And this is why you need a carbon tax.
These clowns are basically making money by turning negative externalities into bitcoin. And the best way to deal with a negative externality is to tax the heck out of those folks and thereby either a) make the activity unprofitable, or b) use the resulting revenues to plow into mitigation efforts to offset the effects of the externality.
People still try, Kyoto was a heroic effort, but at the end of the day the incentives to cheat are powerful and thus the level of trust is very low.
Which is, of course, ridiculous.
They bought a coal power plant in New York, because it already existed. They're not going to disassemble it and transport it to China because that wouldn't be cost effective, so the alternative is that it would remain offline.
Likewise, if people buy electric cars or high MPG hybrids in the US because there is a carbon tax, that reduces the CO2 emitted by the US independent of what anybody else does. It doesn't require any international agreement; you can just do it on your own.
"What about global effects," you say. But that goes the other way.
Africa doesn't buy new cars by and large, they buy used cars exported from America and Europe. If the new cars people buy in America or Europe become electric then they'll still be electric when they're the used cars sold to Africa.
Oil is a global commodity. If America burns less then the price goes down. Which makes it cheaper for other countries to independently enact a carbon tax. Which they have the incentive to do because they get brownie points, and their domestic population doesn't rebel against a change that only keeps the price the same, and it generates revenue at the expense of the (foreign) oil companies. The more countries do this, the easier it is for the others to do it, at the expense of oil net exporters like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Nothing about this requires an international agreement or any kind of cooperation from anyone. Just enact a carbon tax and pay the revenue back to the population as a dividend. It will be extremely popular as soon as everybody gets the first check and realizes that they get back more than they paid because some of the money comes from oil companies and other corporations (who receive none of the dividend).
> Oil is a global commodity. If America burns less then the price goes down. Which makes it cheaper for other countries to independently enact a carbon tax. Which they have the incentive to do because they get brownie points, and their domestic population doesn't rebel against a change that only keeps the price the same, and it generates revenue at the expense of the (foreign) oil companies. The more countries do this, the easier it is for the others to do it, at the expense of oil net exporters like Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Or those countries don't enact a carbon tax and then start sucking up factories from countries that did.
If every country enacted the same taxes then the question comes down to which country has the most lax enforcement. If the enforcement is all the same then you have a potential solution, but of course this is a huge ask in the modern world. It's hard to get competitors to work cooperatively. As long as people treat the world economy like a big zero sum game this problem is basically unsolvable.
Then you can implement tarrifs on countries that refuse to implement carbon taxes.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generatio...
Either they offset it by creating green electricity elsewhere, in which case they should be using that instead of gas in the first place, or either they are offseting using very slow "net-neutral" schemes such as agroforestry, in which case the harm they do will not be compensated until 30 years on.
(as carbon offsetting is typically slow)
So their business is criminal.
If using computing power like this is so bad just make it illegal to use excessive computing power, why allow it but let the government scoop up the cream.
Because assholes exist who will gladly burn the planet down to make a buck.
> If using computing power like this is so bad just make it illegal to use excessive computing power, why allow it but let the government scoop up the cream.
Because enforcing an effective regime on capping the amount of power each US resident can use for computing is considerably _more_ difficult (and results in _more_ bloat) than just taxing emissions.
If you think it would be structured in a way that would stop emissions you’re naive because tax makers would rather still make money than stop something.
Think I’m wrong? Cigarettes and alcohol still kill people they’re just highly taxed.
Taxes solve nothing and ONLY exist to keep poor people poor and middle class people middle class.
Easy: sanction their asses. We banned CFCs, remember? We didn't even need 100% compliance to be effective at repairing the ozone hole!
> Think I’m wrong? Cigarettes and alcohol still kill people they’re just highly taxed.
Taxing alcohol and tobacco reduce their use, thereby reducing the harm they bring. [1] [2]
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[2] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-publh...
Those emissions only happen because of the local price advantage of the externality. Globally there is no price advantage because for every winner (the person emitting the CO2) there is a loser (everyone else being harmed from the CO2). This is a clear case of individual decision making requiring an extension of responsibility. The carbon tax makes the decision maker responsible for the financial damages caused by the CO2 and thus allows local decision making to reach a global optimum.
Advocates of the free market should want local decision making to always result in a global optimum, because that is literally their position. If they want to argue that local decision making should not have to lead to a global optimum then they ruin their own position because what they really want is the right to harm others for private benefit.
Most studies have found that increasing taxes on cigarettes does reduce smoking prevalence.
This is also why carbon tax is gonna be a disappointment. There are way too many rules surrounding it, when really there should just be one carbon budget that every firm can try to buy some of on equal terms.
Assuming they made an exception for private plants that belong to a campus of some sort. Many airports, universitys, housing projects, water treatment facilities, prisons, data centers, etc, run their own power plants primarily for heating and cooling needs with the added benefit of 24/7 onsite power in case of a blackout. They may be grid tied and export some power but are not primary grid suppliers like a utility.
Ask the law makers who wrote it.
> All you jave done is provide a "who", not a "why".
The word "private" is the "why".
If you want an analogy: Do you follow food safety and preparation laws or submit to inspection in your private kitchen before making yourself breakfast? No. Because it's private.
Remember too that AC vs. DC was very much up in the air in the early days of electricity so any early investors in generators would have to gamble on which standard would win for transmission and some of them would end up being incompatible with the grid unless they installed transformers. A sane government would want to allow those early adopters to keep using what they've got until it breaks and not penalize those companies for investing in new technology.
I think the point is that why would the law make the distinction anyway? Like why would it say "power plants connected to a power grid pay X tax"? Why wouldn't it just say "power plants pay X tax"?
A sibling comment points out a reasonable explanation for why non-connected power plants might be exempt from tax, though.
It isn't clear to me that these concerns are absent under any other system -- in fact I would argue that capitalism paired with a liberal representative democracy and strong individual rights is the best system for addressing any concerns.
I was reacting to the non-sequitur that you were suggesting that somehow capitalism was at fault in this situation.
Edit: What if governments just imposed a carbon tax on all crypto mining? The legal framework necessary to support that could be extended to cover other carbon sources in the future.
https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php
You might get more or less usable energy out of it depending on your efficiency, but if you're less efficient you'll have to burn more fuel (hence paying more tax, directly or as part of the price of fuel if it's taxed at the source).
A) petroleum products are used for other purposes?
B) carbon capturing is used to various levels of effectiveness?
C) there can be different levels of partial combustion?
B) I definitely think carbon capture should earn credits in any carbon pricing system.
C) That's just another kind of inefficiency. Same comment applies as above.
The stuff that is turned into lubricating oils, plastics, etc... will keep most of the carbon contained.
The gist is that a private equity firm bought a defunct fossil plant and are running it to power mining rigs directly, without any connection to the outside power grid. Apparently this allows them to do an end run around certain regulations and taxes which only apply to grid-connected power plants.
The scariest part is that this is apparently insanely profitable for them. NY is pretty progressive and it would not surprise me if they crack down on this kind of thing, but other states or countries seem unlikely to do that.
All the stories we've read lately about fossil plants shutting down due to being replaced by renewables could ultimately be for nothing if companies like this one buy them all up and restart them.