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From the article: > As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a was

From the article: > As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up. This is really the key. Once this is implemented, loads of effort/money/research will flow into this field. It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays". But in any case, it seems obvious that DAC is required to avoid bad outcomes. We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We could just leave it there and deal with the problems, but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.

zug_zug 5y ago
Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less. In turn consumers will be incentivized to buy products that create less pollution. Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing. -- To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? [Please double-check my math]
- Supermancho 5y ago
  > I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?
- poopypoopington 5y ago
  driving 15k miles @25 mpg = 600 gallons of gas (15,000 / 25) gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000) cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600) cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons) price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon yeah your math seems great lol assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving sources: [1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php [2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-... [3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/energy-prices/motor-gasoline/weekly-average-motor-gasoline-prices https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...
  - slashdot2008 5y ago
    thanks for plugging and chugging it all out. carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0]. so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV! [0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-price https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Good luck getting Congress to pass a tax increasing the price of gas by 1.33-3x. That's political suicide, even for Democrats. Directly fucks over the working class but corporate fleets can afford to pay the extra $$$ or switch to electric.
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Wow. I recently got a car - first time in 10 years - and I used TeraPass monthly recurring to offset. Or so I thought. Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS? They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2 https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped
  - kisamoto 5y ago
    Terrapass and others offering these low prices are based on traditional offsets rather than carbon removal. By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere. Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton. Some links for you: Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI [Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com https://carbonremoved.com
    - dillondoyle 5y ago
      Thank you! I completely overlooked this difference. That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.
      - jaggederest 5y ago
        Yeah if you do the math and squint a little, virtually all of the economic value of the benefits of oil will be required to be repaid in order to undo the costs. I think over the long term e.g. Exxon is going to be a net-negative business.
- xorcist 5y ago
  > if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US. In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics). Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.
  - marvin 5y ago
    This is a thing I don't get about climate politics in the Nordics. We have already implemented taxation that strongly disincentivizes a large source of CO2 emissions from businesses and private individuals. Gasoline is expensive here because we pay ~80% tax on it, not because it's expensive to ship. And granted, we do have very strong EV adoption to show for it. But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else. We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee. But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!
- modriano 5y ago
  I'm very skeptical that the cost would be that low. The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year. Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated. How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low. [0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Not as easy as it sounds though. The societal return on pollution varies wildly by industry. Steel production vs. factory farms vs. bitcoin mining. A straight carbon tax is prohibitively difficult for some low margin entities that we kind of need to support and face international competition.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  If something is too important to price it all in, and that can only be fixed so quickly, we do carbon rationing.
  - Loughla 5y ago
    Who decides what is important? Who decides that steel is more important than small farms is more important than cryptocurrency? What are the metrics to decide "important" and how do we avoid this just becoming another subsidy to funnel money to cronies in your home state? Does the government then get to set the winners and losers across broad swaths of industry?
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      Yes, the government does. Things can go very wrong with the state and the market. I have no patience for one's fears entirely being over one not the other. Yes, we have endemic regulatory capture. Yes, we have shitty voting systems that severely restrict the electoral options and, worse, the Overton window. But also, study the WW2 build-up. This was heavy state managed and did a fantastic job, and certainly our voting system were no better then. I also hope a combination of UBI and Carbon taxes can work — so the relative prices of things change but the overall cost of living doesn't go up. But a very easy to understand example of where that is insufficient is that it will be much more efficient to build out public transit than try to make electric cars for everyone cheap.
      - spywaregorilla 5y ago
        UBI and carbon taxes synergize in making your country woefully uncompetitive with other nations in international trade, fwiw.
robomartin 5y ago
> it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago. Sorry, that's just impossible in anything even remotely approximating a human time scale. None of these purported solutions pass even the most basic of physics and economics tests. Not sure why people never ask the right questions. Someone else pointed out that we would have to build some 30,000 of these facilities just to be able to keep up with current CO2 contributions. Ignoring for a moment the utter fantasy that such a proposal would represent, just one look at what is happening this very moment with the forest fires in California should make everyone who thinks we can control atmospheric CL2 at a planetary scale take pause. These forests are burning at a rate of tens of thousands of acres and we can't control them. Last I heard the fires (there's more than one) were somewhere between 11% and 30% contained. It is likely that, in a single week, these fires emit more CO2 than then entire US ground transport fleet emits in a year. We do not have planetary-scale control of these matters. We can't fix this. That's the simple reality of the matter. We have known this for quite some time (that we can't "save the planet"). A recent thread on HN explored yet another aspect of the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28284323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28284323
- kisamoto 5y ago
  I'm more optimistic. Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area. Regarding the viability of solutions I don't think there will be a one-size-fits-all approach and it will actually take many removal methods combined to make a dent.
  - pjerem 5y ago
    > Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area. Does the necessity to survive even exists at civilization scale ? Because climate change will probably not put a clear end to humanity as a specie. And, sure, I’m optimistic : we’ll get through this like we happened to survive, world wars, pandemics and a load of other global catastrophic events. But what will be the cost in human lives ? If, say, 20% of the planet remains inhabitable by the time we succeed to stop climate change, is that an optimistic take ?
kibwen 5y ago
> We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Way, way more than than mere gigatons. FTA: "Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere." That's tens of gigatons in one year.
- netjiro 5y ago
  If the reason we are discussing it is the climate effects, we need to look at systemic total CO2-equivalent emissions which are around 50 gigatons per year.
junon 5y ago
Not trying to be tongue in cheek: is "pollution\b\b\ber pays" encumbered somehow, or am I allowed to put it on a T-shirt? I love it.
- lovemenot 5y ago
  I believe they said Polluter Pays.
  - gmac 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polluter_pays_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polluter_pays_principle
  - junon 5y ago
    Yes, auto-corrupt strikes again!
gorgoiler 5y ago
Very clever. Slogans and visibility really work. Is there a high resolution CO2 ppm map? Or does it not work like that, in terms of physical visibility? Perhaps a big red blob marked “Coca Cola” or “Pitsburg” might kick things a bit more into action?
YetAnotherNick 5y ago
And how do you make developing countries pay carbon/pollution tax? There is a stage in country's development where the country don't care about environment and prioritise on development. All of the developed countries went through that phase from 1700s-1900s. Either we need, say USA, to coercively make country create less pollution(which we know that it generally doesn't work) with military control, or developed countries need to pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean. The second option sounds wrong but it is less wrong than alternatives.
- bwb 5y ago
  Import taxes like the EU is looking at to charge a carbon tax look interesting…
- amatic 5y ago
  What is happening now is, for example, USA/Canada building oil extraction platforms, possibly with fracking, in Botswana. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/20/new-oilfield-in-african-wilderness-threatens-lives-of-130000-elephants https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/20/new-oilf... Maybe the more developed countries should build or invest in power plants from renewable sources, or maybe nuclear, in less developed countries.
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    that require fossil fuels. Ever seen what goes into building a windmill? https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbclid=IwAR14fH2-d17QvtQ9gjs89pxsX16JBKpP6mmuvjokzGiM4Wxh1_CJE0aXY0k https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc... We are not even theoretically close to getting off oil, gas or coal.
    - amatic 5y ago
      Is nuclear a better option then?
      - 5y ago
uCantCauseUCant 5y ago
>but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago. The solution is free energy? Now thats a easy one.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
In theory this system already exists with emission rights, but the problem I have with that is that everyone just gets an X amount of emission rights - and then gets the right to sell them, providing an additional source of income. Tesla famously earns a billion a year from selling their emission rights. So that system can work, but don't give out the emission rights for free, have the companies buy them and invest the money earned in removing emissions from the air again.
- marvin 5y ago
  Handing out emission rights can also be tied to the CO2 tax, assuming the CO2 tax is properly used to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere afterwards. There must be some sort of optimal strategy in there somewhere, that maximizes the economic incentive to reduce one's emissions.
miohtama 5y ago
> It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays". This can be achieved with a carbon tax. Or even higher gasoline taxes in places like the US where gas is underpriced. But people do not want this. It is politically infeasible. The current middle class rather preserves their current lifestyle for next 30-40 years they have left before the end of the old age rather than leaving a better planet for their children.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  I think it's the lower-middle class, honestly. There are a lot of people in America driving older used cars that already get bad mileage. Then there's the issue that most carbon tax proposals try to invest the money in green energy R&D or electric vehicle subsidies. Making gas 2x as expensive and Teslas 20% cheaper doesn't help these people at all - they simply can't afford a brand new car to begin with. Unless 100% of carbon taxes are given back directly to the citizens in the form of cash, it will always be perceived as grabbing money from poor rural people to subsidize the fancy lifestyles of "coastal elites" who want to drive shiny new luxury electric SUVs.
japanuspus 5y ago
A lower-hanging fruit would be to reduce methane emissions since methane decays naturally in a decade or two. According to the Economist's summary of the recent IPCC report, the current forcing effect of methane around 30% of that of CO2.
KKKKkkkk1 5y ago
We've already seen massive fraud in the carbon-offset industry [0, 1]. I would be skeptical about further pay-to-pollute schemes. [0] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992545255/do-carbon-offsets-actually-work-planet-money-takes-a-look https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992545255/do-carbon-offsets-a... [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible
- evilantnie 5y ago
  Carbon offsets are a financial instrument, which is very different than an approach that treats CO2 as a waste product. By nature trying to solve this via a financial instrument likely won't motivate anyone, it's just a way for organizations to play hot potato and literally pass the buck. However, if we were to treat CO2 emissions as a waste product, it would likely have more restrictive industry regulation around how organizations are required to manage their C02 waste by products.
- SamBam 5y ago
  I think deforestation-based carbon credits are a particularly easy place for scams, or even accidental double-selling, or selling acres that wouldn't have been cut down to begin with. I think buying credits from GoldStandard [1] is a safer bet. While I'm sure there's some of the same shadiness occasionally, I think that a lot more work goes into vetting projects. The majority of the projects I fund are small solar, wind or hydro plants. While many of these plants might get built anyway, I think the funding from GoldStandard may make the difference for lots of these small projects. 1. https://marketplace.goldstandard.org https://marketplace.goldstandard.org
bamboozled 5y ago
There is absolutely zero chance the "polluter pays", businesses lobby, Governments owe them, do you think they will ever turn around and get taxed? I hope I'm wrong, but I just absolutely cannot imagine that ever happening.

zug_zug 5y ago

Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less. In turn consumers will be incentivized to buy products that create less pollution. Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing. -- To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? [Please double-check my math]

Supermancho 5y ago
> I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?
poopypoopington 5y ago
driving 15k miles @25 mpg = 600 gallons of gas (15,000 / 25) gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000) cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600) cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons) price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon yeah your math seems great lol assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving sources: [1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php [2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-... [3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/energy-prices/motor-gasoline/weekly-average-motor-gasoline-prices https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...
- slashdot2008 5y ago
  thanks for plugging and chugging it all out. carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0]. so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV! [0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-price https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Good luck getting Congress to pass a tax increasing the price of gas by 1.33-3x. That's political suicide, even for Democrats. Directly fucks over the working class but corporate fleets can afford to pay the extra $$$ or switch to electric.
dillondoyle 5y ago
Wow. I recently got a car - first time in 10 years - and I used TeraPass monthly recurring to offset. Or so I thought. Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS? They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2 https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped
- kisamoto 5y ago
  Terrapass and others offering these low prices are based on traditional offsets rather than carbon removal. By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere. Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton. Some links for you: Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI [Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com https://carbonremoved.com
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    Thank you! I completely overlooked this difference. That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.
    - jaggederest 5y ago
      Yeah if you do the math and squint a little, virtually all of the economic value of the benefits of oil will be required to be repaid in order to undo the costs. I think over the long term e.g. Exxon is going to be a net-negative business.
xorcist 5y ago
> if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US. In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics). Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.
- marvin 5y ago
  This is a thing I don't get about climate politics in the Nordics. We have already implemented taxation that strongly disincentivizes a large source of CO2 emissions from businesses and private individuals. Gasoline is expensive here because we pay ~80% tax on it, not because it's expensive to ship. And granted, we do have very strong EV adoption to show for it. But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else. We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee. But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!
modriano 5y ago
I'm very skeptical that the cost would be that low. The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year. Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated. How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low. [0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
908B64B197 5y ago
> How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

Not as easy as it sounds though. The societal return on pollution varies wildly by industry. Steel production vs. factory farms vs. bitcoin mining. A straight carbon tax is prohibitively difficult for some low margin entities that we kind of need to support and face international competition.

Ericson2314 5y ago
If something is too important to price it all in, and that can only be fixed so quickly, we do carbon rationing.
- Loughla 5y ago
  Who decides what is important? Who decides that steel is more important than small farms is more important than cryptocurrency? What are the metrics to decide "important" and how do we avoid this just becoming another subsidy to funnel money to cronies in your home state? Does the government then get to set the winners and losers across broad swaths of industry?
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Yes, the government does. Things can go very wrong with the state and the market. I have no patience for one's fears entirely being over one not the other. Yes, we have endemic regulatory capture. Yes, we have shitty voting systems that severely restrict the electoral options and, worse, the Overton window. But also, study the WW2 build-up. This was heavy state managed and did a fantastic job, and certainly our voting system were no better then. I also hope a combination of UBI and Carbon taxes can work — so the relative prices of things change but the overall cost of living doesn't go up. But a very easy to understand example of where that is insufficient is that it will be much more efficient to build out public transit than try to make electric cars for everyone cheap.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      UBI and carbon taxes synergize in making your country woefully uncompetitive with other nations in international trade, fwiw.

robomartin 5y ago

> it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago. Sorry, that's just impossible in anything even remotely approximating a human time scale. None of these purported solutions pass even the most basic of physics and economics tests. Not sure why people never ask the right questions. Someone else pointed out that we would have to build some 30,000 of these facilities just to be able to keep up with current CO2 contributions. Ignoring for a moment the utter fantasy that such a proposal would represent, just one look at what is happening this very moment with the forest fires in California should make everyone who thinks we can control atmospheric CL2 at a planetary scale take pause. These forests are burning at a rate of tens of thousands of acres and we can't control them. Last I heard the fires (there's more than one) were somewhere between 11% and 30% contained. It is likely that, in a single week, these fires emit more CO2 than then entire US ground transport fleet emits in a year. We do not have planetary-scale control of these matters. We can't fix this. That's the simple reality of the matter. We have known this for quite some time (that we can't "save the planet"). A recent thread on HN explored yet another aspect of the issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28284323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28284323

kisamoto 5y ago
I'm more optimistic. Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area. Regarding the viability of solutions I don't think there will be a one-size-fits-all approach and it will actually take many removal methods combined to make a dent.
- pjerem 5y ago
  > Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area. Does the necessity to survive even exists at civilization scale ? Because climate change will probably not put a clear end to humanity as a specie. And, sure, I’m optimistic : we’ll get through this like we happened to survive, world wars, pandemics and a load of other global catastrophic events. But what will be the cost in human lives ? If, say, 20% of the planet remains inhabitable by the time we succeed to stop climate change, is that an optimistic take ?

kibwen 5y ago

> We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Way, way more than than mere gigatons. FTA: "Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere." That's tens of gigatons in one year.

netjiro 5y ago
If the reason we are discussing it is the climate effects, we need to look at systemic total CO2-equivalent emissions which are around 50 gigatons per year.

junon 5y ago

Not trying to be tongue in cheek: is "pollution\b\b\ber pays" encumbered somehow, or am I allowed to put it on a T-shirt? I love it.

lovemenot 5y ago
I believe they said Polluter Pays.
- gmac 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polluter_pays_principle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polluter_pays_principle
- junon 5y ago
  Yes, auto-corrupt strikes again!

gorgoiler 5y ago

Very clever. Slogans and visibility really work. Is there a high resolution CO2 ppm map? Or does it not work like that, in terms of physical visibility? Perhaps a big red blob marked “Coca Cola” or “Pitsburg” might kick things a bit more into action?

YetAnotherNick 5y ago

And how do you make developing countries pay carbon/pollution tax? There is a stage in country's development where the country don't care about environment and prioritise on development. All of the developed countries went through that phase from 1700s-1900s. Either we need, say USA, to coercively make country create less pollution(which we know that it generally doesn't work) with military control, or developed countries need to pay developing countries fees for keeping the rivers and air clean. The second option sounds wrong but it is less wrong than alternatives.

bwb 5y ago
Import taxes like the EU is looking at to charge a carbon tax look interesting…
amatic 5y ago
What is happening now is, for example, USA/Canada building oil extraction platforms, possibly with fracking, in Botswana. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/20/new-oilfield-in-african-wilderness-threatens-lives-of-130000-elephants https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/20/new-oilf... Maybe the more developed countries should build or invest in power plants from renewable sources, or maybe nuclear, in less developed countries.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  that require fossil fuels. Ever seen what goes into building a windmill? https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbclid=IwAR14fH2-d17QvtQ9gjs89pxsX16JBKpP6mmuvjokzGiM4Wxh1_CJE0aXY0k https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc... We are not even theoretically close to getting off oil, gas or coal.
  - amatic 5y ago
    Is nuclear a better option then?
    - 5y ago

uCantCauseUCant 5y ago

>but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago. The solution is free energy? Now thats a easy one.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

In theory this system already exists with emission rights, but the problem I have with that is that everyone just gets an X amount of emission rights - and then gets the right to sell them, providing an additional source of income. Tesla famously earns a billion a year from selling their emission rights. So that system can work, but don't give out the emission rights for free, have the companies buy them and invest the money earned in removing emissions from the air again.

marvin 5y ago
Handing out emission rights can also be tied to the CO2 tax, assuming the CO2 tax is properly used to actually remove CO2 from the atmosphere afterwards. There must be some sort of optimal strategy in there somewhere, that maximizes the economic incentive to reduce one's emissions.

miohtama 5y ago

> It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays". This can be achieved with a carbon tax. Or even higher gasoline taxes in places like the US where gas is underpriced. But people do not want this. It is politically infeasible. The current middle class rather preserves their current lifestyle for next 30-40 years they have left before the end of the old age rather than leaving a better planet for their children.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
I think it's the lower-middle class, honestly. There are a lot of people in America driving older used cars that already get bad mileage. Then there's the issue that most carbon tax proposals try to invest the money in green energy R&D or electric vehicle subsidies. Making gas 2x as expensive and Teslas 20% cheaper doesn't help these people at all - they simply can't afford a brand new car to begin with. Unless 100% of carbon taxes are given back directly to the citizens in the form of cash, it will always be perceived as grabbing money from poor rural people to subsidize the fancy lifestyles of "coastal elites" who want to drive shiny new luxury electric SUVs.

japanuspus 5y ago

A lower-hanging fruit would be to reduce methane emissions since methane decays naturally in a decade or two. According to the Economist's summary of the recent IPCC report, the current forcing effect of methane around 30% of that of CO2.

KKKKkkkk1 5y ago

We've already seen massive fraud in the carbon-offset industry [0, 1]. I would be skeptical about further pay-to-pollute schemes. [0] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992545255/do-carbon-offsets-actually-work-planet-money-takes-a-look https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992545255/do-carbon-offsets-a... [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible

evilantnie 5y ago
Carbon offsets are a financial instrument, which is very different than an approach that treats CO2 as a waste product. By nature trying to solve this via a financial instrument likely won't motivate anyone, it's just a way for organizations to play hot potato and literally pass the buck. However, if we were to treat CO2 emissions as a waste product, it would likely have more restrictive industry regulation around how organizations are required to manage their C02 waste by products.
SamBam 5y ago
I think deforestation-based carbon credits are a particularly easy place for scams, or even accidental double-selling, or selling acres that wouldn't have been cut down to begin with. I think buying credits from GoldStandard [1] is a safer bet. While I'm sure there's some of the same shadiness occasionally, I think that a lot more work goes into vetting projects. The majority of the projects I fund are small solar, wind or hydro plants. While many of these plants might get built anyway, I think the funding from GoldStandard may make the difference for lots of these small projects. 1. https://marketplace.goldstandard.org https://marketplace.goldstandard.org

bamboozled 5y ago

There is absolutely zero chance the "polluter pays", businesses lobby, Governments owe them, do you think they will ever turn around and get taxed? I hope I'm wrong, but I just absolutely cannot imagine that ever happening.