121–130 of 185 posts
I know cryptocurrencies are popular here but IMHO crypto should be immediately banned before they start generating more and more emissions.
It seems to me we are truly and globally fucked: 1. There were just massive protests and riots in France (a relatively ecologically-aware country) due to an increase in the diesel tax of about 8 cents a liter meant to help wean the country off carbon. As a result of the riots, the tax was cancelled. 2. Current US administration is going 180 degrees in the other direction, i.e. doing everything it can to support coal.…
For France it's better to delay judgement, it's a messy protest movement. I despised it at first because why "defend cars" but these people don't care about cars or fossil fuels. It's just that they have no other way to find and go to a job. ps: no other way as in other modes of transportation worsen badly, they did use train but it's too unreliable and a lot more expensive than a few years ago. This is the kind of t…
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The people in the cities benefit from the things the rural people produce (i.e.food). Why shouldn't they shoulder the cost of at least some of the the externalities also?
Usually this would be accomplished by farmers passing on higher food prices on to the supermarkets and the consumer.
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A decade or two ago I was pretty optimistic. The world came together to phase out CFCs after all, albeit a problem an order or two of magnitude smaller. Unless things like Extinction Rebellion somehow become mainstream ( https://rebellion.earth/ ) in short order I think we're fucked. I think we have to actually accept we're fucked to start doing enough substantive about it. When we can see that wall we're about to hi…
> A decade or two ago I was pretty optimistic. The world came together to phase out CFCs after all, albeit a problem an order or two of magnitude smaller. ps we started releasing CFCs again
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From a simple standpoint massive multigigaton reductions are needed in all sectors and countries. Which was true 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and remains true now with little change. Fracking has been pretty much the biggest net reduction in carbon (nat gas has half the emissions of coal). So far solar, wind, etc has made little dent. This isn’t a political issue and politicizing it by claiming sudden urgency is an err…
> Major changes are needed yesterday, and so far neither party in the US has ever proposed anything resembling the scale of change needed. No, but at least Democrats proposed and passed something. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Clean_Energy_and_Se...
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"Should they be the ones paying for everybody else and let the people living in the cities without a car not pay their fair share of the burden?" A carbon tax, which taxes carbon, taxes the people who use carbon less, does not sound like users aren't paying "their fair share". They ARE paying their fair share, because they use less. The problem of use-based taxes affecting the poor disproportionately is well-known, b…
The reason that people in cities won't pay the tax is that they have buses and trains available. That is not available to the people from the countryside. You can't just say stop polluting but not give any alternative mode of transport for this people. What about the rest of the people of this the planet who don't live in a city? Should they just shut up and take it? Easy to say when you are not the one who has to pa…
In response, all the people who need to drive on it to get to work get outraged. Why don't we charge the people who don't drive on it???!? It's unfair that we have to pay for it just because we use it!
Hopefully you can see how that's ridiculous. And that directly parallels the carbon tax.
The solution is to encourage behavior patterns that generate less carbon. That can mean moving to cities. It can also mean localities providing more public transit. Or labor negotiating more telecommuting options.
A nice, non-distortionary way to deal with the problem is to take the tax, and either reduce other taxes equivalently (for every euro the carbon tax pulls in, reduce the VAT by one euro) or to just hand out the total proceeds of the carbon tax to everyone directly. The disincentive to pollute remains, so you still end up with a fairer economic system.
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I understand your argument, but the people living in rural areas are bigger contributors to pollution since they tend to drive more and live in single family dwellings. Why shouldn’t the actual road users pay the cost of using the road? I agree any industry using fuel should pay an equal tax though.
The people in the cities benefit from the things the rural people produce (i.e.food). Why shouldn't they shoulder the cost of at least some of the the externalities also?
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> A decade or two ago I was pretty optimistic. The world came together to phase out CFCs after all, albeit a problem an order or two of magnitude smaller. ps we started releasing CFCs again
s/we/China
The article offhand mentions that we're on track for RCP 8.5, or 8.5 W/m^2 additional heat in 2100. That should fucking terrify you. That's 4 C global temperature rise, a .75 meter sea level rise, and a doubling of ocean acidity. Page 82 of the IPCC report[1] has some fast facts- at RCP 8.5 most of the wild animals on earth will start dying out from lack of freshwater. Corals and molluscs will die out, and all ocean…
> Any worse than RCP 8.5 and the earth enters a runaway greenhouse. At that point the atmosphere turns into Venus, and life on Earth really would be over. I don't see how that would be possible (and at least the scientists at the ICPP don't believe it would be possible either, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect ). At the end of the day, it is believed that all or almost all of the oil, coal and n…
That's down to the fact that emitting more than 8.5 RCP requires some insane choices. Like, as you say, burning pretty much everything. A low-end runaway greenhouse can happen with 12 W/m^2 forcing[1], which would mean temperature changes ~20 C compared to 4-8, and multiple times more CO2.
> At the end of the day, it is believed that all or almost all of the oil, coal and natural gas we use comes from biogenic sources, meaning it used to be in the atmosphere at some point in the past.
That is a very, very silly way to look at it. The total weight of carbon in the air is 870 gigatons. There are 1000 gigatons in ocean life, 2000 gigatons in the terrestrial biosphere, and 4000 gigatons in fossil fuel reserves. The fact that it was in the atmosphere at one point is irrelevant; I've drunk thousands of gallons of water in my lifetime. If you were to return those to my body all at once, I would explode.
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I'm reminded of Stein's Law. It is not exactly right, but it is how I feel this will likely play out. At least if reduction in carbon emissions is the only card we have in our hand. I.e. we will stop emitting carbon when (for all practical purposes) we run out. Not before. At some point I do expect people will start having more serious discussions about how much climate engineering we are willing to undertake. Certai…
It looks to be a self-correcting problem. Eventually the side-effect of burning hydrocarbons will kill off the creatures who insist on burning hydrocarbons.