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>1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic leadership accountable neither to its people or the global community. China is doing proportionally more t

>1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic leadership accountable neither to its people or the global community. China is doing proportionally more to combat climate change than we are. >70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all emissions is electricity and heat There are so many "easy wins" here. Better insulation and other end user improvements (e.g. heat pumps), stricter efficiency standards and mandates, carbon taxes on the most polluting industries and generation methods (i.e. make it unprofitable to restart an old coal power plant to mine bitcoin), etc. >I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either. There's not an obviously right solution to everything, but there are obviously right solutions to many things, and we are still choosing not to do any of them.

sokoloff 5y ago
In many cases, people are not willing to do the theoretically/physically best/most energy efficient solution because it’s much, much cheaper to not. My house is ~100 years old structural brick. The insulation on most of the vertical walls is just the plaster, air gap, and 9” of brick. As we remodel (very slowly), we insulate with spray foam, but that remodeling is never driven by energy concerns. It’s vastly cheaper for me to keep heating the bulk of the house with natural gas than it ever would be to take money from investments and turn them into insulation and new plaster walls. I’ve had insulation and HVAC contractors out. To totally redo just the vertical walls and change the HVAC to locally electric is a six-figure proposition and by the time it’s done, the first digit won’t be a “1”. The payback period on that is infinite if you charge yourself 2% interest (with energy priced as it is today).
- minikites 5y ago
  >In many cases, people are not willing to do the theoretically/physically best/most energy efficient solution because it’s much, much cheaper to not. This is why we need to change the economics of the situation. If we raise taxes on the very wealthy, Jeff Bezos might not get to go to space, but we could insulate a few hundred thousand houses.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I don’t see a stable and effective long-term alternative to raising carbon-intensive energy prices. If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap, people will take the money and continue to use a lot of energy. (I’ll save money on heating and use it to keep the house 74°F instead of 69°F in the winter or to take a vacation to a tropical location.) Bezos, Musk, and Gates aren’t the problem here. 100s of millions of Americans and a couple billion people worldwide who could all save 2-5% of their footprint are the problem. Incentives need to nudge them each a little rather than confiscation and redistribution of the wealth of a few dozen people. It can be comfortable to think “I don’t need to change; we just need to tax the ultra rich”, but the reality is closer to the opposite.
    - minikites 5y ago
      >If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap Why would we keep energy cheap? The economics of that also needs to change. I agree that we should also raise carbon-intensive energy prices, and do our best to structure it to penalize disproportionate users (e.g. construction costs for massive houses and buildings). I also don't understand how you could "take the money" for improvements like insulation and then still use more energy, unless you just mean fraud in general. Change also needs to happen at a societal level. We need to tax extreme amounts of wealth, because that wealth came from society, so the burden is on them to help. On a global level, we could also do more to help developing and industrializing nations. Imagine a green version of the Marshall Plan.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Right now, I only heat my house to 69°F/20.5°C in the winter (because of the cost). If a government program pays for the insulation, wall repairs, paint, and HVAC replacement to make my house more efficient, I might choose to heat my house to 74 or 75°F/24°C if energy is still cheap. That’s not fraud; that’s consumers making entirely rational trade-offs about how much each additional degree of comfort is worth to them in monetary terms. “We should tax billionaires and raise taxes on carbon energy” is effective overwhelmingly because of the second part. You could nearly equally well say “we should chew more bubble gum and raise taxes on carbon energy”. (It’s fine to have a separate debate on billionaire tax policy, but it seems tenuous at best to link it to energy policy.)

sokoloff 5y ago

In many cases, people are not willing to do the theoretically/physically best/most energy efficient solution because it’s much, much cheaper to not. My house is ~100 years old structural brick. The insulation on most of the vertical walls is just the plaster, air gap, and 9” of brick. As we remodel (very slowly), we insulate with spray foam, but that remodeling is never driven by energy concerns. It’s vastly cheaper for me to keep heating the bulk of the house with natural gas than it ever would be to take money from investments and turn them into insulation and new plaster walls. I’ve had insulation and HVAC contractors out. To totally redo just the vertical walls and change the HVAC to locally electric is a six-figure proposition and by the time it’s done, the first digit won’t be a “1”. The payback period on that is infinite if you charge yourself 2% interest (with energy priced as it is today).

minikites 5y ago
>In many cases, people are not willing to do the theoretically/physically best/most energy efficient solution because it’s much, much cheaper to not. This is why we need to change the economics of the situation. If we raise taxes on the very wealthy, Jeff Bezos might not get to go to space, but we could insulate a few hundred thousand houses.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I don’t see a stable and effective long-term alternative to raising carbon-intensive energy prices. If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap, people will take the money and continue to use a lot of energy. (I’ll save money on heating and use it to keep the house 74°F instead of 69°F in the winter or to take a vacation to a tropical location.) Bezos, Musk, and Gates aren’t the problem here. 100s of millions of Americans and a couple billion people worldwide who could all save 2-5% of their footprint are the problem. Incentives need to nudge them each a little rather than confiscation and redistribution of the wealth of a few dozen people. It can be comfortable to think “I don’t need to change; we just need to tax the ultra rich”, but the reality is closer to the opposite.
  - minikites 5y ago
    >If you create a large pile of government giveaway money but keep energy cheap Why would we keep energy cheap? The economics of that also needs to change. I agree that we should also raise carbon-intensive energy prices, and do our best to structure it to penalize disproportionate users (e.g. construction costs for massive houses and buildings). I also don't understand how you could "take the money" for improvements like insulation and then still use more energy, unless you just mean fraud in general. Change also needs to happen at a societal level. We need to tax extreme amounts of wealth, because that wealth came from society, so the burden is on them to help. On a global level, we could also do more to help developing and industrializing nations. Imagine a green version of the Marshall Plan.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Right now, I only heat my house to 69°F/20.5°C in the winter (because of the cost). If a government program pays for the insulation, wall repairs, paint, and HVAC replacement to make my house more efficient, I might choose to heat my house to 74 or 75°F/24°C if energy is still cheap. That’s not fraud; that’s consumers making entirely rational trade-offs about how much each additional degree of comfort is worth to them in monetary terms. “We should tax billionaires and raise taxes on carbon energy” is effective overwhelmingly because of the second part. You could nearly equally well say “we should chew more bubble gum and raise taxes on carbon energy”. (It’s fine to have a separate debate on billionaire tax policy, but it seems tenuous at best to link it to energy policy.)