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That's an astonishing argument. You argue that companies collaborating with evil regimes to produce oil is good, because... when something happens that means we have to stop buying their oil (Russian invasion of Ukraine)... we're suddenly in a lot of pain?

I come to exactly the opposite conclusion from that.

We'd have been far better off not putting ourselves in that position, i.e. in a position of dependence on those regimes in the first place, not to mention funnelling billions into their treasuries. Countries like Russia and Saudi have been using our cash to prop up their repressive regimes for decades, causing untold pain to their population, building up their military and using those funds to destabilise democracies across the globe.

If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed (and I'd have been fine with legislation to achieve that) we'd have energy security, we'd be looking at much less devastation from climate change and the world would be in a much better place in general.

> If we'd put that money into nuclear and renewables instead of being happy to embrace greed...

The regulators have been squeezing the life out of the nuclear industry for what, 40 years now? There is that wonderful chart floating around [0] showing what regulators have done to the learning curve. You're not going to get a more hardened and cynical capitalist than me and I've been spewing for more than a decade about the Australian government blocking me from investing in nuclear power effectively. Their policy is a disaster on multiple levels.

It isn't greedy people holding back nuclear power, it is the dreamers looking for an industrial power supply that doesn't cause pollution while we run out of fossil fuels. It'd be great if we can find that in renewables, but we'd have gone heavy nuclear decades ago if it was left up to raw greed.

People also whinge about Texas being greedy with their massive investment in cheap renewables rather than winter hardening them. Damn those greedy people for going all in on cheap renewable, I suppose. Again, the issue isn't greed, it is the reactionaries getting antsy when capitalists do things the cheap way. I point out that the Texas grid was still better and cheaper than what the Germans managed with their Energiewende and social whatever it is they wanted to feel moral about.

[0] Figure 7.11 - https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop

How many times has the German grid collapsed?

I have no idea, I only started paying half-attention when the Energiewende started firing up and I don't read German. But I went to have a look and found someone saying they had a 30 hour outage for 30k people in Berlin in 2019.

Things break, and you need to be ready for blackouts. I'd still rather take cheap and 99% availability than expensive and 100%.

https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...

That was just the usual local incompetence. They cut a cable and couldn't get it reconnected. I don't recall the exact number, but it wasn't many houses.

Europe is actually pretty connected wrt the electricity network, so if we'll ever encounter an actual blackout you can expect it to be covered everywhere, especially in Chinese/Russian media as they'll be meme-ing how much better they're.

Despite having countless localized outages all the time, but hey... You know how dictatorships work. Can't let the truth get in the way of propaganda after all.

The linked article is about the fact that there isn't a plan how to handle a full blackout, precisely because there hasnt been one. It's the same for all developed nations, outage just haven't happened in ages so contingencies have been forgotten, basically.

1) Texans pays something like 15c/kWh and Germans pay something like 30c/kWh. The German grid is far inferior to the Texan one given that they'll both have availability in the 99% range.

2) In Texas you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case your supplier is incompetent. In Germany you have to be ready for a 48 hour blackout in case of ... usual local incompetence? Although the Texan grid is obviously less reliable, that doesn't actually change the amount of preparation that households should be doing.

3) There is also a pretty reasonable argument that it is better to have a rare blackout than to have no plan or experience for a major blackout. It is terrible planning to assume that nothing can go wrong.

4) Texan greed got them to ~25% renewable penetration in their electricity mix. It is cheap and sustainable. The German energiewende has got them to around 40% renewable penetration and "highly dependent on Russian energy, as it gets more than half of the natural gas, a third of heating oil, and half of its coal imports from Russia. Due to this reliance, Germany blocked, delayed or watered down EU proposals to cut Russian energy imports amid the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine" [0]. This wasn't a close contest, the Texan regulators - the ones who leave it a bit more to greedy capitalists - are the ones that people should be putting in charge.

The failures of putting non-greedy people in charge of the German energy grid was so bad it had geopolitical consequences! That is why we try to leave it up to greedy people. If they'd listened to us greedy types they'd be knee-deep in reactors and not crippled by the threat of Russian sanctions. The people pushing the Energiewende thought they were a force for good, and it turns out they were the exact opposite. They were empowering a land war in Europe.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany

>Now I'm sure we have a line of people waiting to claim that they are evil, but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil - turns out there are serious risks of people starving or freezing to death. The loss to living standards is incalculable but large.

Well I don't see how people in Western Europe (i.e. excluding Ukraine) are in danger of starving and I would actually argue the people that we are seeing being killed at the moment are a direct consequence of buying cheap energy no matter the ethics. If Europe would have invested more strongly into becoming energy independent instead of chasing the cheapest oil and gas, we might have a slighly lower standard of living, but much of European politics would not be infiltrated by money from resource oligarchs and likely Russia would never have invaded so people would not be dying in a pointless war.

In other words, not

The whole western world took a gamble that Russia would behave within acceptable constraints (ie only bringing misery to its own citizens) because the costs of stepping outside those constraints would be too high economically, due to sanctions or just lost trade. I personally still believe that to be true - Russia is now done as a serious participant in the global economy; they won't be trusted for a generation or more. Living standards there will fall dramatically unless they become a vassal state of China. Where the west miscalculated was in expecting the man in charge to remain a rational actor. The last decade has shown us that such an assumption (as applied inside western democracies as well as outside) is no longer valid - so it now seems reasonable to assume un-ending volatility until a new order establishes itself. The next decade will be decided by whether the USA wants to retain its hegemony badly enough to stand up to China, or whether it will retreat into isolationism instead. Currently, sadly, my money is on the latter.

They ware a perfectly rational actor so far, Europe and the west in general has mostly just spouted empty platitudes and always blinked first.

Nothing happened with the two Chechenyan wars, with Georgia, nobody did anything about Syrian cities being bombed to rubble and the 2014 sanctions post-Crimea ware rather weak.

During that time everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium. Clearly, the west did not care about things like that and it would be business like normal.

Except that this time it was found out there's a limit.

> everybody continued to buy gas, oil, electricity, fertilizer, aluminium and titanium

not to mention nuclear fuel (https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Framatome-and-Ro...)

> There is a great reason that companies are freed from the requirement to be morally good - because human instincts are not calibrated to run an 8-billion-strong postindustrial globe.

Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed. Laws covering worker safety, union-busting, antitrust and fair competition, child labor, truth in advertising, environmental protection, even requirements on the length and validity of warranties.

You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion. A conclusion that implies not only that we should not add further prohibitions against newly-recognized "evil" behavior (e.g. web spying, devices locked against their owner, etc..), but also that we should remove the prohibitions currently in place.

>Yet they are bound by many laws and regulations, beyond contract law and non-aggression, born of these instincts you malign, that (try to) prevent the worst of their greed

We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.

Companies don't poison the water or use bad labor practices because they want to. Large organizations (Boeing, the Catholic church, the FBI, etc) don't "want". They respond to incentives. Companies do it because it's less un-profitable than the next best option and to not do that while their competitors do puts them at a disadvantage. Regulation only adjusts the incentive scale.

>You have to ignore all of these constraints to arrive at the simplistic "greed is good" conclusion

You have to ignore the difference between "good" and "can be harnessed for good" to come to that conclusion. You're implying meaning he didn't write because it makes a more easily defeated position.

> We don't regulate companies to prevent "the worst of the greed" except by some naive definition. We regulate them so they mop up or don't leave messes in their wake, be these messes social or environmental.

Those messes are the worst of their greed that I was referring to. I have no idea what your objection is - that those laws didn't "mandate companies behave good", but merely "readjusted incentives to avoid undesirable outcomes"??

Of course laws are not as simplistic as "try to do good, avoid doing evil", but that doesn't mean that is not their aim.

"but we're running an experiment in Europe to find out what happens when horrible regimes stop providing oil"

That experiment is basically switching one horrible regime with another (e.g. Aserbaidschan and Qatar), so I would argue that it was never really about morals at all, but rather geopolitics and power all along.

Continue doing more buisness with russia would simply be more expensive, as it would increase the cost of doing buisness with closer trading partners/allies.

"morals don't cope with the scale that humans need to operate on now."

So when was a time, when morals could and should have an influence on human operations? Slavery just ended recently (in most parts of the world) and your argument means for example continuing buisness with Nazi germany during the war (and holocaust). There is no line, when you say morals are not the right tool. So this means profiting of slave labour camps. The more and brutal exploitation, the more profit, the better?

I don't think so.

My stance is, that there is just no general solution and everything is case by case. By doing buisness with a random chinese company(e.g. buying something made in china), I do not endorse chinese politic. But if that specific company is involved with slave labour, then yes, I would support that slave system by buying from them and I would try to find a alternative.

I feel like Candide is a pretty good antidote to this sort of thinking, which is a form of Panglossianism.

   <sarcasm>

Supporting brutal regimes because not supporting them means you might not have enough oil or gas? Of course, it works out for the best. A few sacrificed in war and oppression while the many live well. Nazis were bad for the Jews? There are more Jews now than ever, and they have control of their ancestral lands. COVID wasn't being taken seriously enough by some countries/states? They've successfully culled their elderly population and are probably saving tons of long-run suffering.

   </sarcasm>

Obviously, that is all sarcastic, but there is something weird about teleological thinking. The same sort of thinking that the events that led to my birth were ipso-facto moral, because otherwise I would be wishing for my own nonexistence, and as a moral person how could I do that? An immoral person could take my place.

I just read Candide this week, I liked it. The world is pretty miserable - but you need a plan to make it better. "Avoid doing Evil" is a plan that:

1. We have tried.

2. Doesn't work.

The plan "give greedy people incentives to make people materially better off" not only works, but works better than everything else we've tried. Ergo, we want more greed, not less evil.

I wouldn’t call that a plan, just a principle. Same for “all about the Benjamins”. The plan is anything from “Think and Grow Rich” to dealing drugs.

But if your plan is to try to set up a bunch of moral slides that cause your desired outcome as the end of a chain of dominoes, well, best of luck but I am not signing on.