“according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than that price tag suggests.
There are a couple of reasons for that. First, until now, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present.”
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“People do tend to value the present more than the future. You may grab that chocolate chip cookie today, for instance, even though you know it means you’ll have to lean into the diet extra hard tomorrow. But that doesn’t necessarily mean our climate models should follow suit. In fact, some philosophers think baking in people’s rate of pure time preference is a terrible idea.
“We’re basically just measuring a form of human impatience and irrationality, then trying to add it into political decision-making,” Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, argued on the 80,000 Hours podcast in 2017. “It doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing that one should be respecting at all. It’s just like finding a cognitive bias that we have, and then adding it back into your economic analysis in order to make your analysis biased in the same way.””
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“Now, that’s not to say the pure rate of time preference should be absolutely zero. As Carleton and Greenstone wrote, “Perhaps the most compelling explanation for a nonzero pure rate of time preference is the possibility of a disaster (e.g., asteroids or nuclear war) that wipes out the population at some point in the future, thus removing the value of any events that happen afterwards.” Ord has made the same argument, suggesting we should discount the future by the extinction risk to humanity, and no more.
Whatever you think about discounting, intellectual honesty requires us to admit that how we choose to answer the question of what we owe to future generations gets baked into the discount rate and thus into the SCC. And any answer to that question will be a subjective moral judgment, not some objective mathematical truth.”
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“even the first purely economic reason to discount the future (society will be wealthier in the future, and damages matter less the wealthier you are) is not some objective truth.”
The money allocated isn’t enough, and federal money often doesn’t get where it’s most needed due to poor communities’ lower abilities to lobby for the money.
“Whether or not octopuses are intentionally hurling objects at each other — and whether or not we can really call it “throwing” — the study shows that octopuses can use their siphon in clever ways: to move debris, arrange a den, and perhaps even send a signal to other animals, including us.
Does that mean they’re even more intelligent than we thought?
The question itself is fraught, as it suggests that there’s some universal idea of what it means to be intelligent. In our assessment of animals, intelligence is often measured using a human yardstick, as the primatologist Frans de Waal writes in his book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? “Every species deals flexibly with the environment and develops solutions to the problems it poses,” he writes. “Each one does it differently.”
Octopuses, for one, are nothing like us. In fact, “when our two branches of the animal family tree diverged, backbones hadn’t been invented,” as Elizabeth Preston wrote in the New York Times. “It makes sense to be cautious when we guess what’s going on in these animals’ minds.”
There is a benefit to our obsession with octopus intelligence: We show them more respect and compassion, which has implications for wildlife conservation, experts say. “You probably won’t conserve what you don’t respect,” Mather says.
Then again, what makes octopuses so marvelous is just how different from us they are. Case in point: Each of their eight tentacles has roughly 300 suckers, and each of those can have as many as 10,000 or so sensory neurons, allowing them to perceive touch and taste. “It’s alien,” Grasso said. “It isn’t human.””
“Racial and income segregation locks low-income people in a trap of concentrated poverty. The best schools are relegated to the highest-income neighborhoods, good jobs often exist in either exclusive or gentrifying neighborhoods, and businesses are less willing to take root in an area of concentrated poverty because there are fewer customers. All of this is a vicious cycle that traps low-income Americans. It also hinders their ability to foster growth on their own because financial insecurity makes people transient and lacking in time and energy to build community.
Meanwhile, homeowners in well-off neighborhoods have cemented systems of local control through rules like exclusionary zoning to keep their neighborhoods prohibitively expensive for lower-income Americans, including many Black and brown Americans.
Zoning laws are the rules and regulations that decide what types of homes can be built where. While this can sound innocuous, exclusionary zoning is anything but. These rules have a dark history in the United States as a tool of racial and economic segregation, used explicitly to keep certain races, religions, and nationalities out of certain neighborhoods. And while the explicit racism has been wiped from the legal text, the effect of many of these rules remains the same: keeping affordable housing and the people who need it away from the wealthiest Americans.
City by city, the message is clear: Segregation and concentrated poverty are the true blights of urban life, despite our fascination with gentrification.”
“Particularly with the rise of the delta variant, a consensus has formed that the coronavirus likely can’t be eliminated. Like the flu, a rapidly shapeshifting coronavirus will continue to stick around in some version for years to come, with new variants leading to new spikes in infections. Especially as it becomes unlikely that 100 percent of the population will get vaccinated, and as it becomes clear that the vaccines provide great but not perfect protection, the virus is probably always going to be with us in some form, both in America and abroad.
That doesn’t mean the US has to accept hundreds of thousands of deaths annually in the coming years. While the vaccines have struggled at least somewhat in preventing any kind of infection (including asymptomatic infection), they have held up in preventing severe illness, hospitalization, and death — reducing the risk of each by roughly 90 percent, compared to no vaccine. Research has also found stricter restrictions reduce Covid-19 spread and death, and that masks work.
But it’s also become clear most Americans aren’t willing to tolerate drastic deviations from the pre-pandemic normal — lockdowns, staying at home, and broadly avoiding interactions with other people — for long. While social distancing staved off the virus in the pre-vaccine pandemic days, it also wrought economic, educational, and social devastation around the world. It’s the intervention that, above all, most people want to avoid going forward.”
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“the balance, as the coronavirus becomes endemic, will require accepting some level of Covid-19 risk — both to individuals and to society. America already does that with the flu: In some years, a flu season kills as many as 60,000 people in the US, most of whom are elderly and/or people with preexisting health conditions, but also some kids and previously healthy individuals. As a cause of death, the flu can surpass gun violence or car crashes, but it’s a tolerated cost to continuing life as normal.”
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“With about half the country vaccinated, the Covid-19 death rate is still much higher than that of the flu — the more than 120,000 deaths over the past six months is still more than double the number of people even the worst flu seasons have recently killed. But as more people get vaccinated and others develop natural immunity after an infection, the death rate will likely come down.”
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“How many deaths are Americans willing to tolerate?”
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“Are 30,000 to 40,000 deaths a year too many? That’s generally what the country sees with gun violence and car crashes — and American policymakers, at least, haven’t been driven to major actions on these fronts.
Are as many as 60,000 deaths a year too many? That’s what Americans have tolerated for the flu.
Are 90,000 deaths a year too many? That’s the death toll of the ongoing drug overdose crisis — and while policymakers have taken some steps to combat that, experts argue the actions so far have fallen short, and the issue doesn’t draw that much national attention.
Is the current death toll — of more than 1,500 a day, or equivalent to more than 500,000 deaths a year — too much? Many people would say, of course, it is. But in the middle of a delta variant surge, Americans may be revealing their preferences as restaurant reservations are now around the pre-pandemic normal — a sign the country is moving on. “The loudest voices on social media and in public are way more cautious than the average American,” Jha said.”
https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-podcast/22637762/vox-conversations-adam-serwer-the-cruelty-is-the-point
“China’s government banned effeminate men on TV and told broadcasters..to promote “revolutionary culture,” broadening a campaign to tighten control over business and society and enforce official morality.
President Xi Jinping has called for a “national rejuvenation,” with tighter Communist Party control of business, education, culture and religion. Companies and the public are under increasing pressure to align with its vision for a more powerful China and healthier society.
The party has reduced children’s access to online games and is trying to discourage what it sees as unhealthy attention to celebrities.
Broadcasters must “resolutely put an end to sissy men and other abnormal esthetics,” the TV regulator said, using an insulting slang term for effeminate men — “niang pao,” or literally, “girlie guns.””
“The sanctions are ostensibly in response to the poisoning last year by the Russian government of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. That was a truly horrendous crime committed by an authoritarian regime against one of the few figures who continues to rally dissidents against Vladimir Putin’s regime, even from prison.
“There’s no need to apply sanctions on Russia,” Navalny told The New York Times this week. “For now, all sanctions were tailored to avoid almost all significant participants in Putin’s gangster gang. Do you want evidence? Name one real evildoer who suffered. The airplanes, the yachts, the billions in Western banks — everything is in its place,” he added. Navalny recommends directly targeting Putin’s allies.
As Navalny’s comments suggest, restrictions on imports of firearms and ammunition are less likely to hurt well-connected Russian manufacturers, who will almost certainly find buyers elsewhere, than they are to hurt civilian consumers of those goods. Amid social fracture and loss of faith in institutions, American firearms sales are booming, the ranks of gun owners swelling, and ammunition manufacturers are struggling to meet demand. Cutting off the largest single source of imported ammunition to the United States can only reduce supply and drive ammunition prices higher.”