A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

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jacob
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by jacob »

Alphaville wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:34 am
ok, but if our monetary system does not account for externalities, any amount is more or less perpendicular to carbon emissions.
The planetary footprint term in the denominator accounts for the externalities.

Of course one can spend the $6750 in more or less destructive matters. However, gaming the number is largely irrelevant in the aggregate because once spent the subsequent spenders of that money quickly converge on the average representation.

E.g. you spend $1000 on locally grown organic apples, but the person you paid then spends those $1000 on a new TV, refilling his truck, some beef flown in from New Zealand, ...

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:45 am
The planetary footprint term in the denominator accounts for the externalities.
what denominator where? i’m missing a formula here

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by jacob »


sky
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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by sky »

Using modern production methods, it would take about 4.2 acres of farmland to produce this amount of lentils.

https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/afcm/lentil.html

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:45 am
Of course one can spend the $6750 in more or less destructive matters. However, gaming the number is largely irrelevant in the aggregate because once spent the subsequent spenders of that money quickly converge on the average representation.

E.g. you spend $1000 on locally grown organic apples, but the person you paid then spends those $1000 on a new TV, refilling his truck, some beef flown in from New Zealand, ...
sure, but i don’t control that person.

in a limited “vote with my dollars” situation i can still choose the local apple and potato farmer over then local rancher—which i had not been doing, actually. i had been counting my purchases as purely “bang for the buck” rather than “impact for the buck”.

reducing the money i put back into the economy might perversely incentivize the person paid to select cheap dirty products like my old neighbors do. plastic beads from china just “cost” a penny. a giant $10 bag of dirty coal keeps your house hot.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

jacob wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:49 am
viewtopic.php?p=231805#p231805
aaaah....

“World GDP/world population/world ecological footprint”

could you please unpack this a little bit?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

sky wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:53 am
Using modern production methods, it would take about 4.2 acres of farmland to produce this amount of lentils.

https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/afcm/lentil.html
but if the low cost lentils need to be cargoed from india, maybe it’s better if i just eat the local cabbage and potato at lower “bang for the buck” i.e. pricier?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

so my objection to counting money alone is that, even watching for my own portion of global gdp:

-gdp only accounts for market transactions (equilibrium points between supply and demand)

-gdp does not measure negative externalities

-gdp does not count what is being produced (cancer? beer? books?)

too abstract, too coarse, too incomplete

so maybe i’m looking more for something like this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_economics

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/ ... -economics

from 2nd link:
Q: What are some of the alternative measures instead of GDP?
Things like the Genuine Progress Indicator, which is not perfect but does at least try to separate the costs of growth from the benefits. And if you keep those accounts separate, you'll see that in the recent past, since 1975, we haven't actually been improving at all. Our costs have equaled our benefits, and GPI has basically leveled off since 1975, even though GDP has more than doubled.

If we switched and said that what we really wanted to improve is GPI, then there are ways we can do that without increasing GDP. In fact, GDP could decrease, and GPI could go up. We get what we measure, and if we're not measuring the right things, we are going to be getting the wrong results, too.
so i’d rather measure carbon than money at this point but i have to look at this gpi thing now.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by white belt »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 6:50 am
This is even roughly reflected in, for instance, the price of beef vs cheese vs chicken vs eggs. So, one work around would be to eat cheap “waste” meats like chicken livers. This isn’t a cheat because would otherwise likely be dumped. This is an example of how we can already be living in the post-apocalypse scavenger era. OTOH, my extension of this basic principle to middle-aged divorced men may be more dubious and/or more analogous to fishing for Asian Carp.
I actually employed this organ meat strategy in college. Heart, liver, and tongue are all quite easy to prepare from any of the major agricultural meats. Kidney is also possible with proper preparation. I didn’t take the risk with factory farmed meat because I was concerned these animals aren’t the healthiest, but I did buy from a local farmer who used pasture-raised/grassfed practices at prices ranging from $1-3 a lb.

Looks like my fishing for Asian carp idea is rubbing off on someone lol.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

so my objection to counting money alone is that, even watching for my own portion
And herein lies the problem. You are looking at a personal picture, for a personal solution. So long as this is how you frame the problem, this is what you will find, with some variation on the theme.

But if one takes a step back, and looks at the network of people one is surrounded by, what those people do on your behalf, what net overall effect one has in the bigger picture, then 1 Jacob becomes the sweet spot of an optimization problem within these parameters.

Both are valid viewpoints. Personal responsibility for direct results, vs a heuristic for trying to capture indirect results.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by subgard »

I'm not sure what to think about not spending specifically to avoid stimulating consumption in the general economy, but from an accounting perspective, you can't count labor as carbon emissions.
If you count the carbon emissions of a hamburger at the point of sale, you can't then count it in the emissions of a service the hamburger-eater renders.

If a barista makes a cup of coffee, and you count the barista's labor as emissions, you can then not count any of the barista's purchases as emissions.
Many dollars go from labor to labor to labor. You can't count them as emissions each time.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:32 pm
And herein lies the problem. You are looking at a personal picture, for a personal solution. So long as this is how you frame the problem, this is what you will find, with some variation on the theme.
yes, i’m not government, i don’t control anybody else, only myself, and maybe i can influence some friends and family but i’m not an “influencer”. there are 8 billion people on the planet, i’m a speck.

in my house though, i’m not just a policymaker, i’m also famous. :D
Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:32 pm
But if one takes a step back, and looks at the network of people one is surrounded by, what those people do on your behalf, what net overall effect one has in the bigger picture, then 1 Jacob becomes the sweet spot of an optimization problem within these parameters.
that may be in some theoretical sense i’m failing to comprehend yet. in practice, my lived experience with that income level goes through the walmart, the dollar store, wonderbread, grape soda, and chinese apple juice in plastic jugs.

when a pound of global pink sludge is $2 and a pound of organic potatoes from my local farmers market is $3... going for cheap literally pays someone for burning the amazon.
Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 5:32 pm
Both are valid viewpoints. Personal responsibility for direct results, vs a heuristic for trying to capture indirect results.
yeah i’m looking for a better heuristic though.

canada sells durum wheat to italy, italy makes pasta and ships it back to north america. but hey—it’s cheap!

anyway, i’m ditching beef from anywhere and taking a new look a the root vegetables at the local farmer’s market, which looked “expensive” previously but maybe they aren’t in the big scheme of things.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by daylen »

Alphaville wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 6:46 pm
when a pound of global pink sludge is $2 and a pound of organic potatoes from my local farmers market is $3
You could also buy a pound of non-organic potatoes for less than a dollar. Prices for products circulating in the global economy (i.e. not including your local farm with an ideological customer base) are more or less in alignment with the price of oil, and the use of oil is more or less in alignment with increases in carbon or environmental destruction. It's all coupled and simplified into a single measure that is constantly updated. Other measures will typically require more work with little chance of validation between researchers.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

there are 8 billion people on the planet, i’m a speck.
Valid point. But consider:

If you move to a custom lifestyle burning through 7 jacobs per person, but consisting of a diet of organic foods grown in a food forest and blessed by druids and certified emissions free, sequesterizing more carbon into the soils than are released to the atmosphere, your net carbon footprint is neutral.

And still, this solution at speck level doesn't scale, due to the 7:1 resource ratio used to make a speck sized solution.

Once one sits with that for a bit, the value of the dollar heuristic makes itself clearer.
anyway, i’m ditching beef from anywhere and taking a new look a
Remember what was said above about how a metric would be gamed? :lol:

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

daylen wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:05 pm
You could also buy a pound of non-organic potatoes for less than a dollar.
i do that now, but that means oil-based agriculture from a different food basin (idaho?) which means the diminishing local farmlands of the rio grande valley get turned into tacky subdivisions and celebrity housing.

it also means that the true cost of the potatoes (not just the oil emissions but also things like the impoverishment of soils and the loss of biodiversity) is falsified by our economic system.
daylen wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:05 pm
Prices for products circulating in the global economy (i.e. not including your local farm with an ideological customer base) are more or less in alignment with the price of oil, and the use of oil is more or less in alignment with increases in carbon or environmental destruction.
more or less but maybe less than we though:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6517/705 wrote: Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target
the global economy makes no accounting for cabon emissions though. none. they simply ignore the destruction which means spending our ecological capital is artificially decreasing money prices. it’s a worthless system.

cheap oil makes portland cement cheap, and renders adobe construction expensive by comparison. so people build with cement instead of adobe in my region where adobe structures have stood for centuries.

and also i’m fast becoming the ideological customer base. i’ve been on/off member of food co-op for over a decade now, mostly for “health food” availability, but some of their boutique prices didn’t make a lot of sense to me. now when i look at the carbon cost of food—they suddenly do.
daylen wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:05 pm
It's all coupled and simplified into a single measure that is constantly updated. Other measures will typically require more work with little chance of validation between researchers.
it’s oversimplified and ultimately false.

so i’ll start delving into the gpi tomorrow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine ... _indicator

now i’m going to watch a coen brothers movie because at this point my brain is toast

but thanks for the feedback, i understand the model better thanks to your explanation. i just don’t agree with it for me, but i appreciate the engagement.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:34 pm
druids
no druids, just basic stuff.

i’ll answer more tomorrow after i process? must integrate overnight.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

just came back to say
Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:34 pm
due to the 7:1 resource ratio used to make a speck sized solution.
prices are not resources.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

it’s oversimplified and ultimately false.
All metrics are.

Whatever metric one chooses, I find it helpful to familiarize myself with the absurd extremes where a good metric will fail.

When one gets used to the failure patterns of metrics, one stops looking for the right metric, and carefully considers what one wants to measure.

One considers that what one measures, one becomes. In the sense that goals align with metrics. And there is feedback. As the measurable target replaces the goal, the target will move independent of the goal due to the sum of one's actions.

Then one looks for a metric that best fits those needs.

If one's puzzle is:

How do I learn to function on my share of the pie (defined by jacob, above), in such a way that I use the local systems available to me, and account for their costs?

Then I think the dollar is as good a metric as one is likely to find. If only to account for the services provided for you as an American.

As I remember, a jacob is largely consisting of taxes and insurances. This explains why.
prices are not resources.
:lol:

Sure. If you say so.

Tell me, if one were thinking in terms of double entry book keeping, what would be the name on the other column, next to price paid?

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Alphaville »

Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 8:42 pm

Sure. If you say so.

yes. prices are not resources. they’re just the meeting point of supply and demand.

this equivalence of the gdp to oil usage reminds me of the 18th century physiocrats.

but anyway, actually, when you calculate costs of production, the more the production of a commodity relies on externalities, the cheaper its apparent cost, because the actual costs aren’t being accounted for.

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Re: A Conservative Policy Solution to Slow Down Climate Change?

Post by Riggerjack »

yes. prices are not resources. they’re just the meeting point of supply and demand.
Sure. Nothing more. Ever. 8-)

So, does the price you pay ever become resources? Does it signal the further harvest of more resources, to fill this demand you create?

But let me be clear. This is jacob's metric. I don't live by it, I don't even try. But I do admire it, it is an elegant and practical metric for some tricky concepts.

So I fully understand if you choose another metric, I just wanted to clarify the value of jacob's, as I saw it.

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