#stechmesser — Public Fediverse posts

Paper on effectiveness of climate policies https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl6547
"Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades"
Annika #Stechmesser et al 2024

Only casually skim-read for now. Stumbling over this chart below. It shows per capita CO2 emissions in select countries, and in box symbols on the x-axis, markers for year of enforced policy.

Remarkable where the authors placed the " | " as indicator for when a policy is supposed to have had effect on emissions.
It's either 2020, the pandemic year, or shortly after the de-regulated banking sector in the US had catapulted the whole world into economic crisis 2008/09.
And 2012 in Greece, when the IMF forced the country into an austerity period to prevent a Grexit.

Dunno. I don't feel inclined to read the paper after seeing the charts.
They probably also didn't dis-entangle the CO2-price measures from the normal regulations, either.
I suspect, they're following the preferred Econobscene narrative that upping the price for a drug lets addicts make intelligent, rational decisions – no matter how much the drug dealers trick them into staying addicted – 
which magically then leads to keeping in CO2-budget.

I take the paper as another attempt to "prove" a theoretical concept. The speed at which sources of emissions must by now be culled, is in big parts due to economics' wet dreams of how their theoretical world should work. It's not the Anthropocene, it's the #EconObscene

The speed of decommissioning emission sources leaves no room anymore for trial and error. The favoured "small steps, nudging, then hoping and praying" has lead us here. Due to that, true command economy with rations for everything and everyone are necessary now to immediately get emissions down immediately, and to transform energy and agri sector from this lower emission level.