Re:Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
by zdragnar on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @04:27PM
(#22427525)
Certain items? everything is influenced by petroleum, whether transportation, manufacturing or fertilization. Our clothes are made from it. Machines are powered and lubricated by it. Food is cooled and packaged with it. I wouldn't be too hopeful that the cost of anything wouldn't be affected, unless those goods have externality costs excluded, in which case you aren't really pricing in externalities, you're just running another UBI scheme.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
by zamfi on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @06:19PM
(#22428573)
Prices fluctuate all the time. How many tons of CO2 are consumed by the machine that spins yarn? Sure there’s an added cost, but of pennies — this strikes me as a weak counter argument.
At a nominal price of $20/ton, a few things will go way up in price, but almost everything else will see at best a blip, with an added incentive to the producers to reduce the carbon content because that matters at industrial scale (company saves $3m over 30m units by switching to a non-petroleum glue whatever) not to an individual consumer (who would see a cost increase of 10¢).