Yes, Global Warming is a problem but the people trying to keep themselves from freezing contribute a much smaller amount than Big-Tech and industry as a whole.
Trying to shift the blame from corporations on to people just trying to survive the winter is a tale of corporate white-washing/green-washing/hand-waving/lobbying.
If everyone were consuming the same amount/causing the same amount of emissions, this would be a no-op. However, since the rich tend to consume more, this will be a net positive for poorer people, and at the same time it will make decisions about activity that causes emissions more meaningful.
It's also much more palatable than bans or rationing, reasonably easy to implement, and avoids the trap of populist "ban highly visible thing of the day" approaches that tend to lower quality of life without addressing the real issue.
Yes, billionaires with private jets tend to consume more but your average multimillionaire is probably working remote from a cushy white collar job while poor people need to commute to and from work (often long distances because rent is expensive). CO2 taxes are regressive however you try to sell them.
Second, even if it were true, you'd still have control over how you redistribute the revenue, and as a result, you can make the net effect as progressive as you want.
[1] https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
In practice billionaires wouldn't care how much you tax them unless you taxed a substantial portion of income, they'd still consume what they wanted. In order to materially change even middle class peoples' behavior prices need to change by double digit percentage points, and when you factor in that people don't spend all they earn, that's a lot of tax.
If there is a CO2-heavy option that's 10% cheaper than the "green" option, introducing the tax will suddenly make the "green" option the cheaper one.
This could be using an electric truck to get food to the store, it could be using a heat pump instead of an oil furnace, it could be the locally grown potatoes instead of potatoes that were trucked over a long distance from a place with cheaper labor, etc.
Most of the savings won't happen because the millionaire flies less, they will be made because someone, somewhere along the supply chain makes a different decision because the environmentally friendlier thing is now cheaper. That's the beauty of it - it's about fixing the emissions where the best effect can be achieved with the smallest investment, not about taking away people's ability to consume and live an enjoyable life.
Smaller processes that produce CO2 through actual emissions will probably fall through the gaps, but they're not critical in the big picture. Most will be covered through taxes on the fuel or energy. I'd expect most of the electric truck battery emissions to come from energy, either during the assembly of the cells or production of the ingredients.
> If you tax only direct emissions you motivate companies to amortize emissions by concentrating them during manufacture.
I do not understand. Indirect emissions are direct emissions at some point, and that's where they get taxed. The cost then gets passed along, creating an incentive to either buy from a supplier that can produce the same thing more cheaply by reducing emissions, or finding a substitute product that's cheaper because it's less emissions-intensive to make.
The real problem is imports from countries that do not follow an equivalent tax regime. I suppose here approximations will be necessary, and by making them overly generous, other countries have an incentive to join the scheme.
What if it's a giant shipping boat with thousands of containers?
The diesel fuel that the train company will buy has already been taxed at the refinery (if it's a diesel train). The gas that the power company will burn to generate power for an electric train has been taxed at import. The train company will simply pay the price of these goods, tax included, and pass this cost on to the owners of the goods being shipped. How is up to them.
Likewise, the "hidden" emissions from the production of the train are likewise "hidden" in its price: The steel that the train was made from was already taxed when it left the steel mill (not 100% familiar with steelmaking, but this may be one of the cases where it's insufficient to just tax the inputs since the steel mill might emit GHG that don't just come from fuel). The cost of the energy used in processing that steel already contained the cost of the emissions tax that was initially levied on the fuel. etc.
Firstly, what kind of excuse is this - imagine the same argument applied to social networks, should they just leave child porn on their websites because it too difficult to keep track of? What if a social network has billions of photos? Business has to follow the law, just like I do.
Secondly, we have armies of people collecting data on these containers and doing data science to manage and optimise supply chains, and they have the containers, their weights and contents documented for customs, to make sure they are safe and not overloaded, for insurance purposes, so they can be delivered to the right customer, many containers are independently GPS tagged, etc.
All this data already exists for every major carrier, haulage, etc. The hard part is like one guy delivering donuts part-time, but we don't need to go after that.
That electric car battery might be manufactured in China using coal power and shipped over the ocean in a diesel fueled ship and yet pay no tax, making an American-manufactured battery even less competitive.
Of course there is the question about people that simply _store_ carbon, e.g. what if there's a coal mine where the buyers of the coal don't actually use the coal for its energy purposes but instead for, say, makeup creation, or wood for building? We would probably have to work out special licensing for non-usage purposes and that's where it would probably get tricky.
Adding a tax on the carbon content of fuels will push that even harder.
There are no answers given usually, less so convincingly, mostly because the ones demanding scarcity are usually not the ones affected by it.
Just trying to find one member of the working class / blue collar amongst ExtencionRebllion and the like will be a tedious task. Not so much if you look for kids of millionaires, or of bilionaires. Or Millionaires and Billionaires themselves.
As of now I can only see two outcomes:
They either start making these scarcity demands a part of their foreign policy (meaning getting tough on the actual global polluters, not their domestic poor people who barely can afford one cheap vacation to the Balears per year).
Or we just start naming what we would have called it 150 years ago: A top-down class-war.
Meanwhile your "ExtinctionRebellion" phrase seems like a political touchstone that you assume other people know what you're talking about, but I have no clue what it is.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion_Youth
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_Strike_for_Climate
Her Holyness [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg
from 1968 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
and 1972 from that same club [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
and countless dystopian science-fiction literature and movies from that epoch.
edit: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=13
"We have all heard about a population problem in the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where death rates have dropped rapidly and populations have exploded. Only recently have we recognized that the United States may have population problems of its own. There are differing views. Some say that it is a problem of crisis proportions — that the growth of population is responsible for pollution of our air and water, depletion of our natural resources, and a broad array of social ills."
SUBTLE
For me gas prices in the UK, what really messed me up was the standing charges (daily charge for infrastructure) circa 2006 they doubled that but lowered the unit price which for the average family of 4 usage, worked out as a saving of £100 a year. Though as a single person, that change cost me near on £100 a year in extra standing charge and a saving of unit cost of £20 a year. I just find it annoying how most fuel usage pricing can and does actually penalise responsible low-usage users. Sure the more you buy the cheaper things get but when you get to climate, wear and tear upon the infrastructure - those users who don't have to worry about the money or have any care are reward by a fixed impact cost upon infrastructure - even if they use 10x more than somebody else - they both pay the same. Then the more they use - then costs become cheaper for them.
Pro-tip - slow baking a baked potatoes in the oven is a good meal that also warms the home so double usage of that fuel.
What would I change - well I'd quota people - additional quota's for medical conditions and other variable but the gist would be - fuel you use up to that quota then you pay X price per unit and the standing charge is dropped and worked into the price. Now, after you use your quota - you pay extra per unit of fuel. That way those who do the most impact are more fairly paying for it. Sadly it won't happen, but then - some serious action is needed upon climate change.
FWIW when I was more fiscally able (energy usage less than 1% of income)- my fuel usage was the same heating wise - always been a jumper if needed and going for a brisk walk does wonders for feeling warm.
Personal choice is meaningless wrt climate change. It's a topic that cannot be addressed without structural/societal changes, likely by legislation.
Industrial CO2 output doesn't just happen in a vacuum. It's a by-product for manufacturing things that consumers want/need.
Kurzgesagt's recent video (sponsored by bill gates notes)e xpressed the issue much better then I ever could, so i'll only link to it here.
It's a bit like most changes, they take time and sure my impact akin to a grain of sand in a desert, but then I feel comfortable with my choices and eventually over time, such choices will become less open as there will get a time in which government will act.
I'm mindful that many when it comes to change that is impaction can be a case of they don't so why should I and well I don't have too so I can do what I like and the pandemic as been most insightful into such mindsets. Hence we saw laws to enforces common sense in situations that had the people all been responsible, would not of been needed or come to pass. Hence I do expect the whole fossil/fuel/resource aspect of human consumption to become more and more regulated in years to come. Will it be done right is the question or will we just see those who can afford to be feckless, just as enabled as currently.
That's why I agree with you upon this and do foresee that legislation may well be the only way - alas the issue is global and that is a real cruz as when as countries tend to act as individuals and cases of - well they're not so why should we and other unfair arguments play out. So as always the politics becomes more an issue than the issue the politics is trying to solve.
For example: No one should be choosing between heating and eating, from a thermodynamic perspective. It's trivial to drastically cut heating energy through very low-tech methods: increasing insulation in the walls, and add extra layers of glass to your windows. The reason it's not done is because real estate developers have no incentive to increase their construction costs by some marginal amount since they know that natural gas cost is so cheap no customer is going to care about heating energy reduction. Not only that, most customers strongly prefer the cheaper construction once they're shown how many decades it would take for the better building envelope to pay for itself via energy bill reductions. Same reason there isn't a incentive to switch from (dirty) gas to electric, install solar panels, switch to heat pumps etc etc.
Now consider how building related carbon emissions make up about 40% of the total emissions, and you'll see how much of an infuriating obstacle cheap energy is in cutting carbon emissions.
Yes, there will be low-income people for who this will be a crisis, but that can be dealt with separately: government subsidies, or government subsidies of envelope retrofits (great stimulus idea). There is no reason frame this issue in a us versus them manner.
I can't believe people try to shrug it off as no big deal because the absolute carbon output is small, or postulating that they must have offset it. If there are two things people react badly to, it is injustice / unfairness, and hypocrisy. The ruling class has done more to turn the average person against their climate change proposals than just about anything else, in my opinion. Quite probably by design, such is the blatant audacity of their double standards.
Don't worry, The Smartest Guys In The Room went from 0 to 100 on this issue in 1969 when no major societal changes were going on and for no ulterior reason at all: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf
"The difference [in family size] is important not simply because of the numbers but because it bears vitally upon a fundamental question about the Nation's future: Do we wish to continue to invest even more of our resources and those of much of the rest of the world in meeting demands for more services, more classrooms, more hospitals, and more housing as population continues to grow?"
I live in a 100 year old, poorly insulated house with my family of 4, and we manage to use half of the average for a family house here. And we are not really trying, only thing we do is limit what parts of the house we heat (not the bedrooms) and set the temperature smartly.
I cycle 30km to my work on an electric bike to exercise and limit car usage.
So yes, I really don't think the price rise will have too much impact on consumers directly. I think most people in the Netherlands can halve their energy consumption here with very limited impact on QoL just by heating less and using their car less. And if the price really gets problematic our gov could just lower the taxation
On the flip side I respect your dedication to bike that much thru Dutch winter!
We do have lots of baby boomers in big houses that they heatup just for themselves. My mom has 4 times my heating bill by herself than I have with a family of four. It would solve a lot of problems if the elderly move to smaller houses and leave the bigger houses for families that need them.
A lot of places make that kind of swap uneconomical. From paying capital gains now instead of later, to loss of property tax increase exemptions to loss of property tax deferrals. Some places exempt gains on housing gains but not other gains (kinda a problem if you downsize and take a windfall)…
Many places ignore housing wealth when it comes to social assistance, but include everything else.
In most of the US that's a good way to land in the ER.
source: son t-boned on his e-bike 6 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process#Sources_of_hydro...
Have you investigated if it is feasible to retrofit proper isolation? It has been fairly common here in Sweden, though I'd expect that by now most of the housing stock has good isolation. Stuff like triple layers of glass in the windows also helps a lot.
I must say though that a properly insulated house can have a better climate in winter as you can keep the humidity much higher.
I was hoping to make my own, but maybe I'll cave in and just use a Swapfiets electric...
It will probably will mean that you get less tired and exercise less, which may be good or bad depending on your opinion.
ROTFL. Like fertilizer production?
I really fail to imagine an unconditional transfer (like the one you are replying to) turning into a monster of untraceable rules.
This is reality today under capitalism. What happens to me if I don't choose to work?
Increased prices would clearly make it more expensive to raise children. This would lead to more social care towards people with children. How would you recommend solving that?
Reducing capitas will cause a much quicker and effective change than reducing per capita consumption.
I'm sorry, what's the issue? If we need children and need to incentivize it, it's what we'll do. And by definition, you're talking about advantages only to counterbalance new disadvantages. So we need to solve what?
I mean, if on one side we have exponential growth, and on the other we have no children leading to no one to support seniors, surely there is a middle ground where the right number of children are born each year.
On the other hand in Japan and elsewhere in developed countries women postpone having kids until in their in their 30s, because they're involved in the workforce.
So, one either ends up with exponential population growth or with the elderly working until they die and younger people postponing having chindren until mid age (with all the associated health issues, both for the mother and th child) or not having children at all.
It's rather hard if not impossible to keep a middle ground. As a woman one probably has to make a choice between bearing children after you finish college or getting a degree and joining the workforce. Guess what most women's choice is?
Taxation is a road to nowhere as rich people will always either find the way to avoid taxes or find the way to throw the costs of those taxes on the poor. This happens with every kind of tax.
The only solution to decrease CO2 emission is to behave in a rational way and use the only practical, tested and available now clean energy source - nuclear power plants. No amount of eco-talk will change reality that neither solar nor wind energy plants will be able to power modern economy. Europe is learning this the hard way right now.
Maybe Europe will do the suicidal jump with the ideas like "Fit for 55", and will kill its economy to lower global emission by 0.05% but the rest of the World, which emits much more CO2 and will emit even more when all production will be moved from Europe to Asia or USA cannot care less.
After all, the whole point of carbon tax is to reduce usage, not to gain revenue or penalize some people; so it works if and only if it meaningfully changes behavior, i.e. if the tax significantly raises prices of some specific market goods/services and thus drives people to use less of those specific goods/services. A simple income-proportional tax or just "tax the rich" doesn't incentivize reducing emissions, so it's useless for that goal; it's perhaps useful for social equity and wealth redistribution, but that's something not directly linked to climate change goals.
It's not about money, it's about CO2; driving deliveries needs to emit less CO2 so the goal is to either get more efficient deliveries (e.g. electric vehicles) or less deliveries (putting some of those delivery drivers out of jobs), and "who's paying for that" is just choosing the most effective means to achieve these goals.
It gives the delivery company a big incentive to switch to electric vehicles or ebikes or something more efficient. This harnesses market power to push companies to be more efficient with their resources: the ones who are more innovative at avoiding CO2 usage will see financial benefits.
The entire point of CO2 taxes is that you are supposed to avoid them.
Delivery emissions should be attached to the person getting the delivery. Otherwise you could just skip most of your emissions by having everything delivered.
Either way, it changes your behavior, because if delivery is more expensive (to factor in the externalities it causes) you will either consume less, or pay more. This ultimately "attaches the emissions to the person getting the delivery" but in a far less complex and less game-able way.
If I order something off Amazon, do I get a say in where the package is shipped from to control "my" emissions.
Yes, you would have to use some of your carbon credits to pay for the delivery and manufacture of the shoe. The product would have both a monetary and a carbon price. If you don't have enough credits, then you can buy some on the spot market from someone who isn't using theirs up.
This would incentivise repair of the shoe, as it may require fewer carbon credits.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-renewables-us...
If there really needs to be a carbon tax for delivery, it makes the most sense to transfer it directly to the consumer who demanded order-delivery. Any other mechanism will just leave a tax loophole.
And yes, emission taxes/standards should be applied to the whole world. Right now, they are adversely affecting the poor and lower middle class of the first world - none of whom are represented on HN. Meanwhile China can keep polluting away to its heart's content producing ~30% of the world's emissions by itself.
Yes, true. Guess what is used to compensate for lack of renewable output? Natural gas fired plants with short ramp up time. This will only drive electricity prices up.
The article is about gas shortages and people at risk of freezing this winter, yet almost everyone here is talking about CO2 taxes and taxing natural gas?
Probably yes, because that the whole point of Pigouvian taxes.
The distinction in the US is whether you make your money through labor (max 37% tax) or capital gains (max 20% tax). There is a lower tax rate for capitalists (who make money via ownership of capital) vs laborers (who make money through labor income). Furthermore, capital gains can be delayed until you realize your gains (sell your capital). This distinction is what practically gives the rich lower taxes than the poor.
Employers prefer keeping people full time and full time unemployed because it is more efficient per worker and the bargaining power of the unemployed doesn't exist. If everyone were to work according to their own demand for labor then this bargaining power cliff wouldn't exist and a whole lot of welfare programs could be abolished.
What my mother gets for old age pension is the same as the cost as a tank of heating oil for her house. Thankfully she doesn't need a full tank of oil each month and summer means less fuel burned except for hot water for the oil fired water heater. I do help my mom monetarily as much as I can but yes it is a huge burden for low income people to heat their homes.
There are countless policy choices that can help the less fortunate, the great majority of which are not incompatible with gas or energy being more expensive.
For example, I'm not a huge fan of agricultural subsidies, not because I want food to be more expensive, but because of the negative environmental and health effects they've had. But the money the government pays to farmer giants could instead be redistributed to poor people and (IMHO) help them a great deal more.
Likewise, revenue from taxes on things like gasoline could mitigate the effects of higher cost for low income families, which still encourage upper classes to invest in clean energy.
There's something to be said for taxing fossil fuels and paying that money back equally to everybody. People who polute will lose money, and people who don't will receive it.
However, people's health would probably be increased if we could provide people electric heat.
Also, like you said, cooking and heating with wood is terrible for the lungs and this has become much more very evident with COVID.
Remember that it was cheap energy that allowed people to migrate and settle in the city of their choice and thus free themselves from the landowning class.
With housing costs the way they are in certain cities, this is still relevant today.
The solution isn’t to make energy more expensive, but to make things more efficient, and to change where we get our energy from.
LED lights, battery power tools, laptops, these are very efficient compared to just 20 years ago.
Don't really need expensive Li-Ion when you have the space for big and heavy, but cheap SLA batteries.
Oh and if you’re thinking I’m talking about Texas, I’m not.
My point is why do people think these issues are just California?
Global warming and extreme weather is causing power issues in your backyard too.
Why do people love bashing california over issues in their own back yard?
The other reply mentioned TX, I was actually in the heart of the snowstorm last winter. We were saved from days of outage only because we were in a hospital block. So I also think it is not just California.
For me the best/worst part of the winter storm happened a while later when I went to an IEEE webinar on the incident. We asked the panel whether they should concentrate more on the robustness of the grid and infrastructure given extreme weather events are going to be more common. The BiG oIl ExeC in the panel replied "ask me in 1000 years, the scientists are divided on that one." But not all of the panelists were as heartless.. towards the end one of them mentioned that when designing infrastructure we should keep in mind the weak and the vulnerable- those in the hospitals and such, not just the ones with backup generators and firewood stocks.
Our economic system has no affordances for making choices based on true costs – only sticker prices. When these are systematically distorted, it causes a huge collective problem.
If we’re going after all the fun stuff I don’t want the parents to get away scott free.
If we price in the emissions where they happen it will be priced in for all consumers of the products that cause them.
- all the meat and diary your child is going to consume in those 18 years
- all diapers that are going to be produced and disposed.
- all methane and CO2 you child produced on an a daily basis for those 18 years (exhaling, digesting/pooping/farting)
- concrete used for building this extra room for your child
...
just to name a few.
Shall I give you my Venmo?
I can explain my critiques in more detail if you clarify exactly what your argument is.
[1] https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-c... [2] Comical, but fact-based take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
No one here is saying we should all be Amish, but if gasoline is $3 per gallon, but it costs $3 to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere (making both these numbers up, I don't own a car), then there's a good chance that the gas is effectively too cheap, and the rest of us are going to have to pay to clean it up later. If we taxed gas to be its true price (cost of extraction + refining + shipping + profit-margin + environmental cleanup), it would help incentivize cleaner fuels.
This sort of direct air capture will be absolutely necessary in the second half of this century for all of our current oaths to keep warming to 1.5C, according to the IPCC SR1.5 report. And though many parts of the supply chain of CO2 direct air capture might get cheaper with time, the actual sequestration part might get harder and more expensive with time.
Chevron had promised to capture only a small amount of CO2 as part of a LNG project in Australia, but is facing massive fines because they didn't understand the geology enough to actually sequester CO2.
So while I'm fairly confident that we could eventually get the tech for CO2 capture down to maybe $1/gallon of gas, the actual sequestration is only going to get more difficult with time.
Every gallon of gas burned today makes 20 pounds of CO2 that will need to be removed in the future we are burdening future generations with an incredibly difficult debt that we don't yet know how to pay down.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22663597/largest-direct-ai...
In essence, we're still burning lots and lots of carbon just to extract energy. Thermodynamics says to reverse the process and get carbon from CO2 we need to put all that energy back, with a hefty bonus due to inefficiencies.
So how can it be feasible to afford enough energy to "unburn" a century's worth of burnt carbon if we can't even get enough energy to avoid burning new carbon in the first place? Like, our energy generation might double in a few decades, but this "unburning" would require so much spare energy that it doesn't seem likely to achieve as soon as the second half of this century.
The key insight is that you don't need to turn carbon dioxide back into carbon. You just need to store those carbon atoms it in a stable form that keeps them out of the atmosphere. The most plausible way of doing that at large scale is to accelerate the reaction of naturally occurring silicates from rocks with atmospheric CO2.
"From a thermodynamic point of view, inorganic carbonates represent a lower energy state than CO2; hence the carbonation reaction is exothermic..."
That's from chapter 7 of the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, which I recommend reading for more details.
Chapter 7 PDF: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...
Page 321 has the executive summary with your quote.
Parent page for full book: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/carbon-dioxide-capture-and-storag...
The gist is that if you look at the exponential curves of growth of both wind and solar deployments, and assume that we don't back off from those, you get X amount of TWh/year in 2040. Combine that with conversion of heating and transport to electrification, which provides huge efficiency boosts and requires only 1/3 to 1/4 the energy (most fossil fuel energy is just wasted). Then add in all the parts of the developing world which will increase their energy use to EU/China standards, and we are just barely there.
However I think we are likely to see big gains in production capacity as the developing world ups their game. They will be consuming more electricity, but also be immensely more productive.
It isn't, and it won't be. Carbon capture is a pleasing myth we tell ourselves to avoid the massive and immediate actions that would be necessary to avert catastrophe.
We're addicted to fossil fuels, telling ourselves that when we eventually sober up we can undo the damage we've done to ourselves.
There are several startups trying to come up with ways of sequestering atmospheric carbon in ways that will last for thousands of years. We need something like that to work, and to come up with ways to fund massive deployment in the second half of this century.
IMHO when estimating future, starting with the desired outcome (or even considering it much) is harmful, as it causes you to accept unrealistic assumptions and estimates for the key items driving your predictions, just so the predictions will come out as "acceptable" to you. You need to consider the impact factors as they are, and have realistic expectations of the effect and likelihood of interventions (especially considering the specific motivation factors of the narrow groups who can make each of those interventions, how that aligns with their interests), and see to what prognosis they lead you.
If we "need to come up with ways" then it means that it's plausible that we won't, and we (in this case, not we-as-the-world but we-as-individuals and we-as-smaller-communities) also need to plan on how to protect our interests in that (quite likely) scenario. An aching desire for something to work does not imply that it's possible in the required timeframe. Especially because there's no single "we"; those that need a solution to climate change and those that could fund it are largely separate groups; you can't look at it as a primarily technical problem when the largest impact factors are political.
Perhaps you can avoid "unburning" it by some other chemical process (which is why I was asking this) but simply pumping the CO2 somewhere does not seem a reasonable option, the only place on Earth that can easily hold that much of CO2 gas is the general atmosphere where it already resides.
Climeworks' proposal to pump it into basalt caverns, where it chemically reacts and becomes solid, is one way around that.
Carbon Engineering is doing gas to liquids, and claims that they need ~2.25 kWh of electricity to convert atmospheric CO2 to 1 kWh worth of liquid hydrocarbons. We will see.
We will need gigatons/year of sequestration in 2050. It's going to require a ton of innovation to get there.
We'd need to pay back all that energy, but in the coming decades we can't even afford the energy cost of the relatively much simpler solution of "simply" not burning bulk carbon for heat.
Re gas heating, I sure could've used some just this past winter during the Texas snowpocalypse. My apartment uses electric power for heating/cooking, so electricity was a single point of failure. Resiliency through diversity is a point I missed above.
I do not fear being downvotes at all on this topic. If I'm not getting downvoted by the few persistent anti-climate-change voters here, then IMHO I am not pushing forward the truth enough! People, even here, have a lot more to realize about the technological, economic, and political implications of the transition that we must go through in the coming decades.
> 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
Using imperial units is always unfortunate, but when dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, it's inevitable.
Not sure where you are getting your numbers, perhaps you're using a UK gallon or something?
Well, no, when dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, Imperial units are irrelevant, and US Customary units are inevitable.
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
Your error appears to be using a single significant figure for the density of gasoline, at 700. Other sources place it from 711 to 749 kg/m3.
Hopefully you will reconsider my comment being "not nice," since you started with one sig fig and ended with four, and then did not consider the two different meanings of ton. And on top of this all, this ignores all the upstream emissions to generate the gasoline, which is greater than the 15% which you said was "not nice."
still well short of a ton
However, I already told you that I was using a US ton, 2000 pounds, 907kg:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1+ton+in+kg
Additionally, you are not including the 3-6 pounds per gallon in upstream emissions for gasoline.
Let's recall that this all started from the phrase "about 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2" and that when you quotes, you omitted the "about" so that you could try to make your incorrect quibble relevant. So at this point I would like to call this a very "not nice scientifically" departure from anything relevant, but I'm all ears if you were going somewhere interesting with this.
That density seems to be on the low end; different formulations have different densities, and the sources I’ve found give somewhat different ranges, but the ranges given typically seems to be about 750±35 kg/m³.
19.64 - http://www.patagoniaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/...
20 - https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
20 - https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentincludes/co2_inc.htm
19.6 (converted from grams) - https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
“Just over 19” - https://epicenergyblog.com/2013/05/24/how-many-pounds-of-car...
The next hit isn’t about CO2 from burning Gas, but about the upstream emissions that go into producing gasoline, which it pegs at 3.3 to 6.7 per gallon - https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ask-mr-green/hey-mr-green-...
What sort of estimates are you getting?
Yes, “gasoline” is a family of related fuels of different densities and compositions, and it will also vary based on assumptions about how it is burned. Incomplete combustion will result in more “dirty” pollution and less CO2.
IIRC 1 ppm of CO2 is ~1 gigaton of carbon. Roughly the weight of Mt Everest. We're adding ~26 Everests annually.
Thanks.
I'd be happy with this too. What concerns me is that some people will look at this and say "It makes economical sense to burn more coal".
But imagine you're the government of a country that is struggling to provide heating over the winter. It would be very tempting to think "Hmm, we could recommission that coal power plant..."
It is not reasonable to seriously cut energy usage. It will make the lives of the poor unliveable. Also any meaningful decrease will make 90% of people's lives unliveable.
No, we clearly need innovation to make this happen, not force. You cannot expect people to make these sorts of sacrifices, it's not going to happen.
Countries are already enacting deadlines for banning combustion vehicle sales [1], it is straightforward to enact fossil combustion electrical generation bans in similar fashion. The communicates to the market to no longer fund or implement combustion generation facilities, and investment will flow away from existing facilities towards renewables and energy storage (whether that's batteries, green hydrogen and/or ammonia, pumped hydro storage, etc). Most new generation is already renewables (due to cost, see Lazard's LCOE [2]) [3] [4] [5], what I discuss in this comment rapidly pulls forward fossil generation retirement (from 2030-2050 to something more reasonable, such as no latter than 2030).
In short, outlaw fossil combustion, and investment will flow into clean alternatives. The planet doesn't care about your fiat and economic system.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-out_of_fossil_fuel_vehic...
[2] https://www.lazard.com/media/451419/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
[4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46416
[5] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-...
A huge problem with the current market is that it's not very free, entrance is too difficult for new players, and the entrenched players have excessive political power through regulatory capture. There are far too many players with massive amounts of assets that would be stranded and devalued, if they were allowed to be exposed to competition.
But even if there were a more free market, the speed of capital on these sorts of scales is very slow. So even though it may be more economically efficient to abandon a bunch of bad coal plants and do massive deployments of new technology, the amount of capital necessary makes it difficult to make the transition at the economically most cost effective pace.
Look at all the coal plants that burn coal, despite losing money at it.
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
If something is important, it is a good that it is also cheap. Every form energy production has some disadvantages, but we must improve here if we want to reduce our influence on climate.
Your proposal to increase prices will not make people drive or heat less, it will just put another burden on their shoulders. The well off would not change anything, poorer people will have trouble. This is not an idea I would support.
If you want a good economy you have to make the inputs flow unimpeded. People need food, and everything else runs on energy. It has to be a commodity.
Mass air travel will resume now that the pandemic is subsiding. Saw plenty of airplanes on sunday already... That's a massive fuel sink, and as far as I understand, with very low tax rate and fuel cost.
No revolution was ever made with silk gloves kind of mentality right here.
You work from home and/or you make much more than an average person your age. Maybe you're a programmer.
Ok let's make energy more expensive. I think it's only fair that the pain is distributed equitably, so let's put a $0.1/Gb tax on bandwidth [1], the cloud being one of the largest growing emitters of CO2.
Frankly, I liked the 90s low bandwidth internet more than today's, everything valuable we can do today the 90s had enough bandwidth for. Everything that is unhealthy about the internet today typically takes bandwidth. So, I think $0.1/Gb is not enough.
Do you agree?
[1] $0.1/Gb for data flowing to the end user and $0.2/Gb for data crossing country borders. So the cloud folks don't syphon off all the personal data of my citizens.
[EDIT] I think only unethical_ban understood the point of this post. That's it's easy to propose a tax for the poor for their poor behavior. Tax yourself first! I disagree with unethical_ban that it's a bad example - its purposely a glib and capricious indirect carbon tax.
You blame the cloud but you want to tax bandwidth. As if I can’t upload a tiny bit of code that uses tons of compute. And again to “protect privacy” - as if exporting personal data takes a non-negligible amount of traffic compared to Netflix/BitTorrent.
The only way that taxing externalities makes sense, is taxing at the source. If cloud “takes too much energy” then tax energy! And make it revenue neutral otherwise you’re just incentivising the government to increase taxes and waste even more money/resources.
Data centers in say south island new zealand powered by hydro will have near-zero carbon cost and thus be cheaper
The biggest issue with a carbon tax and data centre usage is how to charge tax on the 'import' of services.
This is an incorrect mental model that is unfortunately repeated by so many people.
All¹ of the NZ hydro power is currently used by consumers.
If we add some extra load, then the marginal increase in kWh is 100% generated by gas (or maybe even coal at Huntley).
The same problem occurs when you buy “green” energy: unless you are careful to ensure your purchase creates new green generation, then it is just greenwashing (fooling oneself). This is a significant problem with CO2 credits (not saying you shouldn’t try, but don’t be surprised that CO2 production remains the same even if you try to offset).
¹ There may be short periods when the lakes are full, and water is spilled instead of being used for electricity generation, but that certainly isn’t common.
Perhaps the most charitable interpretation given they specify the South Island is they're assuming that we would displace the energy use of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter. Given that's about 13% of our total energy use, is powered by hydro dams without the grid capacity to transport to population centres, and run by Rio Tinto who keep threatening to throw their toys and go home...
(Of course, the other option would be to build the bloody grid capacity to get energy to where we need it, but that's a different story I guess.)
Charging for bandwidth doesn't align incentives to solve the problem
You tried to make a point, but your example failed.
I see what you're saying: The parent is being glib in your case, not realizing that a blanket increase on energy prices would hit the working class much harder than those with the privilege of staying home or making more money.
Even if I grant that, I suspect if you're working from home and not business traveling, it's still a net negative of CO2 being emitted. I would think that nearly everything that the "cloud" replaces cost more in CO2 than the "cloud" itself.
But I realize that your point is that it's easy to come up with arbitrary taxes that hurt the poor, and that's a reasonable criticism, but I don't think that that implies that we shouldn't do any kind of externallity tax on carbon. Instead, we could use tax incentives to give a rebate to disproportionately affected poor people for gas, or we could use the extra revenue from the taxes to give rebates for electric cars.
I'm not claiming this is a perfect system, and there will definitely be people who slip through the cracks, and that sucks, but the cost of not doing enough about climate change is substantially worse.
Sadly, historically, when society was undergoing large changes, such as industrialization and urbanization, marginalized peoples were never really considered. We can't have fear of change hold back our progress, but we do need to be careful to offer marginalized peoples ways to ease transition into lower-energy regimes.
Aside: I didn't even register the sarcasm in this post when I first wrote it :D
I’m sure it is, but this misses the point. If someone can work from home or have a conference call rather than travel for a meeting, the emissions savings are huge.
However liking a video and clicking an advert generated by a algorithm that tracked habits…
Unless you propose to decide top-down which projects deserve cheap energy and which don't, you cannot avoid the fact that building roads and allowing car ownership is under certain circumstances more economical than building lots of railroads.
On top of that, imagine how commuting 10km by train vs. car work out: By car it's a 10min ride, assuming no congestion. Whereas the door-to-door train trip will take the better part of an hour.
There is a similar advantage for flying. Yes, kerosene is comparatively cheap. But flying has an even more important advantage over trains and that is flexibility. The network of airports multiplies the number of potential connections whereas train stations can only lead you along railroads. In a region with fixed, medium-range traveling routes, say France or Japan, the train wins, otherwise the plane is just more efficient.
To make matters complicated in practice, gas in the US (since that's where this argument makes sense) has long been considered the holy grail of the economy, and gas taxes have not been raised to account for inflation since 1990. Since the 1980s, the US has politically favored cars and airplanes over trains and buses. Roads are never expected to make a profit, though most transit in the US is. Aviation has had things like the Essential Air Service that offer subsidies for rural air routes and carriers that serve rural airports, whereas the closest thing that transit has to this is Amtrak mandates to service cities; these are hamfisted mandates that Congressmen stuff into spending bills to make their constituents happy but don't actually create the kind of healthy market you would need to offer quality service. Moreover Amtrak track is often leased from freight carriers _because_ America apportions less money to rail than it does to roads and transit, so Amtrak trains often must yield and wait for freight trains to go first. That and the fact that externalities from emissions aren't accounted for mean any alternatives to the plane and the car in the US are at a heavy disadvantage.
That's one angle to look at it. As I said, in a country that has more or less static travel routes, railroads will win over airports for the medium range. Because sooner or later the investment into the many tracks will pay off. But long-range and dynamic routes favors the airport.
But my point was that taxing energy usage heavily will bite back. You cannot build infrastructure if energy is too expensive. So either you have cheap renewable energy, for cars as well as trains, or any mechanized transportation (and much more) will become ridiculously expensive.
> gas taxes have not been raised to account for inflation
Are gas taxes absolute values in the US?
A 10 km commute by train typically takes 30-40 minutes door-to-door. For driving, the normal time might be 20-30 minutes, but the variance is often much higher than by train. If driving is consistently faster or slower than that, people tend to switch between train and car or otherwise change their commuting habits until congestion is back to "normal".
For comparison: It takes 25-30 min to ride by bike, depending on effort, weather, etc.
Energy is so important, yet so cheap. I still hear people flying in for a two hour business meeting, or commuting by car tens of kilometers. Only when that ceases to be economically viable we should call the price high. Until then, I'm happy it finally makes economical sense to reduce CO2 output.