We're not building nuclear power plants for one reason -- ignorant cowards who don't want nukular radiashun in their backyards.
Yes, largely the same "ignorant cowards" who want rail systems "like Hitler's" and who are afraid of the end of civilization because of "carbon pollushun". Things have a nice way of balancing out, don't they?
Then again, same applies to rail, even freight. People scream holy murder when infrastructure near them is expanded, and the court litigation process enables their obstructionism.
Yes, how odd that people don't want their neighborhoods cut in half, have noisy trains rumble through their back yards, and have lots of transient people go through their neighborhoods! How dare those peasants resist when rich people want to travel in style from city center to city center!
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is mostly environmental regulations that are used to interfere with rail building. Unfortunately, the jackboot of government usually gets its way after years of litigation anyway.
I checked the prices for the same dates you did. Came up with 100 pounds ($125-$130) for the flights, $65 each way ($130) for rail,
I can't find a $130 round trip on rail, but you can easily find a $86 flight (the price has gone up $3 and the cheapest flights are now on easyJet, Google Flights). In any case, even your rail numbers, we have established that flying is substantially cheaper than taking the train, and that's not taking into account the massive subsidies for trains.
At least if you end up in a city center, you can easily catch continuing transportation to where you're going.
Yes, and you have to deal with congestion in the city. And London-Paris is one of the best-case situations for rail. For longer distances, rail becomes increasingly worse relative to flying.
Americans aren't smart at all... their tax money is squandered on military and law enforcement and their contractor parasites.
Depends on what you mean by "their tax money". Unlike Europe, where taxes are broad based, in the US, the federal government is largely financed by the top 20% of income earners.
(1) No. Certain fixed costs (i.e. engineering, etc) don't change much whether you have one track or three or four. A large proportion of the costs is in initial design, environmental studies, and engineering -- laying down steel or asphalt is cheap by comparison.
Not even close. Look at California HSR or the German system.
(2) If we're going to be building rail networks, we could also build nuclear power stations to power them.
You still don't get it: if we could build nuclear power plants, we would already be doing it, because nuclear power plants address all the concerns environmentalists are trying to address.
Even with fossil fuel stations, it's easier to control emissions from a few point sources than from millions of cars, trucks, and buses.
Meanwhile, cheapest train fare is $130 round trip (not $157),
You can find special deals all the time, both on air and on train travel. I simply picked a date a month out and picked the prices from the main web sites. Furthermore, the trains are subsidized, so the true cost is actually much higher.
You're basically confabulating prices and charges in a vain attempt to justify an inefficient, heavily-subsidized transportation system: rail.
London-Paris on EasyJet flies out of Southend, not Heathrow, Gatwick, or City... and leaves you in the middle of both cities, close to available/cheap ground transportation
I.e., it's perfect for wealthy elites who can afford housing close to the city centers and have business at upscale businesses and shops close to city centers, all massively subsidized by the vast majority of Brits and Frenchmen who never will get their money's worth. It's a giant rip-off. I'm glad Americans are smarter than to fall for that crap.
Fortunately, rail lines can have more than one track. If you have three or four, you can separate passenger and freight trains on different tracks.
The land use and cost is pretty much proportional to the number of tracks, so you're pretty much asking for creating two separate rail networks that happen to be geographically close; an inefficient use.
As far as efficiency, it's not everything. Ability to power 200 mph trains with nuclear power or hydro power is better than burning fossil fuel for a 500 mph airplane. Source of energy also matters.
If we could produce that much hydropower and nuclear power, we'd already have eliminated most of US carbon emissions. We're burning coal precisely because we don't have that. So, that new passenger rail system you want to build would be powered by coal, just like electric cars are today.
As far as light rail, the workers will drive and sprawl to infinity anyway. See also, places like Dallas or Phoenix.
This has been studied extensively: workers pick where they live based on commute time. So, spending a lot of money on light rail doesn't actually improve commute times. Mostly what it does is increase economic inequality.
Show me where my statements contradict each other.
Now $4.6 Billion/year is "too small" a subsidy to oil and gas companies to have an effect.
I've consistently said that.
But apparently all that money "just gets passed on to consumers" so hey I guess they're not that bad at all.
As I have been saying, fossil fuel subsidies are insignificant. They amount to $0.05/MMBtu (or $0.15 / MWh). That amount gets passed on to consumers and it makes no difference whatsoever. It is you who clings to the absurd notion that fossil fuel subsidies somehow keep fossil fuels alive.
Solar is subsidized at $17.93/MMBtu (or $50/MWh), a huge subsidy. Removing that huge subsidy would have a huge effect on the market.
We should kill both subsidies. The effect on fossil fuel use would be nil. The effect on solar would be to stop subsidizing inefficient and costly solar technologies and encourage people to actually start innovating again. Right now, solar subsidies are hurting innovation.
Electric trains for both passengers and freight are environmentally friendly
It is a dubious proposition that criss-crossing the country with rail lines is "environmentally friendly".
On top of that, passenger and freight trains are different systems. Freight trains travel at about 20 mph average; they can't be mixed with passenger compartments and don't coexist well on the same rail system. Going 20 mph on trains is also very efficient, compared to the 200 mph of high speed rail (=massive wind resistance, very expensive construction).
especially if powered by clean nuclear or hydro power.
If we had more nuclear or hydro power, the simplest way to take advantage of it would be to substitute it for existing fossil fuel use, not to build new rail lines.
Europe could do better with carrying more freight by rail, but the US can do better with electric passenger rail in populated areas.
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When you're talking about "rail in populated areas", that means "light rail", a completely different system. Light rail has its own problems, separate from long distance rail. One big problem with light rail is that it uses tax payer money to encourage people to move further away from work than they otherwise might have. Light rail is a system by which you tax poor working class folks so that wealthy white collar workers get a nice commute from their cushy office jobs to condos in nice parts of the city or sprawling suburban homes.
Yaaaay all that economically rational and environmentally friendly use of jet fuel!
For moving people? Most freight can be moved at low speeds, which is far more efficient. People's time is valuable and travel by rail is slow due to connections etc. And people need point-to-point connectivity between many places, something rail networks can't provide. Also the difference between trains and cars isn't all that large because trains need to move all their mass even if there are only a few passengers.
From all those.... privileged few who ever have need of flying 1200 miles.... Because that's different than... riding an elitist euro trains... I guess... hmm.
What makes the European train "elitists" is that the best connectivity for passenger trains is between the places where the wealthy and powerful congregate, just like in the US. But they are also simply expensive and slow, meaning you need both the money and the free time to take them:
LondonBerlin 9/10-9/12: Train: $199, 10h each way Ryanair: $39, 2h each way
LondonParis 9/10-9/12: Train: $157, 2:20h each way EasyJet: $81, 1:20h each way
Well let's just focus on our shared goals and common ground shall we? Fuck giving the record-breaking-profit corporations free money.
The energy sector has profit margins that tend to be about average; information technology and financial usually outperform it.
And you seem to believe that subsidies to oil/gas companies are simply taken as "free money" by those companies, but when you give subsidies to solar energy companies, they are supposedly used for innovation and to lower prices, a strange form of doublethink. In fact, subsidies, like taxes, are usually just passed on to consumers, so subsidies lower both gas prices (insignificantly because they are so small) and solar prices (massively).
US has a nasty way of not enforcing overtime -- many people are in the office 10-11 hours a day,
Most people working in offices are exempt from overtime regulations. This gives people the flexibility of working "10-11 hours a day" and then taking Friday off. So, far from being "nasty", this is a good thing.
The "Fair Labor Standards Act" (and its European equivalents) is a nasty piece of legislation that hurts employees.
Where do you people get these bizarre ideas from? Average annual hours worked by Americans are just slightly above OECD average, behind many European nations. And since American employers are far more flexible in terms of working hours, that translates into even more vacation days than European countries working comparable numbers of hours.
In the public transit sense. Our rail moves coal. Which has priority over Amtrak.
Good! That's the economically rational, environmentally friendly way of using the rail system.
Looks like US$32 from London to Paris. Paris to Stolkhom is US$112.
Yes, if you're the kind of privileged person who has need to travel from London to Paris, not only is it a nice train ride, it's heavily government subsidized by tax payers who never are going to enjoy that ride.
That'd be a 20 hours drive, passing through 4 countries. ~1200 miles. Even with US prices, that'd be $134 in gas money alone.
In the US, you'd fly.
"bu bu but Solar subsidies"!? Really? Developing new tech that saves the planet
If you want new tech that saves the planet, you shouldn't have the government subsidize it because that actually hurts, rather than helps, innovation.
vs subsidizing ancient established oil barons and a product that might lead to a human extinction event....
Yeah, the usual ridiculous, irrational beliefs and platitudes.
siiiiiiiiiiigh, you double-talking motherfucker. You had JUST AGREED we should get rid of oil subsidies. And then you say it would have no effect.
Where do you see the contradiction? Why wouldn't I agree to abolish a meaningless, insignificant subsidy?
No, fuck your toll roads. And I don't like my pavement suddenly turning to gravel.
Your capacity to hold contradictory beliefs in your head is just astounding. You complain that the cost of highways is socialist, that drivers don't pay their fair share, and that Americans drive too much; you want more solar and more public transportation; yet, the policies you want are not only massive subsidies for solar projects and public transit, but continuing subsidies of the highway system.
Ok dude. You hate Europe and they can do nothing right. We get it.
Oh, Europe does plenty of things right. On many measures of individual economic freedom, Europe actually does better than the US. There are many European policies the US should adopt, just not the ones that you and Bernie happen to like.
Traditional platforms now have to spend part of their news hour debunking myths like [...]
Traditional platforms are the major driving factors behind those myths in the first place. Almost nobody would have cared about PizzaGate or the link between vaccines and autism if the "traditional media" hadn't shoved it down people's throats. As for the "flat earth theory", I guarantee you that 99% of journalists would be incapable of telling you the history of that theory and would be incapable of describing the kind of simple experiments philosophers used to prove that the earth was roughly spherical.
And Google/Facebook/etc are happy to spread these lies because it helps their bottom line by increasing "engagement" which furthers their bottom line: advertising.
And that's true even more so for the traditional media, who these days mostly cater to the angry geriatric hippies.
Do.... people in Germany really care about how NewYorkers and Midwesterners get to work?
What they care about is portraying their country as a model, a country that strikes the perfect balance between rational policies, social responsibility, and freedom. And they want to spread that to the rest of the world. It's a cultural trait stemming from a deep insecurity and fear of inferiority, and it is independent of the form of government Germans happen to have at the time.
People also use public transportation because it's... faster, cheaper, simpler, and more convenient....In big cities like NY.
Yes, but like all public transit systems in the US, it's a cesspool of corruption and rent seeking that requires massive infusion of taxpayer dollars from taxpayers who will never see the benefits. Even if it was a good idea and we wanted to, the US cannot pull off even a public transit system like Germany has.
Europe has a better rail system.
Better in what sense? The US has a rail system that's bigger than the entire EU's combined, and the US rail system is utilized nearly 100%. It simply happens to be utilized what rail systems are really good for: freight. Europeans have turned their rail system into expensive leisure travel for the elites while European highways are clogged with dirty, dangerous trucks.
I hear Europe's buses aren't quite as low-class.
Not surprising. In the US, only the very poor have to take buses for financial reasons. In Europe, a car is a significant burden for even many people in the middle class.
Right, and in the USA we subsidize the oil&gas corporations to the tune of $4.6 Billion/year [cbo.gov]
Correct, and I think we should abolish that. But you need to see that in relation to the energy produced. Fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of $0.05/MMBtu, while solar is subsidized to the tune of $17.38/MMBtu. Abolishing fossil fuel subsidies would have no effect on the market, while abolishing subsidies for alternative energies would kill the alternative energy market.
because they have our economy by the balls.
No, it's because there is simply no economically feasible alternative, and there won't be for another 10-20 years. And "they" don't have anybody by the balls: there is a huge global market in fossil fuels.
So the cost of road upkeep is socialized in the USA, while gas tax pays for the roads in Germany.
Last I checked, federal gas taxes roughly cover federal highway maintenance, plus or minus a few billion.
In any case, the US built its inefficient, government-subsidized, environmentally harmful federal highway system following the example of German fascists. Maybe we should take a hint from history and stop copying what the Germans do rather than compounding one bad idea (the federal highway system) with yet another (massive gas taxes)? How about privatizing both federal highways and public transit?
That's deceptive at best, because this doesn't count the distance a given car is driven per year, or how many households own more than one car.
AC made a comment about car ownership, not about distance driven or cars per household. That's what I responded to.
Yes, Americans drive longer distances. I think it's great. Americans see a lot more of the world around them and are having a great deal of fun out in nature doing things they love.
Yes, Americans own more cars per household. I think it's great. Americans own nearly twice as many vehicles per capita as Germans, often owning a couple of small cars for commuting, a pickup truck for towing a boat/RV and home improvement, and an SUV for travel. Americans even have the space to park those vehicles.
The pattern of car ownership and use of public transit in the US and Europe tells you a lot about both countries, just not what you think it does.
Nothing good, according to a new survey published by Gallup and the Knight Foundation on Wednesday. The report, based on web surveys from a random sample of 1,203 U.S. adults, found that 85 percent of Americans don't think the platforms are doing enough to stop the spread of fake news
So the people with a vested interest in propping up traditional media and censorship miraculously discover in a poll that... Americans want more censorship!
It's like Stalin proclaiming that Russians want more communism!
Or like Brawndo proclaiming that Brawndo is what people crave!
"Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government] allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinion calculated to embarrass the government?"
Most importantly to contribute to this discussion I have to say that vast majority of the critical opinions in the US about Europe is from people, who have never been there and vice-versa.
Most Americans couldn't care less about Europe because Europe is of little importance to them or the world. The people who still comment are emigres like myself, and we don't do it because we care about the future of Europe, but because we don't want more bad ideas to spill over from Europe to the US.
- getting around using public transportation in the US cities is not that bad either, just people usually drive
People drive in the US because it's fast, cheap, simple, and convenient. Why people drive less in Germany is no great mystery: on average, Germans are poorer and the government deliberate makes it expensive to drive. And the German government subsidizes the kind of transportation that the intellectual and political elite in Germany prefers, which is why public transit is excellent near political power centers and universities.
See how communism provides prosperity for everybody? Free Internet in Cuba! No need to work for it! Just compare that to the evil, capitalist, fascist West, where workers are forced to be exploited by their capitalist overlords like slaves for several hours each month just in order to be able to afford basic gigabit Internet service!
Household car ownership rates in the US and Germany are almost the same, filling out spots #1 and #2. Why can't we all be as perfect as the Germans? Oh, wait, we are!
so I think comparing with North Western European nations is fair
It's not about fairness, it's about what the boundaries of an economy are. Since EU members, just like the US, are part of a structure with free movement of goods and services and a common regulatory regime, it makes little sense to treat them as separate economies. Furthermore, there is this tendency to cherry-pick whatever European nation happens to support a particular argument; comparing one nation against top-of-28 (with the occasional top-of-50 for "Europe") also makes little sense.
No states in the USA have been military dictatorships or under communism within living memory
Glad you noticed. I'd like to keep it that way. And you know how dictatorships come into power? Usually through claiming that there is an imminent threat that only strong centralized action can address and through getting people upset over unequal distribution of resources. The climate change brouhaha is pretty much textbook "how to grab power", in particular since the proposed policies don't even actually solve the problem. If the people wanting power actually put the cards on the table and described the full extent of what was necessary to effectively address the problem they exist (let's call it "the final solution for the problem of climate change"), people would be running in horror. The strategy is explicitly to grab power incrementally ("we need to do something, this is a good start even if it doesn't solve the problem, we'll do more later"). Civilization could survive even rapid and severe climate change far more easily than it could survive central planning and totalitarianism on a global scale, in particular given the technologies a modern day dictatorship would have at its disposal. I emigrated from Europe. It took me a while to realize how toxic and self-destructive European culture has become in the 20th century.
TFA makes a statement about endpoints, not rate of change. It claims that "hothouse Earth" itself is an 'apocalyptic nightmare". That is what I was responding to.
I can't respond to vague statements like "rate of change matters" because I don't know what you have in mind. For example, many people believe there will be rapid sea level rise "unless we do something", but sea levels can't rise much faster than they are rising now, no matter what we do or don't do.
Average seems a low target to aim for.
Not for a country of 330 million that spans a continent, with an economy bigger than the entire EU's and accounting for about a third of the world economy.
Growth rates in EU nations which have been expanding renewable energy the most have been higher than average, so there doesn't seem to be much evidence on that sort of gross, macroeconomic scale for stifling.
We're not talking about growth rates (which are pretty pathetic in Europe anyway), we're talking about rapid innovation necessary for a post-carbon economy. That innovation comes overwhelmingly from the US.
Furthermore, US carbon emissions have been dropping faster than European carbon emissions.
I took a look at that. Here I will unashamedly use per capita figures to remove any effect of population change: Germany 1995: 10.6, 2013: 9.2. USA 1995: 19.3, 2013: 16.4
I said Europe, not Germany. If you pick out individual EU members, then compare them to the best individual US states.
Second, the time scale to look at is over the last ten years, when shale gas caused a significant drop in US carbon emissions. The point being that real carbon emission reductions don't happen mainly through conservation but through innovation.
I don't know, but I will see if I can find more information.
Please don't trouble yourself. Pointing to embedded carbon, per capita vs intensity, etc. wasn't my attempt to resolve these questions through debate, it was to point out the futility of debating these points. There is no objectively correct answer to the question of how much carbon a nation ought to emit, nor even an objectively correct way of measuring it, and there is never going to be agreement on these points among different people or different countries. You may think that using per capita emissions is the right thing, I consider that choice not just bad but immoral.
My other point was to correct your assertion that the USA is particularly carbon-efficient
This is what I actually wrote: In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average. Calling the US a "carbon pig" given those facts makes little sense. If you get out of that that I'm asserting that the US "is particularly carbon efficient", then you must be illiterate.
Of course, ultimately the planet only cares about the total.
Planets don't care. And in terms of biological diversity and suitability for primates and humans, up to 1000 ppm is clearly fine, and we're never going to reach that.
If you care about your country being efficient, and not damaging the planet more than necessary for a given standard of living, then you should care.
And that is pretty much what carbon intensity measures: carbon emissions for a given standard of living. And the US is pretty average among Western nations in that regard.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wasn't.
Yeah, you and Bernie Sanders believe that crap. Put your fingers in your ear and deny both statistics and what a European tells you.
I don't "deny" global warming; it's clearly happening, I simply don't fear it.
But thanks for revealing your fascist tendencies anyway.
Yes, largely the same "ignorant cowards" who want rail systems "like Hitler's" and who are afraid of the end of civilization because of "carbon pollushun". Things have a nice way of balancing out, don't they?
Yes, how odd that people don't want their neighborhoods cut in half, have noisy trains rumble through their back yards, and have lots of transient people go through their neighborhoods! How dare those peasants resist when rich people want to travel in style from city center to city center!
There is a delicious irony in the fact that it is mostly environmental regulations that are used to interfere with rail building. Unfortunately, the jackboot of government usually gets its way after years of litigation anyway.
I can't find a $130 round trip on rail, but you can easily find a $86 flight (the price has gone up $3 and the cheapest flights are now on easyJet, Google Flights). In any case, even your rail numbers, we have established that flying is substantially cheaper than taking the train, and that's not taking into account the massive subsidies for trains.
Yes, and you have to deal with congestion in the city. And London-Paris is one of the best-case situations for rail. For longer distances, rail becomes increasingly worse relative to flying.
Depends on what you mean by "their tax money". Unlike Europe, where taxes are broad based, in the US, the federal government is largely financed by the top 20% of income earners.
Not even close. Look at California HSR or the German system.
You still don't get it: if we could build nuclear power plants, we would already be doing it, because nuclear power plants address all the concerns environmentalists are trying to address.
Again, you need to do your homework.
No cost for a standard carry-on.
Can't you read? I just checked: $81.
You can find special deals all the time, both on air and on train travel. I simply picked a date a month out and picked the prices from the main web sites. Furthermore, the trains are subsidized, so the true cost is actually much higher.
You're basically confabulating prices and charges in a vain attempt to justify an inefficient, heavily-subsidized transportation system: rail.
I.e., it's perfect for wealthy elites who can afford housing close to the city centers and have business at upscale businesses and shops close to city centers, all massively subsidized by the vast majority of Brits and Frenchmen who never will get their money's worth. It's a giant rip-off. I'm glad Americans are smarter than to fall for that crap.
The land use and cost is pretty much proportional to the number of tracks, so you're pretty much asking for creating two separate rail networks that happen to be geographically close; an inefficient use.
If we could produce that much hydropower and nuclear power, we'd already have eliminated most of US carbon emissions. We're burning coal precisely because we don't have that. So, that new passenger rail system you want to build would be powered by coal, just like electric cars are today.
This has been studied extensively: workers pick where they live based on commute time. So, spending a lot of money on light rail doesn't actually improve commute times. Mostly what it does is increase economic inequality.
Show me where my statements contradict each other.
I've consistently said that.
As I have been saying, fossil fuel subsidies are insignificant. They amount to $0.05/MMBtu (or $0.15 / MWh). That amount gets passed on to consumers and it makes no difference whatsoever. It is you who clings to the absurd notion that fossil fuel subsidies somehow keep fossil fuels alive.
Solar is subsidized at $17.93/MMBtu (or $50/MWh), a huge subsidy. Removing that huge subsidy would have a huge effect on the market.
We should kill both subsidies. The effect on fossil fuel use would be nil. The effect on solar would be to stop subsidizing inefficient and costly solar technologies and encourage people to actually start innovating again. Right now, solar subsidies are hurting innovation.
It is a dubious proposition that criss-crossing the country with rail lines is "environmentally friendly".
On top of that, passenger and freight trains are different systems. Freight trains travel at about 20 mph average; they can't be mixed with passenger compartments and don't coexist well on the same rail system. Going 20 mph on trains is also very efficient, compared to the 200 mph of high speed rail (=massive wind resistance, very expensive construction).
If we had more nuclear or hydro power, the simplest way to take advantage of it would be to substitute it for existing fossil fuel use, not to build new rail lines.
When you're talking about "rail in populated areas", that means "light rail", a completely different system. Light rail has its own problems, separate from long distance rail. One big problem with light rail is that it uses tax payer money to encourage people to move further away from work than they otherwise might have. Light rail is a system by which you tax poor working class folks so that wealthy white collar workers get a nice commute from their cushy office jobs to condos in nice parts of the city or sprawling suburban homes.
For moving people? Most freight can be moved at low speeds, which is far more efficient. People's time is valuable and travel by rail is slow due to connections etc. And people need point-to-point connectivity between many places, something rail networks can't provide. Also the difference between trains and cars isn't all that large because trains need to move all their mass even if there are only a few passengers.
What makes the European train "elitists" is that the best connectivity for passenger trains is between the places where the wealthy and powerful congregate, just like in the US. But they are also simply expensive and slow, meaning you need both the money and the free time to take them:
LondonBerlin 9/10-9/12: Train: $199, 10h each way Ryanair: $39, 2h each way
LondonParis 9/10-9/12: Train: $157, 2:20h each way EasyJet: $81, 1:20h each way
The energy sector has profit margins that tend to be about average; information technology and financial usually outperform it.
And you seem to believe that subsidies to oil/gas companies are simply taken as "free money" by those companies, but when you give subsidies to solar energy companies, they are supposedly used for innovation and to lower prices, a strange form of doublethink. In fact, subsidies, like taxes, are usually just passed on to consumers, so subsidies lower both gas prices (insignificantly because they are so small) and solar prices (massively).
Actual hours worked.
Most people working in offices are exempt from overtime regulations. This gives people the flexibility of working "10-11 hours a day" and then taking Friday off. So, far from being "nasty", this is a good thing.
The "Fair Labor Standards Act" (and its European equivalents) is a nasty piece of legislation that hurts employees.
Where do you people get these bizarre ideas from? Average annual hours worked by Americans are just slightly above OECD average, behind many European nations. And since American employers are far more flexible in terms of working hours, that translates into even more vacation days than European countries working comparable numbers of hours.
Good! That's the economically rational, environmentally friendly way of using the rail system.
Yes, if you're the kind of privileged person who has need to travel from London to Paris, not only is it a nice train ride, it's heavily government subsidized by tax payers who never are going to enjoy that ride.
In the US, you'd fly.
If you want new tech that saves the planet, you shouldn't have the government subsidize it because that actually hurts, rather than helps, innovation.
Yeah, the usual ridiculous, irrational beliefs and platitudes.
Where do you see the contradiction? Why wouldn't I agree to abolish a meaningless, insignificant subsidy?
Your capacity to hold contradictory beliefs in your head is just astounding. You complain that the cost of highways is socialist, that drivers don't pay their fair share, and that Americans drive too much; you want more solar and more public transportation; yet, the policies you want are not only massive subsidies for solar projects and public transit, but continuing subsidies of the highway system.
Oh, Europe does plenty of things right. On many measures of individual economic freedom, Europe actually does better than the US. There are many European policies the US should adopt, just not the ones that you and Bernie happen to like.
Traditional platforms are the major driving factors behind those myths in the first place. Almost nobody would have cared about PizzaGate or the link between vaccines and autism if the "traditional media" hadn't shoved it down people's throats. As for the "flat earth theory", I guarantee you that 99% of journalists would be incapable of telling you the history of that theory and would be incapable of describing the kind of simple experiments philosophers used to prove that the earth was roughly spherical.
And that's true even more so for the traditional media, who these days mostly cater to the angry geriatric hippies.
What they care about is portraying their country as a model, a country that strikes the perfect balance between rational policies, social responsibility, and freedom. And they want to spread that to the rest of the world. It's a cultural trait stemming from a deep insecurity and fear of inferiority, and it is independent of the form of government Germans happen to have at the time.
Yes, but like all public transit systems in the US, it's a cesspool of corruption and rent seeking that requires massive infusion of taxpayer dollars from taxpayers who will never see the benefits. Even if it was a good idea and we wanted to, the US cannot pull off even a public transit system like Germany has.
Better in what sense? The US has a rail system that's bigger than the entire EU's combined, and the US rail system is utilized nearly 100%. It simply happens to be utilized what rail systems are really good for: freight. Europeans have turned their rail system into expensive leisure travel for the elites while European highways are clogged with dirty, dangerous trucks.
Not surprising. In the US, only the very poor have to take buses for financial reasons. In Europe, a car is a significant burden for even many people in the middle class.
Correct, and I think we should abolish that. But you need to see that in relation to the energy produced. Fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of $0.05/MMBtu, while solar is subsidized to the tune of $17.38/MMBtu. Abolishing fossil fuel subsidies would have no effect on the market, while abolishing subsidies for alternative energies would kill the alternative energy market.
No, it's because there is simply no economically feasible alternative, and there won't be for another 10-20 years. And "they" don't have anybody by the balls: there is a huge global market in fossil fuels.
Last I checked, federal gas taxes roughly cover federal highway maintenance, plus or minus a few billion.
In any case, the US built its inefficient, government-subsidized, environmentally harmful federal highway system following the example of German fascists. Maybe we should take a hint from history and stop copying what the Germans do rather than compounding one bad idea (the federal highway system) with yet another (massive gas taxes)? How about privatizing both federal highways and public transit?
AC made a comment about car ownership, not about distance driven or cars per household. That's what I responded to.
Yes, Americans drive longer distances. I think it's great. Americans see a lot more of the world around them and are having a great deal of fun out in nature doing things they love.
Yes, Americans own more cars per household. I think it's great. Americans own nearly twice as many vehicles per capita as Germans, often owning a couple of small cars for commuting, a pickup truck for towing a boat/RV and home improvement, and an SUV for travel. Americans even have the space to park those vehicles.
The pattern of car ownership and use of public transit in the US and Europe tells you a lot about both countries, just not what you think it does.
So the people with a vested interest in propping up traditional media and censorship miraculously discover in a poll that... Americans want more censorship!
It's like Stalin proclaiming that Russians want more communism!
Or like Brawndo proclaiming that Brawndo is what people crave!
Spoken like one of your heroes!
Most Americans couldn't care less about Europe because Europe is of little importance to them or the world. The people who still comment are emigres like myself, and we don't do it because we care about the future of Europe, but because we don't want more bad ideas to spill over from Europe to the US.
People drive in the US because it's fast, cheap, simple, and convenient. Why people drive less in Germany is no great mystery: on average, Germans are poorer and the government deliberate makes it expensive to drive. And the German government subsidizes the kind of transportation that the intellectual and political elite in Germany prefers, which is why public transit is excellent near political power centers and universities.
See how communism provides prosperity for everybody? Free Internet in Cuba! No need to work for it! Just compare that to the evil, capitalist, fascist West, where workers are forced to be exploited by their capitalist overlords like slaves for several hours each month just in order to be able to afford basic gigabit Internet service!
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(Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Well, let's look at the numbers, shall we?
Percentage of households owning a car:
(1) USA: 88%
(2) Germany: 85%
(3) South Korea: 83%
(4) France: 83%
Household car ownership rates in the US and Germany are almost the same, filling out spots #1 and #2. Why can't we all be as perfect as the Germans? Oh, wait, we are!
It's not about fairness, it's about what the boundaries of an economy are. Since EU members, just like the US, are part of a structure with free movement of goods and services and a common regulatory regime, it makes little sense to treat them as separate economies. Furthermore, there is this tendency to cherry-pick whatever European nation happens to support a particular argument; comparing one nation against top-of-28 (with the occasional top-of-50 for "Europe") also makes little sense.
Glad you noticed. I'd like to keep it that way. And you know how dictatorships come into power? Usually through claiming that there is an imminent threat that only strong centralized action can address and through getting people upset over unequal distribution of resources. The climate change brouhaha is pretty much textbook "how to grab power", in particular since the proposed policies don't even actually solve the problem. If the people wanting power actually put the cards on the table and described the full extent of what was necessary to effectively address the problem they exist (let's call it "the final solution for the problem of climate change"), people would be running in horror. The strategy is explicitly to grab power incrementally ("we need to do something, this is a good start even if it doesn't solve the problem, we'll do more later"). Civilization could survive even rapid and severe climate change far more easily than it could survive central planning and totalitarianism on a global scale, in particular given the technologies a modern day dictatorship would have at its disposal. I emigrated from Europe. It took me a while to realize how toxic and self-destructive European culture has become in the 20th century.
TFA makes a statement about endpoints, not rate of change. It claims that "hothouse Earth" itself is an 'apocalyptic nightmare". That is what I was responding to.
I can't respond to vague statements like "rate of change matters" because I don't know what you have in mind. For example, many people believe there will be rapid sea level rise "unless we do something", but sea levels can't rise much faster than they are rising now, no matter what we do or don't do.
Not for a country of 330 million that spans a continent, with an economy bigger than the entire EU's and accounting for about a third of the world economy.
We're not talking about growth rates (which are pretty pathetic in Europe anyway), we're talking about rapid innovation necessary for a post-carbon economy. That innovation comes overwhelmingly from the US.
I said Europe, not Germany. If you pick out individual EU members, then compare them to the best individual US states.
Second, the time scale to look at is over the last ten years, when shale gas caused a significant drop in US carbon emissions. The point being that real carbon emission reductions don't happen mainly through conservation but through innovation.
Please don't trouble yourself. Pointing to embedded carbon, per capita vs intensity, etc. wasn't my attempt to resolve these questions through debate, it was to point out the futility of debating these points. There is no objectively correct answer to the question of how much carbon a nation ought to emit, nor even an objectively correct way of measuring it, and there is never going to be agreement on these points among different people or different countries. You may think that using per capita emissions is the right thing, I consider that choice not just bad but immoral.
This is what I actually wrote: In any case, in terms of energy intensity, the US is comparable to Sweden, Belgium, and Australia and about world average; in terms of carbon intensity, the US is far below world average. Calling the US a "carbon pig" given those facts makes little sense. If you get out of that that I'm asserting that the US "is particularly carbon efficient", then you must be illiterate.
Planets don't care. And in terms of biological diversity and suitability for primates and humans, up to 1000 ppm is clearly fine, and we're never going to reach that.
And that is pretty much what carbon intensity measures: carbon emissions for a given standard of living. And the US is pretty average among Western nations in that regard.