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from the smoke-gets-in-your-eyes-and-lungs-and-clothes-and-environment dept.
Australia Doesn't Care to Break its Coal Habit in the Face of Climate Change:
Earlier this week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a dire warning about climate change: unless governments of the world coordinate to implement multiple long-term changes, we risk overshooting the 2°C warming scenario that countries strived to target in the Paris Agreement. This would lead to ecosystem damage, increasingly dramatic heat waves and previously-irregular weather patterns in different regions, and subsequent health impacts for humans.
Retiring coal-fired power plants is a significant action that could limit our race toward an unstable future. But Australia's officials don't quite care. According to The Guardian, the country's deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, said that Australia would "'absolutely' continue to use and exploit its coal reserves, despite the IPCC's dire warnings the world has just 12 years to avoid climate-change catastrophe."
McCormack also reportedly said that Australia would not change its coal policies "just because somebody might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow and everything that we should do."
The country's previous prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, abandoned emissions reductions targets that the nation had agreed to, and Australia's renewable energy targets are set to expire in 2020. In September, government analysis showed that Australia's greenhouse-gas emissions increased last year, and independent analysts said the country would likely not meet the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions that it committed to under the Paris Agreement. Unlike the US, Australia has not exited the Paris Agreement, but the country's current prime minister has declined to add any more money to the global climate fund.
[...] Still, Australia ranks only fourth for economic coal resources, with the US, Russia, and China ahead of it. In the US, which has the world's largest economic coal resource, the Trump administration has had a difficult time fighting to save coal. On Wednesday, US coal supplier Westmoreland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the face of $1.4 billion in debt. That makes the company the fourth major US coal supplier to file for bankruptcy in recent years due to the significant decline in coal use.
Internalize the profits, externalize the costs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:41PM (8 children)
I'm not sure how to solve the problem, but an externality (like pollution) is usually a sign that property rights are not well defined enough.
Why can't you, as an individual, successfully sue the coal power plant owners for dirtying your air? Why can't you and others join a class action lawsuit on that issue in order to, you know, collectively bargain?
You can't, because private property is not well respected in this world, even in the West. Our society is still very primitive with regard to individual rights.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:48PM (7 children)
The only people that win in a class action is the lawyers.
Your example solution doens't solve anything though. It only (maybe) gives you money after you have already been harmed. Wouldn't it be better to not be harmed in the first place?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @05:58PM (6 children)
You haven't countered my point; you are just helping me identify the problem: Despite it being the explicit goal of the Founders, the various governments of the United States do a pretty poor job of protecting the rights of individuals.
I agree with you; the compensation of lawyers is part of the dysfunction.
I don't know whether you've noticed, but our Universe is an evolutionary one—through variation and selection, complex systems arrive at sustainable solution for the given conditions. You want protections? The only way to find them is to run the evolutionary experiment; a free market does not purport to solve problems immediately, but rather only to find solutions over the course of time, through iteration, through evolution by variation and selection.
Anybody who tells you that he knows the proper shape of a complex system is either delusional or lying. The best any would-be "Intelligent Designer" can do is to set up conditions that allow a complex system to tap into this most fundamental process in our Universe: Evolution by variation and selection.
So, no wonder the Founders' governments failed; a special, blessed, monopoly on violence is not conducive to (and even explicitly fights against) both variation and selection.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:31PM (4 children)
I agree with what you say above. The free market is perhaps the best problem solver we have.
The government should play the role of the "Intelligent Designer". The government should set conditions to reward good things and punish bad things. Taxes are a tool to that end. Don't like carbon emissions? Tax them. The Free Market will work towards finding lower carbon alternatives because it is cheaper. Want the free marker to solve problems faster? Tax them harder.
There is of course a trade-off. Pretty much everything we do, we do using energy from carbon. Carbon taxes make pretty much everything cost more.
Unchecked, the free market will exploit something as long as it makes money. That is at odds with having an environment that is sustainable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @07:08PM
Government control *REEEEEE* violently imposed monopoly REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE taxes...theft....freedumbs.....REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:09PM (2 children)
... and welfare rewards failure.
That's what you're saying.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Thursday October 11 2018, @09:49PM (1 child)
Nope. Not what I said at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:47PM
A tax on "vice" is indistinguishable from a tax on productive work.
And, you know what? WHY SHOULD THE GOVERNMENT GET THAT MONEY, ANYWAY?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday October 11 2018, @10:50PM
Easy solution: kill the lawyers of the losing party. In time, evolution will select only winning lawyers, the ones that will refuse (for their self-preservation) to settle the disputes in court
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford