2020’s: decade of the Green New Deal?

A video from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez imagines the future:

Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/17/green-new-deal-short-film-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

New Consensus

“The World Needs a New Worldview.” Right on.

A truly beautiful world is possible—one without poverty or pollution, and with prosperity and dignity for everyone. Humanity has everything it needs to build that world in a single generation: billions of creative, hard working people, technology that already can allow us to make a comfortable living safely and sustainably, and unlimited energy from the sun that we can now harness to power that technology.

So begins the opening statement from New Consensus, a bold new group that’s helping to spark the New Green Deal. Read more here.

And check out their reading list here.

Solar power + people power

Bill McKibben strikes a hopeful note:

We have two relatively new inventions that could prove decisive to solving global warming before it destroys the planet. One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement.

Read more here.

Youth climate action

Historic youth action from around the world:

See more here.

Passing the buck

A side benefit of moving to decentralized, renewable electricity would be getting out from under these guys:

As California’s deadliest wildfire was consuming the town of Paradise in November, some of the state’s top power company officials and a dozen legislators were at an annual retreat at the Fairmont Kea Lani resort on Maui. In the course of four days, they discussed wildfires — and how much responsibility the utilities deserve for the devastation, if any.

It is an issue of increasing urgency as more fires are traced to equipment owned by California’s investor-owned utilities. The largest, Pacific Gas and Electric, could ultimately have to pay homeowners and others an estimated $30 billion for causing fires over the last two years. The most devastating of those, the Camp Fire, destroyed thousands of homes in Paradise and killed at least 86 people.

Realizing that their potential fire liability is large enough to bankrupt them, the utility companies are spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions. Their goal: a California law that would allow them to pass on the cost of wildfires to their customers in the form of higher electricity rates.

Read more here and here.

Plus update on the saga here.

Political Economy of the Environment: New video series from Econ4

Econ4 is pleased to announce its new video series on the Political Economy of the Environment, produced in partnership with the University of Massachusetts Amherst department of economics.

Part One: Introduction

1. The economy & the environment. Are people different from pondweed?
2. Limits to growth – of what? It’s time for a new formula: grow the good, and shrink the bad.
3. Political economy. Who wins, who loses, who decides?
4. Safety, efficiency, sustainability, and justice. What should be the goals in environmental policy?

Part Two: Environmental protection – in theory and practice

5. What is efficiency? There’s more – and less – to neoclassical efficiency than meets the eye.
6. Discounting the future. Are the lives of our grandchildren worth less than our own?
7. The value of a statistical life. How do economists put a monetary value on risks of death?
8. Externalities. External costs and benefits are not the exception – they’re the rule.
9. The Coase theorem. Why private bargaining can seldom solve environmental externalities.
10. The tragedy of the commons. More accurately, the tragedies of open access.
11. Environmental justice. Defending the right to a clean and safe environment.
12. Power & the environment. Costs and benefits weighted by the power of those to whom they accrue.
13. Regulation & environmental protection. Rules as a solution to environmental problems.
14. Incentive-based environmental policies. Prices as another way to solve environmental problems.
15. Market failure & government failure. Democracy versus oligarchy: beyond the market-versus-government debate.
    

Part Three: Global dimensions

16. Globalization & the environment. The globalization of market failure poses new challenges for governance.
17. The environmental Kuznets curve. What happens to the environment as per capita income goes up?
18. Population & the environment. What Malthus got wrong.
19. Tropical deforestation. How transnational alliances can change balances of power.
20. Building natural assets. How poverty reduction and environmental protection can go hand-in-hand.
21. Agriculture & the environment. The costs of industrial agriculture and benefits of ecological agriculture.
22. Cultivated biodiversity. Small farmers sustain some of the world’s most valuable biodiversity.

Part Four: Climate policy

23. Climate change. The defining environmental challenge of the 21^st century.
24. Carbon pricing: 1. Why & how? Why we need to put price on fossil carbon, and how we can do it.
25. Carbon pricing: 2. The social cost of carbon. What should be the price on carbon dioxide emissions?
26. Carbon pricing: 3. Revenue allocation. The trillion dollar question: who will get the money?
27. International climate negotiations. No-regrets policies can help overcome myopia and the free rider problem.

The fossil-free future

The clean energy transition has turned a corner, writes Bill McKibben:

The fossil-fuel industry is no longer minting money. It’s been underperforming the rest of the economy—and no wonder. Sun and wind are ultimately free, and that puts remarkable price pressure on the stuff you have to dig up and burn. Every single day, the electric car moves further along the path from novelty to normal… The question now is not whether big oil is going down; the question is how fast—and how we make sure the transition is a just one.

Read more here.

Meanwhile in the real world: Countries moving to a fossil-free future

For a glimpse of what’s happening in countries that take climate change seriously, check out this short video:

Source: http://enb.iisd.org/videos/climate/unfccc-cop23-side-events/implementing-paris-and-the-sdgs-through-fuel-subsidy-reform-and-taxation/?autoplay

This changes not much: performance of moral virtue as politics

Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything has attracted many admirers on the left. A thought-provoking exception is economist Peter Dorman, who writes:

[R]edefining politics as the performance of moral virtue rather than the contest for power can provide consolation when political avenues appear to be blocked. Activities of this sort are evaluated according to how expressive they are—how good they make us feel—rather than any objective criterion of effectiveness in achieving concrete goals or altering the balance of political forces.

Read his critique of the book here.

Crazy subsidies

In a stunning display of how political clout trumps (excuse me) common sense, nations of the world spend trillions every year subsidizing fossil fuels. It’s like paying people to drink poison. Check out one of the latest estimates:

A fossil fuel subsidy is any government policy that lowers the cost of fossil fuel production, raises prices received by producers, or lowers prices paid by consumers: they can consist of tax breaks and direct funding for fossil fuel companies. But subsidies can also consist of loans, price controls, or giveaways in the form of land or water at below market-rates, and many other actions.

They have been so high across the world, finds Dr. Radek Stefanski—an economist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland— that they are nearly four and a half times higher than previously believed.

So what’s the damage? It’s pretty colossal. For the last year in his model, 2010, Stefanski found that the total global direct and indirect financial costs of all fossil fuel subsidies was $1.82 trillion, or 3.8 percent of global GDP. He also found that the subsidies meant much higher carbon emissions released into our atmosphere.

Remarkably, the International Monetary Fund puts the price tag even higher:

In 2015, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculated that global fossil fuel subsidies amounted to a monumental $5.3 trillion, which is 6.5% of global GDP—up from $4.9 trillion in 2013. The IMF even had to revise its old figure for 2011, which originally estimated the global subsidies at 2 trillion dollars. The real figure for 2011, the fund concluded, was $4.2 trillion.

Read more here.