Carbon Dividends

[K-Dog]

Technical details are not the point here.

The Author is a CEO in the Bayer Machine.  We are talking about fuel for private jets.  Bayer owns Monsanto.  A global company decides how we should live?  I'm not liking it.  I do not care about hearing 'this is the way it is.'  Money is in charge of the authors brain and I do not have to like it.

Air travel needs to go away as much as possible.  Capitalism has produced a world of excess where humanity is forgotten.  Pyramids of money with the social and financial inequities pyramids of money brings through entitled economic drones makes us all slaves in service to our own destruction. 

A student of Jevon's paradox should see a great flaw.  If you do not restrict consumption at the same time you improve efficiency then you are ignorant if you think you improve anything.  This is not an article about running ambulances on bio-fuels.  This is about flying private jets.  The kind of jets that fly the Kardashians, or the author of this article.  The kind of private jet that flies 150 people if they pay enough money too. 

An article about fueling ambulances would be a different kind of article.  Bayer masters of the universe drones are incapable of reining themselves in or writing the other kind of article.  Masters of the universe should not be controlling the narrative.  This article was in service to BAU and not change.

It there are great men who should choose the direction of the humanity.  Entitled supervisors and the inheritors of privilege should not be the deciders.  They should be different kind of men.

* I don't accept the great man hypothesis.  Change comes from contradictions in material conditions resolving themselves.  Great men, though they be qualified, are still men who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

[RE]

Definitely, anybody connected with the Bayer/Monsanto does not have the greater good for mankind or the planet as a significant factor in his thinking.  Using food to keep jets flying would probably kill more people in a year that Xyclon-B killed in all off WWII in the Nazi gas chambers.  So yeah, this article and his POV and prescription for maintaing BAU is particularly loathsome.

However, the article also talks in more general terms about biofuels as alternative energy because they currently come in somewhat cheaper that carbon free hydrogen, and that was the aspect I was focusing on.  I'm not even sure that's true if you tok away some of the Ag subsidies.  So you have to wonder, if this guy could still have his private jet using hydrogen, WTF use corn and other biofuels?

The answer of course is simple.  Bayer/Monsanto is a chemical company, not an energy company.  They own the patents on the enzymes and processes used for converting plant matter into fuels.  The more  energy we get from biofuels, the more $BILLIONS$ Bayer makes and the bigger his compensation package is.  Cui bono?  He does.

Totally self-serving propaganda, of course.  And yea, the fact that the Masters of the Universe and Influencers who are running the show are the very same type of people like John D. Rckefeller, JP Morgan, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison who got us into this mess by creating the technologies and the markets for burning fossil fuels in the first place is like putting the Fox in charge of the Hen House.  Gasoline was a waste product of the refining business with the diesel engine, in order to profit from it, automobiles running on gas were mass marketed to J6P.  Money and technology, greed and self interest drove the industrial revolution, and they are driving the collapse also.  Nothing has changed.

RE

[K-Dog]

The answer of course is simple.  Bayer/Monsanto is a chemical   profit extraction company.

Fixed that, chemists are not in charge and Monsanto soil scientists are not being paid to take care of the soil.  Since Monsanto will monopolize seed on any bio-fuel they can.  Developed by them or stolen by them, I say they are indeed an energy company.

There should be a way to build up soil and sequester carbon and extract an amount of biomass for fuel, all at the same time.  Capitalism can't do it.  In capitalism profit is always maximized.  Building soil and sequestering carbon is not part of the American capitalist equation.  The American capitalist market will also murder its citizens before it accepts regulation of any kind.  In America, profit is anointed as the only authority which determines what is to be done.  Profit chooses to maximize profit.

If you are a janitor who smokes a fat doobie and watches You Tube all day you do not need the same political rights as Bayer does.  Bayer knows what to do with stuff and you don't.  Juergen I am sure is much more able to explain this point of view than I can.  The Trump Supreme Court is hard at work to make sure this point of view remains the law of the land.

At the end of the day, fat doobie or no, keep any ideas of balance to yourself.

[jupiviv]

Human nature is what human society makes of it, hence not really human nature.

That is a circular argument I won't bother giving any credibility to by debating it.

Another way of putting it is, human nature is an expression of social organization. Circular reasoning arbitrarily relates/equivocates two things. Nothing arbitrary about saying that the wealth created by the poor is what enables the rich to eat and live better than the poor not genes or innate character.

The alternative view, yours, is to bring in a third factor which in the post 19th century world tends to be some combination of 1> genes 2> culture and ideology, ie culture/ideology sublimated out of social determinations (at least the direct material/economic kind). I disagree, but without erring in the opposite direction. Those things can and do affect what people become, but I'm unaware of any compelling evidence or theory indicating they override or at any rate function independently of socio-economic constraints and incentives.

Lack of anybody else proposing a theory has never been an impediment for me, I just make my own theories based on what I observe in behavior, both in the animal kingdom and in human society.  There are analogues all over the place in survival strategies for different species, and homo saps demonstrate many of them at different times under different circumstances.  Stockholm Syndrome is a classic example, where captives come to identify with their captors.  Imprinting is another, catch a child early enough in development al sorts of odd behaviors can manifest later.  And so on and so forth.  All of these macro effects come from associations made in the brain by neurons, all mediated by connections that are genetically determined at birth, then react to stimuli along the way.  More or less of various neurotransmitters get produced, further developing a given personality.  Depending of the nature of the environment, it will develop in many different ways.  Your example of slaves in a slave society would be one of a myriad of possible outcomes.  All I am saying is that generally we were most successful as a species under the least complex social organizations.  That would be the baseline of human nature.  All the rest are environmental factors determined by therule set and organization of the society.

You seem to be more or less agreeing with me except for the part about connections in the brain being genetically determined at birth. As for us being most successful under simple social structures, well those lead to where we are now and current hunter-gatherer societies are as fucked as the rest of us. The minuscule population of genuinely isolated peoples are allowed to live that way by other people. And even if those other people magically vanished, there will always be a need and a desire for more complexity and universality else we wouldn't have transitioned from one to the other when allowed to do so by circumstances.

Another point that complicates the picture - simpler nomadic tribes invaded more complex settled tribes and created even moar complex empires/kingdoms.

Most of the bio/gene stuff was soundly debunked in the 70s and 80s by people like Stephen Jay Gould. The debates today are derivatives of derivatives of the original. We know that genes are not blueprints, that individual genes have diverse expressions across the whole phenotype, and also that Mendelian inheritance patterns only work as they should in theory for artificially regulated and purified lineages.

All genes do is code for proteins.  We really have no clue how genes program the shysiological structure of the body or brain, why we have 5 fingers and toes, opposed thumbs, a large cerebral cortex, blah blah, but we know all Homo Saps have them unless their genetic code is wickedly messed up.  All our brains are built in basically the same way and respond to stimuli the same way.  Human nature begins inside this structure and is circumscribed by it.  It is genetic, we are born with it before ever being exposed to language or social structures.  Once we pop out of somebody's vagina, we each begin to develop inside that social setting, so thereafter things can change quite a bit.  We nevertheless still have the structure and neuroons and transmitter system we were born with no matter what.  It can and does adapt and change along the way, sometimes irrevocably.  That doesn't mean there isn't a best or at least better set of social conditions for that brain to operate.

Having five toes, or being a living organism needing food/air... is very different from personality, talent and rational thought and learning. It's a truism that genes determine who we are and are influenced by environment. The contention is about the terms of that interaction. So far nothing from you explaining why Homo Saps living in complexity surpassing hunting-gathering are innately dumb and evil.

You're expressing the logic of decadent bourgeois liberalism when you postulate an impartial biological lottery, combined with a substratum of flawed human nature being the downfall of civilizations throughout history. If you'd lived in the middle ages, these ideas would have been incoherent (e.g the idea of 'history' as we use it simply did not exist back then). To sum up, your opinion on innate human nature is itself a product of socially determined human nature. Funny ain't it?

Now you're devolving into ad hom argument, name calling me as a "decadent bourgeois liberal".  I thought that kind of nonsense went out of style in the 1920s.  Shall I retaliate and call you a commie pinko leftist?  I don't live in the Middle Ages, evidenced by the fact they didn't have the internet back then.  Obviously I argue based on what I know about the world and biology, behavior and neurochemistry based on stuff that has been elucidated over the last few hundred years.  If you consider scientific knowledge to be bourgeois, I plead guilty.

I admit the decadent part was a bit mean-spirited. The argument itself isn't personal at all. You are in fact reproducing the logic of the liberal-capitalist mode of surplus accumulation, even while being critical of it. Liberalism assumes a contradiction between human nature and scarcity, and postulates the state as a regulating/harmonizing force. (The problem being human nature is a self-serving assumption and scarcity is a historical category.) You're just swapping out the state as a regulator with a future situation of less complex organization caused by collapse.

My point about the middle ages was you/whoever would have justified innate human nature using the hierarchical logic of feudalism instead of the cynically regulated globalised 'markets'. Both are wrong, for that same reason. But one thing in favor of the earlier forms of self-justification - at least they were more honest. They had no use for the 'rational' social darwinism of the 20th century.

Hunting-gathering could well be the future... although the level of destruction it would take to get there is likely to cause extinction, not to mention lingering effects of industrial civ like pollution bio-diversity loss and radiation with no means to ameliorate let alone erase them. But even if it happens, it cannot be the solution cus if it was we wouldn't have come to this point to begin with. And it still wouldn't be caused by 'human nature'.

Don't know if it will be the future or the solution, I never said it would be.  I merely said it was the type of organization we were most successful with as a species.  Would it necessarily lead to the same outcome if we did end up returning to that style of living?  No, it can't, because fossil fuels were a onne time shot for homo saps, the earth won't have time to collect them up again for another round of burning.  Also, surviving Homo Saps would not be the same as the original cro-magnons that bootstrapped up from stone tools.  Some knowledge gained over the millenia will persist.  It's not definitive that the same mistakes would be repeated if there is enough left for 1000 breeding pairs to survive this knockdown, as there were 75,000 years ago.

Neither of us will be around to find out thoough, so it's a moot point.

RE

But you do see it as A New Hope (TM) with different possibilities, and the best/only way out of the current situation which has exhausted it's own. 1000 breeding pairs won't have FFs but there'd be a whole bunch of other stuff they could use to build more complexity. My view is that the current situation is the best way out of itself, while also being resigned to bitter soul-crushing disappointment. Speaking of which I might be (reluctantly) alive to at least witness the general direction of how it ends/up.

[jupiviv]

There should be a way to build up soil and sequester carbon and extract an amount of biomass for fuel, all at the same time.

There is. Legal right to the minimum caloric intake of W Europe worldwide and no market exchange of corn, dairy, poultry. Increase ag laborforce by x200, redistribute land equally then convince them to progressively collectivize up to the largest feasible local organization. Centrally subsidize and improve local land augmentation/reclamation while guaranteeing 6 hr work day, healthcare, schooling, basic amenities. Do away with animal products apart from dairy and poultry.

[RE]

You seem to be more or less agreeing with me except for the part about connections in the brain being genetically determined at birth. As for us being most successful under simple social structures, well those lead to where we are now and current hunter-gatherer societies are as fucked as the rest of us. The minuscule population of genuinely isolated peoples are allowed to live that way by other people. And even if those other people magically vanished, there will always be a need and a desire for more complexity and universality else we wouldn't have transitioned from one to the other when allowed to do so by circumstances.

Actually no, there is no universal "need and desire" for more complexity, that is post agricultural social development that came with the discovery of metallurgy and large sedentary societies that divided up a working caste, military caste, spiritual caste and ruling caste.  Societies such as the tribes of the Pacific Northwest lived quite peacefully for 1000s of years in a relatively open and loose confederacy with each tribe numbering anywhere from about 150 to 1500 in size and at the tie of the European invasion of Turtle Island totalled about 250,00 by some estimates.  Other estimates put it higher at over 1M.  They didn't use money, production in the society was distributed by the Potlatch system and they governed themselves with a council of elders and periodic gatherings where representatives from the tribes met and gifts were exchanged between the groups.

What occurred in the fertile crescent in the Middle East, in India and China in the rice paddies didn't happen everywhere in North America, though it did in Central America and was beginning in the Ohio Valley also.  Long as you don't take that step as a society that leads to greater population size and density and demands you control and protect property and perpetually expand to new land and subjugate it and the people living there, a society can maintain a relatively stable population size that uses resources at a sustainable rate.  If we were to start over, hopefully that would be one ofthe bits of knowledge and experience we will retain for a redo.

Having five toes, or being a living organism needing food/air... is very different from personality, talent and rational thought and learning. It's a truism that genes determine who we are and are influenced by environment. The contention is about the terms of that interaction. So far nothing from you explaining why Homo Saps living in complexity surpassing hunting-gathering are innately dumb and evil.

Personality, talent and rational thought differ between people partly duee to genetics and partly due to  their environment.  The easiest example of this comes with identical vs fraternal twins.  While doing my Master's, I did my thesis for my Child Development class by studying the various forms of intelligence displayed by competitive gymnasts (I coached girl's team, so I had a ready made population to study), contrasting their behaviors, academic ability and musical talent with the general population.  Basically it demonstrated how people are wired differently and it manifests itself on how they end up behaving.

Later I had a great opportunity when I had a set of triplets, all girls 2 identical, the 3rd fraternal.  Raised by the same parents, given the same opportunities, they even all wore identical clothing though since 1 was not blonde you knew she wasn't identical.  The 2 identical ones had similar gregarious personalities, talked a lot and were very fast in their reaction times with a lot of quick twitch muscle.  The 3rd was quiet and shy and hard worker.  She didn't have quite the physical gifts her 2 sisters did, but she made team first because she didn't waste time chit chatting and stayed focused.  The 2 identical ones thought so much alike they answered questions the same sway at the same time.  The other one nearly always answered differently.  All these differences add up over time, but they begin because of differences in the genetics.

I also never said homo saps living in an ag society are inherently dumb and evil.  What individual people develop in terms of intelligence and moral behavior is not the same thing as what societies demonstrate in aggregate behaviors.  That is an emergent property of systems.  You can have good people and bad people, smart people and stupid people under any system.  No matter what system you have, if stupid, evil people run it the system will be stupid and evil.  But even if you have good people inside an evil system, the results always come out evil.

I admit the decadent part was a bit mean-spirited. The argument itself isn't personal at all. You are in fact reproducing the logic of the liberal-capitalist mode of surplus accumulation, even while being critical of it. Liberalism assumes a contradiction between human nature and scarcity, and postulates the state as a regulating/harmonizing force. (The problem being human nature is a self-serving assumption and scarcity is a historical category.) You're just swapping out the state as a regulator with a future situation of less complex organization caused by collapse.

No idea HTF you can come to the conclusion I am in favor of surplus accumulation or how I am swapping out the state as a regulator of anything.  There isn't much of a state with tribal organization, that's why it's called tribal and not nation-state.  lol.  I am in favor of minimalist living and no private property beyond what you can carry with you when you move around.  I lived my whole life as a nomad, most of it out of about 5 bags and containers with my clothes and cameras and computers in them.  Human nature isn't self-serving or an assumption, it's just a quality I observe.  It doesn't account for all human behavior, because it adapts depending on the environment it is immersed in.  You appear to have a lot of preconceived notions about what I believe and read a whole lot into my writing that just isn't there.  I think you do this to justify your own ideas about democratic management as  asolution that I don't agree with.

But you do see it as A New Hope (TM) with different possibilities, and the best/only way out of the current situation which has exhausted it's own. 1000 breeding pairs won't have FFs but there'd be a whole bunch of other stuff they could use to build more complexity. My view is that the current situation is the best way out of itself, while also being resigned to bitter soul-crushing disappointment. Speaking of which I might be (reluctantly) alive to at least witness the general direction of how it ends/up.

I see it not as a new hope but rather a goal to seek of reducing complexity and reducing our demands and impact on the environment we live in.  There really won't be a whole lot we can build without the copious energy supply we've burned through here, and whatever existence we do have post collapse, it's going to be a pretty meager one.

Perhaps we'll both be reincarnated in 5000 years and we'll bee able to chat about how it all played out then.

RE

[K-Dog]

There should be a way to build up soil and sequester carbon and extract an amount of biomass for fuel, all at the same time.

There is. Legal right to the minimum caloric intake of W Europe worldwide and no market exchange of corn, dairy, poultry. Increase ag laborforce by x200, redistribute land equally then convince them to progressively collectivize up to the largest feasible local organization. Centrally subsidize and improve local land augmentation/reclamation while guaranteeing 6 hr work day, healthcare, schooling, basic amenities. Do away with animal products apart from dairy and poultry.

How do you propose to implement any of your plans? 

Disagreeing with or agreeing with any of your proposals right now would not make progress.  But minimum caloric intake is something we all can agree on (unless we are insane).  So how to implement your program?  Who pays for it?  How do you make it happen?  How do you make sure there is no abuse in your system?

Carbon fee and dividend would put the infrastructure for a universal payment system in place.  With F and D in  place payments could easily be issued.  The functional homeless could have their basic needs met.  We can talk about the impaired on another day.

How will you make sure there is enough work for everybody who can pay into your system so your system says solvent?  What about freeloaders.  Until new social values develop which honor and sanctify your system, you will have to incentivize good behavior.  How will you do that?

[K-Dog]

I posted this at ecosophia today:

Open posting. OK then I will. I'll post about carbon fee and dividend. To begin with. Carbon fee and dividend is not a tax. Taxes are collected by government for government use. A fee collected and paid to all people equally is a payment from the social commons not a tax. It is important to understand this or you likely will dismiss the benefits. Consider oil as the example, coal and gas would have fees collected as well but talking about one is easier. Money is taken at the wellhead where it is mined. Before first sale. If a dollar worth of oil is pulled out of the ground a percentage of value is taken from it. A percentage determined by a citizens assembly. After that the added cost is passed on as markup in the distribution chain. All the money is equally divided among all citizens. This allows the individual to cancel the fee added at the wellhead if they use an average amount of fossil fuel. If you use less fossil fuel than average the system pays you money. If you use more you pay more. Collected money is equally distributed with kids getting a percentage starting at 16. Younger children don't use gasoline or diesel, and the money, all of it, must go to citizens who use oil products. Younger kids are excluded because they do not buy anything and the money is paid out to consumers to offset the added price consumers must pay. Having a citizens assembly set the fee is appropriate and should not be done by government. Government provides infrastructure, but the commons should decide to do with the commons. Not an elite group.

I made some corrections.  I think this is the closest I have come to describing what carbon fee and dividend is.  The benefits have to be figured out on your own.  But if you do not think money influences human behavior you will see no benefit to carbon fee and dividend.  If that is the case move on, there is nothing to see.