Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficial than we think

Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by panzagl on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @10:20AM (#20402167)

Let's say gas increases to $8/gallon in the US. Your choice is either to spend more on gas, buy a new car solely to increase MPG, or spend more time getting to places by walk/bike/public transport. All of which would lower my quality of life. In exchange I guess my health insurance costs eventually go down somehow?

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by asdff on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:20PM (#20403410)

You wouldn't lower your quality of life, just your quality of luxury.

Your quality of life would presumably improve due to cleaner air and less pollution. If you take public transit you are also lowering your carbon footprint and alleviating congestion, improving quality of life for you and everyone else in town. If you walk or bike (I bike every day and find it faster to get to work than driving in rush hour traffic, in fact), you are getting a little cardio out of the deal and improving your quality of life. And presumably if enough people opt to walk/bike/transit, investment in that infrastructure will follow and quality of life in that department will also improve.

The true costs of our luxury goods like a personal car are completely hidden to us. It's important to realize how harmful to quality of life certain luxuries we are accustom to really are.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by panzagl on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:53PM (#20403807)

Do you understand at all how much damage you do to the cause of fighting climate change/environmentalism by playing these silly semantic games? How can I take you seriously when you arbitrarily redefine stuff you don't approve of as 'luxury'?

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by ggm on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @07:10PM (#20407534)

How can I take you seriously when you arbitrarily redefine stuff you don't approve of as 'luxury'?

It's not approve or disapprove it's afford or not afford in a wider sense than your personal affordability.

I don't disapprove of you or your life choices. I disapprove of a system which necessarily hangs up on this individualistic story against aggregates.

Not wanting to drive (hah) too far on this, the road system you drive on is a state and federal investment. If the heavy goods went by rail andnot road, and we did focus on deisel abatement and NO and particulates reduction you might have upsides.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by makerofspoons on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @01:09PM (#20403968)

Is it not generally accepted that a personal car is a luxury? The vast majority of people in the world do not have one.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by jbattle on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:25PM (#20403476)

Yes. Our quality of life will probably go down. That's going to happen. If we do nothing, our quality of life will go down because Florida floods so regularly people mass-migrate out. That'll be a drop in a bucket. Enormous swaths of equatorial and tropical land will be too hot for people to live in (economically/year round). So dozens, hundreds of millions of people now living in Mexico / Bangladesh / India / Syria / Ethiopia / Algiera will be forced to migrate or die. So those people will want to be your neighbors as well.

Your life is going to change. Slowly at first then not so slowly. Your kid's life is definitely going to change. Your grandkids lives will for sure be different from what your life is.

Do we want to start mitigating changes now and avoid the worst case scenarios? Or do we say !@#& the next two generations, no one can tell me my life has to change.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by panzagl on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @01:02PM (#20403893)

So start living virtuously now, or else the bad brown people will invade?

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by jbattle on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @02:54PM (#20405159)

That's a dishonest reading of what I wrote. To clear up any potential misunderstanding, I have no problem having anyone for a neighbor. I chose where I live in part because our school district has kids where literally dozens of languages are spoken at home.

My point is not that the people who are likely to be caught up in mass migration are bad in any way. My point is that the impact of migrations of dozens of millions will absolutely impact housing, healthcare, jobs, transportation, politics, everything. If the current turmoil we've seen with relatively minor migrations from central America and from Syria are anything to go from, we are in for turbulent times.

Mitigating the impacts of climate change has nothing to do with virtue. It's eminently prudent

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by panzagl on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @03:34PM (#20405619)

If it's about prudence, then stopping trade with China (to reduce transportation emissions), building nuclear, and being able to control immigration would be the solutions, not giving up hamburgers and moving to the hive-city.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by ggm on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @07:12PM (#20407548)

Your cherry picking. America will suffocate in its own ordure without immigration and in twenty and fifty year terms your aggregate life choices around sharing wealth will consume you (generically). Not trading with China is a great way to bring on a crisis if you want one.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by ggm on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @07:07PM (#20407507)

All of which would lower my quality of life.

Maybe true. But also maybe not true. Your individual state in this is distinct from mine (lifelong user of public transport and cycling) and your neighbours and doctor would very probably disagree about the up and downsides. But I won't deny you feel this now, or that millions of people would feel this. I probably over empathise with different millions of people who don't experience your life and cannot do what you do, but economics say could do better and a lot better if you did a bit worse. How do you feel about that?

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by bryanlarsen on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:05AM (#20402627)

carbon tax & dividend means that your choices are:

- use the dividend to pay the carbon tax, and keep driving.

- buy a new car, keep part of the dividend

- walk/bike/transit, keep the whole dividend

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by panzagl on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:45AM (#20403058)

But the dividend is per capita? So some poor person who is stuck driving to work gets to reimburse me for my Tesla?

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by frenchyatwork on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:59AM (#20403199)

Poor people can't afford vehicles. Poor people currently use the bus. These people would benefit from a tax & rebate scheme.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by panzagl on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @12:36PM (#20403615)

Context is US, many poor own vehicles.

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by ggm on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @07:14PM (#20407561)

Repo man. Own a declining asset which stands them in good stead only because public welfare is insufficient. And the asset becomes a liability overnight.

Why are you defending a system which makes low paid workers sleep in their cars?

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Re:Fighting climate change may be cheaper and more beneficia... by bryanlarsen on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @11:52AM (#20403134)

Yes, it's per capita-ish. As implemented in Canada, rural residents get a bit more than urban, and children get half the amount as adults (paid to their parents, of course).

That poor person isn't taking multiple flights per year, buying lots of stuff, et cetera. So even with driving to work he's probably still keeping a small fraction of the dividend.

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