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RealTalk posted:New member here... This point in particular stood out. No kidding fossil fuels (esp natural gas) are significantly cheaper than renewables and/or nuclear. That's the fundamental problem under discussion. There wouldn't be much of a debate if it were otherwise, we'd just switch like we did with CFCs. The fact that you thought this was a compelling argument as opposed to a trivial restatement of the problem calls into question whether you understand this issue and the debate around it.
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May 20, 2018 19:22
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StabbinHobo posted:yep, confirmed. we've got our selves a market-wahhabist These people believe that the auto industry would have reduced emissions without the clean air act. They are wrong in so many ways.
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May 20, 2018 19:25
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Thug Lessons posted:The problem people have with climate change is that they don't understand the timescales and how they interact with our responses to it. New Yorkers don't wake up overnight and find themselves underwater. They see the sea level is rising and they scramble to implement ways to stave it off. They raise their ports and critical facilities in repeated projects to outrun the rising times. They erect sea walls to hold back the waves. They'll implement flood-control measures to withstand the increasingly-dangerous storms. And in the end, they'll all fail. The seas will rise faster than we can deal with, and they will reclaim the areas affected by sea level rise. As they slowly rise over the decades, people will migrate out of the city to the mainland, the same way their grandparents migrated from all over the world to come to New York. The land won't survive, but the city, or at least the metropolitan area, will. I suppose New York might just become Newark though.
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May 20, 2018 19:33
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I mean, in some fashion it will probably survive, but I wonder how diminished. As soon as a company decides that the risk of flooding and the cost of all the flood-control measures isn't worth the location anymore, and then leaves, the rest of the city now has to bear a greater share of the burden - the costs don't really get measurable reduced by people leaving until you get to the point where you can just straight up abandon certain areas. If this makes other companies leave too, the effect intensifies, and perhaps companies servicing these companies start to leave, taking employees with them, reducing the market for other businesses, and then you have a real vicious circle starting up. You're going to see effects proportional to the SLR and its rate. I would be a lot more worried about how diminished Miami, or especially Dhaka, is going to be than New York.
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May 20, 2018 19:37
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Thug Lessons posted:You're going to see effects proportional to the SLR and its rate. I would be a lot more worried about how diminished Miami, or especially Dhaka, is going to be than New York.
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May 20, 2018 19:40
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Thug Lessons posted:The problem people have with climate change is that they don't understand the timescales and how they interact with our responses to it. New Yorkers don't wake up overnight and find themselves underwater. Actually, this is exactly how it works, because you first really feel the effects when there's a strong storm surge that overcomes existing preventive measures and causes a shitton of unexpected damage and/or deaths. What happens afterwards is that if there's money you rebuild and reinforce the preventive measures, and normalcy sort of returns for several years until everything goes to poo poo again, this time worse, and so on and so forth until there's no money and property value plummets along with the local economy. That is the point when people actually learn to live like they're in a danger area that's gradually being reclaimed by the sea.
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May 20, 2018 20:14
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Real Talk it sounds like your mind is made up. You're citing a Von Mises Institute economist btw, in case you somehow didn't know. Just on the off chance you're trying to genuinely engage, you should know that the institution you're getting your information from is listed by the SPLC. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 20:26 on May 20, 2018 |
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May 20, 2018 20:18
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Conspiratiorist posted:Actually, this is exactly how it works, because you first really feel the effects when there's a strong storm surge that overcomes existing preventive measures and causes a shitton of unexpected damage and/or deaths. Oh, you mean like Hurricane Sandy? You're wrong. Storm surges and increased storm activity occur with incrementally increasing intensity too, and will be adapted to incrementally. There will come a day when downtown Manhattan floods due to a storm surge, but how much of a surprise can that be when we, in 2018, know it will inevitably happen without lowering current carbon concentration to at most 350 ppm? I'm actually more worried about the fallout of insurance companies refusing to offer contracts to properties affected by sea level rise than I am about the actual events as far as the economic aspect goes. The humanitarian consequences are another matter.
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May 20, 2018 20:28
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Conspiratiorist posted:Actually, this is exactly how it works, because you first really feel the effects when there's a strong storm surge that overcomes existing preventive measures and causes a shitton of unexpected damage and/or deaths. You say that like Miami wasn't almost drowned not that long ago with nothing changing.
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May 20, 2018 20:29
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Exactly, nothing changed. But then one day poo poo floods and this time there's no money, and everything is henceforth chaos.
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May 20, 2018 20:40
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Thug Lessons posted:I don't see why this is necessarily true. We went through incredible crises during the 20th century that destroyed huge amounts of both human life and money and still managed to keep an overall trend of positive growth. Two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War and the collapse of the Eastern bloc. These were already catastrophic events. I agree. People tend not to think as economists do in terms of trade-offs and cost versus benefit to various actions. Pollution is a good example of this. I agree that, ceteris paribus, more pollution is undesirable. But things are NOT held equal. Economic processes that produce pollution are also yielding benefits to human welfare. For example, you could claim that smoke inhalation is bad for you. But was the invention (or discovery) of fire a negative for early man or a positive? After all, cavemen now were inhaling a small amount of smoke during their campfires. But, on the other hand, cavemen could now warm themselves so they didn't freeze, cook their food so they could adequately feed themselves, and keep predators away. On balance, the benefit to human welfare from the discovery of fire was FAR greater than the cost of an increase in smoke pollution and inhalation. Similarly, the discovery of fossil fuels improved human welfare more than perhaps any other single discovery in human history. It allowed for the industrial revolution and the emergence of middle classes and great prosperity around the world. But fossil fuels are also dirty and cause pollution. You cannot, in a bubble, complain about pollution without counterbalancing it with the benefits the products produced through industrialization produce for humanity. The air in the city is never going to be as pure as the air in the mountains. But people voluntarily accept lower quality air for all the other benefits of city life. None of this is to say that there should be no laws against pollution. Quite the contrary. While a smaller amount of emissions are not significantly detrimental to human welfare, a larger amount certainly can be. Especially if pollution activity injures a particular party. Companies should be held liable for pollution which causes tangible harm to the health or property of other people. If new energy technologies emerge which yield the benefits of fossil fuels without the costs, that would be fantastic. But the most likely way we will see the necessary innovation is through the market where entrepreneurs risk their own capital in free competition. Government central-planning and subsidization is extremely unlikely to settle upon the best new energy technology. Most likely, they'll misdirect resources and waste a lot of money on political boondoggles.
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May 20, 2018 20:44
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Thank god people tend not to think as economists do. That’d make for a hosed up society!
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May 20, 2018 20:48
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Didn't you start out by saying you were just playing devil's advocate? Are you changing your story already? Not changing my story. I've perused these forums a little and I understand the general political bent of the members here. My political views are a bit different on a variety of subjects. There is nothing in my worldview that has to a priori reject a potential threat from anthropogenic global warming. I'm open to being swayed in different directions depending on what I read and learn. I'll admit that I'm skeptical of the State's ability to do anything useful in combating it, but I don't think all problems have a political solution either. Hence my comments can be taken fairly as a devil's advocate challenge.
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May 20, 2018 20:52
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If you're already reading Von Mises Institute economists you'll be easier to defeat than convince, sorry.
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May 20, 2018 21:02
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I read "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels" once and I'm not going to read it again, serialized, in post form. I look forward to seeing a chart with a vaguely labeled Y axis and an X axis that spans 4,000 years in the next few posts.
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May 20, 2018 21:08
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StabbinHobo posted:i'm sorry you were bloviating so hard I assumed your gender Okay, a few simple questions. 1. Do you agree that, considering current technology, renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuel in the immediate future? Given the numbers I laid out in my original post, hitting the target of 2 degrees Celcius of warming would require a drastic reduction in fossil fuel use. 2. If a new energy technology was discovered which was efficient, cheap, and scalable, capable of fully replacing fossil fuels with much lower emissions, wouldn't such a technology enjoy an advantage in the market? After all, people desire clean air and lower pollution if all other things are equal. The emergence of such a technology would likely render this discussion moot, since people would gladly opt for the equally cheap but cleaner form of energy. Are you aware of "The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894"? https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/ At the end of the 19th century, cities were "drowning in horse manure". Since the automobile (in its mass-produced form) was not yet invented, industry relied on horse and buggy. This produced an enormous amount of horse manure, which was an environmental and public health crisis. Prognosticators of the time warned that this was the single greatest environmental threat that humanity had to deal with over the next century. What they didn't know, of course, was that the invention and mass production of the automobile, rendered the problem nonexistent as cars replaced horse and buggies for transportation and industrial activity. Suppose we had a large, activist government at the time that created a central-planning committee to come up with solutions to the problem. They might impose a massive tax on horse-owners and buggy manufacturers to discourage them from traveling within city-limits. They might appropriate large amounts of wealth to redistribute to inventors (crony-capitalists) who would supposedly work on the problem. But the market, unbeknownst to the prognosticators, created a solution to the horse manure environmental catastrophe that was envisioned. If the environmental catastrophes that are currently predicted are credible and come to pass, this creates an enormous market incentive for entrepreneurs to develop alternatives. At the very least, you'd have to admit that people have a very poor track record of predicting future trends. People assume that current trends will continue indefinitely into the future. But, as has happened time and again, revolutionary innovation changes the entire ballgame. 3. Why should the State be the institution tasked with doing something about this problem? If demographics and political membership prove anything, it's this. a. In the United States Republicans will be in charge roughly half of the time. If these Republicans don't accept the validity of climate change, then they will be unlikely to maintain government policy aimed at combating it. How can we expect an institution with this much volatility to shepherd delicate and critical environmental stewardship? b. Around the world emerging countries are desperate to grow wealthy and ascend into the middle class. If the proposition is offered that they must sacrifice feeding their children or enjoying a minimum standard of comfort for what is to them an abstraction, then they'll choose to feed their families and grow wealthy every time. People in general don't have long-term vision, and this is especially true of poor and desperate people who are focused on surviving day to day. c. The State, as an institution, has been lousy at protecting the environment. For proof of that look at the Defense budget and the wasteful F-35 boondoggle. Look at the depleted Uranium that our military left throughout the Middle East. This is a pragmatic argument against entrusting the State to effectively combat the problem, but the logic seems pretty air-tight to me. People who own property are more likely to care about it's long-term capital value, because it's theirs. They may wish to extract it's resources for years to come or pass down their property to their offspring. Or they may wish to maintain it's value so they can sell it in the future. In contrast, in modern Democratic States political officials don't own any of the property they manage. They are temporarily put in charge of public property and public money. Since they don't personally own any of it, the incentive is for politicians to exploit the resources and funds as much as possible during the short period where they hold elected office. After they are out of government, they have lost their opportunity. This gives rise to high time preferences, wasteful spending and environmental degradation. Give this, it seems perverse to entrust such people with the task of thinking long term in protecting the environment from the ravages of climate change. Your right that I'm not going to go back and read hundreds and hundreds of pages, but don't assume I haven't debated with people about this subject many times in the past. This isn't my first rodeo. Saying it'll take years for me "to wrap my brain around this" is trite and condescending but not substantive. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 20, 2018 21:33
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May 20, 2018 21:44
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RealTalk posted:1. Do you agree that, considering current technology, renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuel in the immediate future? Given the numbers I laid out in my original post, hitting the target of 2 degrees Celcius of warming would require a drastic reduction in fossil fuel use. Renewables using current technology can replace enough fossil fuels to meet the grid's portion of a 2C goal. No new technology is required. This is decades old FUD, there have been endless models run by DOE showing that it isn't just possible, but possible under extreme grid conditions. The fact our economic system decides we choose not to invest in renewables, et al right now isn't a technological issue.
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May 20, 2018 21:45
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Nocturtle posted:This point in particular stood out. No kidding fossil fuels (esp natural gas) are significantly cheaper than renewables and/or nuclear. That's the fundamental problem under discussion. There wouldn't be much of a debate if it were otherwise, we'd just switch like we did with CFCs. The fact that you thought this was a compelling argument as opposed to a trivial restatement of the problem calls into question whether you understand this issue and the debate around it. The reason I stated this is because climate change activists tend to make rosy claims about how far renewable energy sources have come and vastly overstate the extent to which we could currently replace fossil fuels. The argument boils down to "the swich-over would be easy. We aren't we already doing it?" No, the switch-over would NOT be easy and renewable energy, especially wind and solar, are not currently capable of shouldering more than a very small percent of our energy demands. An honest argument would flatly admit that people need to accept a substantial reduction in their living standards in order to potentially ameliorate long-term climate externalities. But people know that climate-change legislation is not going to gain any traction if this fact is admitted. If we admit that further research and development is required, why is it taken as a given that political subsidization will yield the best results? Why wouldn't we instead rely on market entrepreneurs who risk their own capital and have to operate within the constraints of economic calculation?
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May 20, 2018 21:57
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Arglebargle III posted:Real Talk it sounds like your mind is made up. Oh poo poo, really?! The Southern Poverty Law Center? I'm so sorry I didn't dutifully ask the SPLC's permission before reading an unapproved source. What, pray tell, does the SPLC say about the Mises Institute? If I had to hazard a guess, I'd surmise they're probably a bunch of white supremacist, neo-confederate racists, anti-semites, homophobes, people who don't brush their teeth, who smell bad and routinely jaywalk. Am I in the ballpark?
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May 20, 2018 22:04
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See how quickly the goalposts move from “it cannot be done with current technology” to “it cannot be done with wind and solar easily” both adding the weasel word “easily” which can morph to mean whatever is needed but also shifting to try and focus on only wind and solar, while ignoring the role that demand reduction, storage, et al. plays in an integrated grid. But I was never under the illusion this was an honest discussion.
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May 20, 2018 22:04
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Trabisnikof posted:See how quickly the goalposts move from “it cannot be done with current technology” to “it cannot be done with wind and solar easily” both adding the weasel word “easily” which can morph to mean whatever is needed but also shifting to try and focus on only wind and solar, while ignoring the role that demand reduction, storage, et al. plays in an integrated grid. Not as painful as the deniers would have us believe. https://renewablesnow.com/news/us-power-prices-to-fall-at-40-50-wind-solar-share-study-613132/ Between 2.5% and 19% of all hours of the year could witness electricity prices below USD 5 (EUR 4.3) per MWh in four regions of the US in high wind and solar penetration scenarios developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Berkeley Lab this week released a report in which it analyses the impacts of high shares of wind and solar on wholesale electricity markets in California, the Midwest, Texas and New York, and on electric sector decisions. It compares scenarios with wind and solar shares of up to 40%-50% in 2030, to a low-variable renewable energy (VRE) scenario.
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May 20, 2018 22:10
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RealTalk posted:Okay, a few simple questions. This is what "just asking questions" looks like. 
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May 20, 2018 22:12
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RealTalk posted:Oh poo poo, really?! The Southern Poverty Law Center? Great avatar-post combo!
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May 20, 2018 22:25
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The markets may have gotten us into this mess, but gee oh golly gosh they're the only thing that can get us out!
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May 20, 2018 22:29
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Trabisnikof posted:See how quickly the goalposts move from “it cannot be done with current technology” to “it cannot be done with wind and solar easily” both adding the weasel word “easily” which can morph to mean whatever is needed but also shifting to try and focus on only wind and solar, while ignoring the role that demand reduction, storage, et al. plays in an integrated grid. For a transition away from fossil fuels to be successful, the replacing technology needs to be economically viable. By "economically viable" I mean that entrepreneurs would find it profitable to do at a large scale. Government rules have actually artificially advantaged renewable energy sources in much of the United States, yet they are not making a huge dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Look at the link I provided earlier: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.COMM.FO.ZS?end=2014&locations=CN-RU&start=1971 Fossil fuel energy consumption in the United States dropped in percent of total energy consumption from 95% in 1971 to 83% in 2014. Forty-three years to make a 12% reduction in percent use of energy from fossil fuel technologies. This is slightly misleading because our use of Nuclear energy rose during that same time period. Nuclear energy doesn't produce CO2 but it has a host of environmental problems and dangers associated with it. So hardly any environmentalist are advocating that we build more nuclear reactors. I admit that renewable energies have improved over that time period but our total energy usage has also increased. How can we switch-over at the pace that is necessary to meet the 2 degree Celcius threshold given the numbers I cited above? And, more importantly, the glacial pace of adoption of renewable energy sources over the last several decades? Global use of fossil fuels is still around 80% of total worldwide energy consumption. The facts are that intrinsic problems with renewable energy sources, both economic and technological, are holding us back. I'll be the first to cheer if and when breakthroughs are made. You could explain in any way you like how this 2 degree Celcius threshold is going to be met without politically-unacceptable (for practical reasons) reduction in standards of living. I'm trying to sort this out but I'm not coming up with any good solutions.
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May 20, 2018 22:38
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Minge Binge posted:The markets may have gotten us into this mess, but gee oh golly gosh they're the only thing that can get us out! No, I don't accept this. Here's a short history lesson: Throughout the English common-law tradition, there were laws against pollution. It was considered a violation of the rights of person and their property. Since our Constitution and traditions were influenced heavily from English common-law, we had strict laws against pollution during the early 19th century. These were called "nuisance laws". Basically, these laws stipulated that businesses had no right to cause harm to other people through pollution. If they did cause harm, they'd be taken to court and ordered to pay damages and cease their polluting activity. For example, if a woman hung up clothes on a clothesline and soot from a local smokestack blew into her yard and made her clothes filthy again, this was considered a rights-violation and she would have standing in court to demand restitution for the inconvenience and the court would place an injunction against the factory owner who caused the harm. This is consistent with justice and the free market. Companies should be fully-liable for the harm they cause by polluting the air or water. If companies had to pay for pollution, the cost of production processes that were dirty and produced a lot of emissions would be higher. Therefore companies would be incentivized to opt for cleaner production processes so they wouldn't be barraged with lawsuits all the time. This is as it should be. However, during the early industrial revolution, the government intervened into the market economy and dispensed with the common-law tradition and nuisance laws in the name of the "public good". After all, industrialization is good for society so we can't be having your pesky property rights interfere with our march towards "progress". Without any liability for their pollution thanks to government intervention, companies chose the cheapest production methods regardless of how much pollution they produced or how many people they harmed. This went on unabated for a century until the government passed the "Clean Air Act" and "Clean Water Act", among other environmental legislation, to try and clean up the mess that they themselves had created. Of course, as per usual, proponents of this legislation cited "failures of the market". To the contrary, the genuine free market policy is to enforce nuisance laws and protect the environment through protecting private property.
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May 20, 2018 22:55
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The free market replaces excess horse poop with machines that are ravaging the planet. The ‘solution’ was just a far, far, greater problem. Our left arm was chopped off to take our mind off the hangnail on our right hand.
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May 20, 2018 22:57
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RealTalk posted:3. Why should the State be the institution tasked with doing something about this problem? If demographics and political membership prove anything, it's this. This arguments fail to address, "Why government?," and, "What instead?" It's not air tight; it's immaterial. quote:People who own property are more likely to care about it's long-term capital value, because it's theirs. As a plank, only makes sense if you assume Homo Economicus is real and profit-seeking fully aligns with public interest. You sound religious about the free market. I read your post and my only take away is that you have something akin to literal faith underlying your perceptions of the market. Edit: For contrast, I think everything's corrupt, everything's realpolitik. Progress is only achieved when bad people do the right things for the wrong reasons. Stability is only achieved when competing elements of the system equilibrate against each other. I expect you'll read my comment and think I'm doing what you're doing, just in favor of government. Accretionist fucked around with this message at 23:00 on May 20, 2018 |
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May 20, 2018 22:57
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RealTalk posted:No, I don't accept this. Here's a short history lesson: The free market really cleaned up its act when it found it could just dump pollutants in developing countries where those laws aren't in place.
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May 20, 2018 23:19
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Where do these guys keep coming from anyway, lmao
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May 20, 2018 23:31
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RealTalk posted:Not changing my story. I've perused these forums a little and I understand the general political bent of the members here. My political views are a bit different on a variety of subjects. So you lied? And you weren't actually playing devil's advocate? You just had bad opinions and put hilariously minimal effort to try to pretend you weren't to trick us?
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May 20, 2018 23:35
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Accretionist posted:This arguments fail to address, "Why government?," and, "What instead?" It's not air tight; it's immaterial. "Progress is only achieved when bad people do the right things for the wrong reasons." I don't disagree with this. People are corrupt and fallible with few exceptions. But this comment about human nature is actually an indictment against the State as an institution. I'll come right out and say that I consider myself an anarchist. I think the State serves no useful purpose and has no justification for existing. The reasons for this are many, but if we're going by human nature, it's clear that the worst rise to the top in government. The most insincere, the best con-artists, masters of rhetoric, propaganda and manipulation tend to do well in government. The genuine, principled Statesmen are relegated to the sidelines, deprived of any real power or influence. I don't think I'm "religious" about the market. I just favor non-State solutions to problems. If any sort of social organization or authority is needed, it should be at the lowest possible level. This is sometimes referred to as "subsidiarity".
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May 21, 2018 00:01
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RealTalk posted:I'll come right out and say that I consider myself an anarchist. You are not. Don't be insulting.
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May 21, 2018 00:05
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RealTalk posted:Oh poo poo, really?! The Southern Poverty Law Center? Libertarian zealots have a thread they're not allowed to post outside of: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3636681 Try arguing with folks there.
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May 21, 2018 00:15
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Clean Air Act I’d love to hear the libertarian fantasy on how auto emmissions reduction would have happened with just the free market. I love looking at classic cars from my youth, but when I cycle around them they really stink. Tragedy of the Commons? We’re SOAKING in it.
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May 21, 2018 00:23
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there's only one carbon capture and sequestration I believe will work, the one where libertarians get put in the ground
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May 21, 2018 01:25
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Where do these guys keep coming from anyway, lmao Ctrl-c Ctrl-v
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May 21, 2018 01:37
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Climate Change: Fw: Fw: FW: Re: Fw: Re: READ THIS nobody's EVER owned fake scientists like this ONE MARINE, GOD BLESS AMERICA
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May 21, 2018 01:42
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Where do these guys keep coming from anyway, lmao I was just joking when I kept saying for Arkane to come back I’m sorry everyone
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May 21, 2018 02:21
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