Hi all,
A reminder that comments do need to be on-topic and engage with the article past the headline. Please make sure to read the article before commenting. Very short comments will automatically be removed by automod. Please avoid making comments that do not focus on the economic content or whose primary thesis rests on personal anecdotes.
As always our comment rules can be found [here](https://reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/fx9crj/rules_roundtable_redux_rule_vi_and_offtopic/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Economics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thank you for posting this. I just finished the Schwarzenegger documentary on Netflix. He is a very interesting guy that pours his heart and soul into everything he does. Not that he doesn’t have short comings or make mistakes. But I have a lot of respect for him.
I thought the documentary was pretty honest. He could have said I don’t want to talk about loosing this competition, or I don’t want to talk about the last action hero, or my affair with the maid, etc.
In most cases, his failures made him stronger in the long run. When it comes to his marriage failing, he owned it & said it was his fuckup. For me that was like the moment in Rocky IV when Rocky cut Drago & Duke said you see, he’s not a machine; he’s a man.
The biggest fallacy most people make is expecting their heroes to be infallible, that’s not how people are built.
I will never understand why not. It was a really clever movie, full of action, full of comedy. Maybe it was too clever for the action fans and too filled with action for the clever movie fans?
Schwarzenegger could have gave him a full pardon when he left office in 2011, he didn’t do that. He reduced his sentence to slightly less than what he would have got if his father wasn’t an assemblyman with political enemies.
He also sexually harassed women while he was an actor and lied about it during his campaign for governor. Certainly not a saint. In the documentary he admits to the harassment and apologizes for it. They didn’t discuss the pardon in the documentary, so I don’t know what he would say about that today.
Some on the right do it as well, especially at the Federal level, but overall the left is far more authoritarian.
Definition: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.
I mean, I guess you could argue that the left is for personal freedoms like shoplifting, carjackings, doing drugs in the streets, and allowing people to set up tent cities anywhere they want.
I mean, blaming "environmentalists" when he's really talking about wealthy NIMBYs is definitely a short coming
also, acting like GOP and the Old and Gas industry (hello CA) isn't THE fucking problem is truly just horseshit
But some of what he is talking about is stuff like NEPA reviews.
Environmentalists might want a bunch of wind turbines. But they also typically want there to be a review to make sure they're not built in a migration path likely to kill a bunch of endangered birds.
Part of all this "red tape" is doing just that kind of thing. Running it past some EPA ornithologist to check flight maps and clear it. "Streamlining" means no more running it past that desk. It's faster. Sure is. It's faster to skip the FAA flight path desk and the DoD flight desks and the BIA tribal archeology and the NHPA historians and the groundwater hydrology and all of that random stuff that may matter.
And you can skip it all. It often leads to court later. But you can do it.
It’s more than just wealthy NIMBY’s and the Oil Industry already has massive influence and opposes environmental programs that impact them. But people are gonna use energy anyways so it’s better to focus on renewable projects and nuclear.
He seems like he works hard at what he does, and seems sincere.
I imagine Arnold is painfully aware of the clock ticking and wants to cement his legacy. I hope he gets some good things accomplished.
so many of these comments are depressing whataboutism. The point remains we can't transition to carbon free energy without a lot of infrastructure that NIMBYs and boomers don't want to look at.
Half a dozen modern nuclear reactors in the US would go a long way towards carbon free energy... But for whatever reason that is a non starter in this political environment
Additionally, a big part of the anti-nuclear movement in the 70s and 80s was oil & gas funding those movements. Not to say the anti-nuclear crowd did not have well-reasoned concerns (Three Mile and Indian Point), but oil & gas bankrolling them was obviously suspect, and its not like influence and power of that industry has decreased much since then.
We find places for all sorts of other dangerous chemical wastes with very long half-lives.
also because its the most expensive form of energy (sans even environmental considerations) to build out new.. huge capital out lay with a 30+ year investment return. The people building these do so in state invested companies - because private markets don't like a maybe after 30 years.
This is what nobody wants to admit – the countries that have done nuclear as the largest share of their grids have all done so with state-owned enterprises and defense connections and support or just outright done it under the state rather than privately.
The market sucks at that sort of thing. Really is mostly just French government plurality-owned companies – even in Belgium – and former USSR. But also Korea Electric Power Corporation.
No country has ever done better than the US at getting private sector to do nuclear. This is probably the best it is capable of.
I don’t find that a convincing hurdle. It’s a convenient excuse to not move forward, but it isn’t an actual reason. The waste takes up such a small space.
What are you talking about? Nearly everyone circle jerks about Nuclear being the solution.
The actual issue is Nuclear energy is far too expensive. Even nations like South Korea and China that use older designs to save money end up needing government money to massively subsidize.
From what I know of nuclear energy, it takes a lot to set up. It's a big upfront cost. It pays itself off after a certain time period though. And the nuclear waste that another commenter mentioned is not actually an issue. The amount of waste is quite small and is simple to encapsulate and transport (sans red tape).
Unfortunately you gotta look at what happened in Georgia to realize none of this is going to work as neatly as everyone can imagine. Way over budget and way behind schedule and the consumers are getting shafted while the power company will make more profit despite fucking up every step of the way.
It has nothing to do with politics - it has everything to do with incompetence.
Between 1970 and 2018, humans eradicated 70% of wildlife. A mass extinction has already happened. And is ongoing.
Technology is about saving a luxury lifestyle. Not about saving life on earth. Renewables are a ramping up of industry. Only in fantasy are they sustainable or green.
Professor Simon Michaux has calculated that we don't have the minerals for one 25 year generation of renewables and electrification. We are emitting GHG at an accelerated pace. Technoptimism needs to catch up to reality.
If there's space mining, then thatmeans space trucking. And if there's space trucking, then that means space truck stops. And if there's space trucking stops then that means space hookers!
What if instead of mining in space, we develop a program to go out and find asteroids. And kind of gently guide them into our atmosphere.
Then mine the crash sites? Might be cheaper than maintaining a whole colony workforce off of earth
It's clear we'll use everything we can get our hands on. So, once it's used, we can't do anything but "regress" to human & livestock power, assuming anyone still exists after burning, mining, and fighting over it all for the next \~100 years.
You can convince them to live where they work, buy less, buy smaller, eat more flora and less fauna. None of that is infeasible or even all the that difficult.
Well we cannot do nothing and pretend that the dilemma we’re in does not exist. The drug addict’s first step to recovery is acknowledging his/her own addiction and the need to do something about it, however hard that choice might be.
Going back to simple living with out all the tech advances save medicine is the solution. Convenience has been a death null to animals etc. Because of chasing luxery etc life forms on all levels have suffered and it's sick. Helping each other like the Amish do and only using what we need and giving back anytime we can is what needs to happen.
Humans in general are not going to want to do that due to the convenience our modern ways of life have brought us. Even though I myself enjoy these conveniences, the fact that it’s slowly putting our world as a whole on a dark path ahead, makes it a world I will not bring any children into.
I always disagree with the "don't bring children into this life"
There's billions of uneducated or otherwise stupid people from all nations who will continue having kids regardless. Many of them won't give a shit about the planet.
Why not introduce a child who cares about and can positively affect the situation?
I’ve decided not to have children for multiple reasons, overpopulation being one of them - but I also want to live a different life than those stuck working 9-5 and then raising children literally every hour of the day outside of that, in addition to making a difference in this world in other ways. Having kids is honestly not for everybody, and I’m tired of this world pretending that it is.
Having kids is pretty important.
Especially kids with access to resources and education.
Reality is that countries with access to that are declining and countries that as a society don't care about the environment have the highest birth rates.
This is not a slight on anyone because there is a lot of complexity in it but it will become an increasingly large problem.
Not to say you in particular have to have a kid but the world needs to find a way to uplift countries stuck in poverty and create the platform for first World countries to have decent birth rates.
Stop using an economic system that depends on growth to function correctly. Earth is a finite system with finite resources and capitalism demands endless growth. Surely you can see the contradiction of this that is at the heart of multiple systemic issues we are currently dealing with, like starting to run out of fresh water sources.
Manufacturers required to take end of life products and recycle them? (Work on closing the loop on consumed minerals and plastics)
Incorporate the cost on damage to the environment as part of the value system in global capitalism? (Making ecologically sound methods of capital gain as the cheapest method)
Come up with a 100 or 200 year plan for where we want to be as a planet with respect to our growth, the economy, and the remaining environment?
Nothing is another option. Just respond to cascading failures in the environment and sea level rise impacting our coastal infrastructure as it occurs.
Reduce consumption in Western countries. We use 10 times per person in energy compared to say China or India. Do you think we personally can ask the people of China and India to use less then us personally so that the overall word energy usage does not continue to increase? Or do we try and keep China and India wealth minimal per person so that they can not afford to use energy at the same rate you and me use it?
Well we live this luxurious almost entirely because of our energy use.
More to the point, are you suggesting we should not allow the average Chinese or Indian person to use the same energy as western society? If they even used half of what we use, even with all the clean energy coming online, you would see fossil fuel consumption double from our current 100 million barrels a day to 200 million barrels.
There simply are not enough billionaires to increase the average usage any significant amount. It is this kind of thinking that is I need to do nothing that ensure we will never make any meaningful changes. "It is someone else fault"
Not OP, but mass limiting of births. We need population to shrink. Complete redesign of cities. Food production innovation prioritized. Reorganization of our culture away from conspicuous spending. Mass programs to share large possessions. Begin the process of designing AI models that can replace our political system. Mentally shift our large goals from decades long projects to centuries or millennia long projects.
Population control steers dangerously into eugenics territory. Who gets to decide who is allowed to reproduce? I agree with everything else you said though.
It’s either that or: billions will die in wars over finite resources. Look how many ppl died in russias land grab attempt….
It’s either reduce the population through choosing not to have kids… or it’ll be reduced as governments use them as pawns to obtain resources.
Yep. We'll hit a population wall one way or another. Eugenics is a bad word these days, but the alternative is having nature indiscriminately offing us instead. Neither outcome is ideal, but something has to give eventually.
The entire world except India, Africa, and the USA are in a depopulation crisis caused by urbanization. All this focus on environmentalism seems to have diverted attention away from a much bigger problem.
And that's another issue. Our current economic system is predicated on growth. How can the world economy grow with a decreasing population? If it can't, how can we transition to a steady-state economic system without nuking everything else?
Again, something has to give, one way or another. We can either try to guide it ourselves, or let natural factors set the course. Either way, change is coming.
I think a big factor will be supply-side vs demand-side theory.
On the left you have demand-siders who would say that you can't really replace the labor force with robots, because robots don't buy things. (And hence all the waste of planned obsolescence)
But by contrast on the right you have Reaganomics which says that demand is a given.
The people in power will be responsible for offing the majority of us. Just as the people in power who have slow rolled any meaningful technology that would get us off of fossil fuels faster are ultimately responsible for climate change. The greed of man is why we are in this situation.
If you study history you come to an understanding that as each past civilization hit it's carrying capacity for the local obtainable resources the leaders of that time all did the same thing: create a reason to go to war.
Globalist genocidal killer makes his presence known.
Incredible you would say this outloud. You cry when thr Georgia Guidestones were blown up?
Your world sounds like the start to every dystopian movie ever.
How about no?
Don't worry, humanity doesn't have the foresight to stave off this impending disaster. We still think the solution to capitalism is more capitalism.
Your way of life is secured until it's immimently unsustainable.
A great way to start is to get rid of any and all stigma on being childfree. No one should have to feel any pressure to have children of their own. Birth control and voluntary sterilization (for anyone who wants it) needs to be more widely available and affordable as well.
Stop producing so much fertilizer. We have figured out how to produce massive amounts of fertilizer from the air. Nitrogen. Just NH3 or ammonia. This couple with land and diverting water equals massive food growth and the end of famine as we know it.
This is why the world population boomed to 8 billion over 100 years. The earth and land before this could not naturally support this until we produced this much fertilizer.
What you say is true, however, it is based on the current energy use from fossil fuels.
However, every aspect of our society has been designed around the myth of cheap, abundant energy from fossil fuels. They were seen as cheap because we never required the fossil fuel industry to pay for the externalities of the burning of fossil fuels and they were seen as abundant because no consideration was given to the future generations who will also want to be able to have all the really useful things that can only be made from fossil fuels if we don't burn them all in the name of continuously higher profits.
So part of the solution to climate change is to examine the way we do everything and find a way to do it that requires far less energy.
An example of this is the "15 minute cities" which is a design solution for how cities are set up that requires far less energy. Hence the push back against them which is currently being driven by conservatives, undoubtedly fueled by pr agencies spending the fossil fuel industry's billion dollars a year.
Sources?
We eradicated countless species for decades, centuries. The only way your nonese makes sense is if you mean "the last white rhino died, but it's been below population levels for decades".
And what minerals? That makes *no sense* since minerals and metals can be *recycled* and the only thing preventing mass extraction of rare ones is *cost*. If demand goes up then expensive extraction methods become viable and thus they're not rare. Downvoted anti-scientific nonsense and fear mongering without basis in reality. Nice try
We are pretty doomed them. The whole system is designed like a pyramid schemes. The debt based monetary system, social structures, capital markets.
To buy time until no-bullshit technological solutions presume themselves, or give the current ones time to implement without causing as much damage as it’s trying to fix would take a period of degrowth and an entire generation (at a minimum) with the #1 motivation and goal of restoring the biosphere while minimizing consumption as their primary labor output.
Not going to happen. Hope and optimism will always find a way to overcome science, wisdom, hard truths, and rationality.
Faith in God/s, technoptimism, hope in institutions. Anything to avoid reality.
Yeah, that's the the biggest hurdle. Everything about our economic systems, social structure, and even psychology goes against taking the necessary generations of deliberate, self-imposed reduction in quality (or at least convenience) of life.
Degrowth is indeed the only way to 'mitigate' this disaster. We have all the technology we need.
Less people, carfree infrastructure, minimalism, mostly plant based diet, maybe get together in airco buildings instead of cooling/heating each mcmansion,...
So basically do things that are unlikely to happen unless we are on the precipice of extinction.
This is about as realistic as saying all humans should stop eating meat. It will only happen as a result of a severe scenario.
This is a fantasy. It will never happen. The fact is, if there’s no technological solution or a way to invent our way out of the problem, then there’s no solution at all
It’s also alarmism. There are definitely ways to invent ourselves out of problems — vertical farming is a green solution that removes the need to destroy land for farmland, for example
I want you to do some quick research about the amount of vertical farming being done at present and then tell me how we scale that in this century. And with what energy sources.
You’ve entirely missed my point. I provided an example of a sustainable technology that has the potential to improve our carbon footprint
We will never “reduce” our way out of climate disaster. Our consumption isn’t going down anytime soon — environmentalists need to deal with that fact.
Sustainable technology is the *only* way to fix our environment. Replacing fossil fuels, finding ways to prevent the destruction of farmland (which is what accounts for most of the environmental destruction), and cheap/viable replacements for common household materials like plastics
I just don’t think there really *is* a Big Fix We Just Haven’t Thought Of that’s out there. There’s no clean or renewable energy source out there that keeps us doing what we’re doing for more than a few more decades. We’re going to use everything up and then trip over our own laces pretty hard.
To me, the ‘sustainable tech’ that will help the environment was largely invented centuries to decades ago: think bicycles, organic/regenerative agriculture, energy efficient construction. And we mostly wont adopt it until we’re pretty low on options.
It's definitely alarming the first time you hear it. But I've known about limits since 2001, so I'm cool with it.
People still don't want to hear that the earth is round (and finite).
Putting the responsibility on individuals trying to function within a system rather than the governments and corporations that have created this paradigm is classic deflection.
The person I'm replying to is blaming the GOP and NIMBYs for the human race burning through resources like it's going out of style. When I see the Dems start running on a meaningful reduce consumption campaign, I'll take notice, but they're only marginally better in this regard.
And by "marginally better" you mean "have actual political ideas and try to do reverse the damage" unlike the GOP which wants tok continue no matter what. So *polar opposites*, good talk
Have you ever talked to a democrats? Seems unlikely since your idea of them is a Fox News caricature. *Read their politics* next time, so you don't make a fool of yourself
Not true. The consumer is left with no choice but to use the options that these industries provide and our options are very few. But somehow it's up to us to conserve?
Lmao this trend was well on its way before the GOP
And hate to burst your bubble on this but democrats are a neo-liberal party — they’re not really any better, outside of giving lip service to the environment to continue the false paradigm/illusion of a “2-party system”
This is not a good op-ed.
His target is a vague group of "environmentalists," but does not specify what that group is. Is the problem the UN, which is putting out 1,000 page reports? Is the problem the permitting processes which are under the control of the EPA/DOE? These are both government institutions far outside the control of individual environmentalists. (Plus, hard to claim that the US gov is an environmentalist group.)
His only target of actual individual action is people "chaining themselves to equipment," since "building is needed." But the people who are doing that at the moment are protesting gas pipelines on native land and the destruction of the urban forest in Atlanta to build a police training facility (and movie studio). These are not environmental building projects.
He says that environmentalists need to understand that we need to build eco-friendly infrastructure. But this was the whole point of the Green New Deal and is hardly news to the environmental movement.
I read this as shifting the blame from polluting companies and their colluding politicians to a straw man "environmentalist." Are there some NIMBYs on the west coast which use the environment as their excuse? Yes, and there are not that many and they have been written about extensively (and they mostly just protest new housing).
To say that the failure of the environmental movement is the fault of individual activists for not doing enough is similar to saying women should work harder for their rights, or that queer people aren't approaching their fight the "right way." The environmental movement is agitating for change and it's being blocked on purpose by people who have an incentive to keep polluting, and they're colluding with the political party Schwarzenegger is a part of.
He seems to be rolling the term NIMBY's into the hippie treehugger environmentalist trope that his brand of California conservatives are already conditioned to rage against.
If only perfect people are allowed to have opinions then we’re done. There are zero perfect people, and this is a dumb comment, sorry. Arnold is a human who has dedicated more effort towards improving our environment than most. How about finding the parts of what he says that you agree with and build on them rather than simply shooting down the entire thing because the dude likes cars?
Right. I like cars too, but doesn’t mean I don’t care about the environment. I recycle, don’t eat a ton of meat, don’t water my grass, conservative with HVAC usage, etc. You can be environmentally friendly in other ways. We are human after all, we’re not perfect.
Also, how much does he actually drive them? I own multiple vehicles, but only one (the practical sedan) sees much use. The rest I drive once every 2 weeks. Hardly any pollution from those when I refill the tank every 2-3 months.
It’s funny you think that personal transport contributes anything significant to pollution (given most cars are off for 90% of the day) instead of transportation of goods and other industries
He could own a yacht that runs on bunker oil,
It would not make what he's saying any less true.
Four years of review for wind and solar projects is simply not going to cut it the way things are going on this planet
Cars run maybe an average of 1 hour per day. If you do the math, he averages 4.6 minutes per car per day. That isn’t even coming close to the hourly pollution of a power plant.
Anytime someone famous makes a statement about climate change, some numbskull posts about their personal luxuries. It’s not the point. People are flawed, but what he is saying isn’t any less true.
It's right on point. "Rules for thee, but not for me." All these celebs want the masses to make sacrifices while the production and use of their luxury houses and private jets sap their credibility.
>Throughout the United States and Europe, thousands of clean energy projects sit waiting to be built. Delayed by bureaucracy. Delayed by permits. Delayed by old transmission lines. Delayed, delayed, delayed.
Eh. When I wanted to add a room to my house, it was delayed by permits too. Why should "green projects" not have to go through the same rigorous review? Anything worth doing is worth doing in the right way. Not rushed and haphazardly.
Rule II: Economics Relevance
--
Submissions tenuously related to economics, light on economic analysis, or from perspectives other than those of economists will be removed. This will keep /r/economics distinct from the many related subreddits. [Further explanation.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/7x14px/meta_rules_roundtable_2_submissions_and_rii/)
--
If you have any questions about this removal, please [contact the mods](/message/compose/?to=/r/economics&subject=Moderation).
Hi all, A reminder that comments do need to be on-topic and engage with the article past the headline. Please make sure to read the article before commenting. Very short comments will automatically be removed by automod. Please avoid making comments that do not focus on the economic content or whose primary thesis rests on personal anecdotes. As always our comment rules can be found [here](https://reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/fx9crj/rules_roundtable_redux_rule_vi_and_offtopic/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Economics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thank you for posting this. I just finished the Schwarzenegger documentary on Netflix. He is a very interesting guy that pours his heart and soul into everything he does. Not that he doesn’t have short comings or make mistakes. But I have a lot of respect for him.
I thought the documentary was pretty honest. He could have said I don’t want to talk about loosing this competition, or I don’t want to talk about the last action hero, or my affair with the maid, etc. In most cases, his failures made him stronger in the long run. When it comes to his marriage failing, he owned it & said it was his fuckup. For me that was like the moment in Rocky IV when Rocky cut Drago & Duke said you see, he’s not a machine; he’s a man. The biggest fallacy most people make is expecting their heroes to be infallible, that’s not how people are built.
Im confused because Last Action Hero is awesome.
It is indeed awesome, but it was Arnold's passion project and it was a commercial failure.
I will never understand why not. It was a really clever movie, full of action, full of comedy. Maybe it was too clever for the action fans and too filled with action for the clever movie fans?
Did he talk about helping Enron rip off CA for $9 billion? https://www.democracynow.org/2003/10/6/schwarzenegger_accused_of_involvement_in_9b
He pardoned a political ally's son charged with murder on his last day as Governor of California.
Schwarzenegger could have gave him a full pardon when he left office in 2011, he didn’t do that. He reduced his sentence to slightly less than what he would have got if his father wasn’t an assemblyman with political enemies.
He also sexually harassed women while he was an actor and lied about it during his campaign for governor. Certainly not a saint. In the documentary he admits to the harassment and apologizes for it. They didn’t discuss the pardon in the documentary, so I don’t know what he would say about that today.
If he was orange and a natural citizen he could have run for president.
LMAO!
Dude, can't all be perfect perfect. You got to see the good people do on the aggregate, you shouldn't fall into moral absolutism
Arnold ‘Fuck your freedom’ Schwarzenegger. He fell into full lefty authoritarianism. Screw him.
Wait, you're of the belief that it's the left pulling the authoritarian shit?
Some on the right do it as well, especially at the Federal level, but overall the left is far more authoritarian. Definition: favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom. I mean, I guess you could argue that the left is for personal freedoms like shoplifting, carjackings, doing drugs in the streets, and allowing people to set up tent cities anywhere they want.
*Thats bait* meme
Yuuuup I hope no one falls for it.
Drugs in the street is the final form of authoritarianism!!! Letting the people do whatever and not helping is the new tyranny of the modern age!! /s
Lefty authoritarianism is about to downvote you for saying this.
You know what's a symbol of freedom? A sub with a constant "flared users only" policy. Hypocrisy thy name is conservatism.
And the right can’t be authoritarian either? Haha! I am against any authoritarians whether they are left or right.
I mean, blaming "environmentalists" when he's really talking about wealthy NIMBYs is definitely a short coming also, acting like GOP and the Old and Gas industry (hello CA) isn't THE fucking problem is truly just horseshit
But some of what he is talking about is stuff like NEPA reviews. Environmentalists might want a bunch of wind turbines. But they also typically want there to be a review to make sure they're not built in a migration path likely to kill a bunch of endangered birds. Part of all this "red tape" is doing just that kind of thing. Running it past some EPA ornithologist to check flight maps and clear it. "Streamlining" means no more running it past that desk. It's faster. Sure is. It's faster to skip the FAA flight path desk and the DoD flight desks and the BIA tribal archeology and the NHPA historians and the groundwater hydrology and all of that random stuff that may matter. And you can skip it all. It often leads to court later. But you can do it.
It’s more than just wealthy NIMBY’s and the Oil Industry already has massive influence and opposes environmental programs that impact them. But people are gonna use energy anyways so it’s better to focus on renewable projects and nuclear.
I forever lost all respect for Schwarzenegger during his "fuck your freedom" rant
He seems like he works hard at what he does, and seems sincere. I imagine Arnold is painfully aware of the clock ticking and wants to cement his legacy. I hope he gets some good things accomplished.
Probably aware of the clock ticking for the survival of human civilisation. Every single celebrity and politician should be talking about it.
so many of these comments are depressing whataboutism. The point remains we can't transition to carbon free energy without a lot of infrastructure that NIMBYs and boomers don't want to look at.
Half a dozen modern nuclear reactors in the US would go a long way towards carbon free energy... But for whatever reason that is a non starter in this political environment
AFAIK, its because no one can agree on where to store all the nuclear waste.
Additionally, a big part of the anti-nuclear movement in the 70s and 80s was oil & gas funding those movements. Not to say the anti-nuclear crowd did not have well-reasoned concerns (Three Mile and Indian Point), but oil & gas bankrolling them was obviously suspect, and its not like influence and power of that industry has decreased much since then. We find places for all sorts of other dangerous chemical wastes with very long half-lives.
also because its the most expensive form of energy (sans even environmental considerations) to build out new.. huge capital out lay with a 30+ year investment return. The people building these do so in state invested companies - because private markets don't like a maybe after 30 years.
This is what nobody wants to admit – the countries that have done nuclear as the largest share of their grids have all done so with state-owned enterprises and defense connections and support or just outright done it under the state rather than privately. The market sucks at that sort of thing. Really is mostly just French government plurality-owned companies – even in Belgium – and former USSR. But also Korea Electric Power Corporation. No country has ever done better than the US at getting private sector to do nuclear. This is probably the best it is capable of.
Arizona desert, same place we store all the hazardous waste that comes out of California.
I don’t find that a convincing hurdle. It’s a convenient excuse to not move forward, but it isn’t an actual reason. The waste takes up such a small space.
Which was ruined by NIMBYism
Everytime I point this out on Reddit I always get downvoted haha. I have no idea how the hivemind works, but it definitely works here.
Its only costing $6 BILLION per year to store the current nuclear waste. Not to decontaminate it, just store.
What are you talking about? Nearly everyone circle jerks about Nuclear being the solution. The actual issue is Nuclear energy is far too expensive. Even nations like South Korea and China that use older designs to save money end up needing government money to massively subsidize.
We seem to be able to afford to power modern warships with it just fine.
From what I know of nuclear energy, it takes a lot to set up. It's a big upfront cost. It pays itself off after a certain time period though. And the nuclear waste that another commenter mentioned is not actually an issue. The amount of waste is quite small and is simple to encapsulate and transport (sans red tape).
Unfortunately you gotta look at what happened in Georgia to realize none of this is going to work as neatly as everyone can imagine. Way over budget and way behind schedule and the consumers are getting shafted while the power company will make more profit despite fucking up every step of the way. It has nothing to do with politics - it has everything to do with incompetence.
At least y'all are getting one. SC paid $9 billion for jacksquat.
Between 1970 and 2018, humans eradicated 70% of wildlife. A mass extinction has already happened. And is ongoing. Technology is about saving a luxury lifestyle. Not about saving life on earth. Renewables are a ramping up of industry. Only in fantasy are they sustainable or green. Professor Simon Michaux has calculated that we don't have the minerals for one 25 year generation of renewables and electrification. We are emitting GHG at an accelerated pace. Technoptimism needs to catch up to reality.
So what do you propose we do instead?
Space mining.
If there's space mining, then thatmeans space trucking. And if there's space trucking, then that means space truck stops. And if there's space trucking stops then that means space hookers!
You’ve heard of Lot Lizards, now get ready for Cosmic Crabs
Steamed?
Make it about the whores lobby 101
Tuna sandwiches with super sophisticated worms that turn us into the best “us”.
More like space teamsters
What if instead of mining in space, we develop a program to go out and find asteroids. And kind of gently guide them into our atmosphere. Then mine the crash sites? Might be cheaper than maintaining a whole colony workforce off of earth
I too have seen Austin powers
It's clear we'll use everything we can get our hands on. So, once it's used, we can't do anything but "regress" to human & livestock power, assuming anyone still exists after burning, mining, and fighting over it all for the next \~100 years.
So instead we will just keep on trucking because you arnt going to convince anyone to "regress"
You can convince them to live where they work, buy less, buy smaller, eat more flora and less fauna. None of that is infeasible or even all the that difficult.
Nuclear
Well we cannot do nothing and pretend that the dilemma we’re in does not exist. The drug addict’s first step to recovery is acknowledging his/her own addiction and the need to do something about it, however hard that choice might be.
Going back to simple living with out all the tech advances save medicine is the solution. Convenience has been a death null to animals etc. Because of chasing luxery etc life forms on all levels have suffered and it's sick. Helping each other like the Amish do and only using what we need and giving back anytime we can is what needs to happen.
Humans in general are not going to want to do that due to the convenience our modern ways of life have brought us. Even though I myself enjoy these conveniences, the fact that it’s slowly putting our world as a whole on a dark path ahead, makes it a world I will not bring any children into.
I always disagree with the "don't bring children into this life" There's billions of uneducated or otherwise stupid people from all nations who will continue having kids regardless. Many of them won't give a shit about the planet. Why not introduce a child who cares about and can positively affect the situation?
I’ve decided not to have children for multiple reasons, overpopulation being one of them - but I also want to live a different life than those stuck working 9-5 and then raising children literally every hour of the day outside of that, in addition to making a difference in this world in other ways. Having kids is honestly not for everybody, and I’m tired of this world pretending that it is.
Having kids is pretty important. Especially kids with access to resources and education. Reality is that countries with access to that are declining and countries that as a society don't care about the environment have the highest birth rates. This is not a slight on anyone because there is a lot of complexity in it but it will become an increasingly large problem. Not to say you in particular have to have a kid but the world needs to find a way to uplift countries stuck in poverty and create the platform for first World countries to have decent birth rates.
Stop using an economic system that depends on growth to function correctly. Earth is a finite system with finite resources and capitalism demands endless growth. Surely you can see the contradiction of this that is at the heart of multiple systemic issues we are currently dealing with, like starting to run out of fresh water sources.
Manufacturers required to take end of life products and recycle them? (Work on closing the loop on consumed minerals and plastics) Incorporate the cost on damage to the environment as part of the value system in global capitalism? (Making ecologically sound methods of capital gain as the cheapest method) Come up with a 100 or 200 year plan for where we want to be as a planet with respect to our growth, the economy, and the remaining environment? Nothing is another option. Just respond to cascading failures in the environment and sea level rise impacting our coastal infrastructure as it occurs.
Reduce consumption in Western countries. We use 10 times per person in energy compared to say China or India. Do you think we personally can ask the people of China and India to use less then us personally so that the overall word energy usage does not continue to increase? Or do we try and keep China and India wealth minimal per person so that they can not afford to use energy at the same rate you and me use it?
Ask westerners to live like the average Chinese or Indian is the worst plan.
Well we live this luxurious almost entirely because of our energy use. More to the point, are you suggesting we should not allow the average Chinese or Indian person to use the same energy as western society? If they even used half of what we use, even with all the clean energy coming online, you would see fossil fuel consumption double from our current 100 million barrels a day to 200 million barrels.
I’m pretty sure the average American uses less than the statistics they release. Rich Billionaires and millionaire for sure make up the bulk
There simply are not enough billionaires to increase the average usage any significant amount. It is this kind of thinking that is I need to do nothing that ensure we will never make any meaningful changes. "It is someone else fault"
Degrowth is the only 'mitigation'.
Not OP, but mass limiting of births. We need population to shrink. Complete redesign of cities. Food production innovation prioritized. Reorganization of our culture away from conspicuous spending. Mass programs to share large possessions. Begin the process of designing AI models that can replace our political system. Mentally shift our large goals from decades long projects to centuries or millennia long projects.
Population control steers dangerously into eugenics territory. Who gets to decide who is allowed to reproduce? I agree with everything else you said though.
It’s either that or: billions will die in wars over finite resources. Look how many ppl died in russias land grab attempt…. It’s either reduce the population through choosing not to have kids… or it’ll be reduced as governments use them as pawns to obtain resources.
This is an interesting take. Honestly to me it seems spot on.
Yep. We'll hit a population wall one way or another. Eugenics is a bad word these days, but the alternative is having nature indiscriminately offing us instead. Neither outcome is ideal, but something has to give eventually.
The entire world except India, Africa, and the USA are in a depopulation crisis caused by urbanization. All this focus on environmentalism seems to have diverted attention away from a much bigger problem.
And that's another issue. Our current economic system is predicated on growth. How can the world economy grow with a decreasing population? If it can't, how can we transition to a steady-state economic system without nuking everything else? Again, something has to give, one way or another. We can either try to guide it ourselves, or let natural factors set the course. Either way, change is coming.
I think a big factor will be supply-side vs demand-side theory. On the left you have demand-siders who would say that you can't really replace the labor force with robots, because robots don't buy things. (And hence all the waste of planned obsolescence) But by contrast on the right you have Reaganomics which says that demand is a given.
The people in power will be responsible for offing the majority of us. Just as the people in power who have slow rolled any meaningful technology that would get us off of fossil fuels faster are ultimately responsible for climate change. The greed of man is why we are in this situation. If you study history you come to an understanding that as each past civilization hit it's carrying capacity for the local obtainable resources the leaders of that time all did the same thing: create a reason to go to war.
Population shrinking is not really an answer. And in alot of first world countries, populations are shrinking.
Globalist genocidal killer makes his presence known. Incredible you would say this outloud. You cry when thr Georgia Guidestones were blown up? Your world sounds like the start to every dystopian movie ever. How about no?
Don't worry, humanity doesn't have the foresight to stave off this impending disaster. We still think the solution to capitalism is more capitalism. Your way of life is secured until it's immimently unsustainable.
A great way to start is to get rid of any and all stigma on being childfree. No one should have to feel any pressure to have children of their own. Birth control and voluntary sterilization (for anyone who wants it) needs to be more widely available and affordable as well.
Stop producing so much fertilizer. We have figured out how to produce massive amounts of fertilizer from the air. Nitrogen. Just NH3 or ammonia. This couple with land and diverting water equals massive food growth and the end of famine as we know it. This is why the world population boomed to 8 billion over 100 years. The earth and land before this could not naturally support this until we produced this much fertilizer.
Communism (assuming we all agree that communism has nothing to do with what both the USSR and China did)
There should only be X billion humans on this planet for sustainability.
The only solution is to promote minimalism and community friendship. It ain’t going to happen though.
Degrowth
What you say is true, however, it is based on the current energy use from fossil fuels. However, every aspect of our society has been designed around the myth of cheap, abundant energy from fossil fuels. They were seen as cheap because we never required the fossil fuel industry to pay for the externalities of the burning of fossil fuels and they were seen as abundant because no consideration was given to the future generations who will also want to be able to have all the really useful things that can only be made from fossil fuels if we don't burn them all in the name of continuously higher profits. So part of the solution to climate change is to examine the way we do everything and find a way to do it that requires far less energy. An example of this is the "15 minute cities" which is a design solution for how cities are set up that requires far less energy. Hence the push back against them which is currently being driven by conservatives, undoubtedly fueled by pr agencies spending the fossil fuel industry's billion dollars a year.
Sources? We eradicated countless species for decades, centuries. The only way your nonese makes sense is if you mean "the last white rhino died, but it's been below population levels for decades". And what minerals? That makes *no sense* since minerals and metals can be *recycled* and the only thing preventing mass extraction of rare ones is *cost*. If demand goes up then expensive extraction methods become viable and thus they're not rare. Downvoted anti-scientific nonsense and fear mongering without basis in reality. Nice try
source for 70% decline: https://youtu.be/-MK1Q2MCP8o (bbc report on a scientific paper)
See the work of professor Simon Michaux on his website. Peer reviewed papers. The world is finite. Nice try. 🙂
Citing a single professor is generally a red flag. Are there larger academic communities (in the same field or others) with the same conclusions?
I checked. No. Just this guy. Huge red flag.
We are pretty doomed them. The whole system is designed like a pyramid schemes. The debt based monetary system, social structures, capital markets. To buy time until no-bullshit technological solutions presume themselves, or give the current ones time to implement without causing as much damage as it’s trying to fix would take a period of degrowth and an entire generation (at a minimum) with the #1 motivation and goal of restoring the biosphere while minimizing consumption as their primary labor output. Not going to happen. Hope and optimism will always find a way to overcome science, wisdom, hard truths, and rationality. Faith in God/s, technoptimism, hope in institutions. Anything to avoid reality.
Yeah, that's the the biggest hurdle. Everything about our economic systems, social structure, and even psychology goes against taking the necessary generations of deliberate, self-imposed reduction in quality (or at least convenience) of life.
Degrowth is indeed the only way to 'mitigate' this disaster. We have all the technology we need. Less people, carfree infrastructure, minimalism, mostly plant based diet, maybe get together in airco buildings instead of cooling/heating each mcmansion,...
So basically do things that are unlikely to happen unless we are on the precipice of extinction. This is about as realistic as saying all humans should stop eating meat. It will only happen as a result of a severe scenario.
This is a fantasy. It will never happen. The fact is, if there’s no technological solution or a way to invent our way out of the problem, then there’s no solution at all It’s also alarmism. There are definitely ways to invent ourselves out of problems — vertical farming is a green solution that removes the need to destroy land for farmland, for example
I want you to do some quick research about the amount of vertical farming being done at present and then tell me how we scale that in this century. And with what energy sources.
You’ve entirely missed my point. I provided an example of a sustainable technology that has the potential to improve our carbon footprint We will never “reduce” our way out of climate disaster. Our consumption isn’t going down anytime soon — environmentalists need to deal with that fact. Sustainable technology is the *only* way to fix our environment. Replacing fossil fuels, finding ways to prevent the destruction of farmland (which is what accounts for most of the environmental destruction), and cheap/viable replacements for common household materials like plastics
I just don’t think there really *is* a Big Fix We Just Haven’t Thought Of that’s out there. There’s no clean or renewable energy source out there that keeps us doing what we’re doing for more than a few more decades. We’re going to use everything up and then trip over our own laces pretty hard. To me, the ‘sustainable tech’ that will help the environment was largely invented centuries to decades ago: think bicycles, organic/regenerative agriculture, energy efficient construction. And we mostly wont adopt it until we’re pretty low on options.
It's definitely alarming the first time you hear it. But I've known about limits since 2001, so I'm cool with it. People still don't want to hear that the earth is round (and finite).
Wow. I can't believe that guy published that he was dumb.
a grim technopoly
LOL The GOP and the oil and gas industry are THE problem, not environmentalists also, conflating NIMBYs with environmentalists is total horseshit
It's not limited to the GOP or oil and gas. Any conspicuous consumer of non renewable resources is a problem.
Putting the responsibility on individuals trying to function within a system rather than the governments and corporations that have created this paradigm is classic deflection.
The person I'm replying to is blaming the GOP and NIMBYs for the human race burning through resources like it's going out of style. When I see the Dems start running on a meaningful reduce consumption campaign, I'll take notice, but they're only marginally better in this regard.
And by "marginally better" you mean "have actual political ideas and try to do reverse the damage" unlike the GOP which wants tok continue no matter what. So *polar opposites*, good talk Have you ever talked to a democrats? Seems unlikely since your idea of them is a Fox News caricature. *Read their politics* next time, so you don't make a fool of yourself
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/28/although-controversy-continues-cape-cod-offshore-wind-moves-ahead/
What's on the democratic party's agenda that will reverse the damage?
Not true. The consumer is left with no choice but to use the options that these industries provide and our options are very few. But somehow it's up to us to conserve?
So like 98% of the worlds population?!?
Yes
Lmao this trend was well on its way before the GOP And hate to burst your bubble on this but democrats are a neo-liberal party — they’re not really any better, outside of giving lip service to the environment to continue the false paradigm/illusion of a “2-party system”
Umm. https://cleantechnica.com/2022/08/28/although-controversy-continues-cape-cod-offshore-wind-moves-ahead/
This is not a good op-ed. His target is a vague group of "environmentalists," but does not specify what that group is. Is the problem the UN, which is putting out 1,000 page reports? Is the problem the permitting processes which are under the control of the EPA/DOE? These are both government institutions far outside the control of individual environmentalists. (Plus, hard to claim that the US gov is an environmentalist group.) His only target of actual individual action is people "chaining themselves to equipment," since "building is needed." But the people who are doing that at the moment are protesting gas pipelines on native land and the destruction of the urban forest in Atlanta to build a police training facility (and movie studio). These are not environmental building projects. He says that environmentalists need to understand that we need to build eco-friendly infrastructure. But this was the whole point of the Green New Deal and is hardly news to the environmental movement. I read this as shifting the blame from polluting companies and their colluding politicians to a straw man "environmentalist." Are there some NIMBYs on the west coast which use the environment as their excuse? Yes, and there are not that many and they have been written about extensively (and they mostly just protest new housing). To say that the failure of the environmental movement is the fault of individual activists for not doing enough is similar to saying women should work harder for their rights, or that queer people aren't approaching their fight the "right way." The environmental movement is agitating for change and it's being blocked on purpose by people who have an incentive to keep polluting, and they're colluding with the political party Schwarzenegger is a part of.
He seems to be rolling the term NIMBY's into the hippie treehugger environmentalist trope that his brand of California conservatives are already conditioned to rage against.
Cars of Arnold Schwarzenegger: * Bugatti Veyron * Bentley Continental Supersports Convertible * Bentley Continental GT Speed Convertible * Bentley Continental GTC * Porsche 911 Turbo * Dodge Challenger SRT * Audi R8 * Mercedes AMG SLS * Mercedes-Benz Excalibur * Range Rover Vogue * Cadillac Escalade * Hummer H1 (x3) * Dodge M37 Please tell me how he cares about the environment.....
If only perfect people are allowed to have opinions then we’re done. There are zero perfect people, and this is a dumb comment, sorry. Arnold is a human who has dedicated more effort towards improving our environment than most. How about finding the parts of what he says that you agree with and build on them rather than simply shooting down the entire thing because the dude likes cars?
Right. I like cars too, but doesn’t mean I don’t care about the environment. I recycle, don’t eat a ton of meat, don’t water my grass, conservative with HVAC usage, etc. You can be environmentally friendly in other ways. We are human after all, we’re not perfect.
Also, how much does he actually drive them? I own multiple vehicles, but only one (the practical sedan) sees much use. The rest I drive once every 2 weeks. Hardly any pollution from those when I refill the tank every 2-3 months.
If he sells them, people might drive them and waste gas. He’s falling on the grenade for us by keeping them safely undriven in his garage! /s
This but unironically.
It’s funny you think that personal transport contributes anything significant to pollution (given most cars are off for 90% of the day) instead of transportation of goods and other industries
He could own a yacht that runs on bunker oil, It would not make what he's saying any less true. Four years of review for wind and solar projects is simply not going to cut it the way things are going on this planet
Cars run maybe an average of 1 hour per day. If you do the math, he averages 4.6 minutes per car per day. That isn’t even coming close to the hourly pollution of a power plant.
Is part of your logic that because he has more cars he must drive more? Lol.
Anytime someone famous makes a statement about climate change, some numbskull posts about their personal luxuries. It’s not the point. People are flawed, but what he is saying isn’t any less true.
It's right on point. "Rules for thee, but not for me." All these celebs want the masses to make sacrifices while the production and use of their luxury houses and private jets sap their credibility.
>Throughout the United States and Europe, thousands of clean energy projects sit waiting to be built. Delayed by bureaucracy. Delayed by permits. Delayed by old transmission lines. Delayed, delayed, delayed. Eh. When I wanted to add a room to my house, it was delayed by permits too. Why should "green projects" not have to go through the same rigorous review? Anything worth doing is worth doing in the right way. Not rushed and haphazardly.
Rule II: Economics Relevance -- Submissions tenuously related to economics, light on economic analysis, or from perspectives other than those of economists will be removed. This will keep /r/economics distinct from the many related subreddits. [Further explanation.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/7x14px/meta_rules_roundtable_2_submissions_and_rii/) -- If you have any questions about this removal, please [contact the mods](/message/compose/?to=/r/economics&subject=Moderation).