Nordhaus was not a climate denier by any stretch of the imagination. The man founded climate economics, and advocated for carbon taxes very early!
He is deserving of critique for being far too conservative in his approach, yes, but it's not like the biggest damagers of the environment are doing less because William Nordhaus told them to do less. Trump and populist right aren't ripping up the EPA, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc. because of Nordhaus. They ripped up the policies because they deny climate change entirely. Would adopting more aggressive measures in the 80s made things better? Possibly, but I think people over estimate the political will vs. the technological shifts needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
Only now is it obvious we are going to rapidly, exponentially, move to solar globally because the cost savings are undeniable, regardless of what deniers may want. And, contrary to your Berman link above, energy transitions are NOT a myth. They were not evenly distributed, but they were quietly, regionally happening (the UK, and California, for example). Now it's reached a tipping point, and going global.
The effects were not the same as climate change denial, and it's absurd to suggest Nordhaus wanted or even that his results would have let humanity die out.
The majority of damage is being done by climate denying citizens and their elected populist governments that are entirely dismantling climate policies and carbon taxation or alternative carbon pricing measures.
His research methods are the foundation of environmental economics, so he should not be ignored (and won't be, DICE remains one major lens used by governments). The disagreement is over the numbers and specific damage assumptions which have been revised by others in new DICE model variants.
Nordhaus co-wrote the standard economics textbook taught globally, endogenous technological change is an exemplary growth theory that (with Paul Romer) was deserving of the Nobel, and was an early proponent of carbon taxes and created many of the tools used in environmental economics.
I mean, he's absolutely deserving of critique, even harsh critique, but you're going to have try harder than "his analysis is awful" and he caused "immeasurable damage" when he co-created the movement.
"Nordhaus co-wrote the standard economics textbook taught globally"
Which is tragic because it is a neoclassical fiction book misleading millions of students. Anyone who is really interested in the history of economic thought will avoid that book for anything other than being a reference of the theoretical position of the neoclassical synthesis.
This is entirely wrong. It is crucial to teach students the foundations of the academic discipline they're about to study, which is currently the neoclassical Keynesian synthesis.
Every economic model is fiction to some degree, what matters is the usefulness of the models to make policy decisions or predict outcomes. One can branch off into heterodox schools of thought like Austrian, Marxism, Chicago, or Behavioral... but students need to be grounded in the field's consensus to be able to know how to speak intelligibly across these areas if they're to have any effectiveness.
Carbon taxes are your typical neoliberal economic non solution. Incoherent policy designed to create as much political blowback against the do gooders as possible.
Solar + storage is on an exponential growth curve to largely entirely replace fossil fuels (coal mostly, but eventually natural gas) for electricity generation globally. It will take decades, but at this point the economics are undeniable. Which is in part why Texas (oil country) is blanketing with utility-scale solar farms. Energy businessmen have no particular ideological wedding to what will make them more money, and Solar is a far simpler business than oil.
It is not a mode of production problem. The people do have that power at the ballot box, and choose to give more power to corrupt leaders out of fear of the alternative.
The historical case of Enron and Arthur Andersen is instructive. No one from Andersen went to jail but it had to be argued up to the Supreme Court for their charges to be dismissed. The company was disbanded but the conviction against it was overturned afterwards. This is certainly some evidence for "killing the company" not being the right move.
Several Enron execs did go to jail: Kenneth Lay the chairman would have gone for 10+ years but died before sentencing, Jeff Skilling did 12 years, Causey did 5 years, Fastow did 5 years.
In the current environment of DOJ corruption I don't think this sort of thing would happen... unless the executives were conveniently non-supporters of the current President.
The shareholders did not pay for the deception, even though they benefitted from it. There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
If the law was "you need to hire your own private investigators and external auditors to find deception in all the companies you invest in", then yes, shareholder liability would be reasonable.
So if I give $1000 to Boris the loan shark, and he consistently returns 50% year over year, I’m blameless because I didn’t investigate?
Shareholder liability is the only way to prevent companies from tobacco/oil style abuse of externalities. You can execute the execs and it will make no difference, because the same shareholders are there incentivizing the same behaviors with the same massive salary/stock windfalls. Someone will take the money.
Shareholder liability is not the only way, but it is A way. There are many unlimited liability companies out there that get high privacy as a tradeoff to liability. Limited liability corps encourages investment but requires public disclosure and enforcement. Society has to decide it if wants to clamp down on limited liability corps (or not). So far they've voted "or not".
> There is no legal precedence for this kind of action because we have an SEC that is meant to root out deception in public companies, that was gutted as a result of the current US administration.
Trump took the gutting to an extreme, but antitrust and investor protection agencies have been gutted for decades. The only thing that will draw actual consequences is defrauding or otherwise hurting other rich people - Liz Holmes, Madoff, Epstein or the Dieselgate scandal. But screw over the little man? You'll probably get some sort of bonus.
Eh, the tobacco companies were found very liable ($206 billion in the US alone), Meta has to pay $18 billion for the child safety liability findings, Visa+MC $38 billion, Amazon $2.5 billion over Amazon Prime, Opiod companies had a $25 billion judgement recently...
It strikes me that heavy AI agent users have an extraordinarily high risk tolerance for identity theft, privacy breaches and data loss vs. perceived productivity. Far beyond what any responsible medium to large size company would ever tolerate.
Overall the limits to AI productivity can be summarized in one word: discipline. If you're undisciplined in your security, your design constraints, your automated test coverage, your separation of the deterministic and indeterministic, you will be quite productive ... for a time. Until quite suddenly, you aren't, possibly due to catastrophe.
Similar to the early era of computers on the Internet, with lax security, we have a window where we can get away with this, but it will close quicker than many realize. Some things do seem to need to be learned the hard way.
Apple is trying to do the bare minimum here - not even introducing a new security model - and people are already freaking out. But a disciplined agent sandbox model is exactly what we need to get to.
> According to haveibeenpwnd, the email address I've used since gmail was invite-only is in at least 39 data breaches.
This is a stupid nihilistic take. Gmail hasn't been breached that many times. Your original credentials from the first breach were passed around from black market to other black market and were repackaged. They didn't get your newest password 39 different times. The black markets are a lot like middle quality data brokers -- they don't actually care if their data is the most accurate or up-to-date.
If your credit profile was completely hovered, that's another story. Credit bureaus are simply a knowledge database and are a massive liability. But my credit hasn't been similarly destroyed so there is likely another major variable between our risk profiles. Maybe your physical mailbox has been breached multiple times.
Security hygiene is a lot like physical hygiene. You just need a few rules and you are mostly good. Don't sleep around too much, choose your partners wisely, and use protection when you do find a new partner until you both trust each other enough.
As it pertains to Meta, nobody should trust this company after what they did with iOS contacts on the original Facebook app.
And nobody needs to use Muse. You aren't opting out of society on a Unabomber level if you choose not to use this one AI agent app by a less than trustworthy company.
The person you are replying to never said Gmail was breached 39 times, they said their email was in 39 different data breaches, meaning 39 different sites where they used an email login were breached.
This is a string of non-sequiturs that do not prove your conclusion.
According to haveibeenpwnd, my gmail address (which I too have had since invite-only) has been in 1 data breach. My Mac.com address which I've had since it was called iTools, 19 breaches. I've had to rotate my email account passwords I think 3 or 4 times over the last 20 years, and rotate most external accounts that use those email addresses a few times. I'm not sure what this proves other than "you should randomly generate your passwords & rotate them" which is what mainstream users have been doing for at least a few years now. Apple also notifies me if any password I use has been in a breach, and gives an easy link to rotate it.
SSN fraud predates the Internet and has little to do with online consumer services privacy (most don't have your SSN). When I was a young teenage cracker anarchist in the late 80s & early 90s, we got credit cards & SSN's through hacking the credit agencies, credit card companies, credit unions and regional banks (all of whom often had insecure dialup endpoints, or even better, insecure X.25 network endpoints), and through a BBS community that would disseminate these data breaches. Same as it ever was.
Mainstream end to end encrypted apps do not monitor your private messages. Cynicism is not wisdom. WhatsApp offering an on-app opt-in model to detect scans seems like a well thought through feature, though Meta's reputation is not good on this topic.
Clearly many do not care about privacy. But it is quite possible to be very online and have reasonable privacy. It requires discernment and discipline.
No matter how much discernment and discipline about my privacy, I can’t protect myself from someone else’s lack of discipline and discernment about my privacy, especially for mandatory critical systems.
Why put in all this time to protect to my privacy when UpGuard, National public Data, etc will leak my SSN anyways?
I think the point is, even if you attempt to do everything securely, someone along the chain will mess up.
Look at the Equifax breach - most of the US SSN's, addresses, & more released, and they get a little slap on the wrist and continue doing business. I was in there, I never signed up for equifax, I signed up for companies that signed up with equifax.
That said, it is still a slippery slope argument, just because there will be more data breaches, doesn't mean we should give everything out freely and just give up.
Docker has an interesting approach lately with their sandboxes which are firewalled, proxied, and file system restricted microVMs (you can bind mount outside) with a docker daemon inside of it.
He is deserving of critique for being far too conservative in his approach, yes, but it's not like the biggest damagers of the environment are doing less because William Nordhaus told them to do less. Trump and populist right aren't ripping up the EPA, the Inflation Reduction Act, etc. because of Nordhaus. They ripped up the policies because they deny climate change entirely. Would adopting more aggressive measures in the 80s made things better? Possibly, but I think people over estimate the political will vs. the technological shifts needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
Only now is it obvious we are going to rapidly, exponentially, move to solar globally because the cost savings are undeniable, regardless of what deniers may want. And, contrary to your Berman link above, energy transitions are NOT a myth. They were not evenly distributed, but they were quietly, regionally happening (the UK, and California, for example). Now it's reached a tipping point, and going global.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/global-solar-capacity...
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/06/20/the-exponential...
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