6 ms·

>coal is the enemy of the human race What a spoiled, Western-centric, historically ignorant point of view. Without coal mining in England, there would have bee

by zeteo 14y ago

>coal is the enemy of the human race What a spoiled, Western-centric, historically ignorant point of view. Without coal mining in England, there would have been no steam engine, no railways, and no modern economy. Preaching to the Chinese about the evilness of coal is a classic case of pulling up the ladder after you've climbed on it.

jbooth 14y ago
True about England, false about the ladder. We can do better with a combination of renewables and nuclear, and the Chinese would be better off for it as well (depending on how much you like the smell of sulfur).
- protomyth 14y ago
  Not at the cost they are paying. A coal plant is an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, and storage of wind energy isn't exactly a solved problem compared to coal / gas. Every third world country will use the exact path the 1st world used to get to where we are because it is proven reliable, doesn't cause political turmoil (nuclear), and is cheap to implement. If the 1st world wants it to be different then we have to provide the game changing technology. That has not been done.
  - geebee 14y ago
    "Every third world country will use the exact path the 1st world used" Really? They'll do this without the internet? without anesthesia? without antibiotics? or will they re-invent these things themselves? No, of course they won't take the same path. There are far better paths.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      I was talking about energy and China seems to think there aren't better paths.
      - geebee 14y ago
        I understand you were talking about energy. My point is that an argument that boils down to "you did this in the past, so I get to do it now" loses its consistency if the person (or country) making it is so clearly willing to benefit from the fact that they are not industrializing in the 1800s. Clearly they don't plan to do everything the same way England did in the 1800s. China is industrializing in an era when we have technologies that can increase survival rates and extend lifetimes dramatically, when we have greater awareness of the negative externalities of dirty fossil fuel technology, and we have far greater options for generating energy. This leads to a different set of obligations and opportunities. I don't think that the "west", or the US in particular, has come close to meeting those obligations. But that's a different issue. My point here is a more narrow one - if you're going to pick and choose which technologies you're going to use, the claim that you get to do this the 1800s way loses almost all its moral force. Instead, this is "if it benefits us to do things the old way, we will remind you that you did it this way and insist that we get to do it that way too. If it benefits us to do things the new way, hey, we're a modern country, why on earth should we be shacked to the crappy old way you used to do things"
        protomyth 14y ago
        "you did this in the past, so I get to do it now" No, it boils down to "I did it this way and nothing has come along to replace this way". There is no energy revolution at scale, reliability, and continuous 24x7 (through the night / in the calm) production. "China is industrializing in an era when we have technologies that can increase survival rates and extend lifetimes dramatically, when we have greater awareness of the negative externalities of dirty fossil fuel technology, and we have far greater options for generating energy. This leads to a different set of obligations and opportunities." Yet, they still use coal to an excess. It is simple economics. Nuclear has been demonized, and coal is cheap, easy, and well understood. The 1800's way is the 1900's way is the 2000's way. Coal and oil are still the way. Until someone beats coal and oil on all features, it won't change. It is that way in a lot of human activities.
        jbooth 14y ago
  - kaybe 14y ago
    Which is why I'm heavily in favour of German subsity of renewable energy, even if we end up paying more for electricity and our companies are broke because China copied the technologies. (I'm from Germany, so yes, I'm paying.) Just count it as foreign aid, and a good way to get everyone to do what you want. (Could be done better, but it's the best way there is, IMHO.)
epistasis 14y ago
I disagree on both counts. Just because something is an enemy now doesn't mean it always has been; the scale of coal use is the problem, and early industrial levels happening today would have far less detrimental effect. Second, coal is not the desirable thing of modernization: energy is, and energy is available through many means. China seems to be very fond of solar, for example. Also the Chinese pay the externalities just as we all do; and if you've visited China your aware that they see perhaps more pollution than the rest of the world. I have no doubt that these externalities made visible will influence the nation to take them realistically, which we in the western world are not.
- zeteo 14y ago
  >energy is available through many means Even a wealthy economy like the US still draws almost half of its electricity from coal [1]. If Americans couldn't afford to switch to solar already, how are the Chinese supposed to? >the Chinese pay the externalities just as we all do And so did the US. The first (very weak) Clean Air Act was not passed until 1963 [2], at which point the economy was already very energy intensive, very wealthy, and could afford to take an economic hit by implementing more stringent environmental regulations. The holier-than-thou crowd expects China to hobble itself with environmental regulations in advance of the US, while developing an economy that is still decades behind. All this preaching is of course done from countries that have gone through centuries of unrestricted industrial development, and while taking full advantage of the benefits thereof. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)
  - epistasis 14y ago
    Your implicit argument seems to be that not using coal is just too expensive in some sense. The question is not yes/ no to coal, but rather how much coal. This is a numerical argument, that the free market would solve automatically if the price of coal were nearer to its cost.
    - deleted 14y ago
Retric 14y ago
England had coal so that's what they used, but there where other options. For example England has plenty of hydro power capacity to easily meet the needs of the early industrial revolution. Perhaps offsetting with some wind power in remote areas. Electric railways are slightly more infrastructure, but no more difficult than a steam engine. Considering the amount of disease related to coal mining and burning I don't think it's clear they would have been worse off. The real issue was home cooking / heating, but they did use gas streetlamps demonstrating natural gas may have been a viable alternative if England lacked coal reserves. The real issue would have been ships, but considering how much coal was used for home heating that's a tiny fraction of overall demand.
- zeteo 14y ago
  > England has plenty of hydro power capacity to easily meet the needs of the early industrial revolution The English begged to differ. The early Industrial Revolution was powered by water [1], but they switched to coal as soon as they could. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill#Water_.281770.E2.80.931800.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill#Water_.281770.E2.80...
  - Retric 14y ago
    Clearly, England had coal AND found it more useful in large part because they did not pay for external costs. However, if hypothetically they did not have coal they would not have simply given up. Which is what your suggesting by saying the industrial revolution required coal. The fundamental principles of electricity generation were discovered during the 1820s and early 1830s by the British scientist Michael Faraday. His basic method is still used today: electricity is generated by the movement of a loop of wire, or disc of copper between the poles of a magnet.[1] So the time period was not quite consistent. But, they where also still using hydro power in the industrial revolution 1760-1840 and could have kept going at a larger scale after switching to electrical power. PS: Without electricity or large scale dam's coal is ridiculously easier to use in a city, however most factory's use electricity not coal today for a reason.
    - 14y ago
rayiner 14y ago
Nobody ever seems to realize how un-economic arguments like these are. Say there had been a coal tax from day 1 in England that internalize the external costs of coal. Saying the market wouldn't have still gone through the industrial revolution is tantamount to saying that industrial society is not economically efficient! Because that's exactly what things like coal taxes do--let the market manage the externality to allow an efficient equilibrium to be reached.
- epistasis 14y ago
  Exactly, he externality argument is about economic efficiency, and does not value environmentalism at all. It's about discovering the dollar cost that a single entity is extracting from others property. Many environmentalists hate it because of that; it's an argument that inherently trusts in free markets, instead of environmental purity.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    A lot of environmentalists hate it not because of the trust in the markets per se, but because they see policy makers tend to discount the economic value of the environment. If you show that something is causing $100m in externalized costs, even if the government acts to mitigate it might only shift $20m in costs (because "jobs"). Which is un-economic, of course.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- gwern 14y ago
  Why can't there be multiple equilibria?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    There are multiple equilibria, the question is whether they are efficient. Whether or not you internalize the environmental costs of say coal power, the economy will reach an equillibrium. If the negative externalities of coal are not internalized, that equillibrium will involve a higher than efficient level of coal usage.
mattacular 14y ago
Glad you have such prognosticative insight as to extrapolate entire histories out based on the changing of a single variable.
geebee 14y ago
There are often situations where people benefit from doing something that is later revealed to be very destructive. It's important to recognize advantages that may have arisen from that first mover position, and make sure that later legislation doesn't lock in that advantage. I get it. And the US in particular has fallen far short of this standard, and is in no position to preach. However, my big problem with the US is that we want to deny someone else a ladder while we're still climbing on it, not because we did in the past. However, this argument has limits. Clearly China doesn't intend to limit themselves to the technologies that existed when the best way to get from London to San Francisco was by coal powered ship and train. Will they also use asbestos insulation? Will they perform surgeries without anesthesia? Will they treat infections with primitive or no antibiotics? Fortunately, China's leaders are scientists and engineers, and I don't believe for a second that they are unaware of the environmental catastrophe that could result from a stupid energy policy. When they have a drought, they won't lead their state in a prayer for rain. China's leadership is well aware that the survival of their nation depends on getting to clean energy first - and that this may in fact be the best way to become the dominant power of the next century. I think the whole "you used coal in 1850, so now we get to" is more a point of argument to get the west to make concessions (which is a reasonable demand) rather than something they'd actually do.
- rollo_tommasi 14y ago
  The technical education of China's unaccountable governing elite has not prevented them from causing the greatest environmental catastrophe in living memory, nor does it guarantee that they will be at all motivated to clean up the mess. China's leaders may be engineers, but they are also an unaccountable elite whose primary goal is and continues to be their own aggrandizement and enrichment. Who do you think causes environmental damage in the US? Populist governors leading prayer meetings or the technical and economic elites who actually build, own, and operate polluting entities? Mock the U.S. political system all you like, but it contains mechanisms that allowed popular pressure to produce a tremendous environmental turnaround and a raft of effective environmental legislation. That China's political system will do the same is by no means guaranteed.
  - 14y ago
MaysonL 14y ago
Have you taken a look at the air in Beijing lately? It's killing a lot of Chinese. Slowly, yeah, but definitely killing them.

by zeteo 14y ago

jbooth 14y ago

True about England, false about the ladder. We can do better with a combination of renewables and nuclear, and the Chinese would be better off for it as well (depending on how much you like the smell of sulfur).

protomyth 14y ago
Not at the cost they are paying. A coal plant is an order of magnitude cheaper than nuclear, and storage of wind energy isn't exactly a solved problem compared to coal / gas. Every third world country will use the exact path the 1st world used to get to where we are because it is proven reliable, doesn't cause political turmoil (nuclear), and is cheap to implement. If the 1st world wants it to be different then we have to provide the game changing technology. That has not been done.
- geebee 14y ago
  "Every third world country will use the exact path the 1st world used" Really? They'll do this without the internet? without anesthesia? without antibiotics? or will they re-invent these things themselves? No, of course they won't take the same path. There are far better paths.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I was talking about energy and China seems to think there aren't better paths.
    - geebee 14y ago
      I understand you were talking about energy. My point is that an argument that boils down to "you did this in the past, so I get to do it now" loses its consistency if the person (or country) making it is so clearly willing to benefit from the fact that they are not industrializing in the 1800s. Clearly they don't plan to do everything the same way England did in the 1800s. China is industrializing in an era when we have technologies that can increase survival rates and extend lifetimes dramatically, when we have greater awareness of the negative externalities of dirty fossil fuel technology, and we have far greater options for generating energy. This leads to a different set of obligations and opportunities. I don't think that the "west", or the US in particular, has come close to meeting those obligations. But that's a different issue. My point here is a more narrow one - if you're going to pick and choose which technologies you're going to use, the claim that you get to do this the 1800s way loses almost all its moral force. Instead, this is "if it benefits us to do things the old way, we will remind you that you did it this way and insist that we get to do it that way too. If it benefits us to do things the new way, hey, we're a modern country, why on earth should we be shacked to the crappy old way you used to do things"
      - protomyth 14y ago
        "you did this in the past, so I get to do it now" No, it boils down to "I did it this way and nothing has come along to replace this way". There is no energy revolution at scale, reliability, and continuous 24x7 (through the night / in the calm) production. "China is industrializing in an era when we have technologies that can increase survival rates and extend lifetimes dramatically, when we have greater awareness of the negative externalities of dirty fossil fuel technology, and we have far greater options for generating energy. This leads to a different set of obligations and opportunities." Yet, they still use coal to an excess. It is simple economics. Nuclear has been demonized, and coal is cheap, easy, and well understood. The 1800's way is the 1900's way is the 2000's way. Coal and oil are still the way. Until someone beats coal and oil on all features, it won't change. It is that way in a lot of human activities.
        jbooth 14y ago
- kaybe 14y ago
  Which is why I'm heavily in favour of German subsity of renewable energy, even if we end up paying more for electricity and our companies are broke because China copied the technologies. (I'm from Germany, so yes, I'm paying.) Just count it as foreign aid, and a good way to get everyone to do what you want. (Could be done better, but it's the best way there is, IMHO.)

epistasis 14y ago

I disagree on both counts. Just because something is an enemy now doesn't mean it always has been; the scale of coal use is the problem, and early industrial levels happening today would have far less detrimental effect. Second, coal is not the desirable thing of modernization: energy is, and energy is available through many means. China seems to be very fond of solar, for example. Also the Chinese pay the externalities just as we all do; and if you've visited China your aware that they see perhaps more pollution than the rest of the world. I have no doubt that these externalities made visible will influence the nation to take them realistically, which we in the western world are not.

zeteo 14y ago
>energy is available through many means Even a wealthy economy like the US still draws almost half of its electricity from coal [1]. If Americans couldn't afford to switch to solar already, how are the Chinese supposed to? >the Chinese pay the externalities just as we all do And so did the US. The first (very weak) Clean Air Act was not passed until 1963 [2], at which point the economy was already very energy intensive, very wealthy, and could afford to take an economic hit by implementing more stringent environmental regulations. The holier-than-thou crowd expects China to hobble itself with environmental regulations in advance of the US, while developing an economy that is still decades behind. All this preaching is of course done from countries that have gone through centuries of unrestricted industrial development, and while taking full advantage of the benefits thereof. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_power_in_the_United_States [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Act_(United_States)
- epistasis 14y ago
  Your implicit argument seems to be that not using coal is just too expensive in some sense. The question is not yes/ no to coal, but rather how much coal. This is a numerical argument, that the free market would solve automatically if the price of coal were nearer to its cost.
  - deleted 14y ago

Retric 14y ago

England had coal so that's what they used, but there where other options. For example England has plenty of hydro power capacity to easily meet the needs of the early industrial revolution. Perhaps offsetting with some wind power in remote areas. Electric railways are slightly more infrastructure, but no more difficult than a steam engine. Considering the amount of disease related to coal mining and burning I don't think it's clear they would have been worse off. The real issue was home cooking / heating, but they did use gas streetlamps demonstrating natural gas may have been a viable alternative if England lacked coal reserves. The real issue would have been ships, but considering how much coal was used for home heating that's a tiny fraction of overall demand.

zeteo 14y ago
> England has plenty of hydro power capacity to easily meet the needs of the early industrial revolution The English begged to differ. The early Industrial Revolution was powered by water [1], but they switched to coal as soon as they could. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill#Water_.281770.E2.80.931800.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_mill#Water_.281770.E2.80...
- Retric 14y ago
  Clearly, England had coal AND found it more useful in large part because they did not pay for external costs. However, if hypothetically they did not have coal they would not have simply given up. Which is what your suggesting by saying the industrial revolution required coal. The fundamental principles of electricity generation were discovered during the 1820s and early 1830s by the British scientist Michael Faraday. His basic method is still used today: electricity is generated by the movement of a loop of wire, or disc of copper between the poles of a magnet.[1] So the time period was not quite consistent. But, they where also still using hydro power in the industrial revolution 1760-1840 and could have kept going at a larger scale after switching to electrical power. PS: Without electricity or large scale dam's coal is ridiculously easier to use in a city, however most factory's use electricity not coal today for a reason.
  - 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago

Nobody ever seems to realize how un-economic arguments like these are. Say there had been a coal tax from day 1 in England that internalize the external costs of coal. Saying the market wouldn't have still gone through the industrial revolution is tantamount to saying that industrial society is not economically efficient! Because that's exactly what things like coal taxes do--let the market manage the externality to allow an efficient equilibrium to be reached.

epistasis 14y ago
Exactly, he externality argument is about economic efficiency, and does not value environmentalism at all. It's about discovering the dollar cost that a single entity is extracting from others property. Many environmentalists hate it because of that; it's an argument that inherently trusts in free markets, instead of environmental purity.
- rayiner 14y ago
  A lot of environmentalists hate it not because of the trust in the markets per se, but because they see policy makers tend to discount the economic value of the environment. If you show that something is causing $100m in externalized costs, even if the government acts to mitigate it might only shift $20m in costs (because "jobs"). Which is un-economic, of course.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
gwern 14y ago
Why can't there be multiple equilibria?
- rayiner 14y ago
  There are multiple equilibria, the question is whether they are efficient. Whether or not you internalize the environmental costs of say coal power, the economy will reach an equillibrium. If the negative externalities of coal are not internalized, that equillibrium will involve a higher than efficient level of coal usage.

mattacular 14y ago

Glad you have such prognosticative insight as to extrapolate entire histories out based on the changing of a single variable.

geebee 14y ago

There are often situations where people benefit from doing something that is later revealed to be very destructive. It's important to recognize advantages that may have arisen from that first mover position, and make sure that later legislation doesn't lock in that advantage. I get it. And the US in particular has fallen far short of this standard, and is in no position to preach. However, my big problem with the US is that we want to deny someone else a ladder while we're still climbing on it, not because we did in the past. However, this argument has limits. Clearly China doesn't intend to limit themselves to the technologies that existed when the best way to get from London to San Francisco was by coal powered ship and train. Will they also use asbestos insulation? Will they perform surgeries without anesthesia? Will they treat infections with primitive or no antibiotics? Fortunately, China's leaders are scientists and engineers, and I don't believe for a second that they are unaware of the environmental catastrophe that could result from a stupid energy policy. When they have a drought, they won't lead their state in a prayer for rain. China's leadership is well aware that the survival of their nation depends on getting to clean energy first - and that this may in fact be the best way to become the dominant power of the next century. I think the whole "you used coal in 1850, so now we get to" is more a point of argument to get the west to make concessions (which is a reasonable demand) rather than something they'd actually do.

rollo_tommasi 14y ago
The technical education of China's unaccountable governing elite has not prevented them from causing the greatest environmental catastrophe in living memory, nor does it guarantee that they will be at all motivated to clean up the mess. China's leaders may be engineers, but they are also an unaccountable elite whose primary goal is and continues to be their own aggrandizement and enrichment. Who do you think causes environmental damage in the US? Populist governors leading prayer meetings or the technical and economic elites who actually build, own, and operate polluting entities? Mock the U.S. political system all you like, but it contains mechanisms that allowed popular pressure to produce a tremendous environmental turnaround and a raft of effective environmental legislation. That China's political system will do the same is by no means guaranteed.
- 14y ago

MaysonL 14y ago

Have you taken a look at the air in Beijing lately? It's killing a lot of Chinese. Slowly, yeah, but definitely killing them.