A joint study by think tanks IPPR and Common Wealth found profiteering by some of the world’s biggest companies forced prices up significantly higher than costs during 2022.

[...] In April, Société Générale economist Albert Edwards released a scathing note saying he hadn’t seen anything like the current levels of corporate greed in his four decades working in finance. He said companies were using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to hike prices in search of profits.

https://fortune.com/europe/2023/12/08/greedflation-study/

" In a counterfactual exercise estimating CO2 emissions with and without subways, we find they have reduced population-related CO2 emissions by about 50 % for the 192 cities and about 11 % globally. Extending the analysis to future subways for other cities, we estimate the magnitude and social value of CO2 emissions reductions with conservative assumptions about population and income growth and a range of values for the social cost of carbon and investment costs. Even under pessimistic assumptions for these costs, we find that hundreds of cities realize a significant climate co-benefit, along with benefits from reduced traffic congestion and local air pollution, which have traditionally motivated subway construction. Under more moderate assumptions, we find that, on climate grounds alone, hundreds of cities realize high enough social rates of return to warrant subway construction."

https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1656647542610751499

Mining quantities for low-carbon energy is hundreds to thousands of times lower than mining for fossil fuels

We currently mine around 7 million tonnes of minerals for low-carbon technologies every year.1

That includes all of the minerals for solar panels, wind energy, geothermal, concentrating solar power, hydropower, nuclear, electric vehicles, battery storage, and changes to electricity grids. I’ve included a complete list of the minerals included in the footnote.2

But we need to deploy more low-carbon energy, fast. This will need to increase. How much will be mining once the low-carbon transition really picks up speed?

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that in 2040 we will need 28 million tonnes. This is in its ‘Sustainable Development Scenario’, which assumes a fast deployment of low-carbon energy.3

That’s a lot of stuff to be digging out of the earth. Until we compare it to what we’re moving away from: fossil fuels.

Every year we produce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of coal, oil, and gas. This comparison is shown in the chart.

[...] recycling and repurposing of these minerals.

With the right comparison, it’s easy to make renewables, electric vehicles and nuclear energy look bad. Just frame it as “low-carbon energy needs millions of tonnes of minerals”. They look bad because they’re comparing it to a world of zero impact. But this is not realistic. We can't build low-carbon energy without digging minerals out of the earth. We have to compare it to the problem that we’re trying to solve.

I see these dodgy framings everywhere. Take the safety of renewables and nuclear energy. Newspapers report an accident at a solar or wind plant, and people assume that these sources are dangerous. What they’re forgetting is that fossil fuels kill millions every year from air pollution. Nuclear and renewables are not perfect, but they are hundreds to thousands of times safer, even without considering climate change.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/mining-low-carbon-vs-fossil

This paper estimates a global CO2 emissions model using satellite data at 25 km resolution. [...] We find highly significant effects with the expected signs for all model variables, including subways. In a counterfactual exercise estimating CO2 emissions with and without subways, we find they have reduced population-related CO2 emissions by about 50 % for the 192 cities and about 11 % globally. [...] Even under pessimistic assumptions for these costs, we find that hundreds of cities realize a significant climate co-benefit, along with benefits from reduced traffic congestion and local air pollution, which have traditionally motivated subway construction. Under more moderate assumptions, we find that, on climate grounds alone, hundreds of cities realize high enough social rates of return to warrant subway construction.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969723023124?via%3Dihub

From 1981 to 1990, when most of China’s socialist provisioning systems were still in place, the country’s extreme poverty rate was on average only 5.6 per cent, substantially lower than in capitalist economies of comparable size and income at the time: 51 per cent in India, 36.5 per cent in Indonesia, and 29.5 per cent in Brazil. China's comparatively strong performance is corroborated by data on other social indicators. Moreover, extreme poverty in China increased during the capitalist reforms of the 1990s, reaching a peak of 68 per cent, as privatisation inflated the prices of essential goods and thus deflated the incomes of the working classes. These results indicate that socialist provisioning policies can be effective at preventing extreme poverty, while market reforms may threaten people's ability to meet basic needs.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/13563467.2023.2217087?needAccess=true&role=button

At the time of writing (April 2022) the Ocean Cleanup project continues to divide opinion. The project has had successes at stopping plastic pollution from reaching the sea with its Interceptor™ devices, but the organisation’s attempts to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch appear to have failed. In retrospect, its plans for renewable-powered sixty-mile long floating booms which removed debris from the sea and then store it away using conveyor belts were wildly unrealistic, and even scaled-down attempts to passively collect plastic pollution have ended in failure. The Ocean Cleanup has now been reduced to using fossil fuel-powered ships to tow nets through the sea to collect plastic – something which could have been done at the outset and saved tens of millions of dollars. Furthermore, Ocean Cleanup has never fully engaged with the criticisms which have been levelled at the organisation or admitted that the regression from a hi-tech boom system to a towed net represents a failure of its initial aims. Instead, a relentlessly positive and upbeat picture of what the project can achieve has been presented at all times, even though the whole project is likely to only achieve a fraction of the success it initially promised.

https://britishseafishing.co.uk/the-troubles-of-the-ocean-cleanup-project/

"The so-called patch isn’t so much an island as it is a soup, however, in which broken-down bits of plastic are like pepper flakes. Much of the waste is pea-sized or smaller and floats below the surface. That explains why, when you’re there, “it just looks like ocean,” said Melanie Bergmann, a marine biologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who last visited the region in 2019. The same is true for a handful of other marine garbage patches, which form around gyres — systems of rotating currents.

This is one reason why ambitious ocean cleanup efforts are often inefficient, said Richards, the marine scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography; the large pieces of plastic are spread out and much of the rest is impossible to retrieve. Plus, only about 1 percent of the plastic we dump into our oceans ends up in these kinds of patches (it’s still somewhat of a mystery where the rest goes). So even if ocean cleanups were more efficient, they wouldn’t make a significant dent in the overall waste problem."

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22949475/ocean-plastic-pollution-cleanup

The origin story for Vienna becoming the world’s most celebrated example of social housing began after World War I. In the postwar elections, the Social Democratic Workers’ Party gained power, ushering in an era known as “Red Vienna.” The new government leaders inherited a housing crisis so dire that overcrowding forced 170,000 Vienna residents to become what were called “bed-goers,” leasing sleeping space in shifts while still paying extremely high rents. Often, a single sink and toilet were shared by dozens of strangers. Tuberculosis spread so readily in these cramped quarters that it was known across Europe as “the Viennese disease.”

So the new Viennese government devoted its resources to building municipal housing complexes named after figures like Karl Marx and George Washington, demonstrating the ruling party’s commitment to both its “social” and “democratic” missions.

[...] Today, that housing is created mostly by limited-profit associations, organizations that often receive public support in return for tight government restrictions on rent charged and a requirement that any profits be put back into more social housing construction. Many of these limited-profit associations are operated by labor unions.

In these social housing communities, tenants’ long-term tenure in their apartments is guaranteed under the law. Apartments can be passed down among generations under the original terms. The tying of rent charged to a percentage of household income means that renters in Vienna are protected from losing their home when illness or job loss occurs.

[...] As a result, half of the city’s residents live in social housing, which creates a price-dampening effect on for-profit housing that is forced to compete with high-quality subsidized housing. That competitive pressure combines with vigorous rent control on private housing to make Vienna one of the cheapest renting cities in all of Europe, even on the for-profit market. Given the fact that good housing is central to both a household’s and a city’s well-being, it is no surprise that Vienna is frequently ranked the most livable city in the world.

[...] Tight regulation of privately held land in Vienna ensures that social housing construction is ongoing. At least two-thirds of any private land sold must be diverted to rent-limited housing. “Since the ground that can be built on is a limited resource, we don’t see housing as a fit for the private market,” Maltschnig says. The result: anyone with an urgent housing need gets immediate shelter and prompt placement in a municipal apartment. Vienna has virtually no visible homeless population and no slum areas of low-quality housing and concentrated poverty. And Vienna is not alone: several other nations, like Singapore and Finland and Sweden, have followed a similar blueprint in achieving remarkable social housing success, too.

https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias/