> At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output, mainly by destroying the economics of coal

Here is page 122 of NextEra’s investor deck. They are closing all coal plants by 2028 as they are no longer profitable to run. Even without a carbon adder per MWh, coal is dead (“near firm” solar and wind are renewables with battery backing to make them dispatchable when called on by the grid operator). Even existing combined cycle natural gas is under pressure! And their note: “We expect further technology improvements and cost declines will extend the competitiveness of onshore renewables and storage.”

https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/06/lcoe-small.jpg?mrf-s...

Japan is opting out of financing coal plants further in Indonesia and Bangladesh, cancelling ~3GW worth of coal plant projects.

https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/planned-coal-plants-fizzle...

So we’re seeing some progress in avoiding electrical thermal emissions, which is the cheapest emissions offset.

(Oahu, Hawaii’s last coal fired plant turns down in September after the Tesla Megapacks replacing their frequency response capability are installed, another 200MW of coal taken offline)

> They are closing all coal plants by 2028

Also, despite the coal subsidies from congress, even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners. They just want some other way to make a living.

You say that but the big coal areas of america giddily voted for the guy promising to bring coal and coal mining back

Did we really expect "big coal areas" to vote for the other candidate?

As the parent said: >even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, as those same families voted heavily for the politicians who claimed they could bring back coal jobs and the industry. So they obviously want someone to be digging coal, and who else but the next generation?

That's not obvious at all. People in coal-producing areas voted for Trump for the same reasons that people in wheat-producing areas did: they're rural Republicans who watch a lot of TV and the Democrat candidate never even visited their congressional district. Most of the people in those areas don't actually mine coal, and they knew they would get poorer on average under Trump just as they had gotten poorer on average under Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him. They just appreciated a moment of lip service. We can't vote in USA without pretending at some level that voting matters, so why wouldn't they also pretend that one of the candidates cared about their interests?

They should probably do what everyone else did. Move away and find something else to do. Coal mines employ a fraction of the miners they employed 100 years ago and produce more coal. Maybe have them look up what they did.

We could’ve just put federal gov satellite offices there. Train these folks for white collar jobs the federal gov will always need (IRS, SSA, VA, etc). It’s not that many people, there are more people who work at Arbys than in the coal industry.

$More/ton could produce direct capital to pay for building out renewables. The more renewables that are built out, the less competitive the various fossils get.

We also need laws to require plugging abandoned, venting wells, and stiff fines for venting to help pay for that.

I find $/ton to be confusing. $100 / ton is $1 / gallon of gasoline equivalent, and is probably feasible with some current technologies, assuming economies of scale.

A $1/gallon tax on gasoline is rounding error compared to all the other disasters hitting these days.

Are you kidding me? Gas goes up a few cents and suddenly most of the country thinks the free market is a total failure and wants Biden to singlehandedly be pumping out that crude.

Gas is many dollars more expensive now. And Biden is doing a pretty good job at ignoring all the people crying

We need CO2 capture because China and India will never go along with western efforts to tamp down on fossil fuel use before those countries fully industrialize. Beating that dead horse will only distract from efforts that could actually be useful.

This can be fixed with carbon tariffs. Calculate theoretical carbon tax impacts on their exports, and then levy tariffs of the same value.

I didn’t say we don’t need to get rid of past CO2, I just don’t believe air-sucking machines are a viable way to do so.

And it seems only Northern Europe and China even give a shit about the climate. Yes, China is expanding coal plants but they are also worrying more about the climate than others.

I assume you mean "out of countries that are actually in a position to do something about it". Plenty of countries that are immediately threatened by rising seas levels and increasingly erratic rainfall affecting agriculture etc. are pretty worried about it. But they're all tiny emitters...

OTOH I'm not that convinced northern Europe gives a shit about it, given how much oil/gas Norway is drilling and how reluctant Germany has been to reduce its fossil fuel dependence (and now geo-politics has forced its hand on oil, it's ramping up coal usage again!).

The evidence is pretty hard to ignore though - nobody who can really do anything about it is going to give a shit until it's all too late.

> I assume you mean "out of countries that are actually in a position to do something about it"...The evidence is pretty hard to ignore though - nobody who can really do anything about it is going to give a shit until it's all too late.

Yes, one of our founders is an anthropologist and she has been doing field work in underrepresented communities. Rich countries (think they) can afford to pretend there's no such thing as climate change but nobody outside these wealthy enclaves has any doubt.

The reason we spend effort on this is that the atmosphere touches everyone, so we should try to figure out the interests and concerns of as many people as possible to make sure we do our best to do things that help everyone.

It's interesting that the biggest opponents of climate repair seem to come from Germany, USA, UK, and Canada.

> OTOH I'm not that convinced northern Europe gives a shit about it, given how much oil/gas Norway is drilling and how reluctant Germany has been to reduce its fossil fuel dependence (and now geo-politics has forced its hand on oil, it's ramping up coal usage again!).

Yes, it's frustrating that in the face of a war the convo switches immediately back to "drill" rather than "windmill". A big part of that is that corporations speak in terms of benefits, and tailor their messages to specific customer groups (this topic is probably 15% of HN posts and comments) while the conversations of governments and NGOs focus on features and risks.

But I do think it's a top of mind issue in europe, and the continued expansion of the scope of the ETS is a good example. See a long reply I wrote to "tito" to see why there's a complex combination of repairs and continued damage that is unavoidable (point 1 in my comment)

But one way or another it's the OECD who'll have to pay for the cleanup.

China has many hands. They will end up closing the coal plants as they turn out uncompetitive. China doesn't mind building things and leaving them unused; they have millions of hi-rise apartments that will never be occupied, and indeed have no plumbing or wiring because that was known up front.

That is definitely a different thing though - it's well known China was playing games to artificially manipulate their GDP and currency. The coal plants are actually being used because they have demand for the produced power.

Yes, but operating them costs a lot more than the renewables being built out. Similarly, for the nukes under construction. So, as the renewables come online, more expensive generation will go offline. That stuff will all be mothballed because continuing to operate it costs a lot more than shutting it down.

China has the advantage that they do not need to continue operating expensive equipment just because it was expensive.

Never is such a big word. Any country will relinquish fossil fuel use when it is economically feasible.

You mean any country will relinquish fossil fuel use when it's economically profitable. Only some countries will choose to do it when it's simply feasible.

I think an algae system could be in the pennies per tonne. Russ George has an algae scheme that could even be profitable, though possibly scaling only into the hundreds of Gt.

"What's the cheapest Carbon Capture system we can imagine - $100 per tonne?" Considering that I pay around a dollar a pound for bottled CO2 for horticultural use and commercial CO2 is produced from methane. Someone could get fairly wealthy getting paid for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and selling the "undesirable" product for a profit.

Even if we got emissions to zero tomorrow we’d still be in serious trouble. We need carbon capture. Emission reduction just reduces our rate of acceleration towards destruction. We need to hit the brakes.

> should instead go towards lobbying for carbon taxes

Yes, but then you see, existing business will become unprofitable. And these business are currently profitable, and using those profits to pay bribes.

This is the fundamental issues behind all proposed solutions to climate change -- fossil fuel based companies are here now to pay the required corruption fees to keep themselves going. Renewable energy companies might be able to pay the same bribes in the future, but... not now. In the future. Now is now, and politicians want to retire to a cushy consulting job when they lose reelection election, which could be any year now, not decades in the future.

If you want to understand why corruption is inherently bad and can never be tolerated, just think back to this scenario and thousands like this. Our very future -- our survival as a species -- is being undermined by a handful of people in exchange for bribes as low as a few thousand dollars.

Rather than a broad tax that hurts the poor, maybe your effort could go toward taxing specific indoor growers who burn gas to generate CO2 to get more growth from their MJ plants.

It would be simpler to write broad legislation to (a) tax all CO2 sources and then (b) give the tax revenue back to the people, similar to the child tax credit.

Call it the "American Carbon Dividend" or the "Advancing America Dividend".

Done quickly enough, it might be enough to keep Congress from falling back under control of the insurrectionists, come mid-terms.

Use the tax to offset the other taxes at lower income levels. It should be profit neutral for the government.

The tax will probably need to go to carbon capture at this point.

"Carbon dividend" makes Carbon Tax progressive.

Poor people are exactly who will be hurt by a move away from fossil fuels. The problem isn't that someone is burning fossil fuels, it's that everyone is.

Or instead of going after pot growers, maybe your effort could go towards making my neighbor stop BBQing every weekend?

Your neighbor has the right to BBQ, there’s a point where we need to live our lives and stop advocating for denial of comfort.

I mean, a $15/tonne carbon(dioxide) tax would raise the cost of a 20lb bag of charcoal by $0.50, or about 3% based on a quick search. So the BBQing itself is probably not prohibitively expensive.

The price of the beef burgers would go up by 7% according to Beef Magazine, 150% according to vegnews.com, and 40% according to NY Times.

Charcoal is carbon neutral, it's simply releasing the CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere by the trees that made the charcoal. So there shouldn't be a carbon tax on charcoal.

The production of charcoal itself emits a lot of CO2

Source? Isn't it basically the same process as biochar, which has been proposed as a carbon capture technology (the idea being that you bury the resulting charcoal instead of burning it)?

Yes, as far as I can tell the footprint of pyrolysis portion is basically the same (various wild seeming claims notwithstanding) though I haven't dug into this deeply, and specifically haven't looked into it in over a decade.

However on a full cycle basis the difference is biochar is typically made from local material (mostly the leftover waste from the prior year's harvest) which is right there (zero transport) and would otherwise rot and release methane and CO2 on its own, even if plowed into the field.

Charcoal is made from trees, typically cut down and transported to a factory and then transported to the customer.

In general I am not in favor of burning trees, enjoyable as it is on a cold night out in the forest.

For context, here's a news article from March of this year:

"The biggest food price hikes are in meats, with pork and beef up 14% to 20% compared with a year ago."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meat-prices-pandemic-inflation-...

This is an interesting point but I can't see any way that we create a sustainable system that works like this. Carbon dioxide is an unaccounted part of the system. Inevitably, whether it's now or in 1,000 years, a functional society will need to account for these kinds of externalities.

"The bill for magical thinking arrives with unpredictable timing but thunderous force." -pmarca

> Your neighbor has the right to BBQ

Not constitutionally. I demand that people stop advocating for general solutions and instead focus their action on my petty personal grievances for a marginal return.

Well, yes, the federal constitution provides no rights including to bbq. It is a negative document which details restrictions on government.

That's a big woosh right there. The parent was making a an arbitrary comparison to another arbitrary and trolling comment regarding indoor plant cultivation.