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"Science has been settled" The science of what? That we have climate change pretty much "everybody" will agree on. The science of climate solutions is not ev
by 38140585 6y ago
"Science has been settled"
The science of what?
That we have climate change pretty much "everybody" will agree on.
The science of climate solutions is not even close to being settled. I have a Master in Energy (BSc in Energy) with focus on renewable energy. But try to get a group of professors from different fields to get along to see what is the way forward, or the mix of what. Nuclear energy, geoengineering, hydrogen, fusion, batteries of all kind, destruction of nature to create pumped hydro storage, capturing CO2, wind, concentrated solar, solar PV, biodiesel (and from what), ethanol, gas, Algae, bore holes, solar thermal seasonal storage, biomass, ocean energy and the lists go on.
So when you say that the science is settled I think your looking at the simple part where we see the problem but still has a huge way in what the actual solution.
People who say that we should just do this or that are usually pretty much always out of the loop and rarely know the downside of the technologies. It's not that we have 10 000 thousands of professors in the world that are just stubborn egotist. We don't have obvious good solutions yet. We do for some places, Norway have so much hydro that it's ridiculous, other places have other things and worst part is that many don't have that good options.
Please show some humility to people who have worked on solutions for the last 100 years.
- adrianN 6y agoThe sensible thing to do when the science that says that we need to stop producing CO2 as quickly as possible is clear but the solution space is not figured out quite so well is to set up a cap-and-trade system for emissions and adjust the cap to whatever the climate scientists think is reasonable for the warming goal we're trying to achieve. This has been known for a long time among economists; there even was a Nobel price for this. There are also many steps that we can take right now that are completely uncontroversial. For example requiring proper insulation for all new buildings and starting a program to retrofit existing buildings.
- DuskStar 6y agoIsn't Cap+Trade just worse at everything (except optics) than an appropriate carbon tax?
- adrianN 6y agoI don't see a big difference between the two, but I'm not an economist. Why do you think that a tax is strictly better?
- AstralStorm 6y agoTax is not good enough either, because of immediate gaming of "tax breaks". Directly mandate use of clean solutions. No trade, just cap and regulate. Hard deadlines and checks. Including on outsourced deployments to close that loophole.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoIMO, regulations are easier to gamify and capture than simple taxes are.
- AstralStorm 6y agoWhat happens with trade systems is that they get gamed to the point of uselessness. They're implemented already and patently worthless, because the price would have to be truly high to matter. This is not the way and a delay in implementing proper controls nobody can afford.