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Levels of banned CFCs rising

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Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#151

Post by dragonwriter »

munk-a wrote: post #150
evandale wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to go one step further than this idea and introduce carbon tariffs on imported goods coupled with price ceilings so corporations can't pass off the tariffs to wealthy people and still profit. The corporations should be paying these taxes and their bottom line should suffer if they're selling dirty goods. They should not be able to make the profit margins they're making today by manufacturing cheap trash in Chi…

I'm actually quite in favor of, essentially, a minimum VAT tax. The US demands that good manufacturing pays some reasonable level of VAT taxes (let's say 10% as an example). If Apple builds a laptop in China they value at 300$ (paying 45$ in VAT to China) and then ship it over to Bermuda to "endow it with their brand" adding 1700$ to the value and paying a VAT tax of .5% then, once it arrives at US shores, we simply…

So, an import tariff that is waived against imports from countries with sufficiently high taxes on production, provided those taxes are characterized the right way?

Seems like a monumentally bad idea

> It’s an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.

I don’t think it closes any tax loopholes.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#152

Post by 908B64B197 »

nluken wrote: post #18
anonym29 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past. I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 ener…

I mean what do you propose western nations do? Nothing? Yeah stupid measures like removing straws from restaurants make 0 difference, but pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles and cleaner sources of electricity seems like a worthwhile effort without much QoL sacrifice. Green infrastructure (i.e. reducing car dependence) also seems to improve quality of life in many places, so I would argue we should be trying to d…

> I mean what do you propose western nations do?

> Western nations can't demand that the rest of the world reduce emissions until they do first.

The west is working hard at lowering it's emissions, but all that work is getting undone because China's emissions aren't slowing down. Coal is incredibly cheap when there's no carbon tax or emission standards. One of the many reasons it's cheaper to manufacture in China and why North Americans and Europeans can't compete [0]. Comparing the US[1] and China[2], the US has:

- Decreasing per capita emissions in the US starting in 1973 (-27%)

- A decrease in the countries emission starting in 2007 (-13%)

Meanwhile for the same period China has had

- a 7x increase per capita since 1973 (+532%)

- 48% increase for its global emissions since 2007

So it is possible to drastically reduce our carbon footprint thanks to innovation and smarter power generation.

Time to add tariffs on goods produced by states who made the decision of going all-in on polluting power generation, and potentially apply immigration quotas to citizens of these countries.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/us-leads-greenhouse-gas-emis...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#153

Post by sokoloff »

tzs wrote: post #88
anonym29 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is mentioned as having been a likely culprit in the past. I don't understand why Westerners are so keen to make major sacrifices to quality of life in the name of fighting climate change when nothing we do will make a statistically significant impact in the long run with major population centers like China, India, and Nigeria continuing to grow more wealthy with rapidly increasing demand for reliable, 24/7 ener…

For whatever upper limit we finally decide we must keep warming under there will be a corresponding total amount of greenhouse gases that can be in the atmosphere without pushing warming past that limit. Since the atmosphere does not care about arbitrary man-made boundaries it makes no sense to do an unweighted comparison of the emissions of different countries when trying to decide which countries are emitting too m…

If you’re going to create a quota for countries, it’s not obvious that you should allow credits for outsourced emissions. If a country wants to use its previous quota on trade, it can but it gets no credit excusing it.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#154

Post by lll-o-lll »

wongarsu wrote: post #114
anonym29 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're making important strides on fusion too, which makes fission look like a waste of radiological material, in comparison.

They are not really competing for the same material. Fission smashes neutrons into big atoms to make them smaller, fusion smashes small atoms into each other to make them bigger. Both work by making atoms of the more stable medium-sized variety, and extracting the energy of that process. But yeah, looks like commercial fusion reactors are getting closer.

Ha! We need a 100x or 1000x improvement in efficiency before a commercial power station becomes viable.

I can’t see fusion energy being a reality in my lifetime.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#155

Post by wcoenen »

eecc wrote: post #142
morsch wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The combined emissions of CFC-13, CFC-112a, CFC-113a, CFC-114a and CFC-115 increased from 1.6 ± 0.2 to 4.2 ± 0.4 ODP-Gg yr-1 (CFC-11-equivalent ozone-depleting potential) between 2010 and 2020. The anticipated impact of these emissions on stratospheric ozone recovery is small. However, ongoing emissions of the five CFCs of focus may negate some of the benefits gained under the Montreal Protocol if they continue to ri…

Gg, Tg? Is that Giga-gram and Tera-gram? Why not kg, the SI standard unit for mass?

"Teragram" appeared in the original IPCC reports circa 1990, so this has been a thing for at least a gigasecond.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#156

Post by Shaanie »

scottLobster wrote: post #128
anonym29 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a worse starting point, but as another commenter has pointed out, we're trending in the right direction and China is trending in the wrong direction. Part of the solution is necessarily going to be temporary reductions in American energy consumption, writ large, until we can produce technology to sustainably remove carbon emissions from the environment at scale. I'm all-in, for instance, on banning SUVs an…

"to be reduced to a level sufficient only for the sustainment of life past a certain threshold," Wow, do you hear yourself? Who decides what "threshold" is acceptable, you? You think you should be able to determine whether my infant daughter freezes in the winter or swelters in the summer? Oh I'm sure your theory involves some utopian government that never gets anything wrong. What you're proposing is a dystopian pol…

The alternative is that we do nothing until it's too late, and then the consequences will be much worse. Don't worry though, society is terrible at preventive action, so I'm pretty confident we're going for the reactive action once it's too late.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#157

Post by thfuran »

anonym29 wrote: post #83
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> find a way to cleanly 1000x our energy production. Have you heard of our lord and savior Nuclear Fission? We should build a shitload of restores all over the place.

We're making important strides on fusion too, which makes fission look like a waste of radiological material, in comparison.

Aren't we still on the "fusion never" funding timeline? I mean, we might accidentally luck into it, but it's not like we're really trying hard.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#158

Post by [deleted] »

meindnoch wrote: post #100
londons_explore wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Romans were believed to have a 'pale white' skin. They lived in Rome, and while there are records of sunshades (Velarium), it doesn't seem they were common. For example, the colosseum, a place people might stay many hours, had only 30% coverage. I don't think someone with similar skin would last long in Rome in the sun today...

Modern people barely spend time outside compared to the Romans. No wonder we're getting sunburnt when we finally go out in peak summer. If you spend most of your time outside year round, you'll develop a natural deep tan which offers considerable protection from the sun.

[deleted]

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#159

Post by asdff »

guhidalg wrote: post #130
josephcsible wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what do you propose western nations do? Ban imports of goods made in ways that would have been illegal to do here.

Which ones should we start with? We can't go from 0 to 100 overnight, that would halt everything.

You could do all of them and give companies time to adjust their supply chains. I'm sure given such a sweeping order, supply chains will reorient rapidly to other places.

Re: Levels of banned CFCs rising

#160

Post by munk-a »

dragonwriter wrote: post #151
munk-a wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually quite in favor of, essentially, a minimum VAT tax. The US demands that good manufacturing pays some reasonable level of VAT taxes (let's say 10% as an example). If Apple builds a laptop in China they value at 300$ (paying 45$ in VAT to China) and then ship it over to Bermuda to "endow it with their brand" adding 1700$ to the value and paying a VAT tax of .5% then, once it arrives at US shores, we simply…

So, an import tariff that is waived against imports from countries with sufficiently high taxes on production, provided those taxes are characterized the right way? Seems like a monumentally bad idea > It’s an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once. I don’t think it closes any tax loopholes.

Tax compatibility is a pretty solved problem - countries frequently coordinate to make sure income and other taxes don't end up being double counted so it's not like this would happen accidentally[1]. And the point isn't so much that the US should collect all this revenue - it's just to make tax havens moot and unnecessary.

Why spend money shipping laptops to Bermuda so you can put a sticker on them there if you aren't saving any money?

1. There's a positive incentive here, if you work and live in country A and are considering working in country B either country B can craft their tax system so that you won't end up paying the same taxes to both country A or country B... or they can not do that. If they fail to make their tax law compatible they lose out on your tax income (it instead all goes to country A) since nobody wants to be double taxed - if they make their tax laws compatible then they essentially get some free income and another earner. Digital nomads pulling down six digit salaries in low cost of living countries also injects a whole lot of money into the local economy and generally just makes things better - and the country retains the right to limit visas if they ever have any issues with it.

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