The environmental cost of making the car takes a reasonable amount of the resources used in is lifecycle.
So in the case you only need the car for a few miles a week you should consider alternatives.
Maybe village councils should have a car to be shared by all.
You've got 10% of people who want a car for this sort of distance (3000km), so that's 8. Of those chances are at least some of the time almost all of them will want to use it over the same period. Maybe you can get away with 6 or 7 cars instead of 8, with some risk, but that's not saving much, and you're adding a lot of inconvenience (car won't be in the right place), overhead, and risk (what if you need a car now and there's none available?)
If you want to tackle the externalities of the resources producing the car, tax them at the same rate as taxing other resources.
Of course that's a big village, what about a group of half a dozen isolated houses 2 miles from the village?
So we need to add into EROEI all the energy needed to deactivate/retrofit de old technology used in planes and large boats. If I don't do this exercise I will be as in denial as the ones that don't believe in climate change.
We need to reduce air and maritime travel. We need to invest in trains and also avoid unnecessary travel. Fuel taxes in the previously mentioned sectors may be a good option because at the moment they don't have taxes on externalities.
We have only a few years to prevent climate change getting out of hand and there are simple and effective solutions. We do not have a carbon budget for solutions that are not yet viable on paper.
Regarding closing the case with glue, I have an iPod Classic 5Gen and there are a lot of mod's but I don't see one that change the case to be easily open. Remarkable don't apply to this because they are extremely thin but it should be a good feature to have in other devices.
It could work if the promise was to give people time instead of a 9 to 5 shitty job, and assuring equality through a Universal Basic Income. That income could be financed with taxes on externalities. Taxing externalities would also benefit the local and more sustainable economy with more decent jobs.
Maybe this would work in the future, but probably not in our lifetime. Paying $12k a year to every American would already cost about as much (more?) as the US collects in taxes.
Because a UBI is cash, the accounting is a little weird. If you pay $10k "more" in taxes but then receive a $12k UBI, has this cost you money?
Outside of some nominal administrative cost in cutting the checks it doesn't "cost" anything on net, it just moves money around. Of course, the above-median person paying $14k in taxes but only receiving $12k back has lost $2k on a personal level, and that's really the cost to be calculated -- the reduction in incentive caused by the tax.
But if you use the model where the UBI replaces existing social assistance programs, marginal tax rates wouldn't be that different than they are now, and the marginal rates on lower income people would be lower when you account for the marginal losses they currently suffer to phase outs of existing means-tested benefits.
In the video the economist talks about progress just as if progress is the end in itself, but is not. We need to have a goal in order to progress to that goal. To have infinite progress is the same to say that at least one of this things:
We don’t know where we want to go;
We are infinitely greed;
We are infinitely incompetent;
We can use the example of the rope. There was many technological progress in the last decades to manufacture good gear for climbing, but as time goes by we will need to spend much more resources in research to get less and less improvements on the rope. There will be a time were the climber needs are fulfilled and we could just spare the nature (ex: the mountains that they like to climb) and enjoy what we have accomplished.
If I was a car manufacturer I would invest heavily on Uber. The fact that people need to have a new car to work for Uber is one of the main factors that keep the auto industry out of recession.
What would happen if we put the externalities to the level they need to be is that the local economy would be more efficient that the global economy. The important organizations are not "too big to fail" they are "to big to succeed". It's physically impossible to continue buying stuff from the other side of the world that could be done near where we live. Also we need to consume less useless stuff, invest in repairing and maintaining what we have and implement measure to greatly reduce planned obsolescence
I generally agree, but I think it's important to mention that factoring in externalities yields some surprising results on the local/shipped goods dimension. For example, in California, Chilean wines perform slightly better than local wines when it comes to CO2 emissions, and Austrialian wines are almost equivalent to Californian wines. This is due to transport in bulk by ship being much much better that by truck over land.
Reproduction permit auctions are incompatible with the current release of ethics. Also, pensioners insist that growth must not stop while they live out their hard earned sunset years.
> Reproduction permit auctions are incompatible with the current release of ethics.
Care to expand on that? I haven't thought it through very deeply, but are there some options that could be ethically acceptable? Reproducing until we run out of resources doesn't seem like a great alternative and I struggle to see that as more ethical.
Personally I think that monetary incentives not to reproduce could be a good option.
Well, rich parents for everyone! Mostly kidding, but it would be a side effect of "reproduction permit auctions" (until banks invent the parenting loan, then it would become a race to the bottom, poor parents for almost everyone)
Deciding who can reproduce and who cannot is generally seen as the most evil thing next to outright killing. Because it can be used (and was used!) as a form of soft genocide and because it goes completely against the individualism that derives from a non-collectivist reading of equality. That's like giving the finger to 300 years of progressive history. But reproduction controls are not uncommon in other/earlier societies. Strict marriage requirements don't put a cap on children per marriage, but marriage was often a privilege, requiring land, some lord's permission or just a hefty bride price. Of course those where all in the context of seemingly unconstrained growth headroom and the motivation was mostly child welfare (or just a show of power). Nonetheless, once progressive individualism had liberated is from those limits, the number of childless individuals has fallen quite a bit I think. (I'm not an historical anthropologist or whatever field would actually research that, this is just my personal impression)
So much for why the topic is such a hot potato. Particularly principled persons might actually prefer to knowingly condemn everyone to heroic starvation than ever allowing reproduction controls.
A look at Chinese 1CP (an outside, uninformed look but still a look, ok?): it tried to be fair, in a socialistic way. Everyone can have one child! But the most notorious side effects, like the mysterious case of the gender imbalance and the loss of siblinghood are not generally inherent to reproduction control, they are specific to their method of making it fair. But 1CP was an extreme measure anyways, 2CP and the fair way becomes perfectly fine I guess. Except for the issue of enforcement of course, basically unsolved.
This is where incentives come into the picture. But they will forever be at odds with the desire to avoid child poverty, it's difficult.
You could place the externalities directly on an UBI (universal basic income). This would address a problem of redistribution of the tariffs income. France had the yellow jackets because people are tired of not knowing were taxes income go (normally to the very rich.) If we implement externalities to level of what IPPC advices there will be unemployment, but work like the economy is just another mean to an end. Right now the big problem is ecological.
Well, in the long term externalities wouldn't yield much money, and instead move allocation of capital to methods of production with minimal external costs.
It would promote the local economy (the one with less externalities). That would created meaningful jobs, jobs that you know have a propose. Yes we could not buy cheap clothing every weekend or go to a 3 day holiday in the south of Europe 4 times a year but we don't need to. What we need to live within the boundaries of the planet.
Every study that I know show that the dematerialization of economy will lead to a degrowth [1]. Moreover there are many non material things that we need but the majority used to be free. Having time with friends and family for instance. Do we need to turn our relations into a commodity only to achieve growth? Why are we so obsessed with growth that we are willing to exploit ourselves and the planet in order to achieve it?
Marcus Aurelius had the quote "Confine yourself to the present". He was one of the most respected roman emperors, and a famous stoic. Today living the present is associated with reckless living but for the old philosophies it was about questioning every day "what can I do today to improve myself as a human being?"
