From the standpoint of an economist, the logic of global warming is straightforward. There are costs to letting it happen, there are costs to preventing it, and by comparing the two we decide what, if anything, ought to be done. But many of the people supporting policies to reduce climate change do not see the question that way. What I see as costs, they see as benefits.
There are always those who want to herd people like cattle or sheep (for their own good, of course -- can't let those morons make bad decisions about their lives when others know better). But in the past few decades they seem more open about it.
Cost of improving prisons. If the US prison system sees a majority of convicts return as recidivists, then most of the money spent on the earlier incarcerations was wasted. So, on the one hand, why spend (waste) even more? On the other hand, why continue to spend any money doing the same, ineffective, things?
Costs of public school infrastructure. If one popular purpose of the school system is simple, safe, child care while parents work, isn't it sad that schools don't operate late and/or night shifts supporting families who are employed on such schedules? Perhaps the capital utilization would be much better when buildings and equipment is used more hours per day. On the other hand, teachers and staff likely would object to working later, unless paid a substantial shift differential.
Related to school structures -- immigration. Stereotypically many workers and families come to the US to labor in seasonal industries like agriculture and construction. School (childcare) facilities that shut down all summer don't support those workers as well as they support citizens working year-round (office or service-sector) jobs. If we ran summer schools -- especially if we emphasized assimilation skills like English language and trade crafts -- we'd keep vulnerable kids out of the fields and make better residents or even citizens of them. Again, capital utilization for facilities in full year production would be improved. But also, current workforce would likely require huge pay incentives to give up multi-month summer vacations...
Private pensions. When the large corporation, union, or government invests for their workers' citizens' old age there will be investments. But sometimes (CalPERs) there will be failed investments. An entire structure is at risk to collapse all at once. If thousands or millions of individual investors make many different decisions, some will succeed and some fail -- at different times and for different reasons. The costs of individual failures make tragic headlines. The costs of systemic structural failures are incalculable.
David, this could go on all day. All week. The rest of the year...
The obvious one from my POV involves the "benefits" of advertisements, especially advertisements tailored to the interests of the person to whom they are presented.
Unlike some people (you, IIRC a conversation between us correctly), I don't expect advertisements to give me useful information. A typical advertisement minimizes information in favor of attempts to trigger emotional reactions. What information they do include has a fairly high chance of being inaccurate or misleading. Attention given to them is usually wasted.
If I must be presented with advertisements, I prefer them to be maximally easy to ignore. Irrelevance is a benefit.
This would be at least somewhat different if ads weren't constantly repeated to the same audience. I can e.g. clearly remember a chain private school that indoctrinates children into a set of beliefs I associate with certain political positions under the guise of teaching them to think; its ads infest a podcast which I otherwise like.
But my point here is that some people appear to *like* ads, and not merely in their capacity as vendors.
Meanwhile, I find out about relevant-to-me new products by word of mouth, sometimes as the result of venting about the unavailability of something I'd really like to have, or the aggravations of the kludge I'm using to approximate my desired functionality.
That too involves lots of unproductive activity (venting), but the ratio of time spent to results achieved is much much better than paying attention to ads.
When I think of benefits that are really costs, I think of many forms of political activism. I frequently hear people encourage each other to be more politically involved, implying that getting one's views known is a benefit.
Any political issue not trivially solved will develop at least two sides, each populated by a large group of people, who put large amounts of time and resources into getting their position known, "raising awareness", persuading the other side, persuading the middle, or persuading some influential policymaker to implement their position.
If the country split quietly overnight, and each side somehow fully occupied its own fragment of it, there would be no one left to persuade, and all the time and resources spent otherwise on persuasion could be spent on either implementation or on other pursuits. In some cases, the amount spent on implementation seems less than that on activism - imagine spending 30 cents of every education dollar on books and 70 on advertisements.
This leads me to see political involvement as a cost, not a benefit. If everyone sought instead to implement their preferred policies on themselves alone, more of the actual benefit would occur, for all sides.
If the desired effect is deterrence, then the recidivism rate is the measure of that effect. Whatever it is we're doing (or spending) now, it doesn't seem to work particularly well.
Terrible-ness has a terrible track record with regard to deterrence. Most famously, public executions of pickpockets were well attended by crowds of good citizens who needed no deterrence AND by un-deterred free pickpockets preying upon those crowds.
Perhaps those who can't or don't fit in and contribute to the community should merely be removed, isolated, and distanced from the community, without regard to their potential future return and restitution to the community, Carried, or sent, to the far frontier: Australia, the Yukon, Panama, Siberia ... The cost side of such removals are somewhat easy to measure but how would we estimate the benefits, if any, to the original community, to the frontier, to the transportees ...? Costs borne by the convicted transportees themselves were and are, I think, of no particular interest to those doing the accounting.
"...experiments to see whether one or another version of geoengineering will work."
Any such "experiments" would affect the entire world, and could very plausibly cause great harm.
The author seems to take it as given that "climate change" is a problem, and specifically that CO2 is a problem. Is he by any chance aware that throughout most of the earth's history CO2 was much higher than it is today? It was about three to five times as high when dinosaurs roamed the earth and life was thriving, as long as one of the big guys didn't eat you.
With regard to "climate change", I favor doing the one thing that humans absolutely HATE to do: nothing.
It's a little off topic, but I would like to see @TerraformIndies succeed in making natural gas from atmospheric CO2. It takes energy, but they think it would be economical given an energy source.
And yes, I cautiously support fracking and strongly support nuclear power, and the people who hate both usually don't support @TerraformIndies either.
When I look at US media I see one stupid moral panic after another. It's just awful. I think we are right to support the Ukraine against Russian invasion, but hate the moral panic over it in the media. And the worse the climate gets, the more we need a serious response, and the more damage done by the moral panic over climate change. When the life of the mind is moral panics the mind is mad.
You mentioned nuclear power as a possible solution. As you probably know, the LNT model of harm vs. dose drives up cost of nuclear. Many pro-nuclear activists think LNT should be replaced with a more realistic model that accounts for biological repair mechanisms. Here’s a link to Dr Edward Calabrese’s excellent video series: https://hps.org/hpspublications/historylnt/index.html. He documents an unbelievable amount of scientific misconduct pushing LNT. A lot of the fraud was committed by Nobel laureates. Dr Calabrese believes serval key papers supporting LNT should be retracted. I sure would like to hear your take on his history and recommendations.
I find it telling that people opposed public education because they want to be able to brainwash their children in isolation. They can't have much faith [sic] in their ideas. We raised our kid with heterodox ideas (e.g., free-thinking, vegan diet, non-speciesist, etc. More via the link.) and had no fear of public school.
There are always those who want to herd people like cattle or sheep (for their own good, of course -- can't let those morons make bad decisions about their lives when others know better). But in the past few decades they seem more open about it.
Cost of improving prisons. If the US prison system sees a majority of convicts return as recidivists, then most of the money spent on the earlier incarcerations was wasted. So, on the one hand, why spend (waste) even more? On the other hand, why continue to spend any money doing the same, ineffective, things?
Costs of public school infrastructure. If one popular purpose of the school system is simple, safe, child care while parents work, isn't it sad that schools don't operate late and/or night shifts supporting families who are employed on such schedules? Perhaps the capital utilization would be much better when buildings and equipment is used more hours per day. On the other hand, teachers and staff likely would object to working later, unless paid a substantial shift differential.
Related to school structures -- immigration. Stereotypically many workers and families come to the US to labor in seasonal industries like agriculture and construction. School (childcare) facilities that shut down all summer don't support those workers as well as they support citizens working year-round (office or service-sector) jobs. If we ran summer schools -- especially if we emphasized assimilation skills like English language and trade crafts -- we'd keep vulnerable kids out of the fields and make better residents or even citizens of them. Again, capital utilization for facilities in full year production would be improved. But also, current workforce would likely require huge pay incentives to give up multi-month summer vacations...
Private pensions. When the large corporation, union, or government invests for their workers' citizens' old age there will be investments. But sometimes (CalPERs) there will be failed investments. An entire structure is at risk to collapse all at once. If thousands or millions of individual investors make many different decisions, some will succeed and some fail -- at different times and for different reasons. The costs of individual failures make tragic headlines. The costs of systemic structural failures are incalculable.
David, this could go on all day. All week. The rest of the year...
The obvious one from my POV involves the "benefits" of advertisements, especially advertisements tailored to the interests of the person to whom they are presented.
Unlike some people (you, IIRC a conversation between us correctly), I don't expect advertisements to give me useful information. A typical advertisement minimizes information in favor of attempts to trigger emotional reactions. What information they do include has a fairly high chance of being inaccurate or misleading. Attention given to them is usually wasted.
If I must be presented with advertisements, I prefer them to be maximally easy to ignore. Irrelevance is a benefit.
This would be at least somewhat different if ads weren't constantly repeated to the same audience. I can e.g. clearly remember a chain private school that indoctrinates children into a set of beliefs I associate with certain political positions under the guise of teaching them to think; its ads infest a podcast which I otherwise like.
But my point here is that some people appear to *like* ads, and not merely in their capacity as vendors.
Meanwhile, I find out about relevant-to-me new products by word of mouth, sometimes as the result of venting about the unavailability of something I'd really like to have, or the aggravations of the kludge I'm using to approximate my desired functionality.
That too involves lots of unproductive activity (venting), but the ratio of time spent to results achieved is much much better than paying attention to ads.
When I think of benefits that are really costs, I think of many forms of political activism. I frequently hear people encourage each other to be more politically involved, implying that getting one's views known is a benefit.
Any political issue not trivially solved will develop at least two sides, each populated by a large group of people, who put large amounts of time and resources into getting their position known, "raising awareness", persuading the other side, persuading the middle, or persuading some influential policymaker to implement their position.
If the country split quietly overnight, and each side somehow fully occupied its own fragment of it, there would be no one left to persuade, and all the time and resources spent otherwise on persuasion could be spent on either implementation or on other pursuits. In some cases, the amount spent on implementation seems less than that on activism - imagine spending 30 cents of every education dollar on books and 70 on advertisements.
This leads me to see political involvement as a cost, not a benefit. If everyone sought instead to implement their preferred policies on themselves alone, more of the actual benefit would occur, for all sides.
If there are externalities, a distinction must be made between private costs and benefits and public costs and benefits.
If the desired effect is deterrence, then the recidivism rate is the measure of that effect. Whatever it is we're doing (or spending) now, it doesn't seem to work particularly well.
Terrible-ness has a terrible track record with regard to deterrence. Most famously, public executions of pickpockets were well attended by crowds of good citizens who needed no deterrence AND by un-deterred free pickpockets preying upon those crowds.
Perhaps those who can't or don't fit in and contribute to the community should merely be removed, isolated, and distanced from the community, without regard to their potential future return and restitution to the community, Carried, or sent, to the far frontier: Australia, the Yukon, Panama, Siberia ... The cost side of such removals are somewhat easy to measure but how would we estimate the benefits, if any, to the original community, to the frontier, to the transportees ...? Costs borne by the convicted transportees themselves were and are, I think, of no particular interest to those doing the accounting.
"...experiments to see whether one or another version of geoengineering will work."
Any such "experiments" would affect the entire world, and could very plausibly cause great harm.
The author seems to take it as given that "climate change" is a problem, and specifically that CO2 is a problem. Is he by any chance aware that throughout most of the earth's history CO2 was much higher than it is today? It was about three to five times as high when dinosaurs roamed the earth and life was thriving, as long as one of the big guys didn't eat you.
With regard to "climate change", I favor doing the one thing that humans absolutely HATE to do: nothing.
Yes, it's a battery in that sense.
It's a little off topic, but I would like to see @TerraformIndies succeed in making natural gas from atmospheric CO2. It takes energy, but they think it would be economical given an energy source.
And yes, I cautiously support fracking and strongly support nuclear power, and the people who hate both usually don't support @TerraformIndies either.
When I look at US media I see one stupid moral panic after another. It's just awful. I think we are right to support the Ukraine against Russian invasion, but hate the moral panic over it in the media. And the worse the climate gets, the more we need a serious response, and the more damage done by the moral panic over climate change. When the life of the mind is moral panics the mind is mad.
You mentioned nuclear power as a possible solution. As you probably know, the LNT model of harm vs. dose drives up cost of nuclear. Many pro-nuclear activists think LNT should be replaced with a more realistic model that accounts for biological repair mechanisms. Here’s a link to Dr Edward Calabrese’s excellent video series: https://hps.org/hpspublications/historylnt/index.html. He documents an unbelievable amount of scientific misconduct pushing LNT. A lot of the fraud was committed by Nobel laureates. Dr Calabrese believes serval key papers supporting LNT should be retracted. I sure would like to hear your take on his history and recommendations.
I find it telling that people opposed public education because they want to be able to brainwash their children in isolation. They can't have much faith [sic] in their ideas. We raised our kid with heterodox ideas (e.g., free-thinking, vegan diet, non-speciesist, etc. More via the link.) and had no fear of public school.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/08/from-down-under-so-while-i-may-disagree.html