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Almost everyone on HN recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to (most) life on earth. There is less agreement on how to mitigate it's effects.

Almost everyone on HN recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to (most) life on earth. There is less agreement on how to mitigate it's effects. One solution which I favor is nationalization of US oil companies. While hardly discussed in the US, it's a solution that is currently being discussed in the UK and has been done by many different countries, though usually because of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism. Overtime I have come to the realization free market solutions and incentives are incapable of spurring the changes needed to transition to a cleaner form of energy, especially with the short time scale we have before results are disastrous.

mc32 7y ago
So Venezuela nationalized their petroleum, I think Mexico did something similar. And Iran. I don’t see where those actions have kerbed the export or internal use of petroleum.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Goals there were different. Nationalizing those industries and using tariffs to stabilize at a higher price would accelerate adoption of better technology. You could implode demand for natural gas and fuel oil by raising prices and capturing profits to capitalize heat pump adoption in the northeast, for example.
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    ...and you'd likely elect a populist in 4 years that would wrench open the spigots. Dramatically. Live. On cable news. I'm fully in favor of "keep it in the ground." But nationalization isn't necessarily the right way. In fact: if someone sufficiently wealthy were able to buy up certain strategic assets, they'd be able to resist public pressure to reopen them. For instance, if you had bought Arch Coal at its nadir when it went bankrupt for about $1.4 billion, you would've had control over 16% of America's coal supply. From what I can tell, billions of tons of coal. You could shut it down for pennies on the dollar versus any carbon sequestration scheme. Or buy up and close down export terminals (and revitalize the property around them if in urban areas, making back your money easily while crippling the profitability of coal mining in the US). If it was nationalized, it could as likely go the way of Venezuela, which has (until recently) actually extremely subsidized petroleum consumption. IMHO, government power should be used to tax these things what they're polluting (the stick), develop regulations while strongly subsidizing clean alternatives (the carrot). Nationalizing the oil industry and jacking up prices is just going to make people mad at you while enabling a successor to completely undo your work.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      Agreed. I probably should have qualified that I wasn’t advocating the position. Our current situation politically certainly encourages caution.
mr_toad 7y ago
That would only work if climate change deniers weren’t in charge of governments. If the latest Australian elections are anything to go by, popular (popularist) voter sentiment is swinging towards denial.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I don't know how much noise it made in the press, but the US just made some significant investments into nuclear.
- mceoin 7y ago
  That’s the wrong takeaway from the recent Australian election. The only reliable takeaway is that jobs are more important than climate to majority of voters in Queensland.
radford-neal 7y ago
"Almost everyone on HN recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to (most) life on earth." No. There are no even remotely plausible scenarios in which most life (say, all mammals, to pick something specific) go extinct due to climate change caused by human CO2 emissions. If you think that, you have been lied to - and have not been smart enough to recognize the lies.
- cbHXBY1D 7y ago
  Did you read the recent IPBES Global Assessment? An article on it from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-extinction-united-nations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-exti... "Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival." A summary can be found here: https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_unedited_advance_for_posting_htn.pdf https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_uned...
  - boulos 7y ago
    Fwiw, I was expecting your quote to include a number >50%. Not that this wouldn’t be catastrophic, but most does mean more than 50% :). Edit: though now I’m curious by percentage of animals (presumably 40% of species may be, or even is likely, more than 40% of animals, because of power-law-style distributions).
    - rexpop 7y ago
      The initial disappearance of even this minority is significant enough to impact the rest. Ecosystems are fragile, symbiotic systems.
  - radford-neal 7y ago
    Talk of "efforts to protect what natural habitats are left" does not seem to relate to warming from CO2 emissions. Except, that is, that if you're concerned about protecting habitats, you should be concerned about some of the boondoggles destroying them that are justified by "global warming" alarmism - such as replacing natural forests with monocultures of trees that are converted to pellets and shipped long distances to be burned in place of coal. See https://www.draxbiomass.com https://www.draxbiomass.com Also, "one-third" is not "most".
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> One solution which I favor is nationalization of US oil companies. Can you explain your reasoning behind this? It makes no sense to me. This is fundamentally an economic issue. People will stop burning carbon when it's less expensive to do something else. If you nationalize the industry only to shut it down, that causes the cost of burning oil to increase (the intended effect), but then the higher prices spur foreign suppliers to increase production which blunts the effect. Meanwhile you suffer a massive domestic loss as you not only have to pay higher oil prices, you have to pay them to foreign suppliers like Russia and Saudi Arabia rather than domestic companies. By contrast, a carbon tax reduces demand and makes production less profitable world-wide, so everyone reduces production (not just domestic producers), and the money from the higher prices goes to your own government which can either use it to subsidize alternatives or return it to citizens to mitigate the impact of the higher costs.
- amanaplanacanal 7y ago
  Would that require a carbon tax to be applied world wide, or would you suggest that a country could apply the tax at the border for imported goods?

mc32 7y ago

So Venezuela nationalized their petroleum, I think Mexico did something similar. And Iran. I don’t see where those actions have kerbed the export or internal use of petroleum.

Spooky23 7y ago
Goals there were different. Nationalizing those industries and using tariffs to stabilize at a higher price would accelerate adoption of better technology. You could implode demand for natural gas and fuel oil by raising prices and capturing profits to capitalize heat pump adoption in the northeast, for example.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  ...and you'd likely elect a populist in 4 years that would wrench open the spigots. Dramatically. Live. On cable news. I'm fully in favor of "keep it in the ground." But nationalization isn't necessarily the right way. In fact: if someone sufficiently wealthy were able to buy up certain strategic assets, they'd be able to resist public pressure to reopen them. For instance, if you had bought Arch Coal at its nadir when it went bankrupt for about $1.4 billion, you would've had control over 16% of America's coal supply. From what I can tell, billions of tons of coal. You could shut it down for pennies on the dollar versus any carbon sequestration scheme. Or buy up and close down export terminals (and revitalize the property around them if in urban areas, making back your money easily while crippling the profitability of coal mining in the US). If it was nationalized, it could as likely go the way of Venezuela, which has (until recently) actually extremely subsidized petroleum consumption. IMHO, government power should be used to tax these things what they're polluting (the stick), develop regulations while strongly subsidizing clean alternatives (the carrot). Nationalizing the oil industry and jacking up prices is just going to make people mad at you while enabling a successor to completely undo your work.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Agreed. I probably should have qualified that I wasn’t advocating the position. Our current situation politically certainly encourages caution.

mr_toad 7y ago

That would only work if climate change deniers weren’t in charge of governments. If the latest Australian elections are anything to go by, popular (popularist) voter sentiment is swinging towards denial.

Consultant32452 7y ago
I don't know how much noise it made in the press, but the US just made some significant investments into nuclear.
mceoin 7y ago
That’s the wrong takeaway from the recent Australian election. The only reliable takeaway is that jobs are more important than climate to majority of voters in Queensland.

radford-neal 7y ago

"Almost everyone on HN recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to (most) life on earth." No. There are no even remotely plausible scenarios in which most life (say, all mammals, to pick something specific) go extinct due to climate change caused by human CO2 emissions. If you think that, you have been lied to - and have not been smart enough to recognize the lies.

cbHXBY1D 7y ago
Did you read the recent IPBES Global Assessment? An article on it from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-extinction-united-nations.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/climate/biodiversity-exti... "Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival." A summary can be found here: https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_unedited_advance_for_posting_htn.pdf https://www.ipbes.net/sites/default/files/downloads/spm_uned...
- boulos 7y ago
  Fwiw, I was expecting your quote to include a number >50%. Not that this wouldn’t be catastrophic, but most does mean more than 50% :). Edit: though now I’m curious by percentage of animals (presumably 40% of species may be, or even is likely, more than 40% of animals, because of power-law-style distributions).
  - rexpop 7y ago
    The initial disappearance of even this minority is significant enough to impact the rest. Ecosystems are fragile, symbiotic systems.
- radford-neal 7y ago
  Talk of "efforts to protect what natural habitats are left" does not seem to relate to warming from CO2 emissions. Except, that is, that if you're concerned about protecting habitats, you should be concerned about some of the boondoggles destroying them that are justified by "global warming" alarmism - such as replacing natural forests with monocultures of trees that are converted to pellets and shipped long distances to be burned in place of coal. See https://www.draxbiomass.com https://www.draxbiomass.com Also, "one-third" is not "most".

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> One solution which I favor is nationalization of US oil companies. Can you explain your reasoning behind this? It makes no sense to me. This is fundamentally an economic issue. People will stop burning carbon when it's less expensive to do something else. If you nationalize the industry only to shut it down, that causes the cost of burning oil to increase (the intended effect), but then the higher prices spur foreign suppliers to increase production which blunts the effect. Meanwhile you suffer a massive domestic loss as you not only have to pay higher oil prices, you have to pay them to foreign suppliers like Russia and Saudi Arabia rather than domestic companies. By contrast, a carbon tax reduces demand and makes production less profitable world-wide, so everyone reduces production (not just domestic producers), and the money from the higher prices goes to your own government which can either use it to subsidize alternatives or return it to citizens to mitigate the impact of the higher costs.

amanaplanacanal 7y ago
Would that require a carbon tax to be applied world wide, or would you suggest that a country could apply the tax at the border for imported goods?