johanna | March 19, 2012 at 6:57 pm |
Bart, your thinking is so muddled and tangled it is hard to know where to start. It is like the contents of a 10 year old’s knitting basket.
Believe me, johanna, I understand and empathize with your bemuddlement.
You come to this solution, as I did, with 10-year-old knitting of brow, burdened with preconceptions and mess, assuming what you think I’m saying is what I mean because you’re so entangled with old and unworkable ideas.
With respect, just drop your old ideas. Come at this clean and fresh, and you’ll see more clearly.
For example:
“The poor with voice, I have no need to exploit, as they speak for themselves. Which see http://prezi.com/es1vsjfeena3/the-durban-platform-on-climate-change/ – 194 signatories and the presentations within that conference of the (more or less) legitimate representatives of practically every nation on Earth, including the poorest of the poor. Guess what they say for themselves?”
If you really think that the junketeers and elites of Third World countries are the voice of the poorest of the poor, you are bordering on delusional.
Did I say poorest of the poor? No. I said the poor with voice. I’m not a magician. I can’t wave a wand and bring democracy to the Sudan or Syria, Somalia or the shameful North American poverty zones either.
Indeed, while the elites of poor nations are well known to tend to have little or no interest in the causes of the poor, if you claim that’s all that happened at Durban, then you didn’t pay attention.
You meet a lot of the poorest of the poor in daily life, johanna? Are you elected to speak for them? Qualified? Delegated? Did this mission to talk about them and their interests come to you by divine right? With all due respect, who’s delusional?
These people have their eye on the main chance – in this case, the prospect of a gravy train of free money and junkets and prestige for themselves and their cronies, courtesy of the West, with a few bucks here and there trickling down to the folks at home. The pitiable state of the countries they represent is in no small part due to their own corruption and incompetence.
I don’t in any particular dispute that what you say may be possible, however I’ve learned through long and bitter direct in person experience in these issues to be skeptical of everyone who tosses around unspecified generalities.
Where true, it does no good to be vague. Where false, it paints those free from fault with the same brush, a loathesome disenfranchisement.
Proof? Evidence? Citation? Data? Names? Which of the voices are these fraudsters, and which the legitimate ones? How do you tell the Kony Youtube video from factual and relevant cases? You haven’t demonstrated especial familiarity with development issues, the terminology, the organizations, or the germaine concerns. Do you know them? If not, then why not? If so, then why are you here exploiting them, instead of doing something about it?
Then you say:
“Growth comes from predictability and stability.”
Err, no. Grinding poverty can come from utterly predictable and stable conditions. Very dynamic growth, such as we see in China, can come from unpredictability and change. Ever heard of Schumpeter?
Schumpeter.. Schumpeter.. Schumpeter? The name sounds vaguely familiar. Tell me all about the predictability and stability of Haiti, johanna. Talk to me about how prosperous Katrina (admittedly, a long-predicted phenomenon, but treated administratively as if the prediction did not exist) made its victims. Sure, grinding poverty can come from tyranny, a predictable and durable condition, but that’s hardly in the realm of climate, then, is it?
Explain what you mean, please. However extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.. So be extraordinary.
Finally, you have reiterated over and over in your posts, as if we are all deaf and blind or something and didn’t get it the first six or seven times, that underpricing energy does the poor no favours. No sensible economist disagrees, and as far as I can tell, no-one in this thread has disagreed with that proposition.
No-one in this thread is a proponent of cheap energy through subsidy of fossil fuels, preferential policies that use taxes to build infrastructure that benefits only the fossil industry and its direct dependents, tax expenditures to fossil fuel companies and vehicles in the highest fuel consumption and CO2 emitting range?
Not Jim2? Not what he said.
Not Robert Ellison? Not what he said. Over and over and over again, as if we are all deaf and blind or something.
As you don’t believe you need six or seven counter examples, I’ll gladly stop there.
Where the disagreement arises is on how energy should be priced. For reasons that are obscure, and anyway irrelevant, you have decided that the traditional cost plus profit margin approach which maximises economic efficiency underprices energy and is therefore an attack on the poor. Te way to help the poor is to make it more expensive.
Uh no.
Clearly, I’m in no way talking about all energy. If you make a straw man by blurring the line between “carbon based energy” and “all energy”, then you will never understand the argument.
Not all energy comes from burning carbon. Why do you pretend it is, or must be? Don’t you want to understand?
Excluding all non-carbon energy, when we consider the special case of the segment of the market that emits CO2, we must recognize that emission as part of the production of the energy.
We must recognize, further, not because the science legitimately proves the human hand in the rise of CO2, but because the correlation of the human activity and the CO2 rise compels us to accept the probability and Risk of this activity are real. This is the same as the rationale for insurance, safety measures, helmets for children on bicycles, seatbelts and airbags in cars, and drunk driving bans.
Who absorbs the cost of the CO2 Risk?
All of us, equally, per capita, as none of us is ever likely to agree that we have no dog in this fight.
If you really feel no sense of Risk from this activity, that’s great. Foreswear your share of the revenues. Let it be split among your neighbors. Do you see me trying to dissuade you from abandoning your own wealth?
I’m just arguing that the Risk ought be priced, the service that reduces the Risk is the Carbon Cycle, the natural biology that most permanently sequesters CO2 out of the air, and the compensation for that Risk be paid to its owners — everyone in the nation, per capita — by whatever means best suits each nation.
It’s no different from apples or bandwidth. It’s a scarce resource. What does Capitalism do to ensure the most efficient distribution of a scarce resource? It puts it into the Market and the buyer pays the owner.
I’m afraid that this is the point where your grasp of economics morphs into some kind of weird ideological anabranch. Please provide examples of where and how making energy more expensive than it needs to be has helped the poor to improve their lives. Just one would be good, but a few would be much more convincing.
If you are persuaded to abandon the “all energy” straw man, and the unfounded assumption that energy will become more expensive in a market that more efficiently exerts the Law of Supply and Demand on energy pricing than the current subsidy and tax expenditure system, then we can proceed.
I’ll start with some examples of the harms of the current system:
1. Distortion. By interfering in the decisions of every individual buyer and seller in the Market through non-Market fiat and command and control measures preferential to fossil fuels (and the shameful biofuel scam), the whole Market loses value. That value just disappears. Money vanishes. I’m sure you know how this works, whatever anabranch of Economics you prescribe to.
2. Churn. Subsidies to concerns, where they aren’t tax expenditures, take tax money out of the economy, hold it in limbo, then pay it directly to those distortionate concerns. That period in limbo makes the power of that money to drive the economy vanish for that time. No?
3. Innovation. A Market grows as it leans. Why invest in innovation for a future you know your government is doing everything possible to avoid for the benefit of a few free riders?
4. Free Riders. If you need an explanation, I refer you to Schumpeter On Democracy, An Economic Approach, Chpt 3.3: Political Failure?
I’ll stop before I get to 5, as 6 might offend; and let’s not forget, Seven ate Nine.
So, examples of ‘more expensive energy’ making the lives of the poor better, aside from the logical extension of the cure of avoiding 1-4?
Price CO2 emission. Return the revenue to the entire populace per capita, defining the ‘entire populace’ as the CCL does, wage-earners through their paychecks, for our example. (It’s not the only possible definition, let each nation choose how it does it.)
We know from the British Columbia example and close studies that about 70% of the general population earns significantly more dividend than it spends on fees for CO2. This ratio appears to hold true across populations and nations; perhaps there’s a law of human activity here. Perhaps it’s coincidence.
The overlap of ‘the poor’ with the 70% is virtually complete, with a few notable exceptions. Let each nation deal with those exceptions as it will.
Here, the poor have more money. Far more money in most cases. They have Risk, but the Risk is being curtailed if raising the price of their Risk works as Capitalism generally does under Supply and Demand, but they also have money to spend to protect themselves from that Risk.
And if you’re in that 70% and _not_ poor, well you’re also ahead of the game.
If you’re in the 10% who neither gain nor lose in net as CO2 pricing drives your CO2 energy cost up about as much as your income rises, then your ship rises on the rising tide of innovation and economic efficiency.
If the 30% not advantaged begin to shift to reduce waste (with the 70% of CO2 saints), then suddenly we see everyone benefitting. As the revenues fall, so too do the cost of all those fossil-based non-emitting products: fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, plastics, raw inputs to a wide variety of synthetic goods, and the lost revenue from the Risk is more than made up for, again while Risk either reduces or revenues from the Risk allow each individual to find the best measure to adapt.
Do you follow now?
What questions do you have?
Thanks for your attention.