7 ms·

Please elaborate on why stopping c.c. isn't hard. I think it's very hard in terms of what we need to do out in the world, and very hard politically.

imglorp 7y ago
We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...
- jjoonathan 7y ago
  I've seen some very expansive definitions of "subsidy" that include, for example, not taxing carbon emissions. In that case, you couldn't just divert the money, because it never existed in a budget. You could implement a carbon tax, and I'd be all for that, but it wouldn't be in the same policy class as diverting an existing stream of budgetary money.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    About ~1 Billion of that cited number is from global warming costs. The larger portions is from health costs associated with air pollution which accounts for ~2 Billion. You can find a break down of the sources of that subsidy at the bottom of page 21 of the linked article.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      Do you mean trillion here?
      - shkkmo 7y ago
        Haha, yup
  - topkai22 7y ago
    Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities. Only something like $500B is attributed to direct subsidies or foregone tax revenue.
    - givinguflac 7y ago
      "only" 500 BILLION. How is that small change
      - topkai22 7y ago
        It's not small change, but when it is ~10% of the claimed figure I think "only" is the proper adjective. It's what upsets me about these sorts of papers- "civilian" climate change skeptics/deniers point to them as evidence of the dishonesty of consensus community. They are able to take away the wrong message- that consensus community is stretching and manipulating the data, rather than there are $300-600B of subsidies for fossil fuels out there.
      - tengbretson 7y ago
        If the author of that article had to misrepresent in order to pump the number up by 10x we can assume that they didn't think 500 billion was a compelling enough number.
    - naasking 7y ago
      > Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities. Negative externalities are a type of subsidy.
      - DougN7 7y ago
        I think the point is it’s not a subsidy that could instead be spent somewhere else.
        naasking 7y ago
        Closing the loophole of a negative externality absolutely would generate revenue that could be spent elsewhere. Carbon taxes are a perfect example.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    It is counted as a valid means of subsidy by both the EU and WTO. The UK was singled out for increasing fossil fuel subsidy by the EU, when UK gov reduced the VAT rate on domestic fuel bills. As the grid moves to renewables the level of subsidy declines. The UK kept that reduced rate on domestic fuel when they brought in a low carbon price floor (another bonus of EU membership). That managed to take almost all coal out of UK power generation - there's only three plants left, all marked to close in the next couple of years. It's already starting to have impact on gas's viability. As different rules apply to vehicle fuel, and domestic fuel, individual behaviour hasn't been much affected, and cities are still full of dirty air from internal combustion. UK has been particularly weak at improving air quality in the last decade or so.
    - jjoonathan 7y ago
      Definitions are contextual. I think it's 100% reasonable for the EU and WTO to define subsidy in such a way that it can include untaxed externalities. I'm comfortable with that definition myself. I still think it was deceptive for imglorp to transplant that definition into a context where it wasn't mutually understood and then leverage the misunderstanding to promote an incorrect picture of reality. > We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere. "Spending" and "divert" imply a cash flow, not a flow of value in the form of a collection of externalities. That's relevant. Redirecting funds is a different political beast from increasing taxes. To be clear, I want a carbon tax. Let's promote it with logic, not with clumsy attempts at deception.
      - wutbrodo 7y ago
        As someone who believes in action on climate change and is very willing to take the consumption and taxation hits that that implies, this is what frustrates me most about the climate conversation: I've already "priced in" the existence of stubborn skeptics and greedy people, but the fact that even the "good guys" compulsively lie and distort the facts when it comes to climate change makes changing public opinion seem insurmountable (and this is how you change policy in a democracy). It's at times like these when the criticism of my fellow leftists as religious adherents[1] sounds the most uncomfortably true: people talk in terms of facts but think in terms of dogma and heresy. There's no claim in support of the dogma that should be suppressed and no claim in favor of the heresy that should be acknowledged. It reminds me of nothing so much as the tenor of criticism of Trump, especially early in his term. The man is already a monster! You don't need to keep lying to make him look like one, and all it does is turn of people who mightve agreed with your legitimate criticism! [1] To be clear, I have no reason to think that our counterparts on the right don't do this too. It just makes more of an impact to realize that everyone around you is dishonest and stupid than it does to realize that everyone in a relatively alien subculture is.
- CountSessine 7y ago
  Have you read the study? It isn’t behind a paywall or anything - it’s free to read. with under-charging for domestic air pollution accounting for about half of the total subsidy and global warming about a quarter. I’m not completely against calling the huge unpriced externality of carbon emissions a “subsidy”; but markets are reactive and once we start charging a carbon tax, we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too.
  - shkkmo 7y ago
    > we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too. You mean we will have to pay less to deal with the health effects of air pollution and and the economic effects of global warming? I'm not clear what subsidy we "miss out on" here.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      I agree that pricing the externalities is fairly counted, but the GP comment framing it as a subsidy is still dishonest: someone could easily read that Stat and decide that you can add the $N trillion from carbon tax revenue to the $5T in removed subsidy, and they'd end up overcounting by about $4.5T
- guscost 7y ago
  There’s some tricky accounting going on with this number: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/589000/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article... > Then the report adds that there is actually another kind of subsidy, which it calls a post-tax subsidy. This subsidy reflects the difference between “actual consumer fuel prices” and the full societal and environmental costs of a fuel.
  - modzu 7y ago
    sounds like the same math tesla used in pricing their vehicles (subtracting how much an average person spends on gas from the advertised total)
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. Ok, but China is adding millions of brand new drivers to the roads every year, they've had to institute a lottery system just to determine who can apply for a license. They're building roads, bridges, gas stations etc as fast as they can to accommodate all of the new drivers and you can see this documented in the China episode of Grand Tour last season. This is going to happen with or without subsidies (Besides, I highly doubt China is subsidizing their citizens petrochemical purchases in any meaningful amount). China is going to have more drivers than the United States has people in the country in the near future and that will only continue to grow. Are you going to tell more than a billion people to never get a car and to only walk places? What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)? >Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population). https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
  - ptenk 7y ago
    But China is weaning itself off fossil fuels? China has over 400,000 electric buses (99% of the world) and the longest high speed rail in the planet. High-speed rails carry twice as many passengers each month as the country’s airlines. 4.2% of new car purchases in China were electric vehicles in 2018. China has 250 million electric motorcycles/scooters (99% of the world's). These numbers are growing rapidly every year. China is also the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power not to mention the world's leading installer of solar panels. Their literal stated goal for 2050 is to reach 1,300 GW of solar capacity, which is enormous. That would make it the source with the largest installed capacity in China. China has a lot of problems, but fossil fuel addiction is not one of them.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Just by virtue of them being big, it is still a problem. Also said started goal is less than used for consensus "current" climate change target by IPCC which is considered optimistic and nets some 3.5 C rise as per model. 2050 is too late as well. To make a big difference the timetable for that capacity would have to be 2030 and all the baseline would have to be hydro or nuclear. This is unlikely to happen even if they really want to do it. Now consider that we also have USA to handle who are notorious about ignoring climate change targets... Now, even 5 C is not a cataclysmic event but it will be very bad on a global scale - mostly water availability and farming, related price shocks and social upheaval.
deleted 7y ago
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tim333 7y ago
Technically, carbon pricing at $100 would probably do it. I agree politically that's hard.
- HPsquared 7y ago
  $100 per what?
  - tromp 7y ago
    per metric ton (a.k.a. tonne) of CO2
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- cogman10 7y ago
  You'd have to do that globally to be successful. Otherwise you'll just drive producing industries to countries that don't care (Russia, for example). Effectively what would happen is high CO2 parts (such as concrete) would be manufactured in a country that doesn't tax it. If you say "Oh, well we'll just tariff it!" then the next step would be to ship it to a country without said tariff. That country could then move the goods directly to the taxed nation or it could ping pong a bit till it reaches it's end goal. Would that raise prices? Absolutely, but probably less than the $100 tax would. All the while increasing the amount of CO2 emitted due to all the shipping that would occur. And, if you don't think that would happen, just look at how it's worked out with child labor laws. The balancing act would be to tax hard enough to make industries want to decrease their emissions, yet low enough that importing isn't more economically viable. As a bonus, you could spend that revenue in building out clean energy sources to effect change faster.
  - hef19898 7y ago
    Regarding the tariffs. These are usually country of origin based, so shipping to a third country first doesn't help.
Angostura 7y ago
It wasn't hard back in 1989 when we knew it was a problem that needed addressing. It's getting increasingly hard.

imglorp 7y ago

We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509 https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Glo...

jjoonathan 7y ago
I've seen some very expansive definitions of "subsidy" that include, for example, not taxing carbon emissions. In that case, you couldn't just divert the money, because it never existed in a budget. You could implement a carbon tax, and I'd be all for that, but it wouldn't be in the same policy class as diverting an existing stream of budgetary money.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  About ~1 Billion of that cited number is from global warming costs. The larger portions is from health costs associated with air pollution which accounts for ~2 Billion. You can find a break down of the sources of that subsidy at the bottom of page 21 of the linked article.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Do you mean trillion here?
    - shkkmo 7y ago
      Haha, yup
- topkai22 7y ago
  Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities. Only something like $500B is attributed to direct subsidies or foregone tax revenue.
  - givinguflac 7y ago
    "only" 500 BILLION. How is that small change
    - topkai22 7y ago
      It's not small change, but when it is ~10% of the claimed figure I think "only" is the proper adjective. It's what upsets me about these sorts of papers- "civilian" climate change skeptics/deniers point to them as evidence of the dishonesty of consensus community. They are able to take away the wrong message- that consensus community is stretching and manipulating the data, rather than there are $300-600B of subsidies for fossil fuels out there.
    - tengbretson 7y ago
      If the author of that article had to misrepresent in order to pump the number up by 10x we can assume that they didn't think 500 billion was a compelling enough number.
  - naasking 7y ago
    > Yeah, in the cited study is almost all externalities. Negative externalities are a type of subsidy.
    - DougN7 7y ago
      I think the point is it’s not a subsidy that could instead be spent somewhere else.
      - naasking 7y ago
        Closing the loophole of a negative externality absolutely would generate revenue that could be spent elsewhere. Carbon taxes are a perfect example.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  It is counted as a valid means of subsidy by both the EU and WTO. The UK was singled out for increasing fossil fuel subsidy by the EU, when UK gov reduced the VAT rate on domestic fuel bills. As the grid moves to renewables the level of subsidy declines. The UK kept that reduced rate on domestic fuel when they brought in a low carbon price floor (another bonus of EU membership). That managed to take almost all coal out of UK power generation - there's only three plants left, all marked to close in the next couple of years. It's already starting to have impact on gas's viability. As different rules apply to vehicle fuel, and domestic fuel, individual behaviour hasn't been much affected, and cities are still full of dirty air from internal combustion. UK has been particularly weak at improving air quality in the last decade or so.
  - jjoonathan 7y ago
    Definitions are contextual. I think it's 100% reasonable for the EU and WTO to define subsidy in such a way that it can include untaxed externalities. I'm comfortable with that definition myself. I still think it was deceptive for imglorp to transplant that definition into a context where it wasn't mutually understood and then leverage the misunderstanding to promote an incorrect picture of reality. > We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. All you have to do is divert that elsewhere. "Spending" and "divert" imply a cash flow, not a flow of value in the form of a collection of externalities. That's relevant. Redirecting funds is a different political beast from increasing taxes. To be clear, I want a carbon tax. Let's promote it with logic, not with clumsy attempts at deception.
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      As someone who believes in action on climate change and is very willing to take the consumption and taxation hits that that implies, this is what frustrates me most about the climate conversation: I've already "priced in" the existence of stubborn skeptics and greedy people, but the fact that even the "good guys" compulsively lie and distort the facts when it comes to climate change makes changing public opinion seem insurmountable (and this is how you change policy in a democracy). It's at times like these when the criticism of my fellow leftists as religious adherents[1] sounds the most uncomfortably true: people talk in terms of facts but think in terms of dogma and heresy. There's no claim in support of the dogma that should be suppressed and no claim in favor of the heresy that should be acknowledged. It reminds me of nothing so much as the tenor of criticism of Trump, especially early in his term. The man is already a monster! You don't need to keep lying to make him look like one, and all it does is turn of people who mightve agreed with your legitimate criticism! [1] To be clear, I have no reason to think that our counterparts on the right don't do this too. It just makes more of an impact to realize that everyone around you is dishonest and stupid than it does to realize that everyone in a relatively alien subculture is.
CountSessine 7y ago
Have you read the study? It isn’t behind a paywall or anything - it’s free to read. with under-charging for domestic air pollution accounting for about half of the total subsidy and global warming about a quarter. I’m not completely against calling the huge unpriced externality of carbon emissions a “subsidy”; but markets are reactive and once we start charging a carbon tax, we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too.
- shkkmo 7y ago
  > we’ll start emitting less carbon dioxide (good!) But we’ll lose out on much of this “subsidy”, too. You mean we will have to pay less to deal with the health effects of air pollution and and the economic effects of global warming? I'm not clear what subsidy we "miss out on" here.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I agree that pricing the externalities is fairly counted, but the GP comment framing it as a subsidy is still dishonest: someone could easily read that Stat and decide that you can add the $N trillion from carbon tax revenue to the $5T in removed subsidy, and they'd end up overcounting by about $4.5T
guscost 7y ago
There’s some tricky accounting going on with this number: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/589000/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article... > Then the report adds that there is actually another kind of subsidy, which it calls a post-tax subsidy. This subsidy reflects the difference between “actual consumer fuel prices” and the full societal and environmental costs of a fuel.
- modzu 7y ago
  sounds like the same math tesla used in pricing their vehicles (subtracting how much an average person spends on gas from the advertised total)
ryanmercer 7y ago
>We are spending more than $5T annually on fossil subsidies. Ok, but China is adding millions of brand new drivers to the roads every year, they've had to institute a lottery system just to determine who can apply for a license. They're building roads, bridges, gas stations etc as fast as they can to accommodate all of the new drivers and you can see this documented in the China episode of Grand Tour last season. This is going to happen with or without subsidies (Besides, I highly doubt China is subsidizing their citizens petrochemical purchases in any meaningful amount). China is going to have more drivers than the United States has people in the country in the near future and that will only continue to grow. Are you going to tell more than a billion people to never get a car and to only walk places? What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)? >Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population). https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/ https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
- ptenk 7y ago
  But China is weaning itself off fossil fuels? China has over 400,000 electric buses (99% of the world) and the longest high speed rail in the planet. High-speed rails carry twice as many passengers each month as the country’s airlines. 4.2% of new car purchases in China were electric vehicles in 2018. China has 250 million electric motorcycles/scooters (99% of the world's). These numbers are growing rapidly every year. China is also the world's largest producer of photovoltaic power not to mention the world's leading installer of solar panels. Their literal stated goal for 2050 is to reach 1,300 GW of solar capacity, which is enormous. That would make it the source with the largest installed capacity in China. China has a lot of problems, but fossil fuel addiction is not one of them.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Just by virtue of them being big, it is still a problem. Also said started goal is less than used for consensus "current" climate change target by IPCC which is considered optimistic and nets some 3.5 C rise as per model. 2050 is too late as well. To make a big difference the timetable for that capacity would have to be 2030 and all the baseline would have to be hydro or nuclear. This is unlikely to happen even if they really want to do it. Now consider that we also have USA to handle who are notorious about ignoring climate change targets... Now, even 5 C is not a cataclysmic event but it will be very bad on a global scale - mostly water availability and farming, related price shocks and social upheaval.

deleted 7y ago

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tim333 7y ago

Technically, carbon pricing at $100 would probably do it. I agree politically that's hard.

HPsquared 7y ago
$100 per what?
- tromp 7y ago
  per metric ton (a.k.a. tonne) of CO2
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
cogman10 7y ago
You'd have to do that globally to be successful. Otherwise you'll just drive producing industries to countries that don't care (Russia, for example). Effectively what would happen is high CO2 parts (such as concrete) would be manufactured in a country that doesn't tax it. If you say "Oh, well we'll just tariff it!" then the next step would be to ship it to a country without said tariff. That country could then move the goods directly to the taxed nation or it could ping pong a bit till it reaches it's end goal. Would that raise prices? Absolutely, but probably less than the $100 tax would. All the while increasing the amount of CO2 emitted due to all the shipping that would occur. And, if you don't think that would happen, just look at how it's worked out with child labor laws. The balancing act would be to tax hard enough to make industries want to decrease their emissions, yet low enough that importing isn't more economically viable. As a bonus, you could spend that revenue in building out clean energy sources to effect change faster.
- hef19898 7y ago
  Regarding the tariffs. These are usually country of origin based, so shipping to a third country first doesn't help.

Angostura 7y ago

It wasn't hard back in 1989 when we knew it was a problem that needed addressing. It's getting increasingly hard.