Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 185 posts

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#161

Post by AstralStorm »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157
rlucas wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you've got comparative advantage crucially wrong. If country X can produce food a bit cheaper/better than you, but produces shoes much cheaper/better, then you end up growing at least some of your own food and importing shoes from X. https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/Details/comparativead...

Comparative advantage has nothing to do with it. The market price of a global commodity has the opportunity costs already priced in. It's the reason more prosperous countries have higher labor costs. If you and some other country are producing food for the same cost (e.g. because you pay more for an hour of labor but have better automation), adding the same cost to each doesn't affect your competitiveness. You both s…

That does not work because most of the food transportation is by ship freight and truck, which have enough range to evade your tax.

And the local transport costs are identical between local and export farmer, while local production is more expensive on labor and fuel.

The only thing to do is to raise duties on food and... it is risky politically. Alternatively, subsidize much more. Good luck!

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#162

Post by AstralStorm »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #158
flukus wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If country X can produce food cheaper than yours, your farmers will be unprofitable and you'll end up importing food It really depends on where the tipping point is, country X might have a slight advantage but measures like this can widen the gap, then secondary factors like economies of scale kick in. > If both countries impose a carbon tax in the same amount, nothing about that has changed. Most international agr…

> It really depends on where the tipping point is, country X might have a slight advantage but measures like this can widen the gap, then secondary factors like economies of scale kick in. For most markets with behaviors like that you're already doomed, because the other country will figure it out and borrow some money so they can operate temporarily at a loss or convince the government to provide temporary subsidies…

The thing is, nobody can afford a reasonable UBI. US even if they'd put all the military spending into it would do about $200 per month and person. Without a lot of social services, this does not work.

Poland cannot afford 200 PLN (about $60) if we put the whole budget into this which is impossible. It gets strained even with child bonus...

Those are back off the envelope calculations and an unfixable problem.

If you introduce a cutoff it's no longer universal and you still probably cannot afford it.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#163

Post by Oletros »

phkahler wrote: post #8

>> Even as coal has fallen out of favor in some markets, the rise in emissions has been driven primarily by stronger demand for natural gas and oil This is interesting. If you care about CO2 emissions, you don't want to use coal because it's mostly carbon. But if you care about the greenhouse effect, you probably want to burn coal rather than gas or oil because those contain a lot of hydrogen which forms water vapor…

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jan/28/water-va...

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#164

Post by jf22 »

hwillis wrote: post #133
jf22 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there are probably nuances to account for like how much energy generation is used.

Not sure if you're understanding what he's saying, but just in case: Bitcoin and similar are Proof-of-Work currencies, which have you do arbitrary hashes to prove that you deserve a vote on the blockchain. The cost of that computing energy makes it infeasible to generate bad votes when the entire community is voting against you. Ethereum and similar are Proof-of-Stake, which require you to own coins to vote on the bl…

Oh I see, thanks for pointing that out.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#165

Post by IanCal »

shard972 wrote: post #147
IanCal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this all the point though? People live further out and travel more because it's cheaper. The goal is to change behaviour by making more polluting choices less cheap. If the problem is the poorest, why not use the fuel duty raised to help them? They're surely not using all the fuel, so this could be a net benefit to them.

> Isn't this all the point though? People live further out and travel more because it's cheaper. The goal is to change behaviour by making more polluting choices less cheap. The problem I have is that those incentives are driving people to kill themselves as they cannot afford to live anymore. I guess that's what the government wants though, less pollution. Can't pollute if your dead.

> The problem I have is that those incentives are driving people to kill themselves as they cannot afford to live anymore.

Which is why I added the other paragraph.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#166

Post by dredmorbius »

rland wrote: post #12
fromthestart wrote: post #5

It's hard for me to take climate science seriously when 1. We know of the state of crisis that all other soft sciences are in (p-value abuse, publish or perish, institutional bias, replication crisis) [3] 2. We know that the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (with accompanyingly higher CO2 levels) and life thrived [2] 3. We know that we've been coming out of an ice age since long before the industrial r…

I'm just a layman, not a climate scientist, but I don't think the magnitude of the warming is our big issue. The issue is how quickly it's changing. Previous warming events happened very slowly; even the quickest ones occurred over thousands or tens of thousands of years. Ours is happening a couple orders of magnitude faster. We can look back, not at the geological record, but at the biological record. Large, fast sh…

The Siberian Traps massive igneous province (translation: near-continent-scale volcanic eruptions) have been dated to within 13-130ky. Still long by human timescales, but a geologic eyeblink, and well below 1My resolution.

The incident waas also associated with dramatic increases in atmospheric CO2 and mass extinctions.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/Burgess-Bowring-2015-Siberi...

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#167

Post by dredmorbius »

systematical wrote: post #145

The solution is to dump money into R&D and figure out how to "scoop" the C02 out of the air and then break it apart into carbon and oxygen. A series of solar powered drones could hopefully do this. This may sound far fetched, but I think global political action before its too late is even more far fetched. Send the money into DARPA and call it increased defense spending to appease the elephants.

We know these methods. They're not high-tech. Swamps, wetlands, tropical rainforests.

The same landforms which are most under assault by human activity.

http://www.esassoc.com/projects/wetlands-carbon-sequestratio...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=carbon%20sequestration%...

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2002...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=car...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/environment-and-deve...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=car...

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#168

Post by mberning »

iso1337 wrote: post #82
mberning wrote: post #28

That is a pretty staggering amount of uncertainty. The US for example looks like it could be anywhere from 0.5% to 4.5%. That is something I would like to know with more certainty before undertaking any major public policies. From a simple triage standpoint it would seem that focusing on developing economies would hold the most promise. China and India are the likely leaders and given the population and current state…

Per-capita emissions are the highest in the US, Canada, and Australia [1]. The US is also the second-largest emitter of CO2. There is much to be gained by focusing on emissions in the US. Unfortunately, most USians would like a large house with yard, 2+ large cars, etc. Also think about cultural projections -- Hollywood often depicts wealthy people shuttling around in large, inefficient SUVs. These images and aspirat…

Per capita is a BS way to look at it. If US emissions are growing at 0.5% per year then there is nothing to do. It will take 140 years to double and the natural progression of technology will easily solve the problem. Solar and other renewable technologies are advancing so fast that economic factors will take over and there will be much less need for fossil fuels very shortly. On the other hand if a country with a large population is growing emissions at 8% then that is less than a decade to double which is a huge problem.

On another note, why do resent the lifestyle of average people? Not everybody wants to live in an urban hellscape with millions of other people. You speak about it with such contempt.

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#169

Post by dredmorbius »

systematical wrote: post #145

The solution is to dump money into R&D and figure out how to "scoop" the C02 out of the air and then break it apart into carbon and oxygen. A series of solar powered drones could hopefully do this. This may sound far fetched, but I think global political action before its too late is even more far fetched. Send the money into DARPA and call it increased defense spending to appease the elephants.

And for fuel synthesis, seawater is a vastly more viable source, and the research more than a half-century old:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...

Re: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Rise Like a ‘Speeding Freight Train’ in 2018

#170

Post by imtringued »

hackeraccount wrote: post #137
kazen44 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you seem to vastly underestimate how impossible "moving somewhere away from the shore" would be for the majority of the world's population. For instance, my country would be over 50% flooded with a 2 meter searise. also, countries like bangladesh are truely screwed, and it has a population of 150 million people! not to mention that climate change would make our global economy collapse and high yield argriculture impo…

Bangladesh's problem isn't that it's so close to sea level it's that it's poor. California's problem isn't that droughts make forest fires it's that they're aren't quite so rich that they can live in the middle of a tinderbox.

An entire country being wiped out from sea level rise is a problem that is pretty specific to Bangladesh. It only takes 9m of sea level rise to flood more than 70% of Bangladesh.
Post reply on HN