4 ms·

You don't need to prepend "Respectfully" in order to insult. You can just go ahead and say it directly, and what you are doing is helping climate change skeptic

by belorn 7y ago

You don't need to prepend "Respectfully" in order to insult. You can just go ahead and say it directly, and what you are doing is helping climate change skeptics by hiding the fact that coal that was once in the ground is now being burned and released into the air as pollution. If you dig out coal and burn it in a power plant then you are producing pollution and contributing to global warming. No amount of exporting green energy changes that fact. You are trying to dodge the question why there is a big whole in the ground where the coal once where. Someone mined it. Someone burned it. Someone bought it. Each and everyone involved are partly responsible for the harm this act caused to the environment. It is a bit like thief stealing, a fence reselling it and a customer buying it without asking questions of why it is so cheap. It is not an elegant system because in the end a crime occurred and real harm has happened. If you want to produce green energy or run a nuclear plant then do what ever feels best, but the coal stays in the ground. No amount of misleading can hide the fact that digging it out is harmful to the planet, both on a macro and micro level, and if you fund coal mining by buying their energy then you are part of the problem.

avar 7y ago
It's not being hidden, it's being exhaustively documented. Of course burning coal sucks, and we should replace those power plants. But until then we can also discourage their use by subsidising clean energy at their expense. That's what this system is meant to accomplish. It's beyond me how someone can look at what's effectively a tax on non-renewables as whitewashing those energy sources. You tax behavior you want to discourage.
- belorn 7y ago
  When society collectively decide that something suck we have a simple mechanism to fix it. We make it illegal. Theft suck. We have thus laws against it. A carbon tax in the energy sector helps but it is a rather inefficient method compared to simply keeping the coal in the ground. People keep finding ways to make profits from digging the coal out and burning it, and Sweden is currently a customer to those people. The system has not been successful in keeping the coal in the ground. What it currently accomplishing in Sweden is the opposite, as Swedish use of coal energy has increased. A simple law would fix that, and it doesn't require a discussion about what energy should be subsidized. The only thing required is a stroke of the law writers pen. It is the easiest, simplest and most efficient solution in keeping the coal in the ground and the only reason people are not doing it is that people want to keep buying the energy produced by burning coal.
  - avar 7y ago
    The energy credit system accomplishes some things that your proposals don't. It's not realistic to make burning coal and other non-renewables illegal in Europe, less than 20% of the grid has been transitioned[1]. You can't just shut off 80% of the grid without European civilization as we know it coming to an end for the foreseeable future. In the meantime there's plenty of uses of energy that can be built in one EU/EEA country or the other, or shifted between countries, and which will respond to price incentives. E.g. a data center that's not ping-time sensitive or bulk bandwidth sensitive is probably better placed in Iceland than The Netherlands from an ecological perspective. The impact of the energy credit system is to shift that sort of use between countries and energy providers, to the extent that their use will respond to price incentives. It is relatively ineffective in the larger scheme of things, just like our buildup of renewable energy is proceeding at a relatively slow pace. But that's not an argument against the systems in place per-se, just like some country setting their VAT at 1% isn't an argument against VAT structurally. The EU/EEA agreement doesn't have explicit tax-raising powers, so it's really not the case that a simple law could do the same thing. This system is effectively a way to create a new EEA-wide tax through a back-door mechanism. Any national tax policy wouldn't be as effective, because individual countries in the EEA market can't or aren't going to enact law that mandates that some of their companies move abroad because their own energy market isn't renewable enough. It also gives individual consumers a way to vote with their money to increase the buildup of renewables. As an example, I live in Amsterdam where (as far as I know) I have no choice but to consume electrons sourced by burning fossil fuels[2]. However, I have opted to pay extra to buy "green" (wind and solar) energy, but the energy that comes out of my power plugs as I type this comment is still sourced from burning coal/gas. Am I just participating in a gigantic sham? No, because what I'm doing is buying the production of energy capacity corresponding to my own use for use elsewhere on the power grid. So I'm taking part in reducing the overall demand for fossil fuels, and thus doing my own small part in reducing pollution. By the way, from a cursory glance the current Swedish carbon tax is at best around 1/4 per-ton of the cost of sequestering that CO^2 back into the ground. If that's the case of course it's not really all that effective, but just like in the case of the energy credit system the problem there isn't with the very concept of the system of a carbon tax (which is probably the single best way to deal with the overall problem), but with the value that tax is set at. 1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Infographic_REN-2004-2015.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 2. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_Hemweg https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_Hemweg

by belorn 7y ago

avar 7y ago

It's not being hidden, it's being exhaustively documented. Of course burning coal sucks, and we should replace those power plants. But until then we can also discourage their use by subsidising clean energy at their expense. That's what this system is meant to accomplish. It's beyond me how someone can look at what's effectively a tax on non-renewables as whitewashing those energy sources. You tax behavior you want to discourage.

belorn 7y ago
When society collectively decide that something suck we have a simple mechanism to fix it. We make it illegal. Theft suck. We have thus laws against it. A carbon tax in the energy sector helps but it is a rather inefficient method compared to simply keeping the coal in the ground. People keep finding ways to make profits from digging the coal out and burning it, and Sweden is currently a customer to those people. The system has not been successful in keeping the coal in the ground. What it currently accomplishing in Sweden is the opposite, as Swedish use of coal energy has increased. A simple law would fix that, and it doesn't require a discussion about what energy should be subsidized. The only thing required is a stroke of the law writers pen. It is the easiest, simplest and most efficient solution in keeping the coal in the ground and the only reason people are not doing it is that people want to keep buying the energy produced by burning coal.
- avar 7y ago
  The energy credit system accomplishes some things that your proposals don't. It's not realistic to make burning coal and other non-renewables illegal in Europe, less than 20% of the grid has been transitioned[1]. You can't just shut off 80% of the grid without European civilization as we know it coming to an end for the foreseeable future. In the meantime there's plenty of uses of energy that can be built in one EU/EEA country or the other, or shifted between countries, and which will respond to price incentives. E.g. a data center that's not ping-time sensitive or bulk bandwidth sensitive is probably better placed in Iceland than The Netherlands from an ecological perspective. The impact of the energy credit system is to shift that sort of use between countries and energy providers, to the extent that their use will respond to price incentives. It is relatively ineffective in the larger scheme of things, just like our buildup of renewable energy is proceeding at a relatively slow pace. But that's not an argument against the systems in place per-se, just like some country setting their VAT at 1% isn't an argument against VAT structurally. The EU/EEA agreement doesn't have explicit tax-raising powers, so it's really not the case that a simple law could do the same thing. This system is effectively a way to create a new EEA-wide tax through a back-door mechanism. Any national tax policy wouldn't be as effective, because individual countries in the EEA market can't or aren't going to enact law that mandates that some of their companies move abroad because their own energy market isn't renewable enough. It also gives individual consumers a way to vote with their money to increase the buildup of renewables. As an example, I live in Amsterdam where (as far as I know) I have no choice but to consume electrons sourced by burning fossil fuels[2]. However, I have opted to pay extra to buy "green" (wind and solar) energy, but the energy that comes out of my power plugs as I type this comment is still sourced from burning coal/gas. Am I just participating in a gigantic sham? No, because what I'm doing is buying the production of energy capacity corresponding to my own use for use elsewhere on the power grid. So I'm taking part in reducing the overall demand for fossil fuels, and thus doing my own small part in reducing pollution. By the way, from a cursory glance the current Swedish carbon tax is at best around 1/4 per-ton of the cost of sequestering that CO^2 back into the ground. If that's the case of course it's not really all that effective, but just like in the case of the energy credit system the problem there isn't with the very concept of the system of a carbon tax (which is probably the single best way to deal with the overall problem), but with the value that tax is set at. 1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Infographic_REN-2004-2015.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 2. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_Hemweg https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_Hemweg