If it reduces emissions by reducing fossil demand, that's fine too.
If someone asked me if I wanted to contribute to a new freeway in my city that I'm not going to use directly, no I don't, the marginal benefit to me is too slight. But I appreciate having sophisticated infrastructure, and when I see infrastructure spending on the budget, I'm more or less content with it.
By the same token I don't for example pay for trees to be planted for every ton of CO2 I generate, but I'm happy for my taxes to go towards addressing the issue. If someone asked me if I'd like a tax break on the condition that it came out of that line-item, I wouldn't.
I found out about him and his uplifting work through an appearance on the podcast Manifold [1]. But you can also learn about his research directly through ASU [2, 3].
Personally, it made me feel like the problem was far more tractable than I previously intuited.
[1] https://manifoldlearning.com/episode-040/ [2] https://asunow.asu.edu/20190429-solutions-lackner-carbon-cap... [3] https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/
I don’t want gas; I want some means to propel my car from A to B. I’ll choose the most economically practical option, gas being the currently most available one. I live in Florida, so the “underwater in 50 years” meme hits very close to my home: about 3km away, to be precise. Lots of people will see the incentive to use less gas, or to pay for carbon sequestration in the absence of a non-gas option.
No. I meant fossil fuels in this case (specifically natural gas).
>Also can't the rest of those things just use an alternate fuel.
We currently have no alternative to fossil fuels for cargo ships and airplanes.
Nobody _wants_ to pay for trash removal or a sewage system either, because they don't get anything back immediately—maybe a slightly less smelly neighbourhood in a few weeks. The only difference with CO₂ is scale.
Sunk is more accurate than free, though.
The average of (4, 5, 5, 6) is 5. The average of (1, 2, 9, 9) is 5.25.
Laws and treaties ended leaded gas, atmospheric nuclear testing, and markets for several industrial chemicals with global impacts. Future archeologists will be able to date these legal constructs by the concentration of these chemicals, or radioisotopes, and their effects, in layers of rock and soil.
Depends on whether you assume the background property arrangements are valid. We call them a thief because we call this gasoline owned by this group of people we call a company.
Some other group of people might call everyone who buys gasoline thieves since they profit off of the negative externality they leverage on the rest of society.
It's all a matter of what you view as neutral and objective and what you view as a violation of others rights.
I think carbon emitters should be the ones paying. Otherwise you privatize the profits and socialize the cleanup expenses.
Isn't that exactly what the parent comment proposed?
>Is it a bad thing to force people who use a commodity to pay for its cleanup?
My impression is an economist would tell you that it theoretically doesn't matter that much if you tax the consumer or the producer. It's like US payroll taxes - does it make a difference how the tax is split between employer and employee? The real question is who is forced to absorb the cost, and theoretically that isn't determined by who pays from an accounting perspective - it's a red herring.
Often people insist without evidence that someone who will pay a tax can or cannot pass it through, whichever is convenient to argue against it, when the real answer is probably "it's complicated" and the entity taxed is not in control.
I think this is the Wikipedia page describing the phenomenon I'm fumbling at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence
"The theory of tax incidence has a number of practical results. For example, United States Social Security payroll taxes are paid half by the employee and half by the employer. However, some economists think that the worker bears almost the entire burden of the tax because the employer passes the tax on in the form of lower wages. The tax incidence is thus said to fall on the employee.[2] However, it could equally well be argued that in some cases the incidence of the tax falls on the employer. This is because both the price elasticity of demand and price elasticity of supply effect upon whom the incidence of the tax falls"
I'm thinking this also is related to the recent political arguments over who pays US tariffs.
Using gas is like eating dessert first. This is just forcing vegetables as part of the equation.
There will be a carbon tax because people are too short-sighted in identifying long-term impact because - "It doesn't hurt me."
It does...you are just too dense to notice.
To your point, using gas causes externalities. We know how to address externalities broadly. But the political will is lacking due to anti science proponents.
For example: carbon-captured or carbon-neutral fuels have a tax advantage (or even subsidies).
The infrastructure around fossil fuels is big, if you can have a carbon-compensated equivalent to that it could be viable.
if only this was the case. I am afraid it will instead be subsidised by the tax payer.
But your wider point stands: behavioural change via financial incentives.
The projected cost of ccs is much less than $4000/mo even for a oil heated home though.
But now they closed down Fessenheim so more coal would be burned. Thank you Greens, thank you Hollande!
https://www.sustainability-times.com/expert/a-safe-and-profi...
My point rather was that living in a really old badly insulated house or a place with horrendous building standards is a choice, and that has to cost something and not be what we aim for when alternatives are easily possible and has been for decades.
Renewables that are popular now, like solar and wind, are weather dependent, which means the grid needs to handle variable input, which it's not designed to do and would need major fixing. Also means you need to store the energy for when it's not abundant, Germany does this by pumping water into mountain lakes to produce hydro on demand, but they've run out of lakes, so you need batteries. Batteries of a grid-size magnitude need carbon-expensive materials and have their own plethora of problems.
These two problems are only feasibly conquerable in a reasonable timescale by a few countries, for others they are prohibitively expensive, far beyond the small subsidies proposed in things like the Paris Accord. Now, sure, USA, Europe could implement these, but it's not going to fix the problem if Asia, Africa don't, and additionally it's going to add significant economic and geopolitical pressure between these nation-blocs, those who are hamstringing themselves and those who aren't.
Hydro has serious geopolitical issues as fresh water supplies grow more tactically necessary, consider Egypt / Ethiopia right now with the Nile, or China's tibetan plateau snow-seed cannons to capture water before it reaches India.
Tidal has extremely short lifespans, any moving system in salt water is difficult to keep going for more than a few years.
Geothermal is good, but also one of the most expensive and a bit of a "slow burner," not going to be powering anything serious with that without sinking billions into the plant.
The only real solution I see is nuclear, but that's a naughty word for some reason.
Or, we remain with carbon based fuels, except they are synthesized from atmospheric carbon in regions with plenty of solar energy.
These approaches surely have challenges, but I would like to know what are the biggest ones?
I think DME has some potential as an alternative fuel because it can be produced through CO2-to-DME hydrogenation or by using syngas/manure and burned in cleaner diesels (no particulate emissions).
Non-renewable plants have variable output even if it is not dependent on weather, and the grid in fact deals with variations in total and per-plant inputs whether or not solar or wind is attached. If there are problems with that, the need to address them is independent of the use of solar and wind.
Handling a plant going offline is totally different from the logistics of shuttling variable regions of production across the entire country.
Sure, but that's why you favor a regionally balanced mix of renewables, with regional peaker plants (which may not be clean/renewable, but are better than relying on dirty sources for your core needs) not geographic concentration of single sources.
I am sure that if you put your mind to it you can think of some reasons people might feel uneasy about nuclear power. It’s not like incidents involving it are that far in the past.
And new types, like thorium salt reactors don't have classical issues like uranium waste products and much much smaller possibility of runaway reactions. And France has been "5 years away" from fusion reactors for like 30 years on a shoestring budget, with real money that could be a possibility in maybe another 30 years and also dodges all the horror-story problems.
Overall, I agree, modern solar, especially reflector-steam plants shouldn't be lumped in with silicon panels, especially when talking about total carbon footprint. But I do think nuclear carries a lot of unfair baggage that has kept us on oil for way longer than we should have been.
It's the same kind of "leaving problems to the next generation" of current fossil-fuel use except this one is a lot more generations away.
Government action in the form of subsidizing the former and/or taxing the latter is necessary to internalize the externalities so that the relative net cost (benefit) is born by (accrues to) the participants in the transaction.
On paper it looks like a huge win-win.
Very.
And Food Security will be a huge issue moving forward in the 21st Century, as seen with COVID Pandemic shortages it can occur very quickly and have dire consequences due to its centralized and broken networks; also it occurred not because farmers cannot produce the product but because they cannot deliver the product to Market, which leads to Global supply chain disruptions.
The consequences of soil depletion is such that the recovery/remediation costs are so high that its far more affordable to deplete/contaminate the area and recover your costs for the inputs via subsidies and cash crops then it is to undertake sustainable Ag. This is model is soon (if it hasn't already) to run out time as unpredictable weather patterns and climate change are distorting what was the 'status quo.' I've seen it in Switzerland where arable farm land is limited and has a huge premium, one of the farmers I knew bought a 5 hecatre plot of land (I forget the crop) from a conventional farmer adjacent to his livestock grazing plot and home that due to pesticide and artificial fertilizer use had become sterile and unable to yield anything of value. The Farmer sold it to him for a pittance, and the continued to put over 15 million CHF to recover the soil over 25 years, incrementally he decided to plant an apple orchid as he went along, until eventually it was completely done via a Biodynamic approach. I saw it and worked in it on its 28th season, and it was quite the experience but was taken away by the cost only to realize that is perhaps the more accurate costs of remediation costs and that what we've been doing has been the artificially suppressed costs of horrible ecological damage that will soon have to be paid.
Just look at China, they're being pounded with floods compounded with COVID, a recent Swine Flu epidemic, and possible Bubonic Plague outbreak in Mongolia all which can impact and require the culling of large scale livestock, which in turn can impact the effects (capacity to carry costs of a farm) of horticulture as well.
Honestly, this reset needed to happen, and I just hope the West (unlike China who has actually had to spend 100s of billions in its contaminated farm land) has the Good Sense to be proactive about this and lead the way, because a significant amount of the Extinction Rebellion Gen Z kids era don't care or want the Carbon-based economy and are already opting out of School model entirely--labor and passionate talent is what is needed the most in that equation, the rest is pretty much already there its just a matter of collective Will.
Which means that unfunded-liabilities like SS and retirement funds, and pensions that rely on consumer based economies and taxes are not just unsustainable they're ready for imminent collapse due to the mass-unemployment and significant contraction in the consumer-based economy. I've come to realize that the Stock Market is essentially all smoke and mirrors, and doesn't reflect much of anything but a real-time gauge of 'how rich people happen to feel that day' and is mainly done with HFT based algorithms. (To base Food on this metric is absolute folly and should revert to a local economic model on a city level.)
Even being a big Tesla proponent, there is no way in hell why Tesla stock price reflects reality and could/should displace Toyota Motors in any way shape or form. Just the sheer scale of Toyota based cars they produce per year dwarfs Tesla's current and foreseeable supply combined, let alone those already on the roads now all over the World which is massive, and I imagine they could/will remain past the critical mass effect of EV because of their very high QC/QA, something Tesla has never actually been able to figure out and has overcome that shortcoming with Brand 'clout.'
So to summarize, its not just on paper: it has to happen as a matter of survival.
Taxes.
Carbon emissions are externalities, regulating them is entirely compatible, if not mandatory, with maintaining a free market.
> Why would anyone agree to pay for it.
Why do you agree to pay taxes? Oh wait, you don't. You are forced to pay them.
> And if we mandate it wouldn't it make fossil products way too expensive and therefore uncompetitive?
Isn't that what you'd want?
> They are already losing to renewables in some regions.
"Some regions" are just low-hanging fruit.
> I just don't see the logic in shitting around and then paying somebody to clean up the shit. It's much easier to just stop shitting.
Only if you stop eating, which you would probably be forced to do if you were to give up on hydrocarbon-based products such as fertilizer. Also, you'll die.
Alternatively, if you were to just "shit somewhere else" instead, you will need a way to store and transform that shit. That's exactly what carbon sequestration is.
Most budget/spending and political decisions by the government should be subject to approval by the people. Everybody should have a government login and could vote through a website or app. I wouldn't mind voting once or twice per day or even more, as it would be more productive and fulfilling than social media.
We don't need optimal decisions, in fact politicians are also not experts at the decisions they make, even worse, they make decisions based on who paid them to make them. What we need is proper representation and distribution of power.
The idea of a republic is that one elects a wise leader who can take the time to understand the issues and surround themselves with knowledgeable experts that can help fill in the gaps — which isn't even remotely possible in a direct democracy, as not everyone can know an expert in every necessary field.
Now, that said, our country is obviously quite far from an ideal republic. But I think it's other things — gerrymandering, a lack of good participation by voters, and a FPTP voting system that forces a two-party system — which many people think would persist pretty much as-is in a popular vote system —, and forces voters to vote for someone other than who they want to vote for. (Some would also add money-in-government, i.e., rolling back Citizens United; I'm still on the fence there, myself, as it would also prevent coordinated efforts by citizens.)
I don't know how to fix that, but I'm very doubtful that abandoning representative democracy in favour of direct votes on all governmental decisions would be a positive step. It seems likely to just hand even more power to whichever charismatic populists and fashionable "influencers" can persuade people to vote blindly for whatever they promote.
We also have data now, and for what we don't have data we should be running experiments and collecting data to make better decisions.
I've argued it before, and get rebutted with things such as "we need to let the experts decide, average people don't understand nuance" or "we don't want rule by mob/majority" or "get involved in your local community meetings instead" or "what if the people vote to exterminate minorities", etc. But the fact of the matter is that some sort of direct-democracy, or individual-level decision making (such as suggested above regarding tax-spending) would allow society to self-correct and adapt without the need for complicated and "expert" interventions. I understand the extreme examples, sure, but we're not even trying to involve the populace more for even minor things.
On a side note, with my conspiracy hat on, this is why "electronic" voting is opposed so heavily. That and the whole "votes have to be anonymous yet independently verifiable but not linked to your identity because you might sell your vote" nonsense. Because the natural consequence of a reduction of cost when it comes to voting is that we'd end up voting on more granular things and more often, and we can't have that. Instead we want people to enact change by fostering "movements" and "protesting for change", because that really doesn't do anything at the end of the day.
The average American isn't remotely qualified to make these types of decisions. That's why direct democracy has never, ever, in the history of humanity, worked in a society above a few dozen people.
> I understand the extreme examples, sure, but we're not even trying to involve the populace more for even minor things.
Let's try a non-extreme example - naming a post-office. The lefties want to name it after Rosa Parks and the righties want to name it after Stonewall Jackson. The vote ends up 51/49 in either direction - how do you feel that type of conflict would resolve itself in 2020? It's much, much better for the stability of the government to keep passionate people away from the majority of the mundane work of government. Plebiscites should be reserved only for massive issues, like changes to the Constitution.
> On a side note, with my conspiracy hat on, this is why "electronic" voting is opposed so heavily.
It's because security experts have repeatedly exposed how flawed these systems are, and how cheaply and effectively voting is done with paper and pencil.
So what? that's just an excuse to keep power away from them. We are already getting incredibly important decisions made by totally unqualified people (e.g. Pandemic response by the current administration) not only are making bad decisions, they are making them in their own best interest, in detriment to the people they are supposed to represent.
> That's why direct democracy has never, ever, in the history of humanity, worked in a society above a few dozen people.
Examples please? What country/government has ever implemented a real/direct democracy?
> Examples please? What country/government has ever implemented a real/direct democracy?
That's my point. The French revolutionaries tried it for a minute until they realized you can't run a nation-state that way - it's too complex and the average person is too disconnected from the issues to fully grok the n-th order consequences. Plus the tyranny of the masses tends to get out of hand.
The current administration is a product of the current system. And it is a great example of what's wrong with it. It's amazing that you are using it to defend the system instead.
> The French revolutionaries tried it for a minute until they realized you can't run a nation-state that way - it's too complex and the average person is too disconnected from the issues to fully grok the n-th order consequences. Plus the tyranny of the masses tends to get out of hand.
Technology and data should help tremendously in solving the issues you present. Tools which were not available to the French revolutionaries. Also you shouldn't throw something completely out the window just because of one failed attempt hundreds of years ago.
It's the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried. Not making rash decisions off black swan events is another reason to avoid direct democracy.
> Technology and data should help tremendously in solving the issues you present. Tools which were not available to the French revolutionaries. Also you shouldn't throw something completely out the window just because of one failed attempt hundreds of years ago.
Adding technology and data make the process even more fragile and prone to being messed with. How are you going to bash the existing government, and then act like we're somehow going to create a direct democracy based on technology that's fully secure and consistent? What happens when a hurricane knocks out power in Florida? Are they just paralyzed because no one can do their daily voting?
Voting systems should use the minimal amount of technology and the maximum amount of privacy. That doesn't even get into how most people wouldn't want the cognitive burden you are trying to impose on them.
I'm not sure people need any more authority or engagement than they already have in making decisions for people 1000 miles away.
A while back I heard someone propose the idea of "delegating" your vote to an arbitrary person and they'd vote on individual vote items on your behalf, or consequently "delegate" it yet again to someone above. Essentially creating a giant hierarchy of representation.
I’d rather we could earmark our tax payments.
I wouldn’t send anything to any department involved in trampling basic human rights. I also wouldn’t pay a cent to oil or corn subsidies.
In such a system, I imagine Amtrak and the department of education would be getting 10x more than they do now.
Similarly, I suspect the US would be carbon negative in a few years.
The supreme court ruled money is speech, so I argue that not letting me earmark my payments is suppressing my speech.
Why would that be broken on a societal level, and how is it not "democratic" to allow people to allocate their "voluntarily given" taxes how they please? What are we afraid of happening? Can we not control the problem slightly and just give them high-level categories to try it out?
There are merits to such a system, but I suspect they don't align politically with what you intended.
So, yes it could happen because the US government currently ticks that box already and lots of companies are benefiting from all sorts of subsidized programs to funnel tax money into the cause of destroying our planet as fast as we can. Basically, this would be a yet another tax funded effort benefiting big oil, much of the car industry, etc. It's so plausible because the same kind of things have been happening for decades already.
The question why anyone would pay for that kind of thing is indeed one that needs answering because the US seems to consistently end up with leadership actively promoting exactly these kind of things and there's an election coming up with a clear choice one way or another.
If you have a cube of balls 100 * 100 * 100 you've got a million balls. Then mark 400 random balls. Then lets them all fall to the floor. Find the marked balls.
That's what sifting though 400 parts per million looks like and c02 molecules are smaller than ping pong balls.
There is a CCS capable coal seam within 50 km of every coal and natural gas power plant in N. America, so in the minority of cases where falling LCOE of renewables doesn't outcompete existing generation naturally it might make sense to incentivise CCS, provided that the produced natural gas would further enable renewables.
The net carbon impact could be even more significant in China.
I don't understand this, care to expand?
Anyway, CCS is probably already economically viable because it is legal, and there’s no way large institutions will stop burning fossil fuels.
It would make more economic sense to transfer all of the oil subsidies to environmentally sustainable energy, but that’s politically impossible.
It’s no more likely than SF making it illegal to lock a bathroom, and simultaneously spending enough money for social services to reduce the homeless population.
If fossil fuels weren't available, profitable activities that currently release carbon from fossil fuels would be done in other ways.
For example, plastics could be made from plants, and a lot of carbon from the atmosphere would end up in landfills as a side effect of making disposable consumer goods.
> The parable of the broken window was introduced by French economist Frédéric Bastiat to illustrate why destruction, and the money spent to recover from destruction, is not actually a net benefit to society.
CCS is literally unburning coal and oil. Gathering ashes (CO2) and putting them back in the ground. Instead of energy producing goods and services, it just funnels air into the ground. The energy needed for this is at least the same energy that was released in the last 200 years.
It's also needed to stave off catastrophe and civilisation collapse, but let's not kid ourselves: it doesn't produce anything, except in indirect ways. Capitalism is not equipped to deal with this scenario.
Edit: to be clear: I’m not saying we shouldn’t do anything, I’m just saying the solution cannot be to make disparity between rich and poor even larger
Billionaires continue to have their G-wagons flown around the world for them.
"It's pure expense. Why would anyone agree to pay for it."
The outlook is getting exponentially worse each year. But, yeah, we need to be strongly net negative in a few decades.
It takes a while, but that's the predictable final outcome of failing to remove the carbon that is causing climate change.
- Action must be taken before you see consequences
- The best time to act is right away, though it might not seem a big deal if you do
- You need to trust experts
- Taking some initial economic damage is unavoidable...
- ... but is ultimately much cheaper than not taking that hit
- strong leadership and a unified population is needed to align interests and create mutually beneficial cooperation
etc, etc.
But the US failed spectacularly, and most importantly learned nothing from it.
If we can’t control pandemic easily we are certainly going to fail to make any progress on global warming
CCS is more likely to succeed and will lead to significantly less bloodshed than overthrowing all the governments at once.
And how would you go about doing that? I am genuinely curious. Do you know of any organisation that is going to do the forcing? I would be happy to donate. Or do you know a way I can do forcible removal myself without risking my life?
If you’re in the US, vote this fall, and hope the Democrats make good on their campaign promises.
It’s better than nothing.
there's no way forward regarding global warming with the current US insitution of leadership, comprised of both major parties. they've got to be removed for the most optimal response to climate change, but doing so will be ghastly.
that's why i've started hunting for CCS solutions/companies to invest in/ways to start a company to leverage CCS for profit. we're going to need a massive mop to clean up the mess the baby boomers are still insisting on making worse.
edit: I just don't see the logic in shitting around and then paying somebody to clean up the shit. It's much easier to just stop shitting.