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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, @06:14PM (5 children)
Look around you.
The only reason any society can be maintained for any appreciable amount of time is because of Capitalism. This is even true of, for example, North Korea, where "black" markets are the only thing that actually keeps people alive.
You see, your problem is that you think in terms of self-conscious, self-aware "governing" bodies who define themselves in terms of borders, and the like. Capitalism doesn't give a shit about those things; capitalism pervades all human interaction (even against people's wills), and is responsible for long-term, sustainable, productive allocation of resources—it's not the case that a Big Government creates a wealthy society, but rather it's the case that a wealthy society can afford the parasite that is Big Government.
Capitalism is working even through the unconscious, un-self-aware: Solutions are being found without people even realizing; the problems being solved are often not even known to be problems! That is what "the Invisible Hand" means; it doesn't require "Intelligent Design" (though it doesn't preclude it, either)—it is a process of evolution by variation and selection, with or without deliberate, explicit thought.
Government is like that guy who hops in front of a parade and pretends to lead it. That's why politics change with the winds; at a sufficient level of complexity, there is NO SUCH THING as Intelligent Design, and to think otherwise will only ever lead you to dangerous, wrongheaded, self-destructive choices at your so-called "country sized scale".
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snow on Thursday October 11 2018, @06:44PM (2 children)
When I look around, all I see countries which tax their citizens/businesses to fund services.
In places with little/no government you don't get this free market utopian dream. You get a place like Somalia, one of the only places on the planet that lacks the structure of government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @07:05PM
Woah now check your privilege! You can't just drop truth bombs on idiots, either their minds will implode or they'll just dig deeper into denial.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 11 2018, @08:07PM
It's not surprising that warlords arise in the fall of an authoritarian culture.
People's lives have improved immensely (even outpacing the quality of life in nearby "stable" countries) since the fall of Communism.
Indeed, one of the reasons for this improvement is that old quasi-capitalist tribal rules started to fill the power vacuum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 12 2018, @01:58AM (1 child)
I saw the same thing in the Soviet Union. It's interesting that communism is perfectly legal in capitalist countries ( https://www.ic.org/ [ic.org]), but capitalism is illegal in communist countries (https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/neyyyw/we-met-the-young-hustlers-cashing-in-on-cubas-booming-black-market [vice.com]).
(Score: 3, Touché) by dry on Friday October 12 2018, @04:49AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954 [wikipedia.org] and earlier, the Congressional Act that abridged the freedom of speech, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917 [wikipedia.org] was used to prosecute people with politics that the government didn't like, for example,