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Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

theguardian.com

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Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#211

Post by rjzzleep »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #184
roenxi wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Canadians are there in the CCP leadership? China is around 30% of the globes emissions, Canada is 1.5%. Alarmist statements are not going to do anything to Chinese policy. The only thing that is going to work is having a technically better source of energy to move to.

There is a straight forward (but not easy) solution to the China problem. It's called the carbon club, and William Nordhaus won the Nobel Memorial prize for his paper on it. Germany is currently leading the charge to get one set up.

The EU has a pretty history of forcing their citizens foot the bill for lazy corporations failure to do anything in the interest of society or humanity. The most recent example was when they(Germans, EU) was pushing for a digitalization tax so that corporations could have the tax payer foot the bill for their failure to invest money into themselves rather than funeling it out. There are countless examples of this happening in institutions within Germany that used to be public and were half privatized.

Carbon tax is yet another one of these examples where the tax payer has been sold on the idea that they have to foot the bill for the big corps selfishness.

Completely absurd that these things are even presented as a solution. As for China being a problem? I think all the people that worked decades to push everything to China with complete disregard for anything share some blame?

And then at the same time the IAEA was actually supposed to be an institution to help the world forward in safe nuclear energy development.

Talking about Chinas carbon footprint, while ignoring why it's the worlds biggest polluter is kinda how we kept saying how horrible their and some other countries in the areas ocean trash pollution is while omitting that we were the ones shipping our trash there.

But yes, this is the past and now it's different, but just erasing history doesn't give a good ground for a constructive discussion.

And re: carbon club and China, Germany will never defy China. It's their biggest importer. In the end it's all rhetoric. They just recently released a statement how they want to discuss the Xinjiang issue on mutual understanding. They spent a decade promising other countries to setup a parallel remittance system, which never materialized. It's all talk and no substance

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#212

Post by wanderingmind »

Monory wrote: post #208
wanderingmind wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's see. Maybe we start with a 90% tax above 100K income to pay for climate change costs? Will that be acceptable inconvenience to folks here.

Sure, if you get billionaires to pay it, too.

You are willing to pay only if someone more wealthy that you pays, but you expect people who scrape for a living to pay more for their energy and fuel expenses because it's just a mild inconvenience for the greater good?

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#213

Post by ZeroGravitas »

lucidguppy wrote: post #140
dvhh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like using more nuclear power ?

Nuclear power can't come online fast enough. We shouldn't needlessly decommission plants like Germany did. There's an opportunity cost here - we need to make "power plant factories" rather than just "power plants". So if we could make green energy factories and nuke plant factories, that would be better than making one off nuke plants that take so long to get approved.

I would suggest (as is commonly accepted) that building new nuclear is a net-negative for climate change (due to high cost that could have been spent on renewables, efficiency or other related stuff that would have more impact) but I'm not against keeping nuclear plants open if they are within their lifetime.

Having said that, I've never seen an actual solid argument that Germany rushed their nuclear phase-out.

It usually ends at "they're phasing out nuclear, they still burn coal, they're idiots" yet if you look at a graph of their carbon intensity, it's going down at roughly the same speed as their neighbours and there's no obvious blip from the nuclear phase out. If anything, the fact that they still have coal means they've got a few easy wins left as they phase those out. (This holds true even when accounting for carbon imports/exports).

But the whole "carbon tax" thing is about lots of small changes adding up to make an effective difference. Germany appears to be achieving this even with apparent oddities like nuclear and coal. Maybe those were the political cost of doing all the rest of the stuff.

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#214

Post by rapind »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #147
asaddhamani wrote: post #11

We need “unprecedented measures” to stop and reverse the “unprecedented” damage we have caused to the planet and its climate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. Yes, the proposed changes might be inconvenient but it’s time we suck it up and do the needful. Small steps are not good enough. We need drastic measures.

>Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. This same rhetoric has been repeated for decades, and has continually received the same, hostile response from the public and politicians. I'm not arguing that it's wrong or untruthful, but alarmist statements like this are a demonstrably poor tool for rousing the public into action…

Alarmist statements DO seem to work though looking at the previous term’s statements on immigration.

There has to be tons of reasons it’s not working in this case, but I don’t think it’s the alarmist portrayal. I suspect it should be far more alarming.

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#215

Post by ramphastidae »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #181
jay_kyburz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans (and Australians) will never accept any changes that negatively impact their lives or wallets. Especially when the consequences of climate change are not clear and present. As democracies, we will simply vote out any government that asks us to change our ways. I think Covid19 demonstrates how resistant people are to change, and that they are not willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. Nearly 700,00…

One of the most famous speeches in American history: "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." - Ken…

Come on. The US did not go to the moon because millions of Americans banded together and sacrificed around a single goal. The US went to the moon because the government felt capitalism was losing the PR battle to communism (Soviets) and so decided to pour money into it because they didn’t want to look bad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Race

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#216

Post by snarfy »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #46
asaddhamani wrote: post #11

We need “unprecedented measures” to stop and reverse the “unprecedented” damage we have caused to the planet and its climate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. Yes, the proposed changes might be inconvenient but it’s time we suck it up and do the needful. Small steps are not good enough. We need drastic measures.

Americans (and Australians) will never accept any changes that negatively impact their lives or wallets. Especially when the consequences of climate change are not clear and present. As democracies, we will simply vote out any government that asks us to change our ways. I think Covid19 demonstrates how resistant people are to change, and that they are not willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. Nearly 700,00…

We would all need to basically live an Amish lifestyle. Not many will do it willingly. We really need some breakthrough like fusion.

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#217

Post by sershe »

wanderingmind wrote: post #205
asaddhamani wrote: post #11

We need “unprecedented measures” to stop and reverse the “unprecedented” damage we have caused to the planet and its climate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. Yes, the proposed changes might be inconvenient but it’s time we suck it up and do the needful. Small steps are not good enough. We need drastic measures.

Let's see. Maybe we start with a 90% tax above 100K income to pay for climate change costs? Will that be acceptable inconvenience to folks here.

Given the effects of tax-funded wars on drugs, poverty, terrorism, etc., I'm in - as long as the money is spent on war against Earth, i.e. earnest efforts to make it heat up faster. I'm pretty sure we only need a few $Tn and 20 years to achieve cooling ;)

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#218

Post by newsclues »

Factorium wrote: post #152

The best solution to climate change is a price on Carbon. Anything else is just pork. If we don't want to impose a carbon price on ourselves, we can do it to others via import tariffs.

I think carbon is the wrong thing. We need to go after pollution. People understand pollution, it’s plastic in the lake, or smog in the sky, people don’t understand “carbon” but garbage on the ground is something we can do something about.

Climate change is the wrong term. We need to fight a war on pollution.

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#219

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #147
asaddhamani wrote: post #11

We need “unprecedented measures” to stop and reverse the “unprecedented” damage we have caused to the planet and its climate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. Yes, the proposed changes might be inconvenient but it’s time we suck it up and do the needful. Small steps are not good enough. We need drastic measures.

>Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. This same rhetoric has been repeated for decades, and has continually received the same, hostile response from the public and politicians. I'm not arguing that it's wrong or untruthful, but alarmist statements like this are a demonstrably poor tool for rousing the public into action…

[deleted]

Re: Apple and Disney among companies backing groups against US climate bill

#220

Post by newsclues »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #187
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree: It might be part of the solution, but simply taxing carbon means that rich folks or companies can pollute. We need green methods put into law to force folks to cut their emissions and pollutants - and punish those who run afoul of the laws, including steep fines, possible business shutdowns, and personal liability/criminal charges for CEOS and other folks running the company, especially if they cover up t…

Carbon taxes basically do that though. They "fine" you if you use more carbon than your competitors, disadvantaging you in the market. Tax evasion is already a crime, and would be difficult for most people since it would be embedded into the things they buy in a million little ways. But each supplier has their own direct incentive to change that to stay conpetitive. There's room for other policies too, the whole "if…

How do you justify pricing carbon when governments subsidies for fossil fuels are billions of dollars annually?
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