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Bridging the gap between left and right. I came across this clip showing Glenn Beck and Samantha Bee, and thought that this SoylentNews story / comment thread should be stickied till the new year so we have an ongoing conversation. It's a short clip from her show where Glenn Beck is a willing guest; the key point is they are trying to find common ground. Beck points out that Bee is following some of his own patterns of crying "catastrophe" but they really don't provide much insight beyond the significance of their little coming together moment.
The divide is clear and present on this site as most everywhere else, I would like to see a meta discussion where we fact check each other and drill down through the rhetoric until we get some straightforward lists and proposals on how we can move forward together. What are the fundamental blockers? Which ideas do we consider to be too outrageous for credibility? Many here are guilty of attacking each other — can we try and Spock it out for about a week?
I'll start us off with my supposition:
Climate change is real and human activity has an important effect on it. We must agree on this point in order to move forward, and social/economic issues must be handled after needed environmental changes."
If you post as AC — try and behave as if you were logged in — reduce the flames for better quality discussion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @09:54AM
For the people whose property becomes worthless, where is the benefit so great that no reasonable person wouldn't happily take the trade-off?
Their societies become a lot more wealthy with a variety of huge benefits such as reduce or negative population growth, good for the environment, better health, better individual freedom, etc. Further, such ocean-side property still has a long life span ahead of it. The value of it in a few centuries is not the important part.
As for positive externalities, those have never been an excuse in a court of law.
Again, CPR is the obvious counterexample. Having a chance for life is the positive externality. The damaged body parts is the negative externality. Even if we choose not to ban climate change reparation like we do liability for properly done CPR, we still will have a much wealthier society with which to pay such things.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday December 28 2016, @05:42PM
Sharpen your thinking!
Those benefits happened well before liability would begin since we as a species didn't understand the risks at the time.
Liability starts in earnest in the '70s where we have documented evidence of fossil fuel producers who concluded that global warming was real AND they themselves took actions to protect them from at least the more immediate concerns AND took specific actions to deny the problem publicly and retard the development of alternatives that could have mitigated the problems while maintaining all of those beneifis you speak of.
As for CPR, none of that is an externality of any kind. They are a series of benefits and risks that are specific to the recipient. If my CPR on someone somehow caused a 3rd person on the other side of the street to suddenly return to natural circulation, THAT would be an externality. If some guy walking by suddenly had his sternum snap because of my actions, that too would be an externality. It is the consensus of the medical profession that broken ribs are an unavoidable risk to CPR. It's not as if I could have saved the victim without a rib break by performing 'solar CPR'. Note that if instead of standard CPR, I choose to kneel on his chest and bounce because it would make a funnier instagram, I COULD be sued for the rib damage.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:38PM
Liability starts in earnest in the '70s where we have documented evidence of fossil fuel producers who concluded that global warming was real AND they themselves took actions to protect them from at least the more immediate concerns AND took specific actions to deny the problem publicly and retard the development of alternatives that could have mitigated the problems while maintaining all of those beneifis you speak of.
We don't. It is remarkable how much deception there has been on this point. Research into climate change is not agreement on the narrative that climate change requires extraordinary intervention.
Here, we have some evidence that businesses like Exxon did research, came to the inconclusive opinion that there could be a significant harmful effect, but that there wasn't data to support that, and later on, made modest effort to promote thinking that was friendly to their point of view.
As for CPR, none of that is an externality of any kind.
CPR is not a trade so it isn't a perfect analogy. One person's actions affect another without their agreement. That is the core of what externality is.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:55PM
Considering that the oil companies spent money to mitigate the problem, it is reasonable to believe that they were satisfied that there was a problem.
As for CPR, it is an altruistic effort. The essence of an externality is that it is a cost of a desired economic activity that is passed off to others to pay.. Generally those others are unwilling and often unknowing as well.
The difficulty you're having with finding an apt analogy is that we don't generally protect people or corporations from having their externalities internalized.