You have been able to change your gender officially for decades. All the recent brouhaha has effectively been over being able to change it at a whim. You see, having to put your firm conviction that you are gender X or gender Y on record is somehow a tool of patriarchal oppression.
SCOTUS is not going to allow that to happen; it violates equal protection in fundamental ways. And such mandates should offend anybody with an ounce of decency and commitment to classical liberal values.
That's a bizarre qualifier - the transition IS the problem
I was responding to TFA. TFA claims that the "Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare", not just the transition. I merely pointed out that this was bullshit.
When someone describes what transition they imagine in concrete terms, then one can have a rational discussion about whether the transition itself presents a problem and which kind of transition is worse.
Great example of the perfect solution fallacy. Since we can't stop things entirely, there's no point to taking any action at all.
We're not talking about an imperfect solution, we're talking about something that doesn't solve the problem it purports to address at all.
PS:
We've got an entire civilization built around relatively static locations of coastlines, farmland, natural resources, etc.
Absolutely ridiculous in light of 20th and 21st century history, as well as how cities operate. My home town was bombed into a pile of rubble and civilization there didn't come to a standstill.
That so-called "apocalyptic nightmare" is actually the warm, wet, and mild conditions that existed through most of the past 50 million years, the climate that led to the spectacular success of mammals and primates. Not only is it "hospitable" to human life, it is more hospitable than the cold and dry climate we have had over the last million years and that climate activists want to perpetuate.
That's easily verifiable. Go look it up.
My second point was this:
Short of global thermonuclear war, there is nothing we can do over the next 10-20 years that will have any appreciable impact on long term climate: there is no conceivable political or economic way that China, India, or African nations would agree to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, developed nations are already eliminating dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for economic reasons.
Again, that's easily verifiable; even the Obama administration agreed. Generally, the plan was to reduce GHG emissions moderately during his presidency and then kick the can down to the next guy and the next guy after that.
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; (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. Stop trying to derail discussions by bringing up irrelevant points about carbon taxes; you try to win arguments by dragging in more and more irrelevant shit instead of responding to the original point.
Police and other government services love getting powerful military hardware. If this really were to work, we wouldn't end up with the military dropping bombs on forest fires, we'd end up with fire departments owning bombers, plus the creeps who get a kick out of having that much power and destruction at their fingertips. And we end up footing the bill.
The National Association of Secretaries of State said in a statement that it is "ready to work with civic-minded members of the DEFCON community wanting to become part of a proactive team effort to secure our elections."
How about you do your f*cking job and secure our elections, or you get fired and/or imprisoned?
Why would that be the case? It does not make sense. Obviously I do the opposite, I increase my productivity, so I get more work done and hence more money, aka increasing my wage from $100/h to $150/h.
Good grief, I see why you are having such bizarre ideas about economic policy. "I'll just increase my productivity arbitrarily". It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
Your contention was that the USA was more carbon efficient. I pointed out that this was incorrect.
I said no such thing. What I said is:
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.
My contention is that the US is a fairly typical industrialized nation and that beyond that, one can't say anything meaningful because economies, populations, and trade are vastly different.
And the USA is an inventive nation, with many great achievements under its belt, so there's no particular reason it could not do better, and it would be great to see, not just for the planet, but because it would be good for the USA to be leading on such an important area of technology even more than it is already.
If the US is supposed to lead on renewable energies, the last thing it should do is saddle its economy with the kind of stifling regulations that European nations impose. Furthermore, US carbon emissions have been dropping faster than European carbon emissions.
Germany is one of the largest exporters of industrial output per capita by value, possibly the largest, so it is still impressive, and the USA also outsources carbon-intensive industry.
So? What's your point? I didn't try to argue that Germany or the US specifically were better or worse, simply that per-capita measures of carbon emissions are meaningless. Looks like you agree.
Where it does get tricky, though, is determining to what extent the embedded carbon of imports affects things.... The calculations get complex, though, but it might be fair. It would mean, though, that the carbon footprint of China
What's the "embedded carbon" in a movie? In a bank transaction? Most of the carbon these days isn't embedded in physical products. The numbers we can compare are carbon intensity under various assignments of economic activity between countries. But even there, it's unclear why anybody should care.
The government has nothing to do with that. Companies decide by themselves how much it is worth and how much it costs to replace high skilled workers in Germany (or other EU countries) with untrained workers e.g. in China or Indonesia.
I can't tell whether you're dishonest or naive. Low unemployment is big priority for the German government and it will do whatever it takes to accomplish this. That means both subsidizing and pressuring companies, and if everything else fails, even buying into companies. VW, for example, is partially government owned.
Yeah, and everything he did so far back fired. If America does no longer want to buy German cars, we sell them in the emerging markets.
We'll see how that works out for Merkel in the next election when profits are down and unemployment is up.
Carbon intensity is the only meaningful metric: it tells you whether the carbon is put to good use or not.
When the value of the dollar drops, the intensity of the US goes up. If Netherlands simply doubles all its prices it doubles its GPD, and halfs its carbon intensity that way.
Carbon intensity is measured in $PPP, so no, things don't work that way.
The multithreading support in Julia 1.0 still says "experimental". So does it have usable threads or not? How good is the thread implementation? Comparable to Java? To C++? Are the standard data structures thread safe? How many spurious locks are there?
you're at 1.5 MJ per 42-cent-part, less than half of my lowest number
You can calculate what the average about of energy per product is from the US energy intensity. Starting with $7 / kgoe (US energy intensity) you get 6 MJ / $ or 2.6 MJ for your $0.42 part.
For instance, if we take an average cell phone... 175 MJ ball park
We have the numbers for the iPhone. That's 80 kg of CO2 or 27 kgoe or 1000 MJ, not 175 MJ, so you're way off.
Well, among other things, basic physics requires a small increase in global average temperatures due to increased carbon concentrations. But it's a self-limiting process.
You brought up a theoretical argument. I falsified it with a counterexample
I'm sorry, you mistook a statement of belief for an argument. I believe that generally, under the conditions of our economy, for real world businesses, the amount of carbon taxation is about equal to the amount by which Americans get impoverished. There are obviously hypothetical economies for which this isn't true and you constructed one of those. Congratulations, but that isn't our economy.
And good luck with that; for every study that supports your viewpoint, I'll find one that supports mine.
Yes, and that's your problem: you form your opinions based on experts; it's common among people advocating progressive policies.
Now, be all that as it may be, the part you still haven't explained is how a modest carbon tax is actually going to stop climate change. Obama's climate action plan was to reduce GHGE to 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. How is that going to stop climate change?
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.
Where does "switch instantaneously" appear anywhere in there?
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.
And there has been: renewables have been around for decades.
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.
We're not disagreeing about the raw evidence: basic economic data, time series, environmental data, etc. I and others use the same raw data ("evidence") that the Obama report uses or Gore or the IPCC to reach opposite policy conclusions.
Me: Here is contention A, supported by evidence B
What you have done is pointed to conclusions (mostly about policy) reached by people and organizations you consider reputable. That is not science, it's not the application of reason, and it's not evidence.
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.
I can't take you through the arguments about radiative physics, paleoclimatology or free market economics. All I can tell you is to use your own head and do lots of reading, instead of believing reports from the Obama administration.
So we agree that they should be using 7%, but they actually choose something less.
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.
Yes, but it apparently hasn't sunk in with you what that means, namely that in order to save $1 in 2100, we should at most spend $0.003 today. That's what a 7% discount rate gives you.
I am advocating for the collective choice of a carbon tax.
Yes, and you have yet to justify that. You are reasoning as if a moderate carbon tax magically makes climate change disappear.
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.
You said The externality is ALREADY creating a major inefficiency in the market. Lung cancers that haven't yet manifested are not creating any "externalities" or "inefficiencies in the market". (Furthermore, lung cancers don't actually create economic inefficiencies at all, since they usually appear at the end of people's working life and actually save medical costs.)
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.
Yes, it's amazing what you can do with cherry-picked fake numbers, in particular if you ignore most of the energy that is actually going into your hypothetical products.
Now repeat the exercise with actual carbon intensity numbers for the US economy and see what the actual effect is.
Again, sticking to the facts: the US joined the Paris agreement and took some measures (however weak) to curb CO2 emissions under Obama.
Yes, and the fact is that the Paris agreement was useless from the point of view of reducing carbon emissions enough to influence the climate. Furthermore, it placed an undue burden on the US. That is, the Paris agreement was not about climate change, it was about protectionism and foreign subsidies.
Trump appointed a climate change denier for EPA president and is boasting how he is going to pull out of the Paris agreement.
Yes, Trump pulled out of an agreement that was a farce, ineffective at accomplishing its stated objectives, and mainly hurt the American taxpayer. Americans should be grateful for that.
And yet you haven't even done the effort to get yourself educated on the difference between fascism and socialism (and, let me guess, communism is also the same thing?)
Oh, I very much have. Both are collectivist ideologies concerned with inequality and social justice, both strongly oppose liberalism, both divide up society into groups and postulate economic conflicts between those groups, and both are virulently anti-capitalist. The main difference is that fascism tolerates private ownership of the means of production while socialism doesn't. You can figure out for yourself where Sanders fits on that spectrum.
From your statement, it sounds like you may suffer from the common delusion that one is preferable to the other?
Process X requires 22 cent worth of materials + 4 kWh worth of energy. Process Y requires 38 cent worth of materials + 1 kWh worth of energy. Now suppose a 20% carbon tax increases the cost of energy from 5 cent/kWh to 6 cent/kWh. Before the carbon tax, process X costs 42 cent and process Y 43 cent, so you'll use X, and part A costs 42 cent. After the carbon tax, process X costs 46 cent and process Y 44 cent, so you'll use Y, and part A costs 44 cent. Total cost increase for part A: 5%...
Nice, you actually put something concrete on the table that we can analyze. First, let's observe that you postulated something that is pretty unusual, namely exactly the same output arrived at by two very different kinds of processes; let's note that this is implausible. Next, you assumed a product for which energy is only a small percentage of the inputs; not surprisingly, for such products, imposing a tax will not have large effect, but again that's unusual. But the biggest problem with your example is that you overlook that the "materials" that go into the product themselves require energy to produce, so their prices will also go up.
In fact, most of the products in the US have large numbers of inputs. So let's estimate the effect of a carbon tax as proposed in one of the documents you shared on a product with many average inputs. A barrel of oil is 140 kg of oil (kgoe) and the proposed tax is $40/barrel, or about $0.30/kg of oil. US energy intensity is $7 / kgoe, so that's about a 4% tax on GDP.
Because in your fantasy world it's an instantaneous thing to switch the entire grid to a new energy source, I guess?
Why would they need to "switch instantaneously"? The concern about energy usage is nothing new, as is the desire for businesses to lower costs, and people have worked intensively on alternative energies for decades. The cost of solar cells has been steadily and predictably decreasing for decades, and industries have adopted solar as it made financial sense for them. Ditto for other forms of alternative energy.
It would be increasing even more if we stopped all the subsidies for fossil fuels.
I'm all for stopping all subsidies. Fossil fuel subsidies are pretty small (or even negative given the tax structure). Alternative energies are very highly subsidies per kW/h, however.
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.
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.
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. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to actually understanding this stuff. So far, you obviously don't seem prepared to even engage in a rational argument (I quote you: "I don't need to prove the null hypothesis - that the current state of affairs will continue, barring outside influence").
Watch out for the swing of the political pendulum, tovarish.
If you think that Democrats are going to institute meaningful carbon emission controls, you're a fool. Democrats would use climate change simply as a pretext to funnel large amounts of money to their politically connected buddies. Actual carbon emission reductions only happen through the market. The mainstream Democratic party is just a slightly more racist, slightly more corporatist, and slightly more corrupt version of the Republicans.
Of course, there is always a risk that fascists/socialists like Sanders get into power, usually based on the kinds of economic stupidity people like you keep spreading. My family has been through that a few times, and you can bet that I'm prepared for it. Right now, your stuff is pretty weak though, so I don't see that happening any time soon.
No. They specifically discuss the discount rate and accounting for investment returns here [archives.gov].
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.
Arguments should be weighed on their own merit and on the strength of the evidence provided - not based on emotional appeals and personal attacks.
I'm not making a "personal attack", I'm pointing out a false dichotomy you're making: either engage in collective action or take no action at all. In fact, individual, voluntary action is a perfectly feasible choice. Anybody in the US who believes climate change is an existential threat can already live a carbon neutral lifestyle if they choose, and pay the price.
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
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". (And, no, externalities are not inefficiencies.)
instead of flood victims paying the social cost of the carbon
And this nicely illustrates the kind of shell game and deception you are engaging in: flood victims right now are not paying "the social cost of the carbon", they are paying the social cost of bad government land use policies. We'd have no "flood victims" if people didn't choose to settle in flood zones or coastal areas and if the US government didn't constantly pay people to rebuild there. And what is even more annoying about this in the US is that the people who are asking for ever more government handouts in order to settle in those areas are largely wealthy already. The federal flood insurance program is an outrage, and to try to justify this kind of corrupt crap with climate change is outrageous.
Didn't I just literally say that you can keep on believing in your fairy tales AFAICS? You and I may not be the only once reading this conversation (now or in the future). Hence, it's a "debate". In which you're presenting blatantly dishonest arguments (see above) and I'm calling you out on it to prevent you from infecting other gullible people.
Climate change legislation and agreements are dead. The US dropped out entirely, and Europe has been engaging in a meaningless farce and has much more serious issues on its plate. There is nobody to "infect" because the issue is politically dead.
These discussions are more of a post mortem. People like you are the modern equivalent of flat earthers or believers in apocalyptic prophets and it's interesting to see what makes you tick.
Slashdot Mirror
You have been able to change your gender officially for decades. All the recent brouhaha has effectively been over being able to change it at a whim. You see, having to put your firm conviction that you are gender X or gender Y on record is somehow a tool of patriarchal oppression.
SCOTUS is not going to allow that to happen; it violates equal protection in fundamental ways. And such mandates should offend anybody with an ounce of decency and commitment to classical liberal values.
I was responding to TFA. TFA claims that the "Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare", not just the transition. I merely pointed out that this was bullshit.
When someone describes what transition they imagine in concrete terms, then one can have a rational discussion about whether the transition itself presents a problem and which kind of transition is worse.
We're not talking about an imperfect solution, we're talking about something that doesn't solve the problem it purports to address at all.
PS:
Absolutely ridiculous in light of 20th and 21st century history, as well as how cities operate. My home town was bombed into a pile of rubble and civilization there didn't come to a standstill.
I think I made my original case pretty clearly:
That so-called "apocalyptic nightmare" is actually the warm, wet, and mild conditions that existed through most of the past 50 million years, the climate that led to the spectacular success of mammals and primates. Not only is it "hospitable" to human life, it is more hospitable than the cold and dry climate we have had over the last million years and that climate activists want to perpetuate.
That's easily verifiable. Go look it up.
My second point was this:
Short of global thermonuclear war, there is nothing we can do over the next 10-20 years that will have any appreciable impact on long term climate: there is no conceivable political or economic way that China, India, or African nations would agree to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, developed nations are already eliminating dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for economic reasons.
Again, that's easily verifiable; even the Obama administration agreed. Generally, the plan was to reduce GHG emissions moderately during his presidency and then kick the can down to the next guy and the next guy after that.
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; (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. Stop trying to derail discussions by bringing up irrelevant points about carbon taxes; you try to win arguments by dragging in more and more irrelevant shit instead of responding to the original point.
Police and other government services love getting powerful military hardware. If this really were to work, we wouldn't end up with the military dropping bombs on forest fires, we'd end up with fire departments owning bombers, plus the creeps who get a kick out of having that much power and destruction at their fingertips. And we end up footing the bill.
How about you do your f*cking job and secure our elections, or you get fired and/or imprisoned?
Good grief, I see why you are having such bizarre ideas about economic policy. "I'll just increase my productivity arbitrarily". It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
I said no such thing. What I said is:
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.
My contention is that the US is a fairly typical industrialized nation and that beyond that, one can't say anything meaningful because economies, populations, and trade are vastly different.
If the US is supposed to lead on renewable energies, the last thing it should do is saddle its economy with the kind of stifling regulations that European nations impose. Furthermore, US carbon emissions have been dropping faster than European carbon emissions.
So? What's your point? I didn't try to argue that Germany or the US specifically were better or worse, simply that per-capita measures of carbon emissions are meaningless. Looks like you agree.
What's the "embedded carbon" in a movie? In a bank transaction? Most of the carbon these days isn't embedded in physical products. The numbers we can compare are carbon intensity under various assignments of economic activity between countries. But even there, it's unclear why anybody should care.
I can't tell whether you're dishonest or naive. Low unemployment is big priority for the German government and it will do whatever it takes to accomplish this. That means both subsidizing and pressuring companies, and if everything else fails, even buying into companies. VW, for example, is partially government owned.
We'll see how that works out for Merkel in the next election when profits are down and unemployment is up.
Carbon intensity is the only meaningful metric: it tells you whether the carbon is put to good use or not.
Carbon intensity is measured in $PPP, so no, things don't work that way.
The multithreading support in Julia 1.0 still says "experimental". So does it have usable threads or not? How good is the thread implementation? Comparable to Java? To C++? Are the standard data structures thread safe? How many spurious locks are there?
You can calculate what the average about of energy per product is from the US energy intensity. Starting with $7 / kgoe (US energy intensity) you get 6 MJ / $ or 2.6 MJ for your $0.42 part.
We have the numbers for the iPhone. That's 80 kg of CO2 or 27 kgoe or 1000 MJ, not 175 MJ, so you're way off.
Well, among other things, basic physics requires a small increase in global average temperatures due to increased carbon concentrations. But it's a self-limiting process.
No doubt you follow scientism, and integral part of progressivism.
I'm sorry, you mistook a statement of belief for an argument. I believe that generally, under the conditions of our economy, for real world businesses, the amount of carbon taxation is about equal to the amount by which Americans get impoverished. There are obviously hypothetical economies for which this isn't true and you constructed one of those. Congratulations, but that isn't our economy.
Yes, and that's your problem: you form your opinions based on experts; it's common among people advocating progressive policies.
Now, be all that as it may be, the part you still haven't explained is how a modest carbon tax is actually going to stop climate change. Obama's climate action plan was to reduce GHGE to 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025. How is that going to stop climate change?
Where does "switch instantaneously" appear anywhere in there?
And there has been: renewables have been around for decades.
We're not disagreeing about the raw evidence: basic economic data, time series, environmental data, etc. I and others use the same raw data ("evidence") that the Obama report uses or Gore or the IPCC to reach opposite policy conclusions.
What you have done is pointed to conclusions (mostly about policy) reached by people and organizations you consider reputable. That is not science, it's not the application of reason, and it's not evidence.
I can't take you through the arguments about radiative physics, paleoclimatology or free market economics. All I can tell you is to use your own head and do lots of reading, instead of believing reports from the Obama administration.
So we agree that they should be using 7%, but they actually choose something less.
Yes, but it apparently hasn't sunk in with you what that means, namely that in order to save $1 in 2100, we should at most spend $0.003 today. That's what a 7% discount rate gives you.
Yes, and you have yet to justify that. You are reasoning as if a moderate carbon tax magically makes climate change disappear.
You said The externality is ALREADY creating a major inefficiency in the market. Lung cancers that haven't yet manifested are not creating any "externalities" or "inefficiencies in the market". (Furthermore, lung cancers don't actually create economic inefficiencies at all, since they usually appear at the end of people's working life and actually save medical costs.)
And a carbon tax will do nothing to change that.
Yes, it's amazing what you can do with cherry-picked fake numbers, in particular if you ignore most of the energy that is actually going into your hypothetical products.
Now repeat the exercise with actual carbon intensity numbers for the US economy and see what the actual effect is.
Yes, and the fact is that the Paris agreement was useless from the point of view of reducing carbon emissions enough to influence the climate. Furthermore, it placed an undue burden on the US. That is, the Paris agreement was not about climate change, it was about protectionism and foreign subsidies.
Yes, Trump pulled out of an agreement that was a farce, ineffective at accomplishing its stated objectives, and mainly hurt the American taxpayer. Americans should be grateful for that.
Oh, I very much have. Both are collectivist ideologies concerned with inequality and social justice, both strongly oppose liberalism, both divide up society into groups and postulate economic conflicts between those groups, and both are virulently anti-capitalist. The main difference is that fascism tolerates private ownership of the means of production while socialism doesn't. You can figure out for yourself where Sanders fits on that spectrum.
From your statement, it sounds like you may suffer from the common delusion that one is preferable to the other?
Nice, you actually put something concrete on the table that we can analyze. First, let's observe that you postulated something that is pretty unusual, namely exactly the same output arrived at by two very different kinds of processes; let's note that this is implausible. Next, you assumed a product for which energy is only a small percentage of the inputs; not surprisingly, for such products, imposing a tax will not have large effect, but again that's unusual. But the biggest problem with your example is that you overlook that the "materials" that go into the product themselves require energy to produce, so their prices will also go up.
In fact, most of the products in the US have large numbers of inputs. So let's estimate the effect of a carbon tax as proposed in one of the documents you shared on a product with many average inputs. A barrel of oil is 140 kg of oil (kgoe) and the proposed tax is $40/barrel, or about $0.30/kg of oil. US energy intensity is $7 / kgoe, so that's about a 4% tax on GDP.
Why would they need to "switch instantaneously"? The concern about energy usage is nothing new, as is the desire for businesses to lower costs, and people have worked intensively on alternative energies for decades. The cost of solar cells has been steadily and predictably decreasing for decades, and industries have adopted solar as it made financial sense for them. Ditto for other forms of alternative energy.
I'm all for stopping all subsidies. Fossil fuel subsidies are pretty small (or even negative given the tax structure). Alternative energies are very highly subsidies per kW/h, however.
Well, that's not a scientific approach. A scientific approach is to use reason and evidence, not reputation and sources.
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. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to actually understanding this stuff. So far, you obviously don't seem prepared to even engage in a rational argument (I quote you: "I don't need to prove the null hypothesis - that the current state of affairs will continue, barring outside influence").
If you think that Democrats are going to institute meaningful carbon emission controls, you're a fool. Democrats would use climate change simply as a pretext to funnel large amounts of money to their politically connected buddies. Actual carbon emission reductions only happen through the market. The mainstream Democratic party is just a slightly more racist, slightly more corporatist, and slightly more corrupt version of the Republicans.
Of course, there is always a risk that fascists/socialists like Sanders get into power, usually based on the kinds of economic stupidity people like you keep spreading. My family has been through that a few times, and you can bet that I'm prepared for it. Right now, your stuff is pretty weak though, so I don't see that happening any time soon.
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.
I'm not making a "personal attack", I'm pointing out a false dichotomy you're making: either engage in collective action or take no action at all. In fact, individual, voluntary action is a perfectly feasible choice. Anybody in the US who believes climate change is an existential threat can already live a carbon neutral lifestyle if they choose, and pay the price.
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". (And, no, externalities are not inefficiencies.)
And this nicely illustrates the kind of shell game and deception you are engaging in: flood victims right now are not paying "the social cost of the carbon", they are paying the social cost of bad government land use policies. We'd have no "flood victims" if people didn't choose to settle in flood zones or coastal areas and if the US government didn't constantly pay people to rebuild there. And what is even more annoying about this in the US is that the people who are asking for ever more government handouts in order to settle in those areas are largely wealthy already. The federal flood insurance program is an outrage, and to try to justify this kind of corrupt crap with climate change is outrageous.
Climate change legislation and agreements are dead. The US dropped out entirely, and Europe has been engaging in a meaningless farce and has much more serious issues on its plate. There is nobody to "infect" because the issue is politically dead.
These discussions are more of a post mortem. People like you are the modern equivalent of flat earthers or believers in apocalyptic prophets and it's interesting to see what makes you tick.