I'm kinda surprised to see this kind of hostility. Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested even though the IPCC HIGHLY advocates its use. It is all about relative impact. Part of the problem with resolving climate change is that even the people who acknowledge it fight among themselves and don't push for both current technologies (which includes nuclear) and research for new technologies (fusion, batteries, and better solar/hydro/wind). We need to just listen to what the experts say, not what you read in some blog post or HN comment.
> Same thing happens when nuclear is suggested
It's not the "same thing". Nuclear has some sustainability benefits. Bringing back commercial hypersonic air travel seems to have no such benefits.
Air travel is low now only because it's expensive. People world gladly take many, many more flights if they were cheaper.
Of course if we taxed carbon this problem would go away, and taxing international flights would probably be easier than a general carbon tax, if flights were all that was left.
Just the same way the expertise of the most-brilliant central planners in the USSR and elsewhere allocated resources.
It doesn't work. There's a better way which is also consistent with democracy and individual choice. But people don't like the sound of it.
You mean putting a price tag on emissions I assume?
It's inferior in econonic efficiency and comprehensive coverage to a carbon tax.
And if implemented incorrectly, it becomes corporate welfare, and this has already happened. It has potential to be just another corporatist-cronyist scheme at taxpayer's expense.
And to date government and bureaucracy have been pretty horrible about solving climate change.
Carbon tax is a simple, elegant, efficient, effective solution. Most people just dont like the sound of it though.
How would you solve the trade component though? Because carbon production would just shift elsewhere unless:
* there was an international treaty where states each agreed to raise carbon taxes and cut other taxes or do a dividend, or
* import tariffs were levied in proportion to the carbon used in imports from countries that didn't have a similar tax
The latter would demand a large bureaucracy and have a lot of distortions.
I realized recently that a carbon tax isn't like an income tax. An income tax only occurs on profits, whereas a carbon tax is an input tax. This makes the jurisdiction shifting problem more acute.
A carbon tax is still my preferred solution, but was wondering if you had any ideas on how to get around this.
What I know is that many other industries deal with somethint like this. Not just taxes, but costly regulation hurts domestic production. For example, countries which do not respect responsible fishing practices have a competitive advantage.
Part of the answer can be: just dont let those countries sell fish within the US. Others can be international treatise or laws.
If I were king, I'd need to spend more time to consider my options, but I guess a treatise is in order. I dont see how any climate change action within the US's 350M population will do anything meaningful to solve the problem if the other 6.5Billion are not cooperating.
Except for the fact that markets are a great way to manage rivalrous goods, dynamically balance economic need against cost without the need for a centralized authority to have high-touch meddling (which presents a corruption danger), oh and most importantly, ad I said, they work, empirically, as with the United States SOX and NOX markets
My issue was with the parent comment essentially suggesting that you can justify boosting emissions from flight travel because we still rely on fossil fuels, so might as well double down. Nobody was suggesting that we immediately cease all flight travel. I’m open to the possibility that supersonic travel is a net positive, but the argument needs to be around what we’re getting in return for the emissions and why that’s worth it.
People saying supersonic travel is a step in the wrong direction are listening to experts who agree that our use of fossil fuels is a threat to humanity and the environment. And what about when experts disagree? There has to be some level of independent thought to parse and apply what experts are putting forward.
Because there isn't any. None. Zero. Why would you be aware of people worrying about something that currently doesn't exist?
I'm not sure how to break this to you, but scientists are generally aware about up and coming technologies. And we do think about potential future impact.
So let me rephrase
>>I'm not aware of climate scientists actually caring about potential future implementations of supersonic travel.
It's decades old, and it's failed for economic reasons.
Climate scientists worrying about the impacts of supersonic flight would be like Ornithologists looking to spot dinosaurs in the wild.
Sure perhaps we shouldn't be using the internet. Or perhaps we should do a lot more to make sure that the energy used for powering the internet is sustainable.
But our deficiency in that area doesn't make this activity any better.
But it's the reality. Electrification of individual ground transportation, and the phasing out of gasoline cars, is absolutely inevitable over the next 20 years. But jet fuel isn't going anywhere for a long, long time. It's just a matter of physics. It's foreseeable to have small scale electrified commuter aircraft shuttling people within 400 miles. But any type of long haul flight will be done with turbine engines burning kerosene. Even with a 10x increase in energy density for LiPo batteries, we still wouldn't be there.