Noeoelectric Cars

Yeah, nah! maybe a big “no” to electric cars?

Not so fast.

Sabine Hossenfelder was vlogging about her change of opinion on electric vehicles. She prefers Hybrids now. You are welcome to watch the whole episode , but today all I wanted to do was to address the “enormous costs” scare-mongering.

Noeoelectric

Not a typo. It’s a word blende I’m inventing, something like a mix of “no electic”, “neo-electric” and “noosphere” (the latter a Teilhard de Chardin concept for collective growing up y’all).

((Also, I prefer “word blende” to “word blend”, the latter reminds me too much of the, “But will it blend?” guy, who is too freakin’ hilarious. A hidden comedic talent of, “how come your channel doesn’t have a million subscribers,” worthiness.))

Hossenfelder does the same hysteria when speaking about big physics. Not that she is wrong entirely, the real resource cost is fairly large, but she over-dramatizes,, because she focuses, like a good little neoliberal, on the monetary costs. The real resource costs for a Superconducting Supercollider would not be all that much, pretty insignificant, and certainly not an inflation risk. More to the point, not a starvation risk. An SSC is not going to put farmers or builders out of business.

So I made my comments:

@0:48 one thing you neoliberals need to understand (and change your mind about “obviously”) is that the monetary cost is irrelevant for a currency issuing monopoly (government, or in the EMU case the ECB). The cost for governments is always and only in real terms. Every state mandated project must take real resources out of the private sector to employ them in the public sector. A nation faces two choices: (1) either wait interminably long for the private sector to provide for-profit green transport, or (2) make it a public priority. If (2) then it can be done easily provided the real resources are available. It would not be a question of finding the money. Governments create the currency, by computer entries. The problem here is purely political. Neoliberals do not accept the reality of state currency operations, they believe in the “private market” as a “wealth creator”. (True in real terms, false in currency terms.)
      Of course “obviously” a third possibility is available. (3) Government can always provide the financial incentives to private industry to produce the environmentally friendly transport systems. Why? Because as I said, they have no problem issuing the currency, it’s literally scorepoints on a ledger (aka. tax credits). And how? Either by contracting or subsidy. The idea here would be to have decent oversight, so there is no free corporate welfare or cronyism. The subsidies, or contracts, need to be for public purpose, not private profit. The private owner of the contracted companies should be held accountable to the public, and use of Limited Liability legislation has to have a quid pro quo: which is a democratic workplace for any company seeking government contracts or subsidies.
      Neoliberal/libertarian governments will never do any of this. We gotta get rid of them somehow.

Another comment was necessary:

@2:30 this is madness. You have not done the research Sabine, or are parroting macroeconomic ignorance. The private sector cannot create currency. It’d be illegal (counterfeit). (They could spend what they hoarded, but good luck getting the capitalists to release their hoards of bank scorepoints for public purpose.) Banks can issue credit which can circulate for a while, but in all nations outside the EMU the government is the sole source of fresh currency, and by keystrokes. No tax-payer is needed. Tax payments are a redemption operation, driving demand for the currency, not a funding operation.
      The private sector can supply the needed real resources — workers primarily, and whatever equipment the corporates own, they can always be contracted for public purpose use, at a fair price, hence no inflation. If they ask a higher price the government can choose to tax them — but not the “get the money” rather to release the real resources. (That’s the purpose of a tax, to move real resources from the private sector into the public sector.) The government immediately issues the currency that is needed to pay the tax once the corporation is willing to put Its resources to use for public purpose. That’s called the state hiring the unemployed resources it just created by imposing the tax, eliminating the unemployment It generated.

Eliminating Bullsh$\ast$t Jobs

People will often complain about how idealistic youth are desire a “greener” economy. A typical reaction might be, “You can’t just have free range chickens,big farming must grow the food or millions starve, so just be realistic.”

“Be realistic”. Fine words. But all too often I worry they conceal total lack of imagination. In such cases it really is heterological. (Chickens is just one of many examples.) Bullsh$\ast$t jobs are both another example, and the general case for a solution.

People (I mean neoliberals) might, for instance, complain: Well, we cannot just eliminate bullsh$\ast$t jobs, what else would people do?"

The answer is, raise free range chickens of course!

There is no end of good things people can do which are not getting done. There are about 40% of wasted human lives living in bullsh$\ast$t jobs who could be doing those good things, and another 20% of people who are able to work can willing who cannot find employment. You do the math.

How can we eliminate all unemployment and all bullsh$\ast$t jobs? Fill up an infinitesimal fraction of the endless list of jobs people could be doig which are not getting done.

Hilbert the Roosters Hotel. (Is what I am calling it.)

Wrecking the Power Grid?

One argument against mass conversion to electric vehicles is the disruption to power grids. This is probably a fair enough worry.

But what about mass public transport, with dedicated power, so not “on the grid”? Am I mad, or do neoliberals profoundly lack imagination?

I think they lack imagination by design, since their whole shtick is to allow the free market to sort it out, where “it” is basically any problem. Including getting votes in parliament I presume.😂

Having said that, we are electricity constrained, so any such share of electric power generation for public transport has to be capacity we build. It’ll likely not work logistically or politically to sequester existing power utility output for mass public transport.

The IEA estimate is the electric grid (in a nation) needs to expand about 25% faster in the next decade than it did in the previous decade. Hossenfelder scare-mongers about this being diabolically hard to impossible. But any MMT understanding would say it could be easy. If the problem is not insufficient real resources, then it is not an economic nor monetary problem, it is a political problem.

What if you en masse in your country just don’t like public transport? For you Lithuanians, private electric transition the estimate is that the USA and Europe would need to double investment to upgrade the grid to allow private electric vehicle infrastructure. Probably the same for Lithuanian then. But… oh no, what tax payers will want to fund this? 🤣

Maybe the real resources for 25% extension of the electric grid are insufficient at present for a 10 year extension, but we do have the resources. the problem is the rate of build. If that is the real constraint, then “obviously” governments will need to apply other measures, like rationing existing electricity, or employing alternative public transport systems in a transition period. Burn more fossil to eliminate fossil.

That is to say, eliminate oil for transport. We cannot eliminate oil for vital chemical industries… without going a little bit luddite. Not that I’m opposed to a bit of luddite return to “nature”, I just cannot muster up extremist alarmism about it. Sorry. Why not? Because I do not think it is necessary.

Here I am firmly in the Warren Mosler camp of environmentalism. We can easily reduce and cut-back on non-essentials, without giving up Netflix, golf and hamburgers. There are sooo many bullsh$\ast$t job workers no one needs, and so much consumer crap no one seriously needs. We need to learn to give up such wasteful banalities. I do not think it requires extreme luddite tendency. From the Mosler camp, we’d use the COVID pandemic lock-downs as illustrative. It cleared the pollution, in a matter of weeks, in major cities. No one died as a result of that, and the lesson is, we can have consumer lock-downs by volunteer, provided government employs people in non-bullsh$\ast$t work for public good purpose. Such jobs do not have to be higher energy consuming. This is what normies and neoliberals just do not understand. Libertarians are worse, they think lock-downs are evil. They’d be right if the purpose was to cause mass unemployment. So we should not make this the purpose.

((NB: I’d have to consider myself a normie if I had not bothered to understand MMT. Being a mathematical physicist is not a ticket out of normiehood. ))

Employing people for public good purpose is of course not a lock-down. What to call the policy? I do not have a fancy phrase. But the idea is to give workers a simple choice. Just publish the data showing the industries that are the major polluters, and those which produce non-essentials. Then give the workers the choice to quit their jobs, and work instead for the public purpose. Give people the choice.

Just think about it at least, you politicians. Maybe fast-food will survive? Cooking up hamburgers and fries is energy intensive, but we have to eat to survive, and a fast-food join with scale can produce more burgers with less overall energy than a household, probably. The massive energy wasters are elsewhere, I am almost certain. Server farms doing nothing but advertising. Tax attorneys trying to defeat the tax code. Server farms grinding out useless computations for driving crypto(non)currency. The proliferation of wild west artificial neural net scams and data mining for-profit and scamming. Lot;s of low hanging rotten fruit we can cull, terrwatts of bullsh$\ast$t work.

I don’t think cattle farmers are the evil guys.

Back to the question of using real resources for sustainable energy generation transition…

Sadly too, I think this is a political issue, not a real resource constraint. Politicians cannot lift a finger to vote for mass electrified public transport until the greater majority of the public are content to ditch their private transport vehicles. Almost makes one wish for a benevolent Authoritarian overlord ! 🤣

Democracy is Pain to 11

On that latter point. One might be moved to be half-serious. I’m not one of them. It’s worth the pain. Just my opinion.

You could argue millions fewer would die under a benign authoritarian rule, but the trouble is I just think benevolent authoritarianism is psychologically impossible. People with that much power are corrupt.

To be non-corrupt, “the people” have to grant monopoly power to a body, and have the power to remove that power, preferably not invested in one person either. But then that looks a lot like a democracy, and all the hurt that comes with it.

If we could engineer a benevolent overlord, then I might say, reluctantly, “ok, fine, you got me.” I just think it’s not possible, so why waste the effort to try such political engineering? I can see it doing a lot of harm in the effort, because it invites zealotry. You know that never works out well, the Zionist project was such a thing. Like South African Apartheid, both engineered social systems. Both backed by the idea one type of people, defined by birth, knows best.

It is not that benevolent authoritarianism is pain less than 9, but that in attempting to engineer such a social system the pain would go to 22. With no guarantee of dropping back to 9. Just my guess. God help us in not having to live it to prove me right.