12 ms·

On the contrary, most changes proposed reduce the quality of life, reduce choices, and require rationing and rationed distribution of some sort. It is consisten

On the contrary, most changes proposed reduce the quality of life, reduce choices, and require rationing and rationed distribution of some sort. It is consistently pointed out that the first world quality of life is a problem and a growing population (which is almost entirely the product of people living longer, considering first-world birth rates are abysmal) is a problem. And it is rarely acknowledged that developing nations contribute greatly to pollution and curbing that would almost certainly handicap their growth (and likely result in various forms of protest, violence, and war). To simply assign resistance to how humanity uses and consumes energy to oil and coal and car industry and tax income is absurd. General economics is the only surefire way to get the changes we are told are necessary entrenched in society and our way of life. And that means it's technology, not government control and regulation, that is the solution that should be pursued. Carrots might work. Sticks won't.

gameswithgo 7y ago
the history of nations avoiding or failing to avoid various environmental collapse shows that often it has been central government control that provided the solution. sticks have worked. empirically.
- trentnix 7y ago
  Sticks get results. There's no doubt about that. But that road runs both ways.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
Disagree vociferously. 1) A carbon tax is perhaps the most common proposed solution to the climate change problem. It would increase quality of life, not reduce choice nor induce rationing. Currently, burning carbon imposes externalities that are not paid by the emitter. This means that some of the carbon emitted is emitted even though it provides more costs than benefits. A carbon tax and dividend INCREASES economic efficiency by ensuring that CO2 is generated only when benefits exceed costs. 2) oil & gas are extremely useful for a lot of different things, and there's still a lot of it left in the ground. Technology improvements will only shift usage; it will still be used for something. Only a "stick" such as a carbon tax can ensure that such usage is efficient.
- intended 7y ago
  The point to remind people, or at least improve the message, is that the tax exposes the actual price of a good. Right now, we pay for plastic or carbon expensive goods without caring about the cost of dealing with the costs of clean up, or forest fires/storms that cause huge damage. Right now, it’s a lottery - cheap goods, no information, and everyone in the population is hoping their disaster ticket doesn’t get punched. However, people prefer making choices intelligently - knowing what it costs to actually deal with a product means people can immediately make choices. Things are already expensive, we just don’t know how much so. At least this way, we can make informed choices about how we want to live our life- it empowers us.
  - agent008t 7y ago
    How confident are we of the cause/effect relationship between consuming carbon expensive goods, and a fire/storm happening?
    - AlanSE 7y ago
      I don't care about relating these two tings, because they are an intentionally weak straw-man chosen to hijack the discussion. Carbon emissions are mostly from transportation and energy production - neither of which are goods. Both have more sustainable alternatives that a carbon tax would easily push people to use via market forces. The relationship between tailpipe carbon emissions and temperature, and then sea-level rise, is absurdly strong scientifically speaking. Energy accounting is a very hard science. We know what IR bandwidths CO2 gas absorbs, and that translates directly to an additional heat flow. We are watching the northern sea ice disappear because of carbon emissions, and we will witness much more. The most stinging effects will be reduced agriculture output, direct temperature rise consequences, and sea-level rise. The consensus science on sea-level rise (see IPCC) results in extremely quantifiable economic damage within this century, and those are low-ball numbers. The confidence level is simply "confident". There is no reasonable question that things will be as-bad or worse than the consensus predictions. There are reasonable questions about low-probably chances that things will get much, much, worse.
ivanhoe 7y ago
Sometimes you need both, especially in countries where there's no environmentalist culture and people have too much troubles in day-to-day survival to really have time and incentive to care about global and longterm issues like ecology or climate changes. In my own experience of growing in one such environment, if you give them just carrots, they'll work really hard to come up with a way to trick the system and grab the incentives while changing nothing. For any change to happen the government just has to push by force for certain baseline rules to be imposed on everyone, and then after some time peoples' mindsets adapt to this new set of rules and they start to play along.
francisofascii 7y ago
I would argue that first world countries can still enjoy the same quality of life (perhaps better) at a fraction of their current fossil fuel usage. Increased consumption does not always translate to increased quality of life. At some point is becomes detrimental.
perfunctory 7y ago
> On the contrary, most changes proposed reduce the quality of life, reduce choices People keep saying this. I am not really sure what they mean by "quality of life" any more. "But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options." [0] I don't think that if the number of options was reduced to a handful my quality of life would go down significantly. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-options/590185/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-...
- glogla 7y ago
  They might mean easing meat, or owning a car, or having a vacation, or having AC, or even having hot water.
- panzagl 7y ago
  Let's say gas increases to $8/gallon in the US. Your choice is either to spend more on gas, buy a new car solely to increase MPG, or spend more time getting to places by walk/bike/public transport. All of which would lower my quality of life. In exchange I guess my health insurance costs eventually go down somehow?
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    carbon tax & dividend means that your choices are: - use the dividend to pay the carbon tax, and keep driving. - buy a new car, keep part of the dividend - walk/bike/transit, keep the whole dividend
    - panzagl 7y ago
      But the dividend is per capita? So some poor person who is stuck driving to work gets to reimburse me for my Tesla?
      - bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Yes, it's per capita-ish. As implemented in Canada, rural residents get a bit more than urban, and children get half the amount as adults (paid to their parents, of course). That poor person isn't taking multiple flights per year, buying lots of stuff, et cetera. So even with driving to work he's probably still keeping a small fraction of the dividend.
ggm 7y ago
On the contrary, most changes proposed reduce the quality of life, reduce choices, and require rationing and rationed distribution of some sort. The current situation will cause widespread mortaility in person years counts if continued. Particulate matter and NO and effects on asthma and childhood mortality are well understood. Simply replacing charcoal with more efficient fuel in rural settings had massive upsides to life expectancy. So, while I absolutely agree your and my life experience will have a smallish decline in choices and quality in some senses, at the levels of populations and nation states it's less clear. What's your problem with rationing? Didn't it actually improve overall diet and health in the UK in The 1940s? You've driven to an extreme. Reductionist arguments imply an inability to hypothesize alternates on the path. What about median path reductions in plastics and oil consumption and replacement of individual transport with mass transport? I don't recall a car being in the constitutional rights list.

gameswithgo 7y ago

the history of nations avoiding or failing to avoid various environmental collapse shows that often it has been central government control that provided the solution. sticks have worked. empirically.

trentnix 7y ago
Sticks get results. There's no doubt about that. But that road runs both ways.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

Disagree vociferously. 1) A carbon tax is perhaps the most common proposed solution to the climate change problem. It would increase quality of life, not reduce choice nor induce rationing. Currently, burning carbon imposes externalities that are not paid by the emitter. This means that some of the carbon emitted is emitted even though it provides more costs than benefits. A carbon tax and dividend INCREASES economic efficiency by ensuring that CO2 is generated only when benefits exceed costs. 2) oil & gas are extremely useful for a lot of different things, and there's still a lot of it left in the ground. Technology improvements will only shift usage; it will still be used for something. Only a "stick" such as a carbon tax can ensure that such usage is efficient.

intended 7y ago
The point to remind people, or at least improve the message, is that the tax exposes the actual price of a good. Right now, we pay for plastic or carbon expensive goods without caring about the cost of dealing with the costs of clean up, or forest fires/storms that cause huge damage. Right now, it’s a lottery - cheap goods, no information, and everyone in the population is hoping their disaster ticket doesn’t get punched. However, people prefer making choices intelligently - knowing what it costs to actually deal with a product means people can immediately make choices. Things are already expensive, we just don’t know how much so. At least this way, we can make informed choices about how we want to live our life- it empowers us.
- agent008t 7y ago
  How confident are we of the cause/effect relationship between consuming carbon expensive goods, and a fire/storm happening?
  - AlanSE 7y ago
    I don't care about relating these two tings, because they are an intentionally weak straw-man chosen to hijack the discussion. Carbon emissions are mostly from transportation and energy production - neither of which are goods. Both have more sustainable alternatives that a carbon tax would easily push people to use via market forces. The relationship between tailpipe carbon emissions and temperature, and then sea-level rise, is absurdly strong scientifically speaking. Energy accounting is a very hard science. We know what IR bandwidths CO2 gas absorbs, and that translates directly to an additional heat flow. We are watching the northern sea ice disappear because of carbon emissions, and we will witness much more. The most stinging effects will be reduced agriculture output, direct temperature rise consequences, and sea-level rise. The consensus science on sea-level rise (see IPCC) results in extremely quantifiable economic damage within this century, and those are low-ball numbers. The confidence level is simply "confident". There is no reasonable question that things will be as-bad or worse than the consensus predictions. There are reasonable questions about low-probably chances that things will get much, much, worse.

ivanhoe 7y ago

Sometimes you need both, especially in countries where there's no environmentalist culture and people have too much troubles in day-to-day survival to really have time and incentive to care about global and longterm issues like ecology or climate changes. In my own experience of growing in one such environment, if you give them just carrots, they'll work really hard to come up with a way to trick the system and grab the incentives while changing nothing. For any change to happen the government just has to push by force for certain baseline rules to be imposed on everyone, and then after some time peoples' mindsets adapt to this new set of rules and they start to play along.

francisofascii 7y ago

I would argue that first world countries can still enjoy the same quality of life (perhaps better) at a fraction of their current fossil fuel usage. Increased consumption does not always translate to increased quality of life. At some point is becomes detrimental.

perfunctory 7y ago

> On the contrary, most changes proposed reduce the quality of life, reduce choices People keep saying this. I am not really sure what they mean by "quality of life" any more. "But when you type hangers into Amazon’s search box, the mega-retailer delivers “over 200,000” options." [0] I don't think that if the number of options was reduced to a handful my quality of life would go down significantly. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-options/590185/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-...

glogla 7y ago
They might mean easing meat, or owning a car, or having a vacation, or having AC, or even having hot water.
panzagl 7y ago
Let's say gas increases to $8/gallon in the US. Your choice is either to spend more on gas, buy a new car solely to increase MPG, or spend more time getting to places by walk/bike/public transport. All of which would lower my quality of life. In exchange I guess my health insurance costs eventually go down somehow?
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  carbon tax & dividend means that your choices are: - use the dividend to pay the carbon tax, and keep driving. - buy a new car, keep part of the dividend - walk/bike/transit, keep the whole dividend
  - panzagl 7y ago
    But the dividend is per capita? So some poor person who is stuck driving to work gets to reimburse me for my Tesla?
    - bryanlarsen 7y ago
      Yes, it's per capita-ish. As implemented in Canada, rural residents get a bit more than urban, and children get half the amount as adults (paid to their parents, of course). That poor person isn't taking multiple flights per year, buying lots of stuff, et cetera. So even with driving to work he's probably still keeping a small fraction of the dividend.

ggm 7y ago

On the contrary, most changes proposed reduce the quality of life, reduce choices, and require rationing and rationed distribution of some sort. The current situation will cause widespread mortaility in person years counts if continued. Particulate matter and NO and effects on asthma and childhood mortality are well understood. Simply replacing charcoal with more efficient fuel in rural settings had massive upsides to life expectancy. So, while I absolutely agree your and my life experience will have a smallish decline in choices and quality in some senses, at the levels of populations and nation states it's less clear. What's your problem with rationing? Didn't it actually improve overall diet and health in the UK in The 1940s? You've driven to an extreme. Reductionist arguments imply an inability to hypothesize alternates on the path. What about median path reductions in plastics and oil consumption and replacement of individual transport with mass transport? I don't recall a car being in the constitutional rights list.