"Yes" to a "Carbon Price" & Dividend & "No" to a "Carbon Tax" (and There's a Difference)

 

Stephen Greenleaf

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Okay, fellow Dems, listen up! Don't support a "carbon tax" but do put a "price on carbon." What's the difference? Both a "tax" and a "price" would make fossil fuels more expensive and thus make renewable energy sources more attractive (and reduce overall energy use and increase energy efficiency). Both would affect the amount consumers would pay for fossil fuel-based energy sources and products produced with fossil fuels. Thus, from the view of an economist, she might say that a "tax" and a "price" are the same. But increasing the cost of carbon to users is only the half of what we should be doing. Citizens Climate Lobby (of which I'm a member) supports that EICDA: The Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. This act would return the money collected as a "price" (or "tax" if you insist) to the people. In other words, unlike almost any other tax that I can think of (with perhaps the exception of social security taxes), the funds collected will be paid back to the people in short order (quarterly, most likely). In other words, taxes as we normally think of them go to fund government operations and programs. This is not what a "carbon price" via the EICDA would do. If any Dems in Congress think that they should fund their programs by the imposition of a "carbon tax," they're way wrong as a matter of economics, fairness, and electoral politics. Under the EICDA, funds collected would be paid as a "dividend" to the American people on an equal individual basis. In short, about 2/3 of American individuals and households would come out ahead. The wealthiest, who tend to have larger carbon footprints,: more travel (often by air), bigger houses, bigger cars, bigger everything. In short, this plan would help close the growing inequality in American society that contributes to the divisions that we're experiencing.

Of course, this means that all of us would face greater costs and that we'd be wise to make some changes. In short, we'd have to put on big-kids pants. We are in dire straits because of the unabated dumping of carbon in our atmosphere. Mother Nature can't handle all of this carbon, and she's sick, very, very sick. Her prognosis, and consequently ours as her children, is very dire. Not hopeless, but the longer we put off "treatment," the more drastic the steps we'll eventually have to take to try to save her. (Well, really to save us humans; Mother Nature will survive, even without humans and other species that are caught in the sixth extinction.) We need to pay to play. Next time we take a trip, we should weigh the costs across the various means based on an accurate comparison of the carbon cost involved. Car, plane, train, walk, bike, mass transit? We need a price to compare the cost we impose on Mother Nature by assessing a price (cost) on ourselves now that we know that we can no longer afford the free ride that we've granted ourselves in freely dumping our waste into our environment.

#ClimateActionNow #ClimateInnovation #BipartisanClimate #PriceOnPollution #CarbonCashback #CarbonFee #CCL

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Senior Democrats’ push for powerful climate tool collides with political realities

Thoughts for Later in the Day: Sunday 26 Sept 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth.43 Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged.44 Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We are on the cusp of a megacrisis formed by the coincidence of two historical cycles: the lesser geopolitical cycle of war and peace and the greater civilizational cycle of rise and fall. If those who govern us were saints advised by geniuses, and if the populace were eager to embrace change, there might be some possibility of turning this epochal crisis into a grand opportunity to reframe civilization to be both humane and ecological. Unfortunately, it is more likely that events will spin out of control, engendering widespread destruction and chaos. Indeed, we cannot exclude the possibility of a deep collapse entailing the radical impoverishment and simplification of society—in effect, the end of industrial civilization as we know it.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

“At the largest level, depression is all about a person pulling inward, so that they only think about what’s happening inside their own minds, usually in negative ways. But external stimuli like heat and cold force a person to reckon with their environment. It pulls you out of yourself,” he explains. The heat is a wedge that interrupts the things that reinforce feelings of depression. And maybe that is all a depressed person needs: to have a reason to look outward.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

It’s one thing to read about an ice bath, or to imagine what it might feel like to catch a kettlebell in midair as it transforms in your hands from a weapon into a dance. These are things you have to feel to understand.

Imaginal Love

Tom Cheetham

God is not a “being” at all, not even an infinite one. God is Be-ing in the sense that without God, nothing can be. The “being” of God is verbal and transitive‒ the being of God makes everything else be. God says “Be!” and things spring into existence.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

Throughout most of human history and up to 100 years ago — up to 20 years ago, in some parts of the world — a man or woman could lead their entire life snugly within the cocoon of the local tunnel reality. Today, we all constantly collide with persons living in wildly different tunnel realities. This creates a great deal of hostility in the more ignorant, vast amounts of metaphysical and ethical confusion in the more sophisticated, and growing disorientation for all — a situation known as our “crisis of values.”

The Revenge of Geography

Robert D. Kaplan

It was in quest of sea power—the search for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean—that the Soviets ultimately invaded  Afghanistan, a small part of the Heartland that had eluded its grasp. And by getting entrapped by guerrillas in  Afghanistan  the Kremlin’s whole empire fell apart. Now Russia, greatly reduced in size, tries to reconsolidate that same Heartland—Belarus, Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. That, in and of itself, a century after Mackinder put down his theories, constitutes one of the principal geopolitical dramas of our time.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 22 September 2021

 

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Beyond the confines of neo-Platonic philosophy, the special significance of the value triad of goodness, truth, and beauty has also been recognized by a wide diversity of significant writers such as Aquinas, Kant, Diderot, Rousseau, Schelling, Tolstoy, Whitehead, Freud, Gandhi, Sorokin, and Einstein, to name a few. Many spiritual teachers, in both the East and the West, have also extolled this triad of values, including Sri Aurobindo, Rudolf Steiner, Thich Nhat Hanh, Cardinal Newman, and Osho Rajneesh. Sri Aurobindo, for example, describes goodness, truth, and beauty as the “three dynamic images” through which one makes contact with “supreme Reality.” The leading secular writer currently championing this triad is Howard Gardner, whose book, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed (New York: Basic Books, 2012) [referenced in the main text].

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Rectilinearity, as Ruskin had similarly demonstrated of clarity, is illusory, and can only be approximated, like clarity, by narrowing the breadth, and limiting the depth, of the perceptual field. Straight lines are prevalent wherever the left hemisphere predominates, in the late Roman Empire (whose towns and roads are laid out like grids), in Classicism (by contrast with the Baroque, which had everywhere celebrated the curve), in the Industrial Revolution (the Victorian emphasis on ornament and Gothicism being an ultimately futile nostalgic pretence occasioned by the functional brutality and invariance of the rectilinear productions of machines) and in the grid-like environment of the modern city, where that pretence has been dropped.

Nixon Agonistes

Garry Wills

Nixon’s career, whatever else one could say of it, had been at least as consistent as Kennedy’s—as that of the liberal hot-cold warrior, Catholic secularist, McCarthyite civil-libertarian, who changed flags often and deftly. Indeed, it was Kennedy’s ease of adjustment that saved him from his own campaign promises and initial vision of the presidency. He had come to that office preaching cold war as a crusade. Domestic satisfaction seemed almost too complete under Ike; the country was affluent, snoozy, no New Deal rhetoric could rouse it; poverty was undiscovered, and black unrest just stirring. Kennedy, with his call for escape from the Eisenhower narcolepsy, had to reduce everything to a contest with Khrushchev.

Lila

Robert M. Pirsig

It [the "immune system" to certain attitudes] was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself.

The Idea of History

R. G. Collingwood

[A]s Socrates urged against Glaucon, the individual character considered in isolation from its environment is an abstraction, not a really existing thing. What a man does depends only to a limited extent on what kind of man he is. No one can resist the forces of his environment. Either he conquers the world or the world will conquer him.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In De Cive (1651), Hobbes wrote of the sovereign’s duty to keep a firm grip on the universities lest they turn out seditious thinkers who, if clever, would cloud “sound doctrine” on which civil peace depended, or, if stupid, would stir up the ignorant from the common pulpit. Spinoza, who mistrusted clerics and churches, argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that although a person’s beliefs were private and could not be controlled from outside, worship in public was a social matter. “If we want to obey God rightly,” he wrote in chapter, “the external practice of religion must be accommodated to the peace of the republic.”

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient.

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

[H]eaven help the elected official who, in the manner of Edmund Burke, tries to argue against the personal interest of his or her constituents or to communicate bad news.

Escaping Cultural Hypnosis - Startling Confessions of a Rogue Hypnotist!

The Rogue Hypnotist

A hypnotic reality is any 'pseudo reality' (secondary reality) that exists in the mind of an individual or groups of individuals only: it has no supporting proof; it is founded on ideas and not experience.

Last Best Hope: An Essay on the Revival of America

 

Published in 2021

My social scientist-trained daughter has on occasion made disparaging remarks about "journalists." She finds that they tend to construct sweeping generalizations and predictions founded on a thin layer of evidence and understanding. And when recalling the names of certain "journalists" who seemed most to trigger her wrath, I've noted that they tend toward the op-ed variety, where opinionizing and pontificating were often the order of the day. I must admit that I often find myself sharing her attitudes. But not towards all journalists. Some "hit the pavement" to learn from and about people, and they carefully observe what's going on. In addition, they have an intellectual storehouse from which they draw the resources needed to frame their observations. They are educated, and they educate their readers. Among those whom I would include in my pantheon of "good journalists" (and perhaps because they are more than just journalists) are Garry Wills, especially in his early years (his later work tends to the more historical and scholarly) and Robert D. Kaplan, whose passport is probably as full as one could imagine. Now I'll add George Packer. 

George Packer

This is my first book by Packer, and I am impressed. This should come as no surprise given that he won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2013 book about America, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. And while I can't speak with to his other books, I can speak to this one, which struck me not only with its astute assessments about the current state of American society and politics, but also as a cry of the heart arising from our current plight. (In this he reminds me of Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities, published in 2019, which was prompted, so Gopnik reports, by the election of Trump. Gopnik's book is more focused on the liberal heritage than analyzing our current plight, but both books are deeply consideredl books prompted by genuine anguish. Gopnik, too, has a reputation as an exemplary journalist. And by the way, both Packer and Gopnik cite the life and work of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin as exemplary.) But what makes Packer's book unique? Packer, perhaps more succinctly than anyone I know, delves deeply into the divisions of our society by looking closely at the traits of four primary groups within our current politics. I believe that he misses a fifth group: the truly uninformed and uncaring; those without the time, energy, education, or initiative to take a real interest in politics and that are only occasionally motivated to vote. But among those in some measure active in politics--even if in a relatively passive way that our contemporary democracy seems to prefer--Packer's four-fold division makes a lot of sense. 

The four groups that Packer identifies, compliments, and criticizes are "Free America," "Smart America," "Real America," and "Just America." Each group that Packer identifies has a distinct history, identity, and demographic. "Real America" is the traditional (old) Republican base that identifies with "freedom" as the ability to build and develop and that prefers "the market" for sorting out public problems. It represents the attitudes of the  traditional business class from Main Street to Wall Street. "Smart America" represents those who have received the requisite education and standing to participate in the meritocracy. These individuals are broadly "liberal" and are found in the professions and the bureaucracies of governments, educational institutions, and NGOs. A good deal of social conflict comes from the snobbery of "Smart America" and the resulting resentment of "Real America." "Real America" consists of those from small towns and rural America with less education who often live in areas of relative economic decline. These are folks who were enamoured by Sarah Palin ( remember her?) and who attend Trump rallies. Often good friends and good neighbors within their communities, their sense of community remains limited to the people and attitudes of their locality. Finally, "Just America" is the younger, educated demographic that has propelled Black Lives Matter, the "Me too" movement, and other ideas about social justice into the forefront. Packer identifies with their aspirations for justice and their critique of much of contemporary society, but he criticizes their intolerance of diverse opinions and all-too-common disregard of procedures intended to protect individuals from the actions of the crowd looking for scapegoats. 

This, of course, is just a thumbnail sketch of Packer's analysis, and his command of detail and nuance impressed me. He was at once sympathetic with each group and also critical. I found myself mostly nodding in agreement with him as I read along. I, too, can celebrate and criticize each perspective. No such broad generalizations found in any sociological portrait can capture all of the messiness of reality, but such maps can provide us with a guide. And, of course, many of us may find ourselves in a foreign territory. For instance, I suppose by dint of a couple of degrees from my alma mater that I belong to "Smart America," but I grew-up and then often dealt professionally with "Free America." (I was a member of a business partnership and represented many businesses.) I also grew-up in and lived in (or near) "Real America," and I hold a sense of the Jekyll and Hyde realities of much rural and small-town America; its strengths and its weaknesses. Finally, making sure that all individuals and groups are treated fairly and with dignity is of the highest value. But I do pause in the face of excessive righteouness, reverse intolerance, and rash judgments. Sometimes justice can paint in broad strokes, but at other times it requires painstaking detail. (This probably comes from my legal education and over 30 years as criminal defense lawyer.) In summary, Packer's mix of celebration and criticism struck a strong cord within me. Somehow, we need to bring these diverse perspectives into some measure of dialogue and congruence. 

Packer has also done his homework and framed his analysis within the tradition. Specifically, perhaps his most frequent reference to another American commentator is to Toqueville. Following Tocquville's lead, Packer identifies the American concern for equality as at least as important (if not more important) than our concern for freedom. The interplay between equality and freedom that Tocqueville identified in his early nineteenth century tour of America is as complex and often vexing today as it was then. Packer believes (and I hardily concur) that the current degree of inequality that has arisen in the U.S. since the 1970s is the major source of social and political friction that threatens our democracy. (Also, beyond Tocqueville, Packer draws upon the thought of Whitman, Lincoln, Lippmann, and the lives of Francis Perkins and Bayard Rustin to buttress his observations.) 

Toward the end of the book Packer offers some suggestions for addressing our problems. His suggestions, none of which are especially radical or unique, are likely familiar to anyone who attends to the problems of our political situation. Voting reform, media reform, control of big tech, and (perhaps my favorite) devolved decision-making (to get more people more directly involved in the political process at the local level beyond merely attending an occasional meeting to voice a complaint or promote a cause) are all good and necessary suggestions. But I doubt that they by themselves would prove sufficient. In this regard, I agree with Steve McIntosh, who makes this same criticism in his sympathetic consideration of Packer's argument. (Based on the series of exerpts of the book published in The Atlantic.)  McIntosh lays out his similar analysis and his suggestion that we need to go up to get out (my phrase, not his.) MacIntosh makes these points in his book Development Politics: How America Can Grow a Better Vision of Itself and in a review essay about Packer's articles.  I agree with McIntosh in this regard, but the question remains: how are we as a society propel ourselves up. What Packer ignores (for the most part) is the potential changes that climate change will be foist upon us (or other crisises like the pandemic). The one thing that I feel confident in predicting--with the spirit of Yogi Beara always whispering in my ear--is that the future won't be like the past; that "the future isn't what it used to be." Thus, like McIntosh and William Ophuls (to name but two whom I could cite about this topic), we need not only changes in our political economy or our political institutions, but more fundamentally we need a change in consciousness. A sea-change in our culture. This is a tall order, to be sure, and if we knew exactly how to do it (and if we had the will), it would have happened already At best, this is an aspiration, a future that we must explore in a place of darkness, but this level of aspiration is vital to our collective future. 

But back to Packer. He's given us a carefully researched and considered portrait of our current predicatment. Such an undertaking is vital to trying to find a way forward. I can't think of a more succinct and vivid and passionate assessment of where we are. How do we get out of this predicament? Packer is not quite as compelling on remedy, but he's certainly on the right path with his diagnosis. 

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 21 September 2021

 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

The foundation of commanding hope is honest hope. It has the courage to fully acknowledge the dangers we face, so it’s informed by a thorough scientific understanding of those dangers and the likelihood of stark constraints in our future; yet it also welcomes the possibility of genuinely positive alternatives within those constraints.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

They must believe that knowledge is knowable and facts are factual while also remembering that even the most obvious certainties might be wrong. They must commit themselves wholeheartedly to the Constitution of Knowledge while acknowledging its limits and the limits of those who uphold it.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

So, what is left of you after you have left is character, the layered image that has been shaping your potentials and your limits from the beginning. Later years define this character more clearly as the repetitive stories and erotic fantasies, the nighttime vigils and the haunting searches through the halls of memory force the singularity of our character upon us.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Thought without speech is inconceivable; “thought and speech anticipate one another. They continually take one another’s place”...

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

Reason uses this discrepancy between intention and unintended results for the insidious realization of its own purposes; Hegel speaks here of “the cunning of Reason.” Half a century before Hegel the point had already been made most eloquently by Adam Ferguson: “Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not of human design. Cromwell said, That a man never mounts higher, than when he knows not whither he is going; it may with more reason be affirmed of communities, that they admit of the greatest revolutions where no change is intended, and that the most refined politicians do not always know whither they are leading the state by their projects.” See A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767; repr., Cambridge, 1995), 119.

Crises of the Republic

Hannah Arendt

What grounds are there for supposing that the resentment against a meritocracy, whose rule is exclusively based on “natural” gifts, that is, on brain power, will be no more dangerous, no more violent than the resentment of earlier oppressed groups who at least had the consolation that their condition was caused by no “fault” of their own? Is it not plausible to assume that this resentment will harbor all the murderous traits of a racial antagonism, as distinguished from mere class conflicts, inasmuch as it too will concern natural data which cannot be changed, hence a condition from which one could liberate oneself only by extermination of those who happen to have a higher I.Q.?

Cf. Arendt's thought here with those on the same topic from Michael Sandel & Daniel Markovits.

Breath

James Nestor

Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth.

Bomb Power

Garry Wills

The argument for the free market is that it is free. But freedom becomes superfluous if an enemy is threatening the very basis of all freedoms.

The Enigma of Reason

Hugo Mercier

If reason is based on intuitive inference, what, you may ask, are the intuitions about? The answer . . . is that intuitions involved in the use of reason are intuitions about reasons.

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Those who can write can write about anything. Especially when the author’s approach lies in interpreting the object of his attention as a kind of monad, something whose very existence reveals nothing less than the entire state of the world—present, past, and future. Therein lies [Walter] Benjamin’s method and magic. His worldview is profoundly symbolic: for him each person, each artwork, each object is a sign to be deciphered. And each sign exists in dynamic interrelation with every other sign. And the truth-oriented interpretation of such a sign is directed precisely at demonstrating and intellectually elaborating its integration within the great, constantly changing ensemble of signs: philosophy.

Doom

Niall Ferguson

In Richardson’s list of magnitude-6 deadly conflicts, six out of seven were civil wars: the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), the American Civil War (1861–65), the Russian Civil War (1918–20), the Chinese Civil War (1927–36), the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and the communal slaughter that accompanied Indian independence and partition (1946–48).

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

Kissinger never paused in the long journey of his spectacular career to work out his ideas about politics, democracy, and the American way of governance. He was a historian and a statesman, not a political thinker. One of his Harvard professors reported that he “was only average in his abilities as a political philosopher.” But there was philosophy contained in his policies, and there were others, much above average, who may be said to have done his thinking for him, who reflected on the condition of the German-Jewish émigré, with all its complex and inevitable ambivalences, and thought deeply about the problems of democracy and modern society. Two in particular had an impress on political thought that has been as lasting—and as controversial—as Henry Kissinger’s impact has been on international affairs.

Gewen's "two in particular" are Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss.

To be precise, the ‘condition’ which is thus ‘selected’ [as 'the cause' of an event] is in fact not ‘selected’ at all; for selection implies that the person selecting has before him a finite number of things from among which he takes his choice. But this does not happen. In the first place the conditions of any given event are quite possibly infinite in number, so that no one could thus marshal them for selection even if he tried. In the second place no one ever tries to enumerate them completely. Why should he? If I find that I can get a result by certain means I may be sure that I should not be getting it unless a great many conditions were fulfilled; but so long as I get it I do not mind what these conditions are. If owing to a change in one of them I fail to get it, I still do not want to know what they all are; I only want to know what the one is that has changed.

From this a principle follows which I shall call ‘the relativity of causes’.

Remember this statement when any starts talking about 'the cause' of an event.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

[William Graham] Sumner’s defense of elites was not the defense of a class. Going one further than Rehberg, who thought some aristocrats unfit to rule, Sumner took the line earlier taken by the British liberal Lord Acton that every class was unfit to rule. All interests sought to capture government. The rich tended to rent-seeking, and tariffs were there to pamper uncompetitive industries. Sumner’s belief in the primacy of free markets was robustly stated but not always easy to live up to. When the Progressives took aim at the business and banking trusts in the name of competition, Sumner, a conservative anti-Progressive, sided with the trusts.