"His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done."
It's a funny passage, but there is a reason governments pay farmers not to produce. They want surplus capacity. They prefer resiliency to efficiency when it comes to food crops (including fodder). If something goes wrong, they want the ability to put additional fields into play quickly. You actually do have to maintain the machines that you aren't using.
Inefficiencies always look silly, and there will always be those looking to take advantage of them. Compare the vast amounts of fraud on the recent COVID policies. But they were more effective than just letting people die or go bankrupt, which would be even more disruptive.
Heller's book is funny and I don't want to ruin what is basically a good joke. But it's not as silly as it sounds at first.
"They want surplus capacity. They prefer resiliency to efficiency when it comes to food crops (including fodder). If something goes wrong, they want the ability to put additional fields into play quickly."
Source?
This is not the reason I'm aware of. I believe it's all about price control on the supply side, not capacity. Just look at that old SCOTUS ruling that forbid individuals from growing more more a specific amount a wheat. They used the interstate commerce clause to say that the secondary affects of growing your own wheat jeopardizes the wheat industry due to the inability to control prices.
For example, there are current talks about a food crisis due to the war in Ukraine. Yet the USDA has not authorized the land enrolled in conservation programs to be utilized. Also, that land tends to be the lower producing land. Farmers get paid the same for the enrolled land, so they enroll the lower producing acres.
> I believe it's all about price control on the supply side, not capacity.
That doesn't contradict GP's point. Keeping prices from dropping too low reduces incentives for farmers to exit the business, thereby maintaining high capacity for when it's needed.
"thereby maintaining high capacity for when it's needed."
How so? We're talking about acres not farmers. Small farms can go under and larger farms will take over working the land. We saw that in the 80s. The land being conserved is generally lower capacity anyways (they aren't going enroll the high producing acres).
So it might not contradict in theory, but the evidence from the current situation seems to support that the capacity is not valued and only the price control reason is. Is there any support for the idea that it's about having reserve capacity to utilize? Has it ever been utilized?
That's in general. Price controls are an agricultural policy too. Do you have something that shows which general policies apply to which specific ones?
The claim/policy being discussed is about preserved land being set aside for the purpose of using it when additional capacity is needed. So far there is no evidence that is the purpose, since it has never been unenrolled or utilized, even as there is talk about food crisis related to the war in Ukraine. If anything, the information you've posted seems to support my position that the policy is not about utilizing that additional capacity, but about other goals.
The US Department of Agriculture doesn’t have natural resources conservation programs for shits and giggles. They do it to conserve natural resources for agriculture, as the words plainly suggest.
> Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) is the Department’s focal point for the Nation’s farmers and ranchers and other stewards of private agricultural lands and non-industrial private forest lands. FPAC agencies implement programs designed to mitigate the significant risks of farming through crop insurance, conservation programs …
> The mission of Natural Resources and Environment is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the Nation’s forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations.
> So far there is no evidence that is the purpose, since it has never been unenrolled or utilized, even as there is talk about food crisis related to the war in Ukraine.
The US Department of Agriculture protects the interests of agriculture in the US, not the Middle East and North Africa.
The evidence that it is used for agriculture conservation is the fact that it is called agriculture conservation.
There is the expected food crisis from the war in Ukraine. Still they are not allowing early unenrollment. US farmer are asking for unenrollment so they can grow crops that can be exported and reduce the expected market price increase due to lack of supply.
According to you it protects US agricultural interests. Increasing profit and keeping food prices reasonable in the US fit that description. The price control does affect US food security when such a large number already live in food insecure households.
> According to you it protects US agricultural interests.
Does it do something else? I have no clue what you're insinuating.
The prices of food are, in fact, an important part of agriculture policy. This is in conjunction with, not in lieu of, conservation policies.
US agriculture policy has done a pretty good job at this. The US has been, for a while, the country with the #1 lowest percentage of consumer expenditure on food.
If farmers can't profitably farm they sell the land off to other interests or go bankrupt. People are not choosing to go into farming....at all. thus a bankrupt farm will sit fallow, be bought by some golf course development, or be turned into a "nature preserve", reducing capacity. The dots are not hard to connect.
The dots connect differently than you suggest. Sure, maybe in a suburban area the farms turn to golf courses. Many small farms are scooped up by larger farms. Looks like almost 10% reduction in number of farms since '86 and the size of the large farms have increased.
This is obviously false. If nobody at all had gone into farming in the last 40 years, there would be no farmers left. Let me introduce you to my neighbors, the farmers. Hint: they don't live in San Francisco. Drive through Central Valley and guess how many 20-40 year old farmers are involved in all that food production.
There are much fewer farmers than there used to be. But simple math tells you that more food consumption divided by fewer farmers provides a huge opportunity for more profit per farmer. If you are politically- and business-savvy enough you can become enormously wealthy.
In theory I think the capital needed to farm might be the real issue; it needs to be maintained even if it is unprofitable to do so in a given year.
I'm in two minds. We can't afford for anything to go wrong with food security, so it might make sense to do something otherwise wildly stupid if it contributes to people not starving to death. But I question whether any given policy is likely to help or if it is a handout for nothing.
But to resolve that specific policies, places & examples are needed. Debating theory isn't enough.
The real issue is that most primary sector industries can't compete internationally due to the cost of living difference. The capital expense and living expense is high, while the profits are low since other countries can produce the product more cheaply. We subsidize crop production. Without these subsidies our products wouldn't even be close to competing on the international marketplace. It could be interesting to what happens with subsidies removed, but I'm guessing the affect would be large and negative.
In the context of the novel, the reasoning doesn't matter much - either way, an individual is led to act in an unnatural way to appease the institution.
Yes, it sounds funny when written out but the character in Catch 22 is providing some useful utility in having those fields ready to grow if needed.
Geopolitics can change quickly, the world's two largest wheat producers could go to war with each other. Starvation is bad, and unused fields may be a small price to pay to subvert it.
Is this true? We aren't seeing this even as we are facing a potential food crisis due to the war in Ukraine. SCOTUS seems to think it's about price control when looking at the Roscoe Filburn case.
Price controls have the same effect. By either reducing supply or setting a price floor you prop up the market-clearing price from the natural price which would be lower. This prevents those farms whose profitability depends on sale price being somewhere between the natural and artificial price from going bankrupt.
Whether the government can actually leverage those unused acres when needed however remains to be seen. Government would need to act quickly enough to see a potential shortage coming, and give farmers the green-light to plant. Farmers without unused acres will likely lobby hard against this.
When you don't have price controls for food, you get revolutions. Or civil wars. Just ask how our boy Mubarak is doing down in Egypt, or Assad in Syria.
If you're a government minister that wants to die in bed, you need to do three things.
1. Subsidize food production and overproduction.
2. Limit food price increases.
3. Ignore people whining about the cost of #1 and #2, because they aren't the ones who will be swinging off lamp posts when the revolution comes - you are.
Limiting food price increases prevents farmers from making money. It would be more appropriate to introduce a subsidy for food production and pay for it by raising taxes on food and then making the fraction of the price that is below the price limit tax exempt. This way there is an incentive to stay under the price limit to minimize taxes but it is not mandatory.
You can then pay the subsidy out as a food dividend so that everyone has equal access to the proceeds of "food price gouging".
> Limiting food price increases prevents farmers from making money.
Correct. Which is why subsidies for both production and overproduction are the second pillar of this.
Because by the time there's a food shortage, you can't sit around for a year, waiting for farmers to adjust to market conditions and increase output. Food isn't a cloud instance that you can spin up on demand.
Governments do pay farmers not to farm, but having seen this in the uk, the land that is set aside was marginal anyway and so a subsidy is collected but the production barely changes.
Then there is corn, where so much is produced that uses are engineered to try find ways to use it all.
The government could have paid the farmer to do no till agriculture instead and mandate that he improve the quality of the land to specified criteria.
>You actually do have to maintain the machines that you aren't using.
Oh no! The dreaded capital depreciation on underutilized capital. Thank god we have created a money system that cannot represent this capital depreciation so we must utilize all capital at 100% (read we must grow the economy at the rate productivity grows).
I work in Agtech and this is not exactly true. At least not true in terms of big farms. They always work at capacity, in fact one of the reasons Covid hit agriculture supply chains so hard is that they had no extra capacity.
Big farms use crazy automated machines that almost (or do) drive themselves. Maximizing output allows them to set the market price because to generate so much compared to any other grower (like OPEC with oil).
Please expound on your claim that you have to maintain machines you aren't using. Is there some requirement for how many working machines you have to possess to qualify for a subsidy?
This had me in peals of laughter as a student. It was probably the only passage of the book I really enjoyed, being too young at the time to understand the rest of it.
I had a very wrong impression about what sort of books Vonnegut writes, and I've discovered that I'm very much not the only one.
If you haven't read him because the titles and the descriptions sound heavy, they really aren't. You're thinking Dostoevsky or Nietzsche but he's closer to Mark Twain.
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!
— Kurt Vonnegut
The chapter where they are driving around in a jeep at night with the headlights off was one of my favorite book moments long before i was mature enough to understand any of that book.
‘Catch-22’ really benefits from a good audio reading, as any book with lots of dry humor. Best if the reader can make their voice both ‘straight-faced’ and nearly-over-the-top comical at the same time. ‘The Good Soldier Švejk’ works similarly in audio.
"Nature based" offsets aren't that much better. It is mainly "pay us or we'll cut down this forest" but there is a fundamental timing problem: you emitted one ton of CO2 yesterday, somebody else has to protect a forest forever to keep that CO2 trapped.
There are other schemes that claim to be low cost such as
that have the problem of not being measurable. Contrast that to other schemes that get 1% of the press coverage, such as the "gold standard" of injecting CO2 into saline aquifers
where you really can measure the gas going into the hole and can almost (but not quite) take it for granted that the CO2 will stay there for 10,000 years.
I’m shocked at the uniform cynicism here. The big banks are just now getting involved—and hate as you like, but they will bring way more accountability to a multibillion dollar market. When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed. They expect meaningful carbon reductions and accountability systems will improve the market efficiency over time. For instance, adjusting the credit amount based on probability and risk. No one wants to invest in something fraudulent!
We need an all-of-the-above approach to climate change and if carbon credits make a meaningful reduction in rainforest destruction, increase environmentally diverse farm fallowing, subsidize mangrove planting or more efficient technologies/practices, it could have a HUGE impact. Maybe give it a little time before adopting such dismissive cynicism towards markets and technology, please?
I agree that some carbon offsets / credits are "high quality", i.e. represent actual, durable reductions in someone's emissions. They can help with the important projects you mention.
When the result is to durably sequester carbon from the atmosphere, I also agree that this is a good contribution toward net zero. I don't know anything about mangrove planting, but that sounds like it might fit. Certainly the Climeworks project someone mentioned elsewhere in this discussion fits.
The problem is with "avoided emissions" offsets. Suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop. That's a half solution, but it is often treated as a complete solution: X looks good because they bought an offset, and Y looks good because they're no longer emitting anything. That's the shell game.
Concretely, let's consider rainforest preservation. This is critically important, and plausibly (I don't actually know a lot about it) requires payments to relevant actors in places like Brazil. So yes, as a society, we need to come up with money for those payments. But we need to come up with that money in a way that doesn't let some other polluter permanently off the hook for their emissions. If an airline pays to protect some rainforest, says "hey look an offset", and declares victory, how will we ever address the airline's emissions? We've done some good in the short run (we accelerated the effort to preserve the rainforest), but then we arrive at a dead end.
Cap-and-trade systems avoid this problem, if all of the buyers and sellers of credits are part of the system, and the cap is gradually reduced to zero. But if a company says "my plan to reach net zero relies heavily on purchasing offsets", outside of a cap-and-trade system that eventually squeezes avoided-emissions offsets to zero, then we're back to the shell game.
I read the entire article and didn't really get it until I read this paragraph:
> The problem is with "avoided emissions" offsets. Suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop. That's a half solution, but it is often treated as a complete solution: X looks good because they bought an offset, and Y looks good because they're no longer emitting anything. That's the shell game.
Incredibly well put.
So, effectively, one actor's emissions can be made to count for twice its effect through the accounting trick that involves one actor paying the other for having reduced their emissions.
However -- is this really a bad thing? Sure, it's not the full solution, but it's effectively a privately sponsored economic bonus for those actors that do choose to reduce their emissions.
Sure, it should probably be rebranded so it's clear this is actually what happens. "Carbon-reduction contingent donation" or something.
Is there a moral question here about whether some things, like
responsibility, are intrinsically "non-transferable"?
When thinking of simple goods or services it seems fine that I can buy
a car and then sell it. That's part of property rights.
For other things like a medical prescription, driving license or
degree certificate it seems correct that these things are somehow tied
to an individual.
Capitalism has evolved to allow transfer of many non-tangibles.
Financialisation is really the ability to trade companies, and more
importantly "titles and rights". Eventually this has extended to
buying and selling debts. Through this mechanism we've accepted, in
the limit, the trading of responsibility.
Yet there are already obvious limits to this. If I murder a man I
cannot sell that burden by contract, such that if I'm convicted
another will go to prison in my stead.[1]
These carbon trades feel a little bit more like this last case than
selling a car. Should one get to commit a tangible harm and then
offload the responsibility? [2]
[1] actually I think this may have been historically possible in some
cultures.
[2] This is a Kantian question - because clearly under Utilitarian
analysis I can simply claim a "greater good is served".
It's an interesting question but I don't think it applies here.
The problem with carbon offsets is not some moral question about my offloading my guilt to another party. The problem is that there's double-counting. Going back to the scenario, "suppose X and Y are both emitting greenhouse gases, and X pays Y to stop". Let's break that down:
1. Initially, X is emitting greenhouse gases. I'm not sure moral terminology is helpful here, but for the sake of discussion, we can say X is "guilty".
2. Initially, Y is also emitting greenhouse gases, they are also "guilty".
3. X makes a payment to Y, and Y halts their emissions.
If we say that Y is no longer guilty, because they stopped emitting, then we must say that X is still guilty.
If we say that X is no longer guilty, because they purchased an offset from Y, then we must say that Y is still guilty: they started out guilty, and they sold off the rights to their compensating action (halting emissions) to X.
We started with two guilty parties, and only one compensating / atoning action was performed. There is no coherent framework in which it can be said that both parties are now innocent.
This is the stronger argument. It's more complete. Thank you for
explaining. I think we don't disagree and that you recognise my
"non-transferability of guilt" in your step 4. Anyway the double
accounting makes a clearer case.
I read your post again but I don’t see what is not fair. If you look at the target sites for carbon credits, many are reforestation projects in the developing world. Is the concern that it is reducing industrial capacity there? Or, if it is paying another company to subsidize efficiency, is the concern that the money is staying among the rich? Or is it a “they have sinned and you can’t pay off sin?” Im assuming not.
I see this as “I made a mess in the street and I hired cleaners to clean it up.” Sure, I didn’t do the cleaning myself, but I’m still being responsible for it, right?
> Or is it a “they have sinned and you can’t pay off sin?”
Interesting. Yes, this is the closest of your choices. Not quite
Biblical Sin :), but that will do for the moment.
Please note that I asked a genuine, good-faith moral question. I'm
not making an assertion here.
I removed a remark that "perceived fairness is often more important in
human-centred affairs than summative outcomes" - but then noticed
that you teach human centred design and obviously get that. So let's
explore it together.
> many are reforestation projects in the developing world.
Regardless of how "good" the purchased offset is, it does not impact
the Kantian moral argument - in particular I am thinking about
universalisabilty. I don't think it matters whether one bribes the rich
or poor in this case. the question is about the ethics of transferable
responsibility - for which I used the obviously extreme edge case of
buying immunity from murder charges.
> I see this as "I made a mess in the street and I hired cleaners to
clean it up." Sure, I didn't do the cleaning myself, but I’m still
being responsible for it, right?
No, I think that's where I would differ. Let's say you made the mess
the next day, and the next, and the one after... and each day you pay
someone to clean it up. You're not off the hook. Somewhat like the
broken window fallacy, you're still creating a net loss to society.
Unless you think those cleaners have nothing better to do with their
lives than labour cleaning up your mess.
Let's consider another slightly more ordinary place this logic
operates and fails. Parking or speeding fines. Why do we have motoring
restrictions? Ultimately it's to reduce loss of life. Careless driving
or parking gets people killed. But paltry fines have no effect on
those who simply see it as an extra charge to be factored into being
an anti-social driver. Now suppose that instead I can simply pay
another driver to stay at home so I can speed around by the local
school and park across the hospital entrance.
Being "responsible for it" would be not making the mess in the first
place. You're "making amends for it" - those would be better words.
But if that delivers no deterrence from doing it again, a fundamental
aspect of justice necessary for regulating human affairs is not
served.
> Let's say you made the mess the next day, and the next, and the one after... and each day you pay someone to clean it up. You're not off the hook. Somewhat like the broken window fallacy, you're still creating a net loss to society. Unless you think those cleaners have nothing better to do with their lives than labour cleaning up your mess.
We do pay people to clean up our messes. There's entire industries of janitors, street sweepers, repairmen and garbage disposal. Which provides additional jobs, increases time for everyone else to do other things and increases the economic pie. Do carbon offsets work differently?
> it does not impact the Kantian moral argument
Do we care about some moral argument, or do we care about mitigating climate change?
That X has happened in the past is not a moral argument for X
> Do we care about some moral argument, or do we care about mitigating
climate change?
That's a false dichotomy since the two are not mutually exclusive.
Yes, we do care about some moral argument, and indeed all moral
arguments. They often get down to the root causes quicker than 5Y
analysis. For a gentle introduction to the intersection of ethics and
systems theory see [1].
>Somewhat like the broken window fallacy, you're still creating a net loss to society.
This an economic argument, not a moral one, and I think it's wrong. In theory.
Presumably, the idea is that if you can afford to pay to fix the mess, you have rendered sufficient credit to society to offset the loss caused by making the mess. And if we assume that both you and the mess-cleaner are rational agents, and you choose to pay somebody else to fix the mess instead of doing it yourself (or not making it in the first place), and they choose to take your money to clean it up instead of doing something else, then we must conclude that cleaning (or not making) the mess was not an efficient use of your time, and was an efficient use of theirs.
The reason this feels weird is because tons of people have way more money than they should, and others have way less than they should. Idealized capitalism breaks down in a world where rich people can sit back and watch money pour in for free from their "investments".
As you say yourself, there's no basis to the "assumption" of nice
rational actors in a zero sum game within in a singular homogeneous
society of little Bayesian utility maximisers - that's precisely the
simplistic fantasy that's landed us in this damn awful mess. Some
people get away with it. Some get screwed over. Hence I am questioning
such moral arithmetic.
I don’t think anyone thinks that offsets are the complete solution. Eventually we will have low carbon flight tech. A lot of money is being invested in developing this but it takes time to transition. Your argument seems to be based on the idea that because it doesn’t totally solve the problem then it is a scam. But if it contributes to the solution and buys time then what is the problem? It is all about buying time. Tech is rapidly advancing.
For instance, I was just in Dubai. Wow, that is an unsustainable city. Except that they are plowing wealth into solar. It is 13% solar powered today (plenty of sun in those parts) and will be 100% by 2050. That’s great. But the world needs time to transition. And if we can buy time by creating revenue streams for saving rainforest lands and mangrove forests and the like, that’s a win win. But it still isn’t enough without the tech.
And yes, sure, it would be great if no one drove cars or flew. But short of economic collapse, we need time to transition. What am i missing?
The energy grid is a prime example of why carbon offset do not work, and in some cases, actually create perverse incentives.
For the last decade or so the major strategy has been carbon neutral energy grid by using the logic that if the total exports of green energy surpasses the consumption of fossil fuel energy then the net sum is positive. The assumption is that the export will displace fossil fuel energy. The result is that under this plan fossil fuel plants can continue to operate since its more profitable to export green energy than shutting down fossil fuel plants, and since nations need large capacity in transitions lines to do exports they can also increase imports. More and longer life time of existing fossil fuel plants, and increased consumption of imported fossil fuel generated energy, while politicians can claim that the grid is green.
The strategy share much of the articles criticisms of carbon offset. The assumption that the exported energy will create avoided emissions is taken as a fact rather than a theory, with poor evaluation of the quality. If Everyone Did It, the strategy wouldn't work. Everyone can't just export massive amount of green energy while continuing burning more fossil fuels. Someone somewhere need to actually stop burning fossil fuel for emissions to go down. And like the article noticed, the market forces do not align to encourage people to stop emitting carbon.
I agree that the concept of "buying time" has merit. One good way to apply that would be a cap-and-trade system, with a gradually shrinking cap. Trading offsets within a cap-and-trade system avoids the criticisms I'm making.
But I see a lot of companies trumpeting use of offsets in the context of their own individual plan to achieve reduced or zero emissions. This is where the problems come in:
1. It is often presented as a a complete solution, rather than a helpful interim step. A company announces plans to offset their emissions, and then declares victory. But it is only a half victory; between the offset seller and the offset purchaser, only half of the total emissions have been addressed.
2. It removes the incentive to start developing solutions for the more difficult categories of emissions. It will take time to decarbonize, say, steel manufacturing. But we need to start developing pilot projects today. If the steel manufacturers can say "we're addressing climate change, we've purchased offsets", then no one is paying for those pilot projects.
i would assume offsets have to be purchased continuously - that is, you cannot purchase an offset once and be done with it forever.
I also assume that there's limited offsets that could be purchased, and it's not growing unless money is put into making more offsets possible (e.g., enlarging a rain forest, not merely protecting it).
This means every year, there would be more competition to purchase offsets from all participants, raising the price of offset. Eventually, the price would be high enough that it's more profitable just save emissions yourself - e.g, those pilot projects.
But if you predict this, you would start doing those pilot projects sooner, and beat your competition!
So why isn't this true today? The assumptions i made must be wrong - so which assumption is wrong?
This is why the banker-led accounting is important. So that credits are credited appropriately. Sequestering 1 ton at the cost of half a ton should be accounted as half. As I’m sure it will be as the market rationalizes.
You're missing... time. Like us all. The required transition requires time. But the kind of transition you mention is by far too slow to stop climate dereliction and loss of biodiversity.
In 2025, the amount of greenhouses emitted will get the world in the following years to +1.5ºC (when compared to 1750, before the industrialization).
We are already experiencing the effects of the climate dereliction, despite being around +1.25ºC (I'd need to chech that figure). Australia's current unknown floods will be followed by a summer of fires and temperature above 50ºC. The drought in the USA is alarming etc etc.
To avoid reaching +2ºC, the world would need the multiply the current transition trend by a factor... 33.
Above +2ºC, the climate will enter into self-reinforcing effects. The Amazon forest is on the verge of becoming an savanna: such a very large forest produce its own rain. By mid-april 2022, a larger surface of Amazon forest has been burnt than during 2021, the previous highest record.
The Covid and Putin's revolting invasion of Ukraine is masking a fundamental trend: the agricultural yields are already falling almost everywhere because of climate dereliction (about 20% less the recent years). That is the true reason for the huge inflation of food prices.
We just don't have the time for that kind of slow transition in the hope that some wonderful technical breakthrough will save us all.
I'm not the one saying that: just read the 111 page of the sum-up of the IPCC reports just published. Thousands of scientists have participated. Their climate model is now well tuned. The previous reports proved to be already reliable, and even by far too optimistic.
If you believe in Science, then you can't stay in the delusion that we are doing anything near what is necessary to tackle the issue.
Believing that Science and Technology will somehow provide the breakthroughs soon enough to stay under +2ºC is at best a convenient wishful thinking, but more likely magical thinking.
Why? Because the whole subject has been worked on by thousands of scientists in the past 40 years. One can not believe in Science only when it fits one's way of life.
"The future is already here, but not evenly distributed": The solutions exist. It has been shown that their costs to the world economic growth is far cheaper than the current quasi-inaction.
If we invest massively, we are quite capable of handling it. We don't need any breakthroughs. I'm optimistic that some will occur if we focus.
But the whole thing is classic game theory situation: everybody wins if everybody cooperates, but each country will be better off doing nothing while the others pay the cost of transition.
So we do nothing. At least nothing near the acceleration by a factor 33.
Don't trust me. Read the IPCC 111 pages and make your own opinion.
Sorry for the gloomy post. I can't help myself believing in Science.
> the agricultural yields are already falling almost everywhere because of climate dereliction
Sorry, but that's not necessarily true. Photosynthesis intensity increases with elevated CO2 [1] and decreases with higher temperatures. The exact effect of higher yields from more CO2, lower yields from temperatures, and increased arable land area from higher temperatures is not well known.
Agricultural yields depend on many more factors than just CO2 and temperature.
There's been a lot more extreme weather events - case in point : australia (recently floods - a lot of them, and the long term drought for over a decade). I'm sure similar stories could be seen in other parts of the world.
Yields are factually decreasing. As just mentioned, because natural disasters are broader, more intense and more frequent as the result of climate warming; that's why I pay attention to say "climate dereliction that the IPCC scientists prefer to "climate warming".
Furthermore, our pollution (plastic, pesticide s, fertilizers, synthetic materials of all kinds, oil spills, etc etc) is destroying the fertile soils, depleting them from its biodiversity. The ratio living creatures of all sizes per ounce of soil is decreasing. Intensive agriculture of cereals for example with Monsanto seeds and pesticides leads to a 80% loss of " life" inside the soil.
To make that worse, the climate warming destroys biodiversity because it rises far too fast for the Nature to adapt. A forest can move one meter per year in direction of the climate best adapted: the seeds on the less adapted climate die but the seeds on the better side grow. The natural climate cycles varies by a few degrees per 10 000 years (in a global average). The human impact will soon have risen the average temperature of 2ºC in 200 years.
Otherwise, yes, the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is making the forests rise faster in many places. But it is far from compensating the emissions. And the huge fires in Australia, USA and Siberia, plus the going Amazon forest ecocide have emitted an immense tonnage of CO2.
>When top, public facing companies like Jet blue or Microsoft buy carbon offsets, they don’t want to get scammed.
Don't they benefit from the status quo? It's not the companies that get scammed, it's the people who select the cheap "offset my carbon footprint" option when getting a plane ticket and pay for JetBlue to transfer that money to some scammy offsetting service. JetBlue gets good PR for contributing to "carbon offsetting programs" on behalf of customers - which are cheap enough because the market is not heavily regulated.
I don't trust international corporations to do anything but optimize to make more money.
The core problem with carbon offsetting is that it allows the rich elites to continue polluting the environment (because in their mind, they paid for it) while the poor have to take the brunt of the load instead. The richest 10% of the world account for half the CO² emissions [1], a figure that will only grow larger.
What the world needs are clear and hard bans: no more import of meat from Brazil until the country provably prevents further razing of the Amazonas rain forest, a hard cap on flights per person and year to two or four (with reasonable allowance for people in multi-national relationships, expats and the likes), a ban on twenty different brands of yogurt (or any other product class) in stores, and most importantly a hard cap on vehicle size and gas consumption: no fat SUV/truck until you prove to the government you have a reasonable need for such a vehicle. Everyone else gets a standard electric vehicle that serves their needs (i.e. singles and no-child households get either a single 2-seater standard car or two Smart-sized cars, and families get a 3+number_of_children sized car).
Yes, part of this sounds like "omg communism!!!" but the sooner people realize that the status quo is not sustainable and never has been, the better.
If humanity continues its current path of not caring or actively worsening the problem (such as Brazil is doing), more likely than not nature will dictate and send us into extinction - which is why the German Constitutional Court required our previous government to produce scientifically sound plans for CO² reductions in a landmark ruling [1]. The reasoning was that if nothing or not enough is being done today, the freedom of future generations is automatically restricted, to the point that there may be no choices left.
1) Even if we would order a new plant now, it would only be ready in 10-15 years. Building the equivalent amount in wind, solar and battery for storage would be ready faster and cheaper overall.
2) We don't have a permanent, safe place to dump the waste - the "old" reactors might be grandfathered in, but I can't imagine the BVerfG to let anything new pass that would expose future generations to the liability of dealing with the waste.
3) We don't have the cooling capacity - even back when we had more nuclear plants, they had to be regularly limited in power output in the summer because the rivers would get too hot otherwise.
As the BVerfG noted: the less we do today, the more likely it is that our children end up in a dictatorship... just with nature itself as the dictator, which is even worse since you can't putsch away nature.
Yes. The idea that you can use "many businesses believe in concept X, including lots of banks" as a metric for determining the value of an idea is absurd on its face.
If the reason for carbon offset sales is due to marketing and the desire to look good, then the firms buying it won't care how good or efficient the offsetting is done - they want branding and marketing out comes, not environmental outcomes.
Big banks will bring accountability in terms of ensuring the market functions to make them money. Whether or not it functions to help the environment in any way at all would be entirely incidental.
Notice all the financial institutions self-congratulatory boasting a few years ago about divesting from thermal coal. Little odd how that wasn't timed with any new revelation about climate change or coal in the past 50 years, but rather exactly with sagging coal price and estimates of peak coal and continued demand collapse and replacement by cheaper sources. They've gone a little quiet about that since coal prices skyrocketing 5x to historic highs in the past year.
God help us if the big banks are the only ones who can save us.
Let me go out on a limb. Carbon trading of some kind has been a popular policy since the 1980s. In fact it's almost completely substituted for any real action.
If there really was going to be some justice for people's crimes in this life in the next I'd suggest that William Nordhaus might, looking back 1000 years from now, be seen as the most evil person in history.
You might assign 100 million or so deaths to the communist and fascist movements, but a real climate crisis could kill 10x or 50x that.
Nordhaus brought climate change into the space of neoliberalism and promoted the idea that trading carbon credits could fix it.
If we go down this road in 30 years people are going to be saying "we need an all-of-the-above approach... it could have a HUGE impact ... give it a little time."
Such estimates always depend on what you consider the baseline. Is a world without the industrial revolution the baseline for a world without climate change? If so you can arguably reach a negative death total from climate change or multiple billions by excluding all positive effects.
Which is why people never really take such estimates seriously, it’s far too arbitrarily a number to really mean much.
What precedent exists to make you think that big finance will "bring accountability" to anything that they themselves are completely unaccountable for?
It is trivial to identify many examples where they are neck-deep in investments that run counter to the stated goals of environmental movements. Oil investments are a very simple example, but so is the continued financial support for companies which dump toxic waste into public lands. If there is no accountability now, how the hell will there be more accountability when they get even more fingers in more pies?
Investment relies on a simple idea: that the investment returns more money than you put in. Which part of what you've described makes that expectation compatible with solutions to the climate crisis?
It is pretty simple: now there can be investment in companies that make money from reducing carbon. If the products don’t actually reduce carbon, their customers flee them and the investment fails. Does that make sense?
Is it cynicism to notice that capitalist system that created the problem is trying to solve the problem it created with more capitalism or is it magically thinking to believe this is the moment where self imposed regulations will come together to solve the problem?
Doesn’t technology often create problems that technology solves? Don’t people create problems that people solve? Can you explain the logic of your argument?
Technology and people are even broader categories than a particular economic system. One could also point out population growth over the same time period. Or the scientific revolution that made the industrial one possible, which allowed us to feed billions more people and everything that comes with.
Why is climate change incomparable? I would compare it to the technology that was developed in response to CFCs and the ozone hole. Don’t call me lazy as an insult, please.
If "the problem" you refer to is "climate change", i don't see how it is capitalism's fault. Under any communism economics, the same climate change "problem" would occur, if the lifestyle of today is kept the same.
Of course, if you argue that there wouldn't be as much development and energy use under communism, then i agree - but that means the "problem" is not the economic system, but lifestyle and energy use. If people were willing to sacrifice their energy use - aka, no cars, no transport, no plastic products etc.
The same problem would not occur. The reason the climate issue has been allowed to go on so far under capitalism is broken feedback loops: the people who are worst affected by climate change and the people who make the decision to emit more greenhouse gases are different people.
Under a non-capitalist system (at least from an anarchists perspective), the people affected would also be the ones to decide how much to emit -- and it's unlikely they would be as crazy about climate change.
(Not to mention that assuming "the lifestyle of today" where a small fraction of a percentage of the population does most of the consumption would be sustainable under anything other than capitalism seems like a mistake.)
Sorry, but how could an anarchy possibly address this problem?
The emissions from a coal plant somewhere across the ocean affects my weather here in California. In an anarchy, are you saying I would get a voice in the operation of that remote coal plant? How would that work, exactly?
You would not have the mandate to open a coal plant without the consent of those affected.
The logistics of how to reach world-wide consensus, or at least something close to it, is an interesting question I don't have an answer to! Maybe coal plants would be practically impossible under anarchy, due to the consensus difficulties -- which one might argue is as it should be.
How would this be enforced? You wouldn't get any coal miners or other material providers to help you unless you can show your coal plant is truly something humanity at large either wants, or at least does not care about.
I think the poster didn't mean anarchy, but that in a communist centrally planned economy, they would recognize the climate change problem, and prevent the coal plant from being constructed or would decommission it, even if it hurts the energy consumption of the populous. But under capitalism, that doesn't happen as long as the buyer of the energy continue to buy.
The US Navy is talking about synthesizing aircraft fuel with nuclear power and direct carbon capture on aircraft carriers.
An aircraft carrier has to slow down to take on fuel which reduces combat effectiveness (at full speed it can go a few miles while a ballistic missile in flight so it is hard to hit) they are probably paying upwards of $10/gal for fuel as it is. If synthetic fuel means they can operate independently of supplies for longer that's significant.
The Army wants to synthesize fuels too because they are paying more like $50/gal to deliver fuel to forts in places like Afghanistan. They are considering crazy ideas like molten salt reactors, O'Neill style space solar power, etc. It's a matter though of trading a vulnerable and expensive supply chain (Ukraine didn't bother trying to stop the tanks charging towards Kyiv because the fuel trucks supplying them were a soft target) for some expensive (maybe dangerous) hardware that the enemy can blow up.
Some of the aviation could be changed quite a lot if fuel savings was more weighed. For example tankers and transports could be turboprop, maybe use more smaller higher L/D drones instead of F-18:s if not absolute needed etc...
Carbon offsets do make sense but only after low hanging fruits have been picked. In other words, only when we are over 50% renewables - carbon offsets would make a difference. The reason being is that the next 50% would need extra investment and effort.
The only carbon offsets that should be permitted are direct air capture of the CO2 you're emitting. This forces all but the most difficult to avoid CO2 emissions to alternatives (at the current price of $600/ton per Climeworks). Emit, but pay the true cost to capture and permanently sequester (on human time scale) what you're emitting.
Anything else is the equivalent of indulgences. Forests can be clear cut or burned after being paid to not be, etc.
> The only carbon offsets that should be permitted are direct air capture of the CO2 you're emitting.
That's not an "offset" - that's just a system that doesn't emit CO2. Offsets are when you decline to reduce CO2 emissions, instead paying someone else to <mumble>.
Offsets were always a scam. As I recall, they were sold to us with the promise that carbon "prices" were introductory, and were supposed to go up quickly and dramatically. At any rate, the whole idea of a "market" in carbon emissions is silly, because the price of the underlying asset is set by governments.
How do you not emit CO2 when producing cement? The only way to be carbon neutral is to "offset" it by having some carbon capture industry to somehow remove the equivalent of CO2 from the atmosphere.
From what I have read, one of the issues though is that there are only a finite number of trees that can be planted on the earth so carbon offsets of that nature are in a sense a one-off thing available to humanity - they buy us some time but aren't a sustainable solution by themselves.
>take it for granted that the CO2 will stay there for 10,000 years.
How do you know this? CCS isn't exactly a secret, it's regularly discussed in pop science and mainstream news. It's also controversial among actual geologists how well the storage part works, if at all.
Capturing CO2 is relatively easy. When someone makes claims like it's almost guaranteed that the carbon stays in the ground for thousands of years, that's quite the grand claim that would require extraordinary evidence. Because knowing geology, there's a lot of movement through fluids, tectonics, magmatism and all sorts of micro processes altering the chemistry of the crust.
We do have a bit of experience with geology, though, and it's not as black and white as you put it. It staying in the ground for x amount of time is likely the median or average value within a data set. New volcanos that throw up hidden stuff aren't a daily occurrence, but they do occur and we have an idea of how often this happens. This whole "but you can't know that because we haven't let it run the full ten thousand years yet!" sounds a lot like vaccine safety reasoning, except it seems to me that we have better insight into earth's mechanics on geological timespans than our bodies' responses across a lifetime.
Requiring evidence for claims isn't putting things black and white, it's standard practice in science. I notice you have not provided any such evidence btw. And that's just one of the problems of CCS, we've not even gotten to the inherent energy requirement issue that proponents like to dismiss by saying energy from renewables can be used which is free and doesn't cause emissions. But that isn't true, energy has some cost associated with it no matter where we source it from.
"I'm just asking for evidence" indeed nicely demonstrates the asymmetry of time investment. Next, if I dig into the research and adequately answer the question, the next remark is that the experiment didn't run for the full ten thousand years; you don't seem to trust today's knowledge anyhow (judging by the comment above). I'm a bit done with being the one who opens up Wikipedia or digs in hard-to-get-through papers to provide evidence in response to people who are just asking questions. You can accuse me but you've not given evidence of anything yourself. You're also putting up a false argument, claiming that proponents (that includes me) are saying it's gonna use magic free energy. I've actually looked into that before to figure out if something like Climeworks pollutes more than it captures.
Do you have any evidence that the CCS options we have today don't work? Either because it uses orders of magnitude more energy than claimed or because the carbon is released way sooner? (Heck, I'd be fine if it stores the carbon long enough to move the problem from 6 years* to 600 years so we have time to develop fusion or, failing that, fully renewable tech. Anything closer towards 6000, let alone 10'000 years, is pure profit.)
The conditional implies it's not happened yet I take it. Would people just go on the internet and write authoritatively about things they don't know and haven't even looked up?
It's by the way those who make a claim (or wish to support it) that have to provide the evidence, not the other way around. It is unlikely you'll find anyone on HN inexperienced enough in formal logic to attempt to disprove a flying teapot. So you go ahead and provide the data and demonstrate how the carbon can't come to the surface in thousands of years, which was the original claim and which so far remains completely unsubstantiated.
There is no doubt that saline injection on a large scale will hold CO2 for a short time. The 10,000 year time span that we'd like to hold it for is a long time.
A bit pessimistically, the actual injection into a saline aquifer costs something around $20 a ton, but capturing CO2 from a power plant with an amine stripper is around $80 a ton. Direct air capture is a lot more than that.
We aren't seeing many carbon capture projects, even the low hanging fruit like
which is profitable at $20 a ton is not being developed because "junk carbon credits" are available at lower prices.
(I know the corn-based Ethanol at the Decatur facility is environmentally negative in a lot of ways... But put that kind of system on a sugarcane Ethanol plant in Brazil, near Sao Paulo and nowhere near the rainforest, and it would be a different story.)
Vesta does have the advantage of being extremely cheap, assuming it works and their cost estimates are correct. It seems like it could be approximately measurable with some periodic random sampling.
> ...but there is a fundamental timing problem: you emitted one ton of CO2 yesterday, somebody else has to protect a forest forever to keep that CO2 trapped.
That is wildly exaggerated.
First, the planet has greened enormously during the satellite era (meaning since 1979 or so).
Second, crustaceans and plankton are incredibly efficient little CO2 suckers. Sure, they're not fast enough to get us to pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels without us reducing CO2 emissions, but if we stopped altogether I bet they'd get us down below 300ppm very quickly. The point is: a) it's not "forever" that we'd have to "protect a forest forever to keep that CO2 trapped" because the oceans alone will lock away a great deal of carbon as calcite, and b) atmospheric CO2 is not the emergency it's painted as.
I'm sure it's not welcomed here, but without the Industrial Revolution, we were on a path to extinction of photosynthetic life on Earth due to starvation. We can quibble over how many millions of years, and the process might have slowed down if the Ice Age we're in were to end, or it might speed up if it were to get colder, so there's lots of unknowns. But at some point atmospheric CO2 will run too low.
I have a question. If it's injected into water, won't that create carbonic acid? Carbonic acid is what dissolved much of the limestone into caverns around here. Is there a potential for sinkholes or contamination of fresh water aquifers as the acid dissolves the containing rocks?
Are there any organizations that one can donate to that use those more effective methods? There are tons of different organizations for carbon offsets, but I haven't seen any that inject CO2 into saline aquifers if you donate to them, for example. Most use avoided emissions or are "nature based", and as you have pointed out, both can be problematic. So I'm curious if anyone has any organizations that they can recommend.
People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work. To be brief, the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin. End of story. Planting trees does not 'offset' fossil emissions unless you plan to take the tree and bury it in an anoxic environment in which it can never decay. Solar panels and wind turbines offset nothing at all.
The only real fix for fossil-fueled global warming is to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix. A practical plan for doing that would result in perhaps a 3% reduction in fossil fuel PRODUCTION per year (no, don't try counting emissions, count production). In 30 years, this would mean zero fossil fuel production globally.
A single tree is likely to release its carbon at the end of its life. A forest however can permanently endure and keep retain carbon in aggregate, at least compared to the alternative barren ground. To your point though, I would be surprised if this effect is big enough relative to removing fossil fuels from the energy mix.
Here in California we had two million acre burn last year, including, I believe, some "carbon sequestering" forests.
A lot of forest in the US actually have an excessive amount of growth due to suppression policies.
You can't expect to "plant" a forest in some random location and expect it to simply endure. Ecosystems have a more or less natural level of vegetation and getting more to grow is asking for it to burn away later (accelerating global warming, later). And that's not talking about the greater propensity for fire due to global warming itself.
There is no fundamental problem with a forest burning. It might release all it's carbon into the atmosphere while burning, but when it regrows it will re-absorb all that carbon.
Bit of an accounting nightmare. You have to make sure it is allowed to regrow. You can't count that regrowth as new carbon sequestration, it's sequestrating it's original carbon again. And it's also going to take decades before it fully regrows.
My point above is that because of fire suppression, California's forests have grown denser than the long-term, sustainable average. California's forests were much less dense in the 1880s because fires were quite common - it is a "fire shaped landscape", the ecology evolved with fire.
If someone is attempting to make things even more dense, they simply will stoke fuel for more fire.
Yeah. The accounting can become even more of an absolute nightmare if you actually have to start planning that far ahead and taking into account the long-term sustainable average of converting land to forest, instead of the short-term best case.
That's why I said "can". Obviously there is a lot of diversity of forests in the world. Cutting down half of them to make room for human stuff might have reduced the average amount of carbon stuck in wood on average?
I believe you can safely assume "it is not enough". We are recirculating literally millions of years worth of trees into the air. No amount of living carbon will be able to offset it, even if the entire earth were covered in trees (citation needed).
Citations seem to indicate this is actually enough! This surprised me also: https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/global-carbon. Indicates 400GT are in from forests, vs 800GT in the atmosphere. Some various sources seem to indicate that around 50% of forests have been destroyed by humans already (by area, not necessarily by carbon?). So if we could instantly recover all forests, and nothing else changed, that alone would reduce the atmosphere CO2 to preindustrial levels (it has almost doubled). I think the misleading part about "millions of years worth of trees" is that a very small percentage of tree biomass probably becomes useful fossil fuel, and the majority is recycled many times.
> People pushing carbon offsets seem to have a lack of understanding of how global element cycles work.
They're the same as people pushing for mass adoption of EVs, they're not looking for a long term solution to the environmental problem, they're looking for a short term solution to extend their market for one more generation.
Sorry, what? The long-term benefits of EVs is that they can be powered by clean, renewable and nuclear energy (though even without that they are more energy-efficient than ICE cars)
Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so far
> Are you proposing that replacing ICE vehicles with EVs is not an essential part of a long-term, low-carbon future?
Hm yes, a sustainable future won't be made of 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person. There are 1.5B personal vehicles on earth right now, replacing every single one of them with the EV equivalent will just displace the problem (EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even being driven on the street, then you have to take care about recycling, mining the raw materials, &c.)
This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"
> Who's building nuclear power plants now ? Renewable sources of electricity are stacked on top of non renewable ones so far
You're arguing against a straw man of your own making. No one is positioning EVs as the solution for generating clean energy. They are a solution for electrifying transportation which is a prerequisite for moving transportation from fossil fuel generation to clean energy. Moreover, the current average blend of energy sources in the US grid is already much cleaner than burning gasoline, and on top of that virtually all charging stations are powered by 100% renewable energy.
> EVs generate half their lifetime pollution before even being driven on the street,
This is an argument in favor of EVs. Solar panels also produce all of their emissions prior to being plugged into the grid. This is precisely the mechanism by which they reduce carbon output relative to fossil fuel energy sources which have a large upfront carbon cost and then an even larger ongoing cost. It's the same deal with EVs.
> 3 tonnes personal steel cages transporting 1 person
Well, we have to have some way of getting around, and most of the US is not dense urban area. Space is plentiful in the US, and anyway "steel cages carrying one person" isn't optimizing for space, not carbon emissions. Any sort of utopian restructuring of US transportation is going to involve way more carbon up front for decades to solve a relatively small part (transporting humans) of a problem that we need to have solved in decades.
> This is just another chapter of the "don't worry we'll magically figure it out sometime in the future (_cough cough_ after I got my dividends and retire)"
This kind of vapid, incorrect cynicism isn't helpful and probably violates the site rules. We already largely know how to drastically reduce our emissions--clean energy and electrification. EVs are part of the electrification story. There's not much to "magically figure out" except how to make renewable energy viable for base load generation economically, but since any anti-car transportation solution is completely ignoring economy (not necessarily to be confused with "the economy") anyway, we can elide the "economically" requirement for base load generation in which case we already know how to get from here to there. In whichever case, EVs involve much less "magic" to solve than any anti-car alternative.
> We already largely know how to drastically reduce our emissions--clean energy and electrification
I think the parent is arguing against this premise.
You argue from a value system, in which cars for personal transportation, are an axiomatic condition. Not only that, cars, no matter their size, going as fast as geometry allows it, are an inherent fixture.
Solutions like EVs are a solution to carbon emissions, but only within this value system.
I can think of plenty of other solutions, all of them old-skool tech. Driving more frugal cars with high mpg (which will be lighter, smaller), would be a low-tech solution that anyone can implement today. However, since this is not in your value system, it does not occur to you. Since your value system is the dominant one, American car manufacturers no longer even want to put this solution up for sale. Not requiring people to commute, is another low-tech way we can curb carbon emission. Taxing cars by weight is a low-tech bureaucratic solution. A true forest of automated speed cameras to push top speeds down, and thus fuel consumption down, yet another one. Zoning which allows amenities in walking and biking distance is another, and infrastructure making walking and biking be safe, not having to worry about getting run over by 3-ton EVs, would be yet another low tech solution.
None of the above curb quality of life. But rather, they exist in a world that cannot be imagined.
> EVs involve much less "magic" to solve than any anti-car alternative.
This quote is a perfect encapsulation of your solipsism. You cannot even imagine these other solutions, and if you do, they appear magic. While this "magic"is the reality on the ground in so much other parts of the world. Even within the US, they exist.
EVs will not be a solution to curb carbon emissions. It is because EVs fundamentally do not address the root causes of why we have these emissions in the first place. The wasteful use of energy on personal transportation, caused by overly heavy, overly fast vehicles, having to drive over overly long distances, for even the most basic daily needs.
Piggybacking to plug notjustbikes on youtube who does a nice job of outlining why the US's obsession with cars and single-family-zoned housing areas has dug us into the value system you're describing. That is not to say that working to fix these vast infrastructure problems is a simple or remotely carbon neutral feat (Amsterdam has taken 50 years to get there). We got here because of choices about how transportation/freedom in the US should look (many lobbied by the car industry). I'm not saying cars shouldn't exist. I don't think that's realistic with an area as vast as the US. But places like Amsterdam and Tokyo can clue us in that it doesn't need to be like this in reasonably dense areas.
What if we could eliminate the need for cars in many areas by creating infrastructure that's vastly more efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use? We already have a lot of this technology (bikes/trains/buses/trams + relevant infrastructure). Building this would be expensive and create a lot of pollution. Does that mean we shouldn't try?
notjustbikes is such a great channel. I think he paints a great picture of all forms of transportation existing side-by-side. It's not an either/or, but an and/and. Super inspiring channel.
> What if we could eliminate the need for cars in many areas by creating infrastructure that's vastly more efficient, cheaper, safer, and healthier to use?
Yes, that would be so great. Many neighborhoods in the US could accomodate it too. Roads are wide, there's absolutely space for different kinds of road use, side by side. And a lot of neighborhoods predate car travel, everything before the 30s or so, we know, as a historical fact, that they can totally be liveable without a car, if only it was safe for other road users to do so.
> Does that mean we shouldn't try?
Absolutely. The investment in safe road infrastructure, providing transportation options, has so many benefits.
> You argue from a value system, in which cars for personal transportation, are an axiomatic condition. Not only that, cars, no matter their size, going as fast as geometry allows it, are an inherent fixture. ... However, since this is not in your value system, it does not occur to you. ... You cannot even imagine these other solutions
You're making so many baseless and incorrect assumptions about my value system and thought process that it's very hard to assume you're arguing in good faith. You're welcome to try again without making assumptions about my beliefs or capacity for imagination.
I think the original poster is arguing the point that having personal vehicles is the wrong solution, and that the life style of the typical american cannot imagine that as a solution.
I think it is impossible to put the personal vehicle genie back into the lamp. Any future climate solution cannot involve decreasing the quality of life for the typical american (or western person, i'm using american as a catch-all term).
I generally agree, but cars are fully integrated into even the most non-western countries regardless of wealth or poverty. I admittedly can't imagine solutions that also help us meet our (time constrained) climate objectives or which don't cost trillions of dollars, but I think it's pretty rhetorically crumby to criticize someone's "ability to imagine an alternative" without proffering one's own proposal.
>I can think of plenty of other solutions, all of them old-skool tech. Driving more frugal cars with high mpg (which will be lighter, smaller), would be a low-tech solution that anyone can implement today.
But I already do that and considering current gas prices in Germany an EV is cheaper to operate. It's the next small step that short sighted humans are willing to take. I would rather take it than not.
Demanding that we stop driving cars would require a land value tax to encourage densification of downtown. Considering how many people are against letting people live in the place they want to live that's not an option. A car is effectively a tool to undermine the rent seeking done by land owners. If you can just drive away from the oppressor his power diminishes by how far you can get away from him. That's the true source of sprawl.
Changing the value system of the American public is a ridiculous pie in the sky solution that is not going to happen in any reasonable timeframe.
Those things change in small steps one generation at a time. Our best bet right now is to find carbon solutions that are compatible with the current set of values.
I get that point for sure. It's and/and. And electric vehicles (which won't be a solution to climate change) will at least reduce noise and pollution. They're just more civilized, and I think invite more civilized driving overall.
>"pie in the sky"
I think that's where we disagree. I don't think it is at all. Much of the US city infrastructure is build before the 30s. These neighborhoods could accommodate biking, walking, (and yes, together with cars)... much more easily. They don't, it's because every single road is completely dedicated to multi-lane car traffic. It's basically unsafe for others.
Slowing traffic down (top speeds mainly), would really only take bollards and paint. That is just a mental change; basically accept we need to share the road safely. It's unreal to me that such a small, almost insignificant shift, triggers such intense resistance.
The claim we were originally disputing was something like "abolish cars", but it seems you're walking that back considerably to "slower speed limits". The right answer IMO is "slower speed limits on streets AND more, higher throughput highways" so cars can get where they're going quickly and without using streets for bulk of their transit (thus increasing safety for pedestrians).
But this is an unpopular idea among anti-car people because it's insufficiently punitive toward drivers. Specifically, they often advocate for fewer, lower throughput highways even though that only pushes traffic out into the side streets, endangering pedestrians. (This isn't a straw man, I've had that debate with people in my own city about removing a major thoroughfare, essentially to spite drivers).
Please not. But maybe underground, then yes, sure why not.
> removing a major thoroughfare, essentially to spite drivers)
I don't really know the particular situation. I hope it was not out of spite! That'd be sad. (I do understand fwiw - how it can come across like that). I do think a city should never accommodate high speed traffic, only maybe on an interstate or a truly segregated roadway. A lot of these high-speed corridors are through residential areas, it's just plain dangerous, noisy, polluting. There's a reason nobody wants to live next to a high speed road, and if they do, it requires a lot of empty buffer space (huge front yards, basically) to make it tolerable.
> lower throughput highways
Again, not knowing the particular situation, since this can be very context dependent, and maybe we have radically different examples in mind, so ymmv, fwiw, etc... Just as an example: in my town, a recent a high throughput highway was reduced from 4 to 2 lanes. That did not reduce throughput. It did decrease top speeds, no more mad max style passing and jostling, and fewer accidents. Basically, cars now toddle along in single file, at a civilized clip, but no longer that accordion of rushing and breaking from light to light anymore. It also is so much safer for people crossing the road, or biking. It took decades to make this happen. When trying to get these, most drivers at these public planning meeting could just not imagine that removing lanes has any kind of net good. After two years now of this conversion, which is positive is so many ways (it does not even inconvenience drivers, only curbs their worst impulses), every other similar proposal still face this same kind of opposition. This mindset is completely ingrained to such a degree that it almost seems monomaniacal.
Sure it's not _the_ solution to the world's green house gas problem but as someone living in a province with about 97% of energy being hydro/geothermal/wind/solar, making the next car an EV should make a pretty big dent in one's personal CO2 footprint. You have to take your local energy mix into consideration.
I'm still missing a vision for a positive future which lacks EVs.
Every vision of a low-carbon future requires many things to change. You're saying we should let the current slow movement on electricty generation be an excuse for not moving on EVs (despite the fact that they're an improvement regardless). You could similarly argue that the slow movement on EVs should be an excuse from not improving electricity generation (despite the fact that there are improvements regardless).
Whataboutism about one vision is worthless until you have a better vision, where we can compare the practical and political tradeoffs between them.
But yeah that would require work, let's just cry about losing convenience and continue perpetuating the same cycle again, since we have no options but to commit to our clearly unsustainable model
That would not solve the problems like transporting goods from ports and warehouses to stores or transporting equipment that a plumber or drummer needs to do their job. We'll still need electric trucks and vans.
Presumably the parent has something more drastic in mind, like leveling every city and replanning it around bikes and extending public transit to every rural community. Basically treat every place like a dense urban area or force people to move into dense urban areas. At least those are the common, facile alternatives presented by the anti-car side of these debates. It's just urban chauvinism.
I've never heard an anti-car person call for public transit in the sticks. It doesn't seem viable to me[0], and I'm pretty anti-car as is. Most people live in cities or suburbs now and I don't see that changing anytime soon - so it doesn't really make sense to disrupt the lives of people living in rural areas.
While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing" people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the neighborhood 30 years ago.
As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like us"; it's an argument between people who want city centers to actually be cities and people who still think mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan. Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban core outwards or upwards?
[0] Though I may be wrong about this. Part of the reason why Amtrak still exists in it's current form is because it's a de-facto subsidy from Acela[1] riders to rural towns with no airport links.
> I've never heard an anti-car person call for public transit in the sticks.
I don't think anti-car people call for rural public transit as much as they ignore rural, suburban, and exurban areas altogether. They call for "banning cars" (or drastically reducing them) without articulating how this would actually work outside of dense cities.
> While "make everything dense again" is kind of the end-goal, the way we get there isn't so much by "forcing" people to move into dense urban areas. At least, not unless you consider markets to be a form of coercion, in which case everything is "forced" all of the time and I have no argument for you. What happens is that we stop overplanning zoning codes, let commercial and residential zones mix, and allow the market to do it's job rather than just lining the pockets of whoever bought into the neighborhood 30 years ago.
I'm kind of fine with this (I like walkable neighborhoods!). I would like more mixing of residential and commercial (more, smaller shops), but I think it's a foregone conclusion that this would result in the kind of dramatically increased density that makes European-style public transit ubiquitous (a lot of people like space, and there's a lot of it in the US). I certainly don't think that's going to happen on a time scale that allows us to skip EVs while meeting climate targets like the OP suggests.
> As to your point about urban chauvinism, I do want to point out that while New Urbanism (the thing you're talking about) is really prevalent in urban spaces, so are NIMBYs. It's not so much "everyone should live like us"; it's an argument between people who want city centers to actually be cities and people who still think mixed-use land is the path to crack-era Manhattan.
I'm not sure what New Urbanism is, but I would be fine with urban people quibbling about how urban spaces should look (I live in a major US city); however, this debate isn't scoped exclusively to cities.
> Dense urban spaces are already so desirable now that pretty much every formerly-cheap neighborhood has been gentrified to the hilt. If more people want to live in a dense urban area, then why shouldn't the housing market be allowed to cater to that desire and expand the urban core outwards or upwards?
I don't think this is true except perhaps in NYC or the Bay Area. But in general I don't think anyone has a problem with the concept of expanding urban density (although there's surely some NIMBYism from people who don't want their suburb to be the target of urban expansion).
GP specified that mass adoption of EVs was not the solution, not that there were no applications for EVs in a carbon-zero future. Just like the carbon offsets in the OP article, simply replacing personal vehicles with EVs does little to nothing to reduce either the global energy expenditure or carbon emissions, it simply moves the energy budget around. Especially true when a plurality of electric power generation still comes from burning coal and natural gas. Removing personal vehicles does reduce both energy expenditure and emissions (to the extent it is feasible, which covers probably >50% of personal vehicles; remember, while most of the US is not urban, most people live in urban areas)
EVs, like carbon offsets, are a necessary part of a carbon-zero future, but they don't actually get us any closer on their own.
How is that going to work out politically? You think a majority of voters are gong to support banning all personal automobiles? In the US, banning personal firearms is non-starter, and car ownership is even more deeply embedded.
EVs still have a ton of embodied carbon in their production. Creating those batteries is not easy, we still haven't figured out how to remove carbon emission from the steel production process, and at the end of the day we can't beat climate change with out reducing our overall resource consumption substantially.
I looked up the numbers and did the math a few years ago, and best case scenario - an EV fueled entirely by non-emitting sources - is that an EV cuts emissions by 85% in a full lifecycle analysis.
And that's actually a pretty rare case. Most people getting EVs right now are charging them on grids that are still mostly powered by fossil fuels. Which complicates matters even further. Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
For most people, car use doesn't have to be necessary. With intelligent design of our cities and a shift in culture, most people could get around primarily by foot, on bike, or by mass transit and forgo car ownership. So drastically reducing car ownership needs to be the bigger part of the equation. Those who absolutely still need to own a car can go EV. But we can't hit our carbon targets by simply replacing all the ICE vehicles with EVs.
Right but a problem that exists in 100 places is far easier to solve than a problem that exists in 283,000,000 places (in the case of ICE vehicles in the US).
+1 to cities needing to be less car friendly regardless of how they're manufactured, but the reality is that large parts of the world (especially the US), there's just huge, huge, huge amounts of investment in a (yes, broken) model of urban planning that requires cars. Undoing that will be really hard and I don't think we can afford to wait – we should take every solution we can find, even if it's partial.
Yeah, I agree we can't afford to wait for the urban planning model to change (and that changing it is going to require massive investments) so in the mean time we need to be encouraging people who can to go EV. But we need to do that alongside education about the urban planning model and the need to eventually get off cars entirely.
We can't go around saying "Everyone go EV to solve climate change!" because it's not a solution, it's an iterative step to a mid-point towards a carbon neutral society.
What we need to be saying is "Walk, bike, or ride the bus if you can. If you can't, look at your community and figure out why you can't, then work to change your community so you can. And in the mean time, drive an EV if you can afford it, or a fuel efficent used ICE if you can't."
> Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
Given how efficient even something like a coal power plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission, and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often), this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in realistic conditions.
From the US Department of Energy. You can get emissions numbers per Kw for each location. You can get miles per KW for most EVs. From that you can calculate emissions per mile for an EV. Which is a number you can get for most standard gas engines. Then you can compare.
But actually, I probably should have said "highly efficient ICE or hybrid" rather than reasonably efficient. It's been a while since I ran those numbers and the piece of info my brain stored was "Don't get an EV until I can charge it from solar". Either way, my overall point stands - EVs don't actually lead to the major emissions cuts advertised in most real world scenarios.
I just did the math on my EV history (~3.5mi/kWh) and compared to the EPA emissions for my region, Texas. That came out to ~0.122kg/mi of CO2 emissions. If I'm reading this other EIA chart, there's 8.1kg of CO2 per gallon of finished motor gasoline. So for a 30mpg car, that's .27kg/mi of CO2 emissions. So I would need to get on average at least 66mpg to match the CO2 emissions from my EV in Texas.
How many crossovers do you see on the market get >66mpg?
Also, this is entirely ignoring the transmission factors, this is purely a gallon of gas on its own being burned compared to the production at the plant. In reality you'd need to add a significant amount more emissions to the gas as there's tons of trucks having to drive that fuel to local fuel stations all over the place, meanwhile transmission of the electrical energy is pretty darn efficient in comparison.
The problem with pushing EVs as the ultimate solution to car emissions is that they are still grossly inefficient compared to other modes of transportation (rail, bus, etc.). EV's do nothing to solve other problems that car culture has created, such as urban sprawl and the associated traffic.
We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly.
> We should be pushing to replace ICE vehicles with EV's, but we should also be pushing to make mass transit more viable, and make our communities more pedestrian/bicycle friendly
Sure. That doesn’t make EVs a “short term solution”. This is in the same category of fallacy that lead hippie-era greens to oppose nuclear power. It’s not nukes or windmills, it’s nukes or coal.
Nobody is building coal plants. They are being shuttered just as fast as renewables can be brought online. Starting nukes steals funding from that for construction projects which will deliver no power for a decade. We burn coal in the meantime. The coal steals even more dollars, the whole time, and the nuke displaces much less coal when it does come online, if ever. Often, it wouldn't.
Money is fungible. Dollars spent on a nuke, and on coal the whole time it is being built, is dollars not spent on wind turbines that displace coal immediately as each comes online, and displace more than the nuke could.
This is a very stark difference, and no amount of logic-chopping can change it.
Poland is retrofiting coal plants [1] to send anti-nuke Germany power. And every anti-nuke nation is spinning up new gas turbines.
Voters’ sensitivity to power cuts and price spikes is more vicious than their preference for green energy. This sets the rules of the game plainly: anti-nuke states, invariably, burn more fossil fuels.
States that shut down nukes burn more fossil fuel after.
States that build new nukes instead of solar and wind also spend on fossil fuel for all the years until their nukes are done. When the nukes are finally done (if ever), they displace a lot less fossil fuel than the solar and wind would have, for the money.
Or in general with smaller cheaper, lighter vehicles. We should aim to build society where we don't need private vehicles for intercity transport. And then intracity we have electric bicycles or very small vehicles outside specific use cases.
The essential part of a long-term, low carbon future is to drastically reduce car use. After that wether it's an EV or an ethanol fueled ICE is really secondary.
From many people's viewpoints, it is not very well thought out to subsidize the use of 3-ton single occupancy vehicles that require massive amounts of energy to manufacture and massive amounts of energy to move. At the very least there should be far higher licensing taxes, congestion charges, road wear taxes, enormous gas taxes, etc.
We understand. What are we supposed to do, sell our houses and move to a condo downtown? Whose going to buy them, and where the fuck are we going to get the resources to house that many people without a massive energy/resource exploitation. So "no cars" is childish and naive.
Awareness isn't the issue, but awareness of an issue we have no control over does nothing of value to anyone other than add anxiety.
We spread too much thanks to unsustainable technologies/ideologies and now that we're facing the consequences our excuse is "how will we continue living unsustainably"
Same answer as people who built cities in the middle of fucking deserts and complain about potential lack of water: you don't
This is even worse thought out, and really demonstrates a real lack of understanding of how the world works. Oh how humans work. You're one of us, and equally complicit as any human live today. So, maybe, rather than being this unearned smugness, you come up with an answer. Any idiot can identify the challenges, and shit on something.
Las Vegas exists, as do many other desert cities. So, this point makes no sense. Humans, harness the physics of the world around us, to shape our futures.
It would be far better to generate synthetic gasoline from atmospheric carbon, if such a thing were possible. Then you don't need to replace all the cars or all the fuel (energy) delivery infrastructure.
I think synthetic fuels works better in large transport vehicles, like planes and cargo ships. These require hi-density fuels, and electrification of these do not work.
for personal vehicles, i think EV works well, as electricity generation is far more efficient than synthetic fuel generation, and battery at this weight scale and distance works great.
So you'd have a middle use-case - trucks and lorries - which i'm unsure if electrification works for. Presumably, it would, but only if charging stations are dotted around a lot more places, including remote areas.
If a benefit of EVs is currently theoretical and would only come after the useful life of the car, is it really a benefit?
I say this as a happy EV-owner, but one who doubts that my EV will still be on the road by the time when my electricity is >75% sourced from renewable or nuclear energy.
If nothing else, at least the demand from your EV is contributing to the mammoth project of EV charging infrastructure, which will help with future EV uptake.
The current projections are that the switchover to primary renewables is going to happen in the lifetime of EVs manufactured today. For a slow to adapt industry such as our energy grids the drastic capital cost reductions (much less TCO advantages such as decreased fuel costs, decreased maintenance costs) of renewables (especially wind and solar, but some of those advances have had knock-on effects in mainstay hydro's TCO too) has made them take notice and they are adjusting much more rapidly than people assume. Entire countries have had 24 hour periods or more entirely running on renewables, and sure that's good weather, but that's still not something some people would have guessed ten years ago. Most of that isn't top-down government mandates, most of that is "ordinary" capitalism and the fact that power companies are realizing it's "easy money" to go for cheaper renewables as large portions of their energy mix. (To be fair, power companies have always worked that way. Even what most people think of as "coal states" have always been nearly as much hydro as coal since basically the beginning of electricity.)
Just about no one is building new nuclear into the mix right now, but that's a different can of worms, and at least for the moment with so many easy wins in sight to be had in solar/wind/improving existing hydro it may not even be necessary to add much or any nuclear.
My EV is 7.5 years old and so probably halfway to its median practical service life. It's already down to around 70 miles of "can count on it" range and in 7.5 more years, I expect it to be down to just under 60.
I don't think very many 2015 Nissan LEAFs will be in service at the epoch rollover, unless someone comes out with a <$2500 in today's money battery replacement pack. No one's putting a $5-7K battery into a 15 year-old outdated tech BEV in 2030.
For some clarification, I did mean more in terms of EVs manufactured starting around today (next 10-15 years) more than those manufactured as of today.
I don't see the connection to EVs. Certainly one can power EVs using coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, which just shifts the demand away from oil and towards coal and gas. However, people can also power their EVs off wind, solar or uranium power, whose production involves no fossil fuels. In contrast, ICE vehicles are locked into gasoline or diesel.
Obviously, transition to EV is a key necessity for getting transportation off fossil fuels. Now, international jet travel and global shipping are not going to work with electric power due to lower energy density in batteries, but here we can simply do artificial photosynthesis, based on DAC and hydrogen from water, and generate carbon-neutral fuel with no need to sacrifice agricultural land.
I agree with most of this, but we keep finding clever ways to knock down sectors that had seemed impossible to electrify. For instance, FleetZero claims to have a practical approach for global shipping [1]. It's not yet proven, but I haven't seen a serious counter-argument.
Even for jet travel, we may be able to whittle away at the problem with electric planes (or trains!) for short routes, and hydrogen for medium routes. Long routes may have to rely on artificial carbon-based fuels, as you say.
Perhaps GP had an issue with the battery technology itself. Obvious comments about rare or toxic mining aside, population center infrastructure isn't really designed to support everyone having battery based EVs.
It's true that personal EVs are not that great in dense urban centers due to the congestion problem. Light electric rail, electric buses and bicycles are the better option.
I'm going to sidestep the rail & bicycle hole here and focus on busses since those are the closest alternative in America specifically. I wish bikes were more feasible nationwide though.
There are plenty of population centers that aren't densely urban. Cities in the 200k to 400k range seem like they're just starting to be big enough to support a regional bus system on their own, or with the support of a nearby larger city.
The problem is how infrequently they would run though. Those cities tend to sprawl just a bit as they haven't made the full transition to multi-tenant dwellings so lots of folks would have to walk multiple blocks sometimes to get to a stop.
Individually operated vehicles, namely cars, are still the name of the game for the vast majority of America. But then you run into the electrification issues I mentioned. A lot of these neighborhoods have very old electrical systems, and while we've made a ton of room by not running 60W light bulbs everywhere, I'm not sure we could handle charging 50k electric cars per night in many medium sized cities.
> I'm not sure we could handle charging 50k electric cars per night in many medium sized cities.
You can scale up electrical infrastructure relatively easily (especially compared to installing a subway or cable car system), and it will be a lot more popular politically to upgrade this infrastructure than to force people to use buses.
I don't think anyone is pushing mass adoption of EVs as the whole solution to the climate problem, but it largely solves for the "consumer transit" share of the climate problem. Of course, if you're hinting at doing away with cars, then yeah, people are fixating on EVs because getting rid of cars is completely infeasible, politically, economically, and environmentally (it would be a decades-long project that would involve tremendous emissions to address a small part of a problem that we have only a few decades to solve in total).
Too bad nobody makes decade long projects for their country/continent/planet anymore. Instead we're stuck in ~5 years cycles of throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks
You misunderstand the problem. It's not an issue that the project is decades long, it's that it is going to take, say 50 years of capital- and carbon-intensive development to solve a small part of a larger problem that we only have, say, 50 years to solve. And it offers virtually nothing over EVs except to gratify some anti-car ideologues.
NOTE: if it's not evident, those 50 year figures are made up. The point is that we have limited time and resources to solve the whole climate problem and we should be efficient (rather than ideological) in our approach.
Neither thermic nor electric vehicles are sustainable with our current usage.
Let's pretend you don't know about cars and someone comes to pitch you this idea:
"We'll make a 3 tonnes metal box, with a 1 tonne battery, that will on average only transport about 80kg of human being from A to B, we'll need about 1B of them". Who on earth would believe this is the optimal solution to a green future ?
I'm not sure where you got that we need 1B of such vehicles. We won't. But of all the vehicles that will remain, I'm willing to bet that almost all will be EVs. Even if there will be a fraction of vehicles on the roads compared to today, they still won't be using ICEs. Hence, mass adoption of EVs is inevitable either way.
You do realize that people aren't trying to make heavy vehicles, but that weight is imposed by physical and economic constraints. EV manufacturers try very hard to minimize weight. But anyway, it makes no sense to criticize EVs in a vacuum--tell us all about your miracle solution! Are we going to treat every urban community like a dense metropolis? Or are we going to close down urban communities and force everyone into fewer concrete jungles? And how much do you reckon your solution will cost?
Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city limits, for example).
Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be both/and.
> Some of the size forcing is for "safety," that is, we have larger vehicles because they need to survive crash tests at high speeds. But if you have a city that decides they want to set all speed limits at 20 mph and design streets so that it's physically very difficult to exceed that speed, you can get away with much smaller vehicles (no vehicles over a certain weight allowed within city limits, for example).
But people need their vehicles to drive on highways as well as side streets (where 20mph is more reasonable). There's a reason EVs began with smaller, low-capacity batteries that were suitable for the kind of driving you're describing, but grew larger because people want to be able to travel between cities effectively.
> Not every place needs to be a "dense metropolis," but designing everyone's lives and modes of transportation around the needs to people who live 20 or more miles from the nearest city doesn't make a ton of sense. Too often this discussion is presented as either/or when it can be both/and.
I agree that we shouldn't try to treat urban areas like rural areas or vice versa. That said, I don't think we're optimizing for rural areas (I've lived in both kinds of environments). Specifically, I think cities can do more to optimize for their own conditions both without imposing on people in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas and without necessitating the creation of "side-street-only" cars. Specifically, I think this looks like "better planning"--invest in more, faster, and higher-throughput highways so people can get around quickly without relying on side-streets. Side-streets should be slow and pedestrian-friendly, highways should be fast and car-friendly. Get cars off side-streets and onto highways. Note that this is eminently compatible with more investment in public transit and cycling infrastructure (fewer cars on the streets = more room for bus and bike lanes).
I reject the premise--we aren't "designing everyone's lives around the needs of people who live 20+ miles from the nearest city". People who live in cities can (and do!) buy fewer, smaller cars than people who live in rural areas. I think you're right that cities can do more to optimize for their own needs, but I think this looks more like "planning" than building cars that are only safe/useful on side streets. With respect to planning, I think cities can do a lot more to make fast, high-throughput highways so people aren't using city streets for commuting and thus city streets can be slower and more pedestrian friendly. This is also compatible with investing more in public transit and cycling.
Ban people from manual driving on public roads and even highways could work with lighter vehicles with less passive safety. Of course that might be more of an long-term outlook, as in "late this century", but it seems like an option.
Moving intercity traffic to mass transit be it trains or busses seem entirely reasonable. Ofc, this means that those services should be better or as good as private options.
There's a ton cities can do to make public transit a lot more comfortable without billions for building out new public transit infrastructure (which isn't to say that the latter is a bad idea!). Like, put some police on trains and buses so people are less likely to stab, urinate, smoke, blast music, etc. Clean buses and train cars regularly. Keep a high standard for antisocial behavior (if someone is being disruptive, kick them off). Run more trains and buses on existing infrastructure (don't make people wait half an hour for a train, keep people from being packed so tightly into train cars and buses). Keep reliability high.
If we can't manage these fundamentals, I don't know how much of an improvement we would see by building out new infrastructure.
I've been wondering if hybrids aren't actually better than full EVs, since I assume that 95% of trips are short enough to be covered by a hybrid's electric capacity while also minimizing the battery waste by not having gigantic batteries.
But in reality, when prices at the pump rise >20%, even so called progressive governments resort to excise tax cuts and drill baby drill. Because if they didn't they'll be out of office very quickly.
Isn't the carbon that make up trees a form of sequestration? I thought that was the "global warming counter measure" component of planting trees. But, perhaps this part of the equation can never be significant?
Thinking of it at the individual tree level is wrong.
An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon.
"An acre of forest sequesters somewhere in the region of 30,000 lbs of carbon dioxide. Individual trees die and are reborn, but the forest as a whole, if it does not shrink, retains that carbon."
But it's even more complicated than that ...
We are reforesting ~20 acres of woodland just outside of San Francisco and we are not, as you say, thinking about individual trees - we are thinking of the woods as a whole ...
... which means clearing out a tremendous amount of sapling / deadwood / litter material that would quickly combust in a wildfire and destroy the entire forest.
So while we are on track for planting >200 redwood and douglas fir trees, we have also had to cut down >100 marginal trees to reduce fuel load. We're thinking on the scale of the entire forest and the entire forest needs to survive a burn ... including our relatively new trees that aren't as fire resistant as the old growth redwoods that were originally logged out of here.
Generally speaking:
The complexity of carbon mathematics is fraught and complex and I don't think it's reasonable to expect end users like consumers to navigate it.
I’m not an expert on the market, but I don’t think there are many carbon offsets sold as “we will plant and maintain an acre of forest in perpetuity.”
And frankly it’s not something any organization can promise. Governments change and clear forest that was previously protected. Brazil provides a current and unfortunate example of this.
Also I wonder what ratio of those schemes are trees planted that would have anyway been planted for industrial forestry... We grow trees for reasons. And if there is extra cash in it there is few who don't take it.
It doesn’t release all its carbon. Much of the biomass does not end up back into the atmosphere but ends up in the ground. Those oil deposits were once forests.
One of the issues is that planting a tree is a slow form of sequestration. An individual tree may sequester a lot of carbon over its lifetime (measured in decades) as it grows, but it doesn't (and can't) immediately offset things as a seed or a sapling. Some carbon offset schemes attempt to amortize for this with accounting tricks, but for the most part when people are buying things like carbon offsets they are offsetting a pound of CO2 (or equivalent) emitted today with the hope that maybe a tree planted today will maybe sequester that pound over say the next ten years. (If it survives, if it is in a forest that is well maintained and hopefully not in a region prone to wildfires, if that forest is protected as an entity and not clear cut, and so forth.)
An interesting compromise would be that carbon "offsets" are available for purchase, but must be used to fund installation of renewable generation and energy storage infrastructure.
So that carbon offsets are accelerating the transition away from carbon.
> the only way to 'offset' fossil fuel CO2 emissions is to bury an equivalent amount of carbon, extracted from the atmosphere, in a geologically stable formation or a permanently anoxic aquatic basin
Why would avoiding the same amount of emissions in a place where it's cheaper to avoid not help?
Let's say for each kg of kerosene you burn in your plane, you hand out a solar lamp to someone using kerosene lamps, accelerating solar lamp adoption in a way that causes 1 kg less kerosene to be burned by that person.
The total emissions without the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a lamp (over the period we're looking at). The total emissions with the flight + compensation is 1 kg of kerosene burned in a plane (and 0 in the lamp).
This is a time based problem. Even if we make a forest, and cut it down 30 years from now, we have won ourselves 30 years of sequestration. In those 30 years we can develop substitution tech.
If growing in the ocean is to be done, it's probably better to try increase the amount of food algae/plankton at the bottom of the chain.
Last i heard, there was some experiment in this area, where a "sterile" part of the ocean was studied, and found that iron is the limiting micro-nutrient. By spreading iron (or rust i guess?) in these dead areas of the ocean, it would trigger growth, which would create a lot more ocean life where none existed before.
But the long term consequences of doing this is unknown. And that's not to mention how to actually get the requisite amount of iron to those places.
Changing an ecosystem is always a risky thing to do though, because there are long food chains, different species living in symbiosis, and just so very many variables.
I think the key insight that's missing in these discussions is we need to tax carbon at the point of extraction, not at the point of consumption. We need to make mines and wells unsustainably expensive to operate. If people really need oil, they'll find ways to manufacture it more cheaply from biowaste.
The trouble is that this is a Hard Problem because a huge fraction of the world's carbon is extracted in or by countries whose geopolitical standing would be crushed by this. But unless we do this, the same amount of carbon will ultimately be extracted and subsequently burned by somebody.
(Also when push comes to shove nobody actually gives a shit about any of this, and any politician who deliberately does anything to raise fuel prices will find their head on a pike)
" If people really need oil, they'll find ways to manufacture it more cheaply from biowaste."
What? No.
We don't care about the extraction.
If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from wells or Oil from biowaste.
If it's oil for burning an engine, and we need that engine to operate for some economic reason - then we actually want people to consume the cheapest version.
We don't want to make people jump through hurdles to 'run an engine that we need to run' for no reason.
We may want to make sure that running that engine is economically essential, in which case keeping prices high, or, by some regulation.
The act of 'extraction' is not a problem, there's not much negative from that.
Other than geostrategic issues (i.e. Russia) we don't care where it comes from.
What we want to do is tax the fuel itself - not emissions.
The emissions are a direct function of the fuel.
We know X litres of gas will create Y tonnes for Co2 and that's it. So tax the fuel instead of getting people to figure out emissions.
Oil that is used for other reasons, we don't really care about.
We could put a fuel tax, and a natural gas tax up right now - we already have mechanisms in place for that.
>If oil must be burned, don't care whether it's Oil from wells or Oil from biowaste.
Yes, we really do. There is vastly more carbon in the atmosphere than a hundred years ago. Where did it come from?
You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle.
The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, and through a convoluted process putting it in the atmosphere and never retrieving it. And then being shocked that atmospheric CO2 levels are returning to what they were millions of years ago, in the period aptly known as the "Carboniferous".
When you think about it, the real problem is the mismatch between how much CO2 is released and how much is absorbed. It took millions of years to absorb the CO2. It will take us 400 to "burn it all". If we had to burn coal within the limits of what the planet can absorb it wouldn't be a very effective power source. It could barely compete with trees.
Yes. The real real problem is energy. We are expending stored energy at a rate much higher than it was stored. Using plants to sequester carbon is a slow and long-winded way of extracting solar energy, although it has a number of advantages too - low-tech, self-sustaining, self-storing, convenient medium for immediate low-tech use i.e. burning.
To sustain our current per-capita energy consumption beyond our accumulated biomass stores, the limiting factor is land area. There's probably not enough space on Earth to devote to growing biomass purely for energy. Solar panels reach 10 times the generated power per unit area, easily, and we can do even better by exploiting energy accumulation that happens without technology, like wind.
"You can burn oil made from biowaste all day and all night and it won't raise CO2 levels one little bit. Why? Because all that carbon came from the atmosphere to begin with! All the carbon in living things comes from plants, who get it from atmospheric CO2. It's a closed cycle."
Oil comes from plants and animals, crushed under the weight of the earth, it's also a 'natural cycle' - but that doesn't matter at all.
"The problem is solely, 100%, taking carbon that has been safely in the ground for millions of years, a"
No, it has nothing to do with that at all.
It doesn't matter where or how the carbon gets into the air.
Anything that is going to be used as a fuel, we tax, relative to the amount of CO2 it emits, and that's that.
If as it turns out it's incredibly more efficient to burn 'biofuel' than it is to extract Oil - fine. But it's probably not the case.
As a sideline on this conversation. I'm VERY interested in dTal's point and if it stands up to scrutiny. To me, it makes sense. The carbon in the air now is from carbon that was sequestered. It was in oil, it was in trees, it was in the rocks. Then we let it go. We drilled oil, cut down the trees and burned them and built them, we made concrete.
So. If you take carbon out of the ground, and expect to see it floating in the air, you should be taxed. That's the idea.
But does this make sense? Just how much of the carbon in oil really is destined for the air? How much of the wood? How much of the stone? Or is there some other chain I'm missing? How much carbon would be sequestered in plants that produce biofuel? How much of a net negative is ethonol production anyway? What about other fuels? This subject seems complex to me.
You seem to think all this is wrong, and it could be! I really would be interested to hear where the logic breaks down.
If you planted a tree purely for the purposes of later burning it, it would 'capture' a bunch of Co2, then when you burnt it, it could release that Co2 creating a net 0 cycle.
It's not efficient as an energy cycle.
Not even considering the fact that wood burns in a very 'dirty' way and would require a lot of energy to 'clean' the emissions.
We probably wouldn't burn wood directly. Ethanol is also biomass. In fact, every single fuel we "burn" is biomass. The hard part is getting hold of carbon that isn't glued to some oxygen already. Once you have it, you can process it into whatever form best suits you.
You have to be careful when you speak of "efficiency". You have to specify, with respect to what expended resource, and what desired goal? If we say the expended resource is "land area" and the desired goal is "powering all of civilization", then indeed the the "efficiency" of growing trees and burning them is not so great, compared to say solar panels. But if the expended resource is "environmental damage" and the desired goal is "heating a cabin in the woods", burning tree wood is extremely efficient.
yes. That's a net zero. That's the point. If the point is carbon, then net zero is net zero. This is what dTal is saying. We shouldn't tax an activity that is net zero.
So it seems the real point is that it's "dirty"? We'd have to clean... what? Particle emissions? Most areas I see woodburning done have high quality air, low particle counts. Because their density is so low.
This keeps happening. The core rebuttable to dTal's argument is being left unstated. You keep saying it's wrong, you keep not saying why.
It depends on what would happen to the biowaste otherwise. Probably if the waste isn't turned into fuel, it will just rot and release the carbon anyways. In that case, it wouldn't make sense to tax the fuel. It only makes sense if the carbon would otherwise be safely stored and kept from going into the atmosphere.
Yes, the argument is 'burn stuff that's going to go into CO2 anyhow' but it just doesn't add up.
There are not that many dead trees, they don't release all of their Co2, you don't get that much energy, and it's a 'dirty emission'. Burning Hydrogen gives you CO2 and H20 - nice and clean. Burning wood gives you a lot of bad things.
So, I think it's worth talking about CO2 and other emissions (particulates, etc) separately. I totally agree that wood isn't great to burn from the standpoint of all the other stuff that goes into the air. And I agree that it's not a very efficient energy source either. It makes sense to use if you're chopping down trees near your rural home and burning them for heat in winter, but not as, say, a source of fuel for a power plant.
But I think that it's accurate to say that when you burn wood, you're emitting CO2 that would have been released as the wood decayed anyway. In that sense, you're not really contributing to climate change. This doesn't count any energy used in harvesting and transporting the wood, which of course could contribute to emissions.
To use another example, if you grow sugar cane, and using green energy sources, turn it into ethanol, and burn that in a car instead of gasoline, that's basically carbon neutral. If you hadn't grown the sugar cane, something else would have grown there, and decayed, and released the carbon into the atmosphere.
It would be valid to argue that if we had let the field turn into a forest, it would trap more carbon than the sugar cane would. And we should let forests regrow, where we can! But it's a one-time thing -- once the forest is grown, it would stay stable in the amount of carbon captured there. To continue to trap carbon, we'd need to keep harvesting the trees and doing something with them to permanently take them out of the carbon cycle, like turning them into buildings or somehow turning the carbon in them into something that doesn't decompose and burying it.
Their point is that nowadays carbon from dead plants and animals generally gets recirculated, but this wasn't always the case. Back before the enzymes to break down lignin and cellulose existed, when trees died the carbon they had extracted from the atmosphere didn't recirculate. And if we hadn't started digging up fossil fuels and burning them, that carbon would have remained buried basically forever. So where the oil comes from does matter.
A lot of people actually do give a shit, myself included! I like the approach of coupling a carbon tax with a dividend -- it's a lot more palatable to centrists and people who lean right, because it isn't going to what they might consider government waste -- the money from the tax just gets returned to the people. This is the policy that Citizens' Climate Lobby pushes (the EICDA [1]), and there are a LOT of people working on getting it passed.
Taxing at the point of extraction or consumption should be equivalent, right? No one extracts for the sheer fun of it.
It seems to me we could take a page out of Europe's VAT book which is ultimately paid by the consumer but tracks the "value added" throughout the supply chain from raw resources to finished goods.
So the implementation I like (https://energyinnovationact.org/) would tax the production, but companies could get a tax rebate for non-fuel consumption, such as manufacturing plastics. That puts the onus on companies to get their rebate and is a lot easier to enforce, but is pretty fair -- plastics don't cause emissions aside from the energy used in their production (which would already be taxed if it comes from fossil fuels). I guess one issue would be if you're burning a lot of plastic garbage, like I've heard is common in Japan, though I don't know if that's a big contributor to emissions.
I think it's fair to say it would become common, if you imposed punitive taxes on everything except plastic.
Once it's out of the ground, it's a matter of time before it ends up in the atmosphere, unless unusually careful sequestration measures are taken. Better to subsidize those, and tax generation, rather than try to micromanage the bit in between.
All consumption is equal, to a first approximation. To avoid it ending up in the atmosphere you'd have to go out of your way to ensure that whatever fossil-fuel-based product gets sequestered back in the ground after use - all of it, and somewhere where nobody can easily dig it up again and burn it.
Because you should tax the thing you want to stop. Burning carbon is absolutely fine, provided the carbon originally came from the atmosphere and not buried deposits. It's the open-loop cycle that's the problem. The moment you dig it up, eventually it's bound for atmosphere. You want to financially encourage the development of "green" petroleum - nobody will bother if it's taxed all the same.
Also, if you try and individually tax the hundreds of thousands of different uses for carbon, according to how much carbon each thing uses, inevitably you'll get it wrong, and this will create inefficiencies and perverse incentives to do arbitrage between the various poorly calibrated taxes. What you want is for the market to figure it all out!
We know how bad one unit of "cigarette" is for our health, but we don't know how bad one unit of xxx is for the environment. An apple can have a co2 footprint of multiple tons of co2 or zero tons of co2. We can't know for sure.
Products don’t come with a label measuring how much oil was burned in their production. Even if the manufacturer wanted to know, tracing that detail through their entire supply chain is really difficult. Preventing fraud is also very challenging.
Whereas if you tax at extraction this is automatically take into account at every step of the supply chain. The market does all the hard work for you.
Taxing carbon at the point of consumption is like taxing a product if the manufacturers' employees have smoked at the point of consumption. How are you going to enforce that? A product that was manufactured by smokers and non smokers looks identical.
Carbon is a global problem indeed. The most global I would say. So clearly we can't have such a tax be only on local production. Makes me wonder if Bitcoin could play a role.
The political problem is the hard part. People hear tax carbon and think "finally, those big SUVs and trucks I hate will be taxed!" and don't think "my annual international travel will become unaffordable" but that is more likely the outcome if you tax all carbon equally. The reality is people want to tax other peoples carbon and that's more like class/urban vs rural warfare than anything to do with the environment.
For me the pragmatic approach is to assume that the third world isn't going to become carbon neutral anytime soon so we are better off preparing for the inevitability of climate change rather than trying to prevent it. Sadly things like large scale geoengineering projects, genetic modification of local flora to support the new climate and other pragmatic measures aren't palatable to the crowd most worried about climate change.
Isn't it a false dichotomy? To say that we have to prepare rather than prevent? I don't think there's a fixed budget for action here -- while you can say that to some degree, resources uses for prevention would take away from preparing, and vice versa, it's far from a 100% tradeoff. If we completely stopped doing anything to prevent climate change, most of that saved effort would not therefore go into preparing for the effects, it would just be spent on other things.
And international travel becoming more expensive is probably true. To the degree that international travel is emissions-heavy, it needs to slow down and stop. But if you change the markets, other things may change. We may shift more to slower style travel like energy-efficient airship cruises powered by hydrogen, or invest heavily into ethanol to the point where airline travel becomes less expensive again. And maybe I'm wrong, and it will never again be as cheap as it was in the era of fossil fuels. But we have to get to carbon neutral -- if that comes earlier because we invent efficient carbon capture, great, but I really think that ending our use of fossil fuels is going to be vital.
And maybe I'm weird, but I am perfectly happy with my own carbon use being taxed to solve this problem. I really don't want it to be a class warfare issue -- we absolutely should do what we can to make it easier on people who will be hit the hardest, those with low income who have jobs that require a lot of car travel, for example.
Here's the economic argument against, from conservative economist John Cochrane (try to check the tribalism and focus on the arguments), who used to be a proponent of carbon taxes.
The standard vision in policy discussions assumes infinite substitutability. As soon as the cost of clean energy is lower than the cost of carbon-emitting energy, everyone substitutes completely to the latter and the oil and coal stay in the ground. This is the key question. What the graphs make clear is that the majority of carbon must stay in the ground (or go back there) if we want to avoid a large temperature rise. (Again, I do not quibble with the climate side of the models here. Whether the large temperature rise actually hurts GDP is a separate issue, which I'll return to in the next post.) But as long as the elasticity of substitution is finite, as here, then the carbon comes out of the ground. As you use less and less, the remaining uses become more and more valuable, so it's worth it, privately and to society, to keep using it although at lower scale.
This follows from a model that implies that even extremely high carbon taxes will only post-pone 4 degrees temperature rise by 50 years or so.
So I learn from this that a key focus for R&D is not so much on lowering the cost of alternatives, but increasing their substitutability for fossil fuels. Just because the cost of solar cells is plummeting does us little good. We need to increase their substitutability. This consideration once again points to nuclear and carbon capture and storage as really important technologies. We're really talking about how to replace coal-fired base-load electric plants in parts of the world that badly need electricity. Nuclear and capture and storage, though they might not be the least expensive, seem to offer much better substitutability options. That both are forbidden topics in climate debates is sad. Substitution also involves other large carbon emitters. It's hard to make steel and concrete without emitting lots of carbon.
This thought emphasizes a point that Bjorn Lomborg hammered away on in many different ways during a previous presentation: Simply making carbon more expensive will not work.
> only post-pone 4 degrees temperature rise by 50 years or so.
This sounds awesome. How is this an argument against?
I don't understand the substitutability argument. Yes, we need to spend a lot of effort making non-carbon mechanisms to substitute for carbon mechanism. To do that, we need an incentive for this research. The carbon tax is a good incentive.
Carbon tax is also politically neutral -- it doesn't care whether you substitute with nuclear, carbon capture or something prettier.
Got any more arguments for a carbon tax disguised as arguments against it?
I am not an economist, but I'll point out that all of these economists would respectfully disagree with John Cochrane: https://www.econstatement.org/
Including 28 Nobel laureates, former Federal Reserve chairpeople, and a few thousand other economists.
But intuitively, I do agree that simply making carbon more expensive won't work. You have to take the money and inject it back into the economy in a way that alleviates the regressive nature of a plain carbon tax while making the revenue available to boost the low-carbon economy. Carbon dividends, if you trust most economists, is the most efficient way to do that.
you need to pay out the earnings of the tax to the population again. This way the population easily can substitute consumption with usually more expensive alternatives
I'm not sure why Cochrane's so obsessed with using taxation (oh - he's an economist. OK.)
Most fossil-fuel burning is going on in power plants. By diverting power generation to renewables, you remove the demand; fossil fuel prices fall, prospecting falls, extraction falls.
Yes, I know, there's flight, shipping and personal transportation. But power generation is most of it. And I'd just like to see less flight, shipping and personal transportation.
Yale's Climate Opinion Maps[0] would suggest that more Americans than not are with the majority of economists, also. It gets less complex politically when you pair it with carbon dividends, which return the revenue back to households.
It's also fun to compare the effectiveness of pricing carbon with other solutions using En-ROADS [1], built by MIT and Climate Interactive.
However, this is a national policy thing that requires our direct participation in politics. Our elected officials need to be hearing about this from an increasing number of citizens and, frankly, be put into a position of worrying about their re-election chances if they don't support it (and other robust climate policy).
The problem is that we can't seem to tax anything from companies with more than a certain level of resources, since they can just use shell corporations and loopholes to avoid them.
Canada's "carbon pricing" (the government tries to avoid the word "tax" due to its negative connotations) is designed to be almost revenue-neutral to avoid this exact problem. 90% of the money is rebated directly to the people. The other 10% is used to fund green projects.
>Those payments mean that around 80 per cent of households receive a payment that more than covers annual carbon costs; the other 20 per cent are higher-income households that have bigger carbon bills, and so end up being out of pocket.
This claim in the article is directly contradicted by the Canadian government.
>Indeed, most households will see a net loss resulting from federal carbon
pricing under the HEHE plan in 2030-31 (Table 3-2). That is, their overall
costs—which now include the federal levy and GST paid (fiscal impact) and
lower employment and investment income (economic impact)—exceed the
rebate and the induced reduction in personal income taxes arising from the
loss in income.
No, the two claims are not at all inconsistent. Households are seeing more money than they would otherwise, which was the point of the comment you're replying to. See page 10 of your link:
>Taking into account only the fiscal, or “use-side” impacts, we project most
households will see a net gain, receiving more in rebates from federal carbon
pricing under the Government’s HEHE than the total amount they pay in
federal fuel charges (directly and indirectly).
The quote you're pulling specifically factors in a projected "economic impact" of lost investment, which it compares to the "fiscal impact". The economic impact is precisely the point. The fiscal impact is how to make the medicine go down.
It would be great news if we can sacrifice some economic growth in the short term in order to create a potentially popular wealth transfer program that also efficiently disincentivizes burning fossil fuels. If this approach can be scaled up, then the economic losses incurred will be outweighed several times over by averting climate change catastrophe. That's the whole idea.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the politicians and the media never mention the economic impact cost of this plan, and only tout the rebate.
>It would be great news if we can sacrifice some economic growth
The bank of Canada is projecting "significant macroeconomic consequences, touching every region and sector" and "asset values across the financial system could be subject to sharp declines in valuation, which might generate credit and market losses, and it might increase the stress on the financial system".
The Bank of Canada also seems to recognize the economic costs of doing nothing. Full context of both your quotes:
>"Climate change and the transition to a low-carbon net zero economy will have significant macroeconomic consequences, touching every region and sector of the Canadian and global economies," the bank said in a statement tied to the United Nations' COP26 global climate summit in Scotland.
And:
>Separately, Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle said the steps needed to mitigate the effects of global warming would lead to massive restructuring and the risk that some parts of the economy would shrink.
>"Asset values across the financial system could be subject to sharp declines in valuation, which might generate credit and market losses, and it might increase the stress on the financial system," he told a climate panel in Toronto.
If 100% of the money went back, you'd get back equal (or more) what you paid, if you are responsible for the average (or less of the same) of CO2 production per citizen.
Since there are many more poor people than there are rich people which are responsible for disproportional much more emission, the people below the average are the majority
Most Canadian households do get back more than what they paid.
The way that there are net losses to households is by calculating the "economic costs" of lost investment and jobs. This is exactly what carbon taxes are meant to do: internalize the externalized costs of burning fossil fuels.
When I think of lost jobs I think of lost busy work. Surely, if you are complaining about the lack of busywork, climate change mitigation will give you a lot of busy work, just not much profit.
>Indeed, most households will see a net loss resulting from federal carbon pricing under the HEHE plan in 2030-31 (Table 3-2). That is, their overall costs—which now include the federal levy and GST paid (fiscal impact) and lower employment and investment income (economic impact)—exceed the rebate and the induced reduction in personal income taxes arising from the loss in income.
Where's that money going? Administering the program? Being taken by the government as tax revenue?
From a pure fiscal standpoint, there is still a net gain to most households.
The net loss here is calculated by subtracting the "economic cost" of lost investment and jobs due to carbon pricing. This is kind of the point; you would probably expect industries that are more fossil fuel intensive to be taking a hit if carbon taxes are doing what we want them to do.
The more you tax something, the less of it you get. Imposing a non-zero cost on carbon will always be strictly better at reducing carbon emissions than imposing a zero cost on it. How effective it is depends on how big a tax it is, of course, but usually governments addicted to a tax tend to increase said tax, which in this case makes it better, since it will disincentivize emissions even more.
Curious, can you link to any reading on this subject? The canonical high-tax situation I think of is income tax in NYS and CA, and it seems that has only pushed prices and incomes UP, rather than down. But maybe it works differently for income tax because physical work locations are not truly competitive across location and most folks have visas, schools, family, friends, etc. pinning them to a location and reducing flexibility.
What is the basis for the claim that income tax in NYS and CA pushed prices and income up? This seems extremely unlikely, unless you are looking at pretax income or something.
This is what Canada is doing. Equal rebates for everyone - use less and you get a subsidy, use more and you're the one doing the subsidizing.
Now of course Canada's carbon tax is tiny, but there's probably some behavioural economics rationale behind the idea that even a tiny cost can have outsized impact on behaviour.
Rebates for people in certain provinces. Others have implemented a cap-and-trade shell game where the residents receive nothing but they still experience rising prices because of costs to nation-wide businesses being passed on either way.
Shamefully, I've committed the cardinal sin of people from my province: forgetting the other 60% of my countrymen and forgetting that things do vary between provinces.
Clarification question: when you say you're with the majority of economists who say "tax carbon", are you implying that the majority of economists conclude you should tax carbon in some form? Or are you saying that you agree with most of the economists who do, whether or not they are a majority?
I am implying that the majority of economists conclude you should tax carbon in some form. I am in the minority of non-economists who agree with that consensus.
I think it pays to be more specific. Carbon is a generic term that can include all carbon-based lifeforms, including humans. Also, taxing normal people for CO2 emissions just gives more money to the people who designed these systems in the first place.
If you tax CO2 emissions by everyone, and then distribute the money equally among the population, normal people end up with more money afterwards because they tend to emit less CO2 than rich people.
It is also better at reducing emissions, because then less CO2-intensive options become cheaper than the alternative.
It’s just a simple question. If we’re going to add more to the tax burden with the promise that the money then be equally distributed, it’s fair to wonder who would be in charge of making sure it’s actually done correctly.
Now we’re talking. The best way to sell it will be to call it a tax reduction and start by reducing the tax burden on people with a net worth less than $1B, adjusted for inflation. Then fund the entire program to align incentives by implementing a CO2 tax on those with a net worth of > $1B, inflation adjusted, with no loopholes for deductions. Do that and outlaw lobbying and it would have a chance at working.
If the majority of economists really do say that then I guess the only solution is to not tax carbon, or, at the very least, to not do what a "majority of dismal scientists" suggest. Over here in Europe we're still feeling the political and societal effects of the austerity measures introduced after 2008-2010, measures which were strongly supported by the majority of economists back then.
I was kind of expecting some of the stuff in this article, but I was actually amazed that he was able to demonstrate the absurdity of carbon offsets without even getting into sticky topics like corruption (i.e. you pay for a tree to be planted which never gets planted, or the m² of rainforest you "protected" doesn't get cut down today, but in one month).
Someone has described carbon offsets as modern-day indulgences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence) - you pay someone to "wash away" your CO2-emitting "sins", and the less you think about how it works, the better you can feel about it...
Serious question I have about carbon offests with respect to forestry. If you pay me money to not cut my trees and they all burn up in a fire, do you lose your carbon credits, and if so, do I owe you a refund?
I would imagine the requirement to replant the burnt down area would exist. The carbon offset would still exist after replanting, but the time-frame has been shifted to a further future (the time it take the tree to regrow back to pre-burnt size).
Yeah. Because there is a moralistic view that there is no way out—humans are evil and must atone. Any market-based or tech-based approach cannot work because we are dealing with sins.
A lot of armchair environmentalists have this view.
"I liked the idea of carbon offsets, until I tried to explain it as if its aim were something it isn't. Then I found out that it was badly suited to the goal I imagined."
As I remember the aim from when the carbon emission quotas were proposed and introduced, offset trading was meant purely as a transition mechanism, and wasn't intended to have any effect on the long-term situation afterwards. All the carbon emitters at the time got large quotas valid for a long time, so large that noone protested much. Later, the idea was that the quotas should be reduced and then lead to quotas being sold sale and emitters closing down.
This what happens now, as I see it. I read about a company recently that decided to replace its vehicle park with zero emission vehicles, but gradually, and buy carbon offsets from someone to compensate for the old vehicles. So someone with one of those old quotas shuts down a polluting plant a few years earlier than necessary and sells an offset, someone gets to brag about zero carbon vehicles quite soon in the process of replacing their vehicles. The offsets mean that both of them can get a PR win, and arguably push both of them stop emitting carbon a little earlier than would otherwise be the case. It's a win-win effect on the transition and has nothing to do with anything other than the transition.
The main framework the author presents - will it work if everyone does it? - sometimes produces reasonable results, sometimes not. That's the commons for you!
Imagine someone in the global North building an annual net-zero home with solar panels. That will not work if everyone does it. There are not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries... it won't work for people living in the arctic circle, for hunter-gatherer societies, on and on. Doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do for the individual guy building the house.
In short, the framework proposed by the author is helpful in evaluating things, but not dispositive. He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will.
[Author here] A more careful wording of "will it work if everyone does it" would be "if many people do it, does that reduce its feasibility for everyone else"?
This addresses the arctic circle and hunter-gatherer examples. Obviously there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in life. Solar panels won't work above the arctic circle, EVs won't work in an area with no roads, hydropower won't work in a desert. But if I install a solar panel, that doesn't interfere with your ability to also install a solar panel.
"Not enough minerals, not enough land, not enough batteries" would be a real problem if true, but my understanding is that it is not true. Of course we have a lot of work to do in developing mineral sources, scaling up battery production, and so forth. But I have not seen a credible source indicating that it cannot be done. Do you have any such pointers? (The actual trends so far have been very strongly in the opposite direction: the more batteries we produce, the cheaper they get.)
As for this:
> He has rightly shown that offsets cannot work for full decarbonization, but so what. No one thing will.
The limitations of offsets are different than the limitations of, say, solar power. It's absolutely true that solar power can only be part of the solution, but when you put solar power together with wind and storage and (pick your favorites) geothermal, nuclear, etc., you can get to a complete solution for power generation. In this picture, solar is providing an important contribution.
Offsets, conversely, cannot be composed with other tools to achieve a complete solution. If a cement plant operator pays to preserve a forest, who is going to address the (ongoing!) emissions from the cement plant? Not the cement plant operator; they already did their part, they purchased an offset.
There's no maths in your article. I don't get how you can write an article about the impact of climate change policy without maths.
> Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever. We’re still nowhere near net zero!
We're not? How far would we be? Would all the cement operators offset equal or exceed the amount of offsets needed to protect the entire Amazon? What percentage of carbon offsets is the entire Amazon?
Your entire argument hinges on these questions. Ask yourself, what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2?
The idea of "protect the rainforest" offsets, and "avoided emissions" offsets in general, is as follows:
1. Party A is planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as cutting down an acre of forest, or operating their diesel bus.
2. Party B is also planning some carbon-emitting activity, such as operating their cement plant.
3. Party B pays party A to halt / avoid their carbon-emitting activity.
Note that nowhere in this scenario is anyone removing any CO2 from the atmosphere; they're just jockeying over who gets to keep emitting.
If you're thinking, "but merely by existing, the rainforest is actively pulling carbon out of the atmosphere", then that's a separate, complicated topic and not what I'm trying to address here. If you prefer, strike out "preserve an acre of forest" and substitute "replace my diesel bus with an electric bus".
> what happens when all of the Amazon offsets have been sold and I still want to emit CO2?
Again, to avoid getting bogged down in complicated analysis of the carbon dynamics of forests, let's focus on the diesel-bus example. Each year, I can pay the bus owner to continue leasing an electric bus, rather than the diesel bus, for that year. I can keep "offsetting" my cement plant forever.
> Avoided emissions are when I pay my brother to clean his room. Only one approach can lead to a tidy house.
What if you have to pay your brother two clean two rooms. You are right that just offsetting your own emissions doesn't get us to carbon zero, it sort of gets us half way there (provided it actually works of course). If instead everytime you're emitting CO2 you're not just responsible for offsetting your own CO2, you're also responsible for rolling it back. If you want to be part of the problem, you'd have to be part of the solution as well.
Anyway that's in the hypothetical situation where we want to have carbon offsets be the driver of solving the entire climate crisis. I don't think that's the main idea. The main idea is just to be a privatized hedge on carbon tax. A carbon tax could be the other half, or the other half could just be a general tax for example on CO2 positive products.
My original point is at some point you're going to run out of bus operators that can lease electric buses. All the non-electric buses also have to offset their carbon emissions after all. At some point all the avoidable carbon is bought up and offset, and the only way you can continue to buy offsets is by buying more expensive methods such as clean energy generation or even sequestration. What is triggering my math concern in your article is that your examples involve an infinite amount of offsets being available.
Maybe there's enough electric buses for the first cement factory, but what about the second cement factory, it will have to compete for the offsets with the first one, raising the cost of the offsets, enabling innovation where possible (provided again the certification works well enough).
The idea I've seen with the "cap and trade" is that you use the money to, say, help a factory in a developing country install more expensive, less carbon-emitting equipment -- equipment which may not have been economical for them to do without the subsidy. That helps reduce emissions for the lifetime of that factory, as well as encouraging the development of lower-carbon technology overall.
Notably this article is about offsets, not cap and trade.
Cap and trade is fundamentally different from offsets in that there is a central authority who decides precisely what caps every company gets before trading starts, so every transaction which increases one company's cap by 1 ton is guaranteed to decrease another's.
Offsets are a decentralized attempt to quantify how various actions would lower the world's carbon output compared to some estimate of what would happen otherwise. The cheapest offsets prey on this ambiguity in the various ways the article suggestions.
The other big difference is that cap and trade is mandatory while offsets are optional. There is so little offset-buying happening now that the markets are artificially cheap. Companies currently claiming to be "carbon neutral" would certainly be unable to afford doing so if it was required of every company (similar to if the "cap" was universally zero carbon, a clear non-starter today).
The problem with cap and trade is that governments hand out free certificates to favorite industries which completely undermines the program. They are also reluctant to reduce the amount of certificates fast enough to actually bite. Then there is the problem of all the exempt sectors.
Yes the idea is perfectly sensible, the issue is that such schemes are probably a practical impossibility for humans to implement and police in a such a way that we achieve the goals or reducing co2 output, rather than just achieving a way for people to game the system for profit.
Even if everyone involved operated with good faith, even accounting accurately for the co2 externalities accurately is very difficult, and you can be sure a huge percentage of people will not be acting in good faith.
Let's be honest, offsets are a brand of corporate social responsibility, similar to marketing spend. They are ripe for abuse and don't do a whole lot in aggregate.
To be fair, when we're talking about an airliner buying offsets, realistically what else could they possibly do? We are not flying commercial airplanes without emissions during this century. From the individual company standpoint, it is a net benefit to leverage their profits for emission reductions in other sectors. This is similar to Norway's approach of leveraging fuel profits to subsidize emission-offset projects, i.e. outcompete the emission-burning activities that the market would pay for.
I've looked into this area.
I agree with the author that current sources of carbon offsets are poor and sketchy. However, that's not to say that people aren't working on more promising methods. Direct air capture and growing and sinking seaweed are two things that I think definitely pass the additionality aspect.
A big problem, I think, is that the market doesn't really differentiate between these, and that there are no strong regulatory pressures to buy "good" credits. We don't have a carbon tax in the US, and we don't have anything that pressures companies to say, if we want to buy offsets, that we only buy "good" offsets.
To people who say we need to move off fossil fuels - yes, but how do we do it? We can't just move our physical processes from A to B process.
It seems to me that imposing economic costs for every extra unit of carbon emitted, and only allowing high-quality offsets to subtract that, is the best incentive to move forward.
I agree that offsets based on sequestration, as you mention, are a completely legitimate tool. I mentioned that briefly in the post, but didn't dwell on it as the post was getting too long already.
The deep problem with the more common "avoided emissions" credits is not that they're low quality (e.g. "protecting" a forest that might just burn down) -- though some are indeed low quality. The deep problem is that if I pay you to halt your emissions, who is going to pay me to halt mine? That's the shell game aspect. We start out with two emitters, we halt one, we never do anything about the other. One emitter is "done" because they're no longer emitting, and the other emitter is "done" because they've purchased an offset. The model is broken at its core.
I completely agree with you on avoided emissions. I think these should just not be counted. I just hope that going forward, people don't lump all carbon offsets into one bucket and say "they're all a scam". I feel like we need more regulation here.
One thing I'm curious about to see quantified (I'm sure this has been done, but don't know where to look): If you burn a gallon of gas, it immediately releases some quantity of heat into the environment, this becomes heat pollution regardless of how the energy is used. The CO2 then joins the atmosphere and contributes some marginal change in the balance of energy of the atmosphere by inhibiting radiation of energy into space, this can be expressed as an amount of power (greenhouse effect power). There is some amount of time (greenhouse breakeven time) where these effect balance each other out, and the amount of greenhouse effect power * time is equal to the initial energy released. After that point, the greenhouse impact becomes larger than the impact of initial energy released and the greenhouse term matters. I did some really rough calculation of this time period and got ~ 1 year.
If total CO2 in the atmosphere were at equilibrium (it is not currently), there would also be a mean amount of time for CO2 to be sequestered. The ratio of (mean CO2 time / greenhouse breakeven time) would exactly characterize how much worse for the climate energy sources with carbon emissions are relative to zero carbon sources in terms of the total contribution of heat into the environment. With CO2 not at equilibrium, there is probably some fancier model to get a similar characterization.
Finally, it would be interesting to see quantification of different sources of renewable power in terms of thermodynamic impacts. For example, I would expect that solar would lead to energy that would otherwise likely be reflected back to space instead be dissipated into heat. It would probably for example be worse to have a planet that is entirely covered with black solar panels from a radiation perspective. On the other hand, for something like hydroelectric or geothermal, it would seem like we are simply channeling a energy source that is already just about to be dissipated into heat on its own.
I agree with the author, carbon offsets are a scam. They are equivalent to buying indulgences from the church. Now, the big question is, what public figures are promoting carbon offsets? It's not easy to figure out, but the usual suspects (oil companies) seem to be involved. Along with politicians who take donations from the same.
Offsets make sense if those selling them can prove the emissions are physically avoided. For example, if I place a CCS system on my cement plant, for each year I use it I have avoided those emissions, so I can sell an offset certificate to someone who can't do the same, perhaps in some other industry where it's much harder to do CCS, say airflight.
This withstands the "what if everybody is doing it?" test, because if everybody tries to offset in this manner the demand for certificates would push their price to infinity, so everybody is forced by the market to stop emitting instead of purchasing offsets.
The whole rainforest affair sounds like a complete scam. I haven't the faintest idea how rainforest protection, even if it's real, can offset carbon emissions by some other party. It sounds like an ideological connection, because both are "green" things to do, albeit unrelated.
The problem is that in this scenario, the airline is still emitting CO2, so global emissions never go to zero.
If you want to say that the airline is not at fault, because they purchased an offset, then the cement plant operator is at fault: they never offset their own emissions, they only offset the emissions of the airline.
> the airline is still emitting CO2, so global emissions never go to zero.
Sure, but global emissions decrease, and the market will allocate effort to the industries where it's cheapest to reduce emissions. So you achieve the maximum reduction with the minimum cost, as opposed to a prohibitive "net zero" goal, which is neither achievable nor a worthwhile target.
> So you achieve the maximum reduction with the minimum cost
Offsets do allow for a certain amount of optimization, which is a good thing. However, cap-and-trade, or a carbon tax, are better ways of reducing emissions while allowing for optimization. And unlike offsets, these other approaches can actually take us to net zero.
It's also worth noting that in practice, regardless of the policy frameworks we apply, we will not get to net zero unless we start climbing the learning curve for every GHG-emitting sector of the economy (except for those where the best long-term solution is hard offsets via sequestration). A flaw in all of the models that allow optimization via trading of credits (offsets, cap-and-trade) is that they allow us to defer those critical early steps. If all the cement plants buy offsets for the next 10 years, then we don't start learning how to decarbonize cement.
> a prohibitive "net zero" goal, which is neither achievable nor a worthwhile target.
Citation needed.
The mainstream consensus – as embodied in, for example, the IPCC reports – is that it is extremely important that we get to net zero greenhouse emissions. In fact, many scenarios envision that we can+should go to net negative emissions for a while, to draw down some of the excess carbon in the atmosphere.
And with the ferocious progress in solar, wind, batteries, and an exploding plethora of other fields, net zero is starting to look very feasible. It's too bad we didn't start sooner, but we will get there.
They are essentially the same approach, emissions taxes require a governmental mandate while offsets work voluntarily, where for various reasons political action is inefficient, for example in the US.
There are definitely issues with providing companies with a lot of fuzzy legislation that allow them to effectively dodge taxes. Big companies are good at tax evasion in general. And carbon taxes are just yet another tax with a lot of very sketchy and rushed through rules and legislation where people have lobbied heavily for all sorts of loop holes to be in place.
Carbon offsetting is one of those loopholes. Company X gets to burn a lot of coal/gas/whatever but it's OK because they put some trees in the ground in a place where that absolutely adds no value whatsoever. The trees probably won't be there in ten years. The only thing that counts is the hypothetical and typically vastly inflated carbon offset that this company gets to dodge their taxes with. The higher the better it gets for the tax dodging company. Offsetting is just a fancy word for tax dodging. Mostly it means spend a little to avoid spending a lot.
But take value added tax for example. It's a pretty normal thing around the world and people love avoiding having to pay that. VAT used to be easy to dodge with online shopping: just sell/buy your goods from a place that doesn't charge any VAT and you are good to go. They closed that loop hole years ago and it's a lot harder now. Reason, governments did not like missing out on that income and they closed a lot of the loop holes. So, now when you buy something on Amazon, you pay the appropriate VAT.
Carbon tax is not any different it's a tax and we need to make sure it gets paid by the people and companies that owe it.
There are no easy answers here but taxing definitely inspires behavior for minimizing cost. And sometimes the smart thing just becomes minimizing the carbon intensity because not doing that becomes costly/risky once you close all the loopholes.
Under a proper accounting scheme, "avoided emissions" are incentivized by not having to pay the carbon tax on the emissions you avoided. You shouldn't get paid for avoiding emissions, you should just get the benefit of not having to pay the costs of the emissions you avoided.
The only way to make "pay for emissions" actually do what we want it to do without degenerating into countless scams and excess management wastage, is tax it at the literal coal face, and at the port. The market really will figure out who pays what share of the price increases, that's what markets a great at.
It needs to be done slowly, so that markets and stakeholders have time to adjust, and there are no great shocks that destroy otherwise-solvent businesses or industries, but it's the only way it can ever be done fairly.
I don't understand the general thrust of this argument. There are carbon offset companies that are investigated according to sets of standards, specifically to rule out abuses like planting trees that will just get cut down again.
And I understand the basic system effects of: Currently it is cheap to buy enough offsets to cancel out one year of citizenship. If everyone does it, then these plentiful opportunities dry up - whether it's running out of land to plant trees or running out of pilot programs to bury carbon, it gets more expensive.
But that's a feature, not a bug. It means that over that period of time, more externalities have been captured into the system, which is exactly what we want. If companies are mandated to buy offsets and they get expensive, then it creates the incentive to create more tech to be able to sequester more carbon. Which is what we want.
The issue is that they need to be dramatically reducing their carbon footprint right now to avoid catastrophic consequences 50 years from now (and even that is tenuous). Kicking the can down the road by paying a little tax from their record profits does not help.
I'm a little confused about the cement example. Every inch of rainforest is preserved in year 0, so those factories can produce their ridiculous amounts of CO2 to compensate for the now-safe rainforest. That works IMO since the annual capture of an acre of rainforest is equal to one emission-credit worth of factory. (If that's not how the math works out then that is a fundamental problem that can be solved.)
That's all year 0.
The author forgot about year 1, 2, 3, etc. where those factories would still need to offset their production. Where are the offsets for those years?
The article also neglects some of the point of paying money for offsets, which is paying to research those alternatives that are required to get to true net-zero or negative emissions. They are VC for science that could solve the problem, funded by those causing the problem.
Additionality means that it wouldn't have happened without the offset. It's nice that we should or need to do X, but if X isn't going to happen, then any action that causes X to happen is a positive change. If it's a "valid" offset, then we already know X wasn't going to happen without it, regardless of whether it should or must happen.
Double counting is a serious problem here, of course, and the article is right that removal based offsets alone cannot get us to net zero. What genuine offsets (i.e. those that actually meet the 4 required criteria) can do is that (finite) resources get invested where they're more effective, letting us achieve specific intermediate goals earlier than without them.
That's actual kilograms of CO2 that aren't in the atmosphere by a certain date.
"If Everyone Did It, Would It Still Work?" - until we actually get to net zero, yes, actually. As the cheap and easy opportunities go away, genuine offsets become much more expensive, to the point where avoiding the emissions will often be cheaper than offsetting them. Likewise, as regulation tightens towards net zero, the opportunities for offsets that meet the "additionality" requirement go toward zero too.
There are many serious issues with offsets (like the lack of additionality, double counting, non-permanence, and leakage, as mentioned in the article), but the article makes it sound like they can't work even theoretically.
"“Preserving an acre of rainforest” fails the test. Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever." - then the offsetting potential of rainforest protection is exhausted, and other ways to get to net zero will need to be found. Also, the "additionality" criterion should, if applied correctly, already limit the amount of offsets you can get out of protecting the rainforest.
Any carbon emission reduction program that has no global consensus among all countries is a fraud and certainly has the backing of China, Russia and India if you follow the money deep enough.
Sure, you want to reduce emissions, but how do you stop industries from moving out to more polluting countries? How do you get Nordic countries such as Canada and Russia to agree when the unfreezing of their northern territories advantages them? How do you tell the poorest citizens of the world to suffer the brunt of the consequences of higher gas price for something that is centuries in scale and when their family is hungry now?
Not addressing these problems means you're showing off your support for the current cause.
I’ve got a funny feeling that the author didn’t really understand how offsets are supposed to work. Consider the example of all the rain forests. Assume they’ve all been sold off, but we still haven’t reduced carbon in the atmosphere. So far so bad, but given that, there are still going to be emitters left who’d like to keep emitting. To do that, they’ve got to bid the price of credits up. But any owner of credits that wants to sell now has to find a way to reduce emissions so they can sell. As the price of credits goes up, the incentives become reducing emissions to profit from selling credits.
It’s trying to align firm’s desire to profit with reducing emissions.
The other problem right now is shipped natural gas. Sure, gas is better than carbon if its local. But if you extract gas in Qatar, compress it then ship it to Europe, it uses way more carbon than Russian gas, so you might as well burn coal.
Agree. And to add another huge risk factor into the mix, how do you know that the offsets will last through the impacts of climate change? What if a company emits CO2 today, and purchases offsets which invest in the growth of a forest somewhere. In X years, that forest experiences the most intense wildfire season on record and all the carbon they paid to sequester go up in flames. Their offset is worth nothing, yet they already cashed out. Nobody wins, except the polluter who is strangely not liable to keep up their end of the bargain.
The "but what if everyone did it?" argument doesn't make sense and shows a lack of understanding of basic supply and demand.
The more people want to buy credits, and the fewer people willing to sell them, the more the price goes up. If someone is willing to pay me $100 to walk a mile to work, I'm going to walk a mile to work. Jeff Bezos probably won't, but that's ok.
The point is, the price will stabilize at an equilibrium. If this sort of thing didn't work, our whole market economy would collapse almost immediately.
buying carbon offset always struck me as the same as regularly beating your wife and kids, and then absolving your sins by donating some money each year to a domestic violence non-profit.
So the fundamental premise of the article seems to be "offsetting via avoidance can't get you to net zero, so it's a bad idea". I agree with the premise (that it can't get you to net zero), but I wonder if it can hep with resource allocation and efficient sequencing? For example we currently don't seem to have a good plan to reduce the carbon emissions of the aviation industry other than "fly much less". And whilst I can certainly get on board with that, it seems unlikely there's going to be the necessary big shift in behaviour (and corresponding shrinkage of the aviation sector) over the next five to ten years.
Meanwhile we do know that things like reducing the carbon emissions of dwellings by improving insulation is relatively straightforward. But individuals often don't have the capital to make those changes themselves (even where it would provide cost savings in the medium term). So if aviation companies were providing money that was redistributed to projects which are short-term viable but lacking the necessary funding, that could make an impact now, even though it doesn't fully solve the long term problem.
Make those contributions mandatory and we have something that looks like a carbon tax used to fund decarbonisation programmes.
Of course, in the end you still need to tackle the hard problems. But artifical carbon sequestration still seems to be very much at the "reasearch project" stage, and whilst creating natural environments that can sequester carbon (forests, bogs, etc.) is undoubtedly a great idea — not just for carbon, but also for habitat creation, biodiversity, staving of desertification, and a host of other reasons — it seems problematic as a form of offsetting for the reasons identified in the article, plus the fact that it operates over a period of decades, so it's almost impossible to create any accountablity if the carbon is not in fact sequestered.
More than that, the fact that increasing tree cover and restoring natural habitats is so important means it's worrying when the funding plan is based on pennance for carbon emissions. We don't want to create a situation where resources for these incredibly important projects start to dry up just because more companies have successfully reduced their corporate emissions (even if they still have product-usage emissions which are usually unaccounted for).
There’s something I’m not understanding in this critique . If somebody buys a whole bunch of trees, that would presumably increase the price of lumber overall and thus encourage a substitution away from lumber. So somebody certainly could chop down some other trees, but now the opportunity cost would be higher. The more people bidding for trees in order to offset emissions, the greater this opportunity cost would be. Isn’t this precisely a “market solution”?
> Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever. We’re still nowhere near net zero!
This is true, but as a side effect you've saved the rainforests, which would be amazing!
Maybe we shouldn't judge the worth of a carbon offets scheme solely by carbon emissions? It can be kind of dubious and still have good side effects.
The article focuses mainly on offset through forest.
The word forest is mentioned 11 times and the word solar is mentioned 2 times in the article.
Solar panels are a much more tangible form of offsets given they produce energy that can be measured.
Also insulation and temperature can be measured and are much more quantitative.
The author picks on purpose the hardest offsets to measure/quantify in order to support the anti-offset claims.
Agreed. I work in the sustainability industry, and forestry carbon accounts for a small minority of offsets available. It also has plenty of well documented flaws so we often steer out customers clear of it.
Yet the media and every blog writer loves to talk about offsets as though the only projects available are plopping trees in the ground.
The vast majority of offsets fall into filling the funding gap for renewable energy, methane capture and burning (a fun one to explain, but results in a net reduction), biomass use, and on and on. The simple fact is offsets are one of the greatest funders of decarbonisation in low income nations.
It’s also worrying how high this post was voted considering the authors apparent lack of understanding for how the carbon certification or economics work. Examples seemingly missed out include the fact that most certification schemes require buffers for forestry carbon to cover the unknowns in this type of project, or the economics idea that if every offset was purchased it would force offsets to go up in price until they encourage carbon reduction.
The most hilarious (sad?) aspect of offsets is tree rental. Promise to maintain a forest for 100 years and cities, states, or countries will pay you to "offset" their emissions. Average adult lifespan is about 55 years but perhaps these forest rental services are making promises on behalf of their unborn grandchildren.
...and please ignore the basic fact that no one can guarantee a forest will survive. Fires happen.
It's an economic bet - the article assumes static pricing for offsets vs mitigation. That's just naive.
As there is less rainforest to buy and the last few squares get more and more expensive. Along the way things like solar, bio, and other green energy continue to become more economical to implement
Eventually there will be a tipping point where it's cheaper to move to green than to offset emissions.
On a related note, I've just started playing around building a calculator for another externality of fossil fuels: financing Russia's war. First baby step is an API:
If we're going to be serious about reducing carbon emissions we need to end "cap and trade" and simply apply "cap" to everyone, celebrities and politicians included with no exceptions. If we cannot commit to that level of reducing carbon I have wonder if this isn't a trading scheme masquerading as an environmental cause.
On the contrary, it's quite obvious that the rich emits far more than the poor. Even if the rich can accelerate their switch to renewable, they still couldn't fly more. They can't buy too many cars / houses, etc. Also, any reduction in CO2 emission from the rich would help the rest of the population as the allowed average footprint would increase.
My reasoning is that these taxes increase the price of all goods, including food and energy. That hurts the poor much more than it hurts the rich because food and energy expenses are a much bigger % of their income for the poor.
> My reasoning is that these taxes increase the price of all goods, including food and energy.
If you do a cash transfer to low-income individuals funded by the tax, it is entirely possible to make the tax progressive or neutral instead. (and it still does all of the important market-pricing action things its supposed to)
But it can be tricky - some poor people use more gas than others. And if we want to give an extra cash transfer to the cleaner who starts work before public transit starts running, that's going to get complex to administer.
Giving the same to him as anyone else at a similar income level would be just fine. Assuming he can get any other job requiring a similar skill level the market wage for ‘cleaners who have start work before public transport starts’ running would naturally have to increase.
While I think you have a valid point and I'm 100% behind it, cap and trade would not necessarily hurt "the poor".
The difference in emissions between small and big polluters (them being people or companies) is abysmal, a low contributor could easily double/triple its footprint and still come out much lower than the big ones.
I think a sensible solution is cap and trade at the country level and let it trickle down from there.
A system like "cap-and-trade" is sustainable politically precisely because it benefits a few carbon traders who can make huge profits from the system. They can feed back 0.1% of their profits to politicians to keep their privileges.
The rest of us (who depend on this planet to live on) face a collective action problem where everybody has to lower carbon emissions. For instance the US has high per capita emissions but still is responsible for only 15% of global emissions. If the US had a breakthrough and stopped emitting carbon tomorrow it wouldn't solve the problem unless countries responsible for 80% or so of emissions also did.
The structure of it is that there is always (and maybe will be) some major country that takes a contemptuous attitude about climate change (say the US under Trump) that gives other countries (say Germany) cover to talk a good game but take no action.
The poor will suffer the most from global warming, but they’ll still often be much better off than they are now. For example, there are estimates that global warming will cost Bangladesh 10% of its GDP by the end of the century. That’s a lot, but it would be far worse to try and avoid climate change and risk losing even 1 point of annual GDP growth until then.
There are also estimates that Bangladesh will be under the ocean by the end of the century - wonder whether that's worth forgoing 1% annual GDP growth.
Less of Bangladesh will be underwater by the end of the century than Holland in the 19th century. My dad was complaining yesterday that “Bangladeshi kids today don’t know what it’s like to have to take a boat to school during monsoon season.” Flood control technology has pretty much eliminated such flooding in his village and those like it.
They’ve been estimating some place or another would be underwater for years. And it still hasn’t happened. What did Al Gore say in 2009 about the ice caps in “5-7 years?” Gore wasn’t even close to correct.
>They’ve been estimating some place or another would be underwater for years. And it still hasn’t happened.
Because most of those predictions weren't claimed to be happening within the next few years. This would still be some decades off, at least.
>What did Al Gore say in 2009 about the ice caps in “5-7 years?” Gore wasn’t even close to correct.
[sigh] Here, give me your hand, I'll hold it for you...
>"These figures are fresh,” Gore said on Dec. 14, 2009, during the COP15 climate change conference in Copenhagen.
>He added: “Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
>Gore cited findings from climatologist Dr Wieslav Maslowski, a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.
>However, it appears he mis-stated the forecast, according to reporting at the time.
>In an interview with The Times published on Dec. 15, 2009, Dr Maslowski said: “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at. I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”
I would also hope that I don't need to point out to you that just because Gore didn't know how to communicate data he was seeing, that that means climate change isn't a thing. I feel like I do, though, because your comment so obviously feels like you're willfully not paying attention.
The problem is theoretical and practical... In theory, a cap would be the same for everyone... in practice, rich people would be able to avoid the cap, and the poor would still be capped.
I lived in a country, where we had odd- even- systems of driving a car due to gas shortages many years ago (basically if your licence plate ended with an odd number, you could drive on odd dates, and even-even). Rich people bought another car... poor people had transport problems.
We've come to a situation where rich people ride their private jets to eco-something conferences, tell Average Joes that they shouldn't eat meat and drive their cars, because in 20 years, the sea will rise for x meters anyway, and then those rich people take their private jets back to their newly bought beachfront properties.
So, when the law (which is written by the rich) changes... who will get fucked the most? WIll they really hurt their own? If they're "afraid" of climate change, why don't they change their behaviour first? And if they don't, why should average joe do that, when he already pollutes A LOT less?
It is going to be cheaper for poor countries to go directly to renewables. There is no law that says that you need to pollute to become wealthy. The pollute-y kinda tech was just more cost-effective in the past.
A third of the world still burns wood for fuel. One of the most effective things we can do to curb emissions is get them using coal instead. Renewables are not in the immediate future for much of the world.
Burning wood releases more ghg per unit of energy than coal. We're not talking about biomass pellets in efficient furnaces, but actual wood in a stove. The fact that a tree can grow back in 20 years and alter the equation doesn't help us at all right now. Leaving the trees standing and instead burning coal will result in a decrease of emissions.
> It is going to be cheaper for poor countries to go directly to renewables.
Coal plants are the cheapest way to produce electricity. And no, solar which operates at a fraction of installed capacity and is useless for large periods of time is not a cheaper alternative.
This is a surprisingly timely post given the recent "Honest Government Ad | Carbon Credits & Offsets" from JuiceMedia[1].
It's more Australian focused, but it sums it up quite succinctly.
>Some offsets may come down in price due to economies of scale, but they will never be cheaper than “no offset”
There is one: pricing carbons out of the energy market.
If there is e.g. so much progress in carbon fibers that all construction is done with carbon, then all available carbon will be used for that and nobody will waste it to create energy.
Cement will cease to be used because there is not enough rough sand available. If carbon fibers replace that usage, emissions will be stopped.
It's actually stupid to store CO2 in saline storage because in 20 years or so, we will pay good money to get it back.
It should be possible to calculate the price of carbon in 100 years when each of the 10 billion global citizens demands their share of carbon. Offering investment opportunities now in a venture that stores carbon e.g. in the arctics like people store aluminum in the Mexican desert, should provide the funds to create extraction technologies and facilities to make carbon emissions a non-issue.
*edit: Looking at wikipedia, this doesn't make sense. There are 54tonnes available per person.
Maybe humanity has to grow to 1000 billion people to question carbon emissions.
>Proven sources of natural gas are about 175×1012 cubic metres (containing about 105 gigatonnes of carbon), but studies estimate another 900×1012 cubic metres of "unconventional" deposits such as shale gas, representing about 540 gigatonnes of carbon
Like most carbon technologies/statements be it capture, neutral, offset, whatever when it comes with an asterix its 99.999% of the time not true and usually involves a lot of money and probably PR for a multinational, a member of the neauveau riche or a member of the upper class with a guilty conscience or bad image/rep
Previous discussion on cement and CO2 emissions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24604335 tl;dr cement releases lots of CO2 when manufactured (you are basically running CaCO3 → CaO + CO2), but the reaction runs partially in reverse when the cement cures. There was no clean conclusion on what is the overall result.
The idea of carbon offsets is comical from even surface evaluation. I will pollute as much as I want but I paid my friend John not to pollute so all is good. Also I get free money from the GOV when I do this.
I love anything that tries to solve the problem by making people rich while prolonging the problem.
Especially when politics are involved. Still have the same problems as 100+ years ago.
Who is always pushing and agreeing to reduce emissions? China and Russia. Who every year increases energy output (particularly non-green energy)?
China and Russia.
The west is now paying China and Russia to produce green technology. Which requires mass destruction and mining.
At some point it would be nice to truly assess the situation...
As someone who makes money from harvesting plants, I hope for higher carbon and a warmer climate. It means more, larger harvests. Cheaper food for all.
I fear that you've been misinformed on climate change's impact on agriculture. According to the 2018 National Climate Assessment[0], a rigorous accounting of climate change's impact on the United States by 13 federal agencies [1]:
"Rising temperatures, extreme heat, drought, wildfire on rangelands, and heavy downpours are expected to increasingly disrupt agricultural productivity in the United States. Expected increases in challenges to livestock health, declines in crop yields and quality, and changes in extreme events in the United States and abroad threaten rural livelihoods, sustainable food security, and price stability. "
Higher carbon and a warmer climate is going to mean smaller and less nutritious harvests, and food crises the world over. It is in your own self-interest to want rapid decarbonization.
Also, you may not have heard that many climate policies call for a border carbon adjustment, which puts a WTO-compliant fee on imports from countries that are not effectively curbing their emissions. Well-designed national climate policies generally include this, as it largely addresses your valid concerns about making other countries play fair.
Here's more[2] from NASA on it the impacts of climate change on agriculture.
Our current lack of understanding of the Earth’s climate system does not allow us to determine reliably the magnitude of climate change that will be caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions, let alone whether this change will be for better or for worse.
The major errors in the models (we think) are related to not accounting fully for the sun's energy, and not modeling clouds accurately. There is very high confidence that uncertainties in cloud processes explain much of the spread in modeled climate sensitivity.
Even the relationship between CO2 concentrations and temperature is complicated.
The glacial record shows geological periods with rising CO2 and global cooling and periods with low levels of atmospheric CO2 and global warming. According to a 2001 article in Climate Research by astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon and his colleagues, “atmospheric CO2 tends to follow rather than lead temperature and biosphere changes.”
A large proportion of the warming that occurred in the 20th century occurred in the first half of the century, when the amount of anthropogenic CO2 in the air was one quarter of the total amount there now. The rate of warming then was very similar to the rate of warming recently. We can’t have it both ways. The current warming can’t be unambiguously caused by anthropogenic CO2 emissions if an earlier period experienced the same type of warming without the offending emissions.
Even so, the political narratives and trans-national push for net-zero emissions have only strengthened in the face of this growing uncertainty.
Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers
There were no grants from Nasa, the National Science Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil fuel lobby.
"His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done."