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Trump and his key advisors stand to profit from the Dakota Access Pipeline.

On Monday at COP22, leaders of 7,100 cities in 119 countries announced progress on locally-driven emissions reductions is already underway.

Launched as the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy, the group will formalize city-focused climate action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Local leaders committed to slash emissions by 27 percent by 2020 — higher than some national cuts promised in the Paris Agreement. An analysis from the European Commission shows a smaller group of 6,201 cities had already achieved reductions of 23 percent by September.

The coalition already represents 600 million people, or 8 percent of the global population. According to the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, over 66 percent of people will live in cities by 2050, with the most urban growth occurring in developing countries.

Think of the cooperative as a mini-COP agreement of sorts, with cities accountable for establishing, measuring, and achieving climate goals.

“We need the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy to empower cities to take bolder steps in this fight, to challenge other cities to do the same, and to ensure that leaders from around the world recognize the significance of cities,” said Maroš Šefčovič, vice president of the European Commission, in a press release.

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Trump and his key advisors stand to profit from the Dakota Access Pipeline.

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The Robot Revolution Will Not Be a Rerun of the Industrial Revolution

Mother Jones

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Eliezer Yudkowsky asks Tyler Cowen today why he thinks the coming robot revolution1 will be a problem for employment. After all, the Industrial Revolution automated a lot of work too, and it worked out fine for employment. The answer to this, I think, is simple: the robot revolution will automate cognitive work, not just manual work. A machine that can literally do anything a human can do will certainly boost economic growth, but it won’t create more human employment in the process. It will just create more robot employment. For a little more detail on this, you can read a short version of the argument here and a longer version here.

But Cowen suggests that you don’t need to buy this to believe that robots are going to create big employment shocks anyway. You just need to look at the history of employment during the Industrial Revolution in a little more detail than we usually do:

I would challenge the notion that it went fine. Think of the machines of the industrial revolution as getting underway sometime in the 1770s or 1780s. The big wage gains for British workers don’t really come until the 1840s. Depending on your exact starting point, that is over fifty years of labor market problems from automation.

….A second point is that now we have a much more extensive network of government benefits and also regulations which increase the fixed cost of hiring labor. Insofar as automation creates short-run adjustment problems, those problems are more likely to show up in the form of decreased labor force participation than they did in previous eras. We are living in a time where the long-run trend is for labor force participation to fall in any case, and that was not in general the case during those earlier episodes.

Extrapolating a bit from Cowen’s point, the problem here is that the robot revolution is likely to be a lot shorter than the Industrial Revolution. Back then, we endured 50 years of employment problems and then things started to get better. But 50 years from today, the robot revolution is likely to be all but over. By the time we might start to expect wage gains, robots will be advanced enough that no more than a tiny percentage of human work is still relevant.

What this means, of course, is that we’d better start thinking about how we’re going to divvy up all the goods and services we produce when virtually none of them are the result of human labor. Call it Economics 3.0. We aren’t there yet, but we might want to start getting ready for it.

1Assuming that it really does come, of course, which we’re assuming for the purposes of this blog post.

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The Robot Revolution Will Not Be a Rerun of the Industrial Revolution

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Can a Carbon Tax Work Without Hurting the Economy? Ask British Columbia

green4us

Five years in, BC’s carbon tax has successfully reduced greenhouse gas emissions in a stable economy. Hobolens/Flickr Carbon emissions have an unavoidable cost. When we burn fossil fuels and release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it increases the greenhouse effect. The resulting climate change has costs, for example by causing more extreme weather. More frequent and intense heat waves and droughts can damage crops, causing food prices to rise, more intense floods can cause more property damage, etc. Lacking a price attached to carbon emissions in the marketplace, we’re effectively putting those costs on a credit card. We may not immediately see the costs, but they keep building up. In fact they’re building up with interest, because the costs of climate damage are higher than the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. When we put a price on carbon in the marketplace, consumers can see the costs associated with greenhouse gas emissions and adjust their consumption in an informed manner without continuing to build up that climate credit card debt. To keep reading, click here.

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Can a Carbon Tax Work Without Hurting the Economy? Ask British Columbia

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Can a Carbon Tax Work Without Hurting the Economy? Ask British Columbia

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