I'd like to have a cap-and-trade system for carbon. We should have done it years ago when it was hot. I think much like how the immigration debate has festered due to inaction, the carbon debate has too. Regarding immigration, we now have a party proposing ridiculous things (that would be the Republican party, if you weren't sure) because the more reasonable efforts to reform in a bipartisan way were shot down. Same on carbon. The reasonable cap-and-trade approach was shot down so some Democrats are going further left with command-and-control solutions. I'm seeing this also with healthcare, btw. Even though we got our market-based Obamacare market, Republicans hamstrung it and now we're talking single-payer. What I see in this GND are efforts to control the non-monetized side-effects of our economic activity. The market has no signal to say you're emitting too much carbon, so it won't react to change it. A price on carbon isn't just a price hike on goods and services, it's a better price because it recognizes more of the true cost of inputs. So a plane ticket that has to cover a high carbon tax suddenly looks less attractive than a low-carbon train ticket. The investment case for high-speed rail suddenly gets a lot more attractive. The investment case for solar gets stronger, while the case for a gas CCGT goes down. Electric vehicles get a boost and combustion engines get more expensive. We'll be footing the bill in the end anyway, either in a worsening environment, remediation, and/or in overbearing government intervention. So make a market and have the market do the work. "Carbon tax" or "cap-and-trade" do not feature anywhere in GND. For all the ridiculous ambition that is in the resolution, in some ways it isn't ambitious enough. It gets very prescriptive about all the ways government should act and invest to produce desired outcomes, with only vague throw-away references to how businesses might be a stakeholder to be consulted. Leveraging markets to influence how businesses act is just about the biggest tool we have, and it doesn't get a mention.
Oh I know there are other non-fossil fuel/nuclear options. I was being a bit simplistic (for the sake of brevity). I agree with you that nat gas will remain a big boiler fuel/power gen fuel for decades to come. I think coal should play a part too, but that opens up a whole other Pandora's box.
Coal generation, aside from being too dirty, just isn't profitable. Even with everything Trump is trying to do to prop them up, half the current coal fleet is uneconomic. Then imagine if they had to actually pay for their pollution. Given how much gas reserves we've got, I don't see a role for coal at all. Rick Perry will tell you we need it for "resilience", but coal doesn't make the grid more resilient either. It doesn't really have any redeeming qualities left.
You don't agree that it's a problem. I'll need to know if you understand the difference between weather and climate. Also, whether you believe a snowball is proof that Climate Change is a Chinese hoax or a world wide conspiracy for wealth redistribution. So your solution to climate change is a world war? Genius. Saving your future is a waste of people's time and money. Legit.
No surprise one of our resident common sense, bible prophecists is against this. Capitalism is the ticket to save the planet. It has done wonders in <name any capitalist shithole>. Look forward to your next cartoon, photoshop, stupid meme.
Nope, and everyone telling me it is has a larger carbon footprint than me. Go figure. If you actually wanna reduce the carbon footprint of humans then of course. Remember, AOC says we only got 12 years left. What's a little war relative to the end of humanity?
more on high speed rail: This demonstrable ability of other nations to build public works at reasonable—or at least bearable—cost puts lie to the most common excuses for the cost and complexity of American transit projects. America is densely populated and right-of-way property is expensive here? Same goes for Western Europe. America is big? So is China. Unions? Europe, again. You can easily believe that the unique combination of these exacerbating factors of cost and distance would lead to a state where American rail would be the most costly in the world. But more costly by an order of magnitude? American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption—systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit. https://hmmdaily.com/2019/02/15/americas-signature-mode-of-transportation-is-high-cost-rail/
The problem with cap and trade, is that unless it is global, and i do mean entirely global, it's counter intuitive and produces the opposite result to what you want, reducing your footprint, but actually increasing global footprint. It's essentially an indulgence for a new religion. Now what I'm about to link, i didn't know whether to put it in "how's the economy really doing", where he points out the USA has 333 new chemical plants worth $200 billion currently in construction (and this is just one industry, lol, oh no someone is closing down one factory.....), (and this is a very specialised industry with tremendous value adding ability and high paying jobs when they go online), or Brexit/EU because it shows how their stupid regulation creates monopolies (the part where he talks about "uniquely positioned"), but his primary gist seems to be that their environmental policy, and the cap and trade system (europeans just call them all green taxes, but what they have is cap and trade) is stupid https://www.ineos.com/news/ineos-gr...ean-commission-president-jean-claude-juncker/ This is from the founder and chairman of the 3rd largest chemical company in the world, and as he notes, the current US policy is the best one for the environment. The things need to be made either way, but if you create disincentives, the production just goes elsewhere, often to countries with much more relaxed standards, so Europe reduces its footprint, but the production increases global footprint, this is not a win, this is a remission of guilt. Instead the current US strategy is to incentivise producing in the US, but then the environmental standards of said construction project is top of the line, as they are, it results in the lowest amount of environmental damage for the amount of production to meet market demand, and it has the added benefit for the domestic economy. Ergo, Given the USA's unique economic situation (ie it's rich, really really rich), the optimal environmental strategy is the natural consequence of the optimal trade strategy, the GND on the other hand, they either believe in the nonsense that what they want can work, or they don't really believe in it at all and it's just about power, which as is a common phrase in other countries, "Green on the outside, Red on the inside", they've been calling them watermelons in Australia for decades.
I was wondering where I last read about Alinksy... http://bbs.clutchfans.net/index.php...-blackface-photo.296179/page-13#post-12222664
It's a good sensible argument. But I don't think I'm converted. It doesn't push American companies enough for the goals we want to set. And, there are some industries -- like electricity generation -- that you would not or could not offshore. And I think there are tools at our disposal to expand the impacts of a cap and trade beyond our borders given our economic heft where we could force international adoption. Status quo isn't going to be enough anymore. Given that change is coming, we need to find the smartest change we can, or someone is going to impose a stupid plan.
very good, very fair summary of a list of problems with the Green New Deal. Not really about AOC, either: "The grave consequences of implementing the Green New Deal make it necessary to give a sober rebuttal. Even if the Green New Deal fails in Congress, we should not allow the plan to shift the 'Overton Window' of acceptable discourse toward democratic-socialist fantasies. Ocasio-Cortez, the key advocate of the plan, is unqualified to micromanage the national economy. But we should not harp on the inexperience of Ocasio-Cortez so much that we concede the broader point: No person or committee is qualified to command and control our diverse, dynamic national economy." https://arcdigital.media/alexandria...-to-manage-the-new-green-economy-afa518f26802
