Tech won't save us.  With Paris Marx

Drew Pendergrass is a PhD candidate in environmental engineering at Harvard University and Troy Vettese is an environmental historian and a Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute. They are the co-authors of Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. Follow them on Twitter at @pendergrassdrew and @TroyVettese.
The Argument for Half-Earth Socialism

Paris Marx is joined by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese to discuss the environmental crises of climate change and mass extinction we face, and why taking them seriously while providing for everyone requires a radical change to how we structure society.

I think most of us here are agreed we need to restructure society in order to have any chance of at least bringing the non stop degradation of the environment under control, even if we can't reverse what has already been done.  This brings with it a new set of questions.

1-  What are the changes that need to be made, and in what order?

2-  How do you go about implementing these changes?

3-  What means would be most effective for getting the changes made?

4-  What are the negative consequences of making the changes?

5-  How do you get people to accept these consequences?

6-  Who are the people/groups with the best chance of getting the process started, and how do you enlist them in the effort?

7-  How do you make this a global effort with cooperation from all countries?


Pretty tough questions.

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 03, 2023, 12:17 PMThere is not enough copper and lithium to do it.  More than the imaginary money you correctly predict is needed.  Imaginary metals anyone?

Indeed.  Also hard to figure where they are going to find, train and pay all the additional linemen, tower builders and technicians given the already critical labor shortage throughout the economy.  Recruit retired Boomers and add training programs in high school along with the CDL classes?  Retrain the laid off geeks from Silicon Valley?  Will K-Dog leave the Warehouse and exchange his steel toed boots for pole climbing spikes?

Where are they going to find the still solvent banks to finance the construction loans and EV loans and credit worthy customers to hand these loans out to?  I do not think the regulatory delays are the real problem here, but politicians will use that as the spanking monkey in the blame game.

Given the lofty goals for a carbon free transportation system about a decade away in 2035, my WAG would be about 5 years until the mismatch between electric supply and further expansion of EV transport becomes impossible.  A reality check will ensue and the false promise of a techno solution will be apparent even to brain dead J6P.

Of course, we have quite a ffew other problems to negotiate before we hit the 5 year mark, so we may already be swimming in shit anyhow.

RE

QuoteWill K-Dog leave the Warehouse and exchange his steel toed boots for pole climbing spikes?

Retired Boomers?  Most boomers can't do what I do.  I am fortunate to have my health.  How many men of boomer age can throw 70 lbs onto a 7 foot high shelf.  I do.

I am sure there are plenty of hard working people in European and Asian shitholes who keep their kids up late burning midnight oil to learn physics, math and engineering.  Something our binge watching make your own reality woke generation of fourth turning working age Americans won't do.  If metals and money were there, workers would be found.  America would just have more people.  Same as it ever was, but with less stuff for everybody overall.  Less food and none of it cheap.

Bizzness likes foreign workers who work for no benefits.  They work and go home.  Sometimes they stay and bring family.  If they stay we get new restaurants so it is all not so bad.  It would be hard to find an Indian restaurant in my area if we had no Microsoft.  As things are we have grocery stores that are Indian themed up our ass.  I like curry so I have options.  Nice!  Same thing with Asian restaurants. 

New Immigrants would shoulder the debt.  Immigrants would be Americas future if there was a future to be had.  Native born Americans would continue to do drugs, continue to insult immigrants.  Binge watch walking dead type zombie movies and collect mailbox money.  But it would work out.

If things could work out they would.  As things are they won't.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 04, 2023, 12:27 AMI am sure there are plenty of hard working people in European and Asian shitholes who keep their kids up late burning midnight oil to learn physics, math and engineering.  Something our binge watching make your own reality woke generation of fourth turning working age Americans won't do.  If metals and money were there, workers would be found.  America would just have more people.  Same as it ever was, but with less stuff for everybody overall.  Less food and none of it cheap.

Bizzness likes foreign workers who work for no benefits.  They work and go home.  Sometimes they stay and bring family.  If they stay we get new restaurants so it is all not so bad.  It would be hard to find an Indian restaurant in my area if we had no Microsoft.  As things are we have grocery stores that are Indian themed up our ass.  I like curry so I have options.  Nice!  Same thing with Asian restaurants.

If immigration was the solution to the worker shortage problem, how come they haven't solved the Nursing shortage by importing more nurses?  How come the Driver shortage isn't being solved by importing more truckers?

Where are you going to find the affordable housing for this new population of immigrants?  There is already a shortage of affordable housing for the people currently living here.

Are new immigrants credit worthy enough to buy all the new Teslas rolling off Elon's production line?  Are the power utility companies credit worthy to float more debt to finance the build out?  They already can't service the debt they have.

Immigration is no longer the Magic Bullet for Amerikan Bizness it was when the French gave us the Statue of Liberty to encourage all the poor Frogs to leave Paris for the streets paved with gold in Amerika, and poor people worldwide have come to grasp that life here for poor people isn't a whole lot better than where they are, unless it's some war torn country that has already achieved failed state status.  While Libyans and Somalians still jump at the chance to come to Amerika, it's not so true of Germans and Chinese.

Solving the labor shortage is not as simple as increasing immigration anymore.  The situation has become much more complex as collapse has progressed and Amerika is no longer a growing economy.

RE

You make good points but both your examples are bad.  Nurses and truck drivers are an expense.  Is there a real shortage or is this a manufactured shortage claimed by business.  Owners of rehab places want their mailbox money.  They don't want it going to pay nurses.  If owners of trucking companies want more drivers they can get them if they pay more. 

The owning class says people don't want to work.  The truth is they don't want to pay.  Licenses are required to be a nurse or to drive a truck.  That shrinks the labor pool.  Business wants a larger labor pool so they can hire cheap workers.

For the highly skilled, those with skills you can't pick up on You Tube, immigration will fill a shortage be it real or imagined.  Wages will be kept low.  The H1-B program of sanitized immigration has been around for years.

It comes back to the money.  Who finances the green revolution?

Nurses mostly came from the Philippines ten years ago.  What changed?

* Living facilities for guest workers build themselves.  Workers get paid enough to pay rent.  The amount of money Microsoft millionaires (people paid in stock years ago) have invested in new apartment buildings in Bellevue and Redmond, WA must be in the hundreds of millions.  The workers have to live somewhere and it is not hard to figure out what will be profitable with a little inside info.

The superorganism grows.  Money is its blood.

They still do import Filipina Nuses, but it's a numbers problem.  They only graduate so many each year, and the number they produce doesn't keep up with increases needed here due tothe aging population, and of course COVID which required such a rapid increase it left a hole of trainees behind it.  Accelerated training programs and early graduation drained them dry.

The second problem is the same demographic problems are true in all the developed countries, so we're not the only country competing for immigrants to fill these jobs which require a decent amount of training like Nursing and Trucking.  The Euros need the immigrants, so do the Japanese and even the Indians.  Places which used to be net exporters of immigrants are now net importers.  Particularly in skilled professions, this is a global problem.

RE

If fascism whips up enough there won't be any immigration at all.  Not with legions of climate refugees on the seas.  Intensifying the global problem.

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 04, 2023, 09:33 PMIf fascism whips up enough there won't be any immigration at all.  Not with legions of climate refugees on the seas.  Intensifying the global problem.

Also very true.  There is the old issue where people who are already here don't want to share what's left of their shrinking pie with newbies.  Never mind that basically everyone who lives here is a descendant of immigrants, with the exception of a vanishingly small percentage of 100% native aboriginals who mostly live in poverty on a few reservations.

New immigrants compete for housing with the locals, driving up the prices and making it still MOAR unaffordable.  Up here, Wasilla took in something like 2000 Ukrainian refugees, and there are like ZERO open apartments up there now for low income people.  Here in Anchorage I am on a Waiting List for Cook Inlet Housing, with a current estimate of a 6-18 month wait list.  They can't boot me out of my SNF which charges $16K/mo currently being paid almost in full for me by Medicare and Medicaid, but at the end of August my case gets reviewed and my bennies might get reduced, in which case they take all my retirement money and leave me a big $200/mo pocket money.

New immigrants also compete for shrinking Social Services, medical care, education for their kids etc.  Needless to say, none of these agencies are getting more money to provide their services, most of them are getting budget cuts as tax revenues dwindle in the latest economic slowdown, which is already in recession just not admitted to by the stats people officially.

Also presenting obstacles to expanding immigration is the endless War on Terror which labels just about everyone from a Muslim Country as a Terrorist and everyone from South and Central America a Drug Dealer.  About the only thing which might be a little better is racism, since so many Brown and Asians have added to the Black immigrant population already here that all together it's probably close to even with the White population.  Of course, we still do have the local Neo-Nazis protesting further immigration by any non-white populations, aka everybody except Eurotrash.

So to return to the Grid buildout problem, it doesn't seem likely that they will be able to expand the workforce rapidly enough to do the extensive kind of construction necessary inside a 12 year window, even IF the money and the metals were magically available, which they are not.

Despite the fact this should be clear to anyone with half a brain, you still have talking heads from Think Tanks and Political Policy groups hanging the blame here on Regulatory complexity, which is a problem but by no means theworst or biggest problem.  Nobody will admit the problem either, right up to the day EV owners plug in at the local charging station and they hang out the "Out of Juice" sign.

RE

Quote from: RE on Jun 30, 2023, 06:34 PMI think most of us here are agreed we need to restructure society in order to have any chance of at least bringing the non stop degradation of the environment under control, even if we can't reverse what has already been done.  This brings with it a new set of questions.

1-  What are the changes that need to be made, and in what order?

2-  How do you go about implementing these changes?

3-  What means would be most effective for getting the changes made?

4-  What are the negative consequences of making the changes?

5-  How do you get people to accept these consequences?

6-  Who are the people/groups with the best chance of getting the process started, and how do you enlist them in the effort?

7-  How do you make this a global effort with cooperation from all countries?


Pretty tough questions.

RE

Yes, very hard questions and we will get back to this.  (without getting arrested)  I'm convinced a strong labor movement is essential to developing a new community centered focus.  Community focus and proletariat control must be a cornerstone of any movement away from elite narrow minded self-centered rule.


Listening to Richard Wolf is like breathing fresh air.

France:

QuoteDemonstrations strikes all kinds a range of activities showing that the majority of the people are saying something very profound namely this and this is not properly reported in the American Press the French government the ruling class of the French businesses has made a mess of the French economy and once one dimension of that mess is the broken budget.  They spend more money than they tax it's a little bit like the United States in that regard okay and they've been borrowing a lot of money building up the country's debt kind of like the United States and they don't want to keep doing that because that's costly that if you keep raising the debt then you have to tax your people more and more to pay off the interest on that debt to whoever you borrowed the money from to simple rule of the capitalist economic system so they wanted to stop borrowing money and they had to come up there for with another way to manage their budget and they came up with one they're gonna deprive elderly workers who normally under French law for decades have the right to retire at age 62 say to them you cannot retire even if you have paid into your pension in their equivalent of the social security system for your entire working life you've made all your plans you've arranged where you live or your relationship to your children all the rest to retire at 62 no President macron says you won't be able to we're going to keep you working another two years until you're 64.  During those years you will be putting money in to the pension program like all workers do instead of pulling money out in simple English solve the problem that the ruling class messed up its Budget on the backs of the working class and everyone in France knows it it can't hide you know why because all the language of the big fancy press making it look like in the words of President Michael we are reforming the pension system no you're not you're ripping it off because they have socialist and Communists and anti-capitalist newspapers and schools they can give a different interpretation and so the people of France get oh yeah they're taking away my pension

On our side of the pond we don't get the 'different interpretation'.

The unrest was most severe on the evenings of Thursday, Friday and Saturday. In this time span, there have been approximately 2,186 arrests, 3,500 burned vehicles, and 168 attacks on police premises.



That last blurb was from POX news who portray the riots as the result of the killing of a teen of North African heritage.

No, POX news, this is not a George Floyd sort of thing though such a thing might have been the trigger.  Chris Hedges explains it well.  I recall him saying that when things get tense any sort of spark can start a rebellion. 

POX news is in the sheep management business.  They prefer not using the word 'labor' in a sentence.

* shooting from the hip I'd say 3,500 burned vehicles lined up bumper to bumper would make a line over 10 miles long.

Thats the standard Merican interpretation.  France is being ripped apart because one teen died.

Yeah,



I've got this for sale.  Any takers?

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 06, 2023, 02:47 PMThats the standard Merican interpretation.  France is being ripped apart because one teen died.

Right, just like the whole Arab Spring was caused by one Tunisian Fruit Vendor self immolating. 

France has been a Tinderbox since the Gilete Jaunes protests, all it needed was a new trigger to restart.  The question is, how far along will it go this time?  Will it spark enough anarchy to bring down the State?  The French have a very strong Police State apparatus, and you can be pretty sure they'll pull out all the stops to quell the rebellion.  Curfew, detention without trial, live bullets are all on the table.

Here we go again.

RE

Quote from: RE on Jul 06, 2023, 03:10 PM

Quote from: K-Dog on Jul 06, 2023, 02:47 PMThats the standard Merican interpretation.  France is being ripped apart because one teen died.

Right, just like the whole Arab Spring was caused by one Tunisian Fruit Vendor self immolating. 

France has been a Tinderbox since the Gilete Jaunes protests, all it needed was a new trigger to restart.  The question is, how far along will it go this time?  Will it spark enough anarchy to bring down the State?  The French have a very strong Police State apparatus, and you can be pretty sure they'll pull out all the stops to quell the rebellion.  Curfew, detention without trial, live bullets are all on the table.

Here we go again.

RE

I don't think it's fair equating it to the gillete jaune. I believe the demographic is different. The pension reforms are going to affect the young generation starting work not older workers. So you see young people on the street protesting this one. The gilletes jaune protest was mostly older workers frustrated about gas taxes, electrification and cost of living issues. Or so it seemed to me. Plus it's summer in paris which is protest season.

Income inequality, the divide.


Professor Reich at UC Berkeley

* Robert is an endangered species.

Fossil Kapitalism - Ever onward to maximum profits and minimum happiness.  Increase the misery.

I add the K but it is a C in the title.  K is the answer to the problems C causes.

Father Karl looked at the relationship of labor and capital to produce the 'commodity'.  As Diners know a barrel of oil is worth 20,000 energy slaves.  A comparison I have not been fond of.  It is confusing, but the fact is.  Oil MULTIPLIES labor and can't be neglected from a proper analysis of economic conditions, Father Karl style.

As I have been saying like a broken record going round and round and round so much I am dizzy.  We let the money do our thinking and it is KILLING US.

FOSSIL CAPITAL is self expanding value (profit) generated by the metamorhphosis of fossil fuels into CO2 gas.  Profit generated through the service of fossil fuels.

Climate change human extinction and capitalism are joined at the hip.

The video mentions the book 'Losing Earth' by Nathaniel Rich.  Here is what Nathaniel says :

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world's tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming "a prescription for long-term disaster." Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world's leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

Is it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?  <-- Capitalism has veto power on that decision (KD)

Because in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world's major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we've come since. During those years, the conditions for success could not have been more favorable. The obstacles we blame for our current inaction had yet to emerge. Almost nothing stood in our way — nothing except ourselves.

And Capitalism!  All hail the Musk .

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth's atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the "greenhouse effect" — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Why didn't we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.

Nor can the Republican Party be blamed. Today, only 42 percent of Republicans know that "most scientists believe global warming is occurring," and that percentage is falling. But during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. Among those who called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy were Senators John Chafee, Robert Stafford and David Durenberger; the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly; and, during his campaign for president, George H.W. Bush. As Malcolm Forbes Baldwin, the acting chairman of the president's Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, "There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself." The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.

It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists within the federal government predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster. More than 30 percent of the human population lacked access to electricity. Billions of people would not need to attain the "American way of life" in order to drastically increase global carbon emissions; a light bulb in every village would do it. A report prepared at the request of the White House by the National Academy of Sciences advised that "the carbon-dioxide issue should appear on the international agenda in a context that will maximize cooperation and consensus-building and minimize political manipulation, controversy and division." If the world had adopted the proposal widely endorsed at the end of the '80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.

A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions. The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva, when scientists from 50 nations agreed unanimously that it was "urgently necessary" to act. Four months later, at the Group of 7 meeting in Tokyo, the leaders of the world's seven wealthiest nations signed a statement resolving to reduce carbon emissions. Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands. Delegates from more than 60 nations attended, with the goal of establishing a global summit meeting to be held about a year later. Among scientists and world leaders, the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn't.

The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga is over. In that chapter — call it Apprehension — we identified the threat and its consequences. We spoke, with increasing urgency and self-delusion, of the prospect of triumphing against long odds. But we did not seriously consider the prospect of failure. We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves, how we remember the past, how we imagine the future? Why did we do this to ourselves? These questions will be the subject of climate change's second chapter — call it The Reckoning. There can be no understanding of our current and future predicament without understanding why we failed to solve this problem when we had the chance.

That we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels can be credited to the efforts of a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist   who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming. They risked their careers in a painful, escalating campaign to solve the problem, first in scientific reports, later through conventional avenues of political persuasion and finally with a strategy of public shaming. Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed. What follows is their story, and ours.

100 Hansens would have changed the world.  We only had one.

Humanity is not smart enough to figure out that if money got us into this mess, perhaps money could get us out.  Let the obstacle become the way.


Carbon Fee and Dividend puts a tax on carbon AND DISTRIBUTES THE PROCEEDS TO THE PEOPLE.

Gas becomes expensive as FUCK but since YOU GET THE TAX you can still drive if you want to.

BUT YOU COULD CHOOSE TO DRIVE LESS AND GET RICH.

The dumfucks of the world can't understand this.  Too busy dreaming of being the Musk or Bezos to actually care about making their own life better.

I made the last video a couple of years ago.  I found it at the Museum Website.

James Explains How Fee and Dividend is different in the video about halfway through.  This link has more info.

What could have been.