Author Archives: Michael Hoexter

A New Demand for the US Climate Movement: One Million (Frequent) Electric Buses with Wifi plus Protected Bikeways, “Everywhere”

Posted on August 11, 2014 | 8 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The US climate movement, in which I am active, has not to date been effective enough in getting serious climate action on the agenda of government leaders, especially on the federal level. This weakness is in part shared with the international climate movement more generally, though the level of climate denial both among political elites and among the general population in the US is unmatched in the world. With that denial comes resistance to climate action, though for a variety of reasons, no actions commensurate to the climate challenge have really been attempted by governments in the world, whatever the local level of resistance offered.

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Democratizing Government Spending in an Era of Climate Change: Decision Criteria and Spending Priority Lists – Pt. 2

Posted on June 26, 2014 | 3 comments

By Michael Hoexter

General Goals and Decision Criteria for Government Fiscal Policy

In the era of climate change, a worldwide social and economic disaster, the valuation of real resources, especially atmospheric resources and energy resources must change in order for human civilization to survive.  Government fiscal policy is a critical element of that change in valuation, both on the spending and the taxation side.  In addition, in a planning role, government becoming the architect or co-architect of new energy, transportation and land use realities.  As I have written before, making atmospheric resources or the permission to use them, a tradable commodity does not adequately and properly engage our most powerful instrument in addressing climate change and adaptation to climate change, the institutions and fiscal policy of government itself.  However, government leaders are human beings with interests and varying ethical commitments to the common good of their people and humanity in general.  In order to hold them accountable in their spending and taxation decisions it will help to make a part of public political discourse those criteria by which they make spending and taxation decisions.  These public criteria can in turn be modified by political discussion as well as scientific measurement of the results of those policies, which then can either be refined or discarded depending on their outcomes.

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Democratizing Government Spending in an Era of Climate Change: Decision Criteria and Spending Priority Lists – Pt 1

Posted on June 25, 2014 | 4 comments

By Michael Hoexter

The surprise Republican primary victory of libertarian economic fantasist and teacher of economics Prof. David Brat in Virginia’s conservative 7th District has highlighted a point of agreement between the progressive left and far right/libertarians like Brat: both say they are against “crony capitalism”.  While Brat came across to voters and most of the press as a “true believer” in a religiously-tinged libertarian-style economics that decries subsidies and state involvement in industry, the actual sordid history of libertarianism is that it has functioned as an effective cover for corporate lobbying and government’s regulatory and economic support of the interests of the wealthy and large corporations, i.e. crony capitalism. “Libertarianism,” largely a politicized strain of the social philosophy called Austrian economics, was invented after WWII as a lobbying instrument for the interests of corporations like General Motors, at the time amply boosted by federal government spending during the war yet apparently wanting to, in the public eye, disassociate itself from that help after the war.

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Required: A Complete Pivot on Climate and Energy

Posted on June 9, 2014 | 5 comments

By Michael Hoexter

With the release of Obama’s much heralded EPA regulations on coal fired power plants we are encountering once again the ongoing tragedy of low expectations with regard to climate action.  While compared to other Presidents, and there have been only three in the era of pressure for climate action, Obama’s proposal that coal-fired power plants reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030 is the most ambitious climate rule to be implemented, even the relative journalistic “friend” of the Obama Administration, Ezra Klein pointed out, this is a less ambitious path to cut carbon than that proposed by the Republican McCain/Palin candidacy in 2008.   Of course, there is a difference between campaign proposals and a President setting into motion energy and climate regulations but the degree to which expectations have been lowered even in the course of 6 years (despite the appearance of obvious changes in the climate itself) is frightening.  In the best case scenario, the ruling establishes a precedent that may be reinforced in the future.

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Explaining the Conflict between Obama’s Climate Policy and Obama’s Energy Policy – Pt. 2

Posted on May 28, 2014 | Comments Off on Explaining the Conflict between Obama’s Climate Policy and Obama’s Energy Policy – Pt. 2

By  Michael Hoexter

Explanation 5: Washington Consensus Climate Policy Proposals are Politically Hard to Explain, Disproportionate to the Challenge, and Underestimate Government’s Role

The frustration with Obama of many in the established green movement revolves around the assumption that if he is serious about climate, why then, they think, doesn’t Obama simply adopt or fight for their favored policy instruments or revive a version of the 2009 Waxman-Markey bill. There is an unfortunately somewhat naive and unfounded consensus among parts of the Democratic Party and in established green groups that serious climate action involves a policy centered around something like the Kyoto Protocol cap and trade system or a carbon tax. A very large body of discourse in the established climate policy milieu contains advocacy and analysis about why the US has not become a party to the Kyoto process. Additionally, there is, confusingly for outsiders, a rift between those who favor a carbon tax/fee versus those who favor an emissions trading instrument (cap and trade). While U.S. politicians, especially the reality-challenged Republican Party, are currently shying away from any meaningful climate policy for largely the wrong reasons, climate policy is not the well-defined choice and proven path that green groups and many left-of-center Democrats would like politicians and the public to believe that it is.

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Explaining the Conflict between Obama’s Climate Policy and Obama’s Energy Policy – Pt. 1

Posted on May 27, 2014 | 8 comments

By Michael Hoexter

With the Obama Administration recently publishing a frightening report on the effects of climate change, the National Climate Assessment 2014, contradictions in Obama’s orientation on climate and energy are placed in higher relief.  As part of the publication of the NCA2014, Obama took the time to meet with regional weathermen to discuss the contents of the report.   Apparently, Obama did not think or did not want the public to think of him and his Administration as lightly skimming over the dire warnings in the report as an afterthought.

In the meantime, we have experienced a pivotal moment in the discovery of the present and future effects of climate change, with current ice melting patterns ensuring with a high degree of certainty that the West Antarctic Ice shelf will detach and deliver anywhere from 1 to 3 meters rise in sea levels over a 200 to 500 year period or perhaps sooner.  So, talk of rising seas is, to those who heed the science, given much greater weight.  No one has worked out the policy implications of this still relatively distant future event, except that adaptation to climate change in or migration from the world’s very populous low-lying areas becomes a more concrete reality.

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Sorry, Kyoto Signatories, Emissions Traders, Carbon Taxers, Homo Oeconomicus Won’t Save the Climate – Part 4

Posted on April 9, 2014 | 2 comments

By Michael Hoexter

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV]

8.  Effective Climate Policy:  A Massive Commitment of Public and Private Resources

The long list above of features of an effective climate policy may fail the requirement that some would place on documents such as these that they be short and easily absorbed from a momentary scan of the page.  Perhaps at a future date, I or someone else will produce a shorter summary of what would go into effectively transforming the energy basis of society and maintaining and developing civilization beyond its current state.  However when the scale of the challenge is taken into account as well as the stakes involved, I believe the length of the mere sketch I have produced here is warranted.

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Sorry, Kyoto Signatories, Emissions Traders, Carbon Taxers, Homo Oeconomicus Won’t Save the Climate – Part 3

Posted on April 8, 2014 | 3 comments

By Michael Hoexter

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV]

7.  Outline of An Actually-Effective Climate Policy

Actually-effective climate policy, which might be called a comprehensive climate and energy policy, then has the following components:

1)    National Carbon Mitigation Plan:  National carbon mitigation plans (reduce emissions of greenhouse gas emissions to zero or below) commissioned by individual governments that outline the high-level designs of a zero-net-carbon infrastructure for projected 2050 energy and transportation demand in a particular nation.  Such plans should assume no technological breakthroughs but deployment of existing technologies or foreseeable successor generations of these technologies.  For each nation these plans will look quite different depending on existing infrastructure, natural resources, cultural preferences, and geography.  The plan will include targets for carbon mitigation via land use changes and energy conservation.  Such climate plans should include alternative technological and land-use scenarios which would also estimate the carbon emissions required to build those various scenarios.  A scenario with the highest likelihood of success (defined below) would be chosen first with regular check-points built-in for progress as well as preparation for fall-back scenarios in case of bottlenecks closing down paths and new developments opening up new paths.  Such a plan will need to be built around durable social values, ensuring its resilience to both natural and man-made challenges and changes.  In-built into planning would be a “no-regrets” policy, if in the face of well-tested innovations, substantial changes will yield a better social and environmental outcome.  However, implementation of the plan cannot be shelved or delayed on the basis of speculative claims of improved outcomes by pursuing new and untried innovative technologies.

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Sorry, Kyoto Signatories, Emissions Traders, Carbon Taxers, Homo Oeconomicus Won’t Save the Climate – Part 2

Posted on April 7, 2014 | 3 comments

By Michael Hoexter

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV]

4.  Existing Climate Policy Is Lacking a “Drive Axle” Between Ethical Impulse and Policy Implementation

The decision in the 1990’s to turn over climate policy to market mechanisms, in particular emissions trading, was framed by supposedly “objective” economic assumptions based as outlined above on the idea that people are essentially, Homo oeconomicus, i.e. act in practice as if they do not consider, among other things, the moral dimension of life, are “utility” maximizers and are essentially divorced from their community of context or the community of all human beings more generally.  The Kyoto Protocol and its various progeny including the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU-ETS), the Northeastern US Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and California’s AB 32 cap-and-trade system, all “hand off” implementation of the intention to reduce climate change to a constructed carbon permit market, layered above the real markets for goods and services.

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Sorry, Kyoto Signatories, Emissions Traders, Carbon Taxers, Homo Oeconomicus Won’t Save the Climate – Part 1

Posted on April 6, 2014 | 25 comments

By Michael Hoexter

[Part I] [Part II] [Part III] [Part IV]

1. Introduction: Context of Existing Climate Policy

Together, as a world economic system, we are currently on an emissions trajectory to achieve anywhere from 4 to 6 degrees Celsius (7 to 11 degrees Fahrenheit) warming by 2100.  Global average temperature increases within this range mean catastrophe for humankind, with sea level rises of at least 3 meters (10 feet) and a vastly more hostile environment for human life and co-evolved species.  Humanity may be, with these emissions levels either bringing about its own extinction as the effects of the resultant warming set in or, at least, so degrading the conditions of life that very few humans will be able to survive.  We will have to reduce the currently escalating rate of increase of emissions to zero and then over a period of two to three decades reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero in order to have a chance of stabilizing the climate and not significantly endanger the welfare of future generations.

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