The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law

I'm not into conspiracy usually, but regarding everything that was exposed in recent years, I would easily see a conspiracy there.

I'm not necessarily say that it is just a single person or company, but that it is likely that a group of entities is working together on this for a hidden interest.

Just look what happened with the "vote" of the council, each time it became too public that a vote was coming and that some countries would publicly be against due to public pressure, they preferred to "withdraw" the proposal instead of going to the public vote that could have been a strong "no". And they did that multiple times. And it was obvious that the reason to not go to the vote is to be able to try to pass it again. Then, at least the representatives of the countries involved "plotted" against us in a conspiracy, to have the discussion and the decision voted in secret in order to be sure that it will pass. And eventually that no country like Germany could be pointed as individually have voted "yes" despite its population will.

Markets tend to emerge where there are people who have some things while wanting other things

What is you definition of "markets"?

Markets are nothing more than the aggregate expression of what people do, need, desire. It's an expression of a free society. No market means a Stalinist society.

> Markets produce wealth inequality.

That always reminds of Margaret Thatcher's famous words in Parliament: "They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich."

No system consisting of humans is ever stable. We can dampen various events, but building a stable system is impossible. Too many things change constantly around us.

Not even old ossified feudal systems were stable. Either the Mongols came, or Black Death, or some smart-ass with his moveable type, and nothing was like before.

Virtually any country that achieves political stability and effective institutions experiences rapid development in the modern world with open knowledge and trade networks.

There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.

Just had to break a few eggs[1] to make that omelette.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers).

Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1023

This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example.

I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he was just promoted into the central committee, essentially the highest ring of the Soviet state. He had just made it to the top and one of his first meetings was having dealing with the issue of persistent shortages of women's panty hose. He was flabbergasted that he was at the top rung of a country that can blast people into space, but can't deal with basic consumer goods availability.

Also, many countries have industrialized just as fast without central planning, particularly several asian ones. True, then did centrally set goals and use various carrot and stick initiatives, but otherwise let the market dictate most of the rest.

This is all false, I guess you've never been to Soviet Union nor russia (that country doesn't deserve capital R). Central planning is dysfunctional at its core, ignoring subtleties of smaller parts. Also, it was historically always done in eastern Europe hand in hand with corruption, nepotism and incompetence where apparatchiks held most power due to going deepest in ass kissing and other rectal speleology hobbies, not because they were competent.

I come from one such country. After WWII, there was Austria and there was eastern bloc to compare. Austria was severely damaged and had much lower GDP than us. It took mere 40 years of open market vs centrally planned economy to see absolutely massive differences when borders reopened and people weren't shot anymore for trying to escape - we didn't have proper food in the shops ffs. Exotic fruits came few times a year, rotten or unripe. Even stuff grown in our country was often lacking completely. Any product ie electric ones, or cars were vastly subpar to western ones while massively more costly (and often design was plain stolen from the western companies).

Society as a whole made it because almost everybody had a big garden to complement everything basic missing in shops. The little meat you could buy was of worst quality, ladden with amount of toxic chemistry that wouldn't be acceptable in Bangladesh.

But these shouldn't be in contradiction. Oil and gas will end when they will be unprofitable, priced out by much cheaper renewables. Of course this will result in more and cheaper stuff and energy, boost economic growth rates not suppress them.

Petroleum is subsidized so heavily globally. Most oil actually comes from nation companies. That's, like, the maximum amount of government intervention you can get.

The people who think oil are or were a "free market" are beyond delusional. No, that was never the case - all the big players are governments, all of it is centrally planned, and all of it is subsidized by the population. That's why it's so cheap.

The reason it's going up in price is BECAUSE we're doing this less, as renewables become more competitive.

I'm sympathetic to your arguments but I'm fairly sure that nationalizing Nokia would not have staved off the inevitable, though, selling it to MS certainly accelerated the fall.

I still have my trusty N-800 tough, and I expect it will last another decade but that phone was made well after the Nokia brand effectively ceased to exist and is more of a reboot than a successful pivot. Clearly I'm not the 'ideal consumer' but I'm also the exception, I don't know anybody around me except for my 90 year old uncle who still has one of these and even he's been eying a smartphone.

What social and environmental policies are you currently lacking? Be specific please.

And we all want many thing in life, like for example I would want my bus to work every 5 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, but everything nice in life has a hefty price, and if you make a large part of the economy bankrupt or leave and workers unemployed or broke from rising costs, in exchange for financially unrealistic environmental targets that only a small part of the population can tolerate("let them eat cake"), then that might not sit well with a large part of the democratic voting population who has to bare the brunt of your wishes.

A balance has to be found between what's nice and desirable and what's economically feasible without causing economic hardship on others, otherwise something breaks and you get rising extremism and .

Then vote for it. Seems a growing majority disagree with you now. Maybe those policies haven’t worked well for them.

Left and right are just sides of the same cleptocratic coin, catering to different audiences but ultimately doing the same thing.

Because wealth inequality and housing unaffordability has increased regardless if left or right wing were in power.

There's no good and bad one here, they're both just cosplaying.

No. I actually don't want abolishment of private ownership and actions (left) and I also don't want forced adoption of remote polluting energy sources ( aka. renewables) and gender ideologies (green). I want inclusion of exernalities into prices, which is an agenda of liberal and right-wing parties.

No, my point is the root cause is wealth inequality, which is fundamentally undemocratic, and a different issue than free speech. The solution is wealth expropriation, not censorship.

No, their voice should have exactly the same value as everyone else's.

no less, no more.

Unless we are done with pretending that there are no power disparities.

And one of few ways to do so is to either:

- completely ban lobbying, any form of privilege/monetary exchange is considered a bribery. Introduce a public open dialogue when working on a new legislation. Rich can still make their own campaigns for specific issues - just targeting voters, not politicians directly.

- introduce system of checks and balances where any form of lobbying must be publicly visible and attached to image of politician, so voter can easily make informed decision. Including something correlated with amount of money donated, counting shell organizations in it too.

good luck - no politician will vote to cut their own paycheck.

Unserious response.

I describe it as a black hole since there is no limited on how much funding it will take in, and once in, there is no reasonable expectation that we will see anything come back out. Fundamental research is useful for humanity as a whole, and rich countries should use some excess money for that purpose, but this technology was sold to the population as already solved and commercial viable.

Sending large amount of subsidizes to a single commercial entity is also very risky. The bankruptcy of Northvolt demonstrated this quite well, including how wages and costs can get inflated when a commercial venture relies a bit too much on subsidies in order to exist. The size of government funding need to be balanced with the need for government oversight in order to verify that citizens money get used correctly. Time will tell if Hybrit will share the same fate, and for now it doesn't look great.

There need to be honest and clear information when the government funds commercial ventures, especially when it involve untested research. The biggest problem with green hydrogen is that it was presented as an already solved problem that was already commercial viable. Every year for the last couple of decades it was just "a few years" before it would be cheaper than natural gas, even as natural gas prices went up in price. Some municipalities even went as far as building hydrogen infrastructure on this promise that everything from heating to transportation to electricity would be operated on green hydrogen. Now most of that is being removed as the maintenance and fuel costs has demonstrated to be way higher than expected. That was not a well use of citizens money.

The Stell argument is actually valid and not fear mongering. The steel industry simply can't survive with current CO2 emission prices (there is a financial instrument for it).

> "Actual factory owners" also said getting rid of child labor would bankrupt them; they said the same thing about sick leave and a whole number of other now standard measures.

That's very country dependent. In Germany, some "actual factory owners" founded kindergartens and maternal leave, before it was enforced by activists. They first understood that not everything is about money and they need to look their employees in the eyes when they sit next to them in the church on Sunday and also understood, that a happy, worry-less employee is an employee that can focus on the work and work harder. Lenin said about the Germans, that they are to lazy to do a revolution, but I think the actual issue is, that German countries mostly got rulers actually interested in the well-being of the population.

In Germany a lot of regulation used to be introduced by grassroots movements and was followed voluntarily and later the state adopted the winner of the regulation competition. See TÜV, FSGV (basically a random association deciding how to build roads that the state just adopts) etc. A large part of German economic and social failure is, that we don't have that culture of self-regulation and enforcement anymore.

"It has nothing to do with decarbonization and everything with them having no idea how to compete."

So they lost all the ideas since the 1980s or so, when they were top of the heap?

Maybe, but increasing cost of inputs has more than nothing to do with economic balance of any business. Even regular households feel the increase in heating and electricity costs. A factory which needs orders of magnitude more energy will feel them even more.

Cheap energy is very important to any industry, no way around it. That is why China builds so many power stations.

There is no issue

Chat control is being pushed by national police forces as well as europol. It's... Lobbying. Basically. The whole story of how it started with ylva johannsson is the result of strong lobbying by Thorn and Ashton Kutcher

Where I live, we have and exercise the right to legislative referendum, which stops such legislation in a very clear and decisive way. If something like this passes in the EU, we have no way to fight it (international treaties are not subjects to referendum). The influence in EU parliament is delegated on so many levels that it's impossible to transparently see what your vote influences.

You changed my mind on some points, but this still ticks me off

> Start-stop lowering lifetime of bearings while reducing pollution by idling vehicles, good trade-off.

In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.

>Non-removable bottle caps is also a non-issue, it really reduced the littering of bottle caps I used to see everywhere in Sweden, I don't see bottle caps on the ground anymore. The cost is a non-issue as well since after changing production lines it just goes down for every new batch.

Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.