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> Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global
by nilved 10y ago
> Yes and no. You can change the carbon efficiency of people's consumption quite a bit with appropriate nudging and consumption taxes. You can also have global agreements paying countries not to exploit their "unburnable" fossil fuel resources.
No, you really can't, or we wouldn't have year-after-year record breaking temperatures. Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
- dash2 10y ago> Regulation has never fixed anything. That's just silly. Regulation guarantees the safety of the food you eat, the buildings you live in and the car you drive.
- nilved 10y agoPlenty of people are dying from unsafe food, unsafe buildings and unsafe driving. Nobody can fix these problems because lobbyists are increasing the barrier to entry under the guise of safety. After all, check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12340694
- Retric 10y agoThe least safe new car in 2016 is vastly safer than the absolute best car produced in 1980. Remember, seat belts are a direct result of regulation mostly from US airforce testing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stapp
- nilved 10y agoThat doesn't matter unless you're arguing that it wouldn't have happened without a government and regulation. Most of the responsibilities of a government would be better handled and implemented by the private sector.
- Retric 10y agoThe first seat belt was invented over 20 years before air force testing, they went into common use directly because of studies on rapid deceleration and mandates for adoption. It's hard to credit that with any other cause. Consider, you might think break inspections would be completely unnecessary because who would drive a car without breaks. However, in states without annual inspections have accidents related to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection_in_the_Unit...
- m_mueller 10y agoYou seem to think that markets can do absolutely anything. Asymmetric information, unpaid externalities and other economic hazards are a thing.
- gnaritas 10y agoYou are blinded by your ideology, it's making you ignorant to the truths that everyone else clearly sees.
- paulajohnson 10y agoIn 1900 it was literally impossible to buy flour that did not contain significant amounts of chalk dust and other adulterants. In Hong Kong there are entire streets given over to baby formula shops because the Chinese from the mainland don't trust the stuff in their shops, with very good reason. Don't assume that just because things are not perfect that regulation hasn't made a huge positive difference.
- vivekd 10y ago>. In Hong Kong there are entire streets given over to baby formula shops because the Chinese from the mainland don't trust the stuff in their shops, with very good reason. But aren't Chinese shops much more heavily regulated than the ones in Hong Kong. I've always understood China as a very heavily regulated bureaucracy and Hong Kong as a bit more free market?
- bolidecaster 10y agoIt's heavily regulated on paper, not in reality.
- Angostura 10y ago> I'm not going to get into a debate over it, Would that be because you know you've just made an unsustainable statement. Regulation has prevented plenty of ills.
- vtlynch 10y ago>And yet, nobody can fix these problems because lobbyists are increasing the barrier to entry under the guise of safety. that's a shame. how could we fix this? perhaps... regulation against lobbyists?
- exclusiv 10y agoIt also prevents people that are dying from getting drugs that they need.
- Retric 10y agoIf you reduce net CO2 production by 90% you still get record temperatures year after year, but the rate of increase is dramatically smaller.
- jpadkins 10y agomaybe, maybe not. methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas. So if you reduced CO2 90%, but methane went up by 2X then you would have stronger warming. My point is CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas.
- Retric 10y agoMethane is unstable which is why you can burn it. Thus, we have an automatic and endless Methane sink.
- caseysoftware 10y agoYou mean "If you reduce CO2 production by 90% by humans" The analysis that I'm waiting to see is "of the global CO2 production each year, how much of it is due to humans?" If we contribute 90% of CO2 production, then reducing it may change things. If we contribute 10% of CO2 production, then even reducing our portion to zero, the overall change is near-negligible.
- Angostura 10y agoIf my bath is overflowing, the only water I have to worry about is the relatively small volume coming over the edge - not the total amount of water in the bath. The ecosystem produces vast amounts of CO2 ... and consumes a similarly vast amount. It is the imbalance that you need to worry about. And that imbalance is largely caused by humans either damaging CO2 sinks or releasing CO2 that ha been sequestered over the last few billion years
- caseysoftware 10y agoTo continue your analogy: if the goal is to stop the overflow, then we should probably see what the contributors are. If the faucet is on and your kid is dropping pennies in, both are contributing to the overflow but stopping your kid is going to be irrelevant. Do we know which humans are?
- mseebach 10y agoA simple carbon tax at $X/ton and a little patience would go along way by simply making carbon-lighter solutions more competitive. The problem with pretty much any regulation actually implemented is that politicians have been way too eager picking winners (massively subsidising specific approaches instead of letting a thousand flowers bloom) and protecting losers (assigning emissions trading credits to existing big polluters, essentially shielding the organisations that need them the most from incentives, while burying newcomers in cost and red tape), creating an opaque web of perverse incentives and an orgy for lobbyists.
- realityking 10y agoThis. Taxes (and some kinds of regulation like Germany's "fell a tree, plant a tree" rules) are immensely helpful to price externalities into the market.
- mseebach 10y agoChopping down and burning a tree would incur the carbon tax, so the idea would be that this would incentivise you to plant a new tree. Perhaps planting a tree should incur a negative carbon tax.
- bsdetector 10y agoThe question becomes if the taxes are raised high enough to actually impact or reverse climate change, will people abide by them? If it costs $100/day to heat your home in the winter are you going to pay that or buy black market kerosene or just chop down a tree and burn it when no government inspector is around? There's a limit to how much can be done with taxes.
- tomp 10y ago> just chop down a tree and burn it That's the goal, no? Burning oil releases CO2. Growing trees and burning them is carbon neutral.
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- Lagged2Death 10y agoRegulation has never fixed anything. Young, inexperienced but passionate fish sometimes have been known to deny the existence of water. Later they're embarrassed.
- arethuza 10y ago"We can't afford to stifle the inventor who will get us out of this mess." As long as that inventor doesn't turn out to be a new Thomas Midgley Jr.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. NB Inventor of both leaded petrol and CFCs.
- jmcmichael 10y ago> Regulation has never fixed anything. ... > And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum. So, regulation has never protected us from the negative externalities of a scientific discovery destructively applied by the market or state? Remember, the state is also subject to regulations - the same free market that fuels your utopian free-market fundamentalist pipe-dreams is protected and sustained by regulation.
- brbrodude 10y agoTruisms.
- Oletros 10y ago> Regulation has never fixed anything. And especially when it comes to science, we need to remember that innovation and regulation are opposite ends of the same spectrum. One word, CFC