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What market force do you see driving the use of excess energy to sequester carbon? What force is going to ensure enough carbon is sequestered? Climate change i

What market force do you see driving the use of excess energy to sequester carbon? What force is going to ensure enough carbon is sequestered? Climate change is a kind of prototypical example of a tragedy of the commons. Capitalism has not been particularly noteworthy for solving these sorts of problems. I can certainly see it helping to make renewables more affordable, but that's simply not enough at this point.

mulmen 6y ago
Quick quack suggests CO2 can be converted to carbon fiber. Also looks promising as a feed stock in the chemical and plastics industries. We figured out a use for gasoline, I’m sure we will think of something. Doesn’t hurt for the government to put a thumb on the scale either.
- allworknoplay 6y ago
  This just results in more junk. Where do you think it all goes? It's a shell game.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Well we could bury it. Is that so different from taking it out of the air and putting it directly in an old oil well? Not sure what the recycling story is with carbon fiber. I suppose we could make extremely durable goods but that may not be desirable until we pull enough carbon out of the air. These were just quick examples though. There’s bound to be a lot of uses for carbon, it’s abundant for a reason. The point is we can leverage our consumer nature to incentivize markets that help solve climate change. We can literally consume our way out of this mess.
    - allworknoplay 6y ago
      "We can literally consume our way out of this mess" is my new all-time favorite HN quote. Sorry if you were being tongue-in-cheek, it's just too good.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - epistasis 6y ago
        What do you think a just transition will look like? One person's "consumption" and growth is another's "I finally have electricity in my village, powered by solar and batteries," or "EV purchasing grew so much that the oil refinery a mile away shut down and my family no longer gets sick like they used to." What exactly does a Green New Deal look like? Massive consumption is a huge component of it. And this is why white environmentalists are not trusted by the environmental justice community. Too much vague moralizing, not enough understanding of the plight of people who are being oppressed by the current system, or even what the current system actually is.
        allworknoplay 6y ago
        I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm vaguely moralizing -- elsewhere in this thread I recommend a 2020 book called Less is More (https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more) that contains analysis of these problems and very specific strategies for addressing them. It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.
        epistasis 6y ago
        This is quite the coincidence, I was just reading this essay about MMT and degrowth by that author: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-mmt-a-thought-experiment/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-m... And while I agree with his numbered policy prescriptions (perhaps quibbling about a jobs guarantee versus universal income), the rhetoric and diction is so objectionable and wrong that it's like we are speaking different language. What he calls degrowth is actually massive growth and consumption in my view. Public services for all? FANTASTIC and exactly what we need. But that's not "degrowth," that's massive growth. Switch to renewables? That requires absolutely huge economic growth and change. In practice, on the ground in communities using words like "degrowth" in their politics, degrowth is rich people continuing with what they have and nobody else getting access to it. "Degrowth" is the word and philosophy used to block projects that help working people because the wealthy are doing A-OK. The "degrowth" language allows the wealthy capitalists to hold onto everything, and will never enable the correction of wealth inequality and distribution problems of capitalism. I see it in my own small town, that is an outlier in the US. ~30% residents label themselves anti-capitalist, ~30% are working class non-landwoners without much political ideology except populism, ~30% are landlords trying to extract money. A significant chunk of the "anti-capitalist" segment are also landlords and influence the politics of the "degrowth" anti-capitalists to privilege the already privileged, this is really dangerous ways to think about things. The terrible language enables the reactionaries more than the revolutionaries. Make "capitalism" vague and unspecific enough to be a vague "bad" label, make "consumption" a vague and undefinable term, and it will be used by those in power as a tool to subvert any change. For a school of thought that seems to abhor "contradictions," they seem to embrace them when it comes to using words.
radicalbyte 6y ago
Capitalism is exceptionally good at solving problems when there is money to be made. Putting the right price on carbon will solve that.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Capitalism is exceptionally good at solving problems when there is money to be made. Well, unless the money is to be made by exacerbating the problem, but sure. > Putting the right price on carbon will solve that. State intervention to set prices to try to steer the market to make progress on social goals that it would not without State intervention is not capitalism.
  - mulmen 6y ago
    Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system. “Setting the price” is something the market does. Regulation can influence that by manipulating incentives. That does not mean prices are set by the state.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system. If by “capitalist system” you mean “bourgeois socialist mixed economy that replaced capitalism throughout the developed West generally around the mid-20th Century through the efforts of a broad coalition of people fed up with the horrors of actual capitalism”, that's true. But that system isn't actually capitalism, and the central role of government regulation aimed at channeling the effort of “private” industry by rearranging incentives to different places than they would be set by the free market is one of the central ways in which it differs from capitalism. The only reason people pretend otherwise is to maintain the fiction that they are on the opposite side of the global capitalist/socialist struggle that predated general disillusionment with capitalism in the West, because even though actual ideology shifted, ideological tribal identity didn't.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Property rights is an important part of capitalism and CO2 emissions could be modeled as property damage to everyone else.

mulmen 6y ago

Quick quack suggests CO2 can be converted to carbon fiber. Also looks promising as a feed stock in the chemical and plastics industries. We figured out a use for gasoline, I’m sure we will think of something. Doesn’t hurt for the government to put a thumb on the scale either.

allworknoplay 6y ago
This just results in more junk. Where do you think it all goes? It's a shell game.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Well we could bury it. Is that so different from taking it out of the air and putting it directly in an old oil well? Not sure what the recycling story is with carbon fiber. I suppose we could make extremely durable goods but that may not be desirable until we pull enough carbon out of the air. These were just quick examples though. There’s bound to be a lot of uses for carbon, it’s abundant for a reason. The point is we can leverage our consumer nature to incentivize markets that help solve climate change. We can literally consume our way out of this mess.
  - allworknoplay 6y ago
    "We can literally consume our way out of this mess" is my new all-time favorite HN quote. Sorry if you were being tongue-in-cheek, it's just too good.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - epistasis 6y ago
      What do you think a just transition will look like? One person's "consumption" and growth is another's "I finally have electricity in my village, powered by solar and batteries," or "EV purchasing grew so much that the oil refinery a mile away shut down and my family no longer gets sick like they used to." What exactly does a Green New Deal look like? Massive consumption is a huge component of it. And this is why white environmentalists are not trusted by the environmental justice community. Too much vague moralizing, not enough understanding of the plight of people who are being oppressed by the current system, or even what the current system actually is.
      - allworknoplay 6y ago
        I'm not sure where you get the idea that I'm vaguely moralizing -- elsewhere in this thread I recommend a 2020 book called Less is More (https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more https://www.jasonhickel.org/less-is-more) that contains analysis of these problems and very specific strategies for addressing them. It's well understood that wealthy countries, and especially the US, generate far more junk than poorer ones. We don't need to, and there's a big difference between sustainable strategies for getting people what they need and hoping (because, without planning, that's all we're doing) that capitalism will solve this problem through even greater amounts of consumption.
        epistasis 6y ago
        This is quite the coincidence, I was just reading this essay about MMT and degrowth by that author: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-mmt-a-thought-experiment/ https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-09-23/degrowth-and-m... And while I agree with his numbered policy prescriptions (perhaps quibbling about a jobs guarantee versus universal income), the rhetoric and diction is so objectionable and wrong that it's like we are speaking different language. What he calls degrowth is actually massive growth and consumption in my view. Public services for all? FANTASTIC and exactly what we need. But that's not "degrowth," that's massive growth. Switch to renewables? That requires absolutely huge economic growth and change. In practice, on the ground in communities using words like "degrowth" in their politics, degrowth is rich people continuing with what they have and nobody else getting access to it. "Degrowth" is the word and philosophy used to block projects that help working people because the wealthy are doing A-OK. The "degrowth" language allows the wealthy capitalists to hold onto everything, and will never enable the correction of wealth inequality and distribution problems of capitalism. I see it in my own small town, that is an outlier in the US. ~30% residents label themselves anti-capitalist, ~30% are working class non-landwoners without much political ideology except populism, ~30% are landlords trying to extract money. A significant chunk of the "anti-capitalist" segment are also landlords and influence the politics of the "degrowth" anti-capitalists to privilege the already privileged, this is really dangerous ways to think about things. The terrible language enables the reactionaries more than the revolutionaries. Make "capitalism" vague and unspecific enough to be a vague "bad" label, make "consumption" a vague and undefinable term, and it will be used by those in power as a tool to subvert any change. For a school of thought that seems to abhor "contradictions," they seem to embrace them when it comes to using words.

radicalbyte 6y ago

Capitalism is exceptionally good at solving problems when there is money to be made. Putting the right price on carbon will solve that.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> Capitalism is exceptionally good at solving problems when there is money to be made. Well, unless the money is to be made by exacerbating the problem, but sure. > Putting the right price on carbon will solve that. State intervention to set prices to try to steer the market to make progress on social goals that it would not without State intervention is not capitalism.
- mulmen 6y ago
  Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system. “Setting the price” is something the market does. Regulation can influence that by manipulating incentives. That does not mean prices are set by the state.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system. If by “capitalist system” you mean “bourgeois socialist mixed economy that replaced capitalism throughout the developed West generally around the mid-20th Century through the efforts of a broad coalition of people fed up with the horrors of actual capitalism”, that's true. But that system isn't actually capitalism, and the central role of government regulation aimed at channeling the effort of “private” industry by rearranging incentives to different places than they would be set by the free market is one of the central ways in which it differs from capitalism. The only reason people pretend otherwise is to maintain the fiction that they are on the opposite side of the global capitalist/socialist struggle that predated general disillusionment with capitalism in the West, because even though actual ideology shifted, ideological tribal identity didn't.
- kortilla 6y ago
  Property rights is an important part of capitalism and CO2 emissions could be modeled as property damage to everyone else.