Robert Tulip wrote:The facts are that this so-called ‘market-like approach to mitigating CO2 emissions’ has a snowball’s chance in hell of slowing down climate change, and that is due to its inherent defects, not the opposition of denialists. Mitigating emissions, slowing the speed at which we add carbon to the air, can at best remove 1.5% of the carbon problem of anthropogenic radiative forcing each year, not even enough to stop the situation getting continually worse. Emission reduction is a failed paradigm that has to be junked.
You've made these claims before, of course, but in this case it is a shift of the terms of the discussion, as well as being wrong-headed. My point was that the opposition to inaction on the climate was not a left-wing initiative but a level-headed conservative and Republican response to scientific findings. You are trying to paper over that to suit your rhetorical purposes, but it's essentially a dishonest move.
Furthermore, your "at best" claim is an attempt to smuggle the question of political practicality into an assessment of technical possibility, all in an attempt to sell a politically nowhere effort whose technical workability remains unproved.
Robert Tulip wrote:Denialists are not always the sharpest tools in the shed, but they can see a crock of shit when one is served up for dinner.
In fact they have detected 27 of the last 2 crocks served to them.
Robert Tulip wrote:Not only does emission reduction fail manifestly to fix the problem it sets out to fix, but it fails at the cost of enormous expense and disruption.
Not at all. First, as I observed already, it would have fixed the problem by now if wealthy corporate special interests had not interfered with a realistic response. So it is not an inappropriate strategy, just an appropriate strategy that was rejected for inappropriate reasons. Second, the expense and disruption are not necessarily implied, since the implementation of incentives will generate cost-effective responses not recognized as of yet. For example, the strategy you claim to be a net positive fiscal benefit would be provided with adequate incentive to motivate its implementation, while a do-nothing or Hail Mary response would simply let the problem get worse.
Just as happened with acid rain, the emissions will be confronted with whatever cost-effective means the private sector can find, but only when they have incentives. Innovation such as the approach you advocate is likely to lead to mitigation at a fraction of the cost estimates made so far, because they necessarily are made without benefit of the technological improvements that are waiting to be unleashed.
Robert Tulip wrote: The distrust of elitist progressive culture has been carefully cultivated by the agitprop wing of the political right, with echoes of the fascist mentality of belonging to local place and fearing cosmopolitan values.
You think? Then whence comes this business of blaming it on flaming socialists (like Milton Friedman)?
Robert Tulip wrote: The Paris agreement is not fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers; it punishes the United States while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters; it transfers jobs from the USA to other countries; it creates high risk of energy shortages;
That is the usual pack of lies coming from a jerk-off who has done his level best to make the problem worse and has done nothing to address the Agreement's perceived shortcomings.
Robert Tulip wrote:in the most crucial statement of all,
President Trump wrote:“Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree — think of that; this much — Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America — and this is an incredible statistic — would totally wipe out the gains from America’s expected reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.”
We all know Paris was inadequate, but that does not argue for doing even less.
Robert Tulip wrote:I appreciate that people don’t like hearing these arguments from Trump, but they seem to me to be evidence based, and to provide a fairly cogent explanation for why so many people are unwilling to accept scientific arguments about climate change when these are packaged to require ignoring the problems the President has outlined.
You find them "evidence-based" because you have put all your intellectual eggs in the geo-engineering basket. Speaking of motivated reasoning.
Robert Tulip wrote: Harry Marks wrote:Liberty is part of the common good.
There is massive political tension and difference between concepts of freedom and equality. Freedom is associated with individual liberty and equality is widely seen as the main goal of the common good.
By whom? It is a secondary goal at best. The common good can be framed entirely in terms of efficiency of resource allocation and still argues loudly for intervention against externalities, a point Friedman made many times.
Robert Tulip wrote:Liberty and the common good serve as primary structuring factors for the political spectrum from extreme equality on the extreme left to extreme liberty on the extreme right, with the centre involving both in balance. Woodard makes the good point that ideologies of the common good have often been perceived as unduly constraining personal liberty, with communism the extreme case.
A red herring. Or would that be a Red herring?
Robert Tulip wrote:Harry Marks wrote: We know with a high degree of confidence when it is not worth sacrificing the common good for the sake of a utopian ideal of unlimited liberty.
Really? The gun debate in the USA shows how contested such ‘a high degree of confidence’ can be.
I do not argue that goals for the common good win every debate or tension with liberty, and I have already pointed out that liberty is part of the common good. Rather I argue that there is a totally unrealistic ideal of complete liberty advocated on the right in the U.S. (and guns make a good example) that idealogues promote without regard to rational balancing. The result is obvious in the loss of albedo that has been cooking the Northern Hemisphere countries in summer, the runaway release of methane from the permafrost, and the dangerous acidification of the oceans.
Robert Tulip wrote:Reasonable as it may seem to say gun nuts are mad, some respect for their perspective is needed in efforts to achieve a negotiated solution.
Respect for their perspective has been shown over and over in our country. Single-issue voters tend to command inordinate power. Unfortunately in this case their "perspective" has been created by an industry so consumed with its own profits that they have taken to advocating the arming of teachers as the solution to our mass-murder problems. Anyone who has been a teacher for a year knows this would lead to an increase in the problem, not a decrease, but then Wayne LaPierre and the gun lobby would not at all be unhappy to see teachers killing their students.
Robert Tulip wrote:Similar issues arise with climate change, with perceptions that the elitism of the United Nations and its progressive culture creates unacceptable risks to liberty and local decision making power.
Kinda weird to have you quoting the Rupert Murdoch talking points. The problem so far has been doing nothing, not threatening liberty, and the claims of threats to liberty have been a smokescreen financed by special interests who mean "my profits" when they say "our rights."
Robert Tulip wrote: which presents a primary planetary security problem that can only be addressed through immediate geoengineering, driven by political decision, not abstract economic incentive.
Economic incentives are the opposite of abstract.
Robert Tulip wrote: Far cheaper to mine carbon from the air than to stop people burning stuff.
Fine, bring on the incentives and lets do it the cheap way. Or we can talk about what we wish the government would do, "by political decision," as if we know all the answers.
Robert Tulip wrote: Too divisive: the broad conservative mistrust will not be turned around by Baker and Schultz,
That's been proved definitively, but it does not change the fact that Murdoch and his cronies are gutting the environment and the "broad conservative mistrust" consists of a lot of paranoiacs being led around by the nose by plutocrats who laugh at them the whole time. There's a sucker born every minute.
Robert Tulip wrote: New ideas are needed that put these divisive debates about decarbonising the economy to one side, and instead look to profitable methods to mine carbon while also re-freezing the North Pole.
You have contributed, and are contributing, more than your fair share to the divisiveness of the debate.
Robert Tulip wrote: The political debate on climate change is not between reason and irrationality. The so-called rational side of decarbonisers simply ignore the evidence that their policies have no prospect of stopping warming, and largely refuse to countenance discussion of methods that would achieve their goals.
I have responded to your false dichotomy many times, including in this post. I am not going to repeat the reasons why this is fallacious just because you insist on repeating the rhetoric.
Robert Tulip wrote:That analysis applies equally to the motivated reasoning of decarbonisation, with its political attitude of speeding up the end of fossil fuels leading to an irrational rejection of geoengineering. The moral courage to face facts is as absent on the left as on the right.
Good point, but what-aboutism doesn't justify lack of moral courage on either side.
Robert Tulip wrote: People have listened to emission reduction advocacy, and have concluded that its costs are too high and its benefits too uncertain.
Most of the economists, such as Geoffrey Heal, who disputed the report led by Nicholas Stern on intellectual grounds have since repented. They meant to argue for moderation, and instead their arguments led to squandering an opportunity to actually face the problem.
Robert Tulip wrote: nor can we fix climate by cutting carbon emissions.
Well, actually we can, and the technology is already within our grasp. Germany has 26% of its energy from renewables, and France has even lower carbon emissions. That with pitifully small incentives and (in Germany's case) a foolish decision to phase out nuclear power. The incentives for technological response are ridiculously weak, so the requirements of carbon neutrality might turn out to be, as the esteemed Robert Tulip argues, nil. But we will never see them, because ideologues talk people out of their own self-interest on the risible claim that it is bad because it is only for the public good.
Robert Tulip wrote: The idiocy that is stopping geoengineering research is the inability to discuss a pro-capitalist model that is entirely factual about the security risks of climate change.
Sure, the academics and activists who are most committed to de-carbonisation may, for the most part, have this "inability". But even in an Administration supposedly committed to conservative ideology, there is no action, because they drank the "there is no problem" Kool-Aid served up by Murdoch and the Koch brothers. Engineering departments, by contrast, are interested and getting more so.
Robert Tulip wrote: Harry Marks wrote:
The casual willingness of the super-rich to sacrifice the truth and the public good for the sake of another billion dollars is not something history will remember them with respect for. Sometimes people who extract at the expense of others are just wrong.
That critique of the capitalist system is far too simplistic, bitter, resentful and oppositional
No, it isn't nearly bitter or resentful enough. These are the Huns and the Mongols of our day. They are proud to pile up the skulls of Syrians and Yemenis and pat themselves on the back for it. These are evil people, and their pretense to be value creators does not make them less evil.
Robert Tulip wrote:The public benefits of the products that have generated super profits are immense.
Sure, and they will still be piling up benefits after we force them to pay for the damage they are doing, just as the opioid makers will. That doesn't excuse us for ignoring the damage and listening to their lies.
Robert Tulip wrote: Far better to try to forgive the capitalist system for its mistakes, and look to work constructively to use capitalist processes to solve climate change.
This is a non-sensical formulation. Forgive them when they repent and make restitution? Sure. But their criminal fraud and political manipulation is doing real harm, has done real harm, and they do not deserve to be let off from it for having earned some profits any more than the rapist who is also an athlete should be forgiven his misdeeds for the sake of his athletic career. False dichotomy sounds appealing if you phrase it just so, but the fact is they could be paying for the full costs they are imposing and still contribute to the common good. In fact, of course, they would contribute more and have some actual reason for pride.
Robert Tulip wrote:It is entirely possible to achieve net zero by 2030 and a restored climate by 2050, but not via emission reduction. We need a different paradigm to stop the looming danger of sea level rise.
We need every paradigm we can lay our hands on, and above all the one that respects the true strengths of capitalism by providing it with the proper incentive to provide value to its customers.
Robert Tulip wrote: People blame the US and the Saudis for blocking this proposal, but the situation is not clear.
Yes, and Jamal Kashoggi may have dismembered himself. It isn't clear. Unless you are willing to face facts.