Carbon tax discourages emitting carbon into into the atmosphere. Carbon credit encourages sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Both are needed.
One advantage to carbon credits is that anybody can pay them, whereas only the government can enforce a carbon tax. And when it comes to the Amazon, this means the Brazilian government...whose leader is a climate denier that wants to bulldoze the Amazon for agriculture.
Ah I see..I had thought that producing fewer emissions than target/allowance would be given a credit they can sell to others. That is different than Credits for Carbon capture. Thanks for clarifying.
Instead of abolishing single-family zoning completely, I would suggest adopting an approach more like the Japanese. They use "stacked" zoning for most uses, instead of the American-style single-use zoning. Their zoning is also done at a national level, instead of community level.
Generally, the change would allow single-family homes. But it would not REQUIRE single-family homes.
A typical development pattern might be something like...
- all single family homes to start
- area gets popular (property value goes up), a few SFH are replaced with duplex or small apartments
- area gets more popular, more SFH removed, mid-rise apartments begin to appear, small-scale retail appears
Etc.
Of course, this requires that NIBMYs aren't allowed to control other people's property. And the zoning and codes that do exist are enforced so you don't end up with a SFH next to a gas station.
If I had to commute for an hour both ways, I would go completely insane. I don't know about you, but I need to live near where I work, meet friends, and have hobbies.
People are not livestock, to be ferried from place to place as market forces see fit.
That said, we can't have both. Either we have density, or we have everything spread out with long commutes.
Personally, I support Japanese style zoning, and letting people buy the kind of property they wish to live in.
I'm with you and I will probably never have a roommate again because of negative experiences.
However, I've always felt something is deeply wrong with the way zoning works right now. I live in a suburb type residential neighbourhood and the nearest corner store is a 20 minute walk away -- that seems silly. At some point we strictly divided residential and commercial and we all suffer because of it.
Zoning is also one of the prime factors in the car culture problem that is eating up the world's resources and boiling the frog called humanity.
Currently every area of a city is "zoned" for what is allowed to get built there. "Single family home" (SFH) zoning is the most common, and the strictest: it requires every building to be a house meant for one family. No multi-family housing (even duplexes) and no commercial use (even neighborhood stores or home businesses).
This NYTimes articles discusses some of the issues and how Minneapolis is changing its policies. This should be done everywhere:
A middle ground I really like are these mixed residential suburbs I'm seeing more in Ontario. On one street you'll find 3 car garage houses all the way down to 6-unit townhouses. All circling the same park with an apartment building on the far corner.
You're being super disingenuous here. The main priority of Germany's energy transition program was not to lower electricity carbon emissions; it was to phase out nuclear. They were far more worried about a 2nd Fukushima than global warming.
And as you point out, they are managing to reduce CO2 emissions anyway.
Oak Ridge Electric Company, which is a tiny municipal utility that sources electricity from TVA, has 7.09% participation in its green pricing program (which presumably bypasses TVA). This has nothing to do with TVA itself and how it generates power.
Coal is dying in the US. There hasn't been a new power plant built in years, and facilities are getting retired early because it's cheaper to build new solar/wind than to run on coal.
The bad news is that many of the coal plants are getting converted to natural gas rather than being replaced by renewables. And when it comes to climate change, gas is only marginally better than coal. (Though when it comes to air pollution, gas is much better.)
A tiny coal plant recently opened in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Good to know about the natural gas. It now costs less to make a new solar or wind plant than it does a coal plant for the equivalent energy. However it costs less to maintain an old coal plant than it does to replace it with a new solar or wind plant.
The reason why stuff like this (electrolysis, desalination, etc.) is not widely done is that the capital cost of the facilities is too high. If you spend a bunch of money on an electrolysis plant and only run it 10% of the time, you'll never make your money back, even if your electricity is free.
The battery in a Nissan LEAF is warranteed to retain 75% of its capacity for 8 years, 160,000 km. So there's a good chance you'd be on a 2nd battery, considering a 3rd at your stage.
But on the upside, there's virtually none of the other engine maintenance that is required of combustion-run vehicles.
I'm in favor of radical curtailment of the burning of all fossil fuels. Anything short of that is going to be catastrophic. Yes, I know this is a pipe dream at this point. But a boy can still dream.
Deciding whether or not to burn this methane is kind of like being adrift on the north Atlantic and deciding whether or not to burn the ship to stay warm.
I think you are underestimating how much methane there is under there.
>"There is a huge amount of carbon stored in permafrost. Right now, the Earth's atmosphere contains about 850 gigatons of carbon. (A gigaton is one billion tons—about the weight of one hundred thousand school buses). We estimate that there are about 1,400 gigatons of carbon frozen in permafrost."https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/methane.html
The beavers are going to do their thing and create comfortable habitats for themselves, which is melting the permafrost. So it looks like this gas is coming out one way or the other.
Carbon tax discourages emitting carbon into into the atmosphere. Carbon credit encourages sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. Both are needed.
One advantage to carbon credits is that anybody can pay them, whereas only the government can enforce a carbon tax. And when it comes to the Amazon, this means the Brazilian government...whose leader is a climate denier that wants to bulldoze the Amazon for agriculture.