361–368 of 368 posts
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Its the 80s/90s that the US is stuck in. The Reagan/Thatcher deregulation revolution was the inflection point.
https://twitter.com/wardqnormal/status/1206280031552454656 >My new hobby is taking graphs of economic data over time and indicating the year that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, in case people find that helpful or informative.
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Manufacturing went to China because of laxer regulations there making it more cost-effective, how are you gonna convince it to come back to the US and EU with even harsher regulations? Easy. Tariffs on Chinese imports so its cheaper to manufacture cleanly back home.
> Tariffs on Chinese imports If that works at all, it only works in disincentivizing manufacturing in China. That doesn't bring manufacturing "back home", it only brings it to other countries similar or even lower in standards as China, are you gonna tariff those too?
Err, yes, obviously. There aren't an infinite number of countries in the world. You could quite comfortably track all the countries that do and do not comply with Western environmental laws in Excel. Or declare a free trade area the conditions of entry to which are compliance. This is a very very easy problem to solve... once we wean ourselves off the cheap tat China produces.
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> gas plants are not for base load, but for backup when the wind isn't blowing. That’s base load. If you didn’t have the gas plants you would have had rolling outages, which means it’s providing base load. Perhaps you are confusing them with peaker plants, which are to help during high demand.
In the future, which again, is what we are talking about when we are talking about the Paris Accords, gas will serve as a backup source for extended wind droughts. However, we will need to provide some subsidies to keep these gas plants around, because within a decade it will not be economical to operate them unless markets are redesigned to properly compensate combined cycle gas turbines that operate at <25% capacit…
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> Tariffs on Chinese imports If that works at all, it only works in disincentivizing manufacturing in China. That doesn't bring manufacturing "back home", it only brings it to other countries similar or even lower in standards as China, are you gonna tariff those too?
are you gonna tariff those too? Err, yes, obviously. There aren't an infinite number of countries in the world. You could quite comfortably track all the countries that do and do not comply with Western environmental laws in Excel. Or declare a free trade area the conditions of entry to which are compliance. This is a very very easy problem to solve... once we wean ourselves off the cheap tat China produces.
It's not really that obvious because an escalating global trade-war is rarely good for anybody, and tariffs only end up costing the consumers.
That's also why even after years of Trump tariffs on China, and all kinds of other countries, there was still no major shift of manufacturing back to the US.
> This is a very very easy problem to solve... once we wean ourselves off the cheap tat China produces
That "cheap tat" is by now a globally unique industry [0] that took decades to be built, by a government that can centrally plan in the decades. You can't just replace something like that from one day to another, and it most certainly wouldn't be easy.
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However, Xi Jinping very publicly announced that net zero by 2060 is now a national aim, which is basically what is needed from china on this issue: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54256826 There is a question of follow through as they are still building new coal power plants, but China is making noises that its going commit to changing. The US is not a leader on this issue any more.
All the new plants Chinese government approve to build now are super critical coal plants. These are the most efficient ones. The gov also regulated older coal plants to retrofit NOx, SOx, pm2.5 treatment equipments. China doesn't have much oil and natural gas but has a lot of coal. So for energy security at the present moment they kinda have to still use coal. They already import lots of oil for transportation and i…
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I guess people who say this kind of things don't believe they themselves will be part of the cohort undergoing the shrinkage. This so called natural self-regulation will be ugly and painful. I don't envy the generation that will have to go through it.
If every woman gives birth to less than ~2.1 children, we're shrinking. Is having <= 2 children painful and ugly?
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USA per capita CO2 emissions are large, but at least they have been coming down moderately fast. From 2007 to 2017, USA reduced emissions by 20%, whereas if we take Germany as an example of a country with strong "green" element in politics, Germany reduced by 8%. Apply linear extrapolation, and USA would go below Germany in 20 years. Extrapolating with exponential decay, in 40 years. https://ourworldindata.org/co2/co…
Well, after the disaster at Fukushima, we started phasing out nuclear power. It was replaced by renewables. (This was super-stupid since we have a stable government, no enemies close by and basically no natural disasters [0] that would threaten our power plants.) We should have shut down coal plants instead but dwelling on what we should have done does not help. The bright side of this is that our emissions are decre…
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You realize Obama didn’t start any wars and spent 8 years trying to close Pandora’s box?
What about Syria? Obama has been at war longer than any president in the history of the country.