You define a free agent as someone who believes the illusion you choose. If 'you' is nothing more than a collection of parts evolved to optimize certain environmental accidents then what is choice other then a series of electrical signals that terminate in tissue stimulation.
How else would you define freedom? Remember, it should be testable (at least in theory) for it to be a meaningful characteristic rather than just an invisible, arbitrary ideal. The fact that there's nothing magic or supernatural about chemistry and biology doesn't mean that conscious beings can't experience free will. And there's nothing to say that a supernatural cause of consciousness would make free will any more legitimate - it would just be adding yet another suspect cause. And, if my experience of free will is indistinguishable from "true" free will, why should I care? If there's no way, even in principle, to tell between real freedom and illusory freedom, the distinction seems to be meaningless.
Isn't it good enough to have complete predictability if you had complete knowledge?
Yes, it would be, that's how I intended my definition to be interpreted. The thing is, quantum mechanics shows conclusively that we cannot have complete knowledge OR predictability.
The uncertainty principle speaks to our ability to observe, it does not mean the information does not exist.
That's incorrect. The information truly doesn't exist. A particle's position becomes less defined when it's momentum is measured very precisely, and vice-versa. Read up on EPR some time. It was a thought experiment that showed the fundamental absurdity of quantum mechanics - the math suggested particles didn't have properties in the intervals between being measured. The idea was that this was such an absurd claim that it would discredit quantum mechanics. Unfortunately for Einstein, later work (like Bell's Theorem and associated experiments) showed that the absurd conclusions of EPR were correct - so rather than discredit QM, Einstein gave us one of the best examples of how deeply non-intuitive the world is, and it was in fact the final death of the deterministic Newtonian worldview for physicists.
Quantum mechanics experiments tell us that the information truly does not exist - there are "no hidden variables". Heisenberg uncertainty more or less puts a constraint on even the knowledge of god himself. Here's a good discussion on the subject: https://www.physicsforums.com/...
First of all - it is clear that there are more than your two original options, which I will summarize as 1. We have freedom and a god, and 2. We have no freedom and no god. It is certainly the case that we might have 1b. We have no freedom AND a god. This is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
On the second statement - the question here is really about the definition of freedom. I tend to be an empiricist, and so for me a useful definition of this property called "freedom" would allow us to detect its presence or absence by observation. In the simplest terms, I would define freedom as the ability of an agent to perform an action at will. Can I decide to raise my right arm, and will my right arm raise? I can, and it will. I can likewise decide not to do that, and see the results I expect.
Based on that observation, I would conclude that I have freedom. And I would say that I am a "self-directed agent".
Now, for determinism. I consider a deterministic system to be one in which we can predict its future state with perfect accuracy, given complete information about its present state. A non-deterministic system does not have this property.
So, is it possible that I am merely a collection of deterministic events, following inexorably from the initial state of the universe? Could I be just a Newtonian ball in a very complex but ultimately predictable billiards game? No, because that's not the universe we live in. Observation has shown us that the universe is fundamentally unknowable AND unpredictable - Heisenberg uncertainty being one of the simplest examples. So the billiards ball argument against free will is not compatible with our reality.
Capitalism assumes humans are going to be greedy and selfish, and optimizes around that. That will always work better than a system that assumes humans are going to be nice and altruistic.
Not true. Consider open source software - there are many instances where it is superior to proprietary, paid options. It's a system built upon volunteerism and altruism. Also consider things like Utah's homelessness initiative, which saves money by putting people in homes. That ends up being cheaper than the ER, police, and jail costs of homelessness.
By being in a society you have chosen to accept constraints on your freedom - but there are many kinds of freedom still available in any society, even if you do not have complete freedom.
There are only two rationally sustainable world views on freedom:
1) Freedom exists as a gift , granted to us by a transcendent and absolute truth which is also a will or a being and is the cause of the physical forces and the whole universe as well as all ethical and moral principles.
OR
2) freedom is an illusion , all human beings are simply the composite of their environment and genetics absolute truth does not exist ( or is unknowable) and personal desires of a human being no more or less important then those of an ape or an elephant.
This is a false dichotomy. There could be a deity, and it could be the case that said deity does not grant free will to us (as the Calvinists believe, in essence). It could also be the case that no divine beings exist, but we are self-directed agents. The universe is nondeterministic.
This masturbatory fantasy of your where letting people suffer the consequences of whatever happens to them
Hmm...well, it was that way for me, most everyone I know, and for people in ages back before us.
Yes indeed. And we had higher crime, poverty, disease, infant mortality... basically all of the human maladies were much more commonplace in the past. What is attractive about that to you? Sick people, homeless people, and imprisoned people cannot contribute effectively to the economy, which increases the tax burden on everyone else and makes the society generally crappier to live in.
This glorification of the "good ol' days" is completely incoherent and disconnected from the facts of history.
Second sentence of your citation: "Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist."
You clearly stated above on several occasions that your views are true because of science,
No, I advocate for views that are supported by evidence. That's a big difference. We've got really great evidence for some conclusions, so we are justified in advocating strongly for those views. We have really weak evidence for other things, and so we should be tentative about our conclusions in those scenarios. In all cases, any proposition is only as strong as the underlying evidence supporting it.
Attribute possibility of religious totality of statement "this is true" to science.
Sure, you can nitpick that phrase. "Supported by evidence" is a more strictly accurate statement. That said, there are some propositional statements (the earth is round) that are incredibly well supported by evidence. Could we be wrong? Sure. What's the likelihood of us being wrong? Extremely, extremely tiny. Technically, we can never reach absolute truth, but to be pragmatic, we can only have this conversation right now because of the amazingly accurate approximations of reality that science has given us.
My question for you: if we don't learn things through the scientific method, how are you suggesting we learn them? If we don't use scientific evidence to inform our policies, what should we use?
So: (1) show how the "hothouse Earth" climate is actually bad for people, as the argument contents; not the transition to the hothouse Earth climate, but the climate itself;
That's a bizarre qualifier - the transition IS the problem, and exacerbating it is the rate of transition. We've got an entire civilization built around relatively static locations of coastlines, farmland, natural resources, etc. Disrupting all of that will be ugly, and the faster the change happens (and the greater the magnitude of the change is) the worse it will be.
(2) show how we can reduce global carbon emissions to zero over the next 10-20 years, which is what would be needed to stop climate change.
Great example of the perfect solution fallacy. Since we can't stop things entirely, there's no point to taking any action at all.
The truth is, we can still take action to slow down climate change and control our own contribution, as individuals, as members of democracies, and as participants in markets. Slowing down the rate of change will allow more time to adapt and reduce the social, economic, and environmental impact of the transition. The responsible and reasonable thing to do is to take what action we can, in the most informed way possible.
I can't take you through the arguments about radiative physics, paleoclimatology or free market economics.
"I can't take you through the arguments" parses as "I don't have any good arguments". Either way, you aren't actually making a case and so I conclude you don't have one.
They discuss it and they get it wrong. They even tell you (in so many words) why they use the wrong numbers: if they didn't do it, they wouldn't be able to reach the conclusions they want to reach.
No, they don't. Their argument is sound - they discuss the range of rates from 3%-7%, and defend their choice of 7% on the grounds that it reflects historical values. There's an entire massive handbook detailing their approach. And again, third-party analysts that have NO INCENTIVE to inflate these numbers have come up with an even more costly estimate. Explain that.
I'm pointing out a false dichotomy you're making: either engage in collective action or take no action at all.
I have made no such claim. We do make collective choices via voting (assuming you live in a liberal democracy of one type or another). I am advocating for the collective choice of a carbon tax. It's a collective cost with a collective benefit (just like any tax, ever). That's completely orthogonal to whatever individual choices people make.
The "externalities" of climate change are the damage and lost productivity it causes. For the most part, they haven't happened yet, so they aren't creating "major inefficiencies".
That's like saying the coal pollution in urban areas of China has no social cost because the hundred thousand cases of lung cancer have yet to manifest. It's a social cost whether it happens today or 10+ years from now. The delay in the social cost can be accounted for by comparing today's price adjustment to avoid it to the average investment returns for the same quantity over the same period, which, astonishingly, is exactly what the SCC estimates do.
I happen to agree with you on discouraging construction in flood zones - but there's no denying that rising sea levels will make those floods far worse, and turn previously safe areas into flood-threatened ones.
Your argument: if alternative energy was cheaper, all businesses would be using it, but all businesses are not using it, therefore it must not be cheaper. That spurious logic only holds in a case where there are not transition costs and where there has been sufficient time for all businesses to make the change.
Weird, because the only thing that would change my mind would be lots of compelling evidence from reputable sources.
Well, that's not a scientific approach. A scientific approach is to use reason and evidence, not reputation and sources.
"Evidence" is LITERALLY in my statement. It is important to verify the credibility of the source providing the evidence, because you almost certainly are not producing it personally. Even if you are, I can say as someone who has firsthand experience in experiment design and execution, evidence varies widely in quality. I have given you a standard to meet to change my mind: provide some compelling evidence. Or hell, for starters, even a piece of mediocre evidence. You have failed to do even that.
Yes: read up on the physics of climate change, read up on paleoclimatology, read up on Austrian economics, read up on the past history and effects of governmental social, economic, and environmental policy.
Me: Here is contention A, supported by evidence B. You: I suggest that evidence B is bad, but I can't tell you exactly how. Trust me, though, I have read a lot of things that would totally show how wrong A is.
You have not provided evidence. You're just being evasive.
Understanding our limitations as a species and as individuals is the exact reason that we ought to insist on evidence, because without systematic observation, all we've got are opinions and hearsay. The very thing that makes science effective is that it accounts for its own limitations, by insisting on things like peer review and repeatability and test by experiment. How else could you possibly know what is true?
To be honest, I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make. Do you think that science as a whole is ineffective? Do you think evolution is incorrect? How do you think human beings are supposed to learn things? Or are you opposed to the pursuit of knowledge? It seems like you've got beef with the scientific worldview, but if that is the case, it's not clear what your specific complaint is.
So your reasoning is based simply on extrapolating a graph.
I don't need to prove the null hypothesis - that the current state of affairs will continue, barring outside influence. If you expect a well documented trend to reverse, the onus is on you to provide evidence about why. All data indicates that humans cause extinction and that our impact on the ecosystem around us is only increasing, except in the cases where we've taken deliberate action to limit ourselves.
If those were the "exact figures", then all the businesses in the world would already have switched.
Because in your fantasy world it's an instantaneous thing to switch the entire grid to a new energy source, I guess? We can look at the rate of adoption of renewables to see if lots of businesses are investing in this cheaper energy, and lo and behold, renewable energy investment is dwarfing everything else. It would be increasing even more if we stopped all the subsidies for fossil fuels.
That is, I used to believe that externalities work the way you think they do, and that climate change was as serious as you think you do
Weird, because the only thing that would change my mind would be lots of compelling evidence from reputable sources. If your mind was changed, surely you've got lots of that information available? I would really love to hear about it, seriously, because I sincerely do want to have the most informed opinions possible. Unfortunately, so far you've just made weak arguments against my citations, while providing no supporting information of your own. If you can provide some, please do, otherwise I'm done going in circles with you.
And as I explained to you, they are deliberately using the wrong discounting rate
No. They specifically discuss the discount rate and accounting for investment returns here. FYI, their final SCC number is less than half of the value used by EXXON, who has a purely financial interest in getting it right so that they can make appropriate forecasts and informed business decisions.
Is anybody keeping you from taking action? You can reduce your own carbon footprint to zero if you like.
I am taking action in a variety of ways, but ultimately, it's irrelevant and you are propagating a logical fallacy. Arguments should be weighed on their own merit and on the strength of the evidence provided - not based on emotional appeals and personal attacks.
What you are proposing is holding a gun to my head and taking my money because you disapprove of the choices I make between various energy sources.
Ah, this tired old argument. I figured you would have something more original. A consumption tax places all the choice in your hands - pay the tax and generate the carbon, don't pay the tax and don't generate the carbon. Or move to another country, or live as a hermit in the woods and don't participate in the market. If you choose to live in this society and receive the benefits thereof, you are accepting the costs. Again, your choice: get the benefits and and the attendant costs, or ditch the benefits and don't pay the costs. No guns involved, any more than there is a gun involved with you paying any sales tax.
We agree on that. The part you keep denying is that this makes everybody poorer by roughly the amount you tax people by.
No, you insist on deliberately misunderstanding the concept of an externality. The externality is ALREADY creating a major inefficiency in the market and making everyone poorer. Correcting the externality restores the market to optimal efficiency for the product in question, and an optimal market makes everyone richer. If correcting the externality wasn't going to be economically optimal, than it wouldn't be an externality. The only thing you can say is that the tax would move the cost of climate change from one place to another, but again that's the point - instead of flood victims paying the social cost of the carbon, people pay for it at the pump, on their heating bill, and so on. The market function depends on information being represented as accurately as possible via product pricing. So, you can argue whether CO2 output is really an externality or not (and we can agree to disagree), but to argue that correcting an external cost is bad for the market is nonsensical - you are basically just trying to redefine "externality" to suit your argument.
Let's just stop right here. How about you refute my point rather than going on this bizarre God complex tangent? Simple question: what evidence do we have to suggest that evolution does have any intent? In the absence of such evidence, the null hypothesis (there's no mystical force at work here) is the default assumption.
I contend one key thing: that we should base our actions and opinions on EVIDENCE. There's no god complex there - just an insistence that we should get our information from systematic observation.
I'm all for getting mystical and wondering about a greater purpose to biology, but not when it is used as an excuse for inaction and to rationalize away personal responsibility.
Well, since you haven't said what you believe the primary cause of the increased extinction rate is, I don't know what it would take to convince you. But for all the causes we have been talking about, they are either self-limiting or saturating.
Your claim: extinctions will slow down and stop on their own regardless of our action. My claim: the extinction rate is high and accelerating, with no evidence of it slowing down in the future. Another citation: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...
You could convince me with any evidence at all to suggest that extinctions are self-limiting - your claim directly contradicts the observed trend, and data overrules any pet theories you personally hold.
The kW/h figures don't actually tell you how costly that energy is.
What the hell else would you use? Those are the EXACT figures for how costly the energy is, which account for resource extraction, transport, generation and maintenance, land cost, and anything else that needs to be accounted for. If you suggest an alternate mechanism for gauging power plant cost, explain it and provide evidence for it.
Things that are massively harmful for society can be very profitable for an individual company.
I agree: they can be. In the case of climate change, I believe that's not the case; it certainly has never been demonstrated.
I form my opinions based on the best available scientific evidence. What are you using? What evidence would you accept as sufficient?
Yes, you keep saying that. It turns out to be economically wrong (you can't really "account" for externalities through taxes).
And even if you could do all that, it would still be a lousy choice: spending $1 trillion today to save $10 trillion (PPP) in 80 years would be irrational, and IPCC estimates of costs/benefits are substantially lower than that. You are impoverishing the world for no rational reason.
Wrong once more. Externalities lead to LESS market efficiency, and LESS prosperity for all involved. And there are two ways of accounting for externalities: regulation, or taxation. Taxation is more optimal. The basics are spelled out in the same ECON101 slide deck I linked.
And where are their estimates validated? How do you know that they calculated both costs and benefits? In particular, where do opportunity costs enter into the equation?
Read for yourself, that's why I provided the citation.
The idea that we can calculate the global cost of climate change, attribute responsibility to emitters, and then tax them accordingly is beyond ludicrous.
Broadly speaking, there are really only two options here: ignore the science and do nothing, or pay attention to the science and take the most informed response possible. The best science we've got shows that we've got a massive negative social impact from increasing CO2 levels. That same science allows us to put an economic estimate on that social impact. Sure, it's imperfect, but all knowledge is imperfect - saying that we should not take action as long as there is uncertainty is the same as saying that we should never take action, ever. A rational person evaluates all the available data and makes a prudent choice that acknowledges the various costs and benefits in the context of their respective probabilities.
Also, a carbon tax at the source resolves all the complexity of assigning responsibility... we tax the energy up front, and the free market allocates it appropriately throughout the economy.
You may as well ask me if I'm okay with the fact that untold amounts of stars and all their planetary systems have already died, and many more will. Life goes on. We're part of the system, and we play according to the rules of the system. That's it.
Evolution has no intent or direction. It is just a biological process that we've invented a term for - allowing it to progress "naturally" (a nonsense term) is no more virtuous than allowing a fire to progress to consume an entire forest, or allowing a smallpox epidemic to proliferate throughout the population. According to your non-interventionist ideology, smallpox vaccines are wrong, right? Because we are supposed to just sit back and let the system do its thing, and not get in the way of evolution?
You make unsubstantiated claims and then ad hominem attacks when those claims are challenged, so it's clear that you don't really have any facts to stand on here. If you want to provide some citations or otherwise support your arguments, I'd be interested to hear it. Otherwise, it sounds like you just want to advocate for the position that we should ignore science, ignore the consequences of our actions, and accept any destruction of the environment as an unavoidable result of evolution. Sorry, but no thanks. I believe in facing the facts and accepting responsibility.
See, right now we have a huge landmass across Eurasia that is meeting all those standards and has everything in excess
Citation? I'm not aware of any agricultural revolution happening in Europe or elsewhere.
On you last point, the answer is "evolutionary process". Or in the nomenclature used by most of the people alive today, "God", "Creator" and other names used for it.
You also equally appear to have bought into the primeval nature worship, as you think that "conserving what we have" is universal good, rather than clear cut evil.
You know what the "evolutionary process" does? Or "God" or whatever you believe is in charge? It occasionally kills off 90% of all life. Are you ok with that? Is that "universal good", or "clear cut evil" in your opinion?
If you really believe that everything is going to be fine, why don't you just quit your job and sit around waiting for the evolutionary process to give you a paycheck and food? I'm guessing it's because, on a practical level, you understand that if you want a specific kind of life, you need to work for it individually to make it happen. There's no universal law guaranteeing happiness or even survival, on an individual or global level. We, as a human species, DO have the power to destroy ourselves and take most life on Earth with us. I, for one, think we should work to make the future we want, rather than watching things turn to shit while we binge another show on Netflix.
Yes, that is very much what I imagine. The high rate of extinctions is a temporary phenomenon. It won't go on for thousands of years.
Citation? This is a totally unsupported claim, and I see no reason to believe this wishful thinking.
Right now, renewables are more expensive than non-renewable energy
Wrong, so all the rest of your conclusions are wrong. Egypt's new solar power plant comes in at $.03/kw-hr. New wind installations are $0.04-0.06/kw-hr. Nuclear comes in at $0.02/kw-hr and could be cheaper if we could streamline the regulatory approval. Fossil fuel ranges from $0.05-$0.17, so in the worst case, renewables are price-competitive, and in many cases they are cheaper. https://www.instituteforenergy...
"We" simply shouldn't do anyhing. If you let the market do its thing, that's the fastest way of getting towards a low carbon economy across the globe. If you start imposing carbon taxes and other policies for restricting carbon emissions, you just end up making things worse.
Things that are massively harmful for society can be very profitable for an individual company. The market doesn't give a shit about the planet being livable 100 years from now. It's like you've never heard of the tragedy of the commons.
Externalities, by definition, cannot be accounted for by the market without correction by some non-market force. Pollution, carbon emissions, and environment destruction are externalities. We need to account for them via taxation or some other mechanism, but taxation is the most explicit and direct, and most fully empowers the free market to get to work on the problem.
It's a bipartisan, science-backed effort. Of course, we can't have perfect accuracy with anything, but you can reflect the best currently available estimate, considering all the science (which itself accounts for uncertainty ranges, measurement error, etc) - and that is going to lead to much better outcomes than just sitting around and trusting that things will magically work themselves out.
You can certainly get businesses to adopt solar power by imposing a carbon tax. But that isn't for free: people are getting poorer by just the amount of carbon tax you impose.
Yes, exactly, because you're taking a hidden market externality (the social cost of environmentally damaging products) and accurately representing it in the price of materials and energy. Damaging a collective resource DOES carry a cost, and in a healthy market the sale price of a product reflects the true cost of manufacture.
My point has consistently been very simple: while climate change may or may not currently contribute modestly to an increase in extinction rates, believing that anthropogenic climate change will cause a mass extinction is absurd. It is very unlikely that humans will cause a mass extinction at all, but if we do, it won't be through climate change.
Believing that we will not cause a mass extinction is delusional when a significant fraction of species are already gone, and hundreds more species go extinct every year. We are, without a doubt, in the early phase of an extinction event, and it will become a mass extinction, unless you imagine that the rate of extinctions is going to decline suddenly all on its own.
I think habitat destruction, coastal flooding, and pollution are major problems, in particular in poor countries. If you want to combat them, however, the way to do it is to massively increase the wealth of developing nations, which requires increasing carbon emissions.
This is false. Increasing carbon emissions tends to worsen all these other problems you mention. Habitat destruction is a nasty byproduct of coal mining. Coastal flooding is likely to get worse and worse with rising sea levels. Burning coal and gasoline are a massive source of air pollution.
Increasing wealth and prosperity is strongly tied to increasing energy utilization, but that doesn't have to be a high-carbon energy supply when nuclear, wind, and solar are available, and the renewables are getting cheaper every day. If you avoid energy from carbon, you end up with less pollution, less dependence on foreign resources, and a potentially more reliable and distributed energy grid. I'm all for saving the environment and helping the developing world, but the idea that we must increase CO2 emissions to achieve those goals is simply wrong.
If you impose an additional carbon tax, they will use more solar power, but they will also pass on the tax on to consumers, to about the same degree.
No, they will use solar power OR they will pass the tax on to the consumer. In this case, either outcome is a success. Brewers gain an economic incentive to use low-carbon power sources (and low-carbon suppliers). Beer drinkers get an economic incentive to choose low-carbon beers.
It's really pretty easy. Add a per-ton carbon tax at the fuel pump and on the electric bill (if you get your energy from fossil fuels). Tie it to the best current estimate for the social cost of a ton of carbon ($40 currently). Use the tax (which amounts to $0.40/gal) to pay for carbon sequestration, efficiency R&D, renewable installations, or whatever gives the best bang for the buck. The rest of the economics work themselves out. And honestly, this is a far better solution than things like EPA gas mileage regulations - that's a bandaid solution with unintended side effects - it ends up driving more people into SUVs, because the fuel and size compromises are less strict there than on cars.
It really seems like you are arguing that taxes, tariffs, and subsidies have no effect on the market. If not, what are you saying?
Slashdot Mirror
You define a free agent as someone who believes the illusion you choose. If 'you' is nothing more than a collection of parts evolved to optimize certain environmental accidents then what is choice other then a series of electrical signals that terminate in tissue stimulation.
How else would you define freedom? Remember, it should be testable (at least in theory) for it to be a meaningful characteristic rather than just an invisible, arbitrary ideal. The fact that there's nothing magic or supernatural about chemistry and biology doesn't mean that conscious beings can't experience free will. And there's nothing to say that a supernatural cause of consciousness would make free will any more legitimate - it would just be adding yet another suspect cause. And, if my experience of free will is indistinguishable from "true" free will, why should I care? If there's no way, even in principle, to tell between real freedom and illusory freedom, the distinction seems to be meaningless.
Isn't it good enough to have complete predictability if you had complete knowledge?
Yes, it would be, that's how I intended my definition to be interpreted. The thing is, quantum mechanics shows conclusively that we cannot have complete knowledge OR predictability.
The uncertainty principle speaks to our ability to observe, it does not mean the information does not exist.
That's incorrect. The information truly doesn't exist. A particle's position becomes less defined when it's momentum is measured very precisely, and vice-versa. Read up on EPR some time. It was a thought experiment that showed the fundamental absurdity of quantum mechanics - the math suggested particles didn't have properties in the intervals between being measured. The idea was that this was such an absurd claim that it would discredit quantum mechanics. Unfortunately for Einstein, later work (like Bell's Theorem and associated experiments) showed that the absurd conclusions of EPR were correct - so rather than discredit QM, Einstein gave us one of the best examples of how deeply non-intuitive the world is, and it was in fact the final death of the deterministic Newtonian worldview for physicists.
Quantum mechanics experiments tell us that the information truly does not exist - there are "no hidden variables". Heisenberg uncertainty more or less puts a constraint on even the knowledge of god himself. Here's a good discussion on the subject: https://www.physicsforums.com/...
First of all - it is clear that there are more than your two original options, which I will summarize as 1. We have freedom and a god, and 2. We have no freedom and no god. It is certainly the case that we might have 1b. We have no freedom AND a god. This is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
On the second statement - the question here is really about the definition of freedom. I tend to be an empiricist, and so for me a useful definition of this property called "freedom" would allow us to detect its presence or absence by observation. In the simplest terms, I would define freedom as the ability of an agent to perform an action at will. Can I decide to raise my right arm, and will my right arm raise? I can, and it will. I can likewise decide not to do that, and see the results I expect.
Based on that observation, I would conclude that I have freedom. And I would say that I am a "self-directed agent".
Now, for determinism. I consider a deterministic system to be one in which we can predict its future state with perfect accuracy, given complete information about its present state. A non-deterministic system does not have this property.
So, is it possible that I am merely a collection of deterministic events, following inexorably from the initial state of the universe? Could I be just a Newtonian ball in a very complex but ultimately predictable billiards game? No, because that's not the universe we live in. Observation has shown us that the universe is fundamentally unknowable AND unpredictable - Heisenberg uncertainty being one of the simplest examples. So the billiards ball argument against free will is not compatible with our reality.
Capitalism assumes humans are going to be greedy and selfish, and optimizes around that. That will always work better than a system that assumes humans are going to be nice and altruistic.
Not true. Consider open source software - there are many instances where it is superior to proprietary, paid options. It's a system built upon volunteerism and altruism. Also consider things like Utah's homelessness initiative, which saves money by putting people in homes. That ends up being cheaper than the ER, police, and jail costs of homelessness.
By being in a society you have chosen to accept constraints on your freedom - but there are many kinds of freedom still available in any society, even if you do not have complete freedom.
There are only two rationally sustainable world views on freedom:
1) Freedom exists as a gift , granted to us by a transcendent and absolute truth which is also a will or a being and is the cause of the physical forces and the whole universe as well as all ethical and moral principles.
OR
2) freedom is an illusion , all human beings are simply the composite of their environment and genetics absolute truth does not exist ( or is unknowable) and personal desires of a human being no more or less important then those of an ape or an elephant.
This is a false dichotomy. There could be a deity, and it could be the case that said deity does not grant free will to us (as the Calvinists believe, in essence). It could also be the case that no divine beings exist, but we are self-directed agents. The universe is nondeterministic.
Hmm...well, it was that way for me, most everyone I know, and for people in ages back before us.
Yes indeed. And we had higher crime, poverty, disease, infant mortality... basically all of the human maladies were much more commonplace in the past. What is attractive about that to you? Sick people, homeless people, and imprisoned people cannot contribute effectively to the economy, which increases the tax burden on everyone else and makes the society generally crappier to live in.
This glorification of the "good ol' days" is completely incoherent and disconnected from the facts of history.
Over-regulation is, in fact, Fascism.
Your link says nothing of the sort.
Second sentence of your citation: "Historians and other scholars disagree on the question of whether a specifically fascist type of economic policy can be said to exist."
You clearly stated above on several occasions that your views are true because of science,
No, I advocate for views that are supported by evidence. That's a big difference. We've got really great evidence for some conclusions, so we are justified in advocating strongly for those views. We have really weak evidence for other things, and so we should be tentative about our conclusions in those scenarios. In all cases, any proposition is only as strong as the underlying evidence supporting it.
Attribute possibility of religious totality of statement "this is true" to science.
Sure, you can nitpick that phrase. "Supported by evidence" is a more strictly accurate statement. That said, there are some propositional statements (the earth is round) that are incredibly well supported by evidence. Could we be wrong? Sure. What's the likelihood of us being wrong? Extremely, extremely tiny. Technically, we can never reach absolute truth, but to be pragmatic, we can only have this conversation right now because of the amazingly accurate approximations of reality that science has given us.
My question for you: if we don't learn things through the scientific method, how are you suggesting we learn them? If we don't use scientific evidence to inform our policies, what should we use?
So: (1) show how the "hothouse Earth" climate is actually bad for people, as the argument contents; not the transition to the hothouse Earth climate, but the climate itself;
That's a bizarre qualifier - the transition IS the problem, and exacerbating it is the rate of transition. We've got an entire civilization built around relatively static locations of coastlines, farmland, natural resources, etc. Disrupting all of that will be ugly, and the faster the change happens (and the greater the magnitude of the change is) the worse it will be.
(2) show how we can reduce global carbon emissions to zero over the next 10-20 years, which is what would be needed to stop climate change.
Great example of the perfect solution fallacy. Since we can't stop things entirely, there's no point to taking any action at all.
The truth is, we can still take action to slow down climate change and control our own contribution, as individuals, as members of democracies, and as participants in markets. Slowing down the rate of change will allow more time to adapt and reduce the social, economic, and environmental impact of the transition. The responsible and reasonable thing to do is to take what action we can, in the most informed way possible.
I can't take you through the arguments about radiative physics, paleoclimatology or free market economics.
"I can't take you through the arguments" parses as "I don't have any good arguments". Either way, you aren't actually making a case and so I conclude you don't have one.
No, they don't. Their argument is sound - they discuss the range of rates from 3%-7%, and defend their choice of 7% on the grounds that it reflects historical values. There's an entire massive handbook detailing their approach. And again, third-party analysts that have NO INCENTIVE to inflate these numbers have come up with an even more costly estimate. Explain that.
I have made no such claim. We do make collective choices via voting (assuming you live in a liberal democracy of one type or another). I am advocating for the collective choice of a carbon tax. It's a collective cost with a collective benefit (just like any tax, ever). That's completely orthogonal to whatever individual choices people make.
That's like saying the coal pollution in urban areas of China has no social cost because the hundred thousand cases of lung cancer have yet to manifest. It's a social cost whether it happens today or 10+ years from now. The delay in the social cost can be accounted for by comparing today's price adjustment to avoid it to the average investment returns for the same quantity over the same period, which, astonishingly, is exactly what the SCC estimates do.
I happen to agree with you on discouraging construction in flood zones - but there's no denying that rising sea levels will make those floods far worse, and turn previously safe areas into flood-threatened ones.
Your argument: if alternative energy was cheaper, all businesses would be using it, but all businesses are not using it, therefore it must not be cheaper.
That spurious logic only holds in a case where there are not transition costs and where there has been sufficient time for all businesses to make the change.
"Evidence" is LITERALLY in my statement. It is important to verify the credibility of the source providing the evidence, because you almost certainly are not producing it personally. Even if you are, I can say as someone who has firsthand experience in experiment design and execution, evidence varies widely in quality. I have given you a standard to meet to change my mind: provide some compelling evidence. Or hell, for starters, even a piece of mediocre evidence. You have failed to do even that.
Me: Here is contention A, supported by evidence B.
You: I suggest that evidence B is bad, but I can't tell you exactly how. Trust me, though, I have read a lot of things that would totally show how wrong A is.
You have not provided evidence. You're just being evasive.
Understanding our limitations as a species and as individuals is the exact reason that we ought to insist on evidence, because without systematic observation, all we've got are opinions and hearsay. The very thing that makes science effective is that it accounts for its own limitations, by insisting on things like peer review and repeatability and test by experiment. How else could you possibly know what is true?
To be honest, I'm not really sure what point you are trying to make. Do you think that science as a whole is ineffective? Do you think evolution is incorrect? How do you think human beings are supposed to learn things? Or are you opposed to the pursuit of knowledge? It seems like you've got beef with the scientific worldview, but if that is the case, it's not clear what your specific complaint is.
I don't need to prove the null hypothesis - that the current state of affairs will continue, barring outside influence. If you expect a well documented trend to reverse, the onus is on you to provide evidence about why. All data indicates that humans cause extinction and that our impact on the ecosystem around us is only increasing, except in the cases where we've taken deliberate action to limit ourselves.
Because in your fantasy world it's an instantaneous thing to switch the entire grid to a new energy source, I guess? We can look at the rate of adoption of renewables to see if lots of businesses are investing in this cheaper energy, and lo and behold, renewable energy investment is dwarfing everything else. It would be increasing even more if we stopped all the subsidies for fossil fuels.
Weird, because the only thing that would change my mind would be lots of compelling evidence from reputable sources. If your mind was changed, surely you've got lots of that information available? I would really love to hear about it, seriously, because I sincerely do want to have the most informed opinions possible. Unfortunately, so far you've just made weak arguments against my citations, while providing no supporting information of your own. If you can provide some, please do, otherwise I'm done going in circles with you.
No. They specifically discuss the discount rate and accounting for investment returns here. FYI, their final SCC number is less than half of the value used by EXXON, who has a purely financial interest in getting it right so that they can make appropriate forecasts and informed business decisions.
I am taking action in a variety of ways, but ultimately, it's irrelevant and you are propagating a logical fallacy. Arguments should be weighed on their own merit and on the strength of the evidence provided - not based on emotional appeals and personal attacks.
Ah, this tired old argument. I figured you would have something more original. A consumption tax places all the choice in your hands - pay the tax and generate the carbon, don't pay the tax and don't generate the carbon. Or move to another country, or live as a hermit in the woods and don't participate in the market. If you choose to live in this society and receive the benefits thereof, you are accepting the costs. Again, your choice: get the benefits and and the attendant costs, or ditch the benefits and don't pay the costs. No guns involved, any more than there is a gun involved with you paying any sales tax.
No, you insist on deliberately misunderstanding the concept of an externality. The externality is ALREADY creating a major inefficiency in the market and making everyone poorer. Correcting the externality restores the market to optimal efficiency for the product in question, and an optimal market makes everyone richer. If correcting the externality wasn't going to be economically optimal, than it wouldn't be an externality. The only thing you can say is that the tax would move the cost of climate change from one place to another, but again that's the point - instead of flood victims paying the social cost of the carbon, people pay for it at the pump, on their heating bill, and so on. The market function depends on information being represented as accurately as possible via product pricing. So, you can argue whether CO2 output is really an externality or not (and we can agree to disagree), but to argue that correcting an external cost is bad for the market is nonsensical - you are basically just trying to redefine "externality" to suit your argument.
Let's just stop right here. How about you refute my point rather than going on this bizarre God complex tangent? Simple question: what evidence do we have to suggest that evolution does have any intent? In the absence of such evidence, the null hypothesis (there's no mystical force at work here) is the default assumption.
I contend one key thing: that we should base our actions and opinions on EVIDENCE. There's no god complex there - just an insistence that we should get our information from systematic observation.
I'm all for getting mystical and wondering about a greater purpose to biology, but not when it is used as an excuse for inaction and to rationalize away personal responsibility.
Well, since you haven't said what you believe the primary cause of the increased extinction rate is, I don't know what it would take to convince you. But for all the causes we have been talking about, they are either self-limiting or saturating.
Your claim: extinctions will slow down and stop on their own regardless of our action. My claim: the extinction rate is high and accelerating, with no evidence of it slowing down in the future. Another citation: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...
You could convince me with any evidence at all to suggest that extinctions are self-limiting - your claim directly contradicts the observed trend, and data overrules any pet theories you personally hold.
The kW/h figures don't actually tell you how costly that energy is.
What the hell else would you use? Those are the EXACT figures for how costly the energy is, which account for resource extraction, transport, generation and maintenance, land cost, and anything else that needs to be accounted for. If you suggest an alternate mechanism for gauging power plant cost, explain it and provide evidence for it.
I agree: they can be. In the case of climate change, I believe that's not the case; it certainly has never been demonstrated.
I form my opinions based on the best available scientific evidence. What are you using? What evidence would you accept as sufficient?
Yes, you keep saying that. It turns out to be economically wrong (you can't really "account" for externalities through taxes).
Just completely wrong. This is economics 101, literally: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez...
And even if you could do all that, it would still be a lousy choice: spending $1 trillion today to save $10 trillion (PPP) in 80 years would be irrational, and IPCC estimates of costs/benefits are substantially lower than that. You are impoverishing the world for no rational reason.
Wrong once more. Externalities lead to LESS market efficiency, and LESS prosperity for all involved. And there are two ways of accounting for externalities: regulation, or taxation. Taxation is more optimal. The basics are spelled out in the same ECON101 slide deck I linked.
And where are their estimates validated? How do you know that they calculated both costs and benefits? In particular, where do opportunity costs enter into the equation?
Read for yourself, that's why I provided the citation.
The idea that we can calculate the global cost of climate change, attribute responsibility to emitters, and then tax them accordingly is beyond ludicrous.
Broadly speaking, there are really only two options here: ignore the science and do nothing, or pay attention to the science and take the most informed response possible. The best science we've got shows that we've got a massive negative social impact from increasing CO2 levels. That same science allows us to put an economic estimate on that social impact. Sure, it's imperfect, but all knowledge is imperfect - saying that we should not take action as long as there is uncertainty is the same as saying that we should never take action, ever. A rational person evaluates all the available data and makes a prudent choice that acknowledges the various costs and benefits in the context of their respective probabilities.
Also, a carbon tax at the source resolves all the complexity of assigning responsibility... we tax the energy up front, and the free market allocates it appropriately throughout the economy.
You may as well ask me if I'm okay with the fact that untold amounts of stars and all their planetary systems have already died, and many more will. Life goes on. We're part of the system, and we play according to the rules of the system. That's it.
Evolution has no intent or direction. It is just a biological process that we've invented a term for - allowing it to progress "naturally" (a nonsense term) is no more virtuous than allowing a fire to progress to consume an entire forest, or allowing a smallpox epidemic to proliferate throughout the population. According to your non-interventionist ideology, smallpox vaccines are wrong, right? Because we are supposed to just sit back and let the system do its thing, and not get in the way of evolution?
You make unsubstantiated claims and then ad hominem attacks when those claims are challenged, so it's clear that you don't really have any facts to stand on here. If you want to provide some citations or otherwise support your arguments, I'd be interested to hear it. Otherwise, it sounds like you just want to advocate for the position that we should ignore science, ignore the consequences of our actions, and accept any destruction of the environment as an unavoidable result of evolution. Sorry, but no thanks. I believe in facing the facts and accepting responsibility.
So, in your estimation, are we going to run out of water, nutrients, "generally fertile soil" whatever that actually means in your head?
Drought is already a huge problem worldwide: 2/3 of the world potentially facing a water shortage by 2025. Did you not hear about Capetown?
See, right now we have a huge landmass across Eurasia that is meeting all those standards and has everything in excess
Citation? I'm not aware of any agricultural revolution happening in Europe or elsewhere.
On you last point, the answer is "evolutionary process". Or in the nomenclature used by most of the people alive today, "God", "Creator" and other names used for it.
You also equally appear to have bought into the primeval nature worship, as you think that "conserving what we have" is universal good, rather than clear cut evil.
You know what the "evolutionary process" does? Or "God" or whatever you believe is in charge? It occasionally kills off 90% of all life. Are you ok with that? Is that "universal good", or "clear cut evil" in your opinion?
If you really believe that everything is going to be fine, why don't you just quit your job and sit around waiting for the evolutionary process to give you a paycheck and food? I'm guessing it's because, on a practical level, you understand that if you want a specific kind of life, you need to work for it individually to make it happen. There's no universal law guaranteeing happiness or even survival, on an individual or global level. We, as a human species, DO have the power to destroy ourselves and take most life on Earth with us. I, for one, think we should work to make the future we want, rather than watching things turn to shit while we binge another show on Netflix.
Yes, that is very much what I imagine. The high rate of extinctions is a temporary phenomenon. It won't go on for thousands of years.
Citation? This is a totally unsupported claim, and I see no reason to believe this wishful thinking.
Right now, renewables are more expensive than non-renewable energy
Wrong, so all the rest of your conclusions are wrong. Egypt's new solar power plant comes in at $.03/kw-hr. New wind installations are $0.04-0.06/kw-hr. Nuclear comes in at $0.02/kw-hr and could be cheaper if we could streamline the regulatory approval. Fossil fuel ranges from $0.05-$0.17, so in the worst case, renewables are price-competitive, and in many cases they are cheaper. https://www.instituteforenergy...
"We" simply shouldn't do anyhing. If you let the market do its thing, that's the fastest way of getting towards a low carbon economy across the globe. If you start imposing carbon taxes and other policies for restricting carbon emissions, you just end up making things worse.
Things that are massively harmful for society can be very profitable for an individual company. The market doesn't give a shit about the planet being livable 100 years from now. It's like you've never heard of the tragedy of the commons.
Externalities, by definition, cannot be accounted for by the market without correction by some non-market force. Pollution, carbon emissions, and environment destruction are externalities. We need to account for them via taxation or some other mechanism, but taxation is the most explicit and direct, and most fully empowers the free market to get to work on the problem.
Really? Who do you think can "accurately" calculate those externalities?
These folks have done pretty damn well: https://www.edf.org/true-cost-...
It's a bipartisan, science-backed effort. Of course, we can't have perfect accuracy with anything, but you can reflect the best currently available estimate, considering all the science (which itself accounts for uncertainty ranges, measurement error, etc) - and that is going to lead to much better outcomes than just sitting around and trusting that things will magically work themselves out.
You can certainly get businesses to adopt solar power by imposing a carbon tax. But that isn't for free: people are getting poorer by just the amount of carbon tax you impose.
Yes, exactly, because you're taking a hidden market externality (the social cost of environmentally damaging products) and accurately representing it in the price of materials and energy. Damaging a collective resource DOES carry a cost, and in a healthy market the sale price of a product reflects the true cost of manufacture.
My point has consistently been very simple: while climate change may or may not currently contribute modestly to an increase in extinction rates, believing that anthropogenic climate change will cause a mass extinction is absurd. It is very unlikely that humans will cause a mass extinction at all, but if we do, it won't be through climate change.
Believing that we will not cause a mass extinction is delusional when a significant fraction of species are already gone, and hundreds more species go extinct every year. We are, without a doubt, in the early phase of an extinction event, and it will become a mass extinction, unless you imagine that the rate of extinctions is going to decline suddenly all on its own.
I think habitat destruction, coastal flooding, and pollution are major problems, in particular in poor countries. If you want to combat them, however, the way to do it is to massively increase the wealth of developing nations, which requires increasing carbon emissions.
This is false. Increasing carbon emissions tends to worsen all these other problems you mention. Habitat destruction is a nasty byproduct of coal mining. Coastal flooding is likely to get worse and worse with rising sea levels. Burning coal and gasoline are a massive source of air pollution.
Increasing wealth and prosperity is strongly tied to increasing energy utilization, but that doesn't have to be a high-carbon energy supply when nuclear, wind, and solar are available, and the renewables are getting cheaper every day. If you avoid energy from carbon, you end up with less pollution, less dependence on foreign resources, and a potentially more reliable and distributed energy grid. I'm all for saving the environment and helping the developing world, but the idea that we must increase CO2 emissions to achieve those goals is simply wrong.
If you impose an additional carbon tax, they will use more solar power, but they will also pass on the tax on to consumers, to about the same degree.
No, they will use solar power OR they will pass the tax on to the consumer. In this case, either outcome is a success. Brewers gain an economic incentive to use low-carbon power sources (and low-carbon suppliers). Beer drinkers get an economic incentive to choose low-carbon beers.
It's really pretty easy. Add a per-ton carbon tax at the fuel pump and on the electric bill (if you get your energy from fossil fuels). Tie it to the best current estimate for the social cost of a ton of carbon ($40 currently). Use the tax (which amounts to $0.40/gal) to pay for carbon sequestration, efficiency R&D, renewable installations, or whatever gives the best bang for the buck. The rest of the economics work themselves out. And honestly, this is a far better solution than things like EPA gas mileage regulations - that's a bandaid solution with unintended side effects - it ends up driving more people into SUVs, because the fuel and size compromises are less strict there than on cars.
It really seems like you are arguing that taxes, tariffs, and subsidies have no effect on the market. If not, what are you saying?