Of course people want that stuff. That stuff is awesome. The problem is the price the system has arbitrarily assigned to all of it doesn’t include any carbon cost and as a result is actually doable for a decent chunk of the population.
The system is the problem. The people are just fire monkeys and aren’t going to get any better. If your plan revolves around people becoming better humans without a change in incentive structures we really truly are all fucked.
Every time you change the underlying system in any kind of major way the wants of the population shift to accommodate it. Remember when gas prices got really high in the early 2000’s and car manufacturers suddenly lost a ton of money on SUV’s?
Give carbon a price of 100-200/ton. You’ll see everyone substitute high carbon wants for lower carbon wants that are almost as good.
The system won’t change those incentives if ~no one gives a shit and just wants their cheap shit. Who is going to impose this carbon cutting system on us?
But that’s a complete change of subject and has no impact on whether an individual is responsible for their decisions or not.
And if someone claims to want the system to change, but doesn’t make personal decisions that show that? smh. No one is perfect, but just abdicating all responsibility is horrible.
Carbon taxes. We need carbon taxes. Large ones. Not cap and trade, a flat price per ton of emissions levied at the producer/importer level. Then you take the revenue generated and distribute it as UBI.
That may well be right. It’s an empirical question and can be studied and analyzed. There will be reactions to it that may cause harm if you go too far. It may work better in combination with other strategies.
But this is all irrelevant to the question at hand and I’d submit that an individual’s choices in who they invest in and what they consume have a greater impact on CO2 in the world than their 1 ten millionth of a say of who becomes POTUS if they live in a swing state (0 say if they don’t).
Are you sure about that? There are 7.5B people on this planet and each of our individual carbon footprints is microscopic relative to the total amount. Even mine which is commercial scale CO2 emissions isn’t enough to move overall carbon emissions by .00000001%. The only solution possible is political because this is the mother of all tragedy of the commons situations.
Honestly I’m 99.5% sure that every argument that involves ‘you should do less x in your personal life’ is deflection propaganda designed to con us into believing that we’re doing something worthwhile when only working toward a political solution is in any danger of doing anything.
Spain >>>>>>>> Latin America ime. And little lol at Costa Rica being bougie. Its been 10 years since I’ve been, They still got soldiers with assault rifles outside the airport for security?
It’s not all bougie and that’s not exactly the right word, but it’s where wealthier people who don’t want 2 be part of the culture go to Central America.
I wish I could restate her argument better, but an economics PhD student friend of mine argues that the companies you invest in is one of the most impactful things you will do with your time on the planet. You are leveraging the power of hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars over decades to support what these companies are doing.
Saying “someone else would do it if I didn’t” is just lol. There’s a good chapter in Doing Good Better that walks through the expected value of buying or not buying a single carton of eggs at the grocery store. Spoiler: where you spend your money, even a few bucks at a time, makes a measurable difference in the world. Where you invest MILLIONS of dollars over DECADES is a HUGE deal.
This is one of those spots where again we’re all going to have to agree to disagree. Millions of dollars big picture amount to nothing unless at least hundreds of thousands to millions of people do it… and they absolutely won’t.
That whole line of thinking is a giant distraction from fixing what actually needs fixing, which is the incentives.
This is an area I know a good bit about (history, economics, business, and the nexus of the three) and I have an extremely high degree on confidence in it. One of the single biggest arguments for having a government at all is to resolve tragedy of the commons situations. Without outside intervention the worst case scenario pretty much always happens.
Being an econ PhD doesn’t mean you have any understanding about how the world works unfortunately. I’ve had dumber stuff told to me by people with better qualifications. It’s just a particular type of myopia where people who are good at math look at problems that are psychological/sociological and then say things like ‘if everyone just did x then y would happen’… completely ignoring the fact that it’s never happened in human history.
I think establishment Ds don’t get that their con game is over and that people are sick and tired of their condescending bullshit.
Before Trump, they convincingly sold the lie that sure they were a little corrupt but their stewardship and back room deals were necessary to keep the country, nah the whole world!, running smoothly.
Put in the wrong person and the whole system would collapse, so you better vote for them whether you like them or not, or else…
Well, we’ve had a giant toddler as POTUS that embarrasses every single day for 3 years now, and nothing has collapsed!
So that con isn’t going to work anymore. You need to give a positive reason to vote for you.
Perhaps, but now we’ve lost the original point–whether Steyer should be judged for the money allocation decisions he made previously in his life. We can acknowledge that it’s likely his void would have been filled, but then we’d be making the argument that the person that filled his void shouldn’t be elected either! His actions speak to his goals, and his goals put making money above societal good. It’s why I just don’t think I could ever put him above Warren, no matter how frustrated she makes me, because I don’t think his turnaround late in life is quite enough to make me trust him (also fwiw my rating him third was somewhat tongue-in-cheek).
I want to be clear, I’m not disputing her math (Econ PhD’s one and all are better at math than I am). I’m disputing the idea that it’s possible to gain the critical mass of people required to make her math actually work IRL. I think humans are secretly just animals with little/no free will who generally make irrational decisions that are slanted towards whatever they desire at that moment.
They aren’t going to make sacrifices when they don’t feel directly and immediately threatened… which means that while a few of them might have the makeup that makes them feel threatened at the current stage of a given problem, that’s going to largely get overwhelmed by their immediate self interest when it comes time to make an actual decision. I think most people pick a couple of things they could live without and cut them so that they can go to sleep at night not feeling like a piece of shit. Then they go ahead and do everything they consider to be too big of a pain and in the aggregate it doesn’t amount to much reduction at all.
I’d bet there are a nonzero number of people reading this board who drive large fuel inefficient vehicles and own large houses for example. I know most of us eat meat. If the people on this board aren’t willing to make meaningful sacrifices ‘for the greater good’ expecting the larger population to do so is super silly.
You make societal change by changing the obvious/easy decision for everyone. The big first step is a huge carbon tax which shifts the costs of carbon heavy activities in a pretty big way. This will motivate most people to stop doing the high carbon activities they care the least about entirely and moderate the rest. Demand for things like fast fashion and cruises will fall drastically probably to the point of not even being viable. There will probably be a flight from large quantities of luxury goods to high quality luxury goods (because the carbon cost per unit is often identical).
Nothing any individual can do is going to have the impact that raising the carbon tax by .0001$ per ton would have (although it’s important to note that if the carbon tax isn’t large enough to make a difference it won’t… much like individual changes don’t).
I guess we do have to agree to disagree. You’re all over the place and I’m not interested in breaking down each of your points one at a time. Let’s discuss at the UP meetup someday :)
The fact that no one non-billionaire person has much of an impact on their own, therefore it’s just fine investing in unethical companies is not very compelling. Sure, it may not be a singular, planet-saving decision not to buy a share of XOM, but to the extent that a single, middle-class person can make an impact, that is exactly the way they can. A single middle class person can’t change incentives by themselves, either. A vote to change incentives is far less meaningful than divesting from bad companies.
Not to mention that your argument doesn’t preclude both divesting and voting appropriately. They aren’t mutually exclusive actions, so it’s not really sensible to argue that one shouldn’t be done while the other is important.
Unless enough people vote to change the incentives and they actually do change. Then your math is completely trashed.
You deciding to not own XOM doesn’t have the slightest impact on XOM because there are literally millions of other people who will.
I think reaching the tipping point on the political solution is muuuuch easier than reaching the tipping point on the demand side.
Interestingly though if you do something about the incentives all those people who would happily invest in XOM if there was a return to be had will flee for the doors almost immediately because it’s no longer a good investment. We’re already seeing that in oil exploration as it slowly dawns on investors that a political solution is on the horizon and could wipe them out.
Interestingly I’m convinced that a lot of the oil exploration of the last 5-10 years was basically a scam on investors inflicted by corporate executives whose bonuses were based on hitting growth numbers. I strongly suspect that a new oil source discovered after 2015 will probably never break even.
Climate change is obviously super real and the political solution will arrive in ten years or less literally everywhere. This summer there was a massive heat wave in Europe that moved the politics of the whole continent towards the green. Greta Thunberg didn’t blow up right now by accident. This is going to become less of a political issue as time goes on and there’s going to be a pretty major reckoning for fossil fuel stocks… and not because people are motivated by doing the right thing.
I’ll take fear and greed for motivators over altruism all day. They demonstrably work. Altruism demonstrably doesn’t.
I’m a big believer in the multi disciplinary approach
I’m super skeptical of pure econ people because their theories very nearly never work IRL. There are basically no economic theories from the last 50 years that have held up at all because they are all based on the idea that people are rational to some degree or another. Some of the new stuff is interesting (mostly because most of it comes from behavioral econ which is a whole other thing), but I’m sure there will be something fatally wrong with it.
The problem is that the econ people got very obsessed with math IMO.
Things econ PhD’s have told me include the efficient market hypothesis, the idea that the long term profit of firms is zero, that markets tend toward perfect competition, and numerous other things that are just hilariously wrong. Often they told me these things while acknowledging that they didn’t work, but still maintaining that the theories they had built on top of them did work. It turns out that when your assumptions are stupid it doesn’t matter how pretty the math you build on top of them is.
