It’s not actually cheaper, though — we have just failed to price lifetime waste storage into the original budget of those rods or into comparisons with making new ones. That’s arguably an easier sell than pricing carbon-related damage into oil.
Aceris
6259
It’s not a conspiracy theory though. This is explicitly the message of the XR leaders, for example. I don’t know to what extent that fringe has gone mainstream in the US though
Yeah, me too. I read him as saying that this is what we do now, but I could be wrong as well.
It is because they (repliers, at least) think human-created climate change is a hoax created by a united left to create the fifth international, instead of reclaiming the power of the nation-state being just one of the social-democratic proposals to handle an ecocide, where even then people don’t agree on everything.
Aceris
6262
Human centered climate change is not a hoax created by the fifth international, but the fifth international (inasmuch as such a thing exists, which it doesn’t as an organisation or coherent ideology but does as a large group of campaigners who share themes and want similar things) has harnessed, and routinely lies about the science of, climate change in order to further their aims. The environmental movement contains many social democrats, but increasingly the syndicalists and totalitarians are the loudest voices that get the most media time (at least in the UK).
I’m tired of the media deference to people with an extreme ideological agenda which goes beyond climate change, while more constructive moderate voices are all but ignored. (c.f. XR vs LibDems in the UK).
I’m not sure what you mean by “reclaiming the power of the nation state” - I assume this is US specific. The proposals of the people I object to go well beyond the traditional powers of the nation state in a liberal democracy.
[To clarify my position - if I were in charge of energy and climate policy for the UK, I would:
- Encourage through policy and subidy (to the extent necessary) the further development of offshore wind.
- Commission an additional large nuclear power station, using government debt and state owned but privately built and run.
- Increase subsidy for electric vehicles.
- Be much more proactive about building the infrastructure for fast charging. If it has to be state owned then that’s not ideal but it’s better than not getting enough built.
- Review the environmental impact of gas-based heating and investigate economic electric-based alternatives.]
The big gap is freight lorries. I simply don’t see how current electric tech can make these workable. Maybe they need to run on hydrogen, but I think you lose too much efficiency making the hydrogen? Anyone here got any ideas or good links?]
MikeJ
6263
What about the Tesla semi truck? I don’t see why transport trucks aren’t workable.
As for hydrogen, I think it has a worse energy-density problem than current batteries, though maybe new tech can get around it.
Aceris
6264
From what I’ve read the weight and charging of the batteries is a big issue. This vehicles are used much harder than most personal-use cars. I make a rule of not believing anything coming out of Tesla until it’s actually real, although obviously the tesla cars are a very strong design.
It’s a reference to the name of a book by one of the MMT creators. Because if it is a society threatening disaster, which it is, it’s time to stop pretending the market will do much about it, if it even stops complaining about how much it costs them.
A big part of the problem is that you need a fair energy transition problem, because tons of jobs and capacity to move will have to go away, but people still need to eat (see Gillets Jaunes). That’s the origin of doing it at the same time the GND or Sanders’ plan propose, which are far from ending liberal market-driven economies. It’s just recognizing that all the deficits and economic interventions that nations do anyway (trade treaties don’t honor themselves) can be used to solve problems.
When it does go pear-shaped, if we keep not doing fuck all, is when the calls for violence will be a problem. IMHO.
Put them on rails, design cities around them and accept that the point is not for them to be profitable, but as an economic multiplier.
Very much this. Freight should move long distance on rails, not lorries.
Cockroach Herodotus will have a field day with this shit. I hope the next time intelligent life comes around some of the brain loopholes will have been closed.
Aceris
6268
Believing in MMT is very similar to believing humans are not responsible for climate change. It requires you to ignore the experts, and if you have your way you will make a lot of people poorer and/or deader in the long run. I’ve read up on MMT and it’s a shell game. It’s like a 0 == 1 proof in mathematics where things are redefined repeatedly to obscure the fact that all the theory changes nothing fundamental.
Why do you think a government can better solve the “fair energy transition problem” than the market. “Tons of jobs will have to go away”? Why?
If you want to change resource allocation priorities then the government has plenty of levers to pull - carbon tax. Regulation. Subsidies to get people moving in the right direction. Funding of fundamental research. In states that are pulling this levers massive progress is being made.
The “experts” who can’t explain where the inflation is, why Japan isn’t broke, still haven’t made the NAIRU predict anything, how Trumponimcs actually provided a boost (temporary and disastrous) and so on. Fine by me. I have no idea how making everyone employed would make them poorer, though.
Coal miners, some car mechanics, fracking and offshore drillers and so on need new jobs without leaving their towns empty.
Obviously, but much less when it has to be profitable because of some number that doesn’t directly say anything. They’re all still non-free market, though.
Aceris
6270
I’m not an expert, but:
- soaked up by Chinese overcapacity via trade globalization.
- I think because a substantial majority of the debt all ultimately rests with the central bank via QE. Noone argues governments can’t do this kind of thing.
- NAIRU: I got nothing.
- The debt funded “corporate tax cuts” did indeed deliver stimulus. This is keynesianism 101. It’s not surprising in any way.
I think economists have adjusted too slowly to the changes wrought upon their traditional metrics and guidelines by globalisation. However the fact that you can replace inflation with foreign debt doesn’t really solve the problem - if anything it makes retaining the ability of money to act as a store of value and unit of account even more important to economies involved in globalised cross-currency trade.
I think this is a misunderstanding of what the honest free marketeers (as opposed to Trumponomists) really want. The free market is a solution to the resource allocation problem. Give it the wrong incentives and it will give you the wrong answers. A carbon tax is a very clean way to adjust the incentives around carbon emissions, for example.
The best argument the free marketeers can come up with for not having a carbon tax is “but global warming might be good for us! We cannot know!” It’s pretty pathetic.
Snowfox
6271
More good news in the race for fossil free steel. The company claimed in a TV inteview that the test facility is already up and running.
I’m not either, and probably much more likely to say silly mistakes, as I still say now and then (to myself) when reading their blog posts. What I mean by this sidetrack is, by theory, increasing the monetary base should automatically increase inflation and make more loans happen. Post-facto justifications of why things didn’t happen as predicted vary widely between speaker and aren’t a coherent set of rules, especially in the Eurozone. When I hear CBs and governments saying they don’t know why there are no inflation or wage increases, I can’t believe there is a proper explanation that can be treated like the science field it is treated as.
No, it’s because you’re outnumbered in your political side. Most libertarians I’ve seen argue that nearly all direct intervention is a distortion, which has spread a fair to every single right-wing party in Europe that I know of.
One argument against a carbon tax, that I didn’t follow up on properly, it that it is easy to subcontract the polluting part of production to a subsidiary registered in another country. I’d have to research how much it actually happens, though.
Forgot this point. You’ve got it wrong, you replace inflation control via debt emission with higher rates (which is of dubious value) with control via (potentially directed) taxes and zero interest rates. At that point, you can just stop emitting debt and inject the money directly instead of paying (via interest) for financial entities to have a risk-free asset. Currency exchange happens through normal market operations, which floats the currency and means you still need to have things other want to buy and thus acquire the currency in which they are sold.
Aceris
6274
Economics is largely a matter of rules of thumb and trying to fit models to the evidence, it’s true. And that’s precisely why MMT is so bonkers. Trust in the currency is such a fundamental aspect of every stable economy, and the Breton Woods system and the systems that have replaced it have ensured that, by and large, more countries are able to ensure more trustworthy currencies than ever before.
MMT advocates completely restructuring the monetary base. Why? What is to be gained? The claim is always that we are simply being honest about how money works and directing it in a democratic way. But the implementation is always about asserting an unprecedented level of state power over capital allocation ( which would be disastrous in and of itself) coupled with a promise of a consequence free government stimulus when needed ( and of course it is needed now).
It’s impossible to build trust in a currency when governments believe they can buy votes by printing money. That’s not a theoretical result but an empirical one. MMT never begins to explain why this time is different.
Understand it is not merely the libertarians who believe this ( and libertarian is not the same as free marketeer), but virtually every mainstream economist. Including those who favour a more Scandinavian style active social democratic government.
Maybe we should have a separate thread on this, but to circle back round to the topic, it is unsurprising those who support both anti capitalism and environmentalism have latched onto MMT, and make arguments about the policy prescriptions of MMT allowing us to solve the climate emergency. Because it serves the anti capitalist goal as well. What is truly tragic here is that the arguments of those who seek to take environmental action while preserving capitalism get drowned out in the media by the much more dramatic and exciting extremists.
Aceris
6275
What I meant was, you may be able to print money and not trigger an inflation tax because the money purchases supply from overseas, (and then probably returns as inwards investment, hence foreign debt).
To stop resource availability from flowing upwards while infrastructure and the environment decay, at the cost of more and more precarious work and otherwise more and more uncertain life.
The power is already being used to enforce the rights of global companies to do what they want at the cost of everything else, including the climate and buying political control, while creating an intra-class fight for crumbs in political power.
Because it’s not printing money, it’s funding what needs doing while removing incentives to do what needs to not be done.
You gain trust because you supply an educated workforce, a functional justice system and good quality infrastructure to investors, huge waste of resources will still be as easy to spot as now (as in, not much), and controlled by the same systems that allow huge wastes in weapons and saving banks now. Doesn’t seem that different to me, just more honest.
Non role-model Chavez was wasteful, and he still had foreign investment. The Yen is still doing fine, and so is the Icelandic Krona, despite the warnings of collapse. MMT may be wrong, but monetarism doesn’t add up.
MMT is about incentives, not controlling the means of production or private property. It is fundamentally capitalist, much more than externalizing costs to other countries.
But, really, it doesn’t matter what the real model is to solve the ecodice, what matters is that we need one that recognizes the need to allocate more resources to fight climate change, that we can do it like we did for other things, and that we need to not antagonize people who just want a job to buy food, because they’ll kill it. And no proposed solution is getting enough buy in.
US Scientific conclusions released over the holiday break:
If you think the Friday after Thanksgiving seems like an odd day to publish such a major report, you’re right. The assessment was originally scheduled to be released in December at a large scientific conference in Washington, D.C. But earlier this week, officials announced that the report would come out two weeks early, on the afternoon of Black Friday. When politically inconvenient news is published in the final hours of a workweek, politicos call it a “Friday news dump.” Publishing a dire climate report in the final hours of Black Friday might be the biggest Friday news dump of them all.
So who ordered such a dump? During a press conference on Friday, the report’s directors in the government repeatedly declined to say. “It’s out earlier than expected,” said Monica Allen, a spokeswoman for NOAA. “This report has not been altered or revised in any way to reflect political considerations.”
Read: The global rightward shift on climate change
Yet the change in scheduling took the report’s authors by surprise. John Bruno, an author of the report and a coral biologist at the University of North Carolina, told me that he only learned last Friday that the report would be released today. “There was no explanation or justification,” he said. “The [assessment] leadership implied the timing was being dictated by another entity, but did not say who that was.”
Hayhoe told me she only learned on Tuesday that the report would be released on Friday. At the time, she was preparing three pies for a family Thanksgiving. She put the pies aside and picked up her laptop to submit any final revisions to the document.
The White House did not respond directly when asked who had ordered such a change. It also did not respond directly when asked if the report would lead President Trump to reconsider his beliefs.
