The death toll you're using for the sanctions is not as reliable as the one you're using for the war. (Besides which, the war is based on excess deaths from a baseline of a period when Iraq was still under sanctions.) It does not compare directly to the pre-sanction mortality rate, but instead assumes that the death rate should've fallen at the same rate in the 1990s as it did in the 1980s, and imputes a baseline mortality based on such extrapolation.
Jesper, the other costs you mention are also real. If it costs 2 cents to transmit the electricity, it's a real cost that you can avoid by putting the panels directly over your house's roof. The same is true of profits and overhead: coal entrepreneurs are doing some work in figuring out how to mine, transport, and burn the fuel, just like the coal miners and the power plant workers. With solar power there's also profit and overhead going to the PV cell manufacturers, but that's already included in the cost of the installation.
To the extent that the taxes are meant to cover air pollution, they're also real. The issue is that the taxes don't actually come remotely close to covering the cost of climate change; they'd at least double the cost of coal-fired electricity if they did.
Don't forget conservation. Wind power can't be scaled up to provide full power at first-world consumption, though solar can. But power consumption can be scaled down with energy-efficient housing retrofits, shift from suburban single-family housing to urban apartment buildings (which is necessary to reduce transportation emissions too), and accelerated shift to more energy-efficient appliances. More than a quarter of US electricity production is already very low-carbon, mainly hydro with some nuclear and a bit solar/wind, and a large reduction in power consumption means less needs to be built.
I agree with the analysis, but think there are two things it should address better:
1. The use of external markings like a yellow star isn't really a feature of exclusion racism. It's a feature of racism against a group that looks too much like the oppressor group. Thus there was nothing like the yellow star for e.g. Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia.
2. Sometimes, exclusion and exploitation combine. South African apartheid is a good example: it's clearly more like white oppression of blacks in proper colonies or in the US, but the formalized system came about as a result of competition between blacks and poor whites. The biggest supporters of apartheid in South Africa were poor rural Afrikaners, who without apartheid would be at the same social status as blacks. English urban whites didn't care and voted against apartheid early on, because they didn't need the system to assert their superiority; they were already much richer. English racism in South Africa was purely about exploitation, but there was an exclusion component to the system, even before the bantustans.
Meh. The US and Mexico have high levels of violence and low taxes, but South Korea and other developed Asian countries not on the list (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan) have low levels of violence and low taxes.
As for economic growth, yeah, there's no correlation. It's not just Germany, whose economic growth at any rate is moderate. Sweden and Finland have high taxes and economic growth; Italy has high taxes and negative economic growth; the US and Mexico have low taxes and growth; South Korea has low taxes and very high growth.
Could Turkey be afraid that if Syria continues to massacre civilians by the thousands be so unstable, the Kurds in its northern fringe will declare independence?
Divide 30 billion tons by 7 billion people and you get average emissions of a little more than 4 tons per capita. In the US, the average is about 20. Remember this every time someone complains that other countries should do more first.
The death toll you're using for the sanctions is not as reliable as the one you're using for the war. (Besides which, the war is based on excess deaths from a baseline of a period when Iraq was still under sanctions.) It does not compare directly to the pre-sanction mortality rate, but instead assumes that the death rate should've fallen at the same rate in the 1990s as it did in the 1980s, and imputes a baseline mortality based on such extrapolation.
Jesper, the other costs you mention are also real. If it costs 2 cents to transmit the electricity, it's a real cost that you can avoid by putting the panels directly over your house's roof. The same is true of profits and overhead: coal entrepreneurs are doing some work in figuring out how to mine, transport, and burn the fuel, just like the coal miners and the power plant workers. With solar power there's also profit and overhead going to the PV cell manufacturers, but that's already included in the cost of the installation.
To the extent that the taxes are meant to cover air pollution, they're also real. The issue is that the taxes don't actually come remotely close to covering the cost of climate change; they'd at least double the cost of coal-fired electricity if they did.
Don't forget conservation. Wind power can't be scaled up to provide full power at first-world consumption, though solar can. But power consumption can be scaled down with energy-efficient housing retrofits, shift from suburban single-family housing to urban apartment buildings (which is necessary to reduce transportation emissions too), and accelerated shift to more energy-efficient appliances. More than a quarter of US electricity production is already very low-carbon, mainly hydro with some nuclear and a bit solar/wind, and a large reduction in power consumption means less needs to be built.
I agree with the analysis, but think there are two things it should address better:
1. The use of external markings like a yellow star isn't really a feature of exclusion racism. It's a feature of racism against a group that looks too much like the oppressor group. Thus there was nothing like the yellow star for e.g. Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia.
2. Sometimes, exclusion and exploitation combine. South African apartheid is a good example: it's clearly more like white oppression of blacks in proper colonies or in the US, but the formalized system came about as a result of competition between blacks and poor whites. The biggest supporters of apartheid in South Africa were poor rural Afrikaners, who without apartheid would be at the same social status as blacks. English urban whites didn't care and voted against apartheid early on, because they didn't need the system to assert their superiority; they were already much richer. English racism in South Africa was purely about exploitation, but there was an exclusion component to the system, even before the bantustans.
Meh. The US and Mexico have high levels of violence and low taxes, but South Korea and other developed Asian countries not on the list (Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan) have low levels of violence and low taxes.
As for economic growth, yeah, there's no correlation. It's not just Germany, whose economic growth at any rate is moderate. Sweden and Finland have high taxes and economic growth; Italy has high taxes and negative economic growth; the US and Mexico have low taxes and growth; South Korea has low taxes and very high growth.
Could Turkey be afraid that if Syria continues to
massacre civilians by the thousandsbe so unstable, the Kurds in its northern fringe will declare independence?Divide 30 billion tons by 7 billion people and you get average emissions of a little more than 4 tons per capita. In the US, the average is about 20. Remember this every time someone complains that other countries should do more first.