Climate change: The rich are to blame
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: predicting the future since 1999.
CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed"
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"
I was going to link to its page on Paean to SMAC but it turns out that quote is from "Global Energy Theory", a tech that didn't make it into the final game (but had data set up for it). So there's no write-up about it.
Instead, I'll link to the Paean's "First Time Here?" page: https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time-here/
My favourite tech quote was MMI (mind-machine interface):
> The Warrior's bland acronym, MMI, obscures the true horror of this monstrosity. Its inventors promise a new era of genius, but meanwhile unscrupulous power brokers use its forcible installation to violate the sanctity of unwilling human minds. They are creating their own private army of demons.
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "Report on Human Rights"
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The text doesn't do the delivery credit though, the acting as well was often phenomenal.
Individuals and poor people don't cut down hectares of rainforest, kill hectares of soil with mass monoculture farming, spill billions of barrels of oil into the ocean, etc. All these things are done in pursuit of more profit (or at least more revenue). The beneficiaries of these activities are the rich - the execs, shareholders, banking partners, VCs, etc.
I would guess that the scale of damage done -- the disparity of climate harm between rich people and poor people -- is far greater than the individual rich vs poor personal energy consumption.
I seriously doubt that. There might be some activities of a CEO that a customer buying a product of the company led by said CEO might benefit from, but a CEOs activities are exclusively to the benefit of said CEO. Not to the benefit of the company, not to the benefit of the shareholders and for sure not for the benefit of the customers. (Any benefit these groups might incur are accidental).
Customers buy cheap products because they have no means of differentiate between commodity products, except for the price. That's why they buy cheap stuff.
If we had any kind of transparent measure to actually be able to differentiate between commodity products (other than just the self-aggrandizing promotion and advertising), say; some standardized information about i.e. lifespan of a product, invested energy, carbon emissions, then there might be actually be a choice for the customers. But most industries fight tooth-and-nail against such labels, as can be witnessed i.e. the food industry.
The whole point of capitalism is to align the self-interest of people with benefiting society. The CEO might not set out to help people, but if people voluntarily buy those products then the CEO is helping society.
> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.
I don't know why you get downvoted. You made a silly argument but it's not as if that's a reason to downvote anybody.
That private ownership of the means of production means that it is yours. People generally want to have better stuff. When you improve that means of production due to your self-interest then everybody else also benefits from it, because now you can produce something better or for a lower cost. It also tells others that it's possible to improve those means of production.
I also don't agree with your premise that capitalism aligns people's self-interest with society's interests. Let's take a monopoly for example; getting into a monopoly position might be in the interest of an individual actor in a capitalistic market, but that's not in society's interests, not at at all. Furthermore capitalism tends to favor enterprises that manage to externalize as many costs as possible, primarily to the detriment of society which the has to socialize these costs, whereas the profit is privatized.
The primary beneficiaries of this military consumption are the corporations that supply the goods and services that the military pays for (with public money), but the gains made by those corporations go into a relatively few pockets.
Another example is big agriculture corporations. In the US, for decades there have been subsidies paid to corn "farmers" (now big corps), to the extent that the businesses had to find ways to use corn beyond just food. Thus came corn syrup, ethanol (https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_against_ethanol_bad_...) and more.
Beneficiaries of this, again, are a few people. Meanwhile, land is burned out (soil quality reduced to worthless), plus all the infrastructure and energy use related to operating large scale farms.
If I had all day to spend, I could probably find a dozen other examples.
This has nothing to do with cheap food for poor people; and after all, the research shows that the cheap food is the unhealthiest.
Why do you consider the primary beneficiaries of an activity that consumes resources the ones who supply the resources? Surely, the beneficiaries from the activity itself are the primary beneficiaries. Or to put this into context: the primary beneficiaries of the military are the people and trade that the military protects. The primary beneficiary from the military's use of helmets aren't helmet manufacturers, but rather the soldiers using the helmets.
>Another example is big agriculture corporations. In the US, for decades there have been subsidies paid to corn "farmers" (now big corps), to the extent that the businesses had to find ways to use corn beyond just food.
And cheap food benefits nobody? I would imagine that if the food they produce is so cheap that they have to find other avenues of using it that this would benefit people who have trouble affording food.
>This has nothing to do with cheap food for poor people;
It has everything to do with cheap food and goods. Without these economies of scale a chicken sandwich would cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. If you had to gather all of the ingredients yourself then it would be incredibly expensive.
>and after all, the research shows that the cheap food is the unhealthiest.
I wouldn't call potatoes and rice the unhealthiest foods. Nowadays we consider some foods unhealthy because they are so plentiful - because that are cheap. People tend to overindulge in them which makes them "unhealthy". Most of the time it's a question of how much is consumed.
Wait, wait even better - making everything more expensive for everyone is going to somehow disproportionately benefit those who have less over those who have more? I've little doubt the absurdity of taxing ourselves to prosperity certainly sounds perfectly reasonable to people who stand to benefit from it, along with their parasitic electorate.
This is why climate change quackery keeps falling short - it's statist propaganda brought to you for the same people who created all current imbalance by the people aspiring to be their next crony beneficiaries
.. but throws away far more, and the CO2 emissions and land area produced are not the same for all calories.
We eat food they grow and sit on furniture they make while typing on computers they invent bought with wages they pay, all the while complaining that the people who run corporations are destroying the world.
* Carbon taxes
* Cap of total emissions
* Energy assistance program for the poor, or a rebate for everyone; whatever is more likely to succeed politically.
This way the lifestyle adjustment comes mainly from the top, somewhat from the middle and the poor don't waste fuels and electricity or use other means of heating like illegal firewood.
Sweeping generalisations of course
People keep spreading the malthusian myth of overpopulation and shifting blame to the poorest. Blaming the poor while giving the rich a free pass is not only unfair, it’s cruel.
Once climate change denialism is not tenable anymore, climate change will be instrumentalized for atrocities.
I'd love to see the EU to start addressing this by setting higher environmental standards, putting them in force locally and apply such taxes to imported products.
Just look at Norway, my personal go-to example for that kind of taxation. The country has an absurdly high "luxury"-tax on cars (up to 100% all costs combined). The only reason they can do that, though, is the complete lack of a domestic automotive industry. The high taxation simply doesn't affect their national economy in the slightest. Countries like Sweden, the Czech Republic,or especially France and Germany couldn't do that - they have a substantial automotive industry.
What unfair competition can do could be observed in Europe in the 1970s and the 2000s. In the 1970s, pretty much the entire textile industry moved to South East Asia due to absurdly low costs compared to Europe (one could name it outright slavery). In the 2000s, the Chinese government did the same to Germany's solar industry by undercutting prices using substantial government subsidies.
Proper taxation of goods depending on environmental impact would be able to fundamentally change the economy from focus on consumerism to a more sustainable and cyclic economy. But it only takes a few market actors that don't participate to render the scheme unsustainable overall... And the recent trend towards autocratic "alpha males" in global politics (from the White House, to the Kremlin, to the Bosporus, and South America) paired with increasing nationalism worldwide doesn't make me hopeful for the near future.
Here's another: how do populations become motivated to exert pressure for change? One way is to have an enemy. That's been seemingly lacking with the fight to protect our ecosystems thus far. But once we understand that the rich are the common enemy of all life on the planet, it opens new possibilities.
How is that anywhere near the human principal of 'fair'?
Nowadays- and it's enough to read a left-wing newspaper to realise- the left is only concerned with the marginal increase in misery (supposedly) caused to the poorest by climate change. While in fact the mythical baseline we should bring the world back to is only just slightly better than the current situation, that is, still horrid by any standard.
If your problem are the floods in Bangladesh, you'll help them very little by cutting the jet trips of the rich west; what they need are tons of energy and machines to build water management systems, schools to educate a class of engineers and civil servants, factories to build job security, agriculture to build food safety and resilience. All stuff that in fact emits shittons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
/rant
Its a visible outcome of the use of fossil fuels. Obviously its not Bangladesh's only nor primary concern.
Also, FWIW, I find it exceptionally offensive that you've tried to turn this into some left/right hocus pocus. Global warming, climate change, developing world poverty; these are all issues where the directional political learning does _nothing_ to provide the solutions.
Not sure what you mean with this. What I was trying to say is that the political side that is traditionally more vocal about the need to improve the condition of the poorest (I think we can agree on this- that's what defines the left anyway) has- in my opinion- lost its way by focusing too much on the climate issue as if it were the source and the solution of all problems.
More, I think that the left has actually bent the climate issue (which is at its core a scientific issue, something that transcends any value judgement) to the point of making it coincide exactly with its fundamental ideological framework- which explains why climate change is felt as such a central problem by leftwing/ liberals and leaves rightwing/ conservatives so sceptical.
(To give you an example of what I mean with this: you'd expect campaigners for action against climate change to organise big rallies in favour of the construction of hundreds of nuclear plants- or at least for more money into research for cheap and safe nuclear energy. This doesn't happen because the issue of climate change has been shaped into a glove that fits perfectly the ideological framework of the left: less industry, less capitalism, less consumption, more redistribution).
> DAE left and right?
and its just completely unnecessary. I'm sure you enjoy using that frame to approach issues but appreciate it can have a negative impact on discussion, especially somewhere like here where we all appreciate agency and doing stuff and solving problems.
The reason environmentalists who campaign for environmental issues don't campaign for nuclear power is that many of them are also not fans of nuclear energy as they are concerned about nuclear waste. I don't feel like that particular outcome is that surprising given the history of that movement. If you're looking for consistency there maybe they should be more into battery tech to handle green power downtimes?
Coronavirus is hitting back hard on behalf of nature.
Pollution levels in worst hit areas have come down. Industries have shut down and economic activity has subsided.
Coronavirus is in a way a ironic fk you to Humans. Its the kind of enemy that we as a civilization are worse prepared for.
Even after all the technological breakthroughs, we are still nowhere.
With our current technology we can easily tell whether there is a cat or a dog in a picture, but can't tell quickly enough whether a asymptomatic person standing right in front of you has Corona infection. Way to go! Let's make some more bright graduates to work on making people click more ads, yeah.
This isn't a rant, it's devoid of any factual thinking and perspective. What you have here is a desperate attempt to be angry at something.
There are definitely lots of bulshit jobs out there, but I wouldn't call quants among the highest tier in terms of waste of human talent. I'd probably look at adtech for that.
Practically everything on this site is about moats & branding. Of waves of VC money swamping an ingrained industry with the hope of carving out a monopoly. Of google smashing existing competitive markets giving away a better product for 'free' in order to have better surveillance of phools so google can sell their spending.
None of this is "efficient allocation of capital". Unless your goal is wealth concentration and the destruction of democratic liberal society.
We need a cultural change to lauding regulation that enforces competition in our markets and politics. Otherwise we're on a rapid track to feudalism.
markets optimize production and take from workers
workers enjoy what markets provide and optimize the production and specifically production value of human work, taking from those who are producing
production optimizes what markets will sell and take from them.
And in practice it's 100000x more complex than this, mostly because such complexity is necessary.
They had always inflow of citizens and stratified social structure.
Wars and plagues opened possibilities for social mobility however. Elites died same as poor people (or more in times of conquest) and that opened possibilities for lower class individuals to move up.
This is an area of research that I wish I could focus on. It would be beneficial to us if we could understand what inputs nature is using to determine if the system is balanced.
This trend of measuring what resources rich people use compared to everyone else just snacks of jealousy. Who cares if energy distribution isn't "equitable"?? Just live your life and stop comparing.
Edit: Prepared to eat Karma here, but it's what I believe.
It's interesting that you bring up jealousy as argument on the distribution of a limited resource. There are reasons for people to be jealous of others. e.g. Not having enough or people getting more than their fair share through having won the birth lottery or other types of luck.
>>Who cares if energy distribution isn't "equitable"??
I personally don't too much, because I'm lucky enough to have a relatively well paid job in a generally stable country, that is unlikely to bear the brunt of climate change (unless the gulf stream switches off and we start experiencing European Winters), should my circumstances be different, I might be more inclined to care a lot more than I do.
But you know all of this
You genuinely think they should just live their lives and stop comparing themselves to people that enjoy such basic amenities like stable lighting and heat?
For example, if you say, "This is my land, I'll do whatever I want on it - it's my right as the owner of the property;" but you're dumping industrial waste into the stream that flows through it, then you're negatively impacting your neighbors downstream.
The poor person downstream who has no clean water may be jealous of your fancy car and house, but chances are they are more concerned with how you've ruined their resource by your own greed.
It's fine to eat as much as you want, it's not fine to force other people to deal with your excrements.
I'm not sure if I'd call "My crop is failing and me and my family are starving because of climate change and the resulting changed weather patterns" and argument from jealousy though.
To stay with the boat analogy; the top half of the boat is nearly empty, reserved for the exclusive use of some few rich people (and maybe their servants), while the lower decks with the machinery is teeming with masses of poor people, crowded by the hundreds into vast rooms right beside the boilers, devoid of any infrastructure or sanitation, barely able to move or breath.
The boat is sinking and the poor in the lower decks are drowning. All the while the few rich in the upper decks are trying to cut a way pieces of the boat and make them swim by themselves.
We are observing the early stages of a correction in the way of life, and I daresay the near/medium term future will be quite different than things have been for the previous 40 yeras.