Please elaborate on why stopping c.c. isn't hard. I think it's very hard in terms of what we need to do out in the world, and very hard politically.

We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

I've seen some very expansive definitions of "subsidy" that include, for example, not taxing carbon emissions. In that case, you couldn't just divert the money, because it never existed in a budget.

You could implement a carbon tax, and I'd be all for that, but it wouldn't be in the same policy class as diverting an existing stream of budgetary money.

Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities. Only something like $500B is attributed to direct subsidies or foregone tax revenue.

"only" 500 BILLION. How is that small change

It's not small change, but when it is ~10% of the claimed figure I think "only" is the proper adjective.

It's what upsets me about these sorts of papers- "civilian" climate change skeptics/deniers point to them as evidence of the dishonesty of consensus community. They are able to take away the wrong message- that consensus community is stretching and manipulating the data, rather than there are $300-600B of subsidies for fossil fuels out there.

If the author of that article had to misrepresent in order to pump the number up by 10x we can assume that they didn't think 500 billion was a compelling enough number.

> Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities.

Negative externalities are a type of subsidy.

I think the point is it’s not a subsidy that could instead be spent somewhere else.

Closing the loophole of a negative externality absolutely would generate revenue that could be spent elsewhere. Carbon taxes are a perfect example.

It is counted as a valid means of subsidy by both the EU and WTO. The UK was singled out for increasing fossil fuel subsidy by the EU, when UK gov reduced the VAT rate on domestic fuel bills. As the grid moves to renewables the level of subsidy declines.

The UK kept that reduced rate on domestic fuel when they brought in a low carbon price floor (another bonus of EU membership). That managed to take almost all coal out of UK power generation - there's only three plants left, all marked to close in the next couple of years. It's already starting to have impact on gas's viability.

As different rules apply to vehicle fuel, and domestic fuel, individual behaviour hasn't been much affected, and cities are still full of dirty air from internal combustion. UK has been particularly weak at improving air quality in the last decade or so.

Definitions are contextual. I think it's 100% reasonable for the EU and WTO to define subsidy in such a way that it can include untaxed externalities. I'm comfortable with that definition myself. I still think it was deceptive for imglorp to transplant that definition into a context where it wasn't mutually understood and then leverage the misunderstanding to promote an incorrect picture of reality.

> We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere.

"Spending" and "divert" imply a cash flow, not a flow of value in the form of a collection of externalities. That's relevant. Redirecting funds is a different political beast from increasing taxes. To be clear, I want a carbon tax. Let's promote it with logic, not with clumsy attempts at deception.

Sure, it's more accurate to note fossil receives $5t in visible and invisible subsidy, but as more nations start to move to carbon pricing, their absence becomes a far more overt policy-driven subsidy.

So I'm a little more flexible in a web discussion than I would hope for from a finance minister. Except actual politicians, of all colours, are even more creative in the hoops jumped to imply wholly incorrectly their own tax raising policies are not a tax hike such that it becomes a logic and fact free zone.

Personally, I want the same as you, perhaps a little further as I'd like those externalities baked into the price of everything, and required to be picked out before sale. Maybe required on every label like how calories or salt content is picked out on food. Then I can choose logically or at least knowingly. I don't think politicians are ever willing, after a little industry lobbying, to give us that... Which applies to far too many issues, not just climate.

> Sure, it's more accurate to note fossil receives $5t in visible and invisible subsidy

No, that's absurd way to put it. It's like saying that shipping industry receives trillions of dollars of invisible subsidy due to not having to rent the ocean water the container ships float on. Yes, if oceans didn't exist, shipping would be quite a bit more expensive, and you can even do the math and put a number on that, but the fact is that if you tried to "divert" these "invisible" subsidies from shipping companies, and taxed them for the trillions of imputed income, you'll soon find that those trillions do not line up shipping companies pockets.

The only reason to call it "subsidy" is to imply that the companies are "unfairly" benefiting, but unless these externalities have actual cost to the economy instead of just imputed carbon/water tax, you'll find no resources to divert.

Of course they have an actual cost the economy. In health impacts from polluted air, in impacts from changed climate, increasing intensity storms, floods and such. There's been more than enough studies showing impacts.

The ocean analogy isn't such a far stretch either - the increasing levels of pollution and emissions from container traffic, using a particularly dirty fuel and an industry that flushes tanks and oil rich pollutants in international waters has an impact on water quality, fish stocks and other ocean life. Roads are a subsidy on cars as they are paid for by general taxation rather than specifically on vehicle use.

Those externalities should all be priced in to discourage impactful behaviour, and encourage truly sustainable behaviour, on the sole viable planet we currently have. At the very least we can make a poor choice knowingly.

> The only reason to call it "subsidy" is to imply that the companies are "unfairly" benefiting, but unless these externalities have actual cost to the economy instead of just imputed carbon/water tax, you'll find no resources to divert.

It very much does have actual cost, just not today or tomorrow, so it's a bit harder to calculate.

If I break your bike in the middle of winter, the cost won't actualize until spring when you would have used it, and instead have to pay for the bus. So sure, it's not a Q4 cost, but it is real nonetheless.

As someone who believes in action on climate change and is very willing to take the consumption and taxation hits that that implies, this is what frustrates me most about the climate conversation: I've already "priced in" the existence of stubborn skeptics and greedy people, but the fact that even the "good guys" compulsively lie and distort the facts when it comes to climate change makes changing public opinion seem insurmountable (and this is how you change policy in a democracy). It's at times like these when the criticism of my fellow leftists as religious adherents[1] sounds the most uncomfortably true: people talk in terms of facts but think in terms of dogma and heresy. There's no claim in support of the dogma that should be suppressed and no claim in favor of the heresy that should be acknowledged.

It reminds me of nothing so much as the tenor of criticism of Trump, especially early in his term. The man is already a monster! You don't need to keep lying to make him look like one, and all it does is turn of people who mightve agreed with your legitimate criticism!

[1] To be clear, I have no reason to think that our counterparts on the right don't do this too. It just makes more of an impact to realize that everyone around you is dishonest and stupid than it does to realize that everyone in a relatively alien subculture is.

For it to be quite so left/right is uniquely American. In the UK a majority of supporters of both main parties want more dramatic action on climate. The right have yet to respond with a credible policy - going with "ignore it whilst talking loudly about their having committed to carbon neutral 2050", i.e. all mouth and no trousers.

Why the heck would climate get a uniquely honest political conversation? Politicians of all colours lie, obfuscate and distort the facts on all issues all the time, whilst continuing to hurtle in a direction most of the country's voters would prefer not. Unless the US experience has been very different, most votes will be for least worst, not in favour of either as tribal loyalties mostly died last century, only really remaining tribal with the elderly. It's one of the reasons for such a deep mistrust and disillusionment of politics and may have contributed to some of the world's "surprise" results lately, along with so many polls being proved wrong.

Honesty and politics are oil and water. The honest discussion is usually elsewhere.

About ~1 Billion of that cited number is from global warming costs. The larger portions is from health costs associated with air pollution which accounts for ~2 Billion. You can find a break down of the sources of that subsidy at the bottom of page 21 of the linked article.

Do you mean trillion here?

Haha, yup

There’s some tricky accounting going on with this number: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

> Then the report adds that there is actually another kind of subsidy, which it calls a post-tax subsidy. This subsidy reflects the difference between “actual consumer fuel prices” and the full societal and environmental costs of a fuel.

sounds like the same math tesla used in pricing their vehicles (subtracting how much an average person spends on gas from the advertised total)

>We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies.

Ok, but China is adding millions of brand new drivers to the roads every year, they've had to institute a lottery system just to determine who can apply for a license. They're building roads, bridges, gas stations etc as fast as they can to accommodate all of the new drivers and you can see this documented in the China episode of Grand Tour last season. This is going to happen with or without subsidies (Besides, I highly doubt China is subsidizing their citizens petrochemical purchases in any meaningful amount).

China is going to have more drivers than the United States has people in the country in the near future and that will only continue to grow. Are you going to tell more than a billion people to never get a car and to only walk places?

What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?

>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/

But China is weaning itself off fossil fuels?

China has over 400,000 electric buses (99% of the world) and the longest high speed rail in the planet. High-speed rails carry twice as many passengers each month as the country’s airlines.

4.2% of new car purchases in China were electric vehicles in 2018. China has 250 million electric motorcycles/scooters (99% of the world's). These numbers are growing rapidly every year.

China is also the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power not to mention the world's leading installer of solar panels. Their literal stated goal for 2050 is to reach 1,300 GW of solar capacity, which is enormous. That would make it the source with the largest installed capacity in China.

China has a lot of problems, but fossil fuel addiction is not one of them.

Just by virtue of them being big, it is still a problem. Also said started goal is less than used for consensus "current" climate change target by IPCC which is considered optimistic and nets some 3.5 C rise as per model.

2050 is too late as well. To make a big difference the timetable for that capacity would have to be 2030 and all the baseline would have to be hydro or nuclear. This is unlikely to happen even if they really want to do it.

Now consider that we also have USA to handle who are notorious about ignoring climate change targets...

Now, even 5 C is not a cataclysmic event but it will be very bad on a global scale - mostly water availability and farming, related price shocks and social upheaval.

Have you read the study? It isn’t behind a paywall or anything - it’s free to read.

with under-charging for domestic air pollution accounting for about half of the total subsidy and global warming about a quarter.

I’m not completely against calling the huge unpriced externality of carbon emissions a “subsidy”; but markets are reactive and once we start charging a carbon tax, we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too.

> we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too.

You mean we will have to pay less to deal with the health effects of air pollution and and the economic effects of global warming? I'm not clear what subsidy we "miss out on" here.

I agree that pricing the externalities is fairly counted, but the GP comment framing it as a subsidy is still dishonest: someone could easily read that Stat and decide that you can add the $N trillion from carbon tax revenue to the $5T in removed subsidy, and they'd end up overcounting by about $4.5T

It wasn't hard back in 1989 when we knew it was a problem that needed addressing. It's getting increasingly hard.

Technically, carbon pricing at $100 would probably do it. I agree politically that's hard.

You'd have to do that globally to be successful. Otherwise you'll just drive producing industries to countries that don't care (Russia, for example).

Effectively what would happen is high CO2 parts (such as concrete) would be manufactured in a country that doesn't tax it. If you say "Oh, well we'll just tariff it!" then the next step would be to ship it to a country without said tariff. That country could then move the goods directly to the taxed nation or it could ping pong a bit till it reaches it's end goal.

Would that raise prices? Absolutely, but probably less than the $100 tax would. All the while increasing the amount of CO2 emitted due to all the shipping that would occur.

And, if you don't think that would happen, just look at how it's worked out with child labor laws.

The balancing act would be to tax hard enough to make industries want to decrease their emissions, yet low enough that importing isn't more economically viable. As a bonus, you could spend that revenue in building out clean energy sources to effect change faster.

>If you say "Oh, well we'll just tariff it!" then the next step would be to ship it to a country without said tariff. That country could then move the goods directly to the taxed nation or it could ping pong a bit till it reaches it's end goal.

Duties are based on the country of origin, a middleman country would have to do something substantial to the goods to change the country of origin (for example taking wafers and manufacturing them into bare printed circuit boards).

Even with a country doing something significant they could still be subject to counterveiling and/or anti-dumping duties for another country. For example the tariff 8517700000 which is frequently used for parts of mobile phones like the screen/keypad/bezel/antenna from say Vietnam are still potentially subject to ADD/CVD for China. Or photo-voltaic cells/panels universally flag as potentially subject to ADD/CVD regardless of the declared country of origin.

In examples like the above two part of the scope of the investigation involves companies in those countries known to use things from CN, such as aluminum extrusions for the 8517700000, that are subject to ADD/CVD so they have to disclaim it on a case by case basis or pay the ADD/CVD charges.

Source: this is what I do for a living and the 8517700000 VN example is actually from this morning with some mobile phone displays.

Country of origin works when the goods themselves are relatively complex. However, the goods with the highest carbon footprint (concrete, steel) don't really have a "looks like it was made in russia" sort of badge that couldn't be easily removed/replaced.

Take food as an example. With the recent china soybean tariffs the way that some manufactures got around it was first shipping the goods to Thailand.

From there it is either processed or re-exported.

https://www.scbeic.com/th/detail/product/4730

So long as the middleman country/countries have lax regulations and the actors aren't pushing heavily on them, then goods can flow (all be it at increased cost due to additional shipping/repackaging).

>However, the goods with the highest carbon footprint (concrete, steel) don't really have a "looks like it was made in russia" sort of badge that couldn't be easily removed/replaced.

Yeah, except people have tried to do this with aluminum by bringing it through Mexico and it doesnt' really work. This is partly why say 8517700000 from Vietnam like in my example is potentially subject to anti-dumping as if it were from China.

https://fortune.com/2016/09/09/chinese-aluminum-giant-is-tie...

Sure, it works for some handbags or sunglasses, even a few cargo containers of product, but any meaningful amount and forget about it.

Regarding the tariffs. These are usually country of origin based, so shipping to a third country first doesn't help.

That works when everyone is being honest about the country of origin. That doesn't help if Russia makes the product, slaps "made in Turkey" on it, and then ships it to Turkey to get it to the US.

That's the reason why customs reserves looong periods for reviews. They are currently prosecuting a couple of companies and people for that kind fraud that concerned solar module imports into the EU between 2015 and 2016. Customs are sticky with that. Black imports like drugs are, IMHO easier to hide than falsely declared goods as the latter leaves a paper trail.

You'd have to try to make countries like Russia play along, probably by trade sanctions.

Every human exhales about a half ton of CO2 per year. How would a $50 per year breathing license fit into your plan?

Taxes on the food we convert probably exceed $50 already. I get you can't account for every little thing but approximately right may be better than doing nothing.

I'm pretty sure we can simply not put a price on our own exhaling. It doesn't have to be like (the opposite I guess) of Total Recall.

Mostly not from fossil sources though.

The CO2 exhaled by humans was already in the air when they inhaled. Conflating that with CO2 actively created from industrial processes is disingenuous at best.

It was definitely not. It was in the food we interested.

Trees and other plants take carbon from air, energy from the sub, and use it to build themselves. We take carbon from them and put it back into the air, using the excess energy to move and think.

>It was in the food

Which was in the air in the past few months to handful of years depending on how fresh the food is and what it is (plant, animal). Unlike the CO2 from fossil fuels which was sequestered for millions of years. And had that not been harvested for food, it would have sat their being decomposed in a field somewhere returning that carbon right back into the atmosphere via animals and bacteria snacking on it as they broke it down.

Actually even worse as it would get converted into much more potent GHG - mostly methane.

The oil and coal only happen when organic matter is subjected to pressure and non-porous geological layers. Otherwise you get peat fields and those emit methane.

$100 per what?

per metric ton (a.k.a. tonne) of CO2

The hard part is international collaboration. Getting China and India on board has been a non-starter so far, and they're far and away the largest contributors.

Measuring per capita carbon footprint makes more sense for climate science as the effects don't limit themselves to artificial borders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Per capita carbon emissions of US are 8 times as of India and 2 times as of China. And which country is withdrawing from the Paris agreement?

With regards to

> Measuring per capita carbon

being better...

It is not clear to me why this makes sense.

If person A drive 2 miles per day in an SUV, and another person B drives 100 miles per day in a sedan -- person B pollutes more.

Why would driver A considered to pollute more ?

Because supposedly it is self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The amount of emissions correlate strongly to that pursuit of happiness at least for now — you only see extremely low per-capita emissions in extremely underdeveloped countries.

Meanwhile, “all miles driven are created equal” said no one ever.

I am not sure that 'dividing' amount of pollution a given geographical region produces, on to number of people there -- is the only righteous and effective measure of international accountability).

In my view, measuring delta in total greenhouse gasses produced, would a better measure for international accords, and their subsequent corruption-free enforcement.

This is why I brought the pollution-per-mile vs pollution-produced analogy.

With regards to > "The amount of emissions correlate strongly to that pursuit of happiness at least for now..."

I think, you are also averaging out to-per-capita that, might not be appropriate...

Say there is energy-demanding and mineral demanding manufacture process, that causes deforestation, pollutes rivers, mows down beautiful mountains to get coal, produces lots of green house gasses.

You are claiming that this benefits, at least, economically, 'every' per-capita person on that country.

But if same manufacture used more renewable energy, and produced more expensive goods. Would the 'per-capita' be worst off?

Perhaps it would not be. Right?

In other words, we really need to measure what that manufacture is doing.

And that's why I think measuring changes in pollution (due to changes in policy of a given country), and changes in preservation of natural habitats -- is a much more effective way to measure policies of governments.

Another way to look at it is this way:

Performance indicators should be relevant to the individuals or institutions that are actually accountable for the execution of what's being measured.

In this case, we are measuring government policies, not individuals. Therefore dividing per capita, should not be used as 'first-order' measure.

What does that have to do with anything? You've completely ignored the concept of what "per capita" even means in this context. Person B could be in Country 1 with low per capita emissions, or Person B could be in Country 2 with high per capita emissions. It doesn't change the fact that on average, individual people in Country 2 emit more CO2 emissions than people from Country 1...

Also, deciding to not do something positive because other people are still doing something negative somewhere else is a shitty argument.

@gttghh, your "... is a shitty argument ... " critique, is insulting.

This is also against HN guidelines

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>" When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

"

I called their argument shitty, not them personally. I stand by my statement.

Not at all. Both signed up to the Paris -- and previous agreements, but unfortunately Paris is a pretty weak, almost voluntary agreement that gives particular leeway to developing nations.

Up to and including Kyoto they differentiated between developed and developing world. That differentiation was lost at Paris so the developed world could evade their "historical responsibility" (a key phrase of the differentiation). The intent was, I think, that the developed world would assist via subsidy the developing world to shortcut past the mucky phase of fuel use. An intent that goes all the way back to the eighties, and has come and gone in terms of visibility. That would have cost actual money. Needless to say that didn't happen. Or come remotely close to happening.

china and India are large contributors only because they have large populations. Even then the US is a larger total contributor than India.

India, yes, but China emits more per capita than some European countries (e.g. Sweden, Switzerland and France).

China surpassed the EU average already in 2012.

https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2018&ds...

Rephrased: “You gotta stop, we gotta continue our wasteful lifestyle.”

> Getting China and India on board has been a non-starter so far

China is ahead of schedule in reducing its emissions. Consider also that being the first to switch to renewables or other energy sources means we develop technology to replace existing infrastructure that we can then export. The first-mover advantage on this is obvious.

I'm going to copy-paste a comment I wrote a year ago because I get tired of hearing this BS. As far as I can tell, "on board" is just code for "remain poor while we keep the status quo".

India and China both have leadership that acknowledge the existence of anthropogenic climate change and is taking active measures. That would seem like table stakes but unfortunately we live in a world where that's not a given.

India produces 20% of electricity from renewable sources, not including large hydro[1]. Including large hydro, it's 29%. In comparison, the US produces only 15% from renewable sources including hydro[2] which, of course, has lots of environmental costs before any energy generation begins. This is admittedly a meaningless factoid but still kind of cool - India has 5 of the 10 largest solar power stations in the world, more than any other nation.[5] The Delhi city government has made it mandatory for government and public institutions to install rooftop solar[6]. This is on top of a government program that provides subsidized loans for rooftop solar on factories.[7] There's plenty of other renewable energy, rainwater harvesting, and recycling programs at various levels of the Indian government - federal, state, and city. I'm not saying all of them will work (it's the government, after all) but it's solid effort, and hard cash being put in.

Gasoline costs USD 4.55/gal in Mumbai today[8] - compared to around USD 3.50 in California, which already has the highest gas prices in the continental US. Due to the lower average disposable income in India, this means motorists prioritize fuel economy over comfort, and even safety.

India's annual population growth rate is 1.10% - a shade above the global average of 1.09%[3]. It's also been steadily dropping for decades and that trend is expected to continue.[4] China's population growth rate is 0.41% - lower even than the US.[3]

The only way India and China can keep from increasing their emissions is by stopping their economic progress. This would effectively keep their respective populations poor, undernourished, and lacking modern amenities such as healthcare, transportation, or entertainment. So what do you mean by "on board" exactly? What other shining exemplars of environmental rectitude can one point at to persuade India and China? What other nations have made, or committed to make, similar lifestyle sacrifices?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_India

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United....

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio....

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India#Fertilit....

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta....

6. https://www.ndtv.com/delhi-news/government-announces-policy-....

7. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2017/12/07/india-t....

8. https://www.mypetrolprice.com/3/Petrol-price-in-Mumbai

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164816

Please don't copy/paste comments here. I know it's tempting on complex contentious topics, but it's not how conversation works, and HN threads are supposed to be conversations. Boilerplate is the extreme opposite of curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

If you want to bring an earlier comment into the conversation, the way to do that is to explain what it is and link to it.

That's a feature I didn't know you had, the first time I ever saw dupe on a comment! :)

We don't do it often, but it seems there are 218 of them. In case you're curious, here are the most recent 10:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21608174

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21601167

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21600892

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505062

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21428001

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21220189

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21206132

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21172089

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21132614

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21132613

No, they aren't. India's per capita CO2 output is tiny. China's is middle of the road. Per capita is the only way we can talk about CO2, because otherwise we get true absurdities, like Denmark or Ireland being allowed to pollute as much as the US. (The world will not support 200 countries polluting ad much as the US.)

There's also a simple solution to getting trade partners on board. It's called a carbon tariff.

When talking about global action, you need to involve the political organizations of populations where effective action can be practically enacted. Per capita isnt as useful a measure as you think when talking about large scale change.

> India's per capita CO2 output is tiny.

being tiny now implies incredible room for growth given growth rates of those countries, which is actually an arugment for more action not less.

> Per capita is the only way we can talk about CO2

Wouldn't it also mean India and china won't have to do anything for decades till they get to same per capita as USA ?

India is already doing plenty. See my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18164816

It would mean China needs to stop emitting more per capita and the US (and other developed countries) needs to reduce its emissions per capita.

> It would mean China needs to stop emitting more per capita

No it doesn't following GP's chain of logic. It doesn't need to do anything till the point it hits US per capita.

"doesn't need to do anything" is a qualifier that _you_ added, apparently based on a gross misunderstanding of the conversation. We're talking about defining an ideal target here, with deference paid to the fact that the status quo poses some inertia. If we're talking about an idealized frictionless vacuum, everybody would snap to the same emissions per capita, at the level required to forestall the negative effects of climate change. This would imply a substantial reduction of US emissions and perhaps an increase or small decrease in Indo-China emissions; increasing China to US levels doesn't make sense in any model, idealized or otherwise. Given that inertia means that the US reduction can't be immediate and drastic, it still suggests that mroe of the burden for emission reduction falls on the US than on India and China.

I admit don't really understand what target would china and india have per capita under this model.

Why would any burden fall on china/india given they are already on the low end of per capita.

Can you define what burden falls on them under your per capita model?

No, China emits more than the greener European countries so they should act, just like we should. The US being way worse is not an excuse for Europe or China to do nothing.

I also agree with this. Even greener European countries are not particularly close to a sustainable level of emissions.

China's per-capita output is a problem. But it's not the kind of problem where we can just point fingers at it, and using that as a justification to ignore the mess we're making. (As we range from 'just as bad' to 'much worse'.)

> Wouldn't it also mean India and china won't have to do anything for decades till they get to same per capita as USA ?

If the US does not reduce it's emissions, yes. (In China's case, it's emissions are currently per-capita similar to most of the EU).

This is a great argument for the US, and the EU to reduce their emissions, instead of sitting around, pointing fingers are China.

Again, if you aren't using per capita metrics, you will get absurd conclusions. If a country splits in half, does that mean it should be allowed to emit twice as much?

> EU to reduce their emissions

Why would EU need to reduce if they are currently 'middle of the road' like you said.

Because "middle of the road" isn't good enough. If we want to avoid disaster than the EU needs to cut emissions massively, and the US needs to cut even more.

The EU is in a much better position to cut emissions too: their cities are generally denser and have far better public transit than the US's sprawling cities and suburbs. All the EU needs to do is increase the price of auto fuel more to discourage private vehicle usage, and further build out their public transit systems.

The US is in a terrible position, however, because everything is car-based. It would help if they'd push for more dense development and extending public transit, but there's really no sign of that at all.

The US could also increase the price of petrol. This would encourage the use of more fuel-efficient cars. Most European cars are way more efficient than American cars. Admittedly, this is a cultural, not a technological, problem in the US.

>The US could also increase the price of petrol.

No, it really can't. The voters would immediately vote for the candidate that promises to reverse this. Gas prices are a huge political issue in the US, to an irrational extent. Americans cling irrationally to their gigantic SUVs and will do anything to keep them.

>Most European cars are way more efficient than American cars.

Not really, no. Cars these days are all pretty efficient; it's the trucks and SUVs that guzzle gas. Tiny cars really don't get much better fuel economy than mid-size cars any more, and no one buys full-size cars these days (I don't think there's even any made any more). A Prius is way more efficient than some tiny European car like a Smart.

Now if you're talking average fleet economy (which takes into account that so many Americans buy trucks and SUVs instead of cars), then you're correct, but that's because of buying choices. If we all switched to Priuses, we'd easy double (or more) our average fuel economy.

>Admittedly, this is a cultural, not a technological, problem in the US.

Exactly, which is why I was complaining about the sprawl and car culture of the US. Just telling people to buy more efficient cars isn't going to change anything; it's a product of a culture where there's sprawl and too much low-density development and a mindset that everything should be optimized for car-based travel. It's naturally going to lead to many people being selfish and buying larger vehicles than they need. This is the case everywhere where there's private vehicles, including Europe and Japan. I've seen huge SUVs, vans, etc. in Japan and Europe. Of course, they're not that common in those places because fuel prices are high and public transit is good, but if those two factors weren't true there, they'd be full of giant SUVs just like the US.

> Gas prices are a huge political issue in the US, to an irrational extent.

Is there a country where this isn't an issue? I know its a super big deal here India. There are protests, strikes and political agigatioins on regular basis on this issue. It might actually be the number one issue here.

Gas in India is more expensive than gas in the US, yet the average American earns 30-50 times more money.

If gas were $200/gallon, then the amount of attention Americans pay to it would be rational.

That's one of the reasons why I argue countries India will electrify their transportation and no ones going to have a say in it. Least of all what an 'merican in a big truck' thinks. I don't think India wants have to worry about the political fallout of oil price swings. Chafes at being dependent on potentially hostile countries. And has to breathe the same air as everyone else.

Per capita may not be the best metric. China’s population isn’t going to shrink any time soon. If the environment is the concern the total emissions seems like the appropriate figure.

Don’t see how that would make sense. Comparing the emissions of China vs that of Iceland just doesn’t make sense.

We can talk about total global emissions, but then bring it down to the total per capita contribution per country. e.g. China has 20% of the worlds population so are “allowed” 20% of the worlds total emissions.

Careful there. That would incentivize unscrupulous nations to breed vast populations and keep them barely alive in cages, just to be "allowed" more emissions.

That's quite the jump.

"Yeah, this is the most frustrating part of all this. Halting climate change isn't even that hard and would clearly benefit billions of people. It just affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people ..."

I note, with interest, that France enacted the most modest of modest steps toward this goal and the result was nationwide riots in the streets that continue to this day.

I, also, would like to live in the Star Trek future I always dreamed of where we drive electric cars and generate power in new and elegant ways ... I'm not sure how easy it will be.

He also did it on the backs of the same protesting working people, while cutting taxes on the rich - hence the protests.

Nope, France's president E.Macron tried to pull a fast one, raising tax on fuel and diverting the income towards financing the state, which was most needed because he also removed the ISF: Impôt sur la Fortune...

Well, yes, all taxes divert income towards financing the state. That's rather the definition of a tax.

That isn't an argument against rsync's point, which is that raising fuel taxes in France triggered months of nationwide rioting by people wearing yellow vests, symbolic because French people have to have them in their cars by law. That is they literally made the symbol of their protests a symbol of car driving.

The UK is less prone to riots. However the government abandoned its fuel tax escalator policy ("automatic" fuel tax increases) after a series of protests by truckers who blockaded ports and threatened to bring about a collapse of supply chains.

The conclusion I draw from all this is simple but brutal:governments have nothing they can do about climate change. Nor do protestors, nor do most people. The only people who can make any difference at all are a small group of scientists (not climate scientists), and (primarily) engineers. It's only engineers who develop better cars and power generation techniques who shift the needle. The rest of us might as well forget about it.

The underlying policy predates Macron, as it was decided under Hollande (albeit Macron was his economy minister). The policy is to raise taxes on gas little by little to reduce its usage, and that of diesel even more quickly so that the prices of "normal" gas and diesel would converge by 2022. [1]

Macron decided to go faster than initially decided by Hollande. I would not call that a "fast one", especially given that IIRC it was announced during his electoral campaign. Macron electors are mostly urban middle class, so are not affected by taxes on gas that much...

[1] Here is a graph (the article is in French): https://www.ledauphine.com/economie-et-finance/2018/10/24/pr...

The fast one was, sorry I forgot to mention: the tax was justified as financing green initiatives, but a small oart of the proceed went that way... Also some leaked emails about this being an actual scheme, look it up.

The change in sentiment toward climate change feels nearly as slow. It is moving in the right direction and picking up, so it's only a matter of time before it becomes the new hot thing like autonomous vehicles or space travel and everyone wants to do it. The faster the general populations perceive it as good, important and exciting, the more those in positions of influence will tie their images to it. I welcome more "who does more to fight climate change" pissing contests like Elon Musk's $1,000,000 tree planting.

> Yeah, this is the most frustrating part of all this. Halting climate change isn't even that hard and would clearly benefit billions of people. It just affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people, so we can't do it, and instead spin our tires with dumb nit-picking articles like this one.

It's frustrating to me to read comments like this. I will try my best to elaborate.

> Halting climate change isn't even that hard and would clearly benefit billions of people.

This is a simplification of course - I'm in no way implying you're not aware of that, or that this is a flaw in your argument. I think we can agree on this well enough.

> It just affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people, so we can't do it

"It affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people...."

This seems factual.

"It just affects the pocketbooks of a couple of rich people...."

This seems non-factual, due to that seemingly innocuous additional word: just. A multi-trillion dollar initiative and the corresponding policy changes would ripple through the incredibly complex system we call the economy, affecting everyone, and not in a completely proportional and "fair" manner. From my years of close observation of the behavior of the various actors in democratic political systems, I predict this could affect sentiment and therefore voting patterns, to a consequential degree. Keep in mind though, this is only a prediction, I am unable to see into the future.

"...so we can't do it..."

This on its own seems factual, but not for the reason you stated. At the very least, it is speculative.

"...and instead spin our tires with dumb nit-picking articles like this one."

I strongly disagree that this article is "stupid", but rather, I think it is right on the money, and is drawing attention to an incredibly important and incredibly overlooked underlying (potential) cause of our inability to move the ball forward on the climate change initiative.

FTA:

> Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people.

....who then often proceed to vote, illogically, in a "fuck you" manner. [0]

I often read sentiments about climate "deniers"[1] being "the children in the room", and people like[2] yourself being "the adults". I can agree that there is some truth to this, but I would argue less than meets the eye.

My intuition tells me a more accurate description would be something like: the "deniers" are the children, "people like you" are the teenagers, "people like the author" are "the young adults", and the people that recognize that what we're doing just isn't working, decide to calm down and start looking deeply at details, taking into consideration the infinite complexity of the numerous inter-related systems involved (one of which is the human mind), paying close attention to the nature of conversations and making note of where things may be going off track, come up with some new ideas, and try to get those ideas out into the meme war.....these are the actual adults in the room.

To me, tackling climate change with science and facts is similar to bringing a knife to a gunfight. People don't think in facts, because that isn't how we evolved. Purely factual thinking mutations are culled from the herd by evolution, because it doesn't produce results. Historically for sure, but the same argument could be made today, at least within most domains.

We can deal with reality as it "should" be, or we can deal with it how it is. That choice is up to each and every one of us, each and every time we interact with these and similar issues.

(I speculate that) We all think we're worried "just" about the climate change, because our senses tell us that. But is that all that's going on here? The intense emotions we each feel when reading such discussions, are those emotions purely derived from pure logical thinking about the future state of the climate, or might they be in part a result of reactions to subconscious heuristic interpretations of the words others are writing, resulting in a subconscious classification of the person into an in-group or out-group categorization, which in turn results in signals being sent up to the conscious mind to react in a certain manner, which sets off a chain of events which are hilariously counter-productive to our conscious, logical, intended goals. (An example of this curiously complex behavior would be the brain sending signals to the hand to move one's mousepointer over top of one of two available diamonds beside this comment, and then a signal to depress the left mouse button, as an expression of...something, but exactly what is not discernible to an outside observer. It may not even be accurately discernible to the person operating the mouse, such is the beautiful complexity of the human mind).

My proposal is that we cool our jets and realize what is actually going on here, and use the substantial intellectual power that exists within the HN hivemind to start to come up with some better ideas. Battling climate change is a multi-dimensional problem, but we seem to be aware of only a subset of these dimensions. Scientists, politicians, "journalists", and media celebrities are helpful (at times at least), but I believe there are many crucially important disciplines that have been excluded from the conversation - in part because we're thinking about the problem wrong, in part because we often think of those disciplines as "stupid" or trivial.

This thinking may be right, or it may be wrong. But at the end of the day, we are going to find out one way or the other. Let's hope we've guessed right, because that's what we're doing here so far: guessing. Educated guesses perhaps, but still guesses.

As the saying goes: as we sow, so shall we reap. This statement is true regardless of humanity's current collective agreement on the matter - the universe will unfold as it will. We can let this process occur randomly, or we can intervene and attempt to shape it more to our liking, but being successful in that endeavor requires a proper analysis, and proper action.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMm5HfxNXY4

[1] "deniers" are often not actually that, but let's not get hung up on trivialities like facts.

[2] I say "like" here as a generalization, but am reserving judgement on whether you are actually such a person - this footnote is to make it explicitly clear that my statement is speculative.

For sake of argument, is there any evidence that people voted differently before catastrophist framing? It seems to me that Republicans have always voted against addressing climate change.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you that the discourse of many activists isn't great, but I think that's because they have lost confidence that the other side will argue in good faith or even can be reached.

> For sake of argument, is there any evidence that people voted differently before catastrophist framing?

Perhaps one could find some "evidence" that hints at it, but the unfortunate reality is that some things are beyond our ability to know. However, it does not logically follow that we should then assume one way or the other and categorize that conclusion as true or false. An objective approach would be to classify the idea something along the lines of: "Status": "Uncertain - needs further investigation", "Importance":"Potentially High". Of course, this isn't how we evolved to be, but it's worth pointing out.

> It seems to me that Republicans have always voted against addressing climate change.

This may be true (or "true enough", to be pedantic), but is it useful? It's likely useful sometimes, but at other times might thinking and speaking in such terms be harmful (counter-productive to our goals)?

These seem like worthwhile questions to me, and the point the author is trying to make if I'm not mistaken.

> I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you that the discourse of many activists isn't great, but I think that's because they have lost confidence that the other side will argue in good faith or even can be reached.

If you speak to the other side and you are not reaching them, it may be worthwhile to examine the manner in which you are speaking to them and consider new strategies. The fields of psychology, psychiatry, communication (conflict resolution), etc have a fair amount of expertise in this area, yet I don't recall any of them being consulted on this matter.[0]

[0] EDIT: Based on voting, I infer that my theory above is not considered popular by readers. Perhaps this style of thinking is common across those who have influence over what disciplines shall be included in the public persuasion initiative that has been underway for several years now, which would explain why the initiative is limited to only a subset of the plausibly relevant intellectual disciplines, which may in turn be a root cause of why the initiative seems to be falling well short of the desired success rate, that logic indicates should be an expected outcome.

Oh well, what can ya do! I'm probably taking this whole climate change thing way more seriously than the circumstances call for.

The reason we haven't done these things is because of a "couple rich people"? We have a consensus and viable solutions that would clearly benefit billions of people, but we aren't because it affects a couple rich people? Seriously? Who are those people?

No, halting climate change is actually impossible. All you need in order to understand this is elementary physics (conservation of energy, etc) and critical thinking.

This isn’t my opinion, we have known this —by this I mean, science, not voodoo— for many years, probably a decade or more.

You're making a claim but you're not substantiating it, could you elaborate what you're referring to exactly?

Well when you take the words climate change literally and ignore what it means in context, yeah, you're absolutely right.

But then you're also revealing yourself as a dishonest participant who is probably not worth discussing this issue witb

The climate is not static. The conclusion that manmade factors are accelerating it does not perclude the slow warming phenomenon already in effect.

Nonetheless, you are arguing past each other. The answer, is no matter how much is, or is not man-made, we stand to profit as a species if we combat what we can without causing greater harm by proxy.

I've written about this before. Substantiating my claim is easy. Here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21649195

BTW, this IS NOT my opinion. We have known this for probably a decade, if not more. The problem is that the masses are being brainwashed with lies on both ends of the spectrum. One end claims there is no such thing as human-caused climate change (which is false) and the other that we can actually fix it (which is also false).

You're assuming passive measures only (stop producing more atmospheric carbon) and ignoring active measures (carbon scrubbing, carbon recapture).

I haven't examined your math in detail, but I'm willing to stipulate that you're right that passive measures are wholly inadequate to address climate change. But then you may still be wildly wrong by not addressing active measures.

Active measures will not work either. Again, Conservation of Energy. It takes more energy and resources to change something than what went into creating the problem in the first place. Once again, the data shows this clearly; without humanity around it took twice as long for a 100 ppm drop than the same increase.

This is common sense, requiring only basic physics principles.

Simple analogy: Burn a cubic meter of wood inside a warehouse large enough that the flames will not burn it down. How much energy is required to clean the warehouse from all the particulate matter on every surface, shelf, box, counter, light, crevice, etc?

The answer is: Far more than the energy that went into creating the mess in the first place.

This is not meant to be a perfect analogy, of course. All it is meant to illustrate is that we cannot “clean” the atmosphere with less energy than what created the problem. In fact, we need more energy, lots more. Given that we are talking about an unimaginably large amount if energy and resources it is easy to conclude this is nowhere near possible.

My concern is that we are going to cause more damage than good.

BTW, this does not mean we should not clean-up our act across the board. It simply means we need to stop using climate change as a political battering ram to push these things through.

Note: The planet’s approach to carbon sequestration is far from passive. Storms, cyclones, hurricanes and rain capture CO2. This and vegetation growth is how it CO2 regulation has worked for likely millions of years.

There is no need to substantiate it, it is plain pure logic. The climate will always change. We can influence it a bit, but definitely a lot less than we having giving ourselves credit for. More than that, we don't have enough data to understand how the climate would change by itself, without human influence. The same way there is night and day, winter and summer, planet Earth might be subject to other climate variations that we don't have a clue.

One thing I know for sure: if the population is growing, the Earth is becoming better for human-life, not worse. I'll be concerned about climate change when the population starts to shrink but we are way far from that.

> if the population is growing, the Earth is becoming better for human-life

That isnt logical, casting doubt on your absolute claims. Population growth in animals is relative to available resources not some mythical quality that can be interpreted as "better environment".

Population growth in animals is not just available resources, climate, location, and many other factors play their parts. Stating that the person to whom you were replying to was equating "mythical" qualities to their brief description is as much of a stretch as your "available resources". What I mean is, in their brevity they were not 100% detailed on what "Earth becoming better" actually is. Just as your "available resources" falls short. What kind of resources are you meaning? We can all pick nit's but lets try to be civil.

I disagree. Earth becoming better, would be ludicrously tested by removing all but a small population of humans and comparing survival rates between a given time period and now. The Earth, itself, is not "becoming better" in any human sense. The statement was a fantastic statement, which also meant it was unqualified.

> Population growth in animals is not just available resources, climate, location, and many other factors play their parts.

Habitable area is a resource, which species compete for. There is a generous interpretation of my statement, but there isn't one of a "Earth is better", that makes sense. The commensurate appeal to logical thought was rightly pointed out as hypocritical. I stand by it.

> Population growth in animals is relative to available resources

You said the same as me, with different words. That's it. When did humans have so much spare time to be discussing imaginary problems online? And getting so offended when someone disagree that these imaginary problems will cause our doom.

== We can influence it a bit, but definitely a lot less than we having giving ourselves credit for. More than that, we don't have enough data to understand how the climate would change by itself, without human influence. ==

This logic seems completely contradictory. At first you argue that we can’t really influence climate, then you concede that we have no idea of our impact on it. Can you further explain?

That's a great page but I didn't see this particular objection covered. Maybe your point was it's "yet another false argument"?

Obligatory (for you) xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1732/