A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US • Hacker News Board

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#61

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #57

crispinb wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's statements like this, which are completely absurd, which are hindering our progress of making meaningful change. Only the degree of certainty of the statement is exaggerated. The content is well within any reasonable scenario-planning approach. Near-term catastrophe may not be the most likely outcome, but on all accounts it is likely enough to be the most genuinely alarming threat we've yet faced. You may not…

> You may not like the tone, but surely you can muster the courage to set aside your personal taste with regard to something so important? You sound exactly like a Jehovah's witness or a Mormon missionary.

[deleted]

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#62

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #44

bryanlarsen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plan looks feasible to me. Certainly much more feasible than Kennedy's pledge to land on the moon before the end of the decade...

Certainly much more feasible than stopping manufacturing of all non-military steel products and asking people to donate steel for manufacturing tools, weapons, and vehicles for WW2. The issue isn't that it's a huge task. The issue is that the current industries and governments are dragging their feet trying to mik every penny they can from their current dynasty.

[deleted]

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#63

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:06 AM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #26

sxates wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it's analogous. Lets say the cost of gasoline triples in the next 5 years because we're killing all subsidies, ending federal leases, etc., enough to justify everyone to make investments in electric cars. We literally can't make them fast enough. Making a million CDs was easy, but our heavy industries take a lot longer to tool up. Tesla is struggling to scale their supply ch…

Making a million CDs involved building entire new factories to meet demand. Making a lot more electric vehicles could reuse a lot more existing factories (and/or recently shuttered factories) if demand shifted enough away from internal combustion to retool a lot of existing lines in place. The difference between an EV and an ICE car on the factory floor are fewer than between a cassette tape and CD. Whether or not, s…

The real issue here is that there is a natural market replacement rate. You sell a million cars a year even though there are 25 million of your cars on the road. That means it will take 25 years to replace all of the cars even if you switch 100% to the new type. If you want to replace them all in 15 years then you would have to sell below cost in order to induce more than the typical amount of demand for new cars.

So replacement at the natural rate is economical, replacement at a faster rate gets expensive quickly. To do that you have to force people to replace cars they otherwise wouldn't have, which either means more subsidies (expensive) or taxes (expensive), or both. On top of that it requires the resources spent on the existing car to be lost when it gets removed from service before its natural end of life, and it causes you to have to build excess manufacturing capacity to build more than the natural amount of new cars, which then goes idle and has to be written off once all cars are of the new type and the measures to artificially stimulate demand are discontinued.

All this to say that it's quite important that the transition starts now with as many electric vehicles as possible, because the more we do now the less we have to compress the timeline later and pay all of these costs.

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#64

Post by beenBoutIT » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #54

mixmastamyk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before or after automation?

That’s right now.

The opiate epidemic has been killing off coal miners with no letup in sight. https://blog.exploratory.io/how-coal-mining-employment-has-i...

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#65

Post by johnwalker » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:17 AM UTC

lacker wrote: post #32

Since the US only accounts for about 15% of global CO2 emission, even if through some political miracle all of this plan came to pass, it wouldn't slow down global warming very much. We need solutions that will actually scale to be adopted by the whole planet. That means we need to make wind and solar cheaper, or possibly figure out how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Any solution that costs a whole lot of money a…

We need both! In the meantime, I like the idea of ending subsidies for fossil fuels since it incentivizes building a moonshot technology that everyone can adopt, and curbing our reliance on them so that we have time to build better technology.

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#66

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:18 AM UTC

sxates wrote: post #3

These are all good ideas, but the ferocity of change worries me. And I'm the sort of person who thinks climate change is the single biggest policy issue facing our country (and all the other countries) and and spending big $ personally to reduce my impact. My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So b…

> My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So big in fact that we face a generational backlash against de-carbonizing.

It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit.

Then the average person pays e.g. $5000 in carbon tax but receives a $5000 tax credit. But the person who burns a disproportionate amount of carbon pays $7000 and still only receives the $5000 credit, meanwhile someone who burns less carbon pays only $2000 and actually turns a profit after the tax credit.

Then we don't need all of this command and control. People have the right incentives, so they buy electric cars and heat pumps and solar panels, and the problem solves itself. The only real thing you have to tweak is the amount of the tax/credit, to adjust the trade off between being too fast/disruptive and too slow/ineffective.

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#67

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:22 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #66

sxates wrote: post #3

These are all good ideas, but the ferocity of change worries me. And I'm the sort of person who thinks climate change is the single biggest policy issue facing our country (and all the other countries) and and spending big $ personally to reduce my impact. My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So b…

> My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So big in fact that we face a generational backlash against de-carbonizing. It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit. Then the average perso…

> It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit.

A revenue neutral carbon tax means that government is dependent for funding for operations (or, if you follow MMP, “is dependent for extracting sufficient money from the economy for the current degree of inflation control”) on continued carbon emissions at the present level.

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#68

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:37 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #67

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My fear is that we take a big sledgehammer to the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure, and in so doing also take a big sledgehammer to our entire economy. So big in fact that we face a generational backlash against de-carbonizing. It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit. Then the average perso…

> It still seems like the best solution is a revenue-neutral carbon tax, i.e. a carbon tax which is merely refunded to everyone in the form of a fixed tax credit. A revenue neutral carbon tax means that government is dependent for funding for operations (or, if you follow MMP, “is dependent for extracting sufficient money from the economy for the current degree of inflation control”) on continued carbon emissions at…

> A revenue neutral carbon tax means that government is dependent for funding for operations (or, if you follow MMP, “is dependent for extracting sufficient money from the economy for the current degree of inflation control”) on continued carbon emissions at the present level.

Not if the amount of the tax credit in a given year is tied to the amount of revenue the tax generates, i.e. it remains revenue-neutral. Then it automatically phases itself out as less carbon is burned.

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#69

Post by alexandercrohde » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

pteredactyl wrote: post #53

Fossil fuel will be phased out when economically rational. Look at what natural gas did to carbon emissions in the US [0] Some Gov intervention may accelerate the change. But overall I’m weary of their efforts. [0] “Natural gas, which emits about half the amount of CO2 as coal, is being used more extensively due to its lower price and is displacing coal-fired generation...” https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions/

Uh... it's already economically rational... It's called a "negative externality" and the economic consensus is that the correct way to make a market efficiently operate is by applying a tax on those who generate "negative externalities" (i.e. damage the world around them) that can offset the damage.

This is very basic and undisputed economics, so I'm not sure why you're waiving that phrase around.

Re: A plan to phase out fossil fuel production in the US

#70

Post by jwr » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #15

ForHackernews wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This right here is why nothing will happen and we're hosed. > It takes time to make big shifts like this. We have 11 years to cut global CO2 emissions by 50%, and even that may not be enough. > Maybe it's not possible to tackle this without great pain to a lot of people. That might have been possible if we'd started in earnest 30 years ago. Now, we have a choice between serious lifestyle discomfort in the short term…

> Now, we have a choice between serious lifestyle discomfort in the short term or famine and death in the long term. I expect we'll opt for our grandchildren's generation to starve It's statements like this, which are completely absurd, which are hindering our progress of making meaningful change. Please stop using armegeddon like language to describe climate change. It doesn't help if you sound like a crazed cultist…

We tiptoed around these issues for years, using names like "global warming" and "climate change". It's time we started using the right names: we are in a crisis and we have an impending catastrophe.