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Unpopular Opinion: There is no viable solution to climate change through policy or political action. No one wants to give up their own personal comfort or lif

by eric_b 8y ago

Unpopular Opinion: There is no viable solution to climate change through policy or political action. No one wants to give up their own personal comfort or lifestyle for the sake of "the planet." Even people I know who are self-described ardent environmentalists still fly in planes frequently to all manner of touristy destinations so they can keep "collecting experiences." Shit, look at Paris. They champion this climate accord and the minute the government raises taxes on fuel to help pay for some the policies, the people riot and destroy things and the government backs down. The only "solution" to climate change, if you can call it that, is through technology and adaptation. As the Earth warms and the waters rise, people will need to move, and we will need to create new technology to ensure our agricultural production doesn't lessen and we can keep feeding people. Honestly I don't really think it's gonna get all Mad Max/Extinction Level Event, but who knows, it might!

bryanlarsen 8y ago
There's a pretty simple, viable solution. Carbon taxes. Yes, it's hard to get 195 countries to agree to implement a carbon tax, but you could have said the same thing about the ozone layer / CFC problem.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  The solutions are all out there the issue goes even beyond getting the taxes in place to begin with, they have to be left in place even as they cost people money. CFCs were easier because it's a little esoteric and didn't actually change that much for people in their day to day life (helps that there were good enough replacements available for cheap). Carbon taxes on the other hand to work have to hurt enough to change behavior which will make them very unpopular.
- dekken_ 8y ago
  Simple yes. viable, no. Tyrannical, yes.
- jakewins 8y ago
  The problem with carbon taxes is that they are regressive. Carbon taxation plays out as a consumption tax on goods people consume in roughly the same quantities independent of income. Take fuel as an example. The average american adult consumes about 550 gallons of gas a year for driving. It doesn't matter substantially how wealthy you are - there are only so many hours in the day to drive. A $20/Metric Ton CO2eq carbon tax means a fuel price increase of 0.18c/gal, or about $100 a year per person. So we'd expect to see consumers either pay this additonal 18c to keep driving on gas, or some close equivalent cost if they find a competitive renewable fuel at this new price point. So: - If you are at the 10th income percentile, you make $11/hr and society now expects 9 hours of labor from each adult in your household a year to pay for energy transition - If you are at the 90th income percentile, you make $29/hr, society expects you to work 3.4hrs a year to pay for transition. This makes carbon taxation, and related schemes like gas taxes, politically unpopular. See for instance yellow vest protests in France, where gas taxation was a key issue. ---- Incomes: https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_perc.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_perc.htm Carbon tax -> fuel cost: http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/calculating-various-fuel-prices-under-carbon-tax http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/calculating-various-fuel-prices... Fuel consumption: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/01/14/heres-how-much-gasoline-the-average-american-consu.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/01/14/heres-how-much-gas...
  - pseudonom- 8y ago
    "Carbon taxes are regressive" is too simple, and I'd argue wrong, for a variety of reasons: - Some experts just flatly deny it: "low-expenditure households devote a smaller share of their budget to gasoline than do their counterparts in the middle of the expenditure distribution" --- https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63747/isgasolinetaxreg00pote.pdf;sequence=1 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63747/isgasol... - Carbon taxes are often less regressive than alternative sources of revenue e.g. sales taxes - Depends on how the revenue is spent. If, for example, it's used to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit in the US, the overall tax and spend pattern would be progressive. - The impacts of excess carbon are also "regressive" in that global warming affects poor people more severely. This means that the net effect of a regressive tax which reduces a problem with an even more regressive incidence could be progressive.
normal_man 8y ago
It won't be an extinction event, it will be a gradual decline where the global poor suffer and die by the millions. "People will need to move" is not a realistic solution for massive amounts of people; they will starve, and drown. It's not happening because your friends fly to Burning Man, it's happening because global corporations are seeking profit above all else. Climate change cannot be combatted while capitalism is tolerated; we would need a global state that dictates what industries are allowed to do. So in that sense, you're right. It's never going to happen. Enjoy your life and don't have kids.
- rthomas6 8y ago
  You're kind of talking around the parent comment's point. Global corporations don't make that profit in a vacuum, they do it by selling people things they want. Barring huge technological progress, our current way of life has to change to sufficiently lower climate emissions. Regardless of what kind of government system controls industries, for carbon emissions to be sufficiently low, a lot of our current luxuries must become too expensive for most people. The scale of production/consumption itself is part of the problem.
  - normal_man 8y ago
    True but your average joe has far less control over that infrastructure than the corporations profiting from it. When you have to drive to get to work because oil companies leverage their power to make public rail impossible, are you really making a choice to consume that product? I resent the idea that average people just getting by are expected to upend their life, while to expect a corporation to moderate their behavior is apparently absurd.
    - rthomas6 8y ago
      I do think it's absurd to expect them to moderate their behavior without regulation. If it made their products more expensive to do so (which it would), they'll just lose market share to some other less scrupulous corporation selling the same thing for cheaper. A corporation's literal only job is to seek profits above all else. In the US, that's a legal requirement (Edit: I was very wrong about this). That doesn't make a corporation some subversive evil entity, more like an algorithm that finds solutions optimized for one variable. They do what they do because it's what makes them the most money. And remember, they have to operate this way (Edit: I was wrong about legal requirements on this). So we can change the problem space by making it more expensive to behave in certain ways. Aka, regulation/emissions taxes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
>No one wants to give up their own personal comfort or lifestyle for the sake of "the planet." Seriously? Who are you to say that of others?! I'm French (Parisian, actually) and I keep demonstrating with yellow vests to try and force political action so we can save the biosphere. I've been giving up on my personal comfort for years to reduce my environment footprint and help others do the same: I don't go skiing anymore, I don't fly, I stopped driving (this morning, like any, I rode a bicycle although it's snowing heavily in Paris), I spend more and more to buy organic food for the environment (not for my health but to support farmers who care), I spend hours every weeks in NGO and various "1901 associations" to better understand how other can save the environment (even though it's extremely difficult for many, especially the poor) and to help others caring about the environment. I've been changing everything in my life just for the environment (I don't want to live on a dying Earth and watch the world burn), and I really don't know what I can do more. I'm really tired and comments like yours are really adding insult to the injury. I really want to scream a big F*CK you to your face for saying that "No one wants to give up their own personal comfort or lifestyle for the sake of "the planet."". Can you understand that? You seem to have given up any hope in political change, but please, don't speak for other. Edit: one might think I can simply afford spending times and money of trying to reduce the environment but when you've reduced consumption to the minimum, work in a company that try its best to develop technologies to trigger an energy revolution and spend as much time and money possible to accelerate the movement, there's little else one can do to not rerupt when hearing comments such as OP's (and go into depression). Go watch First Reformed if you haven't already.
- jakewins 8y ago
  .. but I thought the yellow vest protests directly lead to rolling back legislation meant to increase prices of CO2-polluting fuel, so that renewable fuels would be able to compete? https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/12/france-puts-fuel-tax-hold-appease-yellow-vest-protestors/577288/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/12/fr...
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
    It's far more complicated than that. Most of those who suffer from those tax do NOT have any alternative to their heavily-polluting cars. Rich people can pay such tax or go full EV but you cannot compel the poor to pay such taxes that will make them just poorer. When you already have trouble feeding yourself and your family, you go crazy and you vote Macron out. Believe me, if Macron keeps lowering the taxes on the extra rich and insists on making the poor pay high taxes for indispensable fuels, we'll get the far right pretty quickly and a far, far worst government in power that will happily destroy any environmental regulation. We've probably passed that point already but there isn't many other options but to force Macron to stop his crazy politics (he lowered the tax on capital gains to a point where I pay far less tax on my stock gains than on my actual work, it's really absurd).
Zealotux 8y ago
>Shit, look at Paris. [...] the government raises taxes on fuel to help pay for some the policies, the people riot and destroy things and the government backs down. The fuel tax was only the trigger of a much larger discontent of the population, more so: only 19% of that tax increase will actually be used for the energetic transition (I could post sources on that but they're in French, ask away if you want to have a look). It sounds like you're assuming that the French population is an hegemonic group of people, but even among the yellow vests you'll find people fighting for various, and often contradictory goals. Now I don't disagree with the general feeling of your message. The main issue to me, which is mostly empirical, being that the very people who are mostly responsible for climate change will be the very last to actually suffer from it. Is climate change the great filter?
elproxy 8y ago
> ... to help pay for some the policies Not quite. https://twitter.com/anatolium/status/1077225708659847168 https://twitter.com/anatolium/status/1077225708659847168
ileri62 8y ago
what an incredibly stupid comment. How many boots are you licking on a daily basis?
IdiocyInAction 8y ago
I also very much dislike the argument that it's the "corporations". The "corporations" are polluting this much because people buy and demand cheap consumer goods. These things need to be appropriately priced. Non-seasonal fruits, cars, consumer electronics, clothes shipped across half the world, air travel. Aside from cars, things that people can live without. They should be priced as a luxury. (Carbon tax maybe?) But if you began pricing these things appropriately, you'd probably see a very bad reaction. Which is why you have a good point.
dr_dshiv 8y ago
Fight the groupthink. Many, many believe we aren't allowed to take a technological viewpoint to climate problem solving because "technology got us into this situation". Plus, they claim a "moral risk": that technological solutions will allow people to continue to lead their big lifestyles. But believe me: you don't want to be on the side of the argument that claims individual virtue is the only way to save the world. Luckily, it's not! There are lots of technological solutions to pursue once we want them. One of my favourites is using jet engines on the back of container ships to loft salt water spray into the air where it seeds/brightens low marine layer clouds. Super cheap, very high impact. https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/25/could-spraying-particles-into-marine-clouds-help-cool-the-planet/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/25/could-spraying-pa... Then we can go back to trying to promote biodiversity, like real environmentalists. Save the rainforest!
- dr_dshiv 8y ago
  Oh, and to be clear -- living in cities without cars, eating minimal amounts of high-quality meat, reducing waste, maximizing renewables, dumping coal -- these all have benefits to the self and society WITHOUT the virtue of co2 reduction. We don't need to fight human nature or overcome impossible odds to mitigate runaway climate change. It's just slow work and it's actually happening! A lot to be proud of. But if the permafrost starts melting, spiking methane, we'd better take the technological approaches available!
njarboe 8y ago
Right now there is a fuckton of capital searching for a return. If we went hog wild on nuclear power by reducing regulations and imposed a slowly ramping-up revenue neutral carbon dioxide tax, people might go for it. Especially if you let the tax be negative and people get paid to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it some way. Oil companies have a lot of knowledge, land, and boreholes and already pump CO2 underground to increase oil production in some fields. You might have a lot of different types of people who could get behind such a plan. I'm hoping a radical centrist can win the US presidency in 2020 and get some such deal done with Congress. The USA needs to lead and then we would have a chance to help/arm twist China, India, and the rest of the world to follow suit.
CaptainJustin 8y ago
> The only "solution" to climate change, if you can call it that, is through technology and adaptation... I agree - Innovation. Clean energy has been around for ages but owned little of the market. Now that it's getting cheaper and competing with dirty methods on a cost bases it's an easy option - for rich countries, countries desperate to ascend from poverty and everyone in-between. In a way, if you care about the environment, the best you may be to able to do is invest in green innovation and tech yourself.

by eric_b 8y ago

bryanlarsen 8y ago

There's a pretty simple, viable solution. Carbon taxes. Yes, it's hard to get 195 countries to agree to implement a carbon tax, but you could have said the same thing about the ozone layer / CFC problem.

rtkwe 8y ago
The solutions are all out there the issue goes even beyond getting the taxes in place to begin with, they have to be left in place even as they cost people money. CFCs were easier because it's a little esoteric and didn't actually change that much for people in their day to day life (helps that there were good enough replacements available for cheap). Carbon taxes on the other hand to work have to hurt enough to change behavior which will make them very unpopular.
dekken_ 8y ago
Simple yes. viable, no. Tyrannical, yes.
jakewins 8y ago
The problem with carbon taxes is that they are regressive. Carbon taxation plays out as a consumption tax on goods people consume in roughly the same quantities independent of income. Take fuel as an example. The average american adult consumes about 550 gallons of gas a year for driving. It doesn't matter substantially how wealthy you are - there are only so many hours in the day to drive. A $20/Metric Ton CO2eq carbon tax means a fuel price increase of 0.18c/gal, or about $100 a year per person. So we'd expect to see consumers either pay this additonal 18c to keep driving on gas, or some close equivalent cost if they find a competitive renewable fuel at this new price point. So: - If you are at the 10th income percentile, you make $11/hr and society now expects 9 hours of labor from each adult in your household a year to pay for energy transition - If you are at the 90th income percentile, you make $29/hr, society expects you to work 3.4hrs a year to pay for transition. This makes carbon taxation, and related schemes like gas taxes, politically unpopular. See for instance yellow vest protests in France, where gas taxation was a key issue. ---- Incomes: https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_perc.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_perc.htm Carbon tax -> fuel cost: http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/calculating-various-fuel-prices-under-carbon-tax http://www.rff.org/blog/2017/calculating-various-fuel-prices... Fuel consumption: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/01/14/heres-how-much-gasoline-the-average-american-consu.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/01/14/heres-how-much-gas...
- pseudonom- 8y ago
  "Carbon taxes are regressive" is too simple, and I'd argue wrong, for a variety of reasons: - Some experts just flatly deny it: "low-expenditure households devote a smaller share of their budget to gasoline than do their counterparts in the middle of the expenditure distribution" --- https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63747/isgasolinetaxreg00pote.pdf;sequence=1 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63747/isgasol... - Carbon taxes are often less regressive than alternative sources of revenue e.g. sales taxes - Depends on how the revenue is spent. If, for example, it's used to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit in the US, the overall tax and spend pattern would be progressive. - The impacts of excess carbon are also "regressive" in that global warming affects poor people more severely. This means that the net effect of a regressive tax which reduces a problem with an even more regressive incidence could be progressive.

normal_man 8y ago

It won't be an extinction event, it will be a gradual decline where the global poor suffer and die by the millions. "People will need to move" is not a realistic solution for massive amounts of people; they will starve, and drown. It's not happening because your friends fly to Burning Man, it's happening because global corporations are seeking profit above all else. Climate change cannot be combatted while capitalism is tolerated; we would need a global state that dictates what industries are allowed to do. So in that sense, you're right. It's never going to happen. Enjoy your life and don't have kids.

rthomas6 8y ago
You're kind of talking around the parent comment's point. Global corporations don't make that profit in a vacuum, they do it by selling people things they want. Barring huge technological progress, our current way of life has to change to sufficiently lower climate emissions. Regardless of what kind of government system controls industries, for carbon emissions to be sufficiently low, a lot of our current luxuries must become too expensive for most people. The scale of production/consumption itself is part of the problem.
- normal_man 8y ago
  True but your average joe has far less control over that infrastructure than the corporations profiting from it. When you have to drive to get to work because oil companies leverage their power to make public rail impossible, are you really making a choice to consume that product? I resent the idea that average people just getting by are expected to upend their life, while to expect a corporation to moderate their behavior is apparently absurd.
  - rthomas6 8y ago
    I do think it's absurd to expect them to moderate their behavior without regulation. If it made their products more expensive to do so (which it would), they'll just lose market share to some other less scrupulous corporation selling the same thing for cheaper. A corporation's literal only job is to seek profits above all else. In the US, that's a legal requirement (Edit: I was very wrong about this). That doesn't make a corporation some subversive evil entity, more like an algorithm that finds solutions optimized for one variable. They do what they do because it's what makes them the most money. And remember, they have to operate this way (Edit: I was wrong about legal requirements on this). So we can change the problem space by making it more expensive to behave in certain ways. Aka, regulation/emissions taxes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago

>No one wants to give up their own personal comfort or lifestyle for the sake of "the planet." Seriously? Who are you to say that of others?! I'm French (Parisian, actually) and I keep demonstrating with yellow vests to try and force political action so we can save the biosphere. I've been giving up on my personal comfort for years to reduce my environment footprint and help others do the same: I don't go skiing anymore, I don't fly, I stopped driving (this morning, like any, I rode a bicycle although it's snowing heavily in Paris), I spend more and more to buy organic food for the environment (not for my health but to support farmers who care), I spend hours every weeks in NGO and various "1901 associations" to better understand how other can save the environment (even though it's extremely difficult for many, especially the poor) and to help others caring about the environment. I've been changing everything in my life just for the environment (I don't want to live on a dying Earth and watch the world burn), and I really don't know what I can do more. I'm really tired and comments like yours are really adding insult to the injury. I really want to scream a big F*CK you to your face for saying that "No one wants to give up their own personal comfort or lifestyle for the sake of "the planet."". Can you understand that? You seem to have given up any hope in political change, but please, don't speak for other. Edit: one might think I can simply afford spending times and money of trying to reduce the environment but when you've reduced consumption to the minimum, work in a company that try its best to develop technologies to trigger an energy revolution and spend as much time and money possible to accelerate the movement, there's little else one can do to not rerupt when hearing comments such as OP's (and go into depression). Go watch First Reformed if you haven't already.

jakewins 8y ago
.. but I thought the yellow vest protests directly lead to rolling back legislation meant to increase prices of CO2-polluting fuel, so that renewable fuels would be able to compete? https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/12/france-puts-fuel-tax-hold-appease-yellow-vest-protestors/577288/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/12/fr...
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  It's far more complicated than that. Most of those who suffer from those tax do NOT have any alternative to their heavily-polluting cars. Rich people can pay such tax or go full EV but you cannot compel the poor to pay such taxes that will make them just poorer. When you already have trouble feeding yourself and your family, you go crazy and you vote Macron out. Believe me, if Macron keeps lowering the taxes on the extra rich and insists on making the poor pay high taxes for indispensable fuels, we'll get the far right pretty quickly and a far, far worst government in power that will happily destroy any environmental regulation. We've probably passed that point already but there isn't many other options but to force Macron to stop his crazy politics (he lowered the tax on capital gains to a point where I pay far less tax on my stock gains than on my actual work, it's really absurd).

Zealotux 8y ago

>Shit, look at Paris. [...] the government raises taxes on fuel to help pay for some the policies, the people riot and destroy things and the government backs down. The fuel tax was only the trigger of a much larger discontent of the population, more so: only 19% of that tax increase will actually be used for the energetic transition (I could post sources on that but they're in French, ask away if you want to have a look). It sounds like you're assuming that the French population is an hegemonic group of people, but even among the yellow vests you'll find people fighting for various, and often contradictory goals. Now I don't disagree with the general feeling of your message. The main issue to me, which is mostly empirical, being that the very people who are mostly responsible for climate change will be the very last to actually suffer from it. Is climate change the great filter?

elproxy 8y ago

> ... to help pay for some the policies Not quite. https://twitter.com/anatolium/status/1077225708659847168 https://twitter.com/anatolium/status/1077225708659847168

ileri62 8y ago

what an incredibly stupid comment. How many boots are you licking on a daily basis?

IdiocyInAction 8y ago

I also very much dislike the argument that it's the "corporations". The "corporations" are polluting this much because people buy and demand cheap consumer goods. These things need to be appropriately priced. Non-seasonal fruits, cars, consumer electronics, clothes shipped across half the world, air travel. Aside from cars, things that people can live without. They should be priced as a luxury. (Carbon tax maybe?) But if you began pricing these things appropriately, you'd probably see a very bad reaction. Which is why you have a good point.

dr_dshiv 8y ago

Fight the groupthink. Many, many believe we aren't allowed to take a technological viewpoint to climate problem solving because "technology got us into this situation". Plus, they claim a "moral risk": that technological solutions will allow people to continue to lead their big lifestyles. But believe me: you don't want to be on the side of the argument that claims individual virtue is the only way to save the world. Luckily, it's not! There are lots of technological solutions to pursue once we want them. One of my favourites is using jet engines on the back of container ships to loft salt water spray into the air where it seeds/brightens low marine layer clouds. Super cheap, very high impact. https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/25/could-spraying-particles-into-marine-clouds-help-cool-the-planet/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/25/could-spraying-pa... Then we can go back to trying to promote biodiversity, like real environmentalists. Save the rainforest!

dr_dshiv 8y ago
Oh, and to be clear -- living in cities without cars, eating minimal amounts of high-quality meat, reducing waste, maximizing renewables, dumping coal -- these all have benefits to the self and society WITHOUT the virtue of co2 reduction. We don't need to fight human nature or overcome impossible odds to mitigate runaway climate change. It's just slow work and it's actually happening! A lot to be proud of. But if the permafrost starts melting, spiking methane, we'd better take the technological approaches available!

njarboe 8y ago

Right now there is a fuckton of capital searching for a return. If we went hog wild on nuclear power by reducing regulations and imposed a slowly ramping-up revenue neutral carbon dioxide tax, people might go for it. Especially if you let the tax be negative and people get paid to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester it some way. Oil companies have a lot of knowledge, land, and boreholes and already pump CO2 underground to increase oil production in some fields. You might have a lot of different types of people who could get behind such a plan. I'm hoping a radical centrist can win the US presidency in 2020 and get some such deal done with Congress. The USA needs to lead and then we would have a chance to help/arm twist China, India, and the rest of the world to follow suit.

CaptainJustin 8y ago

> The only "solution" to climate change, if you can call it that, is through technology and adaptation... I agree - Innovation. Clean energy has been around for ages but owned little of the market. Now that it's getting cheaper and competing with dirty methods on a cost bases it's an easy option - for rich countries, countries desperate to ascend from poverty and everyone in-between. In a way, if you care about the environment, the best you may be to able to do is invest in green innovation and tech yourself.