No i haven't read it. I have a pretty mentally taxing job. I get the gist of her arguments however.Can you say more about that citing anything from her book? Have you read it? I do find the climate justice argument compelling; my guess is you just favor market-based solutions?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/10/must-we-choose-between-capitalism-and-climate.html
Chait does a good job here deconstructing Klein's idealogue arguments.
Believing market-based solutions will solve climate change is a form of climate denial. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Strong disagree. And I think you can make a compelling argument that harnessing markets is the only way we can solve this. If it was as simple as getting rid of capitalism, an easy test case would be Bolivia. I think many on the left look at Bolivia as an economically successful socialist country (and they are right!). And the socialist regime there did a pretty inspiring job of raising living standards across the country, especially for the lower class. And they've been generally good on environmental issues as well, as far as I know (far from an expert). But if your theory is right, their carbon emissions should put capitalist economies to shame. The problem is, the opposite is true. Carbon emissions per capita have risen sharply in Bolvia (at they same time they were falling in the capitalist hellhole that is the US).
The reasons are complicated, and I'm not going to do them justice. But generally, to raise living standards, people need stuff. They need infrastructure, food, shelter, energy. And for a long time, if you want to accomplish those things, the cheapest and most efficient way to do that has been burning carbon. So if you are looking at a trade off between helping your people and burning carbon, the answer has been pretty simple. The good news is, this is changing. And it's changing because of markets. The single biggest driver has been Germany's early subsidies of solar and wind. These used to be expensive tech. But those subsidies allowed them to compete early and take advantage of economies of scale/Wright's law. Because of those early investments ramped up production, we got *way* better at wind and solar. Now new wind and solar tech is *cheaper* than new fossil fuel plants in much of the world. This is huge! Because if we are really going to solve this problem going forward, it's not about curbing emissions in the US (though of course we should do that too), it's creating solutions to help decarbonize the whole world.
In my mind, the best way to do that is huge investments in R&D. We are doing pretty well with power generation and transportation, and storage/grid optimization seems not far behind. But we need to invest massively in decarbonizing agriculture, and infrastructure (cement/steel are massive carbon sucks), and hopefully carbon capture tech as well. We need targeted tax breaks/subsidies to help early markets for all clean tech to flourish and take advantage of the economics of scale/market power that has brought us cheap wind and solar (unfortunately, most of these subsides look like they are being left out of the latest iteration of the budget deal, because of course they are).
In the mean time we need to not do dumb stuff, like outlawing nuclear existing nuclear, which will certainly increase our emissions with the tech in place to replace that clean power with something better.
TL/DR: Capitalism is not killing the planet. I think using government power to push markets in the right direction in the only realistic approach to decarbonizing the world.
I agree with a great deal of this, but to be clear you're not suggesting market-driven solutions. You're suggesting heavy govt intervention into markets to drive change.
Ultimately solutions that provide cheaper and more efficient options will be entirely more effective in addressing climate change.Here's a paper on the decrease in cost of solar.
https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...of+cost+reduction+in+photovoltaic+modules.pdf
Here's a paper on the decrease in cost of solar.
https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...of+cost+reduction+in+photovoltaic+modules.pdf
Market-stimulating policies have played a central role in driving downthe costs of PV modules, with private R&D, economies of scale, andl earning-by-doing together contributing an estimated 60% of the cost decline in PV modules between 1980 and 2012. This finding contributes to an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of market-expansion policies, as complements to publicly-funded R&D (Hoppmann et al., 2013). In the case ofPV, our analysis shows that private sector activity, which was incentivized by government policies in various nations (Trancik et al., 2015), was critically important for driving down costs. Additionally, our findings support the importance of public R&D to complement private sector activity, which may focus more on refinements to technology and manufacturing rather than the more major innovations needed as the limits to incremental improvements are reached (Hoppmann et al., 2013; Zheng and Kammen,2014). These results add insight to earlier findings from correlational analyses on the importance of market expansion in driving energy patenting (asa proxy for innovative activity) in recent years (Bettencourt et al., 2013), with public R&D having played the dominant role in the 70s and 80s
In the same way that for brad, tintin, and the others, the answer is never racism, for mhb, the answer is always socialism.
We don't live in a purely capitalist country. We do live in a country where the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of under-regulation. that can be fixed by getting enough people to the ballot box consistently over a 10-20 year period. But suggesting that pure socialism is going to somehow solve the ills of our country/the world at large is just asinine. And that is a purely theoretical discussion, because our country would have to collapse, like, completely collapse into something like Somalia, for there to be any chance of a socialist government taking hold.
Its why the rock-throwing about democratic candidates for President is such a stupid waste of time. From a policy perspective, the difference between a Biden presidency and a Sanders presidency would only be on the margins.
From a policy perspective, the difference between a Biden presidency and a Sanders presidency would only be on the margins.
he's coming for you now. you're the same as trump.
Absolutely. I'm definitely not saying markets alone. Markets alone are bad. I think they are a necessary component though.