throwaway100773

Because the actual harm done from emitting via gasoline usage is not dealt with under the current tax regime. I’d argue that any tax that exists does not encapsulate the cost of removing those emissions from the atmosphere. Considering it costs somewhere between 90 and 400/ ton (possibly more) to remove co2 from the atmosphere, I don’t see how the current tax regimes are quite enough but more importantly the economic harm that’s being done is not being addressed with those tax dollars.

In theory, you could tax gasoline to the level of true removal cost, but unless a market exists to actually remove the carbon it’s moot since the mechanism to clear the damage can’t exist without a functional market on carbon.

Thus, when you burn gasoline you are externalizing. As a result I cannot understand the desire to needlessly do this just so you can drive a superduty to your office job.

New York City has been losing residents for some time. This is not a supply and demand thing as much as easy money policy chasing hard assets. I’ll have to dig it up the numbers, but Manhattan many condos are vacant, and have been bought by foreign money who don’t live in nyc or investors looking to park assets.

You think that because there isn’t a ticker to tell you your home price every moment from 930-4pm on business days.

Because most places don’t have a carbon tax on gasoline emissions.

Not in the us it doesn’t. The two cap and trade programs in the us do little to stop someone at the individual level from needlessly emitting - there is no economic signal to stop. Even some large emitters aren’t subject to any economic signals in rggi, and California has an odd habit of handing out allowances. In a more perfect world, you would be correct.

The question is why isn’t illegal to externalize on my and my kids life by burning gas as if it had no consequence beside being an asinine financial move.

Exactly. It’s a about a capacity for risk. Rich kids have plenty of capacity since they’re essentially backstopped. A poor kid has one shot, and if it doesn’t start paying out quick, that kid starves.

I find this type of logic to be inconsistent with the innovative culture of tech, and a fair bit hypocritical. On one hand, we have a new, fairly unprecedented technology (at least unprecedented on the scale on which it’s used) yet we are relying on tort law that predates the contemplation of anything of this magnitude. Why?

It was reasonable in 1990 that the mechanism that you suggest here would be highly effective in most cases. We are in uncharted waters now and unlike the titanic, I think we should proceed with caution.

How about if someone else puts you out there against your wishes? What then?

I’m not sure there is enough play in demand elasticity to affect significant change relative to the amount of load difference you see. Furthermore the peaks are highly weather sensitive. Would love to be proven wrong though.

You would need utility scale storage to flatten the load curve. The peaks and super peaks are not going away until there is a viable storage mechanism with enough capacity. We are talking significant changes in demand between even the early afternoon and the super peak in almost all load areas (pjm California ercot). The other alternative is a massive buildout or behind the meter solar which theoretically could solve this issue.

I’m guessing here, but I think the number seems high because shale wells have short lifespans. The declines are much higher than conventional wells, and so there are a great many of them to maintain production as the wells decline. There are large a number of DUCs, or drilled but uncompleted wells. They maintain these so that when one well runs dry, another can be brought online to maintain production targets. Also it’s more economic to drill as many wells as you can as quickly as possible even if it exceeds targets because there are economies of scale when it comes to moving and leasing rigs that drill the wells.

This is probably true but not an excuse for the perverted behavior and incentives that result. If 90% of the students at Harvard aren’t in the top 10% but feel entitled to be and thus cheating becomes a more attractive solution than taking the medicine of reality - clearly the penalties for cheating aren’t quite high enough.

A margin call is not the same as a foreclosure. It’s quite different. You have a fixed payment with a mortgage. If the value of your house declined precipitously, that fixed payment stays the same. You enter foreclosure proceedings only if you cannot make that payment, and depending on the state, this takes some time. You might be living in your house for a year or more without making a payment while in foreclosure.

On the other hand, with a leveraged position in the market, if the value of your portfolio falls to a certain level, you either need to post more capital or your position is liquidated. If you are capital constrained, there is literally nothing you can do in the case of a leveraged position - your broker forces you out.

Regardless, if you keep making your payments, there is no way for a bank to force you out of your mortgage or call for additional capital due to a decline in value. This is the big difference.

I have a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.

I think this is wrong in terms of new build cost. Especially if you take away subsidies. As far as I know, local factors aside, wind gen costs around 1500/kw without storage. Solar is similar, and gas is around 1000-1200 for a combined cycle and 800 for a simple ct (which would likely be a peaker). If I am remembering correctly, Duke energy recently completed a combined cycle plant that came in significantly under cost - around 900/kw.

If you add utility scale batteries, you’re looking at much more for renewable. I’m not sure what type of storage you have in mind though. Add to that, the capacity factors are very high for gas, while notably low for renewable. This impacts payback severely and I’m not even sure if you can sell capacity against a renewable plant - I may be wrong here.

What type of renewable are you talking about and what type of storage? Also what are the new build costs you are referencing? Or are you simply saying that a utility scale battery costs less than building a peaker?

I hope you are right. I think nuclear power is probably the best thing that can be adopted. The new build costs are astronomical compared to natgas though and I’m not entirely sure why. We’re talking almost an order of magnitude the last time I looked - 1200/kw for gas vs 8000/kw for nuke. Gas costs have come down dramatically over the years while nuclear costs have increased. I hope this trend can reverse. Don’t know anything about the sealed reactor that you’re discussing though.

People might be singing a different tune in a few decades when the ground flood of their buildings are taking on water from rising sea levels and economic activity is ceasing due to environmental effects.

It’s a very idiosyncratic risk you’re taking buying a home. Looking at a primary residence as an investment is silly in my opinion. Treating it as consumption makes more sense.

You don’t get margin calls with a house. You just have to make the mortgage payments.

I wonder if the fixed cost of reverse engineering would ever overcome the sheer number of devices you’d have to do this with through scaling geographically.

It’s this type of garbage that has turned me into a luddite when it comes to smart home type technology. Lack of interoperability, inability to understand easily whats actually going on and massive privacy invasion causes me to look for dumb devices whenever possible - I know how to deal with them, I can have other people fix them when something goes wrong, and there’s just less ongoing maintenance. I’m sure this isn’t a novel idea though.

Natgas can’t and won’t die in the short term. It is necessary to balance the intermittency of renewables in electrical generation, at least until there is viable utility scale battery storage. I’m not sure there is another good alternative at the moment. Even if loads were to decrease dramatically (unlikely in my opinion) it would still set the marginal price for electricity in most areas.

There is a massive oversupply globally of natgas at the moment, which is why the long term investment outlook looks bad. It has been overproduced via copious debt, increasing efficiencies have made the extraction price very low, and it’s a pesky byproduct of oil production in some areas (and pricing reflects that in those areas with prices actually going negative at some times). Perhaps if the environmental externalities of extraction were priced in, it would be more expensive but it’s a big reason why the US has been able to retire so much coal over the past decade. Arguably this is a huge net win environmentally speaking.

I’ll speculate as well. The op is saying that the banks want quant skills but don’t have them. Therefore you need to acquire them somewhere else since the banks are lacking these skills.

They flare it where there is no infrastructure or insufficient infrastructure to get the gas to market. There are limits on what can be flared and this is what drives some of the decision making. However, if sufficient infrastructure exists they are literally burning money by flaring the gas or just letting it evaporate into the atmosphere.

Many times it’s hard to distinguish the difference between regulation and corruption. Sometimes they’re one disguised as the other. Not sure what method you have for distinguishing between the two, so please share!

It’s easier and more fool proof to just not use it. That’s the point - their service isn’t working and it’s better for many parents to just tune it out.

That’s parenting - avoid the shitty services that can’t put out a good product so you can focus your effort on something more meaningful. Or YouTube can fix the problem and it will be allowed in my household.

As long as it gets used the way they want it used.

This argument is downright silly. 20bln can do a lot of stuff. You’re conflating reckless spending and the amount of utility 20bln has.

Rules for thee but not for me.

The point I was trying to make was that the trades don’t scale like tech or banking do. It’s clear that this guy, who did manage to scale a trade, has a net worth of about 100mm after almost 40 years of scaling, whereas the most successful tech entrepreneurs have multiples of that in a quarter (or less) of a timeframe. This guy is an exception, but still sort of exemplifies what I’m trying to say. It’s worth noting that this guy may be the most successful plumber in the world (or at least on a short list of the most successful plumbers in the world). If we made a list of people in tech or finance, the people would be younger and richer by several orders of magnitude in some cases which is saying something when we’re talking about 100mm bucks.

My argument wasn’t that the trades don’t scale at all (this would be an asinine argument as I know contractors that do scale and this guy is clearly an exception to that argument), but rather that the trades don’t scale the same way tech or finance do.