It’s super expensive and it takes forever to build—so much so that fossil fuel companies fund “libertarian” voices to use it as an attack on environmentalists because nuclear means decades of unabated fossil fuel sales. If you commit to solar or wind, you start cutting into their business within as little as months.
I think it’s because it’s ignoring the impact of concentration and the range of affected jobs. When, say, people switched from animals as the primary source of motive power for shipping, relatively few people immediately lost their livelihood because the things now using engines still employed tons of people (a delivery guy had to learn to drive but the rest of the job was similar) and a bunch of new jobs were created.
Now we’re being promised a wide range of white-collar jobs all being affected at the same time, always in a way which reduces the number of total jobs and concentrates power in people with assets. The position that people will find new things is begging the critical question of whether those people will have the money to get started or customers who can afford to buy from them, especially when sharecropping using someone else’s models with no guarantee of non-competition.
Perhaps white collar employees have felt jobs not conducted in an office are beneath them. Because a wide range of physical jobs pay a lot more than office work already
> the United States has emitted more CO2 than any other country to date: at around 400 billion tonnes since 1751, it is responsible for 25% of historical emissions; this is twice more than China – the world’s second-largest national contributor
It’s a common fossil fuel industry talking point, which hopes that the listener doesn’t realize that the climate changes in the past which weren’t deadly happened on much slower time scales. We have a much larger human population now so if you’re saying “nature will survive” you’re also saying that you’re okay with millions of people dying or becoming refugees.
Let China continue to cancel fossil fuel plants as they roll out renewables and electrify at rapid scale? It’s not 1980, China is leading a lot of key technologies and they’re looking like they value long-term planning a lot more than we do.
To the extent that they need a nudge, a carbon tax would be very effective for correcting export market incentives, too.
This isn’t a video game where you buy “clean factories IV” and everything stops polluting on the next turn, it takes time to change industrial plans which are years in the making and involve non-trivial supply chains.
China is far, far from perfect but their emissions are going down at a time when the President of the United States is lying about fake emergencies and forcing utilities to run at a loss just to keep emissions up, so China is not the nation most deserving of pressure.
This is one of the stronger arguments for a carbon tax: if you can’t ignore externalities, people have strong incentives to use less (e.g. buying a car instead of an SUV or biking) and all of the alternative fuel and process work is going to be easier if the cost comparison is more even.
Thanks for the link. I read about electric arc furnaces reprocessing scrap steel somewhere else recently. Do we really never need virgin steel again, we already have all we need?
Yes, that’s definitely a risk when there’s a huge industry pumping out agitprop saying we don’t need to act. I think the original proposal was wise to structure it as an income tax refund so people would see a regular positive benefit.
This is not only wrong but you are bending over backwards to maintain the state of ignorance which makes it possible to say that. Most of the carbon in the atmosphere did not come from developing countries, and every reduction buys more time to deal with the problem so, yes, local measures matter: as an example, the U.S. transportation sector is so carbon intensive that getting our average efficiency up will reduce global emissions by more than entire other countries produce.
This is even more wrong when you look at how Africa is electrifying. Unlike the United States, China continued to invest in solar panel production and so they’re now the cheapest option for electrical power for millions of people since solar panels run for decades and don’t require trucking diesel fuel around or building out power grids. Investments in batteries are having the same cycle: richer countries have the research universities and product development but then anyone can buy the product.
That’s why the fossil fuels spend so much money spreading messages like yours: they grew fat on government subsidies and they need those subsidies to continue or even expand as the basic economics increasingly favor renewables. Trump has to force coal plants to stay open because otherwise the operators would switch to cheaper options.
Ok so the wiki graph shows that annual emissions from the rest of the world are growing and US and EU contribute less and less while others contribute more? What’s the argument you’re making here?
This is a function of your personal media diet: when you spend time consuming rationalizations funded by the fossil fuel industry, it’s easy to deride people who were right as “screamers” and the longer you do so the easier it is to project your intellectual failure onto nebulous “other” people you don’t know. It’s not your fault that climate change is costing lives and billions of dollars, the people who tried to stop it were engaged in hyperbole. It’s not your fault that people are being illegally killed, assaulted, or detained, it’s their fault for allowing you to ignore the clear evidence that this was going to happen.
That’s part of it but most of it is the push to huge vehicles loaded with luxury features. The Subaru Outback we bought twenty years ago barely changed price despite gaining all of those safety features until they made it bigger and moved premium features into the new base model. Car companies were saved by cheap loan rates and normalizing previously unheard-of loan durations, and they realized that a lot of people won’t see the difference between financing $20k and $30k if they can keep the monthly payment plausible. Safety features are a popular excuse because it lets people disclaim responsibility for choosing to buy luxury features or perceived image.
It had more margin and manufacturer squeezed it to keep prices. If you want to see real prices look at cheapest cars. Those are no-margin. And that is why their prices are up.
This is not “an excuse”. I literally was in meetings where these cameras and extra compute were priced out in $pastJob. More cameras means more wires. More power supplies. More compute means higher end MCUs which are already very not cheap when it comes to automotive parts. More power supplies for the higher-end compute. Per-unit licensing costs for vendors’ algos to implement EAB and the like. Etc…
> It had more margin and manufacturer squeezed it to keep prices. If you want to see real prices look at cheapest cars. Those are no-margin. And that is why their prices are up.
At $25k total it had less margin than most of the domestic SUV market. People talked about safety or extra (i.e. less) cargo space or off-road capacity but that was the rationalization for all of the other frills built in to the trendy models. No-frills cars still exist, still pass safety tests, and cost literally half of the average MSRP. Safety features aren’t free but they’re not driving prices anywhere near as much as people claim: it’s just convenient to say that you’re broke because the big bad safety regulators forced you to buy the leather seats, integrated TVs, etc.
That’s true, but it’s not always good—Americans have stark examples of the risks of octogenarian leaders whose experience leads them astray by discounting how much the world has changed since they were young.
I think of mental faculties and experience as two separate overlapping curves where there’s a sweet spot in the middle where both are high but either one being low can become a big problem.
They also just don’t have the same energy they used to so even if they have a good idea they’ll be less effective at motivating people to embrace it, and the younger people behind them are going to be acting with more thought to succession politics.
Biden's surely a poster child for the value of experience and connections in the Presidency. Whatever you think of him (and I would certainly agree that he should never have considered a second term), he was quite successful in furthering his agenda while in office.
Yes, I agree that he used his experience well for many things (and had competent staff he could trust to get things done) but I will say he made a huge mistake continuing to back Israel's actions in Gaza to an extent which I don't think someone too young to remember the Six Days War would have done. I think you could also make a solid argument that earlier in his career he probably would have had more energy to put into getting a few of the close votes in Congress over the line.
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