"Taxpayers will likely have to cover much of the difference to ensure wells are plugged and not left to leak brine, toxic chemicals and climate-warming methane."
Sounds like they've solved the problem already.
Sounds like they've solved the problem already.
Get a system rolling that allows real costs to be ignored, then combine that with technological advancement that allows for planetary-scale damage and maybe it becomes inevitable that nascent Type I civilizations go back to banging rocks together, at best. It's the same result you get from an uncontrolled paper-clip maximizer, just with a lot more moving parts and flourishes.
There are a handful of movies that involve the biggest tort litigations in the US: Erin Brockovich, Dark Water, A Civil Affair, the Rainmaker. It’s not clear that most of these businesses would exist if the actual cost of negative externalities was displayed on the accounting ledger with a dollar value.
This cycloptic focus on downsides is also why we're still largely stuck on 1800s energy technology instead of moving to nuclear. People ought to be using cost-benefit logic to evaluate the power grid.
> stuck on 1800s energy technology instead of moving to nuclear.
I really feel like your first paragraph refutes your second. Nuclear is a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. Possibly because nuclear production is forced to account for externalities while fossil fuels aren’t, but it’s not cheap.
I mean, nitpick I guess? but cheap energy isn't a positive externality of the energy industry, it's the product.
If they kept it internal, nobody else would have access to it.
IIRC Japan had a lot of business like that until 1973. All of the major industrial countries did, Japan perhaps the most. Except that although OPEC and the oil shock led to serious problems, the serious problems lasted only a year or so. "Can't function without cheap energy" was true? The dependency was solved so quickly that I find the word "can't" inappropriate.
In fact, water, electricity, the road and internet have one of the best cost/quality ratio have ever seen in the entire world, and I traveled a lot.
France is not a great place to make business, but the quality of life is fantastic.
Meanwhile, the US as a terrible health care system, they have water and electricity scandals every years, your internet has awful value (especially in the silicon valley, talk about irony) and roads are hit or miss.
So yes, the USA are a great place to do business, but touting it has the only way to not be stuck on 1800s technology is a joke.
They are the ones having tasteless tomatoes and $800 insulin, things that were cheap and good less than a century ago.
They are the ones with power outages and polluted water.
We had a war at our border, cutting energy supplies, and last winter, my power wasn't cut even once.
They get a strong winter or summer and their grid dies, plus the public pays the bill.
You’ve missed one thing off that list: sewers.
Probably the most effect public health measure in human history.
France is a privileged country from the geopolitical point of view.
I am from Spain, and if you compare it with it has much more water flows, most of the country is plain and easy and cheap to transport things by rail or rivers(without so much mountains in the middle), the soil is rich and is irrigated, and it is in the centre of Europe. It have access to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. It has warn weather.
I also have traveled a lot. Could you compare France with Morocco or Lybia? China? Russia?
The only country that I personally know that is as privileged as France in the world geopolitically is Argentina. Argentina is richer than France, the political system has lots of similarities and it is an absolute mess.
Other things that you mention has not so much to do with the political system but with History. E.g French, Italian or Spanish people love to eat well, good food, as part of our culture, while anglo saxons in general do not consider eating healthy a priority.
IMHO the political system is France is sh^t, with other system they would be much wealthier. It is very centralised so Paris is very different from the rest of the country. Bureaucracy is so high (bureau is a French word).
What saves France is competition with other systems in Europe when they do crazy stuff like putting a 75% tax on the rich, people can move easily to neighbour countries and their politicians reconsider things.
Can't agree here, France has cca 2x GDP of Argentina, and TBH Argentina is a typical South America mess, could be worse than some neighbors, could be better (ie Chile).
As much as I like bashing France for some weird aspects of their mentality and correspondingly not reaching a fraction of the potential its population has (from somebody living in Switzerland this is painfully obvious anytime I visit, which I do constantly, but Spain doesn't fare better in my eyes in this, in contrary), it is a progressive nation, modern, labor force is smart and effective so they don't need to pull overtimes just to match expectations, relatively (or absolutely if considered globally) rich, stable, with astonishingly beautiful nature - no wonder its year after year the most visited country in the world by tourists. Poor don't just bow down and work endlessly barely surviving, destroying their lives to support rich classes, chasing some pipe dream of emerging as a winner of some absurd rat race if you work yourself to death, quality of life looks different to them (and I agree 100% here, life is too short for that crap).
But yes for opening business its outright horrible place, state is your enemy and if you are above median income, they go after your money without even trying to hide it or act fairly. Somebody has to sponsor that western Europe communism and its not going to be poor burning cars on barricades or blocking roads or city centers. But these are rather just very visible details, overall what I wrote above stands.
What. Argentina has inflation >100% per year, their currency has a thriving black market to be useable at all, many people stockpile dollars in their homes because the banks won’t give it back, they block exports, etc.
They’re not more geopolitically privileged than the United States, for one, which has the global reserve currency.
> Bureaucracy is so high (bureau is a French word).
~30% of English has roots in French so I don’t think this is relevant. That includes words like legume, but they don’t hold a special place in the nut or vegetable markets. (For fun historical reasons, what English calls legumes is largely associated with nuts but the French word refers to vegetables.)
What. Argentina has inflation >100% per year, their currency has a thriving black market to be useable at all, many people stockpile dollars in their homes because the banks won’t give it back, they block exports, etc.
They’re not more geopolitically privileged than the United States, for one, which has the global reserve currency.
> Bureaucracy is so high (bureau is a French word).
~30% of English has roots in French so I don’t think this is relevant. That includes words like legume, but they don’t hold a special place in the nut or vegetable markets. (For fun historical reasons, what English calls legumes is largely associated with nuts but the French word refers to vegetables. This is also true of prune/plum and grape/raisin.)
>If we taxed based on negative externalities and rewarded based on positive ones oil companies would own literally everything.
Negative externalities are costs that you inflict onto other people without compensating them. Positive externalities are benefits third parties receive without paying for them.
This means we already reward oil companies by letting them have free stuff and letting them monetize that free stuff. This is at the expense of all the people who weren't born into free stuff. We live in a world where "Oil companies already own literally everything" to a large extent.
If you have monopoly rights to a positive externality as a third party (e.g. extraction rights to oil), you get to charge for the full surplus, essentially making it so that it doesn't matter whether the positive externality exists or not for the rest of the economy. Privatizing a public externality as a third party is as simple as selling it.
Taxing CO2 cuts into the monopoly surplus and leaves less profits for oil companies. That is the defining feature of pigovian taxes. If we assume a reduction in income taxes, then the dead weight loss of income taxation shrinks and we get less income inequality.
>If we rewarded based on positive ones oil companies would own literally everything.
The producer of the positive externality of oil is a collaboration between plants accumulating carbon and the earth's crust compressing it into oil. You could also call the producer of this externality "the environment".
This means that if we wanted to reward the environment for its good positive externality producing behaviour, we should stop destroying it globally.
You appear to be under the misconception that the third party benefiting from the positive externality also produced the externality. E.g the oil company gets an income from oil, therefore it also produced the oil via photosynthesis and compression according to the neoclassical productivity hypothesis. This is not case by definition, rewarding the production of positive externalities would not reward oil companies, because they didn't produce the positive externality, they just extracted it.
One analogy might be how California requires car drivers to have a minimum insurance to financially protect other drivers in case of collision. Insurance companies already have methods for determining likely risk (eg. a drill site in suburban Los Angeles is much higher risk of negative effects on humans than a rural desert in Texas).
"Society can't function without cheap energy." Prove it. I would argue that society functions fine at the market rate of energy. When you say "cheap energy", I get the feeling you advocate for subsidies, which are just ways to obfuscate that we are all paying more than the number we see on our electrical bill.
"instead of moving to nuclear" It's funny you mention nuclear. I've seen estimates that nuclear isn't cost competitive with other current electric generation if you include the actual cost to build, the insurance required, the likely events (eg. 1-in-100-year weather events), and the cost to safely dispose of all byproducts.
That said, I support nuclear power and wish we (USA) could build it at scale, but away from densely populated regions. I think nuclear is actually cheaper if the negative externalities of oil/gas energy generation (including toxins, carcinogens, and airborne pollutants) are factored into the costs.
Positive externalities of free labor far outweigh the negative externalities. We shouldn’t have to pay for labor.
Positive externalities of free capital far outweigh negative externalities. We shouldn’t have to pay to get capital.
And so on and so forth…
If this $21Bn was split over the many gallons of oil extracted it wouldn’t have ended oil extraction or the growth of the economy. It would have simply priced it better, which would have meant alternatives that didn’t impose such negative externalities would have been competitive sooner.
I think we will need a similar shift in the modern age. Some religious/philosophical movement with a morality which makes waste and pollution sinful/shameful for environmental protection. I also think a ‘liturgical’ epistemological system is needed to reframe ‘truth’ and the value in reason. In this way absurd situations like ignoring externalities could be considered sinful rather than the status quo where most people do not care that these things don’t make sense.
This is kind of a reaction to hyper-individualism and cynicism, which I think is the reason for most modern problems. When people do not see themselves as part of a whole, they become their own god and stop caring about the commons. Apathy becomes the default.
TLDR: we need a cultural shift where people have greater respect for the environmental/intellectual commons
Sounds like the 90s. The world coming together in a return to “nature” was the hip thing back then - from what I heard and experienced as a teen. It can be seen in media of the era like Return To Innocence by Enigma. It was mostly superficial though - there was no real deep engagement with other cultures; else they would have seen the incompatibilities and experience the “clashes” we see today.
> than the status quo where most people do not care that these things don’t make sense.
I don’t think people are “OK” with things not making sense. I think most people feel the world makes sense to them. However each person’s internal model of the world is probably very different from each other’s. We no longer share a “common reality” as much as in the past.
I think we also need a lot more study of religion and spiritual ideas to identify useful methods to teach philosophical/moral/psychological systems through scripture/rituals etc. There are many low-hanging fruit. Meditation is one such concept that has only recently become scientifically accepted in the west. Once it was well-researched it moved from 'alternative' to 'mainstream.' Most modern people are very skeptical of unstudied practices. In the same way we can re-frame behaviors such as 'prayer' and 'rituals' so they are not dismissed by a skeptical audience.
The big filter in terms of population is our ability to terraform other planets and since terraforming takes thousands of years, staying alive on earth with stagnant birth rates is an important part of it until the terraforming is complete.
I think this is actually very crucial, and something too few people appreciate: We need (or will need, at some point; the carrying capacity of the Earth is actually quite a bit more than 8-10 billion, we just need to be better about distributing resources) to keep population from continuing to grow forever on Earth until we have reliable means of colonizing other planets.
This also means we need to avoid getting too far in life-extension/physical immortality research before then! If we can actually achieve physical immortality, but we're stuck on Earth, at some point we will have three choices: stop having kids, start killing each other off in significant numbers, or start running out of resources.
(That is, of course, entirely separate from the concern that life-extension treatments will only be available to the very rich.)
Oooh, nice ! I wish Baxter had added this idea in Manifold (hard scifi novels about "why are we alone in the universe ?" and other things.
For those who wonder what's an uncontrolled paper-clip maximizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence it's a thought experiment that illustrates instrumental convergence:
> Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency for most sufficiently intelligent beings (human and non-human) to pursue similar sub-goals, even if their ultimate goals are quite different.[1] More precisely, agents (beings with agency) may pursue instrumental goals—goals which are made in pursuit of some particular end, but are not the end goals themselves—without ceasing, provided that their ultimate (intrinsic) goals may never be fully satisfied.
> Instrumental convergence posits that an intelligent agent with unbounded but apparently harmless goals can act in surprisingly harmful ways. For example, a computer with the sole, unconstrained goal of solving a difficult mathematics problem like the Riemann hypothesis could attempt to turn the entire Earth into one giant computer in an effort to increase its computational power so that it can succeed in its calculations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence#Paper...
> Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
Though I disagree: the AI in this analogy is mindless, it's up to the controlling entity with agency to stop it or program it to stop at some point. Just like we humans have agency and could decide to stop exploiting our planet's resources until we can do it without destroying it. How that decision is made and implemented is another debate.
I cannot for the life of me figure out how we don’t have an amendment on the books that says “if you produce something in or from this country, you must see to its entire lifecycle”.
Just kidding, I know exactly why we don’t have such an amendment.
Why?
See: regulatory capture.
Also see: politics as career.
look at the pg&e dixie fire that had a cost of well over 1 billion dollars (1000 million dollars) and they got fined 55 million dollars so they could avoid criminal charges.
I'm sure there is a better source, but this covers it https://www.brookings.edu/research/overview-and-analysis-of-...
> These changes undoubtedly reflect a more progressive view of regulation. Yet, they do not jettison cost-benefit analysis. Instead, they have a basis in recent academic research, and they appear to be designed with an eye toward helping agencies withstand court challenges to their cost-benefit analysis.
As I understand it, a cost benefit analyses did not factor into the recent supreme court ruling against the EPA, nor the one from last summer.
We don’t know how many people their current blatant and widespread corruption will kill, so I guess we’ll need to wait and see, then prosecute the responsible parties in 50 years.
Capture is the root of all evil in the way that various ancient/sacred texts said that “money is the root of all evil”.
President Truman was so poorly compensated by capture that they both increased the salary and created a pension because of how embarrassing it was that a President suffered personal financial hardship.
We don’t worry about that sort of thing these days.
Essentially greed. If you really boil the root of evil down to its base, I think you’ll find pride is the true root. IMO pride is the root of greed itself too.
> a minor change or addition designed to improve a text, piece of legislation, etc.
What went wrong in the USA for that word to become a synonym for "fundamental right"?
So if you want to enshrine a right in US law, the highest place to do it is as an amendment to the Constitution.
¹ https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2021/10/18/orphaned...
There are ways to fix this. It’s just that the interests have always ensured an escape hatch.