I'm all for a more realistic approach to climate policy, but at least pretend to engage with real-world research and policy rather than a bunch of convenient strawmen that support your pre-existing position.
"at least pretend to engage with real-world research and policy rather than a bunch of convenient strawmen that support your pre-existing position."
Oren's intellectual identity has gotten him to the point of being feted by the Vice President and Secretary of State--why would he start being an honest broker now?
Interesting that the great bogey man of these pages, China, is making the opposite bet. They don't just burn coal, they already dominate the green energy industries of the future. Like our burgeoning debt, with Don about to break his first term record, our partisan soaked myopia will leave this turd in our grandchildren's punch bowl as well. Here's hoping China shares their technology...
EVs are not good industrial policy but as your general argument goes spending a lot of money to replace something that works with something else that might work. They also move the pollution problem elsewhere to either hapless 3rd World countries or industrial economies that tolerate it for economic advantages to the working class.
I am glad the car is working for you. The issue is that when things break (especially electronic), spare parts may be extremely hard to come by. If you think as an EV as a computer or Iphone with wheels, no one has a 10 year old Iphone in use (often due to software updates).
For sure the market for spare parts will need to grow, but as the vehicle market shifts, it will - it'll be less changing water pumps and alternators and more changing chip components. So I take your point that I am at risk. But so is everyone owning an ICE car - take a look at the auto parts store shelves these days and talk to the workers. Then again, I live in CA.
I had a hybrid that lasted 17 years and was generally satisfactory. Indeed a better solution than all electric. Battery is a environmental problem when it dies though as well as an economic problem. I was lucky because Honda screwed up and the battery died 2 weeks before the warranty ran out instead of two weeks after. Price tag without warranty was $7000.
Bottom of the ocean is a good place for them. Supposedly, there's new battery tech coming which will pose less of a fire risk so another argument against rapid adoption.
For what its worth. I put this in Googles Gemini Deep Research: "But in the broader scheme of a century of economic, technological, and geopolitical changes and challenges, the gradual increase in global temperatures does not rank high. This is not my opinion, it is the conclusion of the climate models, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the analyses that attempt to translate these forecasts into economic impacts."
I would like you to assess the veracity of this statement.
This was the Executive Summary (the report was over 12 pages. It can easily be reproduced):
I. Executive Summary
The assertion that the gradual increase in global temperatures does not rank high among a century of economic, technological, and geopolitical changes and challenges, a view attributed to climate models, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and economic impact analyses, is the subject of this report. A rigorous, evidence-based examination of authoritative scientific and economic sources reveals that this statement is largely contradicted by the overwhelming body of available data.
Far from being a low-ranking concern, climate change is consistently identified as a systemic, high-ranking, and escalating threat with profound, often irreversible, economic, social, and environmental consequences. The IPCC, the leading international body for assessing climate change, issues "final warnings" about the rapidly closing window to avert catastrophic impacts and emphasizes that risks escalate with every increment of global warming. Economic analyses from institutions such as Swiss Re and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) project multi-trillion dollar losses, with some recent studies likening the potential economic damage to that of a "permanent war." Furthermore, global risk assessments, exemplified by the World Economic Forum's reports, consistently place environmental risks, including extreme weather events and critical Earth system changes, as dominant long-term concerns, which are increasingly manifesting as significant short-term crises. This comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the premise of the user's statement does not align with the conclusions of the very institutions it cites.
Given that there is nothing more conservative than the conservation of the natural environment, the choice made by the new conservatives to alienate one of the their potential constituencies is a foolish one.
It reminds me of the Democratic Party alienating religious conservatives concerned about the poor over the issue of abortion.
Phrases like “unhinged,” and “disconnected from reality” spring to mind, followed by “virtue signalling” and “luxury belief”. Even saint Greta has moved on from climate activism.
Are you proposing a different way of addressing climate change, or are you just saying we should ignore it?
I ask because I think anyone that understands climate change would be critical of the policies proposed by Biden and the Democrats. It seems like there should be a possibility of addressing climate change with new deal style public works programs to build high speed rail, transmission lines, power plants, etc.
There are plenty of things Hazlett gets wrong in that book (his chapter on protectionism could have been written by Ricardo and is clearly no longer accurate.) But his first 2 chapters are on "The Broken Window" and the "Blessing of Destruction": essentially the fallacy of war or disasters promoting employment.
Climate Change is akin to this fallacy. Breaking things just to rebuild them isn't productive. This is obvious, and yet in this area most liberals can't see it.
This piece portrays climate change as a transactional proposition, one that must provide an almost immediate benefit from the investment in combatting carbon emissions. That's a false premise to say the least. The benefit to workers (and everyone else for that matter) is the prospect of enhanced quality of life for themselves and future generations. Reforming the world's carbon-based economies from the past hundred years will require substantial investments that will yield dividends that many of us may not live to see. Also, any high school essay writer can cherry-pick climate predictions to support their narrative, but the vast majority of scientific predictions on the gradual disaster of climate change have been accurate, and we're seeing the evidence unfold around the world. The longer we take to confront this pattern, the more it will take to fix it.
It takes political courage to tell voters that saving our planet will take investment and sacrifice. There won't be an immediate payoff for voters in meeting this challenge; so many voters are focused on making a better life for themselves and their families today -- the climate change threat (if they haven't been misled to dismiss it as folly) seems so far away. For the most part, conservative elected officials are pandering to these voters, promising to champion near-term payoffs without the costly investment in fighting climate change. For the sake of winning their next election, these politicians are kicking the climate disaster can down the road again.
Big week coming for the "new" right! Its leader is deploying troops on American streets to fight fellow Americans, (what could possibly go wrong) followed by the military parade honoring himself (here's hoping he goes full on North Korean with the big ole penile ICBM's). All on the heels of his slappy fight with Elon:) Isn't it time for a new Republican establishment, this one seems to be careening outta control. Good luck America...
The arguments made in this post are cogent. I have always wondered why on one hand the global warming contingent sort of forgets that if you want to reduce global warming, focus on the sources that make a difference (ie. coal power plants from China). https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/. One can also use https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions. There is also a great visual computer tool called a Geochron that is great for use in schools to show were air pollution is...... and the US is not the big problem.
Sorry, engineer guy, but carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide, and the let’s bash China and India because they’re the problem is sophomoric as an argument. You’ll probably be pulling that one out about plastic pollution in twenty years, when we’ve reduced our production and offshored it elsewhere.
You’re allowed to critique China and India, as long as the context includes acknowledgement that they both, combined, are light years behind the U.S. in CO2 emissions over time, the U.S. is still belching copious fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere (MIC), and any argument dismissing U.S. leadership in CO2 reduction being contingent on foreign belching is sandbox, gutless, reasoning.
It's a rear-view mirror article about accumulative emissons starting in 1751! Of course the West has produced more since it industrialized a couple of centuries earlier. LOL.
My point is that China and other countries be held accountable for currernt pollution. Actually, the West just shifted it's pollution to China and is equally responsible. But we can't force the Chinese to clean up their act. So, the only thing to do is boycott made in China and instead make the stuff in the West. Set an example with most likely robots, nuclear power, plastic use and pesticide control. Europe is best at maintaining food quality. China is the worst by far and the US is somewhere in the middle.
If the Green New Deal does as much for the “working class” as “globalization” (freedom) has, sign me up!
That’s the thing-Cass makes some good points but in the end he opposes freedom (“globalization”) too, and it’s freedom that has brought unprecedented prosperity to all classes, not substituting Trump-Cass state control (tariffs)for AOC-Klein state control (“Green New Deal”).
What a weird post from Oren. And he gives it away early on when he says he stopped writing about climate change in 2018. Really? 2018? That's seven years ago, a long time and a lot of politics ago. And he says he stopped because the claims of concerned people became too 'unmoored', and then proceeds to show us a couple of headlines where claims were completely opposite of one another, or somesuch.
So essentially Oren is saying that because we haven't been able to generate a completely clear picture of what the outcome of climate change will be, that is, the most fantastically complex phenomenon we've ever thrown at a computer, we should just ignore it. AND he's sure we can be absolutely clear--because there isn't a clear picture of outcomes--that the outcomes won't be too serious. It's not a crisis, it's just a 'challenge'. We just know that. Or rather Oren just knows that. No science or scientists need be referenced, it's just ok to cite a single UN climate report, which actually doesn't say what he pretends it does, while there are dozens of UN reports that are far more frantic in their assessments. But then again since scientists are overwhelmingly liberals, we know that their scientific judgement is distorted by politics. And look, they can't even figure out what this thing is going to look like that they insist we should be concerned about!
But oddly, Oren doesn't cite the many reports from international INSURANCE organizations, and international REAL ESTATE organizations that point out the simple, uncomplicated truth that our form of finance capitalism cannot survive on the present trajectory of extreme weather events (leaving out biodiversity and a host of other climate change dangers). You kind of don't need to have a Nobel in science or economics to get it. Just glimpsing the relationship between real estate, mortgages and insurance is good enough. Some of those reports are as close to 'freaking out' as somber organizations can go--and one suspects there are few Bolsheviks on their staffs. Let's see how what happens after the next major hurricane hits Florida this summer, or next. Because it's not if, but when. Places like Florida are simply the canary in the climate coal mine, although the data points accumulating every year everywhere bear out some of the worst predictions of climate scientists.
Because if you know anything about science and biology and complexity, you realize that the problem with climate change is precisely that you can't really say with certainty what is going to happen, because it's too (fucking) complex! That we all exist within--and are made up of--multiples of ecosystems that are interacting with one another and creating interacting bands of homeostasis at different levels. And when you threaten homeostasis, there is a certain point beyond which organisms simply break down, or mutate and shift altogether, and when everything is connected to everything else--which it is--you just don't know at what point X or Y happens. You just don't. But when you see, for example, extreme weather events happening more commonly, it's the beginning of a phase shift, which is going somewhere, but you actually don't know where. You can make reasonable guesses, but there is inherent uncertainty. But one thing we do know is that we're not going in the direction of more stability. And that has BIG implications, everywhere.
Unless of course, you're Oren, who simply knows it's not much of a problem because he thinks about it every seven years or so, and it really doesn't require that much grey matter after all.
Understandings of climate change are highly theoretical. It's a highly politicized issue, "Like, you're evil if you don't care---how selfish are you?" Cars are a major problem, as a country our infrastructure is just not organized to meaningfully battle climate change. Taking steps like charging for plastic bags can be helpful, but meanwhile, we drive everywhere and a lot.
I'm just wondering what you think of organizations like the American Conservation Coalition and some of their conservative environmentalist proposals? I think that there are certain technologies that we could be utilizing in conjunction with our existing system that could not only reinforce it but help reduce CO2 as well. We've had effective means of sequestering and converting CO2 into ethanol since 2016.
"What is the ongoing devastation of communities that Biden-style policy action will mitigate?"
I think this question identifies the missed elephant in the room. Come on man... it does not take deep economic analysis to conclude that the left-liberal Democrat climate crises claim and their related Green New Deal, are in fact part of an overall agenda to keep heaping pain onto the middle working class... an agenda that they, the Democrats, have telegraphed since Hillary labeled them irredeemable deplorables and Biden deemed them "semi Nazis" and fascists.
Ayn Rand nailed this. Really she did. Producers, looters and moochers.
It is a competition for human status hierarchy really. As Peterson points out... this is primary. Money is secondary and mostly important because for them it buys the primary. There is nothing that an elite academic credentialed lefty hates more than the C-grade average quarterback of the football team ending up owning a few car dealerships or a successful building contracting business and being a pillar of the community. The academic lefty does not have the right stuff... does not do well competing on productive merit within the standard economy where people make, build, grow and sell real products. No, the lefty seeks a second-tier rent-seeking angle... exploiting an opportunity to skim off the top of all that production... that is the core of any economy.
These academic lefties, the Professional Managerial Class, not only strive to fill their bank accounts and power accounts to be seen as top of the hierarchy, their looter insecurity causes them to also strive to punch down their producer competition. Their chronic fear is that captain of the football team showing them up again.
This drive to punch down the working class to prevent competition for status is the primary motivation behind climate crisis. Lefties don't do more education because of any motivation to gain knowledge and skills to be better producers... they do it because they are insecure to launch into the productive private economy and load up with credentials and certifications to be a placebo replacement for the capabilities that they lack.
What they dream about is a two-class society. The elites. The Elect. The "expert" class... the Professional Managerial Class and the Professional Laptop Class... and everyone else. And in their dream utopia, everyone else will be happy on government provided Universal Basic Income. There will be no need for any domestic production... that will be outsourced to other countries without the threat of domestic status competition. And many poor and uneducated immigrants too will be flooded in, because the moocher class supports the looter class in politics... and the oversupply of working class labor will drive down the wages and economic opportunity of the working class even further to prevent that frightening rise of the football captain.
The elephant is the class war. It drives almost all of Democrat politics these days. Republicans tend to be big-tent believers... that everyone can and should have plentiful economic opportunity and compete on their own productive merit.
I'm all for a more realistic approach to climate policy, but at least pretend to engage with real-world research and policy rather than a bunch of convenient strawmen that support your pre-existing position.
"at least pretend to engage with real-world research and policy rather than a bunch of convenient strawmen that support your pre-existing position."
Oren's intellectual identity has gotten him to the point of being feted by the Vice President and Secretary of State--why would he start being an honest broker now?
Interesting that the great bogey man of these pages, China, is making the opposite bet. They don't just burn coal, they already dominate the green energy industries of the future. Like our burgeoning debt, with Don about to break his first term record, our partisan soaked myopia will leave this turd in our grandchildren's punch bowl as well. Here's hoping China shares their technology...
EVs are not good industrial policy but as your general argument goes spending a lot of money to replace something that works with something else that might work. They also move the pollution problem elsewhere to either hapless 3rd World countries or industrial economies that tolerate it for economic advantages to the working class.
There is a good summary of the environmental advantages of hybrid/Plug In hybrids vs Full electric cars in these two articles. The engineering and math is really quite simple. This does not even account for the reality that EV cars will probably have a useful life of 7-10 years at best compared to Hybrid and ICE cars which now are 12-14 years. Note that Tesla bases their environmental claims on a 14 year life! https://www.thedrive.com/features/toyota-is-right-we-need-more-hybrid-cars-and-fewer-evs-heres-why and https://spectrum.ieee.org/electric-vehicles-arent-taking-over-our-roads-as-fast-as-hype-artists-claim
My EV is 7 years and showing no signs of wear. Check back in a few years, but I'm clearly saving money on fuel and oil changes every year...
I am glad the car is working for you. The issue is that when things break (especially electronic), spare parts may be extremely hard to come by. If you think as an EV as a computer or Iphone with wheels, no one has a 10 year old Iphone in use (often due to software updates).
For sure the market for spare parts will need to grow, but as the vehicle market shifts, it will - it'll be less changing water pumps and alternators and more changing chip components. So I take your point that I am at risk. But so is everyone owning an ICE car - take a look at the auto parts store shelves these days and talk to the workers. Then again, I live in CA.
EVs are no better/no worse than fuel efficient ICEs. It’s as though nothing was improved…
I had a hybrid that lasted 17 years and was generally satisfactory. Indeed a better solution than all electric. Battery is a environmental problem when it dies though as well as an economic problem. I was lucky because Honda screwed up and the battery died 2 weeks before the warranty ran out instead of two weeks after. Price tag without warranty was $7000.
Another side effect is the incidence of major fires on the boats shipping them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qH1MjOSLeM.
Bottom of the ocean is a good place for them. Supposedly, there's new battery tech coming which will pose less of a fire risk so another argument against rapid adoption.
https://www.motor1.com/news/762063/toyota-says-hybrids-cleaner-evs/
For what its worth. I put this in Googles Gemini Deep Research: "But in the broader scheme of a century of economic, technological, and geopolitical changes and challenges, the gradual increase in global temperatures does not rank high. This is not my opinion, it is the conclusion of the climate models, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the analyses that attempt to translate these forecasts into economic impacts."
I would like you to assess the veracity of this statement.
This was the Executive Summary (the report was over 12 pages. It can easily be reproduced):
I. Executive Summary
The assertion that the gradual increase in global temperatures does not rank high among a century of economic, technological, and geopolitical changes and challenges, a view attributed to climate models, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and economic impact analyses, is the subject of this report. A rigorous, evidence-based examination of authoritative scientific and economic sources reveals that this statement is largely contradicted by the overwhelming body of available data.
Far from being a low-ranking concern, climate change is consistently identified as a systemic, high-ranking, and escalating threat with profound, often irreversible, economic, social, and environmental consequences. The IPCC, the leading international body for assessing climate change, issues "final warnings" about the rapidly closing window to avert catastrophic impacts and emphasizes that risks escalate with every increment of global warming. Economic analyses from institutions such as Swiss Re and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) project multi-trillion dollar losses, with some recent studies likening the potential economic damage to that of a "permanent war." Furthermore, global risk assessments, exemplified by the World Economic Forum's reports, consistently place environmental risks, including extreme weather events and critical Earth system changes, as dominant long-term concerns, which are increasingly manifesting as significant short-term crises. This comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the premise of the user's statement does not align with the conclusions of the very institutions it cites.
Given that there is nothing more conservative than the conservation of the natural environment, the choice made by the new conservatives to alienate one of the their potential constituencies is a foolish one.
It reminds me of the Democratic Party alienating religious conservatives concerned about the poor over the issue of abortion.
Phrases like “unhinged,” and “disconnected from reality” spring to mind, followed by “virtue signalling” and “luxury belief”. Even saint Greta has moved on from climate activism.
You mean doublethink
No, Greta hasn’t. But nice try.
No she has. She supports the US backed genocide in Ukraine and not the one in Israel.
Walk. Chew gum.
You can do it, too.
Are you proposing a different way of addressing climate change, or are you just saying we should ignore it?
I ask because I think anyone that understands climate change would be critical of the policies proposed by Biden and the Democrats. It seems like there should be a possibility of addressing climate change with new deal style public works programs to build high speed rail, transmission lines, power plants, etc.
Is that something you would support?
I wish more people read Henry Hazlett's classic Economics in 1 Lesson.
https://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/ebooks/economics-in-one-lesson-pdf.pdf
There are plenty of things Hazlett gets wrong in that book (his chapter on protectionism could have been written by Ricardo and is clearly no longer accurate.) But his first 2 chapters are on "The Broken Window" and the "Blessing of Destruction": essentially the fallacy of war or disasters promoting employment.
Climate Change is akin to this fallacy. Breaking things just to rebuild them isn't productive. This is obvious, and yet in this area most liberals can't see it.
This piece portrays climate change as a transactional proposition, one that must provide an almost immediate benefit from the investment in combatting carbon emissions. That's a false premise to say the least. The benefit to workers (and everyone else for that matter) is the prospect of enhanced quality of life for themselves and future generations. Reforming the world's carbon-based economies from the past hundred years will require substantial investments that will yield dividends that many of us may not live to see. Also, any high school essay writer can cherry-pick climate predictions to support their narrative, but the vast majority of scientific predictions on the gradual disaster of climate change have been accurate, and we're seeing the evidence unfold around the world. The longer we take to confront this pattern, the more it will take to fix it.
It takes political courage to tell voters that saving our planet will take investment and sacrifice. There won't be an immediate payoff for voters in meeting this challenge; so many voters are focused on making a better life for themselves and their families today -- the climate change threat (if they haven't been misled to dismiss it as folly) seems so far away. For the most part, conservative elected officials are pandering to these voters, promising to champion near-term payoffs without the costly investment in fighting climate change. For the sake of winning their next election, these politicians are kicking the climate disaster can down the road again.
Again, how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere?
Big week coming for the "new" right! Its leader is deploying troops on American streets to fight fellow Americans, (what could possibly go wrong) followed by the military parade honoring himself (here's hoping he goes full on North Korean with the big ole penile ICBM's). All on the heels of his slappy fight with Elon:) Isn't it time for a new Republican establishment, this one seems to be careening outta control. Good luck America...
The arguments made in this post are cogent. I have always wondered why on one hand the global warming contingent sort of forgets that if you want to reduce global warming, focus on the sources that make a difference (ie. coal power plants from China). https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-power-plants-reached-10-year-high-in-2024/. One can also use https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions. There is also a great visual computer tool called a Geochron that is great for use in schools to show were air pollution is...... and the US is not the big problem.
Sorry, engineer guy, but carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide, and the let’s bash China and India because they’re the problem is sophomoric as an argument. You’ll probably be pulling that one out about plastic pollution in twenty years, when we’ve reduced our production and offshored it elsewhere.
Why aren't we allowed to critique China or India? Or anyone else for that matter. If they pollute the air and environment that should be our concern.
You’re allowed to critique China and India, as long as the context includes acknowledgement that they both, combined, are light years behind the U.S. in CO2 emissions over time, the U.S. is still belching copious fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere (MIC), and any argument dismissing U.S. leadership in CO2 reduction being contingent on foreign belching is sandbox, gutless, reasoning.
"they both, combined, are light years behind the U.S. in CO2 emissions"
Source?
Light years was hyperbolic on my part. But even combined, they still lag way behind the U.S.
Plenty of sources like this one in a Google search. - https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
Mt point about leadership remains. Our responsibility to do the right thing shouldn’t depend on the actions of any other country.
It's a rear-view mirror article about accumulative emissons starting in 1751! Of course the West has produced more since it industrialized a couple of centuries earlier. LOL.
My point is that China and other countries be held accountable for currernt pollution. Actually, the West just shifted it's pollution to China and is equally responsible. But we can't force the Chinese to clean up their act. So, the only thing to do is boycott made in China and instead make the stuff in the West. Set an example with most likely robots, nuclear power, plastic use and pesticide control. Europe is best at maintaining food quality. China is the worst by far and the US is somewhere in the middle.
And how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere??? 0.0427%
Google will help you avoid further embarrassment.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2019/07/30/co2-drives-global-warming/
Check my numbers!
0.0427%
Of the 0.0427% human Industrial Revolution is responsible for 0.01%
It’s not about your numbers. It’s about what the numbers mean.
Reread my link above, and stop digging. You’re embarrassing yourself.
If the Green New Deal does as much for the “working class” as “globalization” (freedom) has, sign me up!
That’s the thing-Cass makes some good points but in the end he opposes freedom (“globalization”) too, and it’s freedom that has brought unprecedented prosperity to all classes, not substituting Trump-Cass state control (tariffs)for AOC-Klein state control (“Green New Deal”).
Covid shut down the civilized world. That should have impacted climate change. It was an environmentalist’s dream come true.
Yet I heard no studies explaining the wonderful effects of no cars on California’s highways for 6 months.
What a weird post from Oren. And he gives it away early on when he says he stopped writing about climate change in 2018. Really? 2018? That's seven years ago, a long time and a lot of politics ago. And he says he stopped because the claims of concerned people became too 'unmoored', and then proceeds to show us a couple of headlines where claims were completely opposite of one another, or somesuch.
So essentially Oren is saying that because we haven't been able to generate a completely clear picture of what the outcome of climate change will be, that is, the most fantastically complex phenomenon we've ever thrown at a computer, we should just ignore it. AND he's sure we can be absolutely clear--because there isn't a clear picture of outcomes--that the outcomes won't be too serious. It's not a crisis, it's just a 'challenge'. We just know that. Or rather Oren just knows that. No science or scientists need be referenced, it's just ok to cite a single UN climate report, which actually doesn't say what he pretends it does, while there are dozens of UN reports that are far more frantic in their assessments. But then again since scientists are overwhelmingly liberals, we know that their scientific judgement is distorted by politics. And look, they can't even figure out what this thing is going to look like that they insist we should be concerned about!
But oddly, Oren doesn't cite the many reports from international INSURANCE organizations, and international REAL ESTATE organizations that point out the simple, uncomplicated truth that our form of finance capitalism cannot survive on the present trajectory of extreme weather events (leaving out biodiversity and a host of other climate change dangers). You kind of don't need to have a Nobel in science or economics to get it. Just glimpsing the relationship between real estate, mortgages and insurance is good enough. Some of those reports are as close to 'freaking out' as somber organizations can go--and one suspects there are few Bolsheviks on their staffs. Let's see how what happens after the next major hurricane hits Florida this summer, or next. Because it's not if, but when. Places like Florida are simply the canary in the climate coal mine, although the data points accumulating every year everywhere bear out some of the worst predictions of climate scientists.
Because if you know anything about science and biology and complexity, you realize that the problem with climate change is precisely that you can't really say with certainty what is going to happen, because it's too (fucking) complex! That we all exist within--and are made up of--multiples of ecosystems that are interacting with one another and creating interacting bands of homeostasis at different levels. And when you threaten homeostasis, there is a certain point beyond which organisms simply break down, or mutate and shift altogether, and when everything is connected to everything else--which it is--you just don't know at what point X or Y happens. You just don't. But when you see, for example, extreme weather events happening more commonly, it's the beginning of a phase shift, which is going somewhere, but you actually don't know where. You can make reasonable guesses, but there is inherent uncertainty. But one thing we do know is that we're not going in the direction of more stability. And that has BIG implications, everywhere.
Unless of course, you're Oren, who simply knows it's not much of a problem because he thinks about it every seven years or so, and it really doesn't require that much grey matter after all.
Understandings of climate change are highly theoretical. It's a highly politicized issue, "Like, you're evil if you don't care---how selfish are you?" Cars are a major problem, as a country our infrastructure is just not organized to meaningfully battle climate change. Taking steps like charging for plastic bags can be helpful, but meanwhile, we drive everywhere and a lot.
I'm just wondering what you think of organizations like the American Conservation Coalition and some of their conservative environmentalist proposals? I think that there are certain technologies that we could be utilizing in conjunction with our existing system that could not only reinforce it but help reduce CO2 as well. We've had effective means of sequestering and converting CO2 into ethanol since 2016.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a23417/convert-co2-into-ethanol/
Do you think there would be any economic or environmental benefit to scaling and utilizing such technologies?
"What is the ongoing devastation of communities that Biden-style policy action will mitigate?"
I think this question identifies the missed elephant in the room. Come on man... it does not take deep economic analysis to conclude that the left-liberal Democrat climate crises claim and their related Green New Deal, are in fact part of an overall agenda to keep heaping pain onto the middle working class... an agenda that they, the Democrats, have telegraphed since Hillary labeled them irredeemable deplorables and Biden deemed them "semi Nazis" and fascists.
Ayn Rand nailed this. Really she did. Producers, looters and moochers.
It is a competition for human status hierarchy really. As Peterson points out... this is primary. Money is secondary and mostly important because for them it buys the primary. There is nothing that an elite academic credentialed lefty hates more than the C-grade average quarterback of the football team ending up owning a few car dealerships or a successful building contracting business and being a pillar of the community. The academic lefty does not have the right stuff... does not do well competing on productive merit within the standard economy where people make, build, grow and sell real products. No, the lefty seeks a second-tier rent-seeking angle... exploiting an opportunity to skim off the top of all that production... that is the core of any economy.
These academic lefties, the Professional Managerial Class, not only strive to fill their bank accounts and power accounts to be seen as top of the hierarchy, their looter insecurity causes them to also strive to punch down their producer competition. Their chronic fear is that captain of the football team showing them up again.
This drive to punch down the working class to prevent competition for status is the primary motivation behind climate crisis. Lefties don't do more education because of any motivation to gain knowledge and skills to be better producers... they do it because they are insecure to launch into the productive private economy and load up with credentials and certifications to be a placebo replacement for the capabilities that they lack.
What they dream about is a two-class society. The elites. The Elect. The "expert" class... the Professional Managerial Class and the Professional Laptop Class... and everyone else. And in their dream utopia, everyone else will be happy on government provided Universal Basic Income. There will be no need for any domestic production... that will be outsourced to other countries without the threat of domestic status competition. And many poor and uneducated immigrants too will be flooded in, because the moocher class supports the looter class in politics... and the oversupply of working class labor will drive down the wages and economic opportunity of the working class even further to prevent that frightening rise of the football captain.
The elephant is the class war. It drives almost all of Democrat politics these days. Republicans tend to be big-tent believers... that everyone can and should have plentiful economic opportunity and compete on their own productive merit.