Re:We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2
by twoodfin on Saturday April 22, 2017 @05:58PM
(#14175057)
The issue is, as I understand it, how to make a carbon tax "progressive". In particular, how to make it so progressive that the developing world will accept it (i.e., it won't condemn their poor to generations of high energy prices and much slower economic growth) but still strong enough to dramatically reduce future emissions growth.
Just imposing it on the developed world would help some, but any benefit would be at least partially offset by emissions-heavy industry shifting further to the developing (and higher emissions-intensive) nations.
Re:We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2
by humanrebar on Saturday April 22, 2017 @08:50PM
(#14175782)
Those are fair objections. Concerns I have myself, but the counterproposals seem scientifically unfounded to me: picking certain technologies (and inevitably companies and industries) and deigning them "the green future" based on our still early developments in science and engineering.
Worse, people are calling people with concerns about subsidizing, say, certain battery companies (at the expense of alternative approaches and competing battery companies) as "global warming skeptics" and "anti-science". As if subsidizing particular avenues of R&D is a scientifically objective question.
It's possible that it would change 3% year-over-year productivity growth to 0.5%. That "it" might be the difference between a marginally healthy economy and "lost generations" and political upheaval.
The "give us the flight controls now or regret it for eternity" position is not necessarily wrong, but there's a real lack of credible evidence with useful confidence intervals that any given combination of approaches will have net desirable outcomes. And there's a justified (I think) lack of trust in that approach.
The entire situation is dire, so why don't we see more of a "full court press" on responding to the effects of climate change as well? Investments into dikes and levees, building above sea level more aggressively, more aggressive weatherproofing, relocating populations from increasingly arid to increasingly temperate places, etc.?
People worldwide are clearly more and more cynical about centralized seats of power (Washington, Brussels, Davos, etc.), so why are we saying the solution to all this is more special interests (say, 'yes' to American batteries, 'no' to French nuclear tech), more regulation, and more bureaucracy?
Alternative plan:
If the problem is carbon in the air, just implement and gradually ramp up a (progressive) tax on that, provide a phased-in minimum income to offset general cost-of-living increases, and then just play with those knobs until emissions hit desirable levels.