Pipoca

This kind of accounting is about generating clicks, ultimately.

We know the actual fixes for this.

Cap and trade fixed acid rain. Pigouvian taxes like a carbon tax work. Even a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend where you split the taxed money evenly among everyone works; it literally pays people to not pollute.

The Green New Deal is a fix.

Novel accounting schemes that generate headlines like this are explicitly not a fix because literally all they do is generate bad publicity for billionaires and ad revenue for the paper. There's nothing real here.

According to the EPA,

The primary sources of greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector in the United States are:

Transportation (28% of 2021 greenhouse gas emissions) – The transportation sector generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation primarily come from burning fossil fuel for our cars, trucks, ships, trains, and planes.

And

The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%). In terms of the overall trend, from 1990 to 2021, total transportation emissions have increased due, in large part, to increased demand for travel. The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by light-duty motor vehicles (passenger cars and light-duty trucks) increased by 45% from 1990 to 2021, as a result of a confluence of factors including population growth, economic growth, urban sprawl, and periods of low fuel prices. Between 1990 and 2004, average fuel economy among new vehicles sold annually declined, as sales of light-duty trucks increased.

In the US, cars and the car-centric sprawl it encourages is absolutely the largest single contributor to carbon emissions.

There's a reason that the per capita emissions of the Netherlands are literally half of what they are in the states. It's the cars.

Is it an unreasonable position that if the IRA launched an attack from a school, then a counterattack is justified even though it would have killed Irish kids, but that unprovoked attacks against Irish civilians would be unjustified?

"They don't think it be like it is, but it do" is originally a quote from a Yankees player, Oscar Gamble, about Yankees management in 1975.

It's a sensible, grammatical construction in his native dialect, but is well remembered mostly because it isn't very sensible in SAE.

That's different, in that its grammatical in a dialect but not in Standard American English.

In particular, it's using the 'habitual be'. It's saying something like "people don't think it always is like it currently is, but it's always like this."

I don't really think it's better. They're fine for coding.

They're basically the corporate default because they're easier for companies to buy and remotely administer, they've got good VPN software, good resale value, etc.

Sure. In terms of directly produced emissions, most billionaires emit somewhere between 100-1000 times as much as the average American.

Which, yeah, isn't all that equitable. But there just aren't that many billionaires, and there's hundreds of millions of average Americans.

It's not like wealth, where the richest 735 billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest 166 million Americans.

Twelve of the world’s wealthiest billionaires produce more greenhouse gas emissions from their yachts, private jets, mansions and financial investments than the annual energy emissions of 2m homes, ...

“Billionaires generate obscene amounts of carbon pollution with their yachts and private jets – but this is dwarfed by the pollution caused by their investments,” said Oxfam International’s inequality policy adviser Alex Maitland.

“Through the corporations they own, billionaires emit a million times more carbon than the average person. They tend to favour investments in heavily polluting industries, like fossil fuels. ...

The carbon footprints of the investments were calculated by examining the equity stakes that the billionaires held in companies. Estimates of the carbon impact of their holdings was calculated using the company’s declarations on scope 1 emissions – direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company – and scope 2, indirect emissions.

Most of that isn't their direct expenses, but from the businesses they own. Their actual travel and direct expenses are a small fraction of the emissions stated in that:

A superyacht kept on permanent standby generates about 7,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, according to the analysis.

“The emissions of the superyachts are way above anything else,”

The average carbon footprint in the US is 16 tons. 7000/16 = 437.5. The emissions of these billionaires is mostly not private jets and super yachts, and the emissions from super yachts and private jets are a very small percentage of the US's total transportation emissions.

In the US, 7% of transportation emissions are commercial air travel, while 58% are passenger cars.

Flying is worse per-trip than driving, but car centric infrastructure is worse than flying.

Similarly, what you eat is way more important than how far it traveled. Most agricultural emissions happen at the farm.

It's actually better for the environment to grow tomatoes in Florida or Mexico and ship them to NYC in the fall or winter than to grow tomatoes locally in a heated greenhouse.

The article basically amounts to "12 billionaires own a bunch of gas company stock".

My point is that

1. The article is pulling a fast one to make it sound like the private jets and yachts are the problem if you don't actually read the article carefully.

And

2. The solution to the problem of emissions from oil sold by oil companies is the same regardless of if the oil company owned by a billionaire, the Saudi king, a communist government or if they're a worker owned co-op. It's the same if it's 1 big company, or 100 smaller oil companies. The problem is pumping and burning oil, not who profits from it.

Billionaires are a problem, but they're not really the problem here. If you threw these 12 billionaires into a gulag tomorrow and sold their yachts and private jets as scrap, the emissions identified here would be barely impacted.

Because, again, the article is dressing up the problem of oil companies as being the problem with billionaires.

Which is a bigger problem, emissions-wise:

1. The private jets of all 12 billionaires on that list

Or

2. China National Petroleum Corporation

It's because Colorado water law is based on 'prior appropriations'.

Colorado was settled around mining and ranching, both of which can be water-intensive. It's also a fairly dry place. Water rights have been serious business for a long time.

So the rule was that the first person there had the right to start using river water for their mine. Then, if a second person starts a mine upstream, they had the right to use river water only inasmuch as it didn't impact the prior downstream mine. If there was a drought, the upstream mine had to use less water so the earlier mine wasn't impacted. Rain barrels were prohibited because that water "belonged" to some downstream rights holder, just as using the water from a stream might be prohibited because it belongs to a downstream rights holder.

This isn't really late-stage capitalism. The law in Colorado goes back to some court cases in the 1870s and 1880s.