To what extent is the decline of Europe's Green parties in the recent EP elections a result of Europeans beginning to see through what I'd call the "Green-Left lie" -- namely the notion that environmentally-meaningful degrowth would be possible only at the expense of "the rich".
This of course isn't the case, because while multi-millionaires may live highly profligate lifestyles, their consumption of physical resources is far less (as a multiple of what ordinary people would use) than their paper net worth is, and certainly doesn't compensate for their minuscule share of the total population. Millionaire wealth is overwhelmingly just _claims_ on other people's economic activity, or "fictitious capital" in Marx-speak.
The only way environmentally-meaningful degrowth would be possible only at the expense of "the rich" is if you define "the rich" so broadly that it encompasses a huge chunk (perhaps a majority) of the developed world's population.
Perhaps one reason why the far right in particular has benefited is that Europeans sense that Greens are asking them to sacrifice on the global South's behalf, and the far right would argue that the global South (especially Africa and the Middle East) is the author of its own misfortune by failing to restrain its population growth. Plus the far right explicitly defends fossil-fuelled lifestyles, consistent with their being backed by the Russian petrostate.
(Which makes it ironic that Jem Bendell further down in the thread you screenshotted basically argues that Europe should let Russia just take what it wants, even if he dresses it up in calls for "ceasefire" and "negotiated peace".)
I’m surprised at your comment on the European Parliament elections. The far right did make some gains, but very minor ones. The centre right and centre left will again dominate the EP, with a big majority, which is contrary to much of the public narrative on this election.
In terms of climate change, degrowth, and politics it is similar to the political inclination to use other peoples money. Progressvie or socialist politicians pretending that the cost for more government largesse can be born by the wealthy. Perhaps by evil industries. Evil banks, evil pharmaceutical companies, evil cattle or pig farmers.....Biden has gone on a rant blaming corporations as the ones causing inflation to provide a recent example. It is just bad politics, stupid even.
I remember when Brexit was being voted on, one of reasons Brits were so unhappy because the European Parliament,for the cause of CO2 reduction, had mandated the size of electric tea pots. Thus making many British Tea Pots not proper as they were too large.
Climate activists have said for years, that energy should cost more. No, energy should actually cost less.
Again it is a issue of communications and policy. The less well off shouldn't need to pay higher energy costs . Corporations are not evil, and making the British use smaller electric tea pots will not save the planet from a rise in tempurature. The Greens have been stupid.
Americans in general do not like being forced to do anything. We are an independent people. Both on the left and the right. Currently the policy for EV’s is bifurcated. One the one hand the Biden Administration is buying EV’s purchases through some subsidies. While discouraging ICE’s by increasing the fleet mileage requirements to 50 MPG. CA along with some other States is forcing EV’s on the public by making ICE’s illegal to sell a few years from now.
What has happened is that the issue is now a partisan issue. MAGA and Trump anti EV and Democrats and the climate activists on the other. This issue has run smack dab into market issues as well. Currently, at least as a few weeks ago, 7 charging stations have been built with IRA infrastructure money. I said when the bill was passed that it will be at least a decade before 500,000 charging stations could be built.
How did I know this? I had a client who needed to build out a parking lot extension for a vehicle storage lot. The original time frame was 6 mos and $200,000. It was completed year and half later, for $650,000. This was an extension of an existing parking lot in a city. Between the permiting process, complying with the required environmental studies, all the different entities involved is was a mess.
No doubt, charginig stations will run up against NIMBY issues, permitting issues, the inevitable Native American burial ground, water table issues and many other issues this will take a very long time.
America as of a few years ago has roughly 275 million registered cars and trucks on the road. EV’s may well be the dominant vehicles sold eventually, but it isn’t in a few years and it won’t be with a average selling price of $55,000 and no system of charging stations.
Re EV charging stations, I wonder if there's an assumption that suburbanites will be charging mainly at home, while residents of dense cities (where it is more economically viable to provide good mass transit) shouldn't really be owning a car at all?
"Climate activists have said for years, that energy should cost more. No, energy should actually cost less."
The more reasonable statement would be that _pollution_ should cost more, and thus energy should cost more to the extent that it comes from polluting sources.
But you're right that some activists want to reduce energy consumption as a goal in its own right, like Amory Lovins who said "if you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other."
Indeed, Amory Lovins's hostility to energy abundance itself probably goes a big way to explain his opposition to nuclear power, but the biggest problem with nuclear is currently its ruinously high costs resulting from the LNT-regulatory-industrial-complex.
Why has the service costs come down? I doubt it's innovation. I would have expected it to go up since there was a net outflow of migration to Mexico since the late 2000s. Did America defeat the Boumol effect?
I don’t know about all services but student hours at universities seems to have fallen a lot. This is probably demographic so it may be an outlier but as baby boomers age they may use a range of services less (obviously this excludes health care).
I first encountered degrowth 5-7 years ago and assumed it was a fringe, illogical ideology. As a descendant of immigrants there is no way that ANYONE is going to make me feel guilty for my quality of life. The energy and resources aren't being transfered to those in need. Andy revkin, Roger pielke, Steve koonin should had a talk that discussed planetary boundaries. I found a lot of deep rooted Christian guilt in it all. Not everything is racism, or colonialism. It's a stupid paradigm. I hate the term global South, but people in these countries also have the personal responsibility to effect change. The moment I stop thinking that way I stop seeing them as equals with agency.
If people want to live tribally hunter gatherer, or subsistence, let them. If they don't help them.find alternatives as fellow travelers on the same planet.
Hospitals are growth and progress.
Free access to education is growth and progress,
Women's rights are growth and progress.
Reality is not a social construct. Try taking a course in quantum mechanics and sell that shit.
Yes, of course it matters. When a student gets fin aid, that does not necessarily mean that someone else pays for that aid. The school doesn't need to collect the exact advertised tuition for every student. It's just a made-up number. Schools think its better to advertise a high tuition (it's such a valuable product!) and then tell students they got a special reward.
The flaw in your reasoning is you conflate advertised tuition with the school's "cost" of educating one student. The data shows quite clearly that tuition has increased faster than cost and much of the difference is unfunded aid.
How much of the relative decline in European real GDP per capita reflects a relative decline in real hourly wages (or real GDP per hour of labor input), and how much is a demographic effect from Europe aging faster than the US and having more retirees per worker?
I guess you could argue that Europe's aging population is also an issue of "degrowth" since it partly reflects more restrictive immigration policies than America's. But I think most people would consider that a different problem from actual degrowth (stagnant or falling labor productivity) and the policy solutions would be very different.
"They must think we don’t know how to read a chart."
IDK who you mean by "they" and "we", but I'd say moist Americans cannot, in fact, read a chart. A fair number of them could not identify Canada on a map.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host. Granted. But degrowth for the sake of degrowth is the ideology of getting us permanently stuck in a bad place and still end up destroying the Earth, albeit done a little bit slower and in somewhat better taste. It's basically "flatten the curve" writ large.
I wonder if there's a connection between the fact that Sweden was one of the few EU countries where the Green vote held up, and that Sweden was one of the few European countries which never had a Covid lockdown?
Worth pointing out that one reason for Spaniards to stint on olive oil is because climate change is *making olive oil much scarcer.* The bread-and-butter vs. climate change issue is a false dichotomy. Do people suddenly not pay for air conditioning?
While it’s true that climate change will absolutely affect things like where crops grow, the reality that no one seems to want to admit in Europe is that Europe will have very little impact on the trajectory of climate change for the 21st century. That rests on the emissions of China, India and the United States. So the question becomes should Europe make itself poorer to try to combat climate change when it will have probably very little effect? I’d say no.
What you should do is invest in ways to make itself more climate resilient, and take advantage of changing seasonal patterns. that might mean you don’t grow as much olives in Spain, but you grow them in Poland.
Europe’s massive investments in subsidizing renewable technologies had an enormous effect on pushing that tech into production. They definitely punched above their weight class, even if a lot of the actual impact will end up in China (but it’s a global atmosphere, so that’s fine.) And there’s certainly more technology to invent.
That would be a possible explanation of the price of olive oil was going up significantly faster than other food prices. What's happening here is that the price of all food is going up faster than wages.
The first article I posted is literally specifically about climate-related olive oil scarcity from notorious left-wing rag (*checks notes*)….the Wall Street Journal.
It can be depressing to have to point out time and again that rent controls, and minimum wages, and non-strategic tariffs are high-cost ways of transferring income to renters, low wage employees, and workers in "protected industries. But is must be done.
Perhaps more depressing is that the need seems to be greater today than in, say, the Clinton Administration.
Maybe econ departments should offer an "Econ for Activists/Journalists" course that would specifically address Pigou taxation for externalities, cost benefit analysis for regulations, Tinbergen (# policies => # objectives, Lerner (import restrictions = export taxes), etc.
Tariffs directed specifically at imports of specific "strategic" goods from China are first best policy. Last time I checked the US maintains tariffs on a number of other items and the Biden administration has in fact increased some of them (lumber from Canada, for example). Those tariffs do not encourage the industrialization of the non-hostile countries.
Noah is obsessed with "imminent" wars with China and Russia. Maybe there's a chance he's right to be obsessed? Or maybe you are right that he's "bonkers." But it is something he frequently writes about or otherwise mentions (as in this case) in what are otherwise non-related thought bubble topics.
“Just bonkers” sounds like a person who hasn’t been paying attention to Eastern Europe. Multiple European countries have assessed that it’s quite likely that Russia will attempt some sort of military confrontation within the next decade. You can disagree with the assessment, but I think the countries that border Russia and survived Russian imperialism before probably know something.
To what extent is the decline of Europe's Green parties in the recent EP elections a result of Europeans beginning to see through what I'd call the "Green-Left lie" -- namely the notion that environmentally-meaningful degrowth would be possible only at the expense of "the rich".
This of course isn't the case, because while multi-millionaires may live highly profligate lifestyles, their consumption of physical resources is far less (as a multiple of what ordinary people would use) than their paper net worth is, and certainly doesn't compensate for their minuscule share of the total population. Millionaire wealth is overwhelmingly just _claims_ on other people's economic activity, or "fictitious capital" in Marx-speak.
The only way environmentally-meaningful degrowth would be possible only at the expense of "the rich" is if you define "the rich" so broadly that it encompasses a huge chunk (perhaps a majority) of the developed world's population.
Perhaps one reason why the far right in particular has benefited is that Europeans sense that Greens are asking them to sacrifice on the global South's behalf, and the far right would argue that the global South (especially Africa and the Middle East) is the author of its own misfortune by failing to restrain its population growth. Plus the far right explicitly defends fossil-fuelled lifestyles, consistent with their being backed by the Russian petrostate.
(Which makes it ironic that Jem Bendell further down in the thread you screenshotted basically argues that Europe should let Russia just take what it wants, even if he dresses it up in calls for "ceasefire" and "negotiated peace".)
Indeed. And sometimes they even say the quiet part out loud!
Who says which quiet part out loud?
The degrowthers, when they define "the rich" very broadly.
I’m surprised at your comment on the European Parliament elections. The far right did make some gains, but very minor ones. The centre right and centre left will again dominate the EP, with a big majority, which is contrary to much of the public narrative on this election.
The Centre does hold, at least in Europe!
In terms of climate change, degrowth, and politics it is similar to the political inclination to use other peoples money. Progressvie or socialist politicians pretending that the cost for more government largesse can be born by the wealthy. Perhaps by evil industries. Evil banks, evil pharmaceutical companies, evil cattle or pig farmers.....Biden has gone on a rant blaming corporations as the ones causing inflation to provide a recent example. It is just bad politics, stupid even.
I remember when Brexit was being voted on, one of reasons Brits were so unhappy because the European Parliament,for the cause of CO2 reduction, had mandated the size of electric tea pots. Thus making many British Tea Pots not proper as they were too large.
Climate activists have said for years, that energy should cost more. No, energy should actually cost less.
Again it is a issue of communications and policy. The less well off shouldn't need to pay higher energy costs . Corporations are not evil, and making the British use smaller electric tea pots will not save the planet from a rise in tempurature. The Greens have been stupid.
Americans in general do not like being forced to do anything. We are an independent people. Both on the left and the right. Currently the policy for EV’s is bifurcated. One the one hand the Biden Administration is buying EV’s purchases through some subsidies. While discouraging ICE’s by increasing the fleet mileage requirements to 50 MPG. CA along with some other States is forcing EV’s on the public by making ICE’s illegal to sell a few years from now.
What has happened is that the issue is now a partisan issue. MAGA and Trump anti EV and Democrats and the climate activists on the other. This issue has run smack dab into market issues as well. Currently, at least as a few weeks ago, 7 charging stations have been built with IRA infrastructure money. I said when the bill was passed that it will be at least a decade before 500,000 charging stations could be built.
How did I know this? I had a client who needed to build out a parking lot extension for a vehicle storage lot. The original time frame was 6 mos and $200,000. It was completed year and half later, for $650,000. This was an extension of an existing parking lot in a city. Between the permiting process, complying with the required environmental studies, all the different entities involved is was a mess.
No doubt, charginig stations will run up against NIMBY issues, permitting issues, the inevitable Native American burial ground, water table issues and many other issues this will take a very long time.
America as of a few years ago has roughly 275 million registered cars and trucks on the road. EV’s may well be the dominant vehicles sold eventually, but it isn’t in a few years and it won’t be with a average selling price of $55,000 and no system of charging stations.
Re EV charging stations, I wonder if there's an assumption that suburbanites will be charging mainly at home, while residents of dense cities (where it is more economically viable to provide good mass transit) shouldn't really be owning a car at all?
"Climate activists have said for years, that energy should cost more. No, energy should actually cost less."
The more reasonable statement would be that _pollution_ should cost more, and thus energy should cost more to the extent that it comes from polluting sources.
But you're right that some activists want to reduce energy consumption as a goal in its own right, like Amory Lovins who said "if you ask me, it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won’t give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other."
Fission!
Indeed, Amory Lovins's hostility to energy abundance itself probably goes a big way to explain his opposition to nuclear power, but the biggest problem with nuclear is currently its ruinously high costs resulting from the LNT-regulatory-industrial-complex.
I believe I read it takes 10 years just for the approval. How do you manage those cost increases.
Personally, I always make 40m look much higher than 175m. LOL that FT chart should be against the law.
Why has the service costs come down? I doubt it's innovation. I would have expected it to go up since there was a net outflow of migration to Mexico since the late 2000s. Did America defeat the Boumol effect?
I think eventually Americans just ran out of willingness/ability to pay.
Has their consumption of the services actually come down?
I don’t know about all services but student hours at universities seems to have fallen a lot. This is probably demographic so it may be an outlier but as baby boomers age they may use a range of services less (obviously this excludes health care).
I first encountered degrowth 5-7 years ago and assumed it was a fringe, illogical ideology. As a descendant of immigrants there is no way that ANYONE is going to make me feel guilty for my quality of life. The energy and resources aren't being transfered to those in need. Andy revkin, Roger pielke, Steve koonin should had a talk that discussed planetary boundaries. I found a lot of deep rooted Christian guilt in it all. Not everything is racism, or colonialism. It's a stupid paradigm. I hate the term global South, but people in these countries also have the personal responsibility to effect change. The moment I stop thinking that way I stop seeing them as equals with agency.
If people want to live tribally hunter gatherer, or subsistence, let them. If they don't help them.find alternatives as fellow travelers on the same planet.
Hospitals are growth and progress.
Free access to education is growth and progress,
Women's rights are growth and progress.
Reality is not a social construct. Try taking a course in quantum mechanics and sell that shit.
Obligatory Niels Bohr quote: "Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."
That 2 Y-axis chart is confusing and seems created to tell a certain story.
Does the financial aid aspect matter in a societal context? You're changing who pays the overpriced bills.
Yes, of course it matters. When a student gets fin aid, that does not necessarily mean that someone else pays for that aid. The school doesn't need to collect the exact advertised tuition for every student. It's just a made-up number. Schools think its better to advertise a high tuition (it's such a valuable product!) and then tell students they got a special reward.
The flaw in your reasoning is you conflate advertised tuition with the school's "cost" of educating one student. The data shows quite clearly that tuition has increased faster than cost and much of the difference is unfunded aid.
Please write something about what Europe should do to start growing again.
How much of the relative decline in European real GDP per capita reflects a relative decline in real hourly wages (or real GDP per hour of labor input), and how much is a demographic effect from Europe aging faster than the US and having more retirees per worker?
I guess you could argue that Europe's aging population is also an issue of "degrowth" since it partly reflects more restrictive immigration policies than America's. But I think most people would consider that a different problem from actual degrowth (stagnant or falling labor productivity) and the policy solutions would be very different.
"They must think we don’t know how to read a chart."
IDK who you mean by "they" and "we", but I'd say moist Americans cannot, in fact, read a chart. A fair number of them could not identify Canada on a map.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host. Granted. But degrowth for the sake of degrowth is the ideology of getting us permanently stuck in a bad place and still end up destroying the Earth, albeit done a little bit slower and in somewhat better taste. It's basically "flatten the curve" writ large.
Growth for the sake of growth is also the ideology of kittens. That's why we have to desex and euthanise them.
I don't quite understand where bad analogies are supposed to get us here.
I wonder if there's a connection between the fact that Sweden was one of the few EU countries where the Green vote held up, and that Sweden was one of the few European countries which never had a Covid lockdown?
Interesting observation
Worth pointing out that one reason for Spaniards to stint on olive oil is because climate change is *making olive oil much scarcer.* The bread-and-butter vs. climate change issue is a false dichotomy. Do people suddenly not pay for air conditioning?
https://www.wsj.com/world/climate-change-is-coming-for-the-finer-things-in-life-6d7efeaa
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/hotter-summers-kill-thousands-in-a-europe-with-scant-air-conditioning-9c8ab5d8?mod=article_inline
While it’s true that climate change will absolutely affect things like where crops grow, the reality that no one seems to want to admit in Europe is that Europe will have very little impact on the trajectory of climate change for the 21st century. That rests on the emissions of China, India and the United States. So the question becomes should Europe make itself poorer to try to combat climate change when it will have probably very little effect? I’d say no.
What you should do is invest in ways to make itself more climate resilient, and take advantage of changing seasonal patterns. that might mean you don’t grow as much olives in Spain, but you grow them in Poland.
Europe’s massive investments in subsidizing renewable technologies had an enormous effect on pushing that tech into production. They definitely punched above their weight class, even if a lot of the actual impact will end up in China (but it’s a global atmosphere, so that’s fine.) And there’s certainly more technology to invent.
They should continue to double down on it and use it as an industrial policy to reinvest in their countries!
That would be a possible explanation of the price of olive oil was going up significantly faster than other food prices. What's happening here is that the price of all food is going up faster than wages.
The first article I posted is literally specifically about climate-related olive oil scarcity from notorious left-wing rag (*checks notes*)….the Wall Street Journal.
It can be depressing to have to point out time and again that rent controls, and minimum wages, and non-strategic tariffs are high-cost ways of transferring income to renters, low wage employees, and workers in "protected industries. But is must be done.
Perhaps more depressing is that the need seems to be greater today than in, say, the Clinton Administration.
Maybe econ departments should offer an "Econ for Activists/Journalists" course that would specifically address Pigou taxation for externalities, cost benefit analysis for regulations, Tinbergen (# policies => # objectives, Lerner (import restrictions = export taxes), etc.
Tariffs directed specifically at imports of specific "strategic" goods from China are first best policy. Last time I checked the US maintains tariffs on a number of other items and the Biden administration has in fact increased some of them (lumber from Canada, for example). Those tariffs do not encourage the industrialization of the non-hostile countries.
The comment about an an imminent invasion of Europe made me doubt the author's sanity.
'And this is not only making Europeans poorer, it’s making the region much more vulnerable to the imminent threat of a China-backed Russian invasion.'
Just bonkers.
Noah is obsessed with "imminent" wars with China and Russia. Maybe there's a chance he's right to be obsessed? Or maybe you are right that he's "bonkers." But it is something he frequently writes about or otherwise mentions (as in this case) in what are otherwise non-related thought bubble topics.
“Just bonkers” sounds like a person who hasn’t been paying attention to Eastern Europe. Multiple European countries have assessed that it’s quite likely that Russia will attempt some sort of military confrontation within the next decade. You can disagree with the assessment, but I think the countries that border Russia and survived Russian imperialism before probably know something.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-preparing-military-confrontation-with-west-says-estonia-2024-02-13/