The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redneck

.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1567886880

Found it...


Energy Vault

https://www.greentechmedia.com/artic...ergy#gs.1qyw7e


.





>

One of about a half-dozen gravity-energy storage concepts out there.Some fertile minds out there.Thanks!

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

If you listen to financial news on the radio, you'll hear a daily report on economic growth, with dire predictions if it has slowed, and cheerful tones if growth appears to be rising.
Yet we know that endless economic growth is incompatible with life on a finite planet.
Jason Hickel's article on the promise and potential of degrowth is academic, and not easy reading, but important.
Here's a snippet:
"The core feature of degrowth economics is that it requires a progressive distribution of existing income. This inverts the usual political logic of growth. In their pursuit of improvements in human welfare, economists and policymakers often regard growth as a substitute for equality: it is politically easier to grow total income and expect that enough will trickle down to improve the lives of ordinary people than it is to distribute existing income more fairly, as this requires an attack on the interests of the dominant class. But if growth is a substitute for equality, then by the same logic equality can be a substitute for growth (Dietzand O’Neill, 2013)."
.
https://mronline.org/2019/08/30/degr...SQF1ovFN7-8-kE
.

Something new to me upon reading Zombie Economics,was that,as of March,2010, all economists were outsourcing boom and bust information from the Business Cycle Dating Committee,National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
The data comes out a minimum of a year AFTER THE FACT. If the world is in a recession,the typical economist won't know about it until the reports are issued.
In the Global Economic Crisis of December 2008,the economists didn't know that the meltdown had started in December of 2007.
I'd be wary of economic 'news' reporting.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

O'Neill sounds like he doesn't understand life at all. Inequality (of wealth) doesn't come about by a dominant class, it comes about mostly by hierarchies of competence and risk taking. Absolutely every single thing you see in nature is characterized by inequality. The large trees get larger, planets accumulate unequal amounts of mass, energy from the sun gets distributed more along the equator and less at the poles, etc...

Degrowth would be a feature of redistributing wealth gained by the most competent and giving it, without merit, to the less competent. Of course that would be political suicide. There is a very small minority of people that truly understand that full socialism and massive economic loss go hand in hand. Perhaps a few people that advocate for Bernie understand this, but most everyone else is like that O'Neill character; not understanding the most fundamental basics of the universe, of hierarchies, and of wealth.

I agree that economic growth is unsustainable, and I agree that throwing a wrench in the machine by distributing wealth regardless of merit would be very effective. My position is that we should slow growth via voluntarily stabilizing population, not by throwing out meritocracy altogether.

Evidence supports the observation that economic consensus and policymakers are responsible for economic inequality.
If you want to make America great again,you'll have to go back between 1945 and 1973.This was the 'Golden Age' of the United States.American prosperity in that period is unparalleled,either before or after.
After market liberalization killed off Bretton Woods,by 1975,the US had lost all economic gains created since 1945.
And I'd never associate wealth with competence.Historically,that would be oxymoronic.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by aerohead

In the meantime,I'd have you consider what the federal government can sell a guaranteed bond for,compared to a share of stock on Wall Street.Then I'd have you consider the difference in operating cost of two identical enterprises,one with zero advertising and zero dividends to shareholders,compared to one created through an IPO,and an imperative to channel 'profits' to someone who'll never contribute an iota of personal capital to the operation,plus run advertising on every TV station,radio station,and print medium,plus equally maintain the enterprise,minus the expenses not shared with the publicly-owned clone.

I've been critical of the stock market. A 1-time capital raise results in trade activity that persists as long as the company is still around. That is extremely inefficient, and stock brokers contribute nothing of value to society, and the trade activity creates nothing too.

I've also been critical of advertising. It isn't used to inform people anymore, but to manipulate emotions. Whenever someone is trying to manipulate emotions rather than inform, they are attempting to circumvent reason, which is an extremely effective strategy. I absolutely loathe advertising. What's the alternative though, all of us living like Spock with little personality expressed?

[sendler]

The Limits of Clean Energy
If the world isn’t careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels.

BY JASON HICKEL | SEPTEMBER 6, 2019, 8:51 AM

The conversation about climate change has been blazing ahead in recent months. Propelled by the school climate strikes and social movements like Extinction Rebellion, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are making plans—at last—for a rapid transition to clean energy under the banner of the Green New Deal.

This is a welcome shift, and we need more of it. But a new problem is beginning to emerge that warrants our attention. Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that it will pave the way to a utopia of “green growth.” Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there’s no reason we can’t keep expanding the economy forever.

This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.

The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs. We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes—but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions—and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium—an essential element in wind turbines—extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium—an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four—all for the entire period from now to 2050.

The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals—although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent.
Take silver, for instance. Mexico is home to the Peñasquito mine, one of the biggest silver mines in the world. Covering nearly 40 square miles, the operation is staggering in its scale: a sprawling open-pit complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that’s 7 miles around and as high as a 50-story skyscraper. This mine will produce 11,000 tons of silver in 10 years before its reserves, the biggest in the world, are gone.
To transition the global economy to renewables, we need to commission up to 130 more mines on the scale of Peñasquito. Just for silverLithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium. Even at present levels of extraction this is causing problems. In the Andes, where most of the world’s lithium is located, mining companies are burning through the water tables and leaving farmers with nothing to irrigate their crops. Many have had no choice but to abandon their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina, Nevada to Tibet, killing off whole freshwater ecosystems. The lithium boom has barely even started, and it’s already a crisis.
And all of this is just to power the existing global economy. Things become even more extreme when we start accounting for growth. As energy demand continues to rise, material extraction for renewables will become all the more aggressive—and the higher the growth rate, the worse it will get.
It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global south. Parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will likely become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonization. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.
If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies—buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way.
Some hope that nuclear power will help us get around these problems—and surely it needs to be part of the mix. But nuclear comes with its own constraints. For one, it takes so long to get new power plants up and running that they can play only a small role in getting us to zero emissions by midcentury. And even in the longer term, nuclear can’t be scaled beyond about 1 terawatt. Absent a miraculous technological breakthrough, the vast majority of our energy will have to come from solar and wind.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates. How might this be accomplished? Given that the majority of our energy is used to power the extraction and production of material goods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that high-income nations reduce their material throughput—legislating longer product life spans and rights to repair, banning planned obsolescence and throwaway fashion, shifting from private cars to public transportation, while scaling down socially unnecessary industries and wasteful luxury consumption like the arms trade, SUVs, and McMansions.
Reducing energy demand not only enables a faster transition to renewables, but also ensures that the transition doesn’t trigger new waves of destruction. Any Green New Deal that hopes to be socially just and ecologically coherent needs to have these principles at its heart.
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Twitter: @jasonhicke

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I've been critical of the stock market. A 1-time capital raise results in trade activity that persists as long as the company is still around. That is extremely inefficient, and stock brokers contribute nothing of value to society, and the trade activity creates nothing too.

I've also been critical of advertising. It isn't used to inform people anymore, but to manipulate emotions. Whenever someone is trying to manipulate emotions rather than inform, they are attempting to circumvent reason, which is an extremely effective strategy. I absolutely loathe advertising. What's the alternative though, all of us living like Spock with little personality expressed?

Quiggin gets into this on page-74,so I've got something to share with this.
Quiggen talks of 'narrow banking'.
*reverse the burden-of-proof with financial innovation.
*discourage it until the financial sector does the equivalent of a double-blind,randomized,placebo-controlled,clinical trial and proves the economic efficacy of the derivative or other product.They can't market it unless they prove its risk-safety to the global economy first.
*no government protection without regulation.
*no government protection for a regulated entity doing business with an unregulated business.
*explicit public guarantees for clients.
*guarantee of solvency
*nationalization as last resort.
*maintain sharp boundaries between speculators.
*no limits to laissez-faire as long as all risk is borne by the risk taker and their own capital,not by the community.
*hedge funds would be completely on their own.
*finance companies would be completely on their own.
*stockbrokers would be completely on their own.
*mutual funds would be completely on their own.
*payday loan businesses would be completely on their own.
*title loan businesses would be completely on their own.
*ownership links between a regulated parent company and an unregulated subsidiary would be absolutely prohibited.
*speculate at your own peril.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Quiggen discusses the likelihood that the U.S.A. and world is probably looking at 'mixed-
economies' as a solution.A communist-laissez-faire hybrid as you see today in Russia and China.My political science professor predicted this for the United States in 1976.
Free market capitalism hasn't worked out so well.The carnival barkers who continue to advocate for it are in on it.There is no trickle down.All it does is concentrate wealth at the top.It violates the preamble of the US Constitution.
'Everything you know is wrong!',Firesign Theatre,Dr.Demento Show,KMET Radio,Los Angeles,California,1973.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

The Limits of Clean Energy
If the world isn’t careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels.

BY JASON HICKEL | SEPTEMBER 6, 2019, 8:51 AM

The conversation about climate change has been blazing ahead in recent months. Propelled by the school climate strikes and social movements like Extinction Rebellion, a number of governments have declared a climate emergency, and progressive political parties are making plans—at last—for a rapid transition to clean energy under the banner of the Green New Deal.

This is a welcome shift, and we need more of it. But a new problem is beginning to emerge that warrants our attention. Some proponents of the Green New Deal seem to believe that it will pave the way to a utopia of “green growth.” Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there’s no reason we can’t keep expanding the economy forever.

This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.

The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs. We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes—but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions—and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium—an essential element in wind turbines—extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium—an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four—all for the entire period from now to 2050.

The problem here is not that we’re going to run out of key minerals—although that may indeed become a concern. The real issue is that this will exacerbate an already existing crisis of overextraction. Mining has become one of the biggest single drivers of deforestation, ecosystem collapse, and biodiversity loss around the world. Ecologists estimate that even at present rates of global material use, we are overshooting sustainable levels by 82 percent.
Take silver, for instance. Mexico is home to the Peñasquito mine, one of the biggest silver mines in the world. Covering nearly 40 square miles, the operation is staggering in its scale: a sprawling open-pit complex ripped into the mountains, flanked by two waste dumps each a mile long, and a tailings dam full of toxic sludge held back by a wall that’s 7 miles around and as high as a 50-story skyscraper. This mine will produce 11,000 tons of silver in 10 years before its reserves, the biggest in the world, are gone.
To transition the global economy to renewables, we need to commission up to 130 more mines on the scale of Peñasquito. Just for silverLithium is another ecological disaster. It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium. Even at present levels of extraction this is causing problems. In the Andes, where most of the world’s lithium is located, mining companies are burning through the water tables and leaving farmers with nothing to irrigate their crops. Many have had no choice but to abandon their land altogether. Meanwhile, chemical leaks from lithium mines have poisoned rivers from Chile to Argentina, Nevada to Tibet, killing off whole freshwater ecosystems. The lithium boom has barely even started, and it’s already a crisis.
And all of this is just to power the existing global economy. Things become even more extreme when we start accounting for growth. As energy demand continues to rise, material extraction for renewables will become all the more aggressive—and the higher the growth rate, the worse it will get.
It’s important to keep in mind that most of the key materials for the energy transition are located in the global south. Parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will likely become the target of a new scramble for resources, and some countries may become victims of new forms of colonization. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with the hunt for gold and silver from South America. In the 19th century, it was land for cotton and sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In the 20th century, it was diamonds from South Africa, cobalt from Congo, and oil from the Middle East. It’s not difficult to imagine that the scramble for renewables might become similarly violent.
If we don’t take precautions, clean energy firms could become as destructive as fossil fuel companies—buying off politicians, trashing ecosystems, lobbying against environmental regulations, even assassinating community leaders who stand in their way.
Some hope that nuclear power will help us get around these problems—and surely it needs to be part of the mix. But nuclear comes with its own constraints. For one, it takes so long to get new power plants up and running that they can play only a small role in getting us to zero emissions by midcentury. And even in the longer term, nuclear can’t be scaled beyond about 1 terawatt. Absent a miraculous technological breakthrough, the vast majority of our energy will have to come from solar and wind.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates. How might this be accomplished? Given that the majority of our energy is used to power the extraction and production of material goods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that high-income nations reduce their material throughput—legislating longer product life spans and rights to repair, banning planned obsolescence and throwaway fashion, shifting from private cars to public transportation, while scaling down socially unnecessary industries and wasteful luxury consumption like the arms trade, SUVs, and McMansions.
Reducing energy demand not only enables a faster transition to renewables, but also ensures that the transition doesn’t trigger new waves of destruction. Any Green New Deal that hopes to be socially just and ecologically coherent needs to have these principles at its heart.
Jason Hickel is an anthropologist, author, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Twitter: @jasonhicke

Jason is revealing the impoverishment of his intellect.He could be the poster child for Donald Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.
He doesn't even know the conditionality of everything he reports.There are caveats galore.Perhaps he's a young person, unacquainted with history.
It get sick and tired of reading these perspicacity-devoid arguments.He probably actually thinks he's helping but I doubt that he is,only keeping alive extinct notions about energy, technology,and government power.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Quiggin gets into this on page-74,so I've got something to share with this.
Quiggen talks of 'narrow banking'.
*reverse the burden-of-proof with financial innovation.
*discourage it until the financial sector does the equivalent of a double-blind,randomized,placebo-controlled,clinical trial and proves the economic efficacy of the derivative or other product.They can't market it unless they prove its risk-safety to the global economy first.
*no government protection without regulation.
*no government protection for a regulated entity doing business with an unregulated business.
*explicit public guarantees for clients.
*guarantee of solvency
*nationalization as last resort.
*maintain sharp boundaries between speculators.
*no limits to laissez-faire as long as all risk is borne by the risk taker and their own capital,not by the community.
*hedge funds would be completely on their own.
*finance companies would be completely on their own.
*stockbrokers would be completely on their own.
*mutual funds would be completely on their own.
*payday loan businesses would be completely on their own.
*title loan businesses would be completely on their own.
*ownership links between a regulated parent company and an unregulated subsidiary would be absolutely prohibited.
*speculate at your own peril.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Quiggen discusses the likelihood that the U.S.A. and world is probably looking at 'mixed-
economies' as a solution.A communist-laissez-faire hybrid as you see today in Russia and China.My political science professor predicted this for the United States in 1976.
Free market capitalism hasn't worked out so well.The carnival barkers who continue to advocate for it are in on it.There is no trickle down.All it does is concentrate wealth at the top.It violates the preamble of the US Constitution.
'Everything you know is wrong!',Firesign Theatre,Dr.Demento Show,KMET Radio,Los Angeles,California,1973.

Most of that seems reasonable to me. As I've maintained, I'm not Libertarian because "what do you care if I pee in my side of the pool" mentality doesn't address the tragedy of the commons. The pee might be diffuse all the way at the other end of the pool, and not of much consequence, but when everyone in the pool has that mentality it becomes a problem.

I completely agree that risk takers are due both the rewards of taking the risk, and the catastrophe of failure. BTW- my position on this is consistent weather we're talking about businesses or individuals. That said, I'll voluntarily help a neighbor in need if it indeed is help to them.

The fair criticism of economics is that much of it assumes perfectly rational decisions, but we know that people aren't rational. Freakonomics addresses this. Even though economics assumes rational exchanges despite that not representing reality, the principles still have predictive power, especially the fundamentals such as supply and demand.

Anyhow, I bring up the irrationality of people because that is reason enough to set boundaries and regulations on business. These regulations need to be as minimal as possible and show a net benefit to society. Requiring certification to braid hair doesn't serve the public interest. I'm skeptical of all certifications because they haven't shown to be effective at protecting people.

The higher up the government chain you go, the less effective it becomes. Government needs to be as local as possible, because it needs to be nimble to address the local problems. Only things like protection of the commons (environment) and protection from foreign enemies and securing the border are appropriate for top levels of government. Even then, the boundaries should be made as wide as possible. Instead of dictating the size, shape and fuel of a vehicle, set the limit for the thing we're trying to reduce and let the market determine how they will solve that problem.

Originally Posted by aerohead

Jason is revealing the impoverishment of his intellect.He could be the poster child for Donald Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns.
He doesn't even know the conditionality of everything he reports.There are caveats galore.Perhaps he's a young person, unacquainted with history.
It get sick and tired of reading these perspicacity-devoid arguments.He probably actually thinks he's helping but I doubt that he is,only keeping alive extinct notions about energy, technology,and government power.

The whole piece seemed coherent to me, if it may be off on the specifics of the problem. The argument wasn't that we do nothing, rather that we be realistic about what we're talking about doing. To do something requires evaluation of the cost and benefit, otherwise the probability of successfully solving a problem is near zero, or introduces new problems that weren't properly considered in the first place.

[freebeard]

The Limits of Clean Energy

A planetary society poops the bed.

A modest investment in molten salt Thorium technology could result in unlimited resources. Because it can pass through the launch window in a dormant state.

Once out of the dominion of the central banks, growth can be exponential. With resources raining back down into the gravity well.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Most of that seems reasonable to me. As I've maintained, I'm not Libertarian because "what do you care if I pee in my side of the pool" mentality doesn't address the tragedy of the commons. The pee might be diffuse all the way at the other end of the pool, and not of much consequence, but when everyone in the pool has that mentality it becomes a problem.

I completely agree that risk takers are due both the rewards of taking the risk, and the catastrophe of failure. BTW- my position on this is consistent weather we're talking about businesses or individuals. That said, I'll voluntarily help a neighbor in need if it indeed is help to them.

The fair criticism of economics is that much of it assumes perfectly rational decisions, but we know that people aren't rational. Freakonomics addresses this. Even though economics assumes rational exchanges despite that not representing reality, the principles still have predictive power, especially the fundamentals such as supply and demand.

Anyhow, I bring up the irrationality of people because that is reason enough to set boundaries and regulations on business. These regulations need to be as minimal as possible and show a net benefit to society. Requiring certification to braid hair doesn't serve the public interest. I'm skeptical of all certifications because they haven't shown to be effective at protecting people.

The higher up the government chain you go, the less effective it becomes. Government needs to be as local as possible, because it needs to be nimble to address the local problems. Only things like protection of the commons (environment) and protection from foreign enemies and securing the border are appropriate for top levels of government. Even then, the boundaries should be made as wide as possible. Instead of dictating the size, shape and fuel of a vehicle, set the limit for the thing we're trying to reduce and let the market determine how they will solve that problem.



The whole piece seemed coherent to me, if it may be off on the specifics of the problem. The argument wasn't that we do nothing, rather that we be realistic about what we're talking about doing. To do something requires evaluation of the cost and benefit, otherwise the probability of successfully solving a problem is near zero, or introduces new problems that weren't properly considered in the first place.

In Quiggen's discussion on the 'Efficient Market Hypothesis' he gets into Louis Bachelier's 'random walk hypothesis which is embedded within the EMH,which assumes that market participants are rational,of which there is no evidence.
There's quite a bit about investor psychology mentioned,like the 'martingale' betting strategy,where trader will chase losses until bankrupt when they ought to have immediately cut their loss an run.
Psychologist,Daniel Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics for his 'behavioral economics' and 'behavioral finance' research..............heuristics.
Richard Thaler has also studied investor psychology....hyperbolic discounting.
Infinite contingency paradox....asymmetric information.... models of bounded rationality.
As far as certifications go,they may be like building codes.When I helped a friend build his house back in '86,we were giving the inspector a light-hearted bad time and he explained that everything in the codes were a consequence of loss of life,one way or another.
As to the long article about resolving the energy/climate issue,a better-read journalist would have known the degree of intensity a society can go to,if they resolve to expedite solutions.In times of crisis,the 'economics' of the situation aren't even on the radar screen.When your kid is rattlesnake bit,you're not going to delay treatment over the emergency room's $60,000 fee.
As far as 'Big Government' goes,consider that your digital computer was developed by the publicly-funded military.(Colosus /ENIAC)
The internet was a DARPA, military/global university sector project.
The first web-browser,MOSAIC, was created at the publicly-funded,National Center for Supercomputing Applications,and became what you know as 'Netscape'. The reason you have highways,safe drinking water,waste treatment,airports,harbors,levees,dams,electrical power,safe food,safe drugs,clean air and water,etc. is because of Big Government.And like Adam Smith said,the only reason a rich man (and his security team) can sleep soundly at night is because he's got a powerful government watching his back.
The rascists,biggots,homophobes,sexists and anti-semites in my family were chagrined to learn that it was a homosexual at Bletchley House,who cracked Hitler's ENIGMA Code,helping to accelerate the end of WW-II,and their cell-phone operates on a system designed by a female Jew.