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I resist this eco-shaming we see everywhere. Flying: bad. Crypto: bad. Avocado: bad. It's total nonsense. What we need is a very heavy tax on CO2eq, or on all

• paulgb 6y ago
  I agree with a carbon tax in general but it misses the point when it comes to crypto. When it comes to domestic travel you can tax airlines directly; for manufacture it’s harder but you can in theory tax at the border. For cryptos, which were designed to subvert government control, there is no way to tax them since mining can just move to somewhere with less environmental controls.
  • Taek 6y ago
    That's not a problem unique to crypto, it's true of all manufacturing. And honestly I think the solution is to declare war (whether via sanctions, violence, or some other means) on regions that are refusing to be responsible with the global ecosystem. I think it's a mistake to single out crypto as a unique actor in this growing issue, and that we should look for solutions that will generalize across all industries. Because all industries are contributing to the modern ecological crisis. And I'll add, crypto does not care if energy becomes more scarce. What crypto cares about is that energy is equally scarce for attackers and defenders. If, due to regulation of production, the cost of energy goes up, crypto will use proportionally less energy and keep chugging away quite happily.
    • andrepd 6y ago
      It's important to undersrand that the EU and the US account for ~25% of the world economy each. They could push reforms unilaterally if they so desired. They just don't, because it's convenient to their business interests.
    • mhluongo 6y ago
      Well said, though jumping to violence so quickly is.. concerning. It does appear that there's a coordination / commons problem here that might not be easy to resolve without force
    • paulgb 6y ago
      Again though, sanctions work for manufacturing but not for cryptocurrencies. Iran is sanctioned from banking from the US and EU but is still a major Bitcoin mining center.
      • phpnode 6y ago
        All it takes is for the US and EU to ban cryptocurrency itself and the problem goes away. It doesn't matter if mining is done in countries beyond their borders because the demand will go through the floor and those countries will have no incentive to keep wasting energy on it. The idea that cryptocurrency is beyond government control is fundamentally wrong. Most people don't want to be criminals.
        • paulgb 6y ago
          Yes, they could block the fiat pipes out instead of the crypto pipes in. Even if it wasn’t a perfect plug, it would devastate the prices and might cause the whole industry to unravel.
    • lifty 6y ago
      I agree with you. And the irony is that the western wealthiest countries have the highest carbon footprint per capita. So the biggest impact would be made by changing our own lifestyles, but it's easier to rip on crypto art than give up your laundry dryer or SUV.
      • paulgb 6y ago
        It might make NFT fans feel better to imagine their detractors getting around in an SUV, but I think you’d find that a lot of us are anti-SUV (both aesthetically and in favor of different incentives around fuel consumption) as well.
        • lifty 6y ago
          Not an NFT fan but point taken. We need to go at this from all directions, but picking energy use cases one by one will make a mess of it. We need incentives at the base layers (energy production, fuels etc.)
    • OskarS 6y ago
      The difference between manufacturing and crypto is that manufacturing actually, you know, manufactures stuff. It makes stuff that is useful to people. It contributes to human society. The energy consumed to power cryptocurrencies contributes nothing to society. It's literally destroying the environment in order to run as many SHA256 hashes as possible per second.
      • matheusmoreira 6y ago
        This problem is specific to proof of work systems. Alternative solutions are already being designed and implemented. Whether existing coins like bitcoin, ethereum and monero will implement these new systems is unknown. > The energy consumed to power cryptocurrencies contributes nothing to society. This is simply false. The energy spent guarantees the integrity of the decentralized ledgers that power cryptocurrencies. Perhaps there are better solutions out there but it's wrong to say that the energy consumption produces no value.
        • OskarS 6y ago
          Whether or not other systems are possible is not really relevant: cryptocurrencies as they exist today work like this. The fact that one day potentially we will have proof-of-stake doesn't change the fact that today we are destroying the earth for no reason at all.
          • matheusmoreira 6y ago
            Destroying the planet? Don't exaggerate. Even the submitted article has the following disclaimer: > Of course even these figures — and anything an individual does — are a drop in the ocean of global emissions (~50 billion tonnes CO2e). There are much higher priority targets for carbon footprint reduction. Eventually cryptocurrencies will use different less expensive algorithms and electricity generation and storage will be a lot friendlier to the environment.
        • danaris 6y ago
          > The energy spent guarantees the integrity of the decentralized ledgers that power cryptocurrencies. This is not of anywhere near sufficient value to society to justify the obscene amount of resources consumed for it. Personally, I would say that it, in fact, contributes nothing to society.
    • tim333 6y ago
      Rather than declaring war which is impractical, you can work out a fine based on tons of CO2 or whatever and put it as a tariff on their exports.
  • mhluongo 6y ago
    I've been avoiding this discussion on HN for months now because most of it appears to be in bad faith / wholly misinformed. But okay, I'll bite. > there is no way to tax them You put a heavy tax on power consumption. Done. > just move to somewhere with less environmental controls Crypto isn't the first industry to take advantage of tax arbitrage. By this logic, few businesses should run in the US.. and yet the only ones commonly taking advantage of havens and tax arb are larger orgs with the resources to structure. Business and money are fluid, but not that fluid.
    • paulgb 6y ago
      > Business and money are fluid, but not that fluid. Manufacturing and moving physical goods is not fluid, but creating and transferring a fungible, pseudonymous asset is. It would be possible for a country to block or put a tariff on imported goods from a country that didn’t do enough to curb carbon emissions, but it wouldn’t be possible to block imports of crypto without overstepping.
    • Retric 6y ago
      Miners outside the US are paid by US investment into crypto. It’s an externality with multiple solutions, but increasing the cost of electricity in the US does nothing.
    • quickthrower2 6y ago
      How do you politically get the world to agree on a power consumption tax? I like the idea but it seems unlikely at a global level.
  • nivenkos 6y ago
    Electricity prices?
  • pavlov 6y ago
    Tax the outflows at crypto exchanges. The only reason anyone cares about this stuff is that you can sell it to the next sucker for real money. Make that unappealingly expensive, and the retail investors will go away.
    • bhupy 6y ago
      That defeats part of the purpose of a carbon tax. In theory, having all crypto be on non-carbon energy is ecologically safe. A carbon tax applied at the level of energy purchase is the most reliable way to move even crypto energy consumption to renewables.
  • bhupy 6y ago
    You can target the energy suppliers directly, who then pass the cost on to consumers of the electricity. With a sufficiently high tax, it becomes unprofitable to mine crypto using non-renewable energy. In theory, if the world had a high energy PoW blockchain solely powered by solar energy, that would be ecologically harmless.
    • DrewRWx 6y ago
      Except that would generate the same sort of run on solar panels and/or their constituent components that is did for GPUS before ASICs got big. Solar panels that could otherwise be used to replace fossil fuels.
      • bhupy 6y ago
        > Except that would generate the same sort of run on solar panels and/or their constituent components that is did for GPUS before ASICs got big. Yes, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, because supply isn't constrained. For any good (or service) for which there is sufficient supply elasticity, when demand increases prices increase temporarily, but that's then followed by an increase in supply to meet that demand. The inflation adjusted price of high-end GPUs has been basically flat since 2000 -> https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/103399-inflation-adjusted-price-history-high-end-nvidia-gpus-tabulated/ https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/103399-inflation-adjust.... Insofar as there has been variation, it has largely been due to other confounding variables. In other words, solar panels will be used to replace fossil fuels no matter what. As long as there's a carbon tax, all crypto mining does is stimulate the demand for solar panels. Right now, I stand to gain a lot of money by starting a solar panel manufacturing company (because of crypto), but the net result (fully developed solar panel supply chains) is still good for humanity no matter what. That only happens if we have targeted environmental policy that magnifies that incentive.
  • snarf21 6y ago
    You don't stop crypto by taxing it. You stop it by banning it at the ISP level. It won't stop 100% of transactions but the price would crater for Bitcoin to $10 and that alone will kill it.
    • gruez 6y ago
      Bitcoin runs over tor, you know.
      • snarf21 6y ago
        True, but what percentage of user who own on Coinbase are going to setup Tor to buy/sell Bitcoin? What percentage are going to be comfortable setting up a Trezor? I did say it wouldn't stop 100% of transactions. If a government bans it, the hedge funds are dumping their positions too. Bitcoin would go back to being a $5 crypto. To be clear, I'm not sure the US government is poised to do this. I was merely saying that you can't carbon tax it out of existence.
• andrepd 6y ago
  That externalities such as pollution are not properly accounted for means market economies will not work not even in theory. It's high time we solved this.
  • cies 6y ago
    It's not often I find like minded people on this one.
• WanderPanda 6y ago
  I don't like the idea of a carbon tax in comparison to a fixed carbon budget. Why would we let politicians decide on a percentage, which might or might not lead to the desired outcome, when we can just limit the budget and trade emission certificates? I also think the government should not sell the certificates but issue them equally to all people (e.g. once a year) who can then sell or consume them. Disclaimer: I am not subscribing to the climate alarmism, but I see that there is a majority now which does, so I at least demand efficient solutions and not more bureaucracy and cronyism.
• mola 6y ago
  I have mix feelings about this. OTH the ban the plastic straws is silly. But I do think it's better than norms keep people in check rather than formal regulation. It's just that norms should not be meme based.
  • DrewRWx 6y ago
    The plastic straw ban is silly because the cost/benefit ratio is almost completely cost. First and foremost the ban has hurt segments of the disabled community that need easily manipulable straws in order to be able to eat. And then to add insult to injury, according to https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-make-difference#gs.vygm3z https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-mak... plastic straws make up less than one-percent of ocean pollution. That disparity between consumer and environmental impact underlines why measures that rely on individual actions are doomed to fail: They are a minuscule improvement per person with nowhere long enough a tail to get close to the impact of the top polluting companies and sectors. Add on top of this the complacency that passing an over-hyped bill generates and how it paints all environmentalists as controlling jerks, and you have a bad situation all around.
• worldsayshi 6y ago
  You are very right and very wrong at the same time. Yes shaming is an extremely poor substitute to such tax but I don't see such tax happening any time soon. So what is the alternative? And shaming has a function: It creates awareness and more importantly momentum to establish such tax. I expect that the counterpoint to this would be that shaming doesn't convince people. Well, I'm not so sure about that. It's not like there's a happier substitute. These things are not fun. We are spending our planet. We need to tighten our extravagances. It isn't fun.
  • cies 6y ago
    > It creates awareness It does not. It pits the common people against each other while billionaires have jets, rockets and fully stocked houses they do not live it. We need to fix something big here, and saying that tax will not happen is simply giving up a lot of species on earth (possibly humans as well). > I expect that the counterpoint to this would be that shaming doesn't convince people. :) It might convince one here and there, but that will add just one whiner to team whiny-whine. Ecosystems are suffering under the exploitation of human's profit maximization. Only a super heavy de-incentifizing tax can truly save us. And the reason that tax in not possible is the reason a revolution will be inevitable.
    • igorkraw 6y ago
      Shouldn't we just shame billionaires a lot and millionaires a little then? On top of calling for revenue neutral carbon taxation that will hit them the most and benefit the common people?
  • bhupy 6y ago
    > but I don't see such tax happening any time soon Curious, why do you feel this way? From where I sit, carbon pricing has been slowly (but surely) making its way into policy all around the world: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/02/climate/pricing-carbon-emissions.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/02/climate/prici... "Canada currently has one of the most ambitious carbon pricing programs in the world. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Liberal government has enacted a nationwide tax on oil, coal and gas that starts at $15 per ton of carbon dioxide this year and will rise to $38 per ton by 2022. Most of the revenue will be refunded to Canadians on their tax bills; the government estimates that these refunds will offset higher energy costs for about 70 percent of people." "With Congress largely gridlocked on climate policy, the main carbon pricing efforts in the United States have unfolded at the state level. In the Northeast, nine states currently participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system that auctions to power plants a steadily dwindling supply of carbon pollution permits. Carbon prices under this system have been fairly modest to date, and it is unclear how much the prices themselves have driven emissions reductions in the region. But states have used the money raised by the auctions to invest in efficiency and clean energy programs. California, meanwhile, has enacted its own cap-and-trade program that goes beyond power plants and also covers manufacturers, refineries, and other polluters. Here, too, carbon prices under the system have remained modest to date, in part because the initial cap was set fairly high, and most of California’s emissions cuts to date have come as a result of other climate policies. Those include the state’s efficiency standards for buildings, and aggressive renewable power targets. State officials are now struggling to tighten the cap so that it drives bigger cuts in future years. There are some signs that carbon pricing could expand further in the states. Virginia and New Jersey are making moves to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, and several Northeastern states are planning a similar program for cars and trucks that would put a price on transportation fuels and invest in mass transit, electric buses or other low-carbon solutions." "Since 2011, China has been experimenting with cap-and-trade programs in several pilot cities, including Shanghai and Shenzhen. The country plans to gradually roll out a nationwide cap-and-trade program starting in 2020, with several years of testing before expanding to major sectors like electricity, steel and concrete. If China manages to follow through, it will have created the largest carbon-pricing program in the world. But the government has not yet finalized key details, like how high it will set the overall emissions cap. Chinese officials have been talking with representatives from California and the European Union, trying to learn from their often-rocky experiences in designing cap-and-trade programs." It hasn't been without its hiccups and we haven't reached maturity yet, but it's clear which way the political winds are blowing. The same can be said for crypto, funnily enough.
• monkeycantype 6y ago
  If blockchain is worthy of it's proponents claims, it should be possible to establish a cryptocurrency which incorporates a blockchain for trading renewable energy where mining consumes the renewable energy coins at a consensus rate.
  • cies 6y ago
    Proof of Stake fixes blockchain's energy problem. It's already fixed. See Cardano and Polkadot.
    • WalterSear 6y ago
      Doesn't solve the problem. Bitcoin isn't going anywhere.
      • monkeycantype 6y ago
        excluding lost keys, there's close to a trillion in personal incentives for the invested to solve bitcoin's problems, Paul Keating used to say 'always back self-interest — at least you know it's trying'. Even if POS doesn't replace POW, I'm curious whether the combination of POS and game theory does, in that breaking POS becomes incredibly expensive, because breaking the system would destroy the value of the stake.
• bairrd 6y ago
  No one in these situations ever talks about political capital. These shame based tactics arise from our powerlessness, as whether consciously or not, people who care about the environment realise that neither party, nor any private industry, will ultimately enact any true change on this front, so the only tool they have left is shaming. We are mired in plastic straws and twitter arguments purely because that is the only avenue left by those that actually hold the ability to change anything.
  • cies 6y ago
    > These shame based tactics arise from our powerlessness Or they are sand in our eyes! There is a vested group who does not want to status quo to change. They make money on pollution, CO2eq-heavy stuff. We need to rearrange the system and the best avenue for this is a very heavy tax on pollution (so big we can lower the tax on wholesome behaviours, like, say, income from labour or housing).
• lm28469 6y ago
  > It's total nonsense. The total non sense is selling an avocado that traveled 6000km to your local supermarket. Just pause for a second and think about it... We'll all need to make sacrifices, and shipping fucking fruits and veggies to the other side of the world is going to be one of them sooner than later. There are already CO2 taxes on cars and it doesn't change much, people still buy them and it's still unsustainable on the long term. Taxing stuff doesn't automagically make the negatives disappear > This will not solve anything except for some people to have something to whine about Let's see how our grand children will be whining in 2150... I'd bet my left nut that your plastic straw and avocado issues will seem very distant to them
  • bhupy 6y ago
    > There are already CO2 taxes on cars and it doesn't change much, people still buy them and it's still unsustainable on the long term. Taxing stuff doesn't automagically make the negatives disappear Are you sure about that? Over the last few years, EV + PHEV proliferation has exploded around the world. Electric cars now make up 54% of the market in Norway (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/electric-cars-record-market-share-norway https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/electric...). In the US, renewable energy consumption surprassed coal for the first time in 130 years (https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=43895). You're right that magic doesn't exist, but it applies to electric technology too; you can't just "will" fully featured replacement power systems into existence overnight. There's still a lot of R&D left to do, and the world is simultaneously working towards improving battery technology while also mass marketing existing technology.
    • lm28469 6y ago
      Replacing the 1.4 ICE vehicles running worldwide with lithium battery powered electric vehicles will be fun... imho we're just displacing the problem in time, lithium isn't magic either and will bring its own share of problems. As long as we keep building and using more and more vehicles we'll always hit pollution and recycling issues which aren't sustainable in the long run. Also, Norway isn't India or Africa, it's a very small country with lots of resources, a very rich population and _massive_ monetary incentives to buy electric vehicles. No matter how much we'll improve out tech, earth is still a finite planet with finite resources and we can't just keep our exponential growth targets indefinitely (more cars, more planes, more roads, more travels, more computers, &c.). It reminds me of plane engine improvements, every XX years we gain 5% on pollution and efficiency but we run 30% more flights... we'll eventually have to make sacrifices
• deleted 6y ago
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