We need a carbon tax stat IMO. Economist John Cochrane had a good blog post about this recently (I actually posted to HN a few days ago but it got buried):
"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."
He then makes that appeal to both sides:
"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."
> To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage.
First, that starts off with a false premise. You don't know that the government is going to regulate carbon.
Second, ignoring the "climate change is a myth" crowd, there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await. That attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way is not worth the unknown outcome of attempting to save the current state of climate.
This isn't even a "not my problem" situation. I've heard this from folks leaving in a coastal region that already suffers some amount of regular nuisance flooding. It's not as if rising tides will skip over them.
Failing to understand that viewpoint is going to result in two sides yelling past each other. One side thinks we must do everything in our power to preserve nature's status-quo, the other is firmly of the mind that it is an impossibility and to try would be wasted effort with much risk and unclear gain.
Your first task is convincing them of the horrors that await for them.
> there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await
Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".
It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
If a family member or close friend dies - you hang out with friends, you go to therapy. You certainly don't buy some weapons and decide to finish off the rest of your friends for good measure!
A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.
What's the goal here? 800ppm? 1200? Literally just whack the thermostat up 10c and have every city in the world suddenly be in the wrong place?
> attempts at regulation will just destroy the economy, and thus their place in it, and that ruining the economy and thus untold (b|m)illions of lives that way
It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.
Shifting consumption to more efficient "happiness/usefulness per damage" stuff wouldn't ruin anything.
It's difficult for me to understand why people would think that carbon pricing pushing people towards different foods or smaller cars or cycling or whatever would "destroy the economy". I think they have a different definition of the word 'destroy'. Consuming a bit less is not destruction. Your hometown being underwater is a destroyed economy.
> A climate that continuously changes by a few degrees every decade is going to be impossible to adapt to properly. We will effectively never be able to build permanent structures again.
Why would we not be able to build permanent structures?
> Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".
> It's unclear to me what you mean by this.
I thought it was very clear:
> If your farm is on fire, maybe you lose a room. OK, so you adapt. Perhaps you'll never earn enough again to rebuild it properly. You might be a bit traumatised - maybe you buy more smoke alarms, cameras, sprinklers, stuff like that.
> What you don't do is set the whole thing alight, burn it to hell, and adapt to the changes having contributed to your life savings going up in smoke.
They're arguing against something like fining the person whose farm caught on fire.
Arguing for pricing in externalities is more akin to arguing for the fine, trying to make people change their ways so such fires are less common, while giving no thought to the people affected directly (unnecessary extra costs on top of recovering from the fire), or who couldn't avoid it (lightning strike causing fire / infrastructure not in place to avoid the cost and it getting passed to the consumer instead of dealt with).
The whole issue here is in thinking about pricing carbon as a "fine".
It represents fixing the economic incentives.
If a beef burger is 10x more environmentally damaging than a vegetable one, it should cost approximately ten times more.
As I've posted below - this is child-level logic. It's time for us to sort our shit out. There really is no option.
We need stable homes, nutrition, and a bit of entertainment. We don't need no-holds-barred competition to literally use as much of everything as we possibly can; and we _certainly_ don't need that to be apportioned essentially randomly - the more damaging activities should cost more.
If it bothers you to be confronted by that - if your first thoughts are "economic damage" and the fact your life might slightly change - I'm sorry for you. Because you really are fucked, you're coming down with all of us.
You’re not using effective arguments that will change someone’s point of view.
I believe climate change is coming but trying to convince someone they should change because they are a Bad Person if they don’t change their ways, or that some unspecified type of fuckedness is looming, is not very successful.
> Pricing in externalities is a part of that adaptation. It literally is "getting on with it".
> It's unclear to me why pricing in externalities would do this.
Well I'm not here try to tell you they will, and why. I'm telling you why you run into intelligent people who aren't gung-ho about reforming our economy in regards to climate change. That if you're trying to have a conversation with to get the desired result, politics, how you need to approach the "other" side.
Of those that I've talked to about this, the belief is that the necessary changes to pricing would result in an economic downturn, as bad as if not worse than the "Great Recession," which is still in recent memory for just about every adult. That's the milder hesitancy, some believe the necessary economic changes simply aren't possible, that to do so wouldn't even help make things better. That we're past the point of no return, so might as well just roll with it and adapt as needed.
Your problem is not telling them "bad things are going to happen if we don't deal with emissions" but rather "things are going to be so bad that your fear of economic decline is the lesser of two evils." Secondary is convincing them that necessary pricing can be put into place without destroying the economy.
We need to emphasize the message that massive amounts of infrastructure must be built both to limit and to adapt to climate change.
That's literally the opposite of damaging the economy. If we actually took climate change seriously as a challenge to civilization itself, we'd have a boom economy like it hasn't been seen in at least 50 years.
That is sort of the problem though. Climate change arguably wouldn't have been much of a challenge for western countries if we had continued to evolve our cities, infrastructure and applicable technologies. Instead our economies are mostly paper based so we can't make real world changes without affecting someone's contract, mortgage or stock value. Therefor we are left changing our papers around, which of course upsets anyone who need the improvements.
> are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt to whatever changes await.
This makes no sense at all. Climate change is not a binary effect, it's compounding.
> there are those that believe that we are, at this point, past the point of helping and that we might as well just get on with it and adapt
Climate change is inevitable but the amount of change can still be affected. Preventing carbon emissions now will absolutely be cheaper that paying for mitigations in the future.
The amount of warming is very important. An increase from 1.5C to 2.0C will kill an additional 100 million people from air pollution alone.
If you want to better understand the argument take a look at Bjorn Lomborg's talks https://www.lomborg.com, basically the argument is that even the strictest regulations are going to have a very small effect on the climate in 100 years, and for every dollar spent now we save merely cents in the future. So instead of implementing economically non-profitable measures, it is better to invest much more into research, and into helping poor countries, which will allow us to find better technologies to fight with climate change.
I am not sure what i think about this argument yet, but it seems like it may be reasonable.
There are many different ways to implement carbon tax.
His proposal to replace other regulations with a small and uniform carbon tax, is bound to make both proponents and opponents of carbon tax unhappy (which may be a sign that it is a reasonable proposal:)
A carbon tax doesn't imply spending money, only moving it and changing the incentives. Money is only spent once it pays for some limited resource, whether that's human time or a truckload of ore.
Climate change isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem.
“Advanced” economies rely on otherwise-unnecessary consumption of resources, irrespective of environmental damage, because there's no effective social penalty for harming the environment.
Clean energy won't help: demand always increases at least as fast as supply.
There is a social penalty. If you try to burn garbage in your yard your neighbours will not allow it. But the price cannot be larger than life, so when it is freezing outside and there is nothing else to burn, they won't mind the smoke, and will come to the warmth of fire instead.
Even if we stopped all unnecessary consumption, and kept only the minimum necessary for life, we would not make significant impact on climate change, because with the current number of people CO2 will still accumulate, and would become problem some time later.
If energy is clean, it simply will not cause global warming, independently of demand, but we do not even need to make it clean, we simply need to use the CO2 (e.g. by creating forests in deserts) or to use some other technology to gain fine grained control over the climate.
The government is already is regulating carbon. California has a cap and trade program, for example, and this court case in 2007 forced the EPA "to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) as pollutants."
Very little has actually come out of that '07 case though. There were the Paris Climate Accords but those and the clean energy plan designed to actually achieve them were immediately ripped up so as much as they're legally required to there's not actually much being done at the EPA that isn't rolling back regulations.
I agree that we need a carbon tax. IMHO the good way to get wider support for it is to make it revenue-neutral - collected money could be distributed equally as income tax credit (or some other way).
In this way carbon tax would increas marginal costs of using carbon-intensive products, but does not increase overall taxation.
I would rather like a carbon market where every person gets the same amount of emissions per year and can then sell this towards manufacturers using fossil carbon. This gets the notion of "the air we breath belongs to all of us" way better than shoveling even more money to the government
The problem with that is there are a lot of transaction costs to individuals selling their personal emissions.
Like the comment one higher up mentioned, one way to get around that and do effectively the same thing would be to split the revenue among citizens. This is what a bunch of economists have called for doing: https://www.econstatement.org/
Trudeau has done this in Canada. I, like you, thought it would be a brilliant way to get around the traditional conservative opposition to taxes, but surprisingly - they still opposed it, and provincial conservatives have challenged it in the courts.
That said, revenue neutrality probably has increased the tax's popularity. Polls show a massive increase in approval when people are informed of this return of money.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that this is not something that "both sides" are equally responsible for. In Canada/US, conservatives/Republicans generally refuse to implement a carbon tax; whereas the center-left and left parties generally do. Additionally in the US, the Republicans don't even believe in climate-change.
Well, depends what you mean by "at fault". I agree it's better to believe in global warming than deny it exists, but I agree with Cochrane that many of the attempts at at fixing it so far are basically "worthless value-signaling gestures".
Cochrane thinks (not sure I agree with him) that the onus right now is more on the traditional left than the right.
"...climate policy advocates have gone far beyond a technocratic idea of simply, well, reducing carbon. 'And nuclear energy' is usually noticeably absent. Carbon capture technologies, equally good at reducing carbon are usually noticeably absent. Other agendas like 'climate justice' creep in -- worthy or not, anything else that creeps in means less carbon reduction per dollar. A carbon tax reduces carbon any way that reduces carbon, which is really good at, well, reducing carbon, and not getting distracted with other agendas. That is a strong reason why carbon taxes, and especially such taxes in return for less regulation are resisted on the left."
Whether you agree re: who is at fault, given that most people on HN are prob on the "do something about climate change" end of the spectrum, if you are personally skeptical of a carbon tax vs something like the green new deal or Jay Inslee's climate change plan, I'd encourage you to look into it more.
Cochrane's blog post and and also this would be good places to start:
'it's better to believe in global warming than deny it exists'
- this sums up the belief system aspects of the current hysteria.
Cynics say the commercial goal of claims human pollution is super heating earth's atmosphere (which may be true) is to extract taxation from everyone on C02 use.
Good stewardship of the planet is clearly in everyone's best interests but falling into the clutches of avaricious ecocapitalists who tax you on everything is only going to empty your wallet and restrict your movements, while probably not solving any environmental concerns.
First, people on the left who are resisting carbon taxes are mostly because they believe cap and trade is a better solution, which many economists agree with.
Second, what has some notion of "climate justice" got to do with anything? I don't see any evidence politicians on the left are somehow getting distracted by "value-signaling".
Third, where does the idea come from that a carbon tax must be matched with less regulation elsewhere? That's a pure right-wing dream to try to match the two together, there is no connection.
What this essentially sounds like is a Republican talking point that it's all Democrats' fault because Democrats aren't succeeding, despite Republicans refusing to help and therefore making it impossible to succeed. The doublespeak and hypocrisy makes your head spin...
I don't think it's a straw man. Look at the two examples I cited.
This is the first thing that comes up when you google 'green new deal':
"A Green New Deal is a big, bold transformation of the economy to tackle the twin crises of inequality and climate change. It would mobilize vast public resources to help us transition from an economy built on exploitation and fossil fuels to one driven by dignified work and clean energy."
And here's AOC's chief of staff on the green new deal: "“Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” "
Second is Jay Inslee, the democratic running for president who has made fighting climate change the centerpiece of his campaign.
Look at his four points. Point three is "fighting for environmental justice & economic inclusion". Two of the other points are subsidies, one for clean energy, the other for a jobs program. The last one -- getting rid of subsidies for fossil fuel industries -- is a good idea. Control f'ing for the word tax (as in carbon tax) gives no results. Neither does cap, nor trade.
I would have agreed with you twenty years ago: back then implementing a global tax of $10 per ton on CO2 and increasing it to $100 per ton over a 20 year period would have been an excellent and extremely cheap solution.
Only I assumed that the "dirty" lobby killed that.
We're now at the point where if we want to keep a similar quality of life without destroying the planet something like the Green New Deal is going to be needed. Not necessarily from a technical standpoint but from a political one - such as change drastically improve the situation for a lot of people and will greatly decrease the risk of amoral fanatics winning again in the biggest economy in the world.
The Democrats are willing to make slight changes, but at the end of the day, Americans are pumping 15-20 gigs tons per year of CO2 into the atmosphere and that number wouldn’t change under either Democrat or Republican policies. (Indeed, its not clear that when you account for Democrats’ opposition to nuclear power, which set of policies would’ve led to lower CO2 output in a counterfactual scenario.) And to keep warming to 1.5C, that number needs to go to zero this decade, then negative shortly after that. Also, this needs to happen in china and India, not just the US.
Note that measures to actually address climate change are unpopular even among Democrats. Sure, they like it when it’s articulated as a jobs program (“green new deal”) but they still oppose things like carbon taxes, which experts have offered forth as the solution. State level measures along those lines got strong push back in very blue and very environmentally conscious Oregon and Washington
He's not great, but I'm disagreeing with the false equivlance here. Trudeau is better compared to Harper who gagged scientists, compared to Scheer who wants to rely on subsidies and regulations to limit carbon, compared to Doug Ford and his ideaological opposition to carbon tax. So yes, Liberals are better then the Conservatives on the issue of the oil industry and reducing carbon emissions.
ETA: In an ideal world I'd prefer NDP or Green, but as long as we're limited by first past the post, the best way to support climate change mitigation is by avoiding Conservatives via the Liberals.
Taxes move money, they don't destroy it. They make some people richer and some poorer. A carbon tax and dividend scheme (advocated by economists) gives poor people a significant amount of money. The Green New Deal (advocated by left wing democrats) gives poor people a significant amount of money.
Overhead from distributing taxes -- makes people poorer on average.
I see how some taxes (such as gasoline tax for building roads) can have outsized advantages that are bigger than the tax distribution overhead. But carbon tax does NOT have advantages like that. At least not yet, considering that too much of the Earth land is too cold.
Something that would help the risk of power outages killing air conditioning, would be to power air conditioning directly by solar panels installed alongside.
There is a high correlation between solar generation and air-con demand, although it's not perfect, as e.g. heat can persist into the evening, so you could have a grid connection to allow the air con to continue working in the evenings, and to absorb any excess power but in the event of grid failure, the air-con power should just follow the solar generation directly. I don't know if such a system exists commercially at the moment.
Even in the event of wide scale power outages, it would not lead to wide scale deaths as most people would have air conditioning that still worked. Air conditioning failures would be a very serious issue, though, requiring evacuation to another building.
This could help in some low density cases, but probably not in dense cities. It would require some changes to the inverters such that air con could still be powered in a blackout, due to anti-islanding concerns (feeding power into an isolated portion of the grid can cause injury to workers and further electrical faults).
An easier alternative for these rare cases is probably just to have a backup diesel generator.
Power outages are not rare everywhere. Where they are rare, a diesel generator that is hardly ever used is likely to not work the time you actually need it. When the grid is working, powering your A/C from solar is still a good idea, and returning power to the grid when you don't need the AC is often helpful.
In terms of emergency power outage in hot day situations, you don't need to cool the whole building, or cool it to a comfortable temperature, it just needs to be below a "wetbulb" of 35°C in a single room people can shelter in until power is restored.
You would need a huge number of solar panels and batteries to power an air conditioning unit. Dehumidifiers are far more energy efficient (removes the hot water droplets suspended in air to cool air temp)
>removes the hot water droplets suspended in air to cool air temp
First of all, most of the water is in gaseous form, i.e., vapor, not droplets. But even if it were in the form of droplets, the droplets would have to be small enough to remain in the air, and consequently just like the water vapor, they'd be in thermal equilibrium with all the other molecules of air with the result that removing them would not lower air temperature.
> Dehumidifiers are far more energy efficient (removes the hot water droplets suspended in air to cool air temp)
Do you have some sort of citation for that?
Because a dehumidifier is pretty much an air conditioner that doesn't make the room cooler from a mechanical perspective, so the premise that there's a wide gap in efficiency, or that the unit which blows it's heat indoors is the more effective one, seems unlikely to me.
I guess running dehumidifiers allows the human body to cool itself when exposed to the environment referenced in the article. While comfort from an air-conditioned room would still be nice I'll take mild discomfort over hyperthermia any day.
If this doesn't scare you I don't know what will. We have to do something about it. By 'we' I mean you and I. As someone said - if you don't think you can change the world you will just be one of the ones who didn't.
We need fundamental cultural and policy change. The question is how to achieve it. Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. Think about any significant societal change in the last century or so. Women suffrage, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, gay rights. None of these were initiated by the parliament. They all started as a popular rebellion and direct action.
So what are we to do.
- Change your lifestyle. Less flying, driving, meat.
- Divest fossil
- Get out of the techno bubble and get your hands dirty with direct action and civil disobedience. e.g. [1]
"Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. "
In the end, voting is the only thing that matters. Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual without government setting policy so that doing the right thing is also doing the most profitable thing.
But despite you being wrong in your core point in my opinion, you're absolutely right about the method. (change your lifestyle, divest fossil, direct action, civil disobedience)
The reason that voting is useless is because voters don't care about the environment. Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters.[1]. Fix that, and then voting might make a difference. And you do that by making it clearly visible that it's important to you, and by convincing others that it's important to them.
Voting matters when (1) laws ensure all people have roughly equal influence when voting, (2) laws ensure voting translates into action instead of an empty gesture to appease the population, and (3) the rule of law is respected and consistently enforced.
When one or more of these is compromised, then the actions of the government are illegitimate, and there is a continuum of actions people can take beyond voting.
Writing letters -> peaceful street protests -> nonviolent civil disobedience like blocking roads -> sabotage -> violent street protests -> armed insurrection -> civil war.
1 is not necessary for voting to matter (cf. the Electoral College). Also, gerrymandering is done specifically to avoid 1, yet it wouldn't be necessary if voting didn't matter.
Voting is important at the end, when a movement has made its case and a majority of people agrees.
But before that being vocal, determined, and incessant is what matters [1]. At first, nobody knows about you, then, nobody believes you. The climate change discourse is still not past that second stage.
> Climate change is #11 in the list of top priorities for voters.
USA is spreading conservative and fossil-fuel interests propaganda all over the world, it's very harmful, but it's not some inherent "voters don't care about X". It's simply that people paid a lot of money for voters not to care about X, and much less money to make them care about X.
Voting in most of the world is just a spectacle. If someone was elected that would in fact challenge the status quo (private property and police dominion for instance) they would be instantly murdered or imprisoned in a coup d'État.
At least that's how the story goes for revolutions in Europe/US and much of our modern colonies. As Emma Goldman once said, « if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal ».
> Individual choices by a small minority of the population are going to be completely ineffectual
This is for sure. The problems are deep and structural and no individual action (however radical) can bring change. The issue is the people profiting from human exploitation and nature's destruction (the wealthy ruling classes) will never stop until it's too late. We have to stop them. Under some circumstances, voting can be a part of this process. But most times social change comes from the people, not a piece of paper.
There is a Princeton study that shows that the laws passed at the federal level have a 0% correlation to the public opinion unless they've donated at least $10k to a campaign. This means that the average voter has taxation without representation.
Some Harvard Business people suggested that we could curb this issue by a three pronged approach:
1. Open primaries to prevent minority duopolies in the general
2. Gerrymander with an open source algorithm or a "shortest split line" method
3. Implement single transferrable vote, ie ranked choice, instead of first past the post (plurality voting), which spoils votes and results in sub-par representation.
> This means that the average voter has taxation without representation.
Well, that's the main attribute of representative "democracy". This system we live in was setup in 1789 by the bourgeoisie to prevent emergence of a democracy. Many Lumières philosophers were frightened by actual democracy (the rule of the people). Voltaire famously said: « The people should be guided, not taught ».
These Harvard people you mention are not wrong. They're just so deep into the status quo they can't even imagine what a real democracy would look like. Building a democracy has nothing to do with technical details. Sure, some Condorcet-style voting system would favor smaller candidates. But to me, as an anarchist, building a democracy has more to do with:
1. Direct action instead of power delegation: the belief in elections prevents people from exerting change in their environment
2. End the tyranny of the majority: there is no universal truth to life and minorities should have their place in a democracy (which is not the case in our capitalist systems)
3. Decentralize institutions: centralization is always the tool of tyrants, whether republican (French-style jacobinism) or pretend-socialist (USSR-style democratic centralism)
Glad to hear it. Nihilism is rampant in these conversations and must be stomped on hard. Far too many believe that "extremely difficult" is the same as "impossible" so we should give up and do nothing.
It was clear from the rest of your comment that you aren't one of those, but I fear they would find support in your comment. Confirmation bias would lead them to emphasize the "voting doesn't matter" part and ignore your call to action.
[edit]: Rereading your comment, you're much more clear than I originally thought about all change being grass roots. Did you edit? If not it really emphasizes this point. I read "voting doesn't matter", hitting one of my hot buttons leading me to misread your comment. We're obviously in fairly close agreement, yet my response was to spout off an angry denunciation...
A carbon tax will definitely mean less driving, flying, AC and meat.
And this tax can make it possible to give out vouchers so vulnerable people who cannot afford AC will not die in heat waves.
So public policy can both incentivise everyone, not only activists to make the right choices. And it can save a lot of lives.
If a suitably large group of people refuse to vote for politicians that don't support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade and other climate policies, it will lead to better outcomes.
So we are near the limits of human heat tolerance and the solution is less AC? Does lowering quality of life actually help increase quality of life?
The simple solution is to build more nuclear. When energy generation doesn’t require burning things, this solves itself. A carbon neutral grid means we can use as much air conditioning as we want. I was in Rome and France last week and “less AC” would have meant vulnerable people potentially dying in the heat.
I would only vote for it if there are tax releases in other areas because tax rate is already enormous in my country. We already have an environmental tax that was used to stuff holes in social security systems.
That said, binding environmental costs to actual prices would be terrific.
But if households only generate 1/5 of overall emissions (depending on data and negligent of consumption), we might need other mechanisms.
You can control many things through taxes, but I believe this to be inefficient. I would have no problem with paying double for fuel. But that isn't the reality for most people that are dependent on cars.
Better than nothing perhaps, but I have very low expectations for this tax.
Pretty much all the carbon tax proposals by economists and climate activists are revenue neutral. That's the whole idea: make climate-damaging activities more expensive, and to balance it out do some combination of just lowering other taxes and investing in infrastructure that helps us cope with climate change (carbon capture, electrical grid, etc.), which creates jobs.
I'm reminded of how the German word for "tax" is "Steuer", i.e. steering/control, which encourages smarter thinking about tax policy because it acknowledges precisely this effect on incentives.
> would only vote for it if there are tax releases in other areas because tax rate is already enormous in my country.
A carbon divided, which is to say redistributing the income of the carbon tax equally and directly to the people should at least in principle be uncontroversial because it is both socially equitable (richer people live more carbon intensive lives and thus contribute more), and it sets the right consumption incentive without taking money out of people's personal pockets (which should please conservatives).
It should, in principle. Canada recently introduced a carbon tax with dividend program in which about 80% of consumers receive more in dividends than they pay out in carbon tax. Despite that, opposition is very significant. It's a crazy world.
I’m all for carbon taxes too, but I always question the accounting for this.
Consumers pay some carbon taxes directly (e.g. while buying gasoline), but does this account for indirect carbon taxes (e.g. the natural gas used in making fertilizer to grow the food that the cow ate to make this burger?).
At the end of the day, a lot of our purchases are really paying for the energy used in its production at some level.
In theory, if both the burger and the natural gas is domestic, it's fully accounted. The tax is on the natural gas so the cost shows up in the burger.
In practice, it's @#%#ed up, as usual. They didn't implement a carbon tariff, so foreign fertilizer would have been a lot cheaper than domestic fertilizer. But instead of putting a carbon tariff on foreign fertilizer, they gave domestic fertilizer a 90% exemption.
Tariffs are often regulated by treaties or meet with reactionary tariffs so local exemptions are usually the most practical way of dealing with imports.
The premise is that the exemptions were selected for political reasons, and a small fish in a small industry has zero chance of getting their own exemption.
AC is more efficient than heating since it is just moving energy around. And yet I don’t see wailing and gnashing of teeth about heating when it is frequently accomplished by burning oil in an on-site boiler. I get the sense that it comes down to places that use AC to make the 3 horrible months of summer livable vote the “wrong” way, while places that burn oil to make the 3 horrible months of winter livable vote the “right” way.
Why is this being downvoted? Are those living in the liberal Northeast US ever proposing to reduce heating? Not much. Read the comments here — using “less AC” appears more frequently than “use less heat.” My point is that you have a point. Colder places lament the AC use of hotter places because they aren’t significantly proposing to limit their own quality of life, but the quality of life of people that don’t vote like them.
Many of the populous northern states (I am familiar with at least MA and NY) are heavily incentivizing weatherization, solar, and eliminating fossil fuels by switching to electric ground and air source heat pumps. Lowest hanging fruit is rural oil and propane heated houses but I expect natural gas to be targeted soon considering New York's climate goals.
Combined with the efforts to switch the grid to renewables (net-zero electric grid by 2040 and net-zero altogether by 2050) this should greatly reduce emissions coming from eating.
In fact, New York has aggressively limited the expansion of natural gas pipelines and recently both ConEd and National Grid, two major gas providers, said in response they will stop expanding their network. IMO New York's energy agencies are using this to see if they can fully eliminate fossil fuels from new development and start a phase out.
I think you are correct, there is definitely more stigma attached to AC than there is to heating. That said, I think the use of AC to the extent that staying inside for too long is uncomfortable without putting on more clothing is probably excessive, in the same way that setting the heating so that you need to wear shorts inside would be excessive.
I think a lot of common sense has been lost in the design of homes. In the south of Europe homes are often comfortable with minimal or no air-conditioning because they have designs suitable for the climate. However, this means having small windows which aren't directly exposed to sunlight, tiled or marble floors etc.
AC is more efficient than heating since it is just moving energy around.
This claim is incompatible the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time."
Afford electricity bills for Air conditioning. In some areas it will soon not be possible to sleep without air conditioning, and people can die in heat waves.
How about we regulate corporate emissions[1]? That could actually have an effect that slows down climate change. Individual actions are almost irrelevant by comparison other than making people feel smug and good while the planet is going to hell. Sure, if you want to do any of the above things, go ahead, but let's not pretend like it's going to make a difference. Getting the top polluters to cut down or stop polluting on the other hand will make a difference and the only way of doing that is to regulate them. Unfortunately that requires voting as ineffective as voting is (extremely ineffective). Otherwise what? Should we overthrow our governments with violence or other such drastic solutions that are unlikely to work (there's a reason revolutions are called revolutions: things end up in the same place: one full revolution). In the meantime, I'm going to fly as much as I can and eat as much meat as I can (after being a vegetarian for well over a decade) as it doesn't fucking matter.
Advocating self-denial (and going on protests) by billions of people is a non-starter and won't solve the problem. It smacks of a pseudo-religious attitude that we have to suffer to solve climate change.
Fixes that really work will have to be at the source - the energy generation stage, making existing lifestyles zero carbon. Bear in mind that billions more people have yet to achieve the comfortable high-energy-use lifestyles that we enjoy.
Isn't it realistically way too late for (ideologically appealing, I understand) lifestyle changes to solve anything? De-growth won't save you from heatwaves or rising sea levels. Mitigation at this point would probably involve extensive dam systems, nuclear reactors and at worst gambling with geoengineering.
We can always get more and longer heatwaves and higher sea levels. It might be more than normal now, but if we don't stop it's only going to get worse.
If we stop now and find a way to get the carbon out of the atmosphere fast enough we might even have a chance to go back to the old normal, but we have to act fast. Please help to push for it!
Those nations possessing a sufficient pool of well trained nuclear engineering talent will be those most likely to survive the coming climatic and geopolitical extremes.
It's hard to build the dams, reactors, geodesic domes and whatever else without more mining, concrete plants, energy intensive logistics and transports, etc.
It doesn't seem possible to do both things without failing at both with terrible consequences.
Far less of that would be required if we used less energy, and it's additive.
Eating beefburgers, flying Australia <-> Europe for holidays, driving a Hummer, using plastic for everything, and so on and so forth, just isn't necessary. My street has twice the number of cars it did when I was younger.
The idea that "terrible consequences" will come about from people taking the piss a bit less is really very silly. It makes me think of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch but inverted (when I were young, we had all the things...)
Adding insulation to your home, riding your bike for short trips, not taking that vacation across the ocean, and eating less beef doesn't stop you from building infrastructure to mitigate the effects of the climate catastrophe.
Another way to help is to slowly cut out fast fashion brands. The amount of waste that is produced from stores such as HM and Zara has heavily impacted our environment.
I believe the point of "fast fashion" is that you buy new clothes more or less continuously to stay "trendy", rather than buying clothes and wearing them for several years until they're worn out.
it's not about the size of the company/store. they sell clothes that won't really last more than a season or two (and will be "out of fashion" by then anyway), so people buy a new set of $10 clothes every season.
the solution is to buy higher quality clothes, but less often.
"Despite popular believe I don't think voting matters. "
In the US, if you could just get more registered voters in Texas to actually vote it would completely flip the balance of power between the Dems and Republicans. The issue, supposedly, is that Texas has a "disproportionate number of young, poor, and uneducated citizens." This means that the (actually quite popular) idea that voting doesn't matter mostly benefits the party that has adopted ignorance as most of its platform.
No civilization has ever voluntarily reduced resource consumption. The incentives and coordination issues make it impossible.
There is only one way to get what you want: build what is effectively a world government and coerce everyone to reduce their consumption. That includes people in countries such as India, China, and Indonesia. They'll need to be told by rich westerners that they can't do the things that we did to get rich. Good luck with that.
A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem. That means more cost-effective green technologies, geoengineering, and adaptive technologies (such as air conditioning, building underground, heat sinks, etc). Those would allow us to keep growing economically, maintain people's quality of life, and it doesn't fail if China or India continue on their current path.
> No civilization has ever voluntarily reduced resource consumption. The incentives and coordination issues make it impossible.
Just to take one counter-example, the UK has reduced CO2 consumption by 38% since 1990.
> A far more practical solution is to innovate our way out of the problem
Technological approaches are part of the solution, but it's far too risky to gamble the future of our civilisation on technical breakthroughs that may or may not occur. We're up against some tough physical limits and we certainly have no guarantee that we'll get any miracle breakthroughs in the next few decades.
Besides, with our current technology level we almost certainly have the ability to solve the problem now; we just lack the political will. How would a slight improvement in technology change that?
I must be missing something in your argument, because if countries can spontaneously reduce consumption without coordination, doesn't that solve the problem?
You say "No civilization has ever voluntarily reduced resource consumption", but civilisation as a whole has not needed to before. This is the first time I can think of that we have faced a global existential threat - or at least one we can do something about.
consumption or production? also, isn't CO2 increase offset by increase in forests (that consume CO2)? so reducing CO2 should lead to reduction in forests, right?
"Maintaining people's quality of life" is already a denial of reality. And "China or India will continue on their current path" as long as our air conditioning, computers, and other objects will be built over there.
I said, "…build what is effectively a world government and coerce everyone to reduce their consumption."
That article says we need to build a global organization that can coerce everyone reduce their carbon emissions. I don't see how my statement was incorrect.
I guess you can see "join the club or pay massive import tariffs" as coercion, but it's less of a world government than existing free trade agreements with their dispute handling mechanisms are.
I think for the foreseeable future, it will come down to proven adaptive technology to avert disaster. We should be preparing to source a lot more electricity, in a way which doesn't dig the hole deeper.
"Cost effective" is relative to peoples value set, green tech is kind of a hand wavy solution with out a comprehensive plan to deploy it as an integrated system.
Handwavy? Nuclear is real, EV automobiles are real, heat pumps for heating and AC are real, insulation for buildings, planting more trees in urban areas helps with the heat island, and creating more green is trivial and helps with storm water management.
Electrified rail.
Low CO2 concrete. Real, already used.
The list is almost literally endless.
But anyway, all of these are simply cost based choices. A carbon tax would literally overnight shift the consumer choices. And the cost effectiveness depends on the market, and that is usually the best we can get.
About voting. It is true that the movements you cite all relied on direct action in building awareness. However, actual changes came from executive and/or legislative action. And arguably none of them would have succeeded if the government had been unreceptive.
So I'd say it's lifestyle change, direct action and voting.
You're taking a human centric view here. As misanthropic as it may sound, it's entirely possible that this is just a correction in the tiny fraction of the great span of geologic time we happen to be living in. Similar to how the human body gets a fever to fight off an infection, we have the earth heating up to a level destroys the destructive pathogen - us.
I suppose it's possible that we get wise enough to deserve continue on as a species, but at this point I doubt it. I don't see anything in humanity that would lead me to believe it's capable of making the cohesive decisions to remedy the situation. Something else will come along in a few million years and maybe they'll do a better job of it.
We could also realize that short of the mass murder of countless souls typically required to institute radical cultural changes we could build systems to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere while we reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
Packaging and cargo are the two big problems, one for the plastic pollution, the other for the co2 emission. It's not meat consumption.
Cutting personal driving/travel is also good but more for environmental well being - eg less noise. It will not make any big changes in the longer run.
- Historically US and Europe have set the global trends. I believe the change must start here. If we lead the way the rest will follow.
- I don't have any (direct) influence on the Chinese government. I am gonna do my part and hope that like-minded people in China will do theirs.
- A fair share of Chinese emissions are actually our emissions anyway. Haven't we outsourced our industry to China? What's the US - China trade "imbalance"?
I've lost hope.
The 3 big issues that I think prevents us solving it are
1. Tragedy of the commons
When a country/company wants to make money by damaging the environment in the process, the money come to the country/company now, but the damage is spread world-wide. If the pollution would stay only in that country/city, it would be different. So, the choice is natural, especially considering government 4-year terms.
2. We always put ourselves first, rest of the city/country much further, and rest of the world... doesn't matter. What people want, by human nature, is to satisfy their own needs & comfort.
Examples:
* Why wait for a bus or use an electric bike when one can just drive a 2 tonnes car to move oneself? It's comfortable and cheap.
* USA-specific, but spreading to other countries as well: people huge SUV-style cars to transport 1-2 persons, when a small one could do the job as well.
* Norway refuses to drill for billions of barrels of oil in Arctic, leaving ‘whole industry surprised and disappointed’. Government made the right choice, but a few (prosperous already) affected by making less money complain: https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/norway-oil-drillin...
* The Bełchatów Coal mine & Power station in Poland. Hundreds of people employed there, they are happy with it. Should the plant be closed to stop pollution? What about our jobs? No way! And no, getting only 20% of salary for free (basic income) and having to learn stuff to maybe find a new job in renewables is not acceptable. So, the coal plant goes on, but it's easier to point to China for doing the same (with more plants, of course).
3. Delayed effects of current actions
The environment effects of what a one person/community/country does, bad or good, are hard to see in the short term. Only the downsides are clearly visible in the present. So, taking the correct action is quite hard.
Unfortunately, I don't see how to overcome these. Would be glad to be proved wrong!
FYI, my personal environment footprint is much smaller than the average in EU/USA, but we are too few to make an impact and others won't listen/change.
To cheer you up a bit - the good news is that, apparently, it only takes about 3.5% of the population to take an active stance on something to effect change
> FYI, my personal environment footprint is much smaller than the average in EU/USA, but we are too few to make an impact and others won't listen/change.
What leaves me hopeless is that any lifestyle restrictions Americans might make are being vastly outpaced by population growth in countries that are doing much less (personally and nationally) than the US to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
At the national level I believe the problem is slightly easier (though still extremely difficult). We generally have effective national institutions, so we "just" have to convince the populace that the pain is worth the gain. It's easier to stomach a little bit of pain for the common good as long as people believe that everybody else is also doing their part.
Same. Given the vastly disproportional amount of power between the super rich and the rest, it doesn't look like any real change will happen any time soon (at least before it's too late). I think the only way real change could happen is if we have violent action - the type the results in many killed, but given how technology has pacified even the most angry, no such action will happen any time soon (until it's too late).
All these suggestions are just temporary solutions at best, as long as the root cause is still in place: overpopulation.
Perhaps at this point in time we could just make things work by cutting back our lifestyles: but 20 or 30 years later the grown population would again need more food and more natural resources.
And hungry people don't care about changing the world but about getting food for today, sustainable or not.
Why is it unhelpful to point out the fact that we're overlooking the root cause of the current problems?
Of course I would love to have provided the solution for world's overpopulation as well but I admit that I don't have it. Yet, somebody else here might.
In my opinion you're putting the bar way too high if you require anybody on this forum to only reply to a discussion when he/she not only can point out a failure in the arguments but has the correct solution as well.
Finally, you are putting some rather dubious solution in my mouth with your comment "What is your point? Should we kill everybody over 70 years old?". Of course I didn't have that solution in mind.
GP said the rest of the discussion is about a temporary solution, but in the longer run overpopulation is the root cause which needs to be addressed.
I don't agree that overpopulation is the root cause, and I'm not a fan of talking about it much either. However, assume for the sake of argument that it is:
Reducing Earth population in the long run doesn't have to involve harming anyone.
For example, we could use changes to politics, technology and culture to provide better skills, education, even healthcare and assisting the old to live longer, and assist with more fulfilling lifestyle aspirations, and generally empower as many people as we can to lead happier lives.
Much of the scientific study we have suggests that will both reduce world population and improve quality of life across the board, because of how humans make choices about reproduction.
Nobody needs to be killed, nobody needs to have medicine withdrawn, nobody needs to be sterilised or even discouraged from having children. No odious racism or elitism or eugenics is required.
It's enough, to just improve lives, and it looks very much as though humans may naturally reduce their population replacement rate in the long run.
So that leaves only the climate problem in the shorter run, for which "temporary solutions" could be good enough.
You might be absolutely right about the root cause, but as a solution it's completely infeasible. To limit climate change to 2 degrees C, we need drastic action within the next ten years. The only way to drastically reduce the population in a ten year time span is through the use of bombs and bullets, but that solution would do far more environmental damage and require more industrialization than it would eliminate.
The underlying point is that any fix needs to be (as) insensitive (as possible) to population levels, since they will rise and wipe out any emissions cuts achieved by 'hairshirt' lifestyle changes. (I read somewhere that a westerner becoming vegetarian actually has very little impact on their CO2 emissions anyway).
A bigger deal than population increase is that energy use is going to rise massively with just the population we have, as people move out of energy poverty.
Reducing overpopulation is a solution, not a very popular one.
Earth can sustain 20 billion humans that live a vegan lifestyle and use virtual reality instead of travelling as mentioned by Martin Reese during a talk at the Long Now foundation not too long ago.²
The current mechanisms of supporting the population are fossil fuel intensive and gradually destroying everything around them. Depleted aquifers, polluted lakes and streams, etc. etc.
Meat production requires a lot more energy for the same amount of nutrition than plant based foods. That's an unavoidable effect of the animals eating plants (or even worse: other animals (e.g. tuna fish eating other fish)) as only a small fraction, about 10% of the energy absorbed by the plants can be converted into meat.
By eating vegetarian you cut one or maybe several factors of ~ 0.1 out of the equation. I'm not vegetarian but have reduced my meat consumption by a lot while not having the feeling that I miss anything.
Well, not feeling anything is not enough. Specially because you're doing Confirmation Bias. Plants do not have the same amounts of nutrients as meat. Vitamind D, A, K, B, B12, carnite, heme Iron, etc. How do you plan to get those without meat?
I am not sure about vegan diet but I have many friends who have been vegetarians(include dairy products in their food) their whole life and are healthy. Have never heard of a link between being vegetarian and vitamin deficiency. I presume as long as we eat a wide variety of vegetables and lentils, it should be fine. NHS seems to support the case as well:
Sure, that's something to keep in mind and the reason why I did not go full vegetarian but just reduced my meat intake.
Edit: I was not talking about missing vitamins when I said "missing". I was talking about missing something as in suffering from practising self-denial.
Somehow, vegans seem to do fine. B12 supplements are necessary, and D supplementation is recommended for everyone regardless of diet where I live, but if we really could not survive without meat, I think we'd know about it by now.
B12 you get from suplements is not the same (structure) b12 you get from natural sources. There are risks of taking those if it is from cyanocobalamin.
Currently animals raised for meat consumption get B12 injections too. What vegan do is just making the loop more efficient by taking the "injection" themselves.
Its complicated, but not eating meat would account for somewhere between 3-8% reduced greenhouse gas emissions. And as more of the world's population becomes "first world" demand is going to go up unless we start reducing cultural dependence on meat throughout our diets.
Like most things in the modern world, an accurate answer is nuanced.
The most sustainable way to farm would be to open pastured cattle, pigs, and sheep which would drop manure in a fallow field and add tons of organic nutrients to the soil - as happens in nature. That pasture would then be used to grow crops the next year, as the animals are rotated to another area. When an area is only used for growing vegetables, there is a net depletion of natural nutrients that have to be supplemented with external input.
The worst part of agriculture is farming ONLY beef or ONLY dairy or ONLY vegetables on acreage. I'm going to risk being contrarian to the HN crowd - but farming can't be automated in a sustainable way. The ecosystem is far too multivariate and interrelated. Sure, you can make a smarter tractor, but that land will be barren in 40 more years. Automation only works at scale, but nature does not divide into neat discrete categories without some sort of tradeoff in biodiversity or long-term resilience
In Montana, that sort of agriculture would quickly destroy the soil.
It only takes a few passes with a plow to turn it into desert, so pretty much the only way of getting calories from land in Montana is by grazing cattle or bison.
Kind of irrelevant though, ranch land in Montana only support a few cattle per square mile.
I'm a big proponent of no-till farming. There are some interesting experiments with intensive small-scale farming with introducing compost and mulch to more or less barren areas, which provide enough nutrition to grow 'compost crops' which can supplement the soil further. It might be an interesting place to try carbon-recapture projects and build a microclimate.
I don't know enough about Montana, but I'm mostly worried about what monoculture farms are doing to the fertility of the Midwest.
Zero-till is awesome. Most of the farmers in Saskatchewan aren't quite fully zero-till but till a lot less than they used to. But zero-till is not organic, so the masses think it's bad.
Doesn't matter from a CO2 point of view. Sheep are better than cattle in this regard, but you still have to transport sheep, feed them crops in the winter, and so on. The net CO2 cost is still high. You're better off from an efficiency point of view in using that energy to grow more vegetables. We could probably grow forests for the carbon capture on most Welsh hillsides where sheep are grazed.
But doesn't a vegetarian diet require more hectares than a meat based one? Livestock farming will emit more emissions per hectare, but I don't think we have enough hectares of arable land to feed 7.7 billion people with vegetarian diets alone.
Particularly organic vegetarian diets need a lot of land.
Here is a land use graphic from Our World In Data that also includes information on what fraction of consumed calories and proteins are provided by the uses.
I totally recognise this. In this example, and the comment below, you measure in unit of nutrition (which I agree is the important factor), but no one has disputed that a human diet from plants compared to meat would not require more usage of arable land. Humans require a larger variety of food than livestock does, so you can't just use efficient (efficient as in terms of nutrition per hectare) plants for humans.
My concern is that we don't have enough land for this, and the fear/threat of overpopulation is already upon us. And has been for decades.
"The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
> But doesn't a vegetarian diet require more hectares than a meat based one?
The animals we eat are mostly fed by what is cultivated on the arable land, exactly because of the modern habits of everybody eating meat every day. Most of the animals never see the pastures. The demand is too big and getting much bigger.
So we feed the animals, and most of the energy stored in their food is converted to the maintenance of the life of the animal, not the meat you get when you kill it.
Compare that with feeding the humans directly (with mostly vegetarian diet): most of the animal food you grow, transport and feed to the animals never end up becoming meat.
Am I missing something or your statement sounds like livestock do not require land to grow their food?
Example from ten percent law [0]:
> Sun releases 1000 J of energy, then plants take only 100 J of energy from sunlight; thereafter, a deer would take 10 J from the plant. A wolf eating the deer would only take 1 J. A human eating the wolf would take 0.1J, etc.
We can go directly from plants to people instead of using land, energy and resources to grow plants to feed animals for human consumption with 10% efficiency.
Don't the animals themselves need a load of veggies? And only a small proportion of that becomes cow/pig/etc. So if that land were just used directly for human consumption, you'd need less of it.
Total emissions per unit of nutrition is the relevant factor.
The only way that meat could win on either metric is if livestock are able to subsist on a diet far less varied than humans; essentially if they are better able to convert lower quality feedstock into higher quality meat.
Livestock mostly lives on soy and corn, things that humans can eat too (or, growing on lands that could produce human food). Some meat can be had in a sustainable way, animals are part of a sustainable agriculture as they can eat food waste or graze on low productivity (or recovering) lands, while naturally adding fertilizer to the soil. The current level of industrial meat production is quite far from that.
The idea that animals only eat food that humans can't consume is very strange. The animals get fed whatever is cheapest on the market, even if that involves burning the rainforest and depleting its soil permanently or feeding them skittles.
Our baseline should be what is required for a healthy body and brain. We can go up from there.
Going down from the current level is farcical. We're in a crisis.
I like me an avocado as much as the next person, but if they need a 500% tax (invented, I don't actually know) to incorporate externalities, they need it. End of.
Like, seriously. It doesn't matter what we "want" at this point. Carbon needs pricing or we are totally fucked.
One intermediary goal that is interesting is to try and aim for 40 pounds of meat per year or less. I forget where I read this, I think it's average meat consumption in a non-US country.
Anyway it is a worthy goal but people shouldn't think they are doing their part of they are successful. I believe the numbers are that if all cows disappeared tomorrow, that'd take care of something like 5% of our worldwide carbon-equivalent emissions.
We need a moral change more than anything else. Otherwise nobody will be motivated enough. Not all the information in the world will convince someone who doesn't care.
I used to be a bit baffled how people could say "fake news" at obvious facts and data and science. Then I read something Fulton Sheen said: never think too much about what someone says, but why they say it. He made this point about atheists, saying that they only choose not to believe in God so they can continue living an evil life. The same can be said of people who deny climate change and the seriousness of the matter, or any clear and demonstrable truth really.
only if civil disobedience produces fewer results than "coherent actionable efforts". The US has quite a long history of effective civil discontent, the highway revolts and the civil rights movement of course being two examples.
To be honest I hear a lot of people talking about actionable efforts all the time, but if they're so actionable, why aren't they happening? Isn't that the definition of the term?
While I agree that something has to change, I don‘t agree with what you propose. The demands of climate activists in Europe are mostly completely unrealistic and would mean drastic life style changes for people with smaller incomes, while others would just pay the premium. What a country like Germany, with comparably high emissions per capita but all in all irrelevant contributions to worldwide emissions, needs to show is that it‘s possible to push climate-friendly politics that work with (and through!) the economy, not against it. Maybe this could lead to a change.
20 years ago, Germany raised taxes on fuel, but that didn’t make anyone drive less. I’m guessing the same would happen with a tax on CO2. So I‘m favoring emissions allowances: Politics dictates a threshold of how much CO2 is permitted and gives out allowances, then the price develops on the market.
But it feels like, for those „rebellions“, capitalism is the root of all evil.
Not only did it not reduce fuel consumption, the money was also used to fix holes in our social security system and almost nothing was done for the environment. Turned out people are dependent on cars. And they really are, to a degree that cannot be satisfied by public transport.
People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
I think the current little pupil rebellion is something very worth supporting. But their demands are naive.
Your proposition would be a more efficient mechanism.
Currently there is a discussion about giving people a fixed amount of money for the additional costs this tax would cause.
> Turned out people are dependent on cars. And they really are, to a degree that cannot be satisfied by public transport.
It turned out the taxes are not high enough. If people really were depended on cars, but were hurt by the high taxes, car makers would sell smaller cars. They don't. Extremely big cars, totally unneeded by almost anyone, are still the most popular models. Why? Cause the costs of having and using one are not as high as you make it sound.
> People in Germany advocating an additional tax have either never worked, payed bills, are stupendously rich, just insane or don't have responsibilities towards others.
Yeah, sure. Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above. It couldn't be that they tend to have a bit more foresight than you.
> Sorry, there is a limit on how much you can use taxes and that limit is staunchly in the red because of naive promises made in the past.
Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years for significant parts of the population. The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages. A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none).
> It turned out the taxes are not high enough. If people really were depended on cars, but were hurt by the high taxes, car makers would sell smaller cars. They don't. Extremely big cars, totally unneeded by almost anyone, are still the most popular models. Why? Cause the costs of having and using one are not as high as you make it sound.
No, no, and no. Cars are getting more and more efficient, and there are many affordable efficient cars today. It‘s just that people in rich countries like to display their wealth by getting a big car. But there are still people that live in the countryside, who have no other means of transportation, that‘d get hit pretty hard by even higher taxes on fuel. It‘s how they get to work, how they get their groceries, how they get to their friends‘ place.
It‘s easy to renounce something if you‘re not dependent on it.
> A problem which hits parts of the population that usually don't even pay taxes (or if they do almost none)
What part of the population exactly are you referring to? Low-income households? Tax evaders?
> No, no, and no. Cars are getting more and more efficient, and there are many affordable efficient cars today.
Which people don't buy most of the time. By your explanation many people seem to be either rich or the price of cars (over lifetime) is still too low. I don't see the majority of people being rich, so that only leaves the other option.
> But there are still people that live in the countryside, who have no other means of transportation, that‘d get hit pretty hard by even higher taxes on fuel. It‘s how they get to work, how they get their groceries, how they get to their friends‘ place.
People in the country-side are the first to state that higher rent is the price of living in a city -- to turn that around: Higher transportation costs are the price of living in the country-side.
> Low-income households? Tax evaders?
The first. You don't pay taxes below a certain income, low wages still hit you. Tax evaders are usually not hit by either.
Now you‘re just imagining things. In 2018, 36.5% of the newly registered cars in Germany were small or compact[0]. Also have a look at this statistic [1].
> higher rent is the price of living in a city [...] Higher transportation costs are the price of living in the country-side.
Exactly. Now think about this: They live in the countryside BECAUSE they cannot afford to live in the city, which ends up being cheaper even if you have to pay for a car, especially with the current housing market situation in cities.
> In 2018, 36.5% of the newly registered cars in Germany were small or compact[0]
To quote your first source:
> Mehr als die Hälfte aller Neuzulassungen entfielen auf die Segmente Kompaktklasse (22,0 %), SUVs (18,3 %), Kleinwagen (14,5 %) und Mittelklasse (10,9 %). Die SUVs verzeichneten mit +20,8 Prozent den deutlichsten Zuwachs in der Jahresbilanz, gefolgt von den Wohnmobilen (+15,5 %) und der Oberklasse (+12,4 %).
SUVs were the second biggest segment and had the highest increase. The third highest increase was for luxury cars. 36,5% for small or compact also means over 60% weren't small or compact. Your source seems to support my conclusions pretty well.
> Exactly. Now think about this: They live in the countryside BECAUSE they cannot afford to live in the city, which ends up being cheaper even if you have to pay for a car, especially with the current housing market situation in cities.
Most poor people live in cities. People in the country side usually live there because they want big houses and "live in the green", not because they cannot afford rent. On the contrary, poor people usually have to live in the city despite the high rent, cause that's where low-wage jobs exist.
> Your source seems to support my conclusion pretty well.
Not quite. You said „which people don‘t buy most of the time“ (referring to efficient cars), which could not be more wrong judging by both of my sources. But sure, people by SUVs, which I never denied. In fact, I also think that‘s a bad thing.
True, some people do indeed buy cars that I would think are way too large. But you should pay close attention to the demographic which does.
> Everyone who doesn't agree with you is one of the above.
It was no judgement. I was also on that train a while ago.
> The problem in Germany right now isn't high taxes, it's low wages.
Partially agreed. There is no reference as to what constitutes too high taxes honestly, but the point stands. Having low wages doesn't really allow for tax increases either.
> Taxes in Germany have never been lower than in the last 20 years
Not true at all. Income taxes maybe, but not overall tax contribution. What I mean is the quota of all taxes combined (Steuerquote). We are setting record after record here. We can be proud of ourselves...
Seriously? Give out certificates (yes, that idea is not new, it's just limited to certain industries at the moment) and then let the price develop?
Those certificates would be a rare resource. How many of those would the non-rich be able to afford, eh?
If you look at movements such as extinction rebellion, reducing social (including financial) inequality is part and parcel of what they demand, exactly because the rich have not been paying their fair share. This is true on a national level, as well as a global level.
And yes, this all requires drastic lifestyle changes. That's the point. No lifestyle change, no climate effect. Simple as that.
I agree but how do you think this drastic lifestyle change look would look like? The price of emission certificates would be reflected in the products you buy, of course.
That is a huge part of the criticism against a tax for households that are just responsible for 1/5th of emissions and I wouldn't include them in the emission trade at all. Because even today people don't waste significant energy for basic needs like heating, so any instrument can only be that effective.
And corporations are currently the only ones paying for every tonne of CO² they emit. And you want to change that to be extended to everyone... You might argue that they should pay more, but...
Of course people in many political parties are rubbing their hands that you actually want to increase tax burdens. Money solves problems, right?
Looking at how much the top tax brackets (income and corporate) have moved over the last decades, I have an idea where to get the money to solve things.
Plus, done like that, it would actually be a relative benefit to lower income tiers.
Of course, that would still mean no flights or meat for poorer people, while rich people could afford those luxuries. But they need to be luxuries, at least until we figure out how to provide them in a climate neutral way.
They demand that because they are Marxists, but Marxism assumes that the entire system will soon collapse and must be replaced with Marxism, which was probably a sensible prediction when Marx made his observations, but hasn't been the case for 2 centuries.
So Marxists try to make it come true, by doing destructive things like the rebellion.
> Would you accept it‘s ok to rebel to force the politicians to lower the cap?
If people rebel for realistic solutions I‘m all for it!
> wouldn‘t a lower cap lead to the „drastic life style changes for people“ anyway (at least in the short term while the economy adapts)
Yeah, probably! Surely not to the same extent like the carbon tax demanded by climate activists. But the idea is to incentivize companies to find more climate-friendly solutions. Certainly some companies would lose their competitive ability if they depend on high emissions, though.
Flying has been seized upon by various groups because it is an easy target and can also be blamed on this awful thing called capitalism (gasp!).
But the reality is that there many, many things to do that are more effective before even starting to look at aviation.
I don't understand the point of calling for "civil disobedience" (which is usually an euphemism for blocking roads and airports, and alienating public opinion in the process). What does it achieve? If you want to use your individual power do it constructively by changing your everyday routine and behaviour.
A transatlantic flight produces about as much carbon dioxide as a typical European produces in a year. Not flying is a very effective thing you can do personally. Globally flying is not that important because almost nobody can afford it.
> A transatlantic flight produces about as much carbon dioxide as a typical European produces in a year
Yes, that's the usual 'argument' except that this does not even seem to be true (return flight from London to New York seems to emit about 1t per passenger when a typical Brit otherwise contributes 7+t, so that's 1/14th of personal annual emissions per flight).
In any case, not everyone flies over the Atlantic every year, so that overall and in the grand scheme of things aviation should not be held as a priority.
I agree that we shouldn't focus on behavioral changes when the important part is an unprecedented buildout of renewable energy and improvements in building insulation and transport efficiency. I still think that choosing not to fly is one of the easiest things one can do as a westerner that has a reasonably big impact.
We have been systematically strip mining the planet for decades. We need to take a step back and calm down.
If you're banging through your credit card, you knock it all out. You start from the bottom up, not the top down. You look at what you absolutely need and slowly add things back in.
While I agree with you overall I've been sliding more and more into fear and despondency.
We need to put our countries on a 'war footing'. We have so many people who could be working to fix these problems stuck in offices doing stuff that there isn't really a need for (i.e. most all software development) because that's what the 'market' rewards. We need to completely overhaul what we think of as value and how we reward it. I don't see how that's possible under the current capitalist system and I don't see the majority of people supporting alternative systems.
Imagine if we deployed the people power and innovation that currently gets wasted in competition between rival social media applications and redirected it to doing something about climate change. It's not possible for individuals to make that change however because at the end of the day they need to pay their landlord (who I regard as largely parasitic leeches on productivity) and buy food at the shops; and the roles that would allow them to contribute to this don't exist in the number, or at the wages, required.
The cost of moving to zero emissions here in the UK was estimated as being £1 trillion so it was kind of kicked down the road to maybe slightly after 2050. Which is just mad. Sure China and India might be bigger emitters but someone has to make the first move. The innovations can then be shared for free with those countries, we can spend money to help them transition. This is our long term survival, we need to be less squeamish about taking what we need from "private property" (read tax havens, the stock market, etc). But clearly these changes aren't achievable at the speed and scale needed solely through voting. Democracies tend to limit themselves to a small range of acceptable views around a midpoint and take a long time to change even if there is a moral imperative, like the previous changes you mention; so I don't see how they can react at the speed necessary to fix this.
In addition addressing climate change without addressing social justice won't work. As the article mentions the people most affected by this are going to overwhelmingly be poor and in less-developed countries. They're going to need to come somewhere when their regions become uninhabitable and while it's possible our response is to erect barriers (see Europe, US, etc) or build prison camps from a moral standpoint it can't be.
> While I agree with you overall I've been sliding more and more into fear and despondency.
I've gone through that stage too. Then I came out and decided I'm gonna do what I can, however little the impact might be. I am not hopeful or optimistic. I don't expect to succeed or fail. I am just gonna work on it.
> The cost of moving to zero emissions here in the UK was estimated as being £1 trillion so it was kind of kicked down the road to maybe slightly after 2050.
Got a source?
My share of that is 16 grand (1T/63M).
Let's just bloody do it. My god. That's a biscuit, it really is.
Your net share is a lot less than 16 grand. That 1T is money that would be collected and spent in country, creating tens of thousands of jobs with its accompanying spinoffs. And since the economy is a giant circle, much of that 16 grand would indirectly come back to you.
Circa £1k per person per year for 15 years. For that you take a global lead in mitigating climate change, you gain energy independence from Russia and the Middle East, a huge reduction in air and other pollution, and potentially become a world leader in renewable energy technology. Seems like an absolute bargain. Please tax me now.
So > £1 trillion by 2050, not sure if that includes assumptions about cost reductions in renewables by then though so I'd assume compressing the timescale increases the estimate.
Either way it needs doing and it would seem that 2050 is going to be too late.
I doubt we could afford to "just do it". It's not a biscuit, because as far as I can tell, most people in the UK don't have 16 grand to spare.
Recirculation, and doing it over a number of years, change the figure into something tractable of course.
But that just makes it an economics question - does the UK have £1Tn available, and over how long. I'm thinking probably no today, and yes between now and 2050 if they aren't stupid with the economy.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying but, to an extent, I find it even more mind boggling, because not only is the human capital misallocated to at best, local optimization of superficial products, but the market most likely would reward people if they focused on other problems.
It just feels like people are suffering from a massive streetlight syndrome where they feel like the only valuable thing they can contribute with their skills (which includes the ability to control unprecedented computing power) is more inconsequential mobile apps.
It reaches an even more ridiculous point when you consider that Silicon Valley is considered "hubristic" by a lot of pundits. What?! No! Silicon Valley's ambitions are underwhelming at best. We should expect a lot more from it.
> While I agree with you overall I've been sliding more and more into fear and despondency.
That's because the carbon-taxers are manipulative and playing on your emotions. You need to feel that it's an absolute dire situation that needs rectifying immediately. They believe the only way they'll get their way is shouting above everyone else.
Truth is, some of us are starting to feel 'I'll lite the world on fire myself before I capitulate to your infantile tactics.' You need to adjust your strategy to offer incentives to actual people that have actual problems, not blame and shout.
And of course it's pure coincidence that draconian measures of control over the populace are being justified by the spectre of climate change, brought to you courtesy of our child-messiah Greta.
I don't think the solution is less flying and less driving, as we obviously can't take a step back in our mobility. This kind of "solutions" is what puts people off. The solution is more green tech and more green power production. And driving those can be done by buying more of those products, and boycotting any products that generate pollution.
Frankly, I think your attitude is precisely what we need to change in order to solve the climate crisis. The solution, the only solution is to change people's perspective such that they see that these things are important.
The kind of "solutions" that involve not changing any of the behaviours that are causing the problems are the ones that are not really solution.
On the flip side, the “solutions” that boil down to admonishing people not to do patently useful things are politically impossible, unless they propose a solution to the new problem they’re creating.
The people so egar to keep up these behaviors should solve that problem themselves. They aren't entitled to have other people carry the burden of supporting their wasteful lifestyle.
Recent history notwithstanding, politics is fundamentally about consensus and compromise. Regardless of the strength of your personal belief, change won’t happen until you convince a majority of people (or their representatives) to vote for your specific plan. Ostracism strengthens the opinions of people on both sides of the issue; it works directly against what has to happen to make actual progress.
Frankly, you are jumping to conclusions. I don't drive a car, despite being a former “petrol head”. I am stating a hard truth, but apparently hard truths are hard to swallow on either side. If anything, you should chance your attitude.
My claim is that the realities of our climate are harder than political realities. Changing people's minds is a necessary part of a solution, so if we can't do that then there is no hope at all.
Tough luck, we're all going to be inconvenienced whether we like it or not, that's the hard truth. People will need to change their habits to help out, or they'll eventually be forced to. Easier to transition of our own volition.
> People will need to change their habits to help out
> or they'll eventually be forced to
I think we overestimate most people's desire to do anything for the benefit of others. My fear is that a lot of the worst offenders of that are people who are quite likely operating on the basis they'll be dead before we feel the absolute effects.
As much as it's the only real solution, I don't think we can rely on regression to drive action. That's why the sugar for the pill of renewables will be eventual cheaper prices. We need to make the alternatives more appealing (or, at least some decent narrative to make them seem more appealing).
What if we _can't_ make the alternatives more appealing?
What if, for example, infinite disposable plastic bottles are actually the easiest solution, and the sustainable solutions are actually a bit more work (e.g. water fountains and bottles you carry around).
Yes, sure, perhaps we can fix landfill. Devil's advocate though - it is definitely not the case that every aspect of our current ecological nightmare has a win-win solution.
We _need_ to start pricing in externalities, whether people moan about it or not. Seriously - this is putting the seat belt on in a car level stuff. Deal with it.
Is the morning after a night out a regression? Not the hangover; the every-day life. No - it's absurd to paint it that way - the high life was the abnormality.
> What if we _can't_ make the alternatives more appealing?
> We _need_ to start pricing in externalities
I might've been arguing the OP at crossed purposes, as my point seems compatible with yours, just framed differently at the point of delivery. We can't rely on the population to just decide "I'm going to do the right thing today". We make it a non-choice as you say. That can either be "it's cheaper/easier/better" or "you'll be locked up if not". It's quite a compelling narrative either way.
Just expecting large swathes of quite evidently moronic people (without delving too far into politics, if you agree the current political climate is as the result of ignorance, that's a sh*t-tonne of ignorant people out there - on the order of billions of people worldwide) to decide to look out for the interests of us as a collective is frankly wrong.
I agree with you - but I think we need to move past the "do it for the planet/species" argument as there's a lot of people who don't care and will be ridiculous in their stubbornness. The scale of it just doesn't work when trying to convince people. But show them how their heating bills will be cheaper and that they'll get a 6-month suspended if they throw a bottle in the sea, and things might change sooner.
I do bad things all the time because I have little agency.
I'm planning to make some major changes to move towards that, but still, if every store around me uses plastic in food etc I can't skip it.
We need to price in externalities. It's that simple. We need to cut this bullshit about the 'short-term economy' or phasing things out over 40 years or whatever; this isn't an emotional argument.
If we don't account for the cost of pollution we are going to kill ourselves.
> We _need_ to start pricing in externalities, whether people moan about it or not. Seriously - this is putting the seat belt on in a car level stuff. Deal with it.
Hmm, no it's not on the same level. Perhaps you can deal with it because you can afford to spend more on goods, but people in poverty will rightly moan.
Again, we either reduce consumption, stop emitting (and likely have to capture) CO2, etc, or we kill ourselves.
It does not matter how much the child wails, if it is time to leave the arcade, one must go.
> can afford to spend more on goods
We must all use less. This is not a matter of bits of coloured paper; externalities must be priced in to force the market in the correct direction.
To take an example: if plastic bottles were banned worldwide tomorrow, or suddenly cost 10 USD per, this would have approximately zero effect on those in poverty other than shuffling some jobs around a bit.
You made a silly ad hominem about me potentially being able to afford to ignore increased prices. So let's go ahead and assume the externalities are priced so high that it's an effective ban for all but 0.1% or whatever.
It doesn't make a difference. We are not playing some identity politics game about who gets more or less.
> You made a silly ad hominem about me potentially being able to afford to ignore increased prices. So let's go ahead and assume the externalities are priced so high that it's an effective ban for all but 0.1% or whatever.
Pricing in the externalities doesn't mean we selectively jack the prices up on the "bad stuff" like plastic bottles (where you get to define what's bad). It means that the price of nearly everything goes up because the cost of raw materials, shipping, etc goes up since everyone on the supply chain has to pay for the pollution they're generating now.
> These people often have kids, and they do a lot for them. They need to understand that it is all in vain if they don't do anything.
And yet, lots of those same people with kids are the reason we're in the current political climate. Deliberate choices designed to cause outweighted impact on the younger generations.
I don't want to veer too much off course here, but look at the demographics around the Brexit vote. Those are large swathes of parents across the country who've made a decision that they wont live to see the ramifications of, with those younger generations almost entirely voting in the opposite direction.
Personally, I believe it's because the issues at play are far too large to comprehend. We need to change the message, and it needs to be localised and individualised as much as possible. However, that's expensive, and the people with the money are the ones less likely to want to help get that message out there...
> Those are large swathes of parents across the country who've made a decision that they wont live to see the ramifications of, with those younger generations almost entirely voting in the opposite direction.
Disagree. Leave/remain is just as 50/50 among my generation (young people) in my area. Anecdotal to be sure.
> I think we overestimate most people's desire to do anything for the benefit of others.
True, which is why we need a legislation framework to combat this problem. We need to do this together, as one human race (also helping certain other races who have it tough such as other mammals). Which won't happen when a country as important as the USA elects someone who "does not believe in climate change".
Actually in a society, changing one's habits have no effect in human relations if it's not reciprocated by the other party.
If your municipality doesn't respond to your transportation needs, your employer doesn't allow you to do remote-work, your professor insists on face-to-face meetings, how can changing your habits can reduce your carbon footprint?
We need to be more flexible in our ways and we shouldn't drive the society and the system this hard for so-called human and organization efficiency.
Yeah, that's why people don't mind the likes of Trump, because people hate hard truths and changing habits, and they keep being told they need to suffer for change to happen. I think radical change in how we generate energy and how we use it is possible without a painful transition, we just need to push harder. The gap between combustion engines and horses was so wide in terms of innovation, that people thought they were some sort of mystical creation. So the question is why can't we come up with something similarly far ahead of our time, to allow for even more travel, even more power, and with radically less impact over our planet?
I don't think taking the plane to go to cheap generic touristic destinations, driving 2000kg of steel to move 1 human being, eating fruits and veggies shipped from the other side of the world or eating meat 2 times a day, everyday is intrinsically part of the human nature.
And if it is let's continue and end it all because it's just plain sad. What a way to go !
What human nature? If the last few centuries have thought us anything is that "human nature" doesn't really mean anything. It's way more arbitrary than people trying to find truths in lobster hierarchies would let you believe.
Our "underlying perceptions" for most things concerned with society are nigh completely incompatible with that of Shakespare and most certainly Machiavelli.
Sure we can still understand thinkers of old in a limited capacity, but that's not due to us thinking like them or even experiencing the world like them as our experience is coloured by the concepts we use. We can understand them because of the continuity of society, the constant translation of the old into the new.
Capitalism can only exist now because of how much those underlying assumptions have changed.
Uh... have you actually read Machiavelli? What in The Prince, exactly, does not fully apply to people today? (As long as you don't get literal minded and say we don't live in a monarchy or something.)
Don't go by the dictionary definition of machiavellian. He really wasn't saying things that are hard to believe. He was really just pointing out the sorts of manifestations of human nature that surround us if we don't blind ourselves and refuse to see it.
Oh. Well your original post was saying that human nature had changed radically over the past few centuries. I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.
When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
I don’t think it’s merely cultural continuation. We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
> Oh. Well your original post was saying that human nature had changed radically over the past few centuries.
I dispute the very concept of "human nature", it implies a platonic "human", a base which we can only uncover the details of. While in reality there doesn't appear to be such a thing.
> I mentioned the authors as evidence that the stuff they taught about human nature still applies.
It kind of does, changes in the "public consciousness" are more often subversive than radical, a lot of concepts Shakespeare popularised or came up with are still in common use, however it's not because he's unlayering the onion of "the human" concept, but because these concepts are useful and haven't been subverted or forgotten.
> When you said when we only understand them in a limited way I took that to mean you disagreed with me that the books have practical value still, and thus were not a good marker of an unchanging human nature. But that's mere contradiction of a claim, you didn’t argue anything directly to show that old authors are in fact hard to understand etc.
They of course still have practical value, when I say "in a limited capacity" I mean it in a more "glass-half full" way, a lot of context for these works has been lost forever and how a person reading a text understands a word relies more on his entire lifetime of experience than it does on the authors intent, good authors can generally bridge the gap easily, dead authors can't. So information is lost.
> We can likewise read Sun Tzu and recognize ourselves and our psyches in his stories. There is no cultural continuity with European authors there.
Unless you've brushed up on your ancient Chinese that's not really true, the cultural continuity here is the translator.
I suspect the cultural continuity is there but it is taken for granted and not noticed as oppossed to the "exotic". Like how most people don't see themselves as speaking with an accent.
This whole debate is like a doc telling a lung cancer patient who has recently started coughing blood to cut out smoking, but he's saying "but I need to smoke!"...
Based on the expectation that humans can't possibly, at this scale, organize themselves around good ideas like reducing consumption and fossil fuel use, we have no options at all and we're on a trajectory to extinction. If that seems extreme to say, just look at the evidence. Believing some other solution will appear is blind faith bordering on delusion.
Let them carry on. Perhaps our exction will be exactly what saves the planet! Our archeological records will serve only as a warning for whatever "intelligent" life evolves in the future ;-)
Not sure why this was voted down, it's true, extinction (or mass population reduction) of humans will go a long way towards letting the planet restore its biodiversity.
It seems like a flippant attitude, but it seems to be the way many people are treating climate change (probably because the worst effects won't hit for decades, when many of the people responsible (i.e. voters) will be dead.)
We're leaving an unsustainable mess for our children, I'd like to see some action in their lawsuit:
I think that’s the point - simply asking people to fly less and drive less and eat les meat will never ever ever work.
We need big carrots and big sticks in order to achieve things like less flying - that means government regulation, huge material incentives for not flying/driving/etc.
If only a politician could get elected by saying "more green stuff, then there'll be less refugees!". The populace would not bother to understand the relationship.
Also, yeah, maybe it's too late now. If only one could reload from a savegame and learn from experience next time around.
Amazingly now a lot of the "Western world" would prefer those other human beings die rather than suffer a downgrade of their comfortable lives...
The incentive model is simple -- just tax carbon sources, the markets will figure out the rest themselves.
Of course, it would have been better to phase in the taxes decades ago since some solutions (mass transit, for example) can take a decade or more to build.
Let's say someone comes to you and says that if you don't change certain behaviors then they will cook your children. Like, literally cook them to death. And you (maybe not at first, but eventually) believe the threat is real. Then I would say that it is wholly compatible with human nature for you to change your behavior even with no other benefit to yourself, even if you are very attached to that behavior.
At the same time, you're right -- the 2 missing pieces are believing the threat is real, and thinking that you can get by if lots of other people change their behavior instead. Which they won't any more than you will, but that leads us back to human nature again.
Because politicians can't sell going backwards. They can definitely sell going forwards, ie Green tech to the masses. If they weren't lobbied so hard by resources companies and unions we'd have been there along time ago.
So let's put self-regulation aside, you will never see it happen on a policy level because it won't be popular.
Same for emissions trading schemes, they're actually great things, but they aren't popular with the masses.
Anyway, let's drop The War on Terror and The war on Drugs and begin the War on Climate Change?
Why is less mobility necessarily "going backwards"? We have the technology for large-scale remote working, but companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons. If the government brought in regulations requiring companies to provide remote working as a choice, unless there was a good reason to require employees to be on-site, I don't think people would see that as "going backwards", so much as being forced to go forwards.
Your food is shipped (often by air), you go on holidays by plane, you drive cars etc, stopping that _is_ going backwards.
I'm not entirely saying I agree with people just flying around for the sake of it, but let's be honest, putting an end to most transport doesn't exactly seem like progress, let's also think of it this way, the problem is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, not traveling.
"companies still require employees to be on-site mostly for historical cultural reasons."
If you're a Doctor, truck driver, pilot, builder, fisherman etc, then how do you work remotely? The majority of the workforce can't just work remotely because knowledge workers can. Besides, data-centers also have a large environmental cost, remote work creates it's own mess.
I'm also a knowledge worker, but I just choose to live in the city close to my office and ride to work so I have a very small / no carboon footprint from transport.
I've also worked remote full-time, it wasn't for me, I think it has it's own set of issues.
None of that is going backward, it's the blowback of maintaining an unsustainable growth way past the equilibrium point. We call that "instability".
We got used to it but it doesn't mean it's the way to go. We're acting like spoiled kids discovering that no, you can't have it all, all the time, for free.
It seems a bit of a grand scheme of Prisoner's Dilemma. "If other people just drive less cars, I'll be able to keep driving mine. No, I won't quit driving mine, you quit yours, cuz I important!"
Driving cars is just an example, the other ones being flying less, procreating less, eating less meat.
Going backwards in the sense we're talking here is the only known way forward. (i.e. significantly reduced use of expensive transportation and consumer goods, having fewer children --real lifestyle changes.) The alternative is a destroyed ecosystem and likely lots of death and suffering. We need to sell people on the idea that we're doomed by the status quo, or else we're doomed. It sounds like hyperbole, but of course it isn't.
The fuel crisis of the 70s resulted in us 'going backwards' successfully by trading in the useless land yachts for less massive cars. The 70s is considered a miserable decade by motorheads ime but it eventually led to better cars and better design.
No, this was an example of why it won't work. THAT is essentially also THE reeason why communism doesn't work. When people are not forced to work to survive, they won't work. Those who work will see that people who don't work still get benefits, so why should they work? Soon nobody wants to work, because why should they.
The same is with cutting back on comfort of living. If I cut my comfort, but my neighbor don't and payoff is equal for us both, why should I suffer more than him? This is our basic species morality which we found even in apes [0].
I would not (but I have job I love and it's good paid), but about half people I know would stop working. If I hadn't wife from lower social class I wouldn't know those people and would probably say like you. Those people are REALLY not like Bill Gates. They typically have primary education, work in a job they don't like but don't have enough skills to have a better job and aren't intelligent enough to aquire those skills, even if they had free time. Some of them would just sit all day long before tv and/or go to bar to get party. Small minority would get constantly drunk, rest would just get bored, maybe if they had free time they would go visit some places and do nothing productive. But from my nearest social circle most of people I know would not stop working. Looking at voting polls, my social circle is a minority.
1. Filling out what you would like to do on a questionnaire is not the same as actually doing so.
2. You and your friends are probably not like the average person.
3. You were probably raised with the idea that it's very important, both financially and socially, to have a job. It might be a lot harder to raise your kids with these values if they grow up in a world where working or not working has no financial impact.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say: If people didn't have to do work that gets paid, then they wouldn't do the work that society needs/wants them to do. To the degree that markets work, money incentivizes people to do work that society feels is important.
A farmer might still plant, but decide to plant flowers instead of food. Or maybe they would plant exotic fruits instead of staple foods.
A programmer might still program, but they might decide to play with algorithm problems instead of developing medical software.
Same here, I am a dev and it's not bad at all, but in reality if working for money wasn't necessary I could read, make music, play games and have fun with my family. We are frugal anyway, 60% of what I make is going towards buying real estate to rent out for a passive income and then I will be able to indulge in the above while living off it.
Live. More seriously: I'd pick up new hobbies, try things I never had time to try, get better at music and cooking, dedicate more time to my well being (yoga, meditation, 9 hours of proper sleep every single nights), spend more time with my soon to pass away grandparents, grow my own food, shorten my endless list of "books you definitely should read but you don't have time to", hike a lot, probably do some volunteering to keep me busy when I want to feel like a useful citizen. Heck I'd even go back to university just for the sake of learning.
Not working means that you reclaim 50%+ of your awake time, and not any 50%, the 50% during which you spend most of your energy. I'm already living on ~70% of the min wage of my country, and I don't feel like I'm restraining myself at all so it wouldn't be such a big deal.
> spend more time with my soon to pass away grandparents, grow my own food... do some volunteering to keep me busy when I want to feel like a useful citizen
If you remove dotted predictions from your comic it suggests the temperature increase in the last 2000 years is about 0.3 - 0.4 Celsius degrees (also supported here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature...). This is pretty stable and is not matching past fluctuations, which are more accurately depicted here:
Another thing is that we're assuming that the current climate conditions on earth are becoming less optimal, which is unsupported. The current climate might actually be better. There are many examples, both negative but also positive, of the climate change.
It might be better, true (apart from the thermal limit thing in the article, that's a hard limit). But our civilization is set up for the climate of the last few hundreds of years, reflected in our distribution of cities and infrastructure.
If you were to change the sea level either way many cities would either be submerged or far from the sea they were close to since it's useful. If the precipitation patterns change the arable land distribution and ground/runoff water availability will change, the soils and landscapes are not adapted to that yet. Animal and plant behaviour will be different, but in many areas humans are dependent on them. Further out, if any of the atmospheric or ocean circulations change to a different pattern, it will change the local climates as well, with all and more of the above effects. To live in a fast-changing world is hard in itself too, it is unclear what to expect for the near and mid-future, making agricultural and infrastructure planning very hard.
So even if the end-state was preferable, the transition will be very painful, for us and the natural world.
Note that the data for the first graph you mention is heavily smoothed: "Because of the limitations of data sampling, each curve in the main plot was smoothed (see methods below) and consequently, this figure can not resolve temperature fluctuations faster than approximately 300 years." That means it shows slow fluctuations, but can never show rapid changes like the rapid increase in temperature we're seeing now (but note that the 2016 temperature is marked there with the arrow labeled "2016"). The other graph, the one that starts 2000 years ago, does show the recent rapid increase.
> If you remove dotted predictions from your comic it suggests the temperature increase in the last 2000 years is about 0.3 - 0.4 Celsius degrees
I don't see where you get the 0.3 - 0.4 from. Looking at the last 2000 years on the XKCD graph, the temperature in year 16 is a bit under the reference, and the temperature in year 2016 is about 0.8 degrees above the reference. That's easily double your 0.3 - 0.4.
> This is pretty stable and is not matching past fluctuations, which are more accurately depicted here
I don't understand how you come to that conclusion. Both the XKCD graph and the graph you mention (the Wikimedia graph covering years 0 - 2016) show that 2016 temperatures are clearly higher than anything else we've seen the last 2000 years. Also note the arrow marked "2016" on the long-time Wikimedia graph indiciating the 2016 temperature, much higher than any other datapoint on the graph. The graphs simply don't support your conclusion.
> Another thing is that we're assuming that the current climate conditions on earth are becoming less optimal, which is unsupported. The current climate might actually be better. There are many examples, both negative but also positive, of the climate change.
There is scientific evidence for more severe tropical storms, rising sea levels (causing severe problems for the large fraction of the world's population living close to the sea), droughts, more severe weather (we're already seeing problematically hot heat waves). What are the positive effects that offset those negative ones?
Anytime someone tells me to do less flying, driving or eating fcking meat, I link to [1] and say: STOP FCKING - or at least stop having children.
The most actionable item (that is of course MUCH harder than not eating meat) is doing something to to convince the nations with most children per woman [2] to have less. But this is not easy - joining organizations that would educate women and doing volunteering or even dangerous work is insanely hard. Not buying meat, recycling and not riding your car seems hard for western people and so you FEEL like you are doing something, but you are not.
I will not have children but do 50 transatlantic flights this year, eat all the meat, hell, I'll even teach myself to drive a car just to show off how useless these individual actions are. You can't convince the world, stop CHANGING the world and change yourself, seek data and find the most actionable item. Jeez!
You don't convince nations. Educating women, female employment and reduced child mortality make the fertility rate drop precipitously as a result. It's still an ongoing process but peak population growth rate was over 50 years ago.
But I want to feel like I am a good person. That's the reason I don't shop lift or beat up strangers in the street. It won't have any effect on national crime rates, but that is not the point. My individual actions matter to me. I am just a tiny cog in a vast machine.
I think you are just signalling a different kind of virtue. You are scientific, sceptical and ever so smart. But you are not saving the world either.
I agree on uselessness of individual actions but barring a couple of countries that don't follow the trend of declining number of children as they get richer, it wouldn't work. An entire family from Chad has less carbon footprint than one american teenager
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/05/ip-on-carbon-tax....
From the end:
"Climate policy was headed to this kind of bipartisan technocratic resolution in the 1990s before it became a tool of partisan warfare. The challenge, from both sides, is to remove the political baggage that climate policy has accumulated."
He then makes that appeal to both sides:
"To my climate-skeptic friends: Given that the government is going to regulate carbon, this is the way to do it with least damage. To my green-warrior friends, if the government is actually going to reduce carbon, not just subsidize cronies and engage in worthless value-signaling gestures, a trade of carbon taxes for absurdly costly regulations and subsidies is the only way to get anywhere."