Posts Tagged ‘carbon tax’
Good Morning, It’s Monday Morning Links
* Paradoxa has put up Mark Bould’s introduction to issue 25, on “Africa SF.” My article on Octavia Butler’s Patternist series is in this one.
* “Sharing economy” companies like Uber shift risk from corporations to workers, weaken labor protections, and drive down wages. Against Sharing.
* Run the university like an insane person’s idea of a spa.
At Auburn University in Alabama, for example, students can soak in a 45-person paw-print-shaped hot tub or scale a 20-foot wet climbing wall before plunging into the pool. Designs for North Dakota State’s facility, on which construction is scheduled to begin next year, include a zip line that students can ride out over the water, a 36-foot-diameter vortex of swirling water and a recessed fireplace on an island in the middle of the pool that students can swim up to. A small “rain garden” is planned to mist lounging students.
* Meanwhile: The ruins of the latest horrible trend in academic misspending.
* Colleges’ Pursuit of Prestige and Revenue Is Hurting Low-Income Students. Why Neoliberal Labor Practices Harm Working Students. Professors on food stamps: The shocking true story of academia in 2014. edutech woowoo, now and forever.
* Marc Bousquet remembers when #altac was a trap.
First, statistic plucked from academic journal where the writer didn’t pay to pass the paywall. Also, a biased survey from a company with countless vested interests. It’s official: the above trend is slightly more common than you thought.
* How to Tell if You’re in a MFA Workshop Story. How to Tell If You Are In an Indie Coming-of-Age Movie.
* 9 college freshmen dead in alcohol-related incidents in first weeks of new school year.
* Better Teachers Receive Worse Student Evaluations.
* King Richard III was probably hacked and stabbed to death in battle, according to a new study.
* What the 17th Century Can Teach Us About Vaginas.
* The second Harmoncountry tour will come through Chicago. November 1.
* When superheroes fight cancer.
* Where are animals in the history of sexuality?
* Neoliberal Mothering and Vaccine Refusal.
* From what you have heard, was the shooting of an African-American teen by law enforcement in Ferguson, Missouri justified? 55% say yes.
* And everyone is mad at Adam for making what seems to me to be the most obviously true observation about protest marches: they don’t work.
Wednesday Night Links
* Breaking Bad aficionados will enjoy Bryan Cranston’s recent appearances on the Nerdist and WTF with Marc Meron, the latter of which has the (new-to-me) tidbit that Jesse was slotted to be killed off in the first few episodes; he was saved from death by the awesomeness of Aaron Paul.
* Wisconsin wants to mess with the Electoral College, too. You’ll be shocked to learn the Koch brothers are involved.
* So the U.S. government doesn’t actually have “hard evidence” Iran tried to murder the Saudi ambassador. I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.
* TPM and @fivethirtyeight (1, 2, 3) have been talking today about the fact that Romney (while unquestionably “inevitable”) has clearly hit his support ceiling in the Republican primary. The Anti-Romney has shifted through several alternatives, but the support never settles on Romney; it just keeps casting about for some new savior, Bachmann, Perry, Christie, and currently Herman Cain. It’s just more fodder for my “Draft Jeb” conspiracy theory…
* Beka Economopolis on Occupy Wall Street: We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable. Yes, perhaps, split the support, lest we not be co-opted. This will be painful, internally, as it won’t always achieve comfortable consensus. But to hold this space and expand the realm of possibility, we have to go farther than others are ready to go.
* Matt Taibbi on Occupy Wall Street.
* The Big Picture blog on Occupy Everywhere.
* Kevin Drum and Paul Waldman on the GOP’s astounding Medicare reality distortion field.
1. Health care in general, and Medicare in particular, are bankrupting our country.
2. But government should never try to figure out which treatments are effective.
3. Medicare should pay for any treatment anyone wants, regardless of whether it works or what it costs.
4. If an insurance company refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s their right as actors in the free market; if Medicare refuses to pay for a procedure, that’s Washington bureaucrats trying to kill you.
5. We need to cut Medicare benefits, because don’t forget it’s bankrupting our country.
* The fiends! In an effort to promote healthful eating and, it has been suggested, to protect traditional Gallic cuisine, the French government has banned school and college cafeterias nationwide from offering ketchup with any food but — of all things — French fries.
* Australia has passed a carbon tax.
* Imagine there’s no peanut butter.
* And Polling Shows North Carolina Faces Uphill Battle To Defeat Anti-Gay Marriage Amendment. Honestly, how are we even still arguing about this?
Cheat Codes Won’t Save Your Soul and Other Tuesday Night Links
* Via Vu, Buzzflash has the 50 best protest signs of 2009.
* When I first heard about Sketchy Santas, I too was skeptical. But I think you’ll agree the results speak for themselves.
* zunguzungu on the UC crisis.
…the scandal of the administration’s conduct is not the fact that they’re cutting services while raising fees, at least not in and of itself. In bad economic times, some kind of response is necessary. The scandal is that Mark Yudof and the regents are using the crisis of the moment to push forward a plan to privatize the UC system that has long been in the works and is geared to be permanent. And they are doing it by assuming “emergency powers” which allow them to arbitrarily overturn the precedents and policy that would otherwise explicitly prevent them from doing so, everything from caps on the amount that student fees can be raised to the contracts they’ve signed with university employees to the “Master Plan” for higher education that the state of California established fifty years ago. So if we want to talk about “Sacramento,” then let’s do so. But we need, then, to talk about two things: first, how the Republicans that run California through the governor’s mansion have been trying to privatize the state’s public education for a very long time, and, second, how the regents and Mark Yudof have been using the rhetoric of “crisis” to push that agenda through, bit by bit and step by step, replacing the UC’s traditional system of shared governance with a system of top-down corporate management.
* Yet another health care compromise shot down by Senate moderates. (UPDATE: Maybe not?)
* North Carolina’s constitution is clear: politicians who deny the existence of God are barred from holding office. Via MeFi.
* Ze v. The War in Afghanistan.
* Fox News v. basic math. More here.
* Over the past decade, oil giant Exxon Mobil has paid millions to organizations and “think tanks” in an attempt to deceive the public about the science behind global climate change. It’s no surprise that those very same organizations are now doing everything in their power to please their benefactor by drawing attention to the so-called “Climategate” scandal involving hacked emails from the University of East Anglia in England.
* Today at the Infrastructurist: How Can the U.S. End Its Oil Dependence for Good?
* Why Republicans Stopped Believing in Climate Change: “The growing skepticism among Republicans, with no matching shift among Democrats, suggests that the changes measured in this poll may be a reaction to having a Democrat in the White House rather than a shift in underlying attitudes toward global warming,” said Keating Holland, CNN polling director.
* Ted Gayer’s testimony to Congress in favor of a carbon tax. Related: Cap and Trade Won’t Work for Climate, It’s a Scam.
* Nuclear explosions since 1945. Kind of related: Maps of Jurassic Park.
Monday Links
* Financialize this: ‘Carbon trading could be worth twice that of oil in next decade.’ If only there were some other policy option…
* The headline reads, “Turkey wants universal email surveillance from birth.”
* Ezra Klein on the House of Representatives and the intent of the Founders.
* In 1969, Chairman Mao commanded the construction of a second Beijing beneath the surface of the original city… Via MeFi.
* Fredrick Engels’s Tiger-Beat-style questionnaire. Via Greenberg.
* Moustache Sexiness Timeline.
* Have I done this one before? T.S. Eliot reads “Prufrock.”
Cap and Trade
It is one thing to support something imperfect but functional. But it is another thing to support something that is imperfect, decidedly non-functional, and that has the potential for additional destruction. The problem Lohmann and other critics of carbon trading recognize isn’t merely that it’s flawed, or that it won’t work, but that it actually introduces a new and uniquely social threat to the atmosphere: the legal right to pollute it.
Via Vu, a must-read piece on why cap and trade could be worse than doing nothing at all. The only sensible neoliberal policy option remains steep carbon taxation, but despite decades of evidence about what we’re barreling towards the political will still isn’t there.
More on Waxman-Markey
Debate over the relative merits of a carbon tax versus this bill’s cap-and-trade model has mostly given way to concerns about whether the legislation, sponsored by representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), lines the pockets of polluters with little to show for it. The most it would cut carbon emissions by 2020 is 17 percent below 1990 levels, nowhere near the 25 to 40 percent reduction sought by scientists and international climate negotiators. The Sierra Club has withheld its endorsement in hopes of improving the bill before a final vote—it wants to prevent polluters from receiving tradable emissions permits for free, preserve the EPA’s authority to independently regulate carbon, and better fund energy efficiency and clean energy—but Fahn and other environmentalists are skeptical that lawmakers will listen. “From my perspective,” he says, “the prospects of strengthening it to where we’d want to support the ultimate version are growing slim.”
Mother Jones has some good coverage of the fight brewing over Waxman-Markey, including a checklist of what the bill will actually accomplish:
Cap and Trade
The Good
Ambitiously caps emissions at 68 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 by creating a market in tradable emissions permits
The Bad
By 2020, the cap will have cut emissions by only 4 percent
The Ugly
Only 15 percent of the tradable emissions permits will be auctioned off by the government; the bill hands out another 50 percent of the permits to the fossil fuel industry for free.
Kevin Drum calls this fight an example of “the circular firing squad,” but he’s wrong. It comes down to this: if the bill will make it harder to pass real carbon legislation later, then we shouldn’t pass it; if it will make it easier, we should. Or, as Harkinson puts it:
Given that almost all environmental groups agree that Waxman-Markey is far from ideal, the ultimate question is whether passing an imperfect bill now is better than holding out for a better one later. Those who advocate for an incremental approach point out that the US needs to bring something to the table in the next round of international climate talks in Copenhagen this December. On the other hand, Pica argues that improving massive bills like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act took decades, “and by that time we will have carbon-loaded the atmosphere to such a degree that it may not be worth improving anymore.”