We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices. Free market will sort the rest out
Energy is so cheap that some renewables could be decomissioned if not for bitcoin: https://www.reuters.com/technology/costa-rica-hydro-plant-ge...
0. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/01/suv-conquere...
The "odd leap" from carbon tax to basic income is exactly to address this issue of the cost to the less well-off. In a tremendously simpler, more effective, and freer way than detailed bans of particular uses of energy which also have successful industries with strong lobbies behind them.
> ...as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis.
They aren't identifying "electricity is too cheap" as the problem. And it doesn't sound like the climate crisis is on their radar right now.
Norway recently experienced its highest energy prices ever, in large part because of tighter coupling with the European market. Some people got bills 10x of previous years. Using less energy simply isn’t an option here, otherwise you freeze to death, or damage your home. It led to a massive political outcry that was easily exploitable by populists.
You can’t go back on decades of energy policy in that short a time frame, and you can’t do it without easing the tax burden somewhere else. The current government in Norway is polling extremely low. So low they probably won’t recover by the next election in 3 years. And they didn’t even cause the spike in energy prices here. I dread to imagine what would happen if a government intentionally hiked the enrgy prices just to stop bitcoin miners…
Then this tax will only influence economy making ways of doing things that don't emit carbon insanely competitive.
Electricity is not just a discretionary commodity, it serves an essential need enabling our modern society. It makes no sense to increase electricity prices and hike up inflation for the common person in an effort to dissuade crypto miners. If we really wanted to go that way, a better solution IMO is to introduce two electricity rates, one for things that perform useful services (by broad positive impact to society) and one other for PoW crypto mining.
Carbon emission are not priced according to their future impact. We need to price it correctly. And it's better to overcorrect rhan undercorrect. The only downside is that this pricing will propagate into the economy (as it should). When it reaches people that can no longer afford to live we can prevent them from dying by giving them money we got from tax.
Sarcasm?
> We should tax the hell out of every ounce of carbon emitted and use money from this tax to pay basic income so that people are able to live with increased prices.
So far so good.
> Free market will sort the rest out
Under free market, the basic income will cause a further price increase, rendering the effort moot.
Subsidizing energy, as Kosovo and Kazakhstan have been doing (resulting in the same consequences on coin mining and crackdown), is necessary, and thus so are the consequences.
Would you really just keep paying more for energy because you have that? The payback period on solar panels just went *0.3, batteries just became a affordable option for day/night balancing, many alternative investments in renewable energy just became profitable.
Many people will use that opportunity to get ahead financially. I think that’s what GP meant with “the free market will sort out the rest”
> we’ll give you $2000p.a. to compensate for the increased energy bill. Would you really just keep paying more for energy because you have that?
In the suggested policy I was replying to, the $2k would decrease if I (and many others) switched to renewable. That loss would muddy the gains, discouraging the switch. Besides, the methods you are describing tend to have high upfront costs.
Hence, the need for subsidizing instead, something very close, but without a negative-feedback-loop incentive.
To be fair, while that is a reasonable policy (and why so many countries enact it), I would favor requiring each company to be individually carbon-neutral, with an exponential penalty. As a result, it is not a tax which could weaken the vulnerable, and yet it forces companies to choose between reducing their negative externalities, and bankruptcy.
But computing carbon-neutrality is hard.
My underlying assumption is that you would reduce the 2k compensation in my example. So the incentive for any saving remains.
On duration: I installed solar for 0.80€ (ex vat) per Wp (which generates about 1kWh p.a.). In NL electricity rates recently spiked to 0.45 euro per kWh. Based on that, payback time is now less than 2 years (that includes everything, panels, inverter and installation, etc.)
but I think we agree the challenge is to find a way to create a good market incentive for consumers and industry to reduce their externalities/CO2.
I'm thinking probably ignorance as the comment also thinks that raising the costs of energy used to produce BTC will somehow make it less profitable to mine when in fact it will simply increase commodity value and most likely drive more interest and increase speculation thus consuming more energy.
Which they will use as an excuse for more taxes.
See the pattern?
——
This comment has two further comments, both of which ask questions. But since this comment is heavily downvoted, I cannot reply to the replies to answer the questions.
In short: no such thing as “negative externalities”, thats just make-believe to whitewash oppression and poverty creation. Taxes are not a market signal by definition. Its interesting how blithely people accept using violence to force others to comply with their wishes.
If you really wanted to reduce CO2 you would support safe clean nuclear. But CO2 isnt causing warming- its historically low, earth started at %100 CO2. Plants evolved to need levels 5 times higher than present. Increased CO2 would improve the environment. We had an ICE AGE at 10 times higher CO2 then now. ETC.
Unfortunately Government propaganda has replace science education.
Taxing carbon emission significantly sends price signal to every actor in the market that uses products and services that have carbon emission upstream to maybe reduce usage of such products and services or switch to another.
Your comment is blatant virtue signalling -- it's taking a moral high ground without providing any alternatives.
[edit] At least you've provided an alternative now: nuclear energy. Then again, you only did it when pushed to.
Arguable false.
The freest markets price in all externalities so that the user pays the whole costs and doesn't outsource the externalities to others.
Taxing is one way to help pass on these externalities.
Arguably this makes it a more free market as taxes help make people pay closer to their actual costs and takes part of the burden off those who don't
Same way you pay i.e. for electricity.
If you can get somebody to capture it for 1$, well, good for you. If there are only buyers for -10000$, then that's your problem.
We're not there yet as far as carbon capture goes, but I do think we'll get there.
What if we figure out something good to do with that carbon, and capturing it becomes profitable? Should we return all that money to those it was stolen from?
Well consider this. We have these things called taxes. Everyone pays them.
Sometimes we change the tax rate.
Once we change the tax rate we don't go back years and give people refunds for the new rates.
Nor do we retroactively go back and charge people more if we raise their tax rates.
Carbon taxes would, perhaps not surprisingly, work the same. At the moment we consider adding carbon to the environment to be a negative event and well tax is as such.
If at some point in the future we decide we really want more carbon in the atmosphere then we can incentivize people to do that, but we generally don't go back and retroactively give people refunds for their old taxes:)
And for the second question: no. Why would we? You pay for the pollution you emit. If a company agree to provide you the means for free, or even pay you to emit this pollution, all the power to you. What happen in the present should have no impact on current taxes.
I still find this wording very interesting, and somewhat loaded. It's not that the population is somehow collectively refusing to pay for their electricity. A mechanism for them to pay it has not existed since 1999.
Discussed previously here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29809078
> While the Kosovo government remains unclear on how to proceed after the six-month deadline, Serbs in the Kosovo north remain confused on how and to whom they should pay their electricity bills.
> Miodrag Milicevic, of the North Mitrovica-based NGO Aktiv, says Serbs in the north of Kosovo are in a “grey zone” when it comes to their electricity bills.
> “Some still favour of maintaining this status, partly because they do not know who to pay, no one has complete information about it, about the method of calculating electricity, or who will be responsible for payment,” Milicevic told BIRN.
[0]: https://balkaninsight.com/2021/05/06/kosovo-pledges-to-solve...
Do we need to attach the climate crisis to everything these days? It’s very important but picking on one thing relentlessly and not others is just silly. We’re not going to solve the climate crisis by trying to stop people from doing things that use a lot of energy. We need to find ways to make those things sustainable/carbon neutral.
One thing that sets POW apart, though, is how it is designed to resist efficiency improvements through the difficulty adjustment mechanism. When hashrate per watt goes up with efficiency improvements, the network difficulty goes up to compensate, so more efficient hardware does not improve the efficiency of the system.
https://twitter.com/thenib/status/1098281126743937031
If you think the comic is hyperbole, I've literally had people say "but you exhale CO2, AHA!" to me when I've suggested we need more people on bicycles for personal transportation.
The fact that bicycles are the most energy-efficient form of personal transit? Irrelevant, apparently, because we exhale CO2.
If people today aren’t willing to change their lives (and they clearly aren’t), then it’s time to enjoy the ride and hope we die (fingers crossed) before things get awful (which they will).
Not that I blame them at all, there was no way to predict the scale of the damage that a single paper could have on the world, and someone else would have eventually come up with the same idea.
> @halfin
> Thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation
> Jan 27, 2009
https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538
Bitcoiners cannot claim they weren't told early, by bitcoin's second developer.
Bitcoin is not ab attack in banks but on inflation.
It is undermining government ability to create poverty and oppress people.
This is not true.
Giant faceless banks in bed with the government good.
You dind't get the memo when you signed up?
The truth is that nobody cares about energy usage. It has exploded in the last decades whilst fully knowing about the problem. People only care about somebody else's energy usage and call for the banning of things they don't use or care about.
That's not quite right. In the West, energy usage per capita has risen until the 1970's or 80's, then stayed flat or fallen. (Of course, it's continued to rise in Asia, but fairly linearly; I wouldn't call it an explosion.)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2012/03/12/world-energy-consumpti...
It can be said much more broadly that people are changing behavior. Not everyone for sure, but there are few people left that will not claim to be making different personal choices for environmental reasons. I think a lot of them are worth very little and there are definitely hypocrites that take multiple flights per year and compensate that by plugging out phone chargers while not in use, but it's still something that's apparently on their mind. People do do things, and some people do significant things. If GP says that they only see people complaining about others without doing anything themselves, that must be a quite narrow bubble (from my point of view, at least).
Edit: maybe a less debatable example is meat replacement products in supermarkets popping up. It's not as if we have more compassion with animals today than ten years ago, what changed is that more people are aware of the climate impact of meat. If nobody was willing to do anything, who's financing the production and buys the shelf space? The products don't even hold that long before spoiling, so they must be sold nearly as fast as meat.
That's your bubble, not mine. This is not my experience at all.
It's possible to use coal for power without subsidies (coal is cheap) and bonus it's even more economically efficient
> The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.
> global bitcoin mining consumes 125.96 terawatt hours a year of electricity, putting its consumption above Norway (122.2 TWh), Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh).
The absurdity of the bitcoin mining in the middle of the climate crisis is mind boggling.