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from the did-you-check-to-turn-the-lights-off dept.
Germany's economy nowadays emits as much carbon dioxide as it did in the 1950s, when it was 10 times smaller.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), carbon dioxide emissions trends for 2019 suggest clean energy transitions are underway. Global power sector emissions declined by some 170 Mt, or 1.2%, with the biggest falls taking place in the advanced economies of the European Union, Japan and the United States. There, CO2 emissions are now at levels not seen since the late 1980s, when electricity demand was one-third lower.
In these advanced economies, the average CO2 emissions intensity of electricity generation declined by nearly 6.5% in 2019. This is a rate three times faster than the average over the past decade.
This decline is driven by a switch from coal to natural gas, a rise in nuclear power and weaker electricity demand, combined with the seemingly unstoppable growth in renewables. These now constitute over 40% of the energy mix in Germany (wind power +11%) and the United Kingdom, where rapid expansion in offshore wind power generation is happening.
The bummer lies with the rest of the world.
There emissions continue to expand with close to 400 Mt last year. About 80% of that increase is happening in Asia. Coal demand here continues to expand, accounting for over 50% of energy use.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:32PM (15 children)
Right before the election, the New York Times and the rest of the "MSM" also thought that Hillary was inevitable. This despite the well-known facts that the presidency tends to switch parties when there isn't an incumbent, especially when the same-party candidate is perceived as establishment like Hillary was and is.
Just because people got caught up in a reality distortion field doesn't mean the facts weren't there. I for one have always believed that Trump getting elected would result in a short-term stock market boom because finance people have an irrational love of Republican fiscal policy. Then at some point in the future, somewhere between 1-10 years after his election depending on how bad Trump actually is at business and finance, the economy will crash again.
It's been 3 years. Some parts of the economy are doing very poorly due to the trade wars, but the overall economy hasn't crashed yet. We shouldn't be surprised or confused that 1-10 years != 1-3 years. The crash is still coming, and it will probably be blamed on the next president, not this one. Heck, there's a good chance that it will happen immediately after the election (you know, when literally nothing has changed yet) when the financiers wake up from their GOP fever dream, look around, and realize that their assets are not as secure as they had assumed. Expect at the very least the stock market to take an immediate dip in anticipation of tax law changes hurting the shareholder class.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:53PM (7 children)
Why do you assume it will crash down instead of up?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Wednesday February 12 2020, @09:42PM (6 children)
Crash...up?
My assumption is that trickle-down economics achieve short-term gains by boosting the capital available to the stock market, but result in long-term losses due to deferred maintenance and lack of investment in community resources.
This leads me to expect that trickle-down economics will largely be good for the president that implements them and bad for the president that follows them.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @10:43PM (3 children)
Look at Venezuela: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/IBVC:IND [bloomberg.com]
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:26PM (2 children)
You're going to have to explain what I'm looking at there. I still don't understand what crashing "up" means, and now I'm even more confused any of this has to do with Venezuela.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:04PM (1 child)
There is numerator and denominator for the y-axis.
When the numerator crashes, the crash is down. When the denominator crashes the crash is up, like in venezuela. You get hyperinflation and shortages of everything.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday February 14 2020, @03:03PM
Now I'm not sure what you mean by numerator and denominator. I mean, I know what those things are in general. You just haven't told me where those numbers are coming from.
But I think I'm starting to get what you mean about the market. You're suggesting that the opposite of the market crashing "down" (i.e. long-term investments are worth less) is hyperinflation.
If that's what you're saying, you're wrong. Hyperinflation is better understood as a crash in currency value. It's often associated with general market crashes, rather than being some alternate form of them.
I would go on, but I'm not an economist. There is probably some theoretical framework I'm not aware of where crashing "down" or "up" is a meaningful distinction, but frankly if it exists, its theoretical jargon is so far removed from common English that its terminology is meaningless outside the context of the framework itself.
If you're applying some specific theoretical framework here, you've left no clues as to what the theory is or where I could go to find out; please point me somewhere with something more instructive than 4 sentences of unexplained metaphor. If not, would you please stop repurposing the English language into jargon of an academic field you invented in your own head? We have enough real indecipherable academic jargon without all the not-textbook-writers vying to redefine market crashes and depressions.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @12:11PM (1 child)
It's not trickle-down economics when the people at the bottom of the pay scale are seeing gains in wages that are the best in history.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday February 13 2020, @03:47PM
[citation needed]
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 13 2020, @04:16AM (3 children)
Right before the election, the New York Times and the rest of the "MSM" also thought that Hillary was inevitable. This despite the well-known facts that the presidency tends to switch parties when there isn't an incumbent, especially when the same-party candidate is perceived as establishment like Hillary was and is.
It seems to me that what the Democrats really failed at was learning from the past, and the quite recent past in fact: Obama's (first) election. It should have been a case study for them, but instead they ignored it, it seems.
Bush was elected over Gore because we had already had 2 terms of Clinton (D), and Gore had some pretty glaring flaws and wasn't all that likeable. People liked Bush. Then after 4 years of the disaster that was Bush's first term (including starting not one, but two wars), they picked John Kerry to run against him. They couldn't have picked a more wooden and unlikable candidate. And being so wealthy, he really screamed "limousine liberal". So, he lost, and we got 4 more years of Bush. Then, the DNC tried to push Hillary on us, and some unknown upstart came out of nowhere and beat her in the primaries, though it's pretty obvious the party wasn't too happy about that. What did Obama have that Hillary didn't? He was likeable, he made great speeches, and the young voters loved him. Also, his pedigree was that he was a "community organizer"; maybe it doesn't sound all that serious, but it sure sounds better to energetic young voters than "someone who gives speeches to Goldman Sachs about how great they are". So he won, by a very good margin. I won't go into his actual Presidency here, but when his 2nd term was over, what did the DNC do? They tried to go right back to their old formula: find someone completely unlikable and seemingly bought off by wealthy interests, and then wonder why young voters aren't hyped and why their candidate loses.
It seems like they're trying again with Biden, but so far it looks like the primary voters aren't going for it this time. It'll be really interesting to see who wins the nomination this time.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:36PM (2 children)
It won't be Bernie. The DNC will throw everything including the kitchen sink at him to stop him. Even if he went into the convention with enough delegates to take the nomination outright, they'd find a way to deny him. They are bracing themselves for the rioting and backlash that will unleash from Bernie supporters and the rest of the progressive base, but they have stopped trying to beat Trump and are now trying to save their party from the dirty plebes. They have a very good, very lucrative scam going that the progressive base fall for over and over and over again, and they'll fight to the death to keep it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 14 2020, @01:15AM (1 child)
Not disagreeing, but can you elaborate more on the "very lucrative scam going"?
As for the progressive base falling for them, it's not like they have much of a choice. We have a two-party system guaranteed by Duverger's Law, so naturally progressives (just like any voting group) have to pick the party that's closest to their ideals if they want a chance of winning, and obviously that isn't the GOP. The problem for the DNC is that voters don't *have* to pick the lesser of two evils here: they can just get fed up and not vote, or they can vote 3rd-party (usually Greens). The latter, while it pretty much has zero chance of resulting in a win, is a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the two parties. One thing it seems many keep forgetting, or never noticed about the 2016 election was that the Greens and Libertarians got more votes than ever, IIRC, and if most of those votes had gone to Hillary she would have won.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 14 2020, @03:16AM
In a word, it's influence peddling. They write the laws to benefit monied interests that are the 1%/Deep State/[insert whichever term you prefer]. If they control the party machinery, they control all down-ticket races too. So they don't want populists like Bernie upsetting the apple cart. It's bad for business.
We can expand on that at length, but I hope that suffices.
Most registered voters are independents now. More have been walking away from the Democratic Party since they lurched to the intersectional Left. (I am one of them, incidentally) At some point their network decoheres and the party falls apart. It has happened before. Last time it was the Whigs that died. It's time for the Democratic Party to die.
The Green Party and Libertarian Party are not very strong alternatives, in my opinion. The Green Party is perpetually trapped in the purity spiral that is killing the Democratic Party now. The Libertarians are too ideological, being too far from the lived experience of most people.
My personal preference would be for a reprise of the Progressive Party of 1912 (the "Bull Moose Party"), whose party platform of that year reads like it could have been written yesterday in how it diagnosed the ills in our society and the common sense remedies it proposed. In fact those remedies comprise the social reforms considered the best of the 20th century, from child labor laws to the 40-hr work week to the FDA. It was populist and pragmatic.
Sadly, the solid, honorable term "progressive" has been irretrievably tainted by what the Democratic Party has devolved into; it is freighted with overtones of transgenderism, victim hierarchies, and toxic veganism. Far from being the rallying cry for regular Americans who want their government to work for them, it is a shrieking, gibbering freakshow that sane people would rather euthanize than listen to.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 13 2020, @05:56AM
If a heavy favorite wins as expected, most of the market change due to the new office holder will happen in the months prior to the election and we'd probably not see much of a change at all at election time.
Presently, I could see a large drop in markets, if Trump is somewhat favored to win, and someone far more adverse to businesses, like Sanders gets elected instead. There won't be anything irrational about that drop either. But
You'd be right no matter who is in the office. Recessions happen every few years no matter what. A long stretch without a recession is unusual. In particular, the high end of your duration range, ten years hasn't happened in the past 80 years except for now! That is, we haven't had a decade long period of uninterrupted economic growth in the past 80 years except for the Obama/Trump stretch that we see now. But I think that's more due to the awfulness of Obama's administration towards business and economics slowing growth than any competence on anyone's part. I'd rather have a few bouts of strong, unsibsidized growth punctuated with a couple of minor recessions than what we had.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 13 2020, @08:21AM (1 child)
Mostly because Trump is complete idiot when it comes to actually governing. He can get almost nothing done. So everything is running basically on momentum and Trump just manages to fuck up a few things that are not important in short term. His fuckups are mostly important in long term, like rampant debt accumulation that only accelerated again under Trump as he gives himself taxcuts.
But as with Hitler, who was also an imbecile, be careful. They learn after few years of failures. If Trump is by whatever means elected again, US is basically fucked. It already is as Trump appoints one lackey after another that does nothing but destroy the institutions of America. Just now he's meddling in justice department to help out his other criminal lackey.
Imagine if a democrat did *any* of this shit.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Phoenix666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @01:55PM
By what measure? Obama got almost nothing done because the Congress was blocking him almost the whole time. Even the Affordable Care Act was gutted from becoming real national healthcare (thanks a lot, Max Baucus, you suppurating piece of shit).
Trump, on the other hand has accomplished a great deal of what he set out to do despite total opposition from the legislative branch and career bureaucrats inside his own administration. He re-negotiated NAFTA, is building his border wall (whatever you think of that project, it's happening), and is pushing back hard on China.
Hitler was evil, but he was not an imbecile. He was intelligent, effective, and determined. Perpetuating cartoonish stereotypes of him and the Nazis obscures how they rose to power and did what they did. Try watching Triumph of the Will and reading Mein Kampf and get their take on what they were about. It ought to unsettle you how easy it is for any of our societies to slip into catastrophe.
Sigh. OK. Every president gets to, and does, appoint his "lackies" to positions in his administration. It's one of the perks of winning that office. The losing side always laments that as "destroying the institutions of America!!!"
You're only overlooking the peccadillos of Democrats because you choose to ignore them, not because they have not happened. (Bill Clinton "running into" Obama's Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the airport tarmac to "talk about their grandkids," anyone? Obama assassinating American citizens with drones, anyone?)
Give it a rest. We've seen and heard it all before from both sides for too long. It's stupid kabuki theater.
Washington DC delenda est.