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I feel like I keep seeing articles covering climate-related events/disasters happening Sooner Than Expected™. I'm already doing my best to reduce my personal im
by vzidex 7y ago
I feel like I keep seeing articles covering climate-related events/disasters happening Sooner Than Expected™. I'm already doing my best to reduce my personal impact and raise awareness in my social circle, but it's worrying that the biggest doomsday predictions might actually come true.
- themagician 7y agoThe change needs to be systemic, which is the problem. Logistics, industry and agriculture make up the vast majority of emissions. But for these things to change prices will have to rise probably quite dramatically. We’ve gotten so used to not paying for the externalities associated with emissions it’s damn near impossible to shift gears. Even at the individual level people are often only willing to do it when the cost increase is marginal. If we taxed emissions at every level things would get so expensive people would riot. I think we just have to accept that our society is not designed in a way that we can deal with this. We will have to let the catastrophe happen before there will be any real change. Even then their may not be change. We just have to wait for enough people to die for the system to fall back into balance.
- specialist 7y agoUpvoted. Your observations, calculus, and conclusions are correct. I'd only suggest that we're already paying for those externalities. It's just that those costs are off book. So the feedback loops are broken. Making improvements all but impossible. A carbon tax would update our accounting rules to capture those costs in a direct and efficient manner.
- jandrese 7y agoThe fundamental problem with the Carbon Market is that we are missing the entire second half of the equation. There is no viable large scale carbon removal technologies that would allow us to set a price per ton of carbon released. The market doesn't work because it is all supply and no demand. If we were serious about this there would be hundreds or thousands of companies competing on the most cost effective way to remove carbon from the atmosphere. All companies would be required to buy enough carbon removal to make them zero net emissions. When you buy a gallon of gas it would have whatever the current market value of 5.5lbs of carbon removal factored in right at the pump. Or that would happen at the refinery and be reflected in the final price of the gas. Unfortunately if you wanted to jump start this market it would be very disruptive to the global economy. Governments worldwide (it's too easy to export pollution, this needs to be a worldwide solution) would have to agree on a very high price to get the market started to avoid undercutting companies wanting to get into it and let the money start forming a pile so terrifically large that people would be scrambling to develop carbon capture technologies faster and cheaper than the competition. There would be a lot of cheating and lying that would need to be policed worldwide. Our current system of governments is not capable of pulling this off. Carbon markets are something people try to entice capitalists with, but only because they don't think people will look at the details. To actually implement them would send those same capitalists howling and screaming to their nearest governmental body with exceptions and rollbacks in hand.
- hcknwscommenter 7y agoMost serious carbon market proposals are not primarily related to removal/sequestration. They are related to reducing emissions. You get credits for emitting less and/or producing low emission technologies (solar panels, EVs, etc.), and can sell them or use them to reduce your tax burden. This type of thing works, when done right.
- thinkcontext 7y agoIts not that they aren't primarily related to it, most proposals are neutral as to whether a ton of CO2 is avoided or sequestered. It just so happens to be the case that its relatively expensive to capture and sequester CO2 from the atmosphere compared to emissions avoidance. The lowest hanging fruit is efficiency (better insulation, more efficient appliances, cars, etc), followed by lower carbon forms of electricity, etc. We'll likely need to do sequestration but, assuming a gradually rising carbon price, it won't make economic sense to do it at scale until we've done the more cost effective things first.
- jandrese 7y agoThe nice thing about working markets is that it would naturally pressure people to do the cost effective stuff first. If buying carbon offsets is appropriately expensive you have a major incentive to avoid buying them.
- jandrese 7y agoThat's just a tax with makeup. That's why they never work in the real world, and why they fall apart under any political pressure. The point of the market is that it provides political pressure from companies on both ends so it is insulated from political whims, at least to some degree. If some company wants to grease their local politicians to get exceptions or have the price set low they get pushback from other companies that want to redeem those credits at full price.
- WorldMaker 7y agoThought experiment: It would be interesting if you could somehow reverse centuries of terrible marketing on blood diamonds and make sequestered/captured "man-made" diamonds more valuable to the average person than ones mined, you might find a lot more interest in sequestration/capture.
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- pier25 7y ago> If we taxed emissions at every level things would get so expensive people would riot Indeed. The carbon tax would have to be implemented gradually so that the market can adapt. We should have started doing this 20-30 years ago, unfortunately we're out of time and humanity will have to make some very drastic and difficult decisions.
- gbrown 7y agoClimate scientists have long feared being called alarmist, and indeed - the preliminary evidence is that this may have led to over-conservative estimates of the impacts and timescale of the climate disaster.
- kaybe 7y agoYou don't want to know about the results discussed at conferences where there doesn't have to be consensus on how bad it is/could be.. the IPCC reports are quite optimistic.