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Lol if you think the US is a democracy, lol if you think the US isn't a command economy run by a dozen billionaires and their lobbyists, lol if you think China going from "agrarian backwater intentionally gutted and kept down by the empires of the time" to "modern world superpower" in a single human lifetime while also unfucking their environment at the same time is somehow an indictment of their economic policy. Yes, they hosed their environment pretty bad, so did we, over the course of centuries, far worse than they ever could hope to, but that was before any of us were born and now that they have the GALL to demand "hey why can't we have nice things too" they're the evil ones? At least they're making an attempt to mitigate and fix the damage industrialization inherently causes, we're just slamming the throttle to full emergency power and riding this poo poo into the ground. E: Very proud of this drunk snipe, gently caress you Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Sep 13, 2020 |
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Sep 13, 2020 04:24
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QuarkJets posted:Okay, so if I generate 10GW in new green sources and 5GW in new brown sources, is that really the same as generating 15 GW in new brown sources? Of course it isn't. Because 15 is more than 5. You apparently disagree and I don't know what to say about that. If generate 10WhateverGigaWatts of Green Energy and 10WhateverGigawatts Emitting Energy but that still causing the world to go over 2C, 2.5C or even 3C then well I guess it's better but you miss completely missed the goal. QuarkJets posted:And this doesn't even get into the secondary benefits of green energy sources becoming cheaper for everyone when countries like China and Germany spend massive amounts on developing and installing green energy I agree but that's not the original topic.
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Sep 13, 2020 04:27
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Crazycryodude posted:Lol if you think the US is a democracy, lol if you think the US isn't a command economy run by a dozen billionaires and their lobbyists, lol if you think China going from "agrarian backwater intentionally gutted and kept down by the empires of the time" to "modern world superpower" in a single human lifetime while also unfucking their environment at the same time is somehow an indictment of them. Yes, they hosed their environment pretty bad, so did we, over the course of centuries, far worse than they ever could hope to, but that was before any of us were born and now that they have the GALL to demand "hey why can't we have nice things too" they're the evil ones? At least they're making an attempt to mitigate and fix the damage industrialization inherently causes, we're just slamming the throttle to full emergency power and riding this poo poo into the ground. Its a pretty good post for a drunk post
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Sep 13, 2020 04:28
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Taffer posted:Also, on the storage point, lithium is a huge huge huge bottleneck. It's rare, expensive, notoriously difficult to mine, and if I understand right (please correct me if I'm wrong) our current known sources of lithium do not even come close to the amount required to manage the grid storage of even one country, much less the world. This is potentially a concern, but we're very likely to be fine as long as we improve our recycling capabilities. Currently known world Li reserves could be used to create about 70 TWh of Li-ion batteries, which is almost exactly one day of worldwide power consumption. It's also pretty likely we'll continue to discover additional reserves, since interest in Lithium hasn't been very high until somewhat recently. We also don't need to use strictly Li-ion, there are loads of other battery chemistries. Li-ion is just currently a strong choice in many ways. Taffer posted:Also there are the human rights implications of that, like how the US just overthrew a government so that we could continue to exploit lithium sources.
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Sep 13, 2020 04:28
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CommieGIR posted:Its a pretty good post for a drunk post If I told y'all that I've been sober these past 4 years, and took the world's bullshit head on, would you believe me?
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Sep 13, 2020 04:30
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Grouchio posted:If I told y'all that I've been sober these past 4 years, and took the world's bullshit head on, would you believe me? As a non-drinker myself... No
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Sep 13, 2020 04:36
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Gabriel S. posted:If generate 10WhateverGigaWatts of Green Energy and 10WhateverGigawatts Emitting Energy but that still causing the world to go over 2C, 2.5C or even 3C then well I guess it's better but you miss completely missed the goal. That's not relevant to whether China is a world leader in green energy investment.
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Sep 13, 2020 04:46
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Gabriel S. posted:I agree but that's not the original topic. It's extremely relevant to the topic of green energy profitability, which is one of the things that we're talking about. Those multiple decades of massive subsidized investments drove green energy from economically infeasible to one of the best bets in town and are basically the only reason anyone is making any headway at all on deploying green power sources
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Sep 13, 2020 04:49
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QuarkJets posted:That's not relevant to whether China is a world leader in green energy investment. The crux of the matter is emissions. It's like being a great athlete but you can't even cross the finish line. Results matter. Leaders deliver results. QuarkJets posted:It's extremely relevant to the topic of green energy profitability, which is one of the things that we're talking about. Those multiple decades of massive subsidized investments drove green energy from economically infeasible to one of the best bets in town and are basically the only reason anyone is making any headway at all on deploying green power sources This whole discussion started because I disputed earlier that's primarily a problem of economics. It is a problem of economics and more than just that. Give that global warming is an literal existential threat to our species and the planet I am going to go out on a limb and say that is absolutely critical that is communicated as such.
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Sep 13, 2020 04:57
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Gabriel S. posted:The crux of the matter is emissions. It's like being a great athlete but you can't even cross the finish line. Results matter. Leaders deliver results. Yeah, cool. But you were disputing whether they're a world leader in green energy investment. They definitely are, the numbers don't lie. Like I said, it's possible to be a huge green energy investor and a net polluter at the same time, those aren't exclusive
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Sep 13, 2020 05:05
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QuarkJets posted:Yeah, cool. But you were disputing whether they're a world leader in green energy investment. They definitely are, the numbers don't lie. Like I said, it's possible to be a huge green energy investor and a net polluter at the same time, those aren't exclusive I'll concede they're investing the most capital into green energy but what do they have to show for it? Not much.
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Sep 13, 2020 05:15
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China is a leader in a variety of ways, both in terms of clean energy development and greenhouse gas emissions. This is largely a factor of being the biggest economy and biggest GHG emitter in the world. The important statistic is their overall GHG emissions year-over-year. You can build all the solar panels you want, but if you aren't actually closing down coal plants then it isn't really progress - Germany is a perfect example of that. I'm hopeful that China's investments will eventually lead to goal dividends as other nations become envious of their infrastructural advances. But the cold hard reality is that they continue to increase their emissions each year, unlike other major economies like the United States and the European Union.
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Sep 13, 2020 06:02
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Gabriel S. posted:I'll concede they're investing the most capital into green energy but what do they have to show for it? They have nearly a terawatt of renewable power capacity. That's a fuckload
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Sep 13, 2020 06:08
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Grouchio posted:If I told y'all that I've been sober these past 4 years, and took the world's bullshit head on, would you believe me? actually that's exactly what i'd expect from a weenie like you Grouchio
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Sep 13, 2020 06:12
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GE-Hitachi and TerraPower showing off another design for Nuclear-Thermal storage: https://twitter.com/Sonalcpatel/status/1304895829665296384?s=20 Caveat: TerraPower and GE-Hitachi push a lot of these designs and seem to get nowhere near where even where NuScale has gotten.
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Sep 13, 2020 21:55
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Taffer posted:Sorry in advance for making this tangentially political thread explicitly political, but this really is what it all comes down to. Capitalism is the primary cause of the mess we're in. Breathlessly chasing the cheapest most destructive energy sources for decades and destroying huge swaths of land that are critical to the planets ability to absorb more of the effects of climate change See, this poo poo right here is incredibly ignorant of human nature, economics (which is really just another way of saying “human nature”) and actual history (ditto.) The most toxic, heavily polluted areas on earth are not uniquely or even predominately the result of “capitalism,” and breathlessly chasing the cheapest energy solutions is not a thing that is done solely because of profit motives. And if you eliminate profit motives, there are still many things which motivate people to chase the cheapest solutions. I am going to mention the phrase “opportunity cost” again, because that is a thing which does not go away just because you’re not capitalist. Seriously, if you don’t understand why East Germany was an environmental disaster that only began to be mitigated following reunification and the adoption of capitalism, you need to stop talking about how environmental problems are a unique feature of (or “primarily caused by”) capitalism. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 03:56
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Ardennes posted:China is at least also trending downward which is something considering it is still developing. Where are you getting “trending downward” when it is planning on building hundreds of new coal plants? https://www.ft.com/content/cdcd8a02-81b5-48f1-a4a5-60a93a6ffa1e
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Sep 14, 2020 03:59
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Phanatic posted:See, this poo poo right here is incredibly ignorant of human nature, economics (which is really just another way of saying “human nature”) and actual history (ditto.) You misunderstand; no one is claiming that greenhouse gas emissions are unique to capitalism, only that capitalism is largely to blame for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have been and continue to be emitted. This does not mean that any other economic system is guaranteed to do any better, merely that other economic systems have the capability to do better. These other systems include variations on pure capitalism; basically the less pure the better Obviously it's not capitalism that leads to things like the Paris Climate Accords, carbon taxes, subsidies for green energy, etc. That doesn't mean that you have to be a communist in order to be an environmentalist, you just have to not be a fetishist for pure capitalism. QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 04:23
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Phanatic posted:Where are you getting “trending downward” when it is planning on building hundreds of new coal plants? Trending downward in construction and the amount of coal power period, remember that Chinese electricity consumption is only growing.
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Sep 14, 2020 06:05
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Phanatic posted:See, this poo poo right here is incredibly ignorant of human nature, economics (which is really just another way of saying “human nature”) and actual history (ditto.) I didn't and I wouldn't say that capitalism is the exclusive driver of all environmental damage - that would be ludicrous, and I know that. But it is the primary driver. Things like using coal for power are plainly not something driven only by capitalism, but exploiting governments and creating structures to artificially decrease cost and remove responsibility of negative externalities (subsidies, using governments to foot the bill of various disasters etc that was discussed a few posts ago) are. And pushing fossil fuels as leading energy sources well past the point where society was aware of the dangers and had the full capability in technology and resources to move away from them is also primarily due to capitalism. This is distinct from "developing" countries relying on things like coal because they largely don't have the resources to bootstrap immediately to nuclear or a massive renewable grid. And this is before even talking about the massive geopolitical implications of powerful nations securing access to cheap fossil fuels in the borders of less powerful nations. You could argue that this isn't strictly due to capitalism and I would agree with you to an extent, but you can't ignore what a powerful influence capitalism has on governments. Between reelection funds and media control and cozy board positions after leaving office, it creates extremely warped incentive structures that are inherently opposed to the democratic spirit that the US and other western countries like to masquerade in. Would these things still happen without capitalism? Yes, most definitely. Would that happen on the same scale? I doubt it. And you can't talk about East Germany without automatically roping in the implications of capitalism.
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Sep 14, 2020 10:52
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Taffer posted:But it is the primary driver. Things like using coal for power are plainly not something driven only by capitalism, but exploiting governments and creating structures to artificially decrease cost and remove responsibility of negative externalities (subsidies, using governments to foot the bill of various disasters etc that was discussed a few posts ago) are. This is abject nonsense. It is literally ahistorical. You don't think, say, Communist countries created structures to "artificially decrease cost" and "remove responsibility of negative externalities"? How was the cost of negative externalities like having to dispose of nuclear reactor cores captured by sinking them in shallow waters where people fish? Did the ChiComs implement a carbon tax to properly pass the external costs of burning coal onto the people who chose to burn coal? For that matter, have the externalities of rare earth mining been properly captured and priced into the windmills produced with the materials mined here? https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth And this doesn't even touch on the fact that things like making sure the users of a product are the ones that pay the costs of that product is entirely compatible with capitalism! A carbon tax isn't anticapitalist. Even the Austrians will tell you flat out that economies function better when the users of a product are the ones who pay the costs of the product, and those costs include externalities. Figuring out how much a kilogram of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere costs, and then implementing a a tax on coal power so that the people who run the factories powered by that coal plant have to pay more for electricity and then pass that cost along to the people who buy the widgets produced in that factory is capitalist, because it makes prices more accurate, which gives people more information with which to make decisions. quote:And pushing fossil fuels as leading energy sources well past the point where society was aware of the dangers and had the full capability in technology and resources to move away from them is also primarily due to capitalism. This is distinct from "developing" countries relying on things like coal because they largely don't have the resources to bootstrap immediately to nuclear or a massive [renewable grid. That's a very convenient distinction. Moribund command economies are excused their trashing of the environment, but when they update their moribund economic principles and liberalize and start being able to clean up the messes made by those command economies, now their environmental pollution can be blamed on capitalism. quote:Between reelection funds and media control and cozy board positions after leaving office, it creates extremely warped incentive structures that are inherently opposed to the democratic spirit that the US and other western countries like to masquerade in. Would these things still happen without capitalism? Yes, most definitely. Would that happen on the same scale? I doubt it. Countries that don't have elections obviously don't need to worry about reelection funds. Countries that don't have a free press don't need to worry about "media control." So obviously the problems that come from having a free society wouldn't happen "on the same scale" without free socities. This is not an indictment of free societies, it is not an argument in favor of command economies that suppress price signals and are incapable of making good economic decisions, it is a tautology dressed up with additional words. Do you think the incentive structures that placed certain people in charge of various subdepartments at GOSPLAN, the processes that picked the people in charge of various ministries, were non-warped and purely rational? QuarkJets posted:You misunderstand; no one is claiming that greenhouse gas emissions are unique to capitalism, only that capitalism is largely to blame for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have been and continue to be emitted. Because capitalism produces a lot more stuff that people want, and producing stuff people want generates greenhouse gas emissions, sure, okay, capitalism is largely to blame for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have and continue to be emitted. A medieval agrarian society where grinding and abject poverty was the rule would, admittedly, emit very little in the way of greenhouse emissions. Unless you're making the argument that that state of affairs is preferable to one in which we build a lot of buildings called "schools" and "hospitals" and "factories," or that capitalism is "largely to blame" for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have been emitted but is not "largely to blame" for the sheer numbers of humanity it has lifted out of grinding and abject poverty, then this would seem to be a trivial point. And you're also omitting the other part of that claim. The claim was not that capitalism is largely to blame for the quantities of greenhouse emissions, it was that capitalism is largely to blame for them *because* capitalism particularly incentivizes "Breathlessly chasing the cheapest most destructive energy sources.' Which is ahistorical nonsense, as demonstrated by the record being replete with examples of non-capitalist economies breathlessly chasing the cheapest most destructive energy sources. Because, again, *opportunity costs do not go away in command economies.* Phanatic fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 14:11
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Phanatic posted:*opportunity costs do not go away in command economies.* Pretty much the gist of it.
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Sep 14, 2020 14:21
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Frankly I don't think the standard capitalist critiques are particularly applicable to energy generation, since so much of it is explicitly government-driven. We can talk about the role of corporate regulatory capture, or the close relationship between business and "nation-building", but it still amounts to political entities choosing winners and losers. To my mind, it's more an example of "socialism for the rich" than any form of capitalistic excess.
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Sep 14, 2020 15:14
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That’s a really good point. For instance in Australia the bulk of energy generation was built by state governments and as government employees did not give the first care for the environment (my sister was the enviro at Muja power station and struggled with the culture there). Their priorities were keeping the lighting on and that’s what they did. Private power was required to follow environmental laws that public organizations were exempt from. Thousands of more employees than needed on very good salaries but try and get them to simply do fly ash tail dam inspections at half the frequency of the law applied to the private generator across town was a bridge too far.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:48
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Phanatic posted:Because capitalism produces a lot more stuff that people want, and producing stuff people want generates greenhouse gas emissions, sure, okay, capitalism is largely to blame for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have and continue to be emitted. A medieval agrarian society where grinding and abject poverty was the rule would, admittedly, emit very little in the way of greenhouse emissions. Unless you're making the argument that that state of affairs is preferable to one in which we build a lot of buildings called "schools" and "hospitals" and "factories," or that capitalism is "largely to blame" for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have been emitted but is not "largely to blame" for the sheer numbers of humanity it has lifted out of grinding and abject poverty, then this would seem to be a trivial point. This is a really big strawman. Firstly, capitalism doesn't just "produce stuff people want", it manufactures desires and then creates products to fulfill those artificial desires. Production is vastly beyond human want or need, at least by the measure of consumption in wealthy nations. Second, agrarian societies were not some horrific existence as a rule. Many lived in grinding medieval poverty as you call it, but a large portion also lived simple, happy lives that many historians consider happier and healthier than the lower class in so-called first world countries today. The state of affairs had more to do with the political and economic environments than it did with lack of technological or scientific progress. Pointing out "schools" and "hopsitals" as if they're the leading source of environmental damage and also the leading cause of no longer experiencing "grinding, abject poverty" is both dishonest and wrong. The state of poverty someone experiences has essentially nothing to do with the amount of stuff they're able to accumulate or the amount of technology in the society around them, it's entirely to do with their security in access to food, housing, and healthcare, all things that capitalism is uniquely bad at providing to people who are experiencing poverty. I won't argue about factories, because besides energy generation itself they're probably the worst polluters of both air and ground, but why do you throw schools and hospitals in there? Are you saying that constructing buildings and having healthcare require mass amounts of greenhouse emissions? I'm aware that concrete and steel are sources, but not on the scale you're implying for such mundane structures. I'm really, really baffled how you and other posters seem incapable of imagining any economic system that isn't either maximum capitalism, maximum command economy, or medieval feudalism. You do know that there are other means of organizing economic activity... right?
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Sep 14, 2020 18:52
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Phanatic posted:And you're also omitting the other part of that claim. The claim was not that capitalism is largely to blame for the quantities of greenhouse emissions, it was that capitalism is largely to blame for them *because* capitalism particularly incentivizes "Breathlessly chasing the cheapest most destructive energy sources.' Which is ahistorical nonsense, as demonstrated by the record being replete with examples of non-capitalist economies breathlessly chasing the cheapest most destructive energy sources. Because, again, *opportunity costs do not go away in command economies.* It's not nonsense, that's what capitalism actually does and has always done. I'm sorry that you don't understand how capitalism, which optimizes solely for profit, leads to exclusive use of the cheapest energy sources available. As I pointed out, this does not mean that you have to be a communist to be an environmentalist, or that any other system promotes environmentalism.
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Sep 14, 2020 19:37
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Actually I think you'll find that communism is when the government does things and the more the government does things the more communister is, capitalism is when the government does not do things and the fewer things it does the more capitalister it is, and this is a 0-100 sliding scale on one axis with no other considerations
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Sep 14, 2020 19:43
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Dante80 posted:Pretty much the gist of it. Wow. I could just hear the layman conversations around a real cost of coal. “Those god damned libs! They just tripled my heating bills! Why do those rich Californians and New Yorkers think we have to pay for their dumb ideas?? West Virginia thrives on coal! Why my daddy...[rant continues]”
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Sep 14, 2020 20:09
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thesis: value is imputed by the labor it takes to make a thing antithesis: value is whatever anyones willing to pay for it synthesis: value is the energy cost of acquisition & consumption
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Sep 14, 2020 20:10
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MightyBigMinus posted:thesis: value is imputed by the labor it takes to make a thing Counterpoint: If we solely define the value of our energy by how cheap it is, we're done for as a species. There's going to have to eventually be a balance between its "value" and how environmentally sound it is to use.
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Sep 14, 2020 20:26
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Also, if you are talking about East Germany or China, how much of their pollution was/is from a lack of decent choices? Eastern Germany (at least at the time 1970s/1980s) was building nuclear reactors fairly quickly for such a small country (not without issues), but otherwise, their only other choice was coal power. Pollution was so bad Eastern Germany, even if it was doing better than most of the rest of the Eastern bloc, because of a lack of decent choices. Likewise, most of the devastation of the Aral sea occurred during the 1990s/early 2000s since post-Soviet Uzbekistan/Kazakstan were sapping as much water as possible to export cotton, one of the few functioning parts of the regional economy. As Kazakstan has been doing better in recent years they had started to allow water back in. It doesn't excuse what occurred, but it informs how and why choices were made in the second world. Likewise, China has been building coal likewise because they're the cheapest way to provide stable amounts of electricity. They are clearly transitioning away from coal, but it will be years before they really limiting coal output entirely. How much is it the command economies or simply choice? (Likewise, developing market economy also building coal plants is likely logical). I think the issue isn't even capitalism itself (although it is an issue), but the largest economy of the earth (and the "leader" of the other large economies) clearly not making any sort of effort for decades. It isn't even that capitalism itself (Keynesian-style capitalism was able to accomplish infrastructure improvement) is the only thing holding us back as a mechanism, but we can barely conceive of doing anything different. We did and still have the ability to make a different choice, but honestly, I think it is far more about the beltway than it is about anything else. Btw the nuclear issue is part of this, since it would take a real shift of opinion in DC to change how nuclear power is approached. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 20:42
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The value of fossil fuels is really poor when you account for externalities but those externalities are distributed in a way that's impossible for a market to capture. An entire industry exists because of this fact. Of course the people at the top of that industry will fight to prevent the kind of intervention that is necessary to capture those externalities. We need the intervention regardless, so we need to overcome this natural resistive pressure of capitalism. Many countries have been successful in this but Republicans love huffing gas fumes so it's been harder for the US, but there's been progress over the last 50 years despite that, partly due to the investments of other countries
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Sep 14, 2020 20:47
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Ardennes posted:how much of their pollution was/is from a lack of decent choices? This is a really important point, and one I tried to capture (maybe poorly) in a previous post. There's a lot of hand-wringing and finger-wagging done at countries like China or India or other rapidly industrializing countries about how much they're polluting by the "first world", but on a per-capita level even these perceived horrible polluters are far below the US, Canada, UK, Germany, etc. Not only that, but these countries have a right to pull themselves out of poverty, they have a right to bootstrap their industry and resources to a point where they can transition to more sustainable things. Particularly when you look through a historical lens at how broadly they have been (and are being) exploited economically and environmentally. As the wealthy industrialized nations of the world we have both the means and the moral responsibility to work to undo the horrible global damage that we've been the primary contributors of. We should not only be limiting consumption, but coming up with strategies and technologies in energy, transportation, land preservation/restoration, and spreading that knowledge and technology to around as much as possible so that less industrialized nations have a shorter and easier path to reducing emissions. Not to mention other side-benefits, like how wealthy nations where people feel security and confidence produce significantly less children, which will automatically drive down population growth, which will be a big factor in dealing with ongoing climate change. Something like that might sound pie-in-the-sky or naive, but if we continue in our current state or even something similar to our current state, we're hosed. Humanity as we know it will be over, and life on earth will be reduced to a miniscule fraction of what it once was. So the hopes and ideas that I post about here are unrealistic in the sense that they require breaking the status quo, but that has to be done no matter what, so lets actually try to imagine one where things can get better. We CAN build lots of nukes, we CAN consume less, we CAN restructure our societies to be more sustainable, and we CAN share knowledge and infrastructure (and even money! :gasp: ) with other nations to accelerate this process for those who have fewer means. All these things are possible! Circling the doomsday drain is pointless, because there's only one outcome: we and our children all die because of climate collapse. Let's do better.
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Sep 14, 2020 21:06
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I hope this isn’t too far to stray, but I remember my time in North Carolina well: Just before I got there, a month or so, I had read that Boss Hog article in Rolling Stone by Matt Tabbi. People wold relate to me how very many others they knew in the pig farming industry as seeming verifications that, in this state, there was a good deal of factory style pig farms. Those farms produced so much hog waste it had become an insane problem for storage. A good storm or even a hurricane would hit, and the waste ponds would overflow, dumping not just fermenting bacteria laden feces and urine into a swampy state with a high water table providing consumer drinking water from individually owned artisan wells, but the HORMONES that the pigs were given to fatten and enlarge them that had been excreted through their waste. Those hormones were incredibly likely to persist in the environment till someone drank a big glass of them, or showered in them, or soaked in them to go swimming. Nobody cared, nobody believed me when I pointed out to my friends that it seemed odd that every woman who had grown up out there in rural NC near Smithfield where I was staying, every local woman I met that was over the age of 35 had undergone a hysterectomy. I was looked at like an alien, like a foreigner who was interloping and casting judgment. (Roughly a dozen women is not a sample group, it was just too frequent for me to ignore) Maybe it was my horror at the realization that in this, a reformation state in 2012, that black people were still treated like non humans, and biology as a science was a hoax being thrust upon them by arrogant, out of state liberals. I was mocked at insisting on drinking bottled water the whole time I was there. I left soon after my realization. NC, the feds, or even Smithfield the company could have done anything with that pig waste. They could have made biogas out of it, the could have baked it and buried it in a landfill, they could have done anything different with it, but they grew hay with no market value and sprayed it on the fields, they sprayed it into the air over the ponds to speed the reduction of its volume, they let it continue to run into the streams and eventually the bays they ran into, causing massive anoxic events in their fisheries.  it’s people. it’s the people of the world economic leader because democracy thrives on an informed and moral public. that’s not capitalism, that’s people being the engine of their own destruction via the dark channels of ignorance that are still held up as a virtue in many places. one day in my lifetime china will be that economic leader or so i’m told, i just can’t imagine that they’ll keep up their stance as a green energy leader even when the air is too hot and damp to sweat in, i can’t imagine their leadership won’t quietly give up on their citizens, blanketing them with propaganda. I can’t imagine much of a difference in attitude between these rural Americans and some rural Chinese living in the shadow of one of those hundreds of planned coal plants. I can’t imagine either set being concerned about higher education enough to become someone who could actually run a nuclear power plant, let alone understand the proof of a slow moving and hardly visible problem like climate change. Tell me again, generic Midwest political candidate, how people on the coasts think rural citizens are ignorant rubes, “but they’re so wrong!” Even in an unelected government, there is still some mutual reflection of a people and their leaders, so here we are... Solvent fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Sep 14, 2020 |
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Sep 14, 2020 21:57
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Taffer posted:This is a really important point, and one I tried to capture (maybe poorly) in a previous post. There's a lot of hand-wringing and finger-wagging done at countries like China or India or other rapidly industrializing countries about how much they're polluting by the "first world", but on a per-capita level even these perceived horrible polluters are far below the US, Canada, UK, Germany, etc. Not only that, but these countries have a right to pull themselves out of poverty, they have a right to bootstrap their industry and resources to a point where they can transition to more sustainable things. Particularly when you look through a historical lens at how broadly they have been (and are being) exploited economically and environmentally. I don't understand, where does the shareholder value come from in this situation 
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Sep 14, 2020 22:08
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QuarkJets posted:You misunderstand; no one is claiming that greenhouse gas emissions are unique to capitalism, only that capitalism is largely to blame for the sheer quantities of greenhouse gas that have been and continue to be emitted. Taffer posted:I didn't and I wouldn't say that capitalism is the exclusive driver of all environmental damage - that would be ludicrous, and I know that. The primary driver of climate change is emissions of Greenhouse Gases. Everything else is secondary. Taffer posted:I'm really, really baffled how you and other posters seem incapable of imagining any economic system that isn't either maximum capitalism, maximum command economy, or medieval feudalism. You do know that there are other means of organizing economic activity... right? Of course, other economic systems exist and they too have had their environmental catastrophes. Hell, they had them even before the existence of capitalism or any kind of real market.
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Sep 15, 2020 05:54
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Taffer posted:This is a really big strawman. Firstly, capitalism doesn't just "produce stuff people want", it manufactures desires and then creates products to fulfill those artificial desires. I think it is hard to determine though to what extent demand for products is manufactured and how much is 'real'. Similarly, it isn't straightforward to me to say to what degree the media is just a reflection of society's ideas & beliefs or whether it plants ideas into people's minds. Taffer posted:We should not only be limiting consumption I think any American politician who suggests doing something like this in a non-trivial way would get crucified. Americans like things like hot water, air conditioning, heating, cheap air travel, constant availability of any type of consumer good imaginable with free two-day shipping, single-family houses, personal automobiles, constant availability of almost any kind of fresh produce, even in the winter, etc.
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Sep 16, 2020 13:21
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Well too bad, they can either give up some of those things willingly in a controlled scaling back of consumption or they can lose them anyways when poo poo starts collapsing more and more. At least in the former you get to keep a roof over your head in a wood-frame Khrushchyovka that has running water and climate control and enough local-ish food to keep you healthy, in the latter we all just get to live in a climate-ravaged wasteland where billionaire compounds get to keep all the luxuries and it looks like Fallout for the rest of us.
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Sep 16, 2020 14:35
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Crazycryodude posted:Well too bad, they can either give up some of those things willingly in a controlled scaling back of consumption or they can lose them anyways when poo poo starts collapsing more and more. At least in the former you get to keep a roof over your head in a wood-frame Khrushchyovka that has running water and climate control and enough local-ish food to keep you healthy, in the latter we all just get to live in a climate-ravaged wasteland where billionaire compounds get to keep all the luxuries and it looks like Fallout for the rest of us. Have you seen the American response to covid? They can't even be bothered to wear a mask and stay away from restaurants even with the risk of death.
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Sep 16, 2020 15:09
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Hitachi pulling out of the Wylfa nuclear power project in Wales Also, there is a free webinar today at 5PM PDT with a member of the board of governors of the California Independent System Operator Who Turned Off the Lights?: Grid Resilience with Severin Borenstein
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Sep 16, 2020 16:45
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