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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 expens

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.
  - agent008t 7y ago
    In other words, the confidence level is 100%? As in, we can predict that certain catastrophic events will happen as a matter of fact, and reducing carbon emissions would prevent those events as a matter of fact?
    - AlanSE 7y ago
      No big decisions have a 100% confidence level, that's an absurd criteria. Catastrophic events are also a bad thing to look at because researchers tend to just stop the detailed simulations beyond a certain horizon (specifically 100 years) because so much changes in the human world on those time frames that people don't take it seriously. The vast majority of truly terrible things that will happen as global warming continues will happen past that time frame. At some point, the metabolism of the plant will draw down the CO2 concentration (if we stop emitting), and this is >1,000 year frame. 100 years tends to not be enough for terrible (and I mean like really truly truly terrible) things to happen due to thermal inertia. We're going to have to engineer the climate directly if we still want to have an industrial society in 200 years. We will probably do it much sooner. The effects of the combination of more CO2 + artificially decreased sunlight are going to be bad, but are not well understood. It is true, it's not a question of whether we have consequences or not, just a question of "how bad". That is extremely strongly a function of how much emissions we emit until, say 2050. It's hard for me to even imagine how we can continue using fossil fuels for energy much beyond then, so not reducing emissions also strikes me as kind of... needless self-inflicted harm.
      - agent008t 7y ago
        I am not setting a threshold, I just want to estimate the objective confidence level in our predictions. When you say 'It is not a question of whether we have consequences or not, just a question "how bad"', it sounds like 100% confidence, but then you say that it is not 100%. So is it more like >99%? Or 70%? Or 10%? Or <1%? And more specifically, what is the probability that reducing anthropogenic emissions to a certain target would result in us averting the predicted catastrophic scenario that otherwise would not have been averted?

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.
- agent008t 7y ago
  In other words, the confidence level is 100%? As in, we can predict that certain catastrophic events will happen as a matter of fact, and reducing carbon emissions would prevent those events as a matter of fact?
  - AlanSE 7y ago
    No big decisions have a 100% confidence level, that's an absurd criteria. Catastrophic events are also a bad thing to look at because researchers tend to just stop the detailed simulations beyond a certain horizon (specifically 100 years) because so much changes in the human world on those time frames that people don't take it seriously. The vast majority of truly terrible things that will happen as global warming continues will happen past that time frame. At some point, the metabolism of the plant will draw down the CO2 concentration (if we stop emitting), and this is >1,000 year frame. 100 years tends to not be enough for terrible (and I mean like really truly truly terrible) things to happen due to thermal inertia. We're going to have to engineer the climate directly if we still want to have an industrial society in 200 years. We will probably do it much sooner. The effects of the combination of more CO2 + artificially decreased sunlight are going to be bad, but are not well understood. It is true, it's not a question of whether we have consequences or not, just a question of "how bad". That is extremely strongly a function of how much emissions we emit until, say 2050. It's hard for me to even imagine how we can continue using fossil fuels for energy much beyond then, so not reducing emissions also strikes me as kind of... needless self-inflicted harm.
    - agent008t 7y ago
      I am not setting a threshold, I just want to estimate the objective confidence level in our predictions. When you say 'It is not a question of whether we have consequences or not, just a question "how bad"', it sounds like 100% confidence, but then you say that it is not 100%. So is it more like >99%? Or 70%? Or 10%? Or <1%? And more specifically, what is the probability that reducing anthropogenic emissions to a certain target would result in us averting the predicted catastrophic scenario that otherwise would not have been averted?