No, it does not. Since you appear to be a bit short of memory (see further down) your statement was:
Yes, indeed it was! I assumed that you were smart enough to figure out the apportioned case yourself. Since you can't figure it out yourself, I'll work it out slowly for you again below.
If you make energy a bit more expensive, the balance will shift to a new optimum, in which less energy is spent
We agree on this.
This price difference partially goes to the sectors that provide the aforementioned "other things" and partially to the government. Which could use the extra income to e.g. increase the buying power of those who don't have much of it, or to decrease taxes for everyone, or to invest into the economy
Let's say the government raises the carbon tax by 10% and gets a reduction in carbon usage by 50%. That means that half of users decide that compliance is cheaper than 10% and their costs will go up by the difference. The other half of energy users just pay the 10%, raise their prices, and government is going to spend the money on some unproductive purpose. Either way, Americans end up substantially poorer because of the carbon tax. And those differences compound over the years. Your error is in assuming that this doesn't matter when, in fact, it is far more devastating than any form of climate change.
No car manufacturer dared to move production to e.g. Africa or China
I said that a German car manufacturer can simply move the carbon intensive production steps out of the country. For example, aluminum production has declined greatly in Germany since the 1980's. German car manufacturers are so heavily subsidized and politically connected in Germany that they obviously can't move production out of Germany wholesale.
After all german cars are bought by Germans, too. Why would I trade 10,000 unemployed for a car that is $1000 cheaper when I lose half my traditional buyers?
Yes, that's the traditional protectionist attitude: let's adopt government policies that keep our workers employed domestically even if it costs more money. The reason why you might not want to do that is because eventually, other countries do the same thing, free trade collapses, and you end up with a lot more than 10000 unemployed. You may notice that Trump got elected on, among other things, getting tough on Europeans; this is why.
Read for yourself, that's why I provided the citation.
And as I explained to you, they are deliberately using the wrong discounting rate and they fail to account for benefits, opportunity costs, and technological progress. The article is scientifically worthless.
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.
Is anybody keeping you from taking action? You can reduce your own carbon footprint to zero if you like. My carbon footprint is probably smaller than yours. What's keeping you?
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.
Yes, that's what a rational person does, and you are welcome to do it, as is anybody else in a free society. 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. (I strongly encourage you to read up on the history of analogizing between persons and societies; that is not a company you want to keep.)
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.
We agree on that. The part you keep denying is that this makes everybody poorer by roughly the amount you tax people by. And the part you underestimate is how serious that is economically and politically: just a few percent impact on the economy is the difference between growth and a satisfied population on the one hand, and a miserable depression and potential revolution on the other.
Nope, I'm not double-counting. I clearly said the price difference PARTIALLY goes to the sectors that provide the aforementioned "other things" and PARTIALLY to the government. Clearly my attempt to pull you out of your imaginary all-or-nothing world has completely failed.
I'm not making an "all or nothing" argument. My statement obviously also holds for partial allocations between the two extremes, as should have been obvious.
Excuse me. I gave an EXPLANATION on why I think it won't be bad.
No, you merely said that "the assumption that carbon tax will necessarily make it worse is very much unproven."
nd I'm not going to waste more time on debating with someone
We're not having a "debate"; you're trying to convince me to change my position and you're failing. Any significant increase in energy costs or fossil fuels clearly has negative effects on me and on my retirement funds. On top of that, I think it's also devastating for developing nations and hence deeply immoral. Against that I see some unproven, highly discounted benefits a century or more from now and ridiculous and unscientific fear mongering about "mass extinctions". And you haven't just failed to convince me, people like you have failed to convince voters. Even European governments have failed to adopt meaningful emissions standards and are mostly using climate change as a gimmick to institute protectionist policies.
So, I don't have to prove anything since my position is the default position that we have already adopted. You have to prove your point if you want to convince people like me to change.
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.
So your reasoning is based simply on extrapolating a graph. Sorry, but that's not valid science nor a rational basis for policy.
What the hell else would you use? Those are the EXACT figures for how costly the energy is,
If those were the "exact figures", then all the businesses in the world would already have switched. Since they haven't, those figures fail to account for many hidden costs.
Sorry, but just because Berkeley economics teaches something doesn't make it true.
Externalities lead to LESS market efficiency, and LESS prosperity for all involved
Whatever externalities climate change may or may not have, they are mostly many decades in the future. So, even all your economic arguments were valid, what you are proposing is decreasing prosperity now in exchange for increasing prosperity in the future, and future prosperity needs to be discounted at around 5-7% per year.
What are you using? What evidence would you accept as sufficient?
Using for what? I'm not trying to prove anything. Carbon taxes clearly make the cost of products go up and force me to switch from products that I like to products that I don't like for no tangible gain. That's why I and the majority of voters in all Western democracies largely refuse to go along with any meaningful carbon reduction mandates. If you want to change that, you need to up your gain in terms of making rational arguments.
So far, everything you have said is stuff I already know and have rejected. 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, and that we should weigh future undiscounted costs against current undiscounted costs; I changed my mind after looking at the data. I suspect you will do too if you spend the time to look deeper into it.
And while we're arguing about who is doing what about cutting the carbon emissions, the Earth's climate is steadily changing.
Earth's climate is always changing.
Nobody will care about money when people start dying off from famine and heat.
Well, lucky then that climate change will produce neither.
We've been doing the same thing for decades.
And, for better or for worse, fossil fuel use will largely be eliminated in the West within half a century. Short of a thermonuclear war or a communist takeover of the world, there is nothing that can stop that. See, people work, innovate, eat and shit without the government telling them to, and they do it better when they are left alone and not taxed.
Bla-bla-bla should go away and we should start taking this far more seriously, because when it happens we will have nothing left to argue about, and there might even not be anybody left to argue with.
It's just amazing that as people have become secular, they still need their apocalyptic beliefs. If people like you don't start acting rationally, Western civilization is going to collapse again; that has happened before.
Citation? This is a totally unsupported claim, and I see no reason to believe this wishful thinking.
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. And to extrapolate from current rates to future rates assumes that the current status is a steady state, which is also clearly not true.
So, you tell me why you think that you can extrapolate extinction rates over the next 100 or 1000 years and I'll tell you why you're wrong.
Wrong, so all the rest of your conclusions are wrong. Egypt's new solar power plant comes in at $.03/kw-hr.
The kW/h figures don't actually tell you how costly that energy is. Sorry.
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. You may believe the EDF because it is looks science-y, but that doesn't make it objectively true.
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.
Yes, you keep saying that. It turns out to be economically wrong (you can't really "account" for externalities through taxes).
But even if you could, it would require a global tax scheme, and that's not going to happen.
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.
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?
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,
The "best currently available estimate" is useless; we can't even predict the effects of changes to tax rates on revenue. The idea that we can calculate the global cost of climate change, attribute responsibility to emitters, and then tax them accordingly is beyond ludicrous.
But energy consumption will still not be "minimal"
I didn't say that "energy consumption was minimal", I said that companies minimize the amount of money spent on energy. They can clearly minimize energy usage further, but it increases costs and decreases productivity.
Yes, the product will get slightly more expensive.... as long as we're talking about a reasonable carbon tax rate... The nonchalance with which society consumes energy clearly demonstrates
You assume businesses and other people "consume with nonchalance" and that if something costs only a few percent more it doesn't matter. But in reality, businesses worry about tiny fractions of a percent in their finances. And at the level of the economy, if you impose carbon taxes that amount to, say, 2% on products and services, that's a massive difference; that makes the difference between a healthy growth and economic stagnation.
Which could use the extra income to e.g. increase the buying power of those who don't have much of it, or to decrease taxes for everyone, or to invest into the economy
You're double-counting the taxes; if they succeed, you don't collect the revenue, if they fail, they are simply a tax increase on businesses unrelated to carbon. But either way, prices go up, less stuff is being produced, and society is worse off.
Bottom line: the economy is not as simple as you might imagine, and your assumption that carbon tax will necessarily make it worse is very much unproven.
Oh, the economy is very complex, but that complexity won't turn bad economic policy into good one, it merely means that we don't know how bad a carbon tax is, but it is inevitable that it has a negative effect on the economy.
In other words, your statement is the equivalent of "medicine and the human body are very complex, so eating like a pig might actually be good for me!" It's the typical self-serving justification for bad decisions.
I think the evidence for a modest amount of anthropogenic warming is pretty good, there are simply lots of other confounding factors. Where we seem to agree is that nothing needs to be done about it.
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.
Really? Who do you think can "accurately" calculate those externalities? Are you going to tax people to whom this is a positive externality as well? If not, why not? Heck, we don't even know what discount rate to apply for damage that occurs a century from now.
Furthermore, government action on externalities only even has the potential to work if it transfers payments from people causing harm to people being harmed. The current and proposed carbon tax regimes just take the money and then spend it on government projects. That is not addressing a hidden market externality, it is simply a general taxation scheme using the pretext of externalities for justification.
Sorry, the externalities justification just doesn't hold water.
Those are people who don't have health insurance, often by choice, not people who can't get health insurance. That's a big difference. The ACA health plans are such a financial ripoff that it's rational to be uninsured, in particular if you're young and healthy. If I could, I wouldn't have ACA-compliant coverage; as is, I picked the cheapest and most useless plan I could get and pay everything out of pocket.
(2) I'm pretty sure spending more on healthcare for people who are un/underinsured will make them healthier. Not sure how you can disagree with that.
No, more spending does not translate into better health. For example, the US spends a lot more per capita than countries with better health outcomes. And it's been shown that people on Medicaid have health outcomes that are no better, and often worse, than those with no insurance at all. Ultimately, the best way to improve health is for people to live a healthy lifestyle and take preventative measures; healthcare has a very limited effect on health, and too much healthcare spending (as in the US) has a statistically negative effect on population health.
(3) This is debatable but there's numerous studies indicating that healthy workers contribute to a more robust economy. See: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/n... [harvard.edu]
The article talks about "indirect costs associated with preventable chronic diseases". What are those "preventable chronic diseases"? Heart disease and diabetes. The way to eliminate those costs is to actually prevent the preventable diseases. How do you do that? By maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, and exercising. None of those involve healthcare spending. In fact, excessive healthcare spending is what encourages people to lead the kinds of lifestyles that lead to preventable chronic diseases in the first place, because they assume (correctly) that they don't have to face the financial or personal consequences of their sloth and gluttony for many years to come.
OK, now I know you're just making shit up to justify your world view.
My world view is based on actually having looked at the data and having been insured in half a dozen different systems around the world. I encourage you to look at the data yourself, instead of trying to find various biased secondary articles written by journalists.
There is nothing to account for. You cannot conclude anything from the absence of statistical significance. So we don't know which of these differences are real and which ones are not, hence it's pointless to speculate which of the alternative hypotheses I listed applies. Women treating men may have the same statistical differences as women treating women, but they didn't show up.
But let's say we actually knew all the differences for certain. Every possible pattern of differences could simply be explained in terms of patient and doctor demographics and self-selection, without any sexism or bias, and that would be the obvious explanation and would have to be excluded first. Jumping to the conclusion that this gives " greater urgency to diversity initiatives in medicine" is utterly unsupported by the data, in particular since women are already overrepresented in medical schools.
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.
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.
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
Right now, renewables are more expensive than non-renewable energy, so if you force people to use them, you harm economic progress. If you harm economic progress, the rate of improvement and the adoption of renewables will be slower and the outcomes will be worse.
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.
"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.
Pure bullshit. It's figured out how to do the minimum required of it by law.
No, what greedy capitalists have done is figured out the most profitable way of producing beer (and other products). That means, among other things, minimizing the amount of money spent on energy.
That's because you're willfully ignorant so that you can justify believing that what we are doing now is okay, so that you don't have to do anything to improve things.
I do lots of things to improve things; as an engineer and inventor, that's my job. I would like government and "willfully ignorant people" like you not to interfere with that.
Do any of those explanations account for the lack of statistical difference between male and female doctors when the patient is male?
Your question shows a fundamental misunderstanding of "lack of statistical[ly significant] difference". A lack of statistically significant difference doesn't mean "evidence of absence" it means "absence of evidence".
That is provably false. Scientists have figured out how to reduce it as much as possible, but industry is lagging behind.
I'm sorry, you're missing context here; in general, you don't need a scientist to reduce carbon emissions to zero, just a nuclear bomb. In context: The market already has figured out how to reduce it as much as economically possible; more taxation doesn't help. That is, more taxation certainly leads to less carbon emission, but it does so by making people poorer.
If Democracy can't do the job, get ready for anarchy leading to feudalism when democracies fail due to climate change.
Your irrational apocalyptic fears are your problem. I don't worry about climate change causing democracies to fail.
In that case, get ready for everything to go to shit in a way that makes what we have now look like paradise.
What we have now is a paradise by historical standards. I'd like it to stay that way.
No, I don't have any evidence. My points are called "alternative hypotheses". Actual scientists understand that proposing alternative hypotheses is a key element of how science makes progress.
My point doesn't rest on the fact that climate change is the sole cause of extinction.
I don't know what "your point" is. 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.
I don't see how you can look at this evidence and conclude that everything is fine and we should continue operations as normal with no regard for the consequences. I don't have any particular pet policies, just things that I think would be effective and economically practical - like a carbon tax,
I don't conclude everything is fine. 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.
By misattributing the problem of extinction to climate change and then proposing solutions intended to combat climate change, you are making the problem worse, not better. You can't fix a problem if you misdiagnose its cause.
No, they will use solar power OR they will pass the tax on to the consumer. In this case, either outcome is a success
If you need a $10000 tax to get some business to adopt solar power, that means that the cost of adopting it is $10000. That's how tax incentives work. So, you can impose the $10000 tax, the business will use solar power, and then pass on the $10000 it paid extra for generating power from solar to consumers.
It really seems like you are arguing that taxes, tariffs, and subsidies have no effect on the market. If not, what are you saying?
They do have an effect on the market. 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.
Agreed. You don't set targets. You just tax CO2 and let the market figure out how to reduce it.
The market already has figured out how to reduce it as much as possible; more taxation doesn't help.
You may also place sanctions against nations for overall production, and let them figure out how to reduce it
Well, if I may, I think Europe should be allowed no carbon emissions at all! Those dirty European bastards still have to pay for the crimes against humanity they committed!
Every nation has a pretty clear picture on how to improve the situation, but nobody wants to do it because it's expensive.
Correct: no democracy is going to say to its citizens "we are going to make everybody 10% poorer because of climate change". Not going to happen.
But if everyone had to do it, because everyone had the same kind of carbon taxes applied to imported goods, then everyone would figure out how to make it happen.
Yes, the eternal dream of statists: if only we could impose our draconian rules globally, then the market couldn't undermine our policies. It's the modern form of the Berlin wall. Again, not going to happen.
At least not yet. This "Creator Edition," says CEO Abovitz, is part of a "controlled market release" in just a handful of cities in the United States for the developers and creative types
"Handful of cities"? What does that mean? You have to prove residency in L.A. to buy one? You have to queue up in line physically in one of these "cities" to get one?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, indeed it was! I assumed that you were smart enough to figure out the apportioned case yourself. Since you can't figure it out yourself, I'll work it out slowly for you again below.
We agree on this.
Let's say the government raises the carbon tax by 10% and gets a reduction in carbon usage by 50%. That means that half of users decide that compliance is cheaper than 10% and their costs will go up by the difference. The other half of energy users just pay the 10%, raise their prices, and government is going to spend the money on some unproductive purpose. Either way, Americans end up substantially poorer because of the carbon tax. And those differences compound over the years. Your error is in assuming that this doesn't matter when, in fact, it is far more devastating than any form of climate change.
I said that a German car manufacturer can simply move the carbon intensive production steps out of the country. For example, aluminum production has declined greatly in Germany since the 1980's. German car manufacturers are so heavily subsidized and politically connected in Germany that they obviously can't move production out of Germany wholesale.
Yes, that's the traditional protectionist attitude: let's adopt government policies that keep our workers employed domestically even if it costs more money. The reason why you might not want to do that is because eventually, other countries do the same thing, free trade collapses, and you end up with a lot more than 10000 unemployed. You may notice that Trump got elected on, among other things, getting tough on Europeans; this is why.
Yes, when I say "carbon intensity" I mean "carbon intensity".
You must have misread the data. US carbon intensity is below world average, comparable to the Netherlands and Hungary.
And as I explained to you, they are deliberately using the wrong discounting rate and they fail to account for benefits, opportunity costs, and technological progress. The article is scientifically worthless.
Is anybody keeping you from taking action? You can reduce your own carbon footprint to zero if you like. My carbon footprint is probably smaller than yours. What's keeping you?
Yes, that's what a rational person does, and you are welcome to do it, as is anybody else in a free society. 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. (I strongly encourage you to read up on the history of analogizing between persons and societies; that is not a company you want to keep.)
We agree on that. The part you keep denying is that this makes everybody poorer by roughly the amount you tax people by. And the part you underestimate is how serious that is economically and politically: just a few percent impact on the economy is the difference between growth and a satisfied population on the one hand, and a miserable depression and potential revolution on the other.
I'm not making an "all or nothing" argument. My statement obviously also holds for partial allocations between the two extremes, as should have been obvious.
No, you merely said that "the assumption that carbon tax will necessarily make it worse is very much unproven."
We're not having a "debate"; you're trying to convince me to change my position and you're failing. Any significant increase in energy costs or fossil fuels clearly has negative effects on me and on my retirement funds. On top of that, I think it's also devastating for developing nations and hence deeply immoral. Against that I see some unproven, highly discounted benefits a century or more from now and ridiculous and unscientific fear mongering about "mass extinctions". And you haven't just failed to convince me, people like you have failed to convince voters. Even European governments have failed to adopt meaningful emissions standards and are mostly using climate change as a gimmick to institute protectionist policies.
So, I don't have to prove anything since my position is the default position that we have already adopted. You have to prove your point if you want to convince people like me to change.
So your reasoning is based simply on extrapolating a graph. Sorry, but that's not valid science nor a rational basis for policy.
If those were the "exact figures", then all the businesses in the world would already have switched. Since they haven't, those figures fail to account for many hidden costs.
Sorry, but just because Berkeley economics teaches something doesn't make it true.
Whatever externalities climate change may or may not have, they are mostly many decades in the future. So, even all your economic arguments were valid, what you are proposing is decreasing prosperity now in exchange for increasing prosperity in the future, and future prosperity needs to be discounted at around 5-7% per year.
Using for what? I'm not trying to prove anything. Carbon taxes clearly make the cost of products go up and force me to switch from products that I like to products that I don't like for no tangible gain. That's why I and the majority of voters in all Western democracies largely refuse to go along with any meaningful carbon reduction mandates. If you want to change that, you need to up your gain in terms of making rational arguments.
So far, everything you have said is stuff I already know and have rejected. 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, and that we should weigh future undiscounted costs against current undiscounted costs; I changed my mind after looking at the data. I suspect you will do too if you spend the time to look deeper into it.
Earth's climate is always changing.
Well, lucky then that climate change will produce neither.
And, for better or for worse, fossil fuel use will largely be eliminated in the West within half a century. Short of a thermonuclear war or a communist takeover of the world, there is nothing that can stop that. See, people work, innovate, eat and shit without the government telling them to, and they do it better when they are left alone and not taxed.
It's just amazing that as people have become secular, they still need their apocalyptic beliefs. If people like you don't start acting rationally, Western civilization is going to collapse again; that has happened before.
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. And to extrapolate from current rates to future rates assumes that the current status is a steady state, which is also clearly not true.
So, you tell me why you think that you can extrapolate extinction rates over the next 100 or 1000 years and I'll tell you why you're wrong.
The kW/h figures don't actually tell you how costly that energy is. Sorry.
I agree: they can be. In the case of climate change, I believe that's not the case; it certainly has never been demonstrated. You may believe the EDF because it is looks science-y, but that doesn't make it objectively true.
Yes, you keep saying that. It turns out to be economically wrong (you can't really "account" for externalities through taxes).
But even if you could, it would require a global tax scheme, and that's not going to happen.
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.
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?
The "best currently available estimate" is useless; we can't even predict the effects of changes to tax rates on revenue. The idea that we can calculate the global cost of climate change, attribute responsibility to emitters, and then tax them accordingly is beyond ludicrous.
I didn't say that "energy consumption was minimal", I said that companies minimize the amount of money spent on energy. They can clearly minimize energy usage further, but it increases costs and decreases productivity.
You assume businesses and other people "consume with nonchalance" and that if something costs only a few percent more it doesn't matter. But in reality, businesses worry about tiny fractions of a percent in their finances. And at the level of the economy, if you impose carbon taxes that amount to, say, 2% on products and services, that's a massive difference; that makes the difference between a healthy growth and economic stagnation.
You're double-counting the taxes; if they succeed, you don't collect the revenue, if they fail, they are simply a tax increase on businesses unrelated to carbon. But either way, prices go up, less stuff is being produced, and society is worse off.
Oh, the economy is very complex, but that complexity won't turn bad economic policy into good one, it merely means that we don't know how bad a carbon tax is, but it is inevitable that it has a negative effect on the economy.
In other words, your statement is the equivalent of "medicine and the human body are very complex, so eating like a pig might actually be good for me!" It's the typical self-serving justification for bad decisions.
No, that is not my explanation. Re-read what I wrote, it's clear enough.
I think the evidence for a modest amount of anthropogenic warming is pretty good, there are simply lots of other confounding factors. Where we seem to agree is that nothing needs to be done about it.
Really? Who do you think can "accurately" calculate those externalities? Are you going to tax people to whom this is a positive externality as well? If not, why not? Heck, we don't even know what discount rate to apply for damage that occurs a century from now.
Furthermore, government action on externalities only even has the potential to work if it transfers payments from people causing harm to people being harmed. The current and proposed carbon tax regimes just take the money and then spend it on government projects. That is not addressing a hidden market externality, it is simply a general taxation scheme using the pretext of externalities for justification.
Sorry, the externalities justification just doesn't hold water.
Those are people who don't have health insurance, often by choice, not people who can't get health insurance. That's a big difference. The ACA health plans are such a financial ripoff that it's rational to be uninsured, in particular if you're young and healthy. If I could, I wouldn't have ACA-compliant coverage; as is, I picked the cheapest and most useless plan I could get and pay everything out of pocket.
No, more spending does not translate into better health. For example, the US spends a lot more per capita than countries with better health outcomes. And it's been shown that people on Medicaid have health outcomes that are no better, and often worse, than those with no insurance at all. Ultimately, the best way to improve health is for people to live a healthy lifestyle and take preventative measures; healthcare has a very limited effect on health, and too much healthcare spending (as in the US) has a statistically negative effect on population health.
The article talks about "indirect costs associated with preventable chronic diseases". What are those "preventable chronic diseases"? Heart disease and diabetes. The way to eliminate those costs is to actually prevent the preventable diseases. How do you do that? By maintaining a normal weight, eating a healthy diet, and exercising. None of those involve healthcare spending. In fact, excessive healthcare spending is what encourages people to lead the kinds of lifestyles that lead to preventable chronic diseases in the first place, because they assume (correctly) that they don't have to face the financial or personal consequences of their sloth and gluttony for many years to come.
My world view is based on actually having looked at the data and having been insured in half a dozen different systems around the world. I encourage you to look at the data yourself, instead of trying to find various biased secondary articles written by journalists.
There is nothing to account for. You cannot conclude anything from the absence of statistical significance. So we don't know which of these differences are real and which ones are not, hence it's pointless to speculate which of the alternative hypotheses I listed applies. Women treating men may have the same statistical differences as women treating women, but they didn't show up.
But let's say we actually knew all the differences for certain. Every possible pattern of differences could simply be explained in terms of patient and doctor demographics and self-selection, without any sexism or bias, and that would be the obvious explanation and would have to be excluded first. Jumping to the conclusion that this gives " greater urgency to diversity initiatives in medicine" is utterly unsupported by the data, in particular since women are already overrepresented in medical schools.
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.
Right now, renewables are more expensive than non-renewable energy, so if you force people to use them, you harm economic progress. If you harm economic progress, the rate of improvement and the adoption of renewables will be slower and the outcomes will be worse.
"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.
Ah, thanks.
(I don't think I want representatives from a company called "Enjoy" anywhere near my body :-)
No, what greedy capitalists have done is figured out the most profitable way of producing beer (and other products). That means, among other things, minimizing the amount of money spent on energy.
I do lots of things to improve things; as an engineer and inventor, that's my job. I would like government and "willfully ignorant people" like you not to interfere with that.
Your question shows a fundamental misunderstanding of "lack of statistical[ly significant] difference". A lack of statistically significant difference doesn't mean "evidence of absence" it means "absence of evidence".
I'm sorry, you're missing context here; in general, you don't need a scientist to reduce carbon emissions to zero, just a nuclear bomb. In context: The market already has figured out how to reduce it as much as economically possible; more taxation doesn't help. That is, more taxation certainly leads to less carbon emission, but it does so by making people poorer.
Your irrational apocalyptic fears are your problem. I don't worry about climate change causing democracies to fail.
What we have now is a paradise by historical standards. I'd like it to stay that way.
No, I don't have any evidence. My points are called "alternative hypotheses". Actual scientists understand that proposing alternative hypotheses is a key element of how science makes progress.
I don't know what "your point" is. 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.
I don't conclude everything is fine. 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.
By misattributing the problem of extinction to climate change and then proposing solutions intended to combat climate change, you are making the problem worse, not better. You can't fix a problem if you misdiagnose its cause.
If you need a $10000 tax to get some business to adopt solar power, that means that the cost of adopting it is $10000. That's how tax incentives work. So, you can impose the $10000 tax, the business will use solar power, and then pass on the $10000 it paid extra for generating power from solar to consumers.
They do have an effect on the market. 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.
The market already has figured out how to reduce it as much as possible; more taxation doesn't help.
Well, if I may, I think Europe should be allowed no carbon emissions at all! Those dirty European bastards still have to pay for the crimes against humanity they committed!
Correct: no democracy is going to say to its citizens "we are going to make everybody 10% poorer because of climate change". Not going to happen.
Yes, the eternal dream of statists: if only we could impose our draconian rules globally, then the market couldn't undermine our policies. It's the modern form of the Berlin wall. Again, not going to happen.
"Handful of cities"? What does that mean? You have to prove residency in L.A. to buy one? You have to queue up in line physically in one of these "cities" to get one?