@zeh
I don't care what kind of economic system you have, when people start to have difficulty putting food on the table, they're going to vote you out, and quality of life is unfortunately highly correlated with energy consumption.
@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @dazinism

@cjd
That makes no sense. You're mistaking your experience for what is possible, when the first is a tiny subset of the second. Voting inside "economic systems" that constrict your options to what is profitable is a travesty of freedom and there could be as many ways to live well as there are people, correlated to energy spending or not.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@zeh @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr @cjd Well, sure, unspecified hypothetical modes of organization will always win out over real world implementations.

@freakazoid
Not what I did. I just pointed out that taking this shit as inevitable is a mistake. But if you want to go that way, you may take hunter-gatherer tribes as a counter-example of both of those claims (which are also referred to as a system of primitive communism, actually).
@cjd @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@zeh @dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr @cjd I don't take it as inevitable. But unless we have strong confidence both that a particular solution is better than that a particular set of actions is likely to get us there and not to an even worse state that's even harder to get out of, we're limited to incremental changes that are either easily reversible or that we at least have reasonable confidence won't make us worse off without a decent way out.

@cjd @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism @zeh And there's plenty of obvious low-hanging fruit *today* that for some reason people ignore because it isn't perfect, or because it benefits people they don't like, or because they don't want to be called "moderates", or whatever.

@freakazoid
Low hanging fruit? to address climate apocalipse, which was the case in point? Such as? Short of reorganizing the system of production and eliminating profit as the number one priority, what would you suggest
@dazinism @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr @cjd

@zeh @dazinism @Wolf480pl @freakazoid @cjd Even a socialist autarky uninterested in profit can easily run into situations where, if carbon taxation starts impacting quality of life for the masses (that is, it artificially causes scarcity that does not otherwise exist), they'll attempt to depose the government (whether it's democratic or not), unless you have effective suppression of information flow.

Which is why you need to make alternatives to carbon emission and make them attractive enough that quality of life doesn't degrade, or at least make it such that you can blame degradation on someone else.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Interestingly enough, this seems to be something that entrepreneurship is fairly good at. I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish it, and entrepreneurship (at least when funded by intellectual property) is obviously bad at certain kinds of invention, like certain types of drugs and medical treatments, but nonprofit foundations seem to do the best job there, not government grants.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl I think there's a difference between R&D and deployment, though.

Private organizations do seem to be very good at throwing ideas at the wall and proving that they work... but getting them to the masses is extremely inefficient due to how capital allocation works in the private markets.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism @zeh (Just look at, say, Tesla as an example, and how rocky their ramp is. We know the technology works and can be cost-effective as fuck, at this point. The capital markets can't divorce that from the vagaries of a slow-building startup that isn't designed for an "exit". Meanwhile, China's state capitalism is subsidizing them massively (presumably partially to get access to their IP, but still) and in under a year they'll be from farmland in Shanghai, to a factory there. I don't think this is the *best* approach either, but it seems to work better than whatever we're doing in the west...)

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Tesla is an interesting example. Elon Musk has as much money as he does because of the factors I mentioned, but Tesla itself is in many ways a charity; VCs and angels would never have financed such an endeavor out of a profit motive. It's going to take a very long time to even come close to paying Musk back, much less making him more money than he's put in.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr And the current pattern of bringing new technologies to "early adopters", who tend to be wealthy, first means that those early adopters are the ones paying for the research. One can imagine ways to accelerate this process, but most new products that aren't just minor iterations on old ones end up failing, so most of the time you'd just make failure more costly in total.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Making failure more costly is bad, because the process of invention is mostly a random search, so failure should be fast, cheap, and plentiful.

This is a major problem with the current way the markets are allocating capital. Uber has essentially been treated as if the investors are certain it will succeed if only it gets enough money and grows large enough.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In a way this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that money is getting spent on lobbying and driving competition out of the market. But it's also extremely costly, because to make an above-market return on their investment, the investors are betting on the irrational exuberance of the public after it IPOs.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism IOW, their plan is to build this thing that looks like the "next Facebook" and dump it on the public. And the public will suck it up because with enough VC money almost any idea can be made to look good.

So raise interest rates, shift more money into debt financing which requires actual profits, and actual savings accounts (or treasuries and CDs), and make companies grow more slowly and fail more quickly.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr (Those latter things were consequences of raising interest rates, not additional actions that need to be taken.)

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @zeh @dazinism
I would really really like to know how the monetary policy would work in the Federated Republic of Sean.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl@niu.moe @zeh @dazinism
Because these issues are things I've wrestled with in my mind and I never found any decent conclusions, nor even really proper understanding for some of the phenomenon.

@cjd @dazinism @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr I don't have a good answer yet. As much as he's demonized, Milton Friedman came up with a couple interesting ideas late in his life: either target the broad money supply directly instead of interest rates, or keep the monetary base constant and let the market decide what the multiple should be. The problem with the latter approach is that there are still other levers like the Federal Funds Rate and Discount Rate.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @dazinism @cjd I like the idea of "free banking" as well. This doesn't mean banks are completely unregulated, just that they are not backed by the government or Fed, which would not exist in such a scenario. I would probably have the government provide insured banking services, with the private banks left for folks who already had sufficient "safe" savings.

@cjd @dazinism @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr Free banking is not exactly what used to exist in the US, for a couple of reasons: first, banks were regulated under state law and were prohibited from branching outside their own states or even a single neighborhood, which meant they had no diversification. Second, many states required banks to hold a percentage of their assets in the state's own debt. Those states, unsurprisingly, tended to default a lot.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @dazinism @cjd A better example is Canada, where banks were allowed to branch nationally, and which had no bank failures during the Great Depression. Canada created a central bank, but in order to facilitate international payments without relying on London banks, not to promote stability.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Addressing the other points in your post, while it's true that we know the technology works, the problem is that we also know there are a bunch of alternative technologies that are likely to be even better, so going "all in" now has a decent chance of producing a worse outcome (possibly much worse) than an approach that puts the decisionmaking and risk in the same (preferably distributed) hands.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In my view the best approach by far is to push *away* from the thing we know for sure is bad and let people decide on their own what they think the best alternative is. The best way to do that is with a carbon tax.

...

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism And also raise interest rates, but the immediate recession from that will slow things down a bit in the short term. We'll have a renaissance afterward, though, from all the capital and labor that's now been freed up from "zombie" companies that only existed because investors were constantly throwing money at them.

...

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr And the resultant increase in revenue will more than make up for the increased cost of borrowing, including the extra bonds the government will have to float in order to pay for expanded/extended unemployment, welfare, and health benefits or even a UBI in order to avoid making the most vulnerable worse off in the short term.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism The problem is that you need to make alternatives accessible and available.

If carbon taxation pushes everything out of availability, and progressive redistribution of the carbon tax isn't sufficient (you need to watch for things like developers increasing close-in housing costs in response to carbon taxes purely because the market can bear it, too, as this hits lower income people the hardest), then you need to subsidize, which means you've gotta pick winners and losers.

Also, I'm not aware of any technologies that look more promising than battery-electrics for personal car-based transportation - yes, there's hydrogen, but that's been a fossil fuel industry boondoggle for decades.

Mass transit also needs to be subsidized in every case I've seen, and mass transit systems can't just be given to "the market" to decide, you have to actually choose something and do it.

And, really, we don't have time to wait for better technologies to come to fruition, we need to go all-in on mitigation *now*. We have eleven years. Once the crisis is resolved, we've got time to rethink things in better ways.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism @zeh (Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that personal electric cars are the answer. They're *an* answer that is palatable to a wide swath of the population, but that should be deployed alongside improvements for low-speed vehicle infrastructure for electric-assisted low-speed vehicles (bicycles and scooters being among them), as well as widespread mass transit with frequent service intervals.)

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism I agree that battery powered cars appear to be the best choice, for cars. What we don't know is what kind of battery or charging system is best. If we picked CCS chargers and lithium ion technology, we'd be stuck with a system where charging takes at least 10x as long as fueling. Long lines at charging stations, etc.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr Investing in alternatives to cars is exactly what the government should be doing. It can use a carbon tax to partially fund this if it wants, but IMO the carbon tax should be considered independently of any redistribution. If the carbon tax is a good idea, we should implement it. If subisidization of mass transit is a good idea, we should do that. Doesn't matter where the money goes from the first or comes from for the second.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl You also assume that once a car is in service, that's it.

*Especially* if you move away from the current American-style of consumerist capitalism, retrofits become practical.

Better batteries come along? Install them as retrofits when the batteries stop meeting peoples' needs.

CCS is too slow (although really it has lots of headroom beyond what the batteries can take now, and a lot of time spent charging is below the peak)? Retrofit a new connector and charge system.

And, focusing on those issues is also not considering that aggressive deployment of high speed electric rail greatly reduces the need for large amounts of energy on board private cars, or fast charging...

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism The structure of capital markets is driven largely by the specifics of regulation and taxation and by monetary and fiscal policy. The single largest driver is monetary policy, because interest rates decide the balance between debt and equity as a source of financing. Low interest rates drive large market capitalizations, demand for fast growth of individual companies, and an appetite for risk.