I have a different take: Things will change once a big part of the electorate no longer feels like climate change policies will hurt their pocket. A lot of the opposition to the policies are from people who aren't in the richer percentiles and probably work in a field that's related to fossil fuels (like heating engineers, car mechanics, etc.). They fear job losses and that their commute and heating bills go up.
I have a different different take. It's not the electorate's pocketbook that matters, it's the political donors pocketbook that matters.
"Drill baby drill" will be echoed so long as petroleum companies and petroleum rich nations dump billions into propaganda outlets, politician campaigns, and in the US, PAC groups to support "drill baby drill" friendly politicians.
So long as that dynamic exists, it doesn't matter if 80% of the electorate screams for change. So long as the incumbent advantage exists forcing people to vote mostly on social issues, these sorts of economic and world affecting issues will simply be ignored.
There's a reason, to this day, you'll find Democrats talk about the wonders of fracking, clean coal, and carbon capture.
IDK how to change this other than first identifying the issue. Our politicians are mostly captured by their donors. That's the only will they really care about enacting.
Not sharing your take of the electorate's powerlessness at all. It's not an overwhelming majority (only 57% of voters in the US: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54124-nearly-half-american...) which thinks they need to do more about climate change. I think most politicians are in tune with their voters - you need to change the people's minds if you want stricter policies. Refine the question a bit more and ask people if they still want to do more against climate change if some basic necessities in their life will get more expensive and you will likely even drop below 50%.
Well part of that 43% I think have their opinions primarily because of propaganda from the same donors who are buying off the politicians.
But also, I'd point out that even in the Democrat party where this is more of an 80:20 issue with their constituents, the democrats are still far too friendly to fossil fuels (Biden, for example, specifically campaigned on how much he loves natural gas, fracking, and carbon capture).
This isn't the only 80:20 issue where democrat politicians are out of alignment with their base. That's also what informs my pessimism.
Solar power is cheaper than oil, but it doesn't work 24/7. If you can find a way to work with that, switching to solar is already financially incentivised. Even if you can't, we're already seeing whole countries and regions saturating at 100% solar electricity during daylight hours, significantly reducing oil usage. It doesn't matter what the oil sellers want, because it's a buyer's market for energy when the sun is out, and they're not going to throw extra money at oil companies just because.
The universe was not built to cater to our desires. We can't have our cake and eat it too.
Virtually all economic activity consumes resources and energy, directly or indirectly, and in the process creates ghg emissions.
If we want to curb climate change and our emissions, it necessarily means we're going to take an economic hit.
We either do that willingly with some degree of ability to exercise control along the way, or be forced by physics to take an even worse economic hit and face vastly more death and suffering without our hands on the wheel.
There's no option where we don't get our pockets hurt.
Same reply to you as the other commentator: Fully agree that not doing anything will hurt more. The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now. The conservatives basically everywhere around the world are against redistribution - so they ideologically oppose anything that looks like it. At the same time if we just enact policies that limit CO2 the rich people won't really care that flying, heating, driving and some foods have gotten a bit more expensive. But the poor people will. And of the ones who would get hurt by the higher prices a lot of them are ideologically opposed to any kind of redistributing policies. So you are kind of stuck in a catch-22 for now.
An interesting policy proposal is negative tax. Basically take the carbon cap, divide by the number of people, and give the equivalent carbon tax price to each person. A person who uses exactly average carbon sees no change, while a person who uses less gets a tax rebate, and a person who uses more pays more. You can charge it at the source, tariffing oil by its carbon content and then reducing taxes by that amount for everyone.
- probably have a poorly isolated home with oil or gas heating
will be the ones with higher than average emissions. And the rich people who do will just shrug at this minor extra expense. I feel like this is not mentioned enough in discussions (probably because wealth disparity is such a touchy subject) but your ability to reduce your carbon footprint is also directly tied to your wealth.
The average would also include rich people - if rich people are using far above average and poor people are using slightly above average, who's below average?
Rich people, even with electric cars and solar panels, are responsible for far greater emissions than poor people even with their old beaters and longer commutes. Far, far greater.
> The hard part is finding policies that actually work without costing the lower and middle class more right now
You imprison the current administration for treason, seize their ill-gotten gains and there you go, hundreds of billions of dollars.
It's absolutely trivial. There's just a group of people that doesn't want it.
Simultaneously institute an inheritance tax as well as an exit tax of 90% of assets above $1+ billion, at time of death or leaving. That's a cool $1+ trillion in revenue for the next few decades. Both exit taxes and inheritance taxes are very established and work fine in plenty of countries, FYI. Not like yearly wealth taxes that are always criticized as not working or untested.
It's trivial to come up with policies that don't hurt the lower nor the middle class. Laughably easy. There's however a group of people that are blocking them. Those people are the problem and their blocks need to be removed to get closer to preventing then oncoming extinction event (which has complete scientific consesus). These policies work, and what needa to be done is removing of their blockers.
Come on now everyone, at least give an argument before you downvote. Warren Buffet is set to give away 99% of his wealth, so it's clearly possible. Humanity can no longer depend on the others to have the same basic decency as he does - clearly he's the exception, the others don't have it.
Not responding to climate change is hurting everyone's pocket. Home insurance premiums are obscene in some places. Energy insecurity due to reliance on fossil fuels sourced from overseas (particularly relevant right now with the US war on Iran and Russian war on Ukraine). Extreme temperatures mean we either spend more money on heating/cooling our homes or, if you're not wealthy enough to pay, you pay by having to endure the temperature extremes.
Not disputing that it will hurt everyone's pocket. But politically it is very fraught to push for policies that will benefit a new group of people (wind turbine engineers, solar cell installers) at the expense of an established group (gas turbine mechanics, fuel truck drivers). And for the home owners: It's not hurting them on a broad enough level - people who oppose climate change policies probably just don't care about homes in the coastal areas getting flooded - maybe because most of the opposition lives further inland.
Until climate plans align with short-term personal incentives, I don't see how there's going to be any serious persistent fight against climate change.
People might feel benevolent one day and do something good, but the next day when they are faced with a problem and the environment is a convenient trash can or resource bin, they'll go right back to those bad habits.
The only way things will change is if everyone's life gets made miserable by the effects.
It's one of those super easy things that 90% of the users just never do - like changing their default search engine, export their social graph, install ad blockers, etc.
Kind of a bad look - but I can't precisely say why. Maybe he thinks he can raise more capital this way than he could for each company separately? Especially raising more money for X might be quite hard - they seem to be quite a bit behind on the revenue side compared to OpenAI / Anthropic. With both companies merged he might just find enough retail investors willing to buy at sky high valuations.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - I'm wondering the same thing. Catching up is inherently more expensive than just maintaining a lead. And on top of that the EU pensioners will oppose any reallocation of resources outside of their retirement / pension schemes. The EU does have more fiscal headroom than the US, ie. lower debt per GDP and lower debt per capita - so through borrowing they could mobilize some more funds. But that's about it and I'm doubtful that's going to be enough.
I guess a lot of Europeans don't want to see the real logical questioning and downvoting out of pure frustration.
Also EU doesn't have fiscal freedom. Germany is the only country barely keeping it together and without any hard reform France is a ticking time bomb when it come to its debt-to-GDP.
US has a huge advantage compared to France. US has the control of its currency and can devalue it. France cannot do it since Euro is not controlled by France.
BTC failed to live up to it's own prophecy by not doubling from the last height of ca. 69420 to at least 140k in 2025. There was a last chance in October of last year, where it seemed to get close but ultimately it just didn't find enough buyers. Now with the narrative broken (bitcoin always goes up over the long term) one sell off will lead to the next as more and more people lose trust.
That isn’t something you can categorically say for sure though. If it hits 125k next month then Bitcoin does go up over the long term. Same if it hits 125k next year.
Wrong. The problem with bitcoin is its volatility itself. If it doubled in value, that means its undergoing hyper deflation, which makes it a terrible store of value.
Bitcoin's proponents are its own biggest liability. People who see it as a speculative asset rather than a currency that needs to be a stable store of value. It, like all currency, has no ingerent value and its stupid to speculate on it
I still find it interesting that the pump and dump still works - it's the same cycle over and over again of building the market to dump crap onto people. I bet some folks have so much crap they've been dumping it gradually just so the market can absorb it.
and it has proven to not be a great hedge against inflation (lately, short term)
the digital gold narrative falls apart when non-digital gold outperforms it and nobody wants it for its digital properties (payments, blockchain, etc.)
This is exactly how its going to go. But the reason is not lazy bureaucrats but that a lot of countries fear they will lose out on taxes from corporations currently domiciled in their country. Of course another big source of friction is different labour laws in different countries. And there's no way these are going to be touched. And of course banks will also oppose the unified capital market because they fear losing fees from their domestic customers to better banks in other countries.
UK is famous for having extremely tough zoning laws, with many, many buildings being listed / landmarked. Something that does run very well in the UK are stores like Greggs which are usually classified as small shops (cat. E) without a kitchen. So the analysis applies there as well.
transaction fees are not increasing though, so they can't offset miner rewards. they have been in the $100k-$200k per day range for a long time, with only occasional breakouts: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/transaction-fees-... and the trend is not to the upside. in fact with the arrival of ETFs in 2024 the trend is clearly downwards.
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