The Bush administration pioneered the theory of the unitary executive, which is the idea that the president can do anything because he is the president. They’re the ones who kicked over the guardrails, they just did it in the context of an endless war that they started. For more on this I recommend Sheldon Wolin’s work.

Listen how can I get a quart of milk from the store without also taking two chairs, a loveseat, a sound system, my heater and air conditioning unit, some steel armor plating, and a storage unit?

Sure, no arguments there. I guess it’s the “green” label I take issue with. Carbon-free capitalism is definitely possible as long as there are enough critical elements to produce all of the necessary solar panels and wind turbines (and I guess fusion reactors if we’re really ambitious about printing money 🤑). I do wonder about rent collection long-term though, especially with such decentralized energy sources. Overproduction will also come sooner than everyone thinks. But I guess these are much better problems to have than imminent eco-catastrophe.

Yeah that’s my point. The average democrat would consider him to be a dangerous radical leftist.

I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won’t end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I’ve read, it’s mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.

Capitalism can’t do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.

The best way to counter this is to point out the laziness at the top. Corporate welfare is way more damaging to society than the few million lazy people at the bottom. It would cost a lot less to write them off than to pay CEOs 2000 times as much as the average worker.

And, since we’ve shifted so far to the right, the “Marxist” texts can be written by John Maynard Keynes.

“Massive coal” was twenty years ago. India is “massive coal” now.

They have an electric car that costs $10,000.

They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.

They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it’s not entirely fair to call them “non-capitalist”.

Neoliberal capitalism is bad at long-term projects. That’s why we’re struggling so much with climate change mitigation. A lot of the gigantic power projects that required such long-term planning were built in the New Deal era and the postwar industrial boom. During this time, corporate tax rates and workers’ salaries were high because the government was genuinely afraid of worker power.

Building a modern nuclear power plant requires subcontracting it out into what is essentially a builders’ market in which companies compete with each other for pieces of state-level building grants. None of these companies want to undertake risky long-term ventures like a new nuclear reactor because they want to maximize their short-term revenue (profit). So they jack up the prices until the project budget is overrunning already in the planning stage, and it’s doomed from the start.