3 ms·
It's easy to dismiss every 0.3% improvement as not worth it. I remember reading that the Gates foundation doesn't invest in things that don't have a chance of i
by lucb1e 5y ago
It's easy to dismiss every 0.3% improvement as not worth it. I remember reading that the Gates foundation doesn't invest in things that don't have a chance of improving emissions by at least a percent.
But the full picture is to look at both sides. To gain this 0.3% emission reduction, what do we lose?
I love the speed-limit-less autobahn. I'm Dutch but now living in Germany, it's one of my favorite things. It's convenient that you often just go with the flow instead of having to look out if maybe you're doing 5km/h too fast. Definitely nice. But also, I really use it (160km/h+) maybe twice a year for a few minutes. It's fun, but only safe when you have at least 2 clear lanes and also damaging to the environment. Mostly I drive ~100 for the regular (non-pandemic) trips (to friends/family; work is by public transport).
So I'd miss it, but not a whole lot. The vast majority of people's trips would get longer by a marginal amount. Is that not worth it? I'm inclined to say it might be, but I ultimately don't know. I'd love a system where you get an allocation of, say, 30 minutes per year (and it carries over if you don't use it up), but that's not feasible. Or if a speed limit of 130 is posted, then that you can be caught exceeding it by any amount once every five years with a reasonable fine (not losing your license) unless you clearly created a dangerous situation (that's covered under separate laws already anyway). When lower limits are posted, it's always for a reason so there you just shouldn't go faster. Maybe that could allow people to do it if they're in a truly exceptional rush, or just want to, but still reduce emissions by virtually the same amount?
Or we just tax fuel at the price that it costs to take it back out of the air. Then it's simply your choice to drive as economically as you like. But that's also unfair if you live on minimum wage and need to commute by car. Or maybe the first, say, 75 liters a month are tax-deductible, same as with other deductibles? That would keep it affordable for necessary trips but still give the right incentive for those that want to waste fuel.
- allendoerfer 5y ago> I'd love a system where you get an allocation of, say, 30 minutes per year (and it carries over if you don't use it up), but that's not feasible. We have that limit, it is called mineral oil tax.
- freemint 5y agoThat is a bad way to limit things as the yellow vest movement demonstrated.
- Loveaway 5y ago> Or we just tax fuel at the price that it costs to take it back out of the air Common we can't just tax fossil energy with a bigger amount of energy. That's not gonna solve anything.
- lucb1e 5y agoSorry to be naming a brand rather than a generic technique, but they're the only ones I know of: have you heard of Climeworks? What they do is run machines on renewable energy that take CO2 out of the air. (I have a subscription to support it because I think we'll need the tech to be mature sooner rather than later.) It definitely would be more efficient to just use that renewable energy directly until we're at 100% renewable energy, but we'll still have chemical reactions. Cement for buildings, creating plastics, space launches, currently airplanes (but it looks like electrofuels might become a thing to solve that), there are a bunch of things for which we'll need this unless we have some breakthrough. Similarly, if you want to run your combustion engine on the Autobahn, I don't see the problem if you clean up after yourself in some way. Causing more emissions while cleaning up, as you argue, is obviously not cleaning up so that's not what I'm proposing. Another popular route is to buy these credits, where supposedly someone else will not burn down a particular piece of forest because you bought it and so you can say that you reduced global emissions. While better than nothing, I'm not sure those are as effective as something easily verifiable like Climeworks (easy to see if the machine really poops out solid CO2 as claimed, and easy to see if it runs on renewable energy).
- Loveaway 5y agoIt's not that people "want" to run combustion engines or use fossil fuels. The problem is that over 80% of the world energy output comes from fossil fuels at the moment. Taking the CO2 out then requires more energy than we got out of it in the first place. So we would need to reduce our fossil fuel usage by something like 90% to have enough energy from renewables to be able to extract the CO2 back (that's just new emission, don't even think about recouping the CO2 from over a century of fossil usage). It's not possible unless we drastically reduce energy consumption to pre-industrialization levels, but with 7+ billion people. It's gonna be back to riding horses. Barring breakthroughs or divine intervention, there's not gonna be a magical 100% renewable energy replacement at current consumption rates. Fossil fuels are the "free" energy our world as we know it runs on, we don't just have a choice, or can tell people to clean up after themselves via taxes. It's just dancing around the problem, not a solution to anything.