraction of the Western civilisation, and numbers increase slowly.
That has close to zero effect on the economic system, still designed to make more, sell more, etc. Plus the fact that it is a global system, in which almost every country is involved. How to you plan to convince 150+ countries and thousands of corporations to cease operating in a way that has made them rich for decades?
As for world population, I wasn't talking about gross population increase, only about those who are already here and striving to catch up with us.
Even if world population caps at around 8 billion, there will still be resources problems.
Even if we managed to lower our resources consumption, say by 25% in a short period of time - which I consider unrealistic - , when hundreds of millions of people currently in relative poverty reach 75% of our current level of wealth and development, there will still be a resources problem.
Recycling is of course necessary but has limitations, for example plastic cannot be reused more than a few times. And overall levels of recycling are shockingly low.
You might say we should recycle more. Sure! But I doubt we'll reach 70%+ levels of recycling worldwide quickly enough before there's more plastic than plancton or fish in the oceans.
Again, things are moving, they always are, but far too slowly relatively to the urgency of the many problems we are facing at the same time. Hoping that, without changing the current system too much, we will somehow find magical solutions to solve our problems isn't the best bet I wouuld make.
As for dematerialsation, you seem to forget that a "virtual" anything relies on concrete, material things, data centers, infrastructures, more computers, tablets, more power plants to power more of everything related to it. If they are carbon free, that would be better, but I am not sure the current general trend is in favour of more nuclear.
Over 25% of CO2 emissions worldwide come from coal fired plants, and coal has never been in decline for decades, contrary to what many people think. I don't think we're going to stop building new ones tomorrow morning.
It will take time, time we no longer have.
So more dematerialisation means more resources pumped out of the ground, more stuff manufactured and more energy demand.
Not to mention the fact that everything in our daily lives is becoming "connected" or autonomous.
That's 10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, +10% every year on average. And there's no sign it's going to stop anytime soon.
Your point seems to be - correct me if i'm wrong - that, whatever happens, the current economic system will manage to produce viable solutions, mostly technological, or through marginal adjustments, and that the current system does not really need structural reforms.
I'm not an anti-capitalist, I have enjoyed the fruits of it as anybody else in the West, I just feel that this won't be enough.
Most of the time, when a factory is built for example, the best solutions available regarding the environment are discarded because "it's too expensive" and would impair competitiveness and profits. I am not blaming a company for seeking profit, i'm only saying that with this system, outside of any personal judgement, our grand-children will be dead when we are still struggling to decide and do the best things possible to save what can be saved.
I think I understand your point, and my take on it is that business as usual or almost as usual won't be enough.
I know about the Ocean Cleanup project (and many others such as this one). It's great, but its scale is a minuscule fraction of what it should be have a sicgnificant impact quickly. Again, Musk and his colleagues in mega-wealth should give them millions to buid more of their machines to speed up the process. But they are not doing so.
So in 5, 10 years, millions of tonnes of plastic will still have been dumped into our oceans, and the Ocean Cleanup will still be painstakingly trying to get funds to do more. Not enough, not quickly enough, which is my main point about the whole issue.
There seems to be an invisible hand of the market whereby the more a country's population becomes wealthy the shoddier the longevity of the goods sold it. I can vouch for this in a trivial way. In 2000, I bought socks from a store specializing in Indian imports. Today I still have those socks, a few of which are finally wearing out. In those 21 years, I have bought innumerable pairs of socks made for the U. S. market that last at most a year. Reversing this trend, as you point out, would make great strides towards reducing waste and resource depletion.
Forever chemicals are a worry, as is the erosion of coastal nurseries through unsustainable fishing practices (always buy you scallops dive caught). The mass life extinction and deforestation you speak of is as a result of human activity and is a byproduct of economic desperation. It turns out when a country reaches about $5,000 per person per year, they end-up caring about things like air quality and the environment- which is one of the reasons why China is now devoting resources to recovering vast areas of what were once deserts into forests and productive farmland.
Where the West has singularly failed was in substituting foreign aid for genuine free market opportunity, because when people earn more they have fewer kids and treat the environment with more respect. Coal-fired power plants in the Developing World may be bad, but they are far less worse than using kerosene for cooking, which was, until quite recently common practice in many regions.
Here in the Northern hemisphere we now have more trees and natural forest than we did one hundred years ago. People make better custodians of the planet when they have relatively more wealth than our predecessors. If the current population were forced back to the late 19th C or to pre-industrial lifestyles, then it be game over instantly because everyone would have to burn trees to stay alive in winter.
'The best CO2 capture technology already exists and always has, it's called trees and plants.' Great point. It's already happening. Higher yields through more intensive farming have led to huge tracts of land being put back to fallow through the process called wilding. A recent YouTube source from the Economist highlighted a study which showed that optimally this process could lead to around 20 years worth of carbon sequestration through reforestation.
You should claim Elon Musk's prize. However, one other thing we could do is reverse the drainage channels which currently make farming possible in places like Louisiana with a view to making the area a huge onshore fishery/shrimp farm very much like the one is Spain. Not only would this sequester a huge amount of carbon, but it would also critically ease ocean fishing. Fish are an incredibly important part of the marine life cycle. Without the remains left by the predation of other species, marine plant biomass begins to decline. By creating onshore fish resources where possible and protecting their nurseries, countries can make a huge impact in terms of replenishing the marine life cycle.
Shellfish farms, especially of mussels, clams and the like should be promoted as a part of every Westerners diet once a week. It's the shells you see. It's a perfectly natural way of stripping carbon out of the oceans, reducing acidification. If you do decide to submit the idea to Elon Musk then please remember me when you're allocating shares.
On energy, the only answer is nuclear- to at least 40% to 60% of base load energy. Sweden and France are the two prime examples- France in particular has proven far more successful in tackling climate change than either Germany or California, and their energy is cheap. A maximum of 3,000 people have been killed by nuclear power, and countless millions have been saved by it, from not having to breathe in radioactive coal ash.
You are right about Western levels of consumption. But this is changing. Within 20 years our methods of consumption will have changed. We are already dematerialising significant segments of our economy. Do you want to know the one thing which would make things change more quickly. Start a consumer pressure group to make Amazon allow users to search by length of guarantee or warrantee. A computer screen which lasts 20 years rather than five, massively eases the consumption of raw material. How about T-shirts that last 10 years. I met a guy in a fish restaurant once who started the trend towards using used clothes in airplane seats, and even in the Ford Focus.
We do need to change, but they need to be sensible changes. A movement towards more sustainable forms of sourcing materials and goods. High quality wood furniture which lasts for example, is a great way of sequestering carbon and a relatively good investment over time.
The other thing to remember is that we are not replacing our populations anywhere except for in Africa (particularly Sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East- even India is slightly negative now. We just don't see it yet because people in the developing world are living much longer. For the moment, this trend will be largely invisible- but by 2050 the reversal will be evident, because even with modern medicine people can only live so long. And the other thing to bear in mind is that as people become older, they naturally become more frugal and less consumptive, unless we're talking about restaurants, gardening centres, home improvements and Viking river cruises.
You are right to be concerned. But I wouldn't worry or panic. Plus, it's always best to remember that any proposed solutions will have trade-offs. The one thing to consider is that EVs still have a way to go in reducing their green premium, and there is ample room in the current price profile for significant improvements. When the price comes down, sales will shoot up. Especially in Europe, where car journeys tend to be more local, there is real demand for cheaper EVs. The smart thing to do would be to introduce congestion charges in every major city- as well as parking options exclusive to EVs. This is a very specific form of carbon tax I am heavily in favour of, because it has all manner of life-saving and improving potentials.
When I say I am a techno-optimist I'm not talking about gadget or toys- I don't own a mobile phone and I built this PC in 2012- the only things I have changed are the graphics card and moved to a SSD. But there are really great project out there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFIHecZDfc - this is the NEOM project with technology developed by Cranfield University in the UK, and could have profound implication in terms of regreening like tracts of high population areas which are basically deserts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyZArQMFhQ4 This is from Ocean Cleanup and it will make you cry (or at least it did me). You seem like a nice person. I would heavily recommend training your YouTube to give you climate and engineering content. For me, it happened purely by chance- but it certainly helped me feel a good deal more optimistic about the world we live in. I would also recommend Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now!
I agree wholeheartedly. If we destroy the engine of technological progress, we won’t be able to use it to solve the very real challenges we need it to solve. And on the whole, technological trends are decidedly good for the environment. Look at dematerialization for instance.
I’ll have to check out the Honest Broker. I’m not familiar with his work.
I would start with the two part section on the recent IPCC report- it gives a more honest assessment of reason for cautious optimism.
Some humility, please, Mr. Johansen. There are some things that we humans cannot comprehend: climate change being one. There are simply too many variables, too many unknowns to make meaningful predictions hundreds of years into the future.
My point would be that the actual science of the IPCC is far removed from the climate alarmism that we read about in the media and hear from our politicians. Best estimates place the annual economic impact of climate change on the economy by 2100 will be around 3%, set against a backdrop of 300% to 1000% of GDP growth predicted, primarily in the Developing World.
And with the possible exception of China, who are keen to exploit new markets, it is market innovation which is transforming our world for the better, not governments (although they could do more by assuming the sovereign risk of nuclear power, with its cheap and safe base load energy). It's not by accident that Sweden and France are leading the world in producing a carbon free energy sector, vastly outperforming Germany and California. Top estimates of deaths from nuclear power hover around the 3,000 mark, whilst the cleaner air it allows has saved millions.
I agree with you about models and predictions- but on a positive note it now appears that the potential 'Black Swan' of methane hydrate release is less of a risk than initially feared. Recent monitoring of methane release in coastal areas has shown that it is governed by the tidal cycles of the moon- slightly higher water levels, means far less methane release. https://www.livescience.com/moon-trigger-methane-release-arctic.html . It's also worth noting that more methane release from seas than previously estimated in the 2018 IPCC special report actually makes the immediacy of the problem less, not more (because it shows a greater impact in the climate in response to human activity).
If you look at this graph: https://www.realclimate.org/images//sr15_spm_fig1.png , you'll find it places the central line of ACTUAL change through human activity, lower down the graph range of possible scenarios for external mitigation or exacerbation of man-made climate change, pointing to a problem which becomes less worse (within the possible range) over time.
Plus, its worth revisiting what we know about methane, despite being a gas 30 times more potent than CO2 as a global warming agent, it breaks down in the upper atmosphere over 15 years through hydroxyl interaction. My point would be we need leaders who are willing to take the sensible path towards energy infrastructure investment and innovation, rather than spending all our money on wind and solar, which may be crowd-pleasing, but can only be a small part of the solution for our energy sector and by no means decisive in tackling climate change- especially as the slowly reducing green premium on EVs comes down and our energy sector demands significantly rise.
And do a valid government role of taxing negative externalities that free markets do not take into account. Taxation for winning political points against others is no way to run a nation.
I have never quite understood the equation of socialism with environmental friendliness. Certainly capitalist greed produces some true horror stories but it also has the capacity to create some incredibly advanced sustainable exploitation mechanisms. Socialist systems offer no such advantage. I can only think that the constant propaganda 'socialism is modern therefore it is good' pulls the wool over peoples eyes most effectively. Perhaps abandoning the shibboleth that socialism is a modern system is the way forward.
Well, I think part of its appeal comes from attracting people who live in the world of ideas, and therein lies a susceptibility to desire to see the world as the way one wants it to be, rather than the way it is. Blank Slatism and Lysenkoism are other examples, but the more powerful appeal of Socialism is that it comes with ready-made villains and an invitation to personal heroism. To be sure, Capitalism does produce a small percentage of villains sufficient to confirm the legend to budding Socialists, as all good legends contain a small element of truth, but as for its promises they can be considered little more than a myth and a harmful one at that.
I am however considering writing an essay on the Basque worker owner model of Mondragon, if for no better reason that it provides an alternate solution to Capitalism in that its community capitalism provides workers with owning the means of production without inviting the State to own everything. Perhaps if I provide a positive example, with none of the glaring inequalities which drive cosmopolitan liberals crazy and prods them to want to invoke State force and coercion, it might provide them with a more libertarian and community orientated vision, people not to their liking might be able to live with- at a distance.
That will be interesting. My personal take, for what it's worth, is that socialism exploits the innate sense of fairness we all possess. This then feeds into equality of treatment or equality of opportunity. The former is the socialist approach and can safely be summarized as free lunches for everyone for ever. But this is significant, it is successfully marketed as fair. So when a socialist state boasts of having eliminated poverty what they really mean is that everyone is poor. Government action is sometimes necessary but it needs to focus on what is necessary for society's benefit whilst allowing freedom.
If you accept liberty, then people are free to trade for "greed" or for "community." The key is the trade is voluntary, it's not propped up by the state, and negative externalities are addressed. Capitalism doesn't reject coops.
I largely agree- with one exception- law relating to third parties. Here in the UK, we have fairly strong laws which make it clear that if you buy a property from a seller, you also buy any contractual obligations which may be attached to the business or property in relation to third parties.
This works as well for employee pension rights as it does for owners of static homes whose lower housing costs are dependent upon the previously negotiated rents and utility charges. Probably one of the worst examples of American laxness in terms of third party standing was when the government itself sold people's mortgages through the FDIC (Freddie and Fannie) at terms which allowed for repossession, even when there were no arrears and the repayments were close to the end of the payment schedule.
This allowed the mortgage companies to sell out the house from under the mortgage holder and then repurchase it well below market value in what was, in effect, an auction with only one bidder. Several brave judges at various levels actually denied standing to the companies in court, in what can only be seen as a brave stand against the diktats of federal government. Needless to say, it was not broadly covered by legacy media- although a few local news stations did pick it up.
That's just nasty and I didn't realize it ever happened. But I'm not sure how breaking any contracts by government force is an "exception" unless it was somehow tied to bankruptcy.
Sure. But say I sell you my ride-on, but neglect to mention I've got a standing contract with my neighbour to rent it out once a fortnight. Would you then be responsible for ensuring the neighbour had access to the lawnmower? Of course you would- it's caveat emptor. But you would also be perfectly free to sue me.
The thing is in America these sorts of third party obligations are rarely insisted upon in a court of law.
Not sure what a "standing contract" is but if it's like verbal/handshake, that is unlikely to protect you if the asset is sold. That would be a bad scenario, to be sure, without a written agreement, and of course the seller would have sold it without proper disclosure of the "standing contract" if it were to remain in effect as new owners are typically free to change any future rental agreements.
Capitalism has no way to force anything. If it does, it's likely fascism is at play (cronyism of the right) or socialism (cronyism of the left). The excesses of capitalism are only a real issue of there's a negative externality that isn't being addressed. The speed and power of free markets is great so long as it's tempered against those externalities, just like liberty must be tempered by the rights of others.