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Weirdly enough this actually gives me a lot of hope for humanity and is the beginning of a realistic and scalable solution to climate change. The main problem
by nisten 7y ago
Weirdly enough this actually gives me a lot of hope for humanity and is the beginning of a realistic and scalable solution to climate change.
The main problem with the free market has been lack of accountability and dollar damage projections on environmental damage.
Most fossil-fuel energy companies have lobbied against it because it would make their product a lot more expensive to produce if their customers had to pay a market-rate fee for it's burning/disposal. The ammount of carbon that can be dumped out is finite, yet the cost is artificially set to zero/free which makes no sense unless you live in a communist system.
By accounting this into credit risk, it makes it more expensive for governments to ignore the environment. It means they have to pay a lot more interest on their debt which puts maximum political pressure on them to address the money problem regardless of their ideology beliefs.
This also makes clean energy companies actually competitive at market rate since they have very little carbon dumping to pay for.
It also puts a lot more pressure to improve the measurement accuracy of carbon emission if it is actively being traded. It also greatly increases insurance costs for new fossil fuel development because now they can face liability when people's homes are flooded for the first time.
On the positive side, It also makes local farming produce more competitive and economically stable too because it needs to burn a lot less gas, thus pay for less carbon waste for delivery compared to a similar product that's shipped from extremely greater distances.
Because shipping does not pay a market rate for carbon waste, it creates some absurd situations.
For example a lot of pepper farmers here in Ontario actually ship their produce all the way to China for packaging and then ship it back here to sell because it saves them a small margin this way in the current cost.
By enabling the market to factor in environmental costs, you're basically letting a distributed graph-based computer, a giant hive mind, the market, address the problem a lot more efficiently and with massively more processing power than you would have with central planning.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoWish I shared your optimism. It is simply too little, too late for humanity to avoid serious, calamitous effects of climate change. Take a look at these graphs: 1. Annual worldwide CO2 emissions by region: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... That graph keeps growing every year (save for major recession years). Consider how much effort it would take just to reduce the growth to 0, where we would still be very much screwed. 2. Global CO2 concentration: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-co-concentration-ppm https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-co-concentration-p... Again, up and to the right, consistently, for decades, with no sign of slowing down. 3. Same graph of CO2 concentration, but over a longer timescale, to really freak you out: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-term https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-concentration-long-te... I'll start having optimism when I see even a small change in the direction of these graphs.
- nisten 7y agoThere are more drastic ways to cool the planet and they're actually economically feasible too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJFtdvrTZs4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJFtdvrTZs4 By no means are they safe or anything, the environmental impact is vast and with many unknowns. However at some point in the passing decades it will be unethical not to use them. The environmental damage of the continuing warming will be greater that the possible environmental damage of the geo-engineering methods. Therefore we will most likely use them. The 2 most practical methods that can be enacted by a single nation today are ocean fertilization to spur growth of oxygen producing plankton and spraying of reflective sulphur dioxide dust in the stratosphere, even if all the permafrost melts, methane in the atmosphere has a half life of only 7 years. The carbon is the main problem. At 1000 ppm we can still breathe despite the impact it has on our cognitive health. Most likely we'll offset that with massive tree planting at scale. Other carbon capture methods are not that scalable in my opinion. Wood is basically captured carbon, it makes great building material and certain species of it can grow pretty fast over and over again like bamboo which grows 91cm/3ft per day. Genetically modified derivatives of it are quite likely to be developed too.
- PeterStuer 7y agoForgive my bluntness, but I thought we had buried the 'efficient market' fallacy over a decade ago. Besides, the only thing your market would optimize for is how to maximize rentseeker profits, the 'climate' situation be damned.
- Isinlor 7y agoHow was the efficient market hypothesis buried? Believing that markets are optimal in a very strong sense is wrong, indeed. We know that people are not perfect rational actors, but we are quite rational anyway. Markets work damn well if what we care about is priced in. Not to mention that market economies of many different kinds have been proven over and over to be more efficient than centrally planned economies. For example, China authoritarian and socialist market economy miracle of rising almost a billion people out of extreme poverty in strong contrast to the centrally planned disaster with the Great Chinese Famine where at least 15 million people died of starvation. Or Holodomor in Ukraine with 4 million people starved to death. Centrally planned economies are responsible for more deaths and misery than the whole Holocaust.