John Kerry endorses a Reaganoid approach to climate change

[Einzige]

Quote: The solution is going to come from the private sector, and what government needs to do is create the framework within which the private sector can do what it does best, which is allocate capital and innovate and begin to take the framework that’s been created. ... We need to go after this as if we’re really at war.”

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro...ate-change

[David Horn]

(03-28-2021, 12:19 AM)Einzige Wrote:

Quote:The solution is going to come from the private sector, and what government needs to do is create the framework within which the private sector can do what it does best, which is allocate capital and innovate and begin to take the framework that’s been created. ... We need to go after this as if we’re really at war.”

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro...ate-change

Two comments:

1. I've banned numerous iterations of our resident troll for opening threads with bare links. You dug-in and provided some actual content from the link. Our troll should take a hint ... or take a hike. His/her choice.
   
2. Quoting "The Hill", in it's most recent form, is shooting fish in a barrel. Of course private industry should get the spoils. It's what they believe over there.
   

[Einzige]

(03-28-2021, 08:08 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-28-2021, 12:19 AM)Einzige Wrote:

Quote:The solution is going to come from the private sector, and what government needs to do is create the framework within which the private sector can do what it does best, which is allocate capital and innovate and begin to take the framework that’s been created. ... We need to go after this as if we’re really at war.”

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro...ate-change

Two comments:

1. I've banned numerous iterations of our resident troll for opening threads with bare links.  You dug-in and provided some actual content from the link. Our troll should take a hint ... or take a hike. His/her choice.
   
2. Quoting "The Hill", in it's most recent form, is shooting fish in a barrel.  Of course private industry should get the spoils.  It's what they believe over there.
   

Private industry, of course, cannot solve climate change. The problem is that Democrats like John Kerry, who are the slavish servants of Capital, think it can. The problem here isn't The Hill; the problem is John Kerry and reactionary American liberalism. The quote I provided in the OP is from Biden's Secretary of State. He sounds, badumtish, like a "moderate" Republican.

[Anthony '58]

So long as what I have dubbed the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation;" that is, the pre-Boomers, are still alive in essentially any numbers whatsoever, nothing will be done on climate change because they will never let go of how the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) was Lenin's would-have-been 100th birthday (April 22, 1870, in the "new style" calendar), indelibly branding the entire environmentalist movement as a "communist plot."

[David Horn]

Climate change will be addressed because it can’t be avoided. Addressing it well and soon is another issue.

[pbrower2a]

As with COVID-19, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) will be a concern of Big Business. Big Business does not want its assets inundated and ruined. Real estate and fossil-fuel interests could end up in great ideological struggles against each other -- and even war. Some strange alliances that seem unlikely now will emerge. Consider the unlikely alliance between organized labor, heavily Catholic and 'ethnic', with Southern racist agrarians. Those people had practically nothing in common in culture, and their sole shared common interest was their distrust of Big Business (attempts to smash organized labor as institutions and disdain for high-tariff protectionism). Such was the New Deal coalition to a large extent and it succeeded because the two disparate groups rarely met each other except at political conventions of the Democratic Party.

So who will speak for peasant farmers in places like Bangladesh? Quite possibly big slumlords in giant cities. Should AGW be neglected, then the worst effects (mass inundations and desertification of prime farmland with resulting shortages of food) will hit hardest around the time of the next Crisis Era -- the Crisis of 2100. Humanity will have mostly gone through an era of myopic greed and neglect of social decencies in the name of economic growth and mindless hedonism. Many people will say to themselves

"Let us live for the moment, for there may be no tomorrow".

That all too often proves a self-fulfilling prophecy even in good times for many... but in bad times, such ill prepares people, economically, morally, or intellectually for what follows.

Remember: no technology has any fix for food shortages. Humanity could adjust should climate change offer fertile lands in subarctic regions in which, due to overall warming, people could do successful agriculture and get a yield of one crop a year (as in climates with real winters but also four months of real summer), but even that requires the development of suitable topsoil and the melting of permafrost and/or the draining of swampy upper levels of the ground.

[Einzige]

(04-02-2021, 12:26 PM)Anthony Wrote: So long as what I have dubbed the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation;" that is, the pre-Boomers, are still alive in essentially any numbers whatsoever, nothing will be done on climate change because they will never let go of how the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) was Lenin's would-have-been 100th birthday (April 22, 1870, in the "new style" calendar), indelibly branding the entire environmentalist movement as a "communist plot."

This has very, very little to do with the private preferences of "pre-Boomers", and absolutely fuckall to do with the anniversary of the first Earth Day. It has to do with massive corporate interests denying anthropogenic climate change for decades and now greenwashing themselves and posing as the solution to the problem.

[pbrower2a]

(04-03-2021, 11:17 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(04-02-2021, 12:26 PM)Anthony Wrote: So long as what I have dubbed the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation;" that is, the pre-Boomers, are still alive in essentially any numbers whatsoever, nothing will be done on climate change because they will never let go of how the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) was Lenin's would-have-been 100th birthday (April 22, 1870, in the "new style" calendar), indelibly branding the entire environmentalist movement as a "communist plot."

This has very, very little to do with the private preferences of "pre-Boomers", and absolutely fuckall to do with the anniversary of the first Earth Day. It has to do with massive corporate interests denying anthropogenic climate change for decades and now greenwashing themselves and posing as the solution to the problem.

The Soviet Union and its satellites had poor records on environmental protection and the stewardship of resources. Not until Gorbachev did Soviet officials admit this. Most Commies actually had something else to celebrate that day -- and it is obvious what that was. 

The people involved in the original Earth Day were young adults then, and the youngest of those would now be in at the least their late sixties. 

... Take note. Nobody has any cause to believe that there will be any worldwide Socialist revolution between now and the start of the next Crisis Era (about 2080), and much of the cause of the next Crisis Era will potentially be the damaging effects of AGW upon food supplies, complete with the prospect of famines and political chaos. There is no technofix for hunger, and the world's food supply is finely tuned to existing realities of climate. Humanity may be able to adjust to slow, steady changes of climatic pattern, but rapid changes can disrupt everything. 

The world's most productive agriculture is in the tropical wet-and-dry climates -- in places like Bangladesh, the southern two thirds of India, almost all of southeast Asia, eastern Brazil, and much of Africa. It is telling that the PRC is investing heavily in Africa to increase the agricultural potential of many countries, and that requires large investments in highways to get foodstuffs to the ports. The PRC may have images of the definitive anti-capitalist Mao Zedong on its currency.. but the nominal Communists are as shrewd capitalists as any in the West. 

As I have said, I assume that there will be no worldwide Socialist revolution, and Big Business will have a big role. Most obvious will be the bankers, people who at best serve as gatekeepers for access to capital in the form of "other people's money", whose initials sound much like "opium". When bankers do that job well, things go well. For that bankers need to be the least daring, the least entrepreneurial, and the least imaginative of capitalists. Know well that banks attract almost as a rule, the laziest, least intelligent, least daring, and least imaginative of college graduates. Banks also pay less than any other businesses except perhaps retail sales and food services... and that will have to change if corporate retailing and restaurant businesses are to remain competitive. 

The fossil-fuel business will have to adapt to the vanishing reserves of carbon-based fossil fuels. A few years ago Exxon-Mobil made advertisements about how it sought to grow fast-growing algae that can quickly be compressed under great pressure into substances that imitate fossil fuels, taking a few years instead of scores of millions of years to create suitable petroleum-like fuel. I am unaware of how this project worked or whether Exxon-Mobil is continuing it. If companies like Exxon-Mobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron find that the days are numbered for petroleum and that other activities in energy production and supply are profitable, then they will go that way.

[Eric the Green]

(03-28-2021, 12:19 AM)Einzige Wrote:

Quote: The solution is going to come from the private sector, and what government needs to do is create the framework within which the private sector can do what it does best, which is allocate capital and innovate and begin to take the framework that’s been created. ... We need to go after this as if we’re really at war.”

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-enviro...ate-change

Obviously, if Einzige thinks that the private sector should be abolished, then he would not think the solution would come from it. But Kerry is right. The government needs to regulate the private sector, and that will help move it in the right direction on climate change. The problem is the Republicans still think fossil fuels are needed for decades to come, at least. Shutting fossil fuel industries down is inconceivable to them. But that is what Democrats like Kerry propose (or must propose) over the next decade or two. 

But that does not mean private transportation and energy industries need to be shut down, unless you are a communist. Shifting their products, taxing them more, maybe even breaking them up? Those might be good ideas to propose if you are a liberal, a progressive, a green, or a democratic socialist, etc.