Reparations seems like a bad idea here. You're trying to assign an historical cost to future earnings. The shareholders who benefitted in 1988 to 2022 from carbon emissions have already taken that money and spent it on hookers and blow (or whatever else they wanted). The shareholders of 2025-2050 are different people. If some reparations model was made, it would depress the stock price of the companies and current holders of shares would lose their shirts. But again, many of the shareholders of 1988-2022 likely have already taken their profits and sold their shares. You can't get reparations from those people in the past. You can't get them from shareholders of the future, either, since the costs will be priced into the shares they buy. You take all $23 trillion from today's shareholders, even if they just bought in yesterday. It doesn't hold the right people accountable. What does us all being f**ked look like to you? Are you expecting extinction? Because if a remnant of humanity can live on and adapt to a changed world, how badly we're f**ked might make a real difference. I expect hardship, suffering, and deaths from crossing the tipping point, but I don't expect extinction. So doing the best we can will still help. Maybe we need to also focus more than we do on damage mitigation, but decarbonization is still important. Looking at traveling in England and I was surprised and dismayed that it made more sense to fly Ryanair than to take their trains.
Data is mostly shared to display how much in government welfare O&G gets from nations worldwide. Trillions of dollars per year. How is that not financing socialism with tax dollars? And who are the majority of the people financing that relief with their tax money so that O&G execs can as you say, blow it on hookers and coke? I would think shifting actual policies that provide relief to the poor and middle class and doesn't force the tax burden that O&G should be responsible for onto them would actually benefit the middle class more than your shoulder shrug of a response that nothing can be done that's in the past and nothing can be done in the future. I think that's a weak argument you're presenting.
A good chunk of our agricultural goes to just feeding the animals we eat. Do you believe you are entitled to cheap meat? Or do you believe in accountability where you pay the true cost of meat? We subsidize the hell out of meat and agriculture and call it capitalism…. Weird.
I was responding to the 'pay the piper' section of your post that was suggesting take reparations from oil companies for past harms and saying it was a bad idea. I didn't respond to the bit about the $5.9 trillion in annual subsidies for fossil fuels. On subsidies, I can agree with you that oil companies should face the full costs (including the carbon cost) of the products they sell going forward and not take implicit or explicit subsidies. I wouldn't call that socialism but something more like privatizing the profits while socializing the costs. But again, it's not the execs taking that money (though they make good money facilitating the whole enterprise), it's the shareholders. And the identity and relative weights of those shareholders is dynamically changing all the time. The purpose of a reparations scheme is to hold those responsible accountable, and this one doesn't do that. Those companies did all those things for the benefit of their shareholders of the time, and those shareholders took the money. So a reparations plan has to do an incredible accounting feat to re-settle all their ill-gotten gains. It's impossible. So I'm shrugging my shoulders? No. As I said, removing the subsidies going forward is the obvious step. Your link says 92% of those subsidies are implicit in failing to charge the companies for the costs of the environmental damage they inflict. Charge a carbon tax. Gasoline and many other things would get more expensive, consumption would go down, companies would get a lot more innovative about carbon reduction, and governments could deploy the tax revenues to make our communities more resilient to climate change. That fixes things going forward. (Heard an interesting pov on the carbon tax from the head economist at BP. As most economist do, he thinks a carbon tax is the most efficient way to recognize the environmental costs of carbon, but he sees that it is politically toxic. And, he said, climate change is the toughest sort of problem for modern politicians to fix because climate change is global and long-term while the remit of politicians is local and short-term. So, he has instead come to embrace the policy solutions we see in Biden's IIJA and IRA that lean on subsidies for green energy. Subsidies are local and short-term like the politicians (and shareholders, I would say) who stand to benefit, but they contribute to the long-term and global effort of fighting climate change.) Isn't there still a climate justice issue that I would leave unaddressed without reparations? All that stuff about the Global North causing the problem (and taking the profits) and the Global South bearing the brunt? (Aside, I hate the Global North/South vocabulary.) Yes. Forward-looking fixes to market models to drive decarbonization do not address the injustice of the past several decades. I just don't think assessing reparations at the company level is the way to get that justice, but there are other ways. Justice demands that the Global North pay for most of the decarbonization, and that the Global South is not unduly hampered in their own economic development by the extra cost of higher environmental compliance. Those are issues being addressed in the Paris Climate Agreement negotiations with countries (not companies) as the basic unit. We still don't have as much agreement at that level about who pays as we'd want, but that's the right level to make a deal at to serve the question of justice.
Exhume the remains of Rockefeller and have a line of people effected my climate change pee on it one at a time.
Germans have been conditioned into obsessing over climate change. Countries with real survival problems like Israel and Argentina...not so much.
Follow the $. https://www.axios.com/2023/06/06/climate-change-homeowners-insurance-state-farm-california-florida Decisions by two major insurers to stop offering new homeowner's policies in California highlight the growing portion of America that's becoming close to uninsurable. Why it matters: The threat of climate change-related disasters is a large factor driving up consumer costs and putting insurers out of business in parts of California, Florida, Louisiana and elsewhere. It is also bedeviling regulators. "I never thought I would see in my lifetime houses that are flat-out uninsurable," says Robb Lanham, chief sales officer for insurance brokerage HUB Private Client, which works with about 500 insurers. Driving the news: The recent moves by State Farm and Allstate to stop offering new homeowner insurance policies in California have kicked off a national conversation on insuring risk in an increasingly perilous climate. State Farm said in late May it was done accepting new applications for California property insurance — including homes and commercial property — "due to historic increases in construction costs outpacing inflation, rapidly growing catastrophe exposure, and a challenging reinsurance market." An Allstate spokesperson confirmed to Axios that it quietly did the same thing in California in 2022 for the same reasons. The big picture: Disastrous wildfires have plagued California in recent years, while multiple hurricanes have hit Florida and Louisiana, racking up losses for insurers at the same time that home replacement costs have skyrocketed. Studies show that climate change is leading to larger, more frequent wildfires in much of the West. Human-caused climate change is also making hurricanes more prone to rapid intensification and capable of delivering greater amounts of rainfall. At the same time, sea level rise from climate change is causing more frequent sunny day flooding, and more damaging storm surge events in coastal areas. Zoom in: The regulatory environment is also contributing to insurance flight. In California, regulators have blocked insurers from raising rates above a certain threshold, which insurers say has prevented them from covering the costs of their policies. At an average of about $1,300 per year, home insurance rates there "have been artificially low for decades," Insurance Information Institute (III) spokesman Mark Friedlander tells Axios. "This means insurers have been writing business there for this very high risk. And they've been losing money." Threat level: Lanham said many of his clients can't get insurance for their homes. The hardest states to insure homes, in order, are California, Florida, Texas, Colorado, Louisiana and New York, Lanham says. But this is a 50-state problem as insurers are being forced to re-assess their risk tolerance as climate change leads to more common and severe extreme weather events, says Steve Bowen, chief science officer at Gallagher Re. Unless investments are made in hardening infrastructure, more insurance companies will have to pull out of markets, he said. "We really need to fundamentally change how we're viewing risk and accept that the risk that we assumed was normal 20 years ago is not the same risk today. And it's definitely not going to be the same risk 10, 20 years from today," Bowen said. State of play: In many areas, homes are insurable, but costs are mushrooming. In Florida, average annual rates are expected to rise about 43% to nearly $6,000 in 2023, according to the institute. Friedlander and Nyce agreed that average Florida rates could hit $10,000 within a few years. In some areas, that amount has already been surpassed. "There's a cost associated with living in paradise," Charles Nyce, a Florida State University professor and expert in catastrophic risk financing, tells Axios. The impact: Some two dozen Florida-based insurers are on a regulator's watchlist due to their financial predicaments. "We're not sure how many of those are going to survive," Friedlander says. "We expect more to fail." In some parts of Florida, residents must now turn to the state-backed Citizens Property Insurance for coverage, whose rate increases are restricted by lawmakers. It has become the largest insurer in the state with more than 1.2 million customers. In the event of more extreme weather events, "we all could be on the hook to help replenish their funds," says Friedlander, a Florida resident. Between the lines: Home replacement costs have risen 55.4% since 2019, according to the institute, as wages and material costs escalated. Another problem is that the cost of reinsurance — essentially insurance for insurers — has also risen to prohibitive levels for companies operating in areas prone to escalating climate risks. Worth noting: When homes become uninsurable, it makes it difficult to get a mortgage on the property. In some cases, insurers are revising the types of policies they offer by including deductibles that are a percentage of the home’s value, instead of a flat amount. Lanham says the risk of rising rates is that it'll make areas unaffordable for certain residents and will trigger migration, causing coastal residents to move inland, for example.
Agreed. Unfortunately that's a major giveaway to Big Agriculture and the corn belt. The GOP didn't offer up ethanol subsidies during the stupid debt issue.
"But, but, love, it's an electric car." (x 20) "It's really quiet, I'll give you that. ... silent but deadly."
I’ve been reading a bit about 60s politics recently. The right called civil rights communist. This makes just as much sense. We hate these two things, so let’s conflate them.
It's funny, but at the same time, she is representative of the climate religion fanatics. They want to feel morally superior to others and lecture them, with no basis in fact.
Mike Hulme's book published today in the UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Climate-Change-isnt-Everything-Liberating/dp/1509556168/ref=sr_1_1
