3 ms·

I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no on

by c3534l 5y ago

I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no one pays for the negative effects of pollution and therefor everyone does.

oofbey 5y ago
Carbon tax is a really nice and simple idea. But its key problem is that it costs the same whether or not there is a viable alternative for lowering carbon. So it punishes industries for which there is no viable alternative using today’s technologies. And it also provides relatively low pressure to adopt the technologies we know are on the cusp of working. In theory in the long term it encourages innovation in all the right ways, but in practice there’s no way to usefully spend billions of dollars on pure research projects to fix the problems we don’t know how to fix yet. Targeted incentives and regulations, in contrast, can force industries to adapt quickly in ways that we know are actually not economically painful. (You just gotta enable low power mode on your laptops Dell, seriously it’s not hard just stop whining and do it.) Yeah it is a bit annoying, but it’s just annoying, no worse - not like putting a carbon tax on concrete which would be super expensive, basically impossible to avoid, and drag down economic growth everywhere.
ashtonkem 5y ago
In many cases this would be true. I think people would be a bit shocked if every pound of steel or concrete they bought came with a carbon tax attached, for example. But in the case of dishwashing vs. hand washing you are already paying for the decreased efficiency in the form of your water and heating bill. The issue is that most of us have no way to measure the relative hot water consumption of either, so we’re left with the heuristic of “more convenient is less efficient”.

3 ms·

I wouldn't be wrong if you just charged me for carbon. I'm sure there's plenty of things people are wrong about carbon emissions and have no idea, because no on

by c3534l 5y ago

oofbey 5y ago
Carbon tax is a really nice and simple idea. But its key problem is that it costs the same whether or not there is a viable alternative for lowering carbon. So it punishes industries for which there is no viable alternative using today’s technologies. And it also provides relatively low pressure to adopt the technologies we know are on the cusp of working. In theory in the long term it encourages innovation in all the right ways, but in practice there’s no way to usefully spend billions of dollars on pure research projects to fix the problems we don’t know how to fix yet. Targeted incentives and regulations, in contrast, can force industries to adapt quickly in ways that we know are actually not economically painful. (You just gotta enable low power mode on your laptops Dell, seriously it’s not hard just stop whining and do it.) Yeah it is a bit annoying, but it’s just annoying, no worse - not like putting a carbon tax on concrete which would be super expensive, basically impossible to avoid, and drag down economic growth everywhere.
ashtonkem 5y ago
In many cases this would be true. I think people would be a bit shocked if every pound of steel or concrete they bought came with a carbon tax attached, for example. But in the case of dishwashing vs. hand washing you are already paying for the decreased efficiency in the form of your water and heating bill. The issue is that most of us have no way to measure the relative hot water consumption of either, so we’re left with the heuristic of “more convenient is less efficient”.