What percentage of emissions is usage vs manufacture? I've looked, but I can't get a figure.
264 karma · joined August 24, 2018
India, Nigeria and Pakistan likely should burn more fossil fuels, as those three countries represent a large chunk of the world's desperately poor - with 1.33 Billion, 200 million and 200 million people respectively. It is hard to argue climate change is the biggest issue when your country has most of the world's people living in abject poverty.
Anyway, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... shows that India uses 1.7 metric tonnes per capita, Pakistan 0.9 and Nigeria 0.5. China uses 7.5, so that's about break even for a booming economy. Lets be conservative and say all three countries double their carbon output, and that's an extra 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon in India, and an extra half a billion-ish tonnes for the other two. Lets call it 3 billion extra tonnes of carbon as a nice round number.
It is hard to see where the reductions will come from to cover just that increase. The EU is unlikely to drop much if any, and even The USA, currently at 16.5 per capita with 330 million people, would need to drop 10 tonnes per capita just to break even with India, Pakistan And Nigeria's increases. Dropping over 50% of carbon usage is a huge ask.
I think that the other two solutions need to be proritised, and fast.
Also, markets price in these sorts of things. If divestment was a real threat, that would already be factored into the price. It is partly why the P/E ratio of BHP is 13.94, whereas it is 75.56 for Amazon.
Lastly, with a lot of money in index funds (~50%), divestment seems close to impossible. Unless index funds specifically were pegged to non-fossil fuel indexes, they will alway be investing in those companies.
This seems likes the investment version of the plastic straws ban: ineffectual at best.
> If we were to have truly political discussions, we'll need to include all the other countries of the world, which none of us would want
That's a really, really good point, and I'll keep it in mind when political topics arise.
I can see where places with bad power supply currently, with the rolling brown and blackouts, might move to renewables, especially if 1st world countries subsidize it. "Oh, these are flaky and power is intermittent? So business as usual?"
But is coal really being moved out in the 1st world? Still the largest source of power in Germany.
The pie chart here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption shows that over 54% of the world's energy came from carbon. AFAICT as primary energy, that excludes motor vehicles (the graph above has oil higher than coal). I'm not sure if a reduction of 10% from carbon sources would represent a decrease in total carbon, given the rate of growth of energy usage world wide which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi... demonstrates.
In any case, is it true that, globally, "non-carbon energy sources will, faster than most of the world currently thinks, force carbon energy sources off the market"?
The problem with income tax is that it encourages the richest to run scams where the ROI is "cost of accountant + tax saved < expected tax = do it". If your income exceeds $100,000, it is almost guaranteed to be worth it to hire expensive lawyers.
Then there are the terrible scams like the one I read (which I can't confirm) where startup founders with public companies receive a minimal income, like $1 per year, and instead borrow their yearly requirements against the value of their shares. That could be $10M tax free - it is borrowing so it isn't income - and a sales tax starts to look like a pretty good idea! That'd be $1M in tax on a sales tax of 10%, vs $0.
Anyway, like I said, tax is complicated!
No site's output is 100% because of the tech team - content writers can put in weird code, marketers can add all sorts of stuff to say Tag manager, the robots.txt is likely from 2008. And a site built with code as the primary goal is likely lacking in some marketing oomph somewhere.
Someone who's job it is to find the right balance, and aim to maximise the returns from the single largest source of traffic, is pretty valuable.
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...
https://www.drawdown.org/ has a big list of things that can be done, with the benefits of each in terms of cost and carbon reduction. It would make most sense to work through the list. If you guessed what number 1 is, you're a smarter human than I am!
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...
It's funny, but that sounds an AWFUL lot like the Terra Nullius argument used to disposes Indigenous people of their land.
Australia's "wide open spaces" are home to flora and fauna that are unique and worth preserving. The idea we'd want vast swaths of solar destroying the natural environment - one that is unique and wonderful - is odd to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w really changed my mind on this. I was pro-nuclear before seeing it, but am even more so after.
Which type: metallurgic (used to make steel) or thermal (for power)?
Metallurgic coal is the more expensive, loved kind (as you need it to make buildings) and that is what Australia produces, at ~40% of total exports by volume (not sure via value). https://minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/181012%20Commodi... BTW: that is 3X the next biggest metallurgic coal exporter (the USA).
> There seems to be real chance that the demand for Australian coal drops by >50% in the next few years
Where are you getting that figure from? Coking coal looks pretty solidly in growth from what I know.
The USA undeniably has a low macro rates of homelessness overall, but I wonder if it has high micro levels of homelessness, e.g. Sydney seems to have lower rates of homelessness than San Francisco or Seattle, even though Australia has a higher homelessness rate than the USA overall. I wonder as I can't find any data that uses the same measurements across cities and countries and is easy to compare.
On numbers, Seattle has 12,000 homeless according to wikipedia, and I can't find similar numbers for Sydney. Given Sydney is about 15% larger than greater Seattle, it would need to be closer to 14,000 to be the same. I doubt Sydney has that many Homeless, but with no data I guess it may.
I could be completely off base here, but I do think the USA has some really concentrated pockets of homelessness, and that skews people's views, in both directions, based on personal experience.
I have no idea, but it does seem that if there are bottlenecks in the process, demand for nuclear could bring costs come down dramatically. Am I missing something here?
I think the idea that renewables will be feasible in a country India's size with India's population, while preserving much if any natural space seems, at best, optimistic.
By all means Australia - the 6th largest country by area in the world with a population of 25ish million has the space. But India? Sure it is the 7th largest country by area, but it is less than half Australia's size, with 50-70 times the population (India's population estimates are tricky).
The scariest part of these debates is that the solution is likely energy dependence, as in countries with space - and day more sunshine - sell electricity to those without it. I don't think ANYONE likes that idea, but I can't see any way that it is feasible worldwide while maintaining each country's energy independence.
The problem at present is the west has convoluted and arcane immigration rules (https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/award-winning-aussie-bar... for example of westerner in another western country) and two dramatically different buckets - limbo/slave to employer or full, no questions asked rights. There needs to be a less dichotomous, more gradual attainment of citizenship, and a set of intermediary steps, where the potential citizen has some of the rights of a citizen, but not all, and they increase over time towards full citizenship.
I think a message's context matters - and this is almost self evident from examples like ads for airline tickets being shown on plane crash articles. I think targeting is great, I really do, but I think the value of trusted brands is likely just as, if not more, strong.
If context matters, and I think that argument was the entrenched idea pre-internet and has not been disproven, then where is the positioning of targeting? My hypothesis would be that targeting is likely best utilised when people stray from self selecting brands, e.g. NYTimes needs no targeting, but a smaller publication likely does, as people aren't there for the brand's known positioning, but because of their targetable interests, e.g. they ended up on a site about coding, or computer games, or knitting or whatever.
This is a tough argument, because AFAICT this is the full argument:
1. We can do positive things for what the sun hurts, e.g. we can treat high blood pressure.
2. We can't stop melanoma.
3. Therefore, avoid the sun, and take medications to treat the resulting complications.
That's an argument that takes one risk (Melanoma) and contrasts it with other risks minus the efficacy of their treatments. I have no idea how ANYONE has worked out that equation, as no working is shown.
Personally, I really like the sun, and the lifestyle that comes with it. Doesn't seem like a small increase in Melanoma risk is worth giving all that up, especially when the cost is taking more medication for years as a result.
> Note that IQ tests correlate with SAT scores!
That is (in part) Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point: we use IQ to select for success, then say IQ is correlated with success. It is circular reasoning.
The more interesting measure is not jobs for which IQ is the main selection criteria to qualify for the training (your examples of MDs, JDs, and PhDs), but things where people create their own impact, lets say entrepreneurs, or world changing ideas (think Naler's Nudge).
I don't necessarily agree with this, BTW. Just linking the ideas back together.
I think the mistake is thinking that one measure will be absolutely predictive. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point is that IQ is a great measure of stupid people, almost absolute at < 70 IQ levels, but as you progress upwards it's predictive power wanes.
Which is GOOD. Success is defined by many parts. Genetics, culture, training, hard work, timing aka luck. That there is no one metric that predicts everything is a good thing. However, while we should be clear on the limits of each of our measures, and not over state their individual value, that is not to say that these metrics are useless.
Said simply: stupid is stupid, but we're not totally sure what smart is.
The title of the article itself points to this fact, as the word "largely" is inserted. Nassim Nicholas Taleb himself can see the value at the lower levels.
If the goal was to find people that can, say, program, I think IQ works as a perfectly fine metric. If one wants to find someone who can make revolutionary break throughs, possibly less so, but even then, if IQ can exclude 50+% of people, you are onto a good thing.