Connecticut, USA wants to penalize insurers for backing fossil-fuel projects
Comments
bloppe
yongjik
> It's the customers (i.e. "us") who are responsible for those emissions. And the cost is being passed on to those customers.
So, by making fossil fuel projects uninsurable, we will make fossil fuels more expensive, which will reduce consumption, and since it's ultimately we the consumers who consume those fossil fuels (and their products), it seems "fair" that we have to pay for our indulgence.
Sounds like the policy is going to work exactly as intended?
bloppe
Ya, even better. I'm all for carbon taxes actually. Just saying that fossil fuel consumption reverberates through the whole economy. You cannot blame the suppliers that much more than you can blame anybody else.
jmholla
> It's the customers (i.e. "us") who are responsible for those emissions. And the cost is being passed on to those customers. The insurance system is working just fine.
The companies don't just get a pass. Especially not if those companies aren't working to reduce emissions from their processes. And let's not even get started on situations where a company has basically cornered a market and consumers who need their products don't have a choice.
grecy
> It's the customers (i.e. "us") who are responsible for those emissions
No, you're confusing cause and effect, or putting the cart before the horse.
Yes, there are companies that sell products that produce a huge amount of pollution, and it would all stop if consumers stopped buying those products.
It would stop faster and more directly if the companies stopped making the horribly pollutant products in the first place. They have a responsibility in this, it's not OK to just hide behind "we just make stuff, it is someone else's fault they're buying it".
_aavaa_
This is not a fallacy at all.
For starters, these are not neutral sellers, "oh I guess we'll see this stuff if people want it". They induce demand, they actively work to conceal the negative externalities of the things they sell, they actively fight regulations that negatively impact them but positively impact the rest of the planet.
overstay8930
Imagine being the guy wanting to make it harder for insurance companies to do business after watching what is happening in places where it’s hard for insurance companies to do business right here in the US.
nashashmi
This would be like a rule that prevents trade with Iran Energy Sector. Except on insurance companies who do business with fossil fuel companies.
toomuchtodo
If you consider climate change an emergency, and/or the fact that fossil fuel externalities are rarely internalized (vs dumped on the collective commons), this is a reasonable policy position.
If we can’t pass a carbon tax due to lack of political will, find other points of leverage and exert force.
kcplate
> If we can’t pass a carbon tax due to lack of political will, find other points of leverage and exert force.
It’s remarkable to me how fast people are willing to resort to authoritarianism when they can’t get their way via a democratic process. Jesus, you people scare the fuck out of me.
kadoban
In what way is this not the democratic process? It's a law under consideration in a state. Is Connecticut not a democracy?
kcplate
I was referring to the comment above me.
mortify
It is the democratic process and this is why the country was founded as a republic because they saw democracy as a kind of tyranny by the majority. Even if everyone in CT voted to kill Bob in Granby, it would be illegal although it would be democratic to kill him.
kadoban
Is your point that this action is some sort of direct democratic process and thus problematic? I'm having trouble finding any other reading of what you're saying. But it isn't, this is a bill working its way through the state senate. That _is_ the republic part. It's not a ballot initiative.
neon5077
We've been trying the democratic process for almost a century. This is not fast or sudden at all.
kcplate
And if you are not able to get what you want from it, then perhaps what you want is not appropriate or desired by the people around you.
wizzwizz4
Therefore, if something is not currently a law, we should not ever try to make it a law! Georg Hegel was right: we have reached the absolute ideal free society. https://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/348
kcplate
That’s not what I said nor what I was arguing. I quoted the parent commenter in my original comment.
toomuchtodo
Interestingly, living within our carbon budget scares you, but not climate change. This is an extremely concerning position to someone like myself who believes in climate change (based on all available evidence). If you’re in your 50s, you won’t even be around when the worst of this hits. You’re ordering dinner for a table you won’t be at when it arrives.
Democracy is great when everyone is an educated, engaged, rational voter. It is not so great when significant cohorts are uneducated, ignorant, and/or vote their feelings, or worse, gerrymandering, the electoral college, and other political systems giving overweighted control to political minorities who would otherwise not have the power they have. Citizens should be entitled to representation, but not over representation (which is what holds us back currently).
kcplate
> Interestingly, living within our carbon budget scares you, but not climate change
No. What’s scares me is a bunch of people willing to resort to authoritarianism to impose their will and moralities on other people to get their way who ought to know better from literally the whole of human history. Your argument is the same tired shit I have heard for decades from various groups with an eye and agenda for control and power (evangelicals, fascists, elitists, now these leftist authoritarians) and its always the same lame excuse—“They are not educated and cannot be trusted”.
wizzwizz4
Indeed. I'm happy with the Reich's strong stance against the undesirables, and I don't see why the Allies want to impose their will and moralities on us to get their way. Likewise, the Suffragettes are just using authoritarianism to push through the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928. And I can't believe those barons are strong-arming the monarch, who near-everyone agrees should be ruling the country, into never enacting a tax without their say-so!
Your argument is too general: it 'proves' too much. The way you talk, any kind of social change is 'authoritarianism'.
kcplate
Do you really think giving examples of complacency due to fear to an authoritarian regime and a social change process that ultimately resulted in a democratic change somehow disproves my point?
I don’t want an authority that is so feared that the people are afraid to speak out against it or cannot be changed.
wizzwizz4
There were plenty of people who were die-hard in favour of the Nazis' purges (and still are). There were loads of people opposed to women's suffrage (and still are). I don't know if there were objections to Magna Carta, but if there were, I'm pretty sure complacency due to fear wouldn't have been a major factor. And sure, there was lots of support for reform, in each case… but there's currently widespread support for (the idea of) taking positive action against climate change.
Today, there are people afraid that, if they engage in climate activism, they will be evicted from their homes, denied medical treatment, and left to starve to death. Several governments are labelling people 'extremists' for blocking traffic with their (somehow) non-violent protests, and enforcing laws against them that were originally designed for terrorism.
> I don’t want an authority that is so feared that the people are afraid to speak out against it or cannot be changed.
To be clear: I agree with this. But this definition of "authoritarianism" isn't compatible with what you were originally complaining about. Every action is an imposition of will on the universe: imposition of will is neither the main problem with, nor the characteristic feature of, authoritarianism.
kcplate
> Today, there are people afraid that, if they engage in climate activism, they will be evicted from their homes, denied medical treatment, and left to starve to death.
Where are these people? If they are in the US, their fears are completely unfounded and frankly ridiculous. However, the lesson here is that those are things authoritarian governments will do. So why would climate change activists advocate for authoritarian solutions if they are already concerned about what authoritarians can do to the people they disagree with? It comes down to a desire for the power they are scared of
> Several governments are labelling people 'extremists' for blocking traffic with their (somehow) non-violent protests, and enforcing laws against them that were originally designed for terrorism.
So blocking traffic on major roads is pretty extreme and is quite possibly the dumbest way to motivate any public change for their cause (The second dumbest being throwing soup and defacing artwork.).
wizzwizz4
> If they are in the US, their fears are completely unfounded and frankly ridiculous.
Get arrested, don't show up at work, get fired (totally legal: it's an at-will state!), lose your health insurance, can't pay rent, eviction, now your former landlord wants you to pay for your own eviction… You can apply for SNAP without an address of residence, so long as you can receive letters, but if not, you're reliant on savings or charity until you can get back on your feet. Alternatively, your employer doesn't like your activism and fires you for it; or your landlord doesn't (though this is potentially less bad than job loss – depends on circumstance).
You don't even have to be an activist in the US for these sorts of things to happen: but activism is the opposite of keeping your head down, and makes them more likely.
Demonstrative political activism is never without cost. That's basic signalling theory.
> So blocking traffic on major roads is pretty extreme
Cutting off the king's head is pretty extreme. Falling under the king's horse is pretty extreme, refusing to eat until food is poured into your lungs is pretty extreme, hiding Jews in the basement of a Nazi officer's villa is pretty extreme. How is blocking traffic extreme?
Nobody calls it 'pretty extreme' when the rubbernecking after a car crash blocks traffic on major roads: that's just a cost of doing transport. Does the purposefulness, the meaningfulness, make blocking a road for a few days an extreme act?
> motivate any public change for their cause
The problem is political will. Doesn't matter how many people want universal suffrage, if the people in charge won't call a referendum.
> The second dumbest being throwing soup and defacing artwork.
If you're referring to the Just Stop Oil protests in October: they threw soup at a piece of glass in front of an artwork, and placed paper in front of another. Damage occurred to two frames and a small amount of varnish: none to the actual paint of any paintings. No artwork was destroyed, or even damaged. (If anything, art was created.)
kcplate
> Get arrested, don't show up at work, get fired (totally legal: it's an at-will state!), lose your health insurance, can't pay rent, eviction, now your former landlord wants you to pay for your own eviction…
Yes, actions have consequences. You have a right to protest, but if your method of protest has a law breaking component to it and you are arrested for that law you broke, there could be downstream consequences to your action. The very same thing can happen for any reason you may chose to break a law. Activism doesn’t give you a law breaking pass.
> How is blocking traffic extreme?
Would you do this on the regular just for the fun or utility of it?
> The problem is political will. Doesn't matter how many people want universal suffrage….
Is that the problem? Seems to me what you are describing as a lack of “political will” is really your own impatience.
> No artwork was destroyed, or even damaged. (If anything, art was created.)
Yeah I am sure that striking the protective safety glass over the Velázquez painting 10x with hammers just to test to make sure it wouldn’t break and destroy the painting before they reinterpreted the masterpiece with their bold warholian-pollock style.
wizzwizz4
You don't need to break the law to get arrested. But the powers-that-be can just pass a law that makes protest illegal, and then what? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65542558 (For clarity: while Amnesty International calls the bill "draconian",[0] the UK has not made all forms of protest illegal for all people. A government could, and many have,[1] but the UK government has not. And while the Met has some pretty serious issues, there's nothing even remotely like the police-violence-against-protestors stuff you see in the US (e.g. Stop Cop City). Indeed, the police in the UK – even the Met – are usually doing their jobs properly! See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67398933 for a slightly-less-cherrypicked example of Met officers making arrests at a protest.) In the US, many police departments use chemical weaponry – a war crime, if used in war – on unarmed civilian protestors.
If you're following the rules, if you're behaving as you would “on the regular”, it's not a protest.
Regarding climate change, of course people are impatient! We have no way to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere, so every month spent waiting is a month where things get permanently worse. It'll be hundreds of years before things start approaching the conditions of the average living person's childhood, and that's if we stop everything now, quickly enough that people will die from lack of infrastructure.
[0]: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/campaigns-blog/public-order...
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/freedom-of-expression/...
kcplate
An asteroid could hit the earth tomorrow too.
Tossing out a bunch of hypotheticals doesnt convince me of anything as plausible and or likely.
wizzwizz4
How's this for a hypothetical? https://www.icnl.org/post/news/analysis-of-anti-protest-bill...
redserk
Could you provide us your definition of "authoritarianism"?
kcplate
I think the parent comment I originally quoted and commented on is a fine example of the attitude I am concerned about.
“If we can’t pass a carbon tax due to lack of political will, find other points of leverage and exert force.”
acdha
What is your definition of authoritarianism? It can’t be “if you don’t get immediate consensus for a big change, give up and stop trying to fix the problem”. Just in this context, for example, many Americans have been trained to have a strong negative reaction to the word “tax” which leads to many things being done less efficiently using other mechanisms, but it’s hardly authoritarian to find a compromise position following the democratic process.
redserk
This isn't authoritarianism.
Just to review: In the US, even at the state-level, you elect officials to handle governance on your behalf. You typically elect an official to a lower legislative house, an upper legislative house, and a governor.
All 3 must cooperate in some fashion for legislation to become law, unless the state has a stipulation that a threshold of legislative members may override the governor.
As a resident you have say in each legislative chamber and for the state-level governor seat.
Now, it's the responsibility of a truly functional legislative body to respond to unpopular political objectives by determining if the electorate wants another solution or wants the issue dropped altogether. If the legislative body makes an error, one may vote out their representative via a party primary or via scheduled elections. If they have made a grave error, typically this can be resolved via the courts as a check.
While a carbon tax may very well be unpopular due to political will, a bill is proposing an alternative mechanism. This is a legislative body working as designed.
So no, this isn't authoritarianism.
kcplate
I am well aware of how our government works and am ok with it. My read of the comment I initially responded to was that they were unhappy with the process that you just described and wanted a different process that will impose the change under force without the need to rely on the political mechanism for the change..
I am ok with change that happens via the normal democratic process with all the checks and balances and time it takes to get us there. I am not ok with change against the will of a democratic society under the threat of force out side of the established political process. If you are imposing your will on me and my society against our wishes, that is authoritarianism.
toomuchtodo
Saving the rest of us from climate deniers is authoritarianism? It sounds like self preservation to me. We’re just insisting on folks stop ruining the ecosystem the rest of us must survive in. There’s nowhere else for us to go once this one is ruined.
~1.8M voters over the age of 55 age out every year in the US, so while the argument may be tired, older folks won’t have to hear it for long (and change, while constant and inevitable, can be hard to accept).
sandspar
Note: Keep this guy in mind.
kcplate
You know, nearly every generation that proceeded you made some form of the “preserve the earth and society for when we are your age” argument. Your generation seems to be the only one that I can think of that wants to make it happen via authoritarian means.
Once upon a time, us liberals argued against that sort of thing. Probably because we saw first hand what it does to a society. Good luck, like you said, you will need to live under the fist in that world you create, I’ll be thankfully gone.
acdha
> Your generation seems to be the only one that I can think of that wants to make it happen via authoritarian means.
This is hard to support if you study much history. Every environmental law has been criticized as authoritarian. In the middle of the previous century, Los Angeles had smog so bad it was common not to be able to see across the street and some conservatives argued that doing anything about it was tyranny and would devastate the economy; California’s air quality laws were so effective that they were widely copied and it devastated the economy into 5th place globally. Very few of the critics ever admitted being completely wrong about that, even if they will admit that it’s easier to breathe now.
That pattern repeats for water quality, bans on all kinds of pollutants, anti littering campaigns, etc. because there are a lot of industries which have a financial incentive in preserving the status quo. Often those pushes cut across industry lines, too: for example, a decade ago there was an astroturf campaign arguing that DDT restrictions were responsible for malaria deaths (based on people not knowing that evolved resistance was already a major problem in the 1950s), and that appeared to be funded not by the chemical industry but by the tobacco companies who were looking for attacks on public health agencies in Africa in response to successful anti smoking campaigns.
kcplate
But in all those cases the political process ultimately prevailed to create the laws it needed create to resolve the problem. It was not necessary to toss out the political system and move to an authoritarian one just to make it happen.
People may describe things as authoritarian in process, but once the law is established by elected representatives, it is by my definition NOT authoritarian.
acdha
> It was not necessary to toss out the political system and move to an authoritarian one just to make it happen.
Where? When? It’s by definition not applicable to the topic of this thread.
kcplate
Well it’s exactly what I was talking about from the very start of my comment thread.
People not having patience for the political process to play out leading them to desire and adopt authoritarian means as their solution to get their way scaring the fuck out of me.
acdha
The comment you started with reads like it’s supporting the democratic process in evidence here and I haven’t seen any evidence that the poster had something else in mind. Failing to pass a carbon tax and finding other legislative paths which get more support is pretty much the opposite of authoritarianism.
kcplate
“Force”
alephknoll
> Citizens should be entitled to representation, but not over representation (which is what holds us back currently).
But it's the climate change advocates like you who are overrepresented? You don't represent the majority. Not just in the US, but even more so globally.
wizzwizz4
Advocates and activists are almost never the majority. People who agree with the advocates, though? In this case, my search engine says they seem to be. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/09/14/in-response-to... https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/09/09/despite-pandem...
Recent polls suggest that opposition to climate change has decreased in the US in the past few years, but it's still just about a majority (and a clear bipartisan majority, if you only count under-30s). https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2022/07/14/americans-div...
Do you have a reason to believe otherwise? We all have a tendency to think our views are more common than they are (unless we're, like, being heckled for them in the streets): maybe the people in your local area are disproportionately opposed to anti-climate-change action?
toomuchtodo
https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support ("Our World In Data: More people care about climate change than you think: The majority of people in every country support action on climate, but the public consistently underestimates this")
alephknoll
[flagged]
mc32
What this might accomplish is the acceleration of Insurers moving out of CT. If CT had an otherwise well diversified economy, it might not be a biggie. If they have a lot of insurers there, then it might not be such a good move.
In addition, if there is less resource extraction in the US which has higher regulation, this will move extraction overseas where there is lighter regulation, but the local politicians feel good about doing something.
acdha
The bill is scoped to projects in Connecticut. Nobody is relocating their headquarters over that because they’d either pay the same fee anyway or pass on those projects.
alephknoll
[flagged]
> Insurers are helping make the problem worse by underwriting the very projects that warm the Earth even as they bear the costs of mounting climate disasters and pass them on to customers.
This the same fallacy people fall for when they say things like "100 companies responsible for 70% of emissions" [1]. It doesn't make any sense. Those companies aren't emitting CO2 in isolation. They're selling products that billions of people are creating demand for, either directly or indirectly.
It's the customers (i.e. "us") who are responsible for those emissions. And the cost is being passed on to those customers. The insurance system is working just fine.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...