Green New Deal

RE: leisure/UBI/&c

Juliet Schor has written a bunch about the time v. money issue, among other things I think we as a society should be thinking/talking about a lot more. I stumbled across her work in the aftermath of the financial crash, when for a brief moment it seemed there might be an opening for criticism of our idiotic high-waste high-stress consumption culture.
She also goes into how a move away from prioritizing convenience/efficiency (e.g., cooking a meal from scratch instead of picking something up on your way home from work) has some 2nd and 3rd level benefits which connect to JQ’s point about experiences yielding greater satisfaction than money or stuff.
It’s a bit off-topic, but one thing she spends some time on that I really like is the idea of “true materialism” (I think that’s the term she uses), actually recognizing and appreciating all of the inputs that make an item possible, paying more for well-crafted/durable items, &c.

Anyway. I’m glad to see this conversation is happening again, and hoping this time it’s got real legs. I honestly think we’re never going to make real progress addressing the climate crisis until we address the crisis of overconsumption, the dominance (and bad-faith manipulations) of advertising, and the subtle (or not) way so many people are shoehorned into a long-hours/ high-consumption lifestyle that can so easily influence them to then adopt the values that allow them to get through the day without having a nervous breakdown from all the cognitive dissonance.

Living the major parts of the ”Green New Deal” now for some years – in an area which is ruled by ”the Greens” – I only highly can recommend it – and that’s the truly great thing about ”globalization” – everybody who is skeptical about – how or if it will work – can come an check it out!

That goes especially along ”with research findings suggesting that experiences, rather than material goods, are a better source of lasting happiness”

As –
indeed –
and already mentioned as one of the most important parts of ”the Best Deal” – 6 to seven weeks of payed vacations are a ”must” and proof that ”experiences arising from participation in family and community activities are a lot more genuine than those offered by commercial providers such as tourism operators”.

the most important demand should be a reduction in working hours, with no offsetting change in wages. That amounts to taking the benefits of increased productivity, and progressive redistribution, in the form of increased leisure rather than increased consumption. It goes along with research findings suggesting that experiences, rather than material goods, are a better source of lasting happiness. To make the argument work completely, we need the further proviso that experiences arising from participation in family and community activities are more genuine than those offered by commercial providers such as tourism operators

Even if experiences involving family and community > other experiences > acquiring possessions that doesn’t entail that free time > purchasing power because the first two areas are both already increasingly commodified. The kind of experiences matter and most people seem to feel this involves spending money. (I don’t know what you mean by suggesting they’re more ‘genuine’…)

“…decarbonize the economy, shifting to a fully renewable electricity system and electrifying the transport system.”

Travel being one of the prime experiences that enrich people’s lives, I’m not altogether certain that rationing travel miles for people is entirely consistent. On the general subject of electrifying the transport system, it is not clear that solar can provide that much power. I’m not even sure battery propelled ships are practical.

And as to experience, meat rationing (or at an extreme legally obligatory veganism) when exotic foods like tropical nuts or out of season vegetables and fruits are banned because of transport costs, may not provide moral elevation to everyone.

Obligatory population control would affect the experience of family life.

The recycling police however would provide an new experience.

It may be objected that of course no one espousing green would mean to end up cutting the consumption of the masses, that they just mean to cut out the fat so to speak…just like cutting wasteful government spending.

Massive reforestation programs do actually seem to be needed. The demolition of suburbs and replacement by actual cities seem to be a way of replacing concrete and asphalt with green spaces. But disassembling monstrosities like LA or Capetown, “cities” in a desert would seem to be on the agenda too. The thing is, once you start putting massive population transfers on the menu of options, it gets contentious, no?

Green is like anarchism, the devil is in the details.

I’d suggest that the new New Deal, as it finds a way for humans to coexist with the Holocene, or what’s left of it, on the planet, should also be more upfront on the equality front. Like, what is, quantitatively, an acceptable level of inequality? Myself, I think something like 14 to 50 x median household income and wealth. If we tied taxes to such a project, one of the possibilities is making corporations pay in very severe ways for paying upper management more than 14 to 50x the lowest salaried worker – so that CEO and upper management compensation, if it wants to go stratospheric, has to pull that worker with them. Or it can’t be at all. I’ve heard it suggested that companies will find work-arounds – like making workers sub-contractors. I see no reason that these work arounds can’t be covered in the law. In any case, this is my suggestion: taxation that does intrusively create incentives for the private sector to raise wages.

I believe that the concern of the paragraph

” To make the argument work completely, we need the further proviso that experiences arising from participation in family and community activities are more genuine than those offered by commercial providers such as tourism operators.”

is that, even if the working hours are reduced, in their newly acquired free time, people would engage in activities that consume lots of energy, such as water-skiing or even simply driving, rather than to work, to a museum downtown. If so, while people may enjoy their life more, the deal would not be much green.

I guess one can quantify this effect, at least with some “back of the envelope” calculations. As a side, consideration like these is why economists often recommend to address the market imperfection heads-on ( in this case, by taxing pollution more) rather than addressing indirectly as proposed here.

I think a big part of any green new deal will be making sure that subsidies for the change in lifestyle are at least partially funded by the government. A lot of infrastructure is going to be obsolete, if you ask individual families to pay for it resistance will result as they have to give op assets that are still working fine. Asking families to invest in energy saving home improvements, replace furnaces with electric heating, replace gas with electric vehicles, etc. Will destroy a lot of wealth. Better for the government to finance this with low interest rates rather than have individuals finance it at higher rates.

Regarding working less rather than producing more, I think this will help at the margins but the toughest areas are going to be transportation and buildings. Replacing all this equipment is going to take a lot of hours. I think the question is how to shift the economy to co-ops and co-determination so that employees are making these choices rather than bosses. The government is second best but I don’t think we should be trying to make these choices for people. The tech is there to decarbonize everything, the problem is relative cost. Build systems that let people make these choices themselves once infrastructure is converted to green sources.

Pie in the sky, but not much more so than a successful conversion to green energy in the needed time.

One thing to keep in mind is that we must act quickly, ideally very quickly, and this means in particular that we cannot wait for industries to change: solar energy may already be bigger than coal, but we cannot wait for the remaining coal workers to retire, we need them to drastically diminish their activity right now (and the same for many industries, from industrial fishing to airplane transportation). Because nobody wants to die of hunger and very few people actually enjoy charity, this further means that we need to think hard into compensation schemes. That’s why the Job Guarantee part is in my view quite important (the Yellow Vests protest in France is a good example of what happens when the compensation part is glossed over).

@roger gathmann I’d suggest that the new New Deal, as it finds a way for humans to coexist with the Holocene, or what’s left of it, on the planet, should also be more upfront on the equality front

Absolutely, if only because the real hard work we need to do requires a society which has a strong sense of its internal cohesion and value, and those cannot prevail above a certain threshold of inequalities (not only economic ones) that contemporary societies have unfortunately passed perhaps two decades ago already. So there is a bit of a conundrum here (we need a Green New Deal, but that won’t happen if we can’t get a more cohesive society, but that entails reducing inequalities, but that requires courageous policies of the scale of a Green New Deal, and ideally a Green New Deal…) but Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch so inverting the proposition, I think a political space is by now open for successful political platforms based on policies that simultaneously reduce inequalities and radically change production and consumption in a way that might save the ecosystem.

Against inequalities, for the ecosystem, that’s where the hope lies, I believe, or “Plus de banquise, moins de banquiers” as I read on a Yellow Vest sign (so all hope is not lost).

John Quiggin OP: “It goes along with research findings suggesting that experiences, rather than material goods, are a better source of lasting happiness. To make the argument work completely, we need the further proviso that experiences arising from participation in family and community activities are more genuine than those offered by commercial providers such as tourism operators.”

As Matt #3 points out the notion of “genuineness” in play here needs needs unpacking. Another feature to specify is for what socioeconomic groups the positive effect is claimed. There is of course a lot of research on the positional goods nature of a lot of consumption by rich people that can be relevant here. Getting rich dude A and B from a position of status competition in terms of the most/biggest yachts to status competition in terms of some other unit that have much less environmentally negative resource inputs is a collective action problem.

Another thing: your case for reduction in working hours doesn’t require the (1) “better than” claim you hint at above. A sufficient claim is (2) “just as good” or (3) “roughly equally good”. Since if a policy scores better in terms of climate change prevention and scores on par in all other regards then it’s all things considered a good policy.

In ideal theory an even weaker claim might suffice: (4) “worse but not so much worse that the badness of that aspect outweights the goodness of the climate change benefit that the reduced working hours reform also brings”. Though this last one is likely harder to get majoritarian popular political support for in non-ideal reality.

The changes being contemplated are going to be massively unpopular and need to be sustained for generations. So a necessary first step for any plan like that is going to be the establishment of a permanent technocratic coup, an undemocratic/antidemocratic order immune to change by any means, not just elections but revolution, corruption or ideological drift among the elite, and escape through capital flight and emigration. A tall order, to say the least. But more realistic than trying to permanently bribe a majority with other perks. (because in ten years if not five they’ll want to pocket the extra day off and go back to meat and off-season vegetables.)

I signed up as a potential volunteer on this website: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/. This would seem to be a movement primarily composed of USA youths to push the Green New deal, and hopefully increase the participation of youth in the political process. It remains to be seen how this will work out.

John Quiggin #24: yeah genuine might not be the best term. I take the core question to be how to shift people from currently desired resource intensive activities with negative externalities re climate change to other activities that (1) have much less such negative externalities and (2) when given the right social and institutional background structure will be supported and desired by people as sources of good things like experienced happiness, social connection, perceived meaningfulness, a sense of accomplishment, and so on. Finding out what satisfies (1) (2) is partly an empirical matter. We shouldn’t preemptively assume that “genuine” will be the best term to capture it.

One thing you might want to look at along with the NGD writing is recent work under the Degrowth heading. See for example this recent post by Jason Hickel
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/1/14/inequality-and-the-ecological-transition , which shares some themes with your post here.

And a recent back and forth between Dean Baker and Hickel
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/saving-the-environment-is-degrowthing-the-answer
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/stability-without-growth-keynes-in-an-age-of-climate-breakdown
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/will-degrowthing-save-the-planet
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/hickel-response-on-degrowth

A More Pessimistic Analysis this contains links

Expropriate the wealth not of the 1% for instance, but the top 33%, meaning everything over $90,000 a year. And yeah, a command economy.

My ideas above were more in line of a personal solution to the coming apocalypse, a way to survive and help a few. Find a small city in the country, organize and make it self-sustaining, find ways to feed, house, and keep people alive locally.

Downsize like hell and get back to nature, because to survive we probably have to reduce commercial (and personal) energy consumption 25 to 50 percent (at least for a while), while allocating another 25% to the conversion.

Critique of Green New Deal: https://louisproyect.org/2018/11/21/vain-hopes-in-a-green-new-deal/

Another point is whether or not the radical transformation of the world economy that is needed is compatible with the continuing hegemony of the (at the moment) oil, coal and gas controlled American Presidency.

American imperial power being ultimately backed up by the American armed forces of which see here: https://www.projectcensored.org/2-us-department-of-defense-is-the-worst-polluter-on-the-planet/

“For example, one possible step would be to require all coal-fired power stations more than 30 years old (or, more or less equivalently, everything less efficient than the most modern ultrasupercritical plants) to close, perhaps with partial compensation.”

It is unclear how this decarbonizes the economy. Natural gas is already shutting down coal-fired power plants, but that’s not genuine decarbonization. It’s why the rise of natural gas in power production hasn’t already solved half the problem of emissions. There seems to be an ambiguity in the notion of decarbonization. Nor is it clear what decarbonization can even mean when abstracted from carbon recapture by forests, algae, etc.

In principle the only truly sustainable economy requires use only of truly renewable resources, that is, a stationary one, growing only in response to such technological innovations that use less energy. Of course no previous human economy has actually ever devised such a stationary economy. Many previous civilizations have collapsed, with massive population declines. To my eyes, history powerfully suggests that once a culture dies, it doesn’t come back without massive input from other, more advanced societies.

At this point is there really any possible way to preserve the current world system of nation states and global capital markets other than massive restrictions in consumption for large parts of the population? Compensation for the effects of change already upon us, partial or not, is apparently beyond the status quo. After all, even in the US no one can imagine compensating for shutting down coal mines by income support for coal miners who lose their jobs. One would have thought that, if shutting down coal mines were truly so beneficial to global society as a whole, it would pay the cost of helping those suffering the local effect.

But plainly, this isn’t the case. I conclude it is because the crisis still is not grave enough to justify some sort of world government, much less the unspeakable horror of planned economy. Just grave enough to require social discipline of personal consumption by the masses.

“It is unclear how this decarbonizes the economy.”

Per unit energy, coal produces roughly three times the CO2 of NG.

NG= CH4 (4:1 H to C ratio); Coal= [CH]n (1:1 ratio, where “n” contains some free carbon, making the ratio around 3:1 instead of 4:1).

Actually, the ratio of CO2 production from burning coal compared to CO2 production from NG is more like 2:1. Precisely because coal has a lot more carbon, it produces more calories per unit weight than NG.

John Quiggin shows with his comment about retiring coal fired plants over 30 years of age that he again does not understand the scale of the problem. In addition to the fact that they are replaced by gas, which does not make electricity production zero carbon, a great many power plants in China and India are new, and could take 15-20 years to close. That’s too little too late, given (as Hidari reminds us) that we have until 2050 to get to a zero carbon economy(and we need reforestation offsets to cover agriculture, shipping and aircraft). Closing every coal fired power station in the world would reduce a portion of our co2 emissions by 2/3 if they’re replaced with gas – reducing global carbon emissions by perhaps 20%. That might buy us five years at the other end, but it’s not enough and it will require a huge upfront carbon investment as we build gas plants to replace them.

What we will need is more along the lines of: immediate forced end to deforestation in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia and Africa; a five year plan of complete replacement of coal with solar/wind; nationalization of the global shipping fleet and its immediate conversion to nuclear, with the fleet managed by national navies; a moratorium on fishing; a global cap on meat consumption, distributed fairly by population and not by wealth; complete electrification of all public transport systems and a global moratorium on growth in the physical size of cities. All future development will need to be in carbon zero electricity and high density housing, the energy production and mining industries will need to be immediately nationalized and their current leadership thrown in jail as an example to others. Climate change denial needs to be a criminal offense ruthlessly punished. All of those actions might buy us 10 years, giving us time to decarbonize personal transport, replace gas with renewables, and begin massive reforestation projects.

McManus, I say we need to focus on living in cities because they are way more energy efficient than small rural communities. This is why japan uses far less energy per unit of gdp than the USA, and it would be even more efficient if not for the need for earthquake resistant houses. Dense cities mean (somewhat confusingly for Americans to understand) lower rent, lower transport and lower energy costs, more efficient building costs, and greater equality. Urbanization has been an inexorable force of the 20th century for more reasons than just the hunger of capital for labour. That small low density rural community you imagine will be high carbon. Those people could be in the city, and the town could be a solar farm or carbon sink, with a few people living nearby to manage farms and forests, subsidized by low energy city dwellers.

This is why we are doomed: because at this late stage of the crisis, Americans still don’t even understand what the crisis is or how it is caused, and economists are still confusing carbon budgets and emission rates.

So… should we be worrying about doing something about big hydro? Should we at least be worrying about how it’s being ramped up because it’s renewable?

Burning methane is less carbon-intensive than burning coal, because CH4 +2O2 -> CO2 +2H2O instead of C + O2 -> CO2, and gas is certainly cleaner than coal with respect to other pollutants.

Unfortunately, methane itself is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, so losses in extraction, compression, transmission and storage render it questionable whether its substitution for coal is actually ameliorating climate change. Reducing oil consumption would reduce attendant uncaptured methane release as well as flaring.

The EIA can help you here. About 26% of the US emissions in 2017 came from coal, which means that switching to natural gas would reduce these emissions by 2/3, so total US emissions would decline by about 16%. That is not “problem half solved”. Very far.

The EIA charts show that almost all of transportation emissions are from nonelectric emissions, vs. about 2/3 of industrial and 1/3 of household. You can’t reduce a lot of the industrial emissions (coking coal!). If you were to electrify public transport and then make all electricity natural gas you might shift another 10% of the total emissions. What remains is electrification or hydrogenification of cars. But note that the EIA charts don’t disaggregate for agriculture; they do suggest that if the US completely electrified its agricultural systems and could somehow make its fertilizer and chemical production carbon neutral, 10% of emissions would still arise from methane.

You need to look at these charts to understand that you can’t tax your way out of this problem, or fix the problem by faffing around with a few delicate policy changes like retiring old coal plants or moving into wooden houses. This is an extinction-level event for industrial civilization, and it is going to require measures beyond anything our current governments (or most American pollyannas on here) are even able to conceive of, let alone enact.

The concept of a “Green New Deal” needs to be unpacked.

The fact that the concept’s proponents have put no plans on the table to substantiate the concept is interesting because the global warming crisis has been around for approximately fifty years during which opposition intellectuals have had time to make such plans. Hence, either the intellectuals have failed, the concept’s proponents are staggeringly ignorant about the central issue of twenty-first century human civilisation, or the concept’s proponents do not actually wish to do anything but merely wish to spout rhetoric for self-serving and partisan purposes.

The term “New Deal” is symbolically significant for Democrats, as a time when Democrats were in power and Republicans discredited. However, the actual “New Deal”, which was supposedly intended to end the economic depression of the 1930s, failed to do so; economic depression was only ended by the rearmament which began to reach substantial levels in 1940. The “New Deal” was constituted as a gesture to show the public that the elite were concerned about their problems, and thus avoid wholesale restructuring of socio-economic activity of the kind which actually happened in pursuit of World War II.

Therefore, a “Green New Deal” would be symbolic and ineffectual, which is exactly what we do not want. We cannot wait a decade for an ecological Pearl Harbour to oblige the elite to take action which they clearly are not willing to take. (In any case the “Pearl Harbour” has already happened; the elite would be happy to wait until Yamamoto’s carriers were steaming up the Potomac to enforce the surrender.)

A “Green World War II” is what is needed here. (Much like what Faustusnotes says, although he fantasises about global action, which will not happen.)

What would it look like in the case of the U.S.? The entire coal, oil and gas electrical generating system must be replaced with renewables, which will be extremely expensive as renewables require much more installed generating capacity than fossil does. In order to reduce demand, the current U.S. pattern of indoor temperature control must be scrapped, meaning that all buildings must be restructured to protect them against heat and cold. Furthermore, all oil and petrol vehicles (other than emergency vehicles) and small-scale electrical vehicles, and all private air transport, must be scrapped and thus a vast electricity-based communal transport infrastructure must be constructed. All this has to happen in about twenty years.

I can’t imagine how much it would cost. Assuming it were done sensibly, perhaps it could cost as little as $300 billion a year. That’s $1000 per person. In theory this is not enormously expensive (I suspect it would cost a lot more, however). It’s like a second Defense Department draining U.S. wealth, although in this case it would at least be doing something useful.

However, there are problems with this. Shutting down the fossil fuel industry would be financially disastrous, particularly because the least energy-efficient aspects of the industry (fracking, tar sands and deepwater drilling) are heavily financially leveraged and their destruction would probably cause a financial crash which could easily be blamed on government rather than the industry, by the usual methods which we saw in 2007-9. The oligarchs would be unwilling to pay for the system and would try to shift the burden of cost onto the poor and the middle class, who can’t afford it and who could easily be manipulated to oppose the system.

Some of this could be obviated by the Democrats devoting the next eighteen months to campaigning around the “Green War”, explaining what the problems are, why these problems have been hidden from the public, how the problems can be solved, and why only the Democrats could solve them. If they do that, they might have a chance of a) winning in 2020 (if they don’t do that, the whole plan is pointless) and b) persuading a majority of the public to support the Democrats against the oligarchs. Unfortunately, however, the current Democrats appear to be wholly controlled by the oligarchs. Hence it’s unlikely that the “Green War” would ever happen, and hence the United States is doomed.

@30
”Critique of Green New Deal”
by Louis N. Proyect – posted here by – Louis N. Proyect

”Ocasio-Cortez has made the Green New Deal front-page news after taking part in a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office on November 13th. Most people who just skimmed the headlines on this story might have assumed that this was some kind of protest meant to discredit Pelosi and the establishment Democrats. In reality, it was much more of a bonding exercise of the sort that has been taking place ever since the “progressives” poured into the new House of Representatives making nice with Pelosi and other old-guard players”.

So… ?
What?

and:
”It turns out that the origin of the concept was in op-ed columns by Mr. Globalization himself Thomas Friedman. In a January 19, 2007 NYT op-ed, the arch-imperialist wrote:
The right rallying call is for a “Green New Deal.” The New Deal was not built on a magic bullet, but on a broad range of programs and industrial projects to revitalize America. Ditto for an energy New Deal. If we are to turn the tide on climate change and end our oil addiction, we need more of everything: solar, wind, hydro, ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal and nuclear power — and conservation.

Yes?!

So – in order to get US a Green New Deal -(some other so called ”advanced Western Democracies already have) – wasn’t it GREAT that some ”old-guard players bonded with young “progressives” and even a (otherwise ”silly dude”) like Friedman is all on board for a ”Green New Deal”?

That makes it far more ”realistic” – faaar more faster!

Right?

And if now – also – all the idiots and Clownsticks also would get on board – or ”bond” with AOC – WE could start tomorrow!

Right?

Attributing GND to that neo-liberal idiot savant T. Friedman is nonsense. Ann Pettifor founded her GND group in 2007, back when Gordon Brown was PM. You all remember her? She issued one of the clearest warning of the approaching GFC back in 2006:

https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230007857

But since she’s not a phd. economist, she obviously doesn’t count.

But since then she’s made little headway. She’s currently an econ advisor to Corbyn’s labor Party, and especially to his number 2 McDonnell. But since the Brexit clusterf*ck dominates all other issues, it’s doubtful still that she could gain much effective influence.

I think the point of the GND slogan/branding is that it is dimly remembered and publicly intelligible. But if one takes the ND to mean the FDR policies of the ’30’s + the war economy + the Marshall Plan then the heuristic value of reviewing that history is to recognize how inadequate those measures were. In fact, the resulted in the initiation of the “Anthropocene” era, of which we are currently enjoying the harvest. Dealing with the climate/ecological/natural resource crises would require massive write-down of current ostensibly profitable infrastructure and capital stocks, including the pile of financial assets laid on top of the them, while simultaneously massively investing in alternative stocks and infrastructure together with conservation and demand reduction measures. And that involves massive institutional changes, not just technological “miracles”, since those investments won’t be conventionally financially profitable. IOW a transition to a significantly post-capitalist global order. Since I think that’s little likely to happen, I’d wager that we’re just cooked.

The Guardian is reporting a new study that finds a rolling phaseout of fossil fuels could work. In this strategy every fossil fuel burning thing is replaced by a renewable-driven alternative when it reaches the end of its working life. That would be all cars, planes, and powerplants. The kicker though is that the plan also assumes “massive reductions in beef and dairy consumption.”

If that plan is followed the earth has a 66% chance of staying within the 1.5C guard rail. If we start right now. That’s a little bit more extreme than decommissioning power plants over 30 years of age!

You think the world will be saved by Ginza at night…

…I want thousands of Hammarby Sweden pop 25,000. Small and modest, built with wood frames.

Here we have the governor of a large state launching a state level carbon reducing initiative, and calling it a Green New Deal.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/new-york-cuomo-green-new-deal-clean-energy#gs.fDGcz2mA

The cornerstone of Cuomo’s Green New Deal is to boost New York’s Clean Energy Standard from 50 percent to 70 percent renewable electricity by 2030. To meet this new mandate, the briefing calls for:

Nearly quadrupling New York’s offshore wind target to 9,000 megawatts by 2035, up from 2,400 megawatts by 2030
Doubling distributed solar deployment to 6,000 megawatts by 2025, up from 3,000 megawatts by 2023
More than doubling new large-scale, land-based wind and solar resources through the Clean Energy Standard
Maximizing the contributions and potential of New York’s existing renewable resources
Deploying 3,000 megawatts of energy storage by 2030
Which looks like a pretty ambitious ramping up beyond current “comittments”.

 It goes along with research findings suggesting that experiences, rather than material goods, are a better source of lasting happiness.

Yes; also we could change what kinds of material goods are interesting/valuable, towards bespoke, artisanal, provenanced, regional/local, or otherwise unique. In general requiring major input from direct human involvement rather than energy-intensive mass-production/distribution for consumer goods. “An extinction-level event for industrial civilization” means that we will have to develop (or luck into) a non-industrial … form of societal organization.

Long-term process, obvs. There be time.

I hate to be a downer, honestly I do, but you all realize that this GND isn’t actually going to happen, right? And even if it does it will be woefully inadequate and far too late? That when the technocratic centrist who was the template for the climate fight took his first, tiny, halting steps toward implementation he nearly precipitated a full-blown revolution? You all noticed that I assume?

Are there lots of historical examples of societies, especially large ones, that willingly made massive, society-wide alterations in lifestyle in a period of a few years because of an abstract, non-military threat? Of people willingly giving up 3/4 of the stuff they like to consume because of some lines plotted on x & y axes? And then replicating this process in every society on the planet in a just a few years? I admit I’m not the most imaginative person on earth but I’m having trouble thinking of examples.

There is no reason not to at least attempt a GND coupled with an end to remorseless growth-capitalism, but let’s be realistic and start thinking more about solving the inevitable problems going forward, e.g. should we build a 30 foot sea wall around Miami or move all the residents out.

Global climate change is indeed inescapable. It is not clear to me that a runaway greenhouse effect turning the earth into another Venus is at hand. Indeed, it is not clear to me how much of the catastrophe is the flooding of prime real estate in coastal cities, or a general decrease in the profit rate, or the prospect of a squeeze on the so-called middle classes. .

In other words, if sea levels rise, move inland. If the tropics get to be uninhabitable move to higher latitudes. If farms are less productive, move people out of Bob McManus’ suburban sprawl. People already limit population growth, limit it more. Plant new forests and water them by hand if you have to.

The difficulty of course is that the status quo won’t do such things because it can’t. It works for profit. That is the only measure of human wants, and the environment—human life itself—is not an opportunity cost because neither are profit foregone. (True, regardless of John Quiggin’s new book, which forgets the market defines full employment because full employment is the maximum as measured by profits as resources are distributed according to the dictates of the sovereign consumer’s pocketbook.)

Further, the modern state system which arose to defend national markets and national currency and the national labor system in its peculiarities can’t do such a thing. There will be no concerted action on a massive scale by modern states because there will be no concert of vested interests. Worse, as change destabilizes the weaker states, the more powerful states will attack in the attempt to preserve their interests. And they will succeed, temporarily, perhaps even expanding their power and wealth. In the end, though, the massive depopulation desired now for hoi polloi will strike all. It is unlikely that advanced civilization will magically arise from the ashes.

There is one thing that is clear, that the consensus of the serious thinkers is that revolutionary change is both impossible and undesirable, if there is a distinction.

Because John the plan suggests all power plants, not just coal (it includes gas, oil, or any other exotic fossil fuel burner), it applies to cars, ships and trucks and planes, and it requires a massive reduction in beef consumption. You also predict your plan would end coal production by 2030, as if no new coal plants had been built in the last 15 years. In fact about 400gw were installed since 2010 (net, per the guardian). Your plan would phase out less than 20% of the worlds carbon emissions by 2040, and potentially replace them with carbon emitting gas. When we need to be carbon zero by 2050! The plan I linked to would phase out about 75% of the worlds carbon emissions by 2050, with the majority of that upfront or in the first 10 years. And that plan is calculated to only have a 66% chance of meeting the 1.5c target.

You are simply underestimating what needs to be done, and even in this thread after a post where you finally admit that more than price signals or tinkering will be needed, you still are blasé about what it is going to take. 30 years ago we could have got away with these ideas but that was then, this is now. We need to get serious and stop pretending we can solve this problem with cosmetic fixes.

Heliopause has the truth of it, we aren’t going to do it. All we have to look forward to is ruin.

Sorry John, totally off topic and far less important, but I missed my chance to post this on Daniel’s thread:

Chinese Poetry Congress

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POpjcxRPmA8&feature=youtu.be&list=PL0eGJygpmOH44M3lR51bv1O6_eOq_wCyf&t=2984

X-Factor

@bob mcmanus 58
“…I want thousands of Hammarby Sweden pop 25,000. Small and modest, built with wood frames.”

You do realize that Hammarby Sjöstad is a district of Stockholm, basically on the edge of the central city and not an independent town…

you need chemical factories, which need steel, which needs coming coal. There is no alternative to coking coal for making steel.

There are a few, actually — direct reduced iron using methane. Or charcoal instead of coke. The former process is used on an industrial scale in India, the latter in Brazil. It could be bio-methane from anaerobic digesters. The vast majority of currently consumed coking coal plays the role of reducing iron oxides to metallic iron; the actual carbon alloyed into the final steel is less than 1%.

Direct reduced iron produced with electrolytic hydrogen instead of renewable methane offers more potential to scale: Assessment of hydrogen direct reduction for fossil-free steelmaking

Climate policy objectives require zero emissions across all sectors including steelmaking. The fundamental process changes needed for reaching this target are yet relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose and assess a potential design for a fossil-free steelmaking process based on direct reduction of iron ore with hydrogen. We show that hydrogen direct reduction steelmaking needs 3.48 MWh of electricity per tonne of liquid steel, mainly for the electrolyser hydrogen production. If renewable electricity is used the process will have essentially zero emissions. (H-DR emits only 2.8% of blast furnace CO2.)

There’s a pilot plant currently under construction in Sweden for the hydrogen direct reduction process.

Faustusnotes: “There is no alternative to coking coal for making steel.”

Not so.

First, 27.5% of crude steel does not come from pig iron in blast furnaces but from recycled scrap, a process which dose not use significant quantities of coking coal. With flat steel use, this percentage is bound to rise as recycling catches up with larger volumes of dead cars etc. from 20 years ago when production was rising fast (source. That won’t reach 100%, but a third is still significant.

Two, iron can be made by direct reduction of iron ore using natural gas. The world total is only 86mt/year (5.2%), but it’s a business not a lab curiosity. It’s technically possible to replace fossil gas with catalysed hydrogen (link). The EU is funding two substantial projects led by Swedish and Austrian steelmakers to make this work commercially. The Austrian firm is Voestalpine; the same company that developed the basic oxygen process used today to make most of the world’s steel. This is not a sure thing, but odds-on. It might need a carbon tax to pay, but there will soon be a lot of very cheap hydrogen available from surplus wind and solar peak electricity.

How Many People Does It Take to Develop Solar? Fewer and Fewer

Here’s another sign the solar industry is maturing: it takes fewer people to get a megawatt of panels up and running.

The decline has been steep — it took 23 people to manufacture, develop and install a megawatt of solar panels in the U.S. in 2017, down from 101 in 2010, according to a report Thursday by BloombergNEF. The changes are due in part to more automated factories, increasingly efficient panels and components that are easier to assemble in the field.

…

I’ve been saying for a while that the large number of renewable jobs relative to e.g. “coal jobs” in the US is a statistical artifact of rapid growth. New coal plants aren’t getting built in the US. You only see steady-state operational jobs there. The currently-large numbers of solar and wind jobs are mostly in construction. Renewables are still in a rapid growth phase. So far installation rates are rising even faster than workers-per-megawatt-installed decline, but it won’t be so forever. Solar and wind plants require trivial numbers of permanent workers once they’re built, relative to retiring fossil plants.

If you look at the labor-years needed to build and operate a solar farm over a 25 year life cycle, it yields a lot more energy-per-worker (fewer jobs-per-energy) than the old coal systems. That’s even after adjusting for the lower capacity factors of wind and solar farms. So I’m not particularly sanguine about “green jobs” in energy compensating for declining plant-worker and extractive jobs in fossil power.

bob mcmanus @69 “‘We must depopulate the countryside in order to use our resources more efficiently’ say the liberals.
‘American as apple pie’ say the Sioux and Comanche.”

Perhaps it is not wise to imitate nastywoman’s prose style? At a guess, this is supposed to be sarcasm about how the Sioux and Comanche used their resources more efficiently, disproving liberal nonsense about depopulating the countryside. If so, the much, much lower population/population density of the Sioux and Comanche golden ages does count as depopulation in comparison to modern times.

It also seems odd to criticize the military for raping nature instead of invading other countries. I am so lost to human virtue I would not count a Green army as an improvement at all.

The third paragraph is a list of words. I suspect these are all Bad Things. I do wonder how many people have actually seen Dr. Mabuse der Spieler at all, much less thought Dr. Mabuse was the hero of the movie. And I wonder how many people have actually read Sax Rohmer. Possibly the Burroughs who was meant was Edgar Rice, not William S. But if so, I do have to wonder how Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard get left off that list. Is it really just because Burroughs wasn’t English?

“And finance and urbanism have always been at the center of imperialism.” The problem is, when we start talking about “always,” we have to include the Han empire, the Persian empire, the Roman empire, the Inca empire, etc. which are not notably financial, and whose “urbanism” doesn’t seem to match up so closely to anything today. Apparently James C. Scott is somehow taken seriously in these parts, but the Mongol empire or the Zulu empire or the Iroquois league empire count too.

Dude, it’s all very nice being a clergyman far too learned and urbane to actually believe, but Marxism isn’t a religion. That’s BS from dolts who didn’t pay attention when they were in church and sunday school, assuming they ever were there at all.

When I wrote the sentence about coking coal I was fully expecting a bunch of people to come out of the woodwork saying “oh no, there are alternatives.” This is a problem we have been facing for years in climate action and it’s something we need to face up to: prancing about saying that there’s a new tech around the corner that will solve a huge problem is a form of time-wasting. These techs do not in general come to fruition and when you dismiss a required change because some other fanciful tech will come up you just delay real changes that can be made now. We heard this with 4th generation nuclear, which has been hyped for years now (at least 10 that I can recall) and has had zero traction; meanwhile functional 3rd gen plants are being cancelled in the UK. We heard this with hydrogen, repeatedly over the years, while meanwhile batteries continued to improve. I’ve been hearing it about the iron and steel industries for years. While we should be working on these alternatives, we don’t have time to wait for them. We need a series of rapid, practical and occasionally extreme policies that we can put in place now to buy time for the harder ones that need to come later.

It goes like this: we cannot easily reduce emissions from boats, agriculture, concrete or steel. So they need to be dealt with later, or banned. We cannot ban all small boats but a moratorium on fishing would put a lot of them out of the water. We can’t ban agriculture but we can ban beef, or put a global cap on herds. We can’t reduce emissions from concrete, steel or air travel and we can’t ban them. So, we need other big changes that we can enact now so that we can figure those out later. The big changes we can do now without technological change – purely social changes – are: forced obsolescence and replacement of cars, power plants, trucks, large boats (to nuclear). End deforestation in major arboreal regions and start major reforestation projects in and outside these regions. Ban beef. Ban fish. This puts us on probably a greater than 66% chance of meeting the 1.5c target and buys us 10 or 15 years to figure out a battery- or hydrogen-based solution for small and large ships. The moratorium on fishing may lead to a regeneration of aquatic life that is itself equivalent to a major reforestation effort, with no energy or effort expended by us, and would probably also help to protect a lot of fragile ecosystems whose collapse could be disastrous environmentally and/or socially.

We could probably make a lot of those changes in the developed nations + China first, and roll them out to developing nations later. Radical changes in the developed world now will buy us the 10 years we need to roll those changes out across the BRICS and then developing nations later. That is practical, and also has a strong basis in global justice. At the end of that stage we will need to do things with concrete and steel, but by then we will have had 30-40 years to figure out tech to solve those problems, and to develop reforestation programs that will help to work as offsets. We will likely also, as James Wimberley suggests, have a greater stock of old steel to recycle without using coal, which could mean the steel industry becomes primarily recycling-based and thus electrificable.

Had we started in 1990 with gradual changes none of this would be necessary. But the American government and big tobacco obfuscated and delayed, with economists leading the charge as denialists, and now we no longer have the luxury of gradualism. We have reached the point where waving your hands at a single sectoral change and saying that will be enough is a form of denialism. We’re in the trenches now, and we have to get brutal.

@80
”Dude, it’s all very nice being a clergyman far too learned and urbane to actually believe…”

A nasty woman easily could have written the above –
concerning ”don’t imitate her prose” –
but Marxism could be a ”religion”? – especially if it’s our duty to stay super-positive about some ”New Green Deal”.
-(even for Cowboys AND Indians!)

I’m in the rural Midwestern US ATM. Petrol was 0.46€/L today. In an economy where there has been wage stagnation for decades, and there’s increasingly wealth inequality, with crippled or non-existant public transit and low population density, it’ll be political suicide to call for – let alone impose in a top-down manner – the elimination of widespread usage of personal gasoline engines before meaningful alternatives exist, and there’s no sign of meaningful alternatives being in place any time soon. This applies just as much for consumption and diet, but the degree to which cheap gas is a pacifier and comfort food can’t be overstated. There needs to be a culture shift before any sort of GND has a hope of surviving in the US, and I’m rather gloomy about the prospects of that happening anywhere near enough to matter.

I’m in the rural Midwestern US ATM. Petrol was 0.46€/L today.

Oh man, I bet people were _really_ confused at that gas station!

(I’m not sure from what you say if you mean this to be a low or a high price, but for the U.S., in my experience, it’s a fairly low price for the last 15-20 years.)

TM@91 “I was commenting on stj 66, who suggests that places like Bangladesh, which are imminently threatened by GW, might be mainly inhabited by ‘prime real estate’, and doesn’t seem to regard the likely breakdown of global agricultural productivity as a big issue.”

I don’t know whether TM thinks Bangla Desh is a coastal city rather than a country. Or whether TM thinks more people are worried about sea level rise in Bangla Desh than in New York City or Miami or London, which really are coastal cities with lots of prime real estate. But I don’t believe either proposition.

I do think TM should have realized I was saying the imminent threat to Bangla Desh is not global warming raising sea levels (or tsunamis as the shifting weight of the Antarctic ice cap triggers earthquakes.) but, yes, I say it again, India. Tragically it seems highly unlikely India will ever recover from Modi, any more than the US ever recovered from Truman, McCarthy et al. Bangla Desh is even more vulnerable, there the Modi of the day will attack Bangla Desh. The mass of the population on both sides will suffer of course, but that’s never the issue in modern war. Do the masters on one side think they have an easy win that will profit them, no matter who else suffers? Or even worse, do the masters of one side fear that without a victory they, personally, will lose their dominion?

If TM believes anything other than the need to argue with me, it seems to be something like this: Global warming is a runaway process that will inevitably devastate vast portions of the entire biosphere, in an ecological collapse that cannot be meliorated even temporarily. No movement of agriculture to currently unused lands can suffice, even temporarily. No possible investment of resources can provide enough food for the population which will die of literal starvation (rather than disease and violence accompanying famine?) in an avalanche of change that will not even permit substitution of new food crops.

I also suspect TM thinks of agriculture now as straining the limits, whereas I think agriculture now is already limited to profitable food production. This is the flip side of seeing the mass of humanity as an army of stomachs. It seems to me TM agrees with the CT community that the excess people are eating too much meat. I’m afraid I also think there are excess people, capitalists, but their meat consumption, high as it may be, isn’t really straining the world resources.

I’m not quite certain why TM singles me out, as I rather suspect many others don’t think so either. At this point I do not think the changes from global warming will turn most of the planet into a slightly cooler version of Venus. Under the system we have now I think civilization can collapse in a general war for profits in a shrinking pie. But I do think the handful of survivors trying to scratch out a living with newly rediscovered stone age technology will be able to find some plants and animals to eat.

stj, that comment is so incoherent it would be utterly pointless to try to respond. Apparently I “should have realized” you were talking about India when in fact you never mentioned India until 92. I can’t make sense of this (“I say it again, India” – ???). Just one remark: please refrain from speculation of what others might believe, unless they tell you what they believe. It’s fruitless and offensive, and usually wrong.

TM@94 forgets writing @91 “I was commenting on stj 66, who suggests that places like Bangladesh, which are imminently threatened by GW, might be mainly inhabited by ‘prime real estate,’ and doesn’t seem to regard the likely breakdown of global agricultural productivity as a big issue.” Since I didn’t suggest anything of the sort, the claim is a very good example of the “fruitless and offensive, and usually wrong” misrepresentation supposedly decried.

And when I wrote “Worse, as change destabilizes the weaker states, the more powerful states will attack in the attempt to preserve their interests,” and TM brings up the specific example of Bangla Desh, the more powerful state is India. That is obvious, and I have made the point before in other threads.

And generally, the charge of incoherence is bogus, a feigned amazement that substitutes an insult for an argument. About the only confession of defeat more ignominious is posting a graphic of somebody else’s generic insult.

Fortunately the cure for people guessing your ideas wrong is quite simple: State them yourself.

OC:

I don’t disagree with most of your last comment, but how farmers respond to market forces is not the predominant factor when looking at rural areas, because it’s no longer true that most rural dwellers are farmers. The rural (or suburban, or urban) working poor, driving 20+yo vehicles because it’s more feasible on their budgets, is more what I had in mind. And WRT rural and to a lesser degree suburban, the regulatory regime of exhaust emissions testing seems relevant: it’s more common to see emissions testing in (blue) urban areas, but in (red) suburban and rural areas, the regulatory strictures that make it infeasible to drive a 20 or 30yo car are politically toxic.