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We need “unprecedented measures” to stop and reverse the “unprecedented” damage we have caused to the planet and its climate. Desperate times call for desperat

• aaronbrethorst 5y ago
  The proposed changes include a $12,000 tax rebate on buying a new electric car, weatherization incentives for homes, and will probably include sweet deals on solar panels. Where’s the inconvenience?
  • optimiz3 5y ago
    Only if the vehicle is built in a union shop, which the leading EV manufacturer is not. The credit is significantly reduced otherwise. Also, gas burning PHEVs (Prius) count as EVs which is such a limp handout to legacy auto and does little to push R&D forward.
    • VBprogrammer 5y ago
      Honestly, I'll never understand American politics. Linking a EV tax credit to unionisation just boggles my mind.
      • apendleton 5y ago
        It's basically a bribe -- there was pretty well-sourced reporting that UAW was going to lobby against the electric vehicle package because electric require less manufacturing labor than ICE cars do (ugh), so this was the way to buy them off. It's sort of annoying, but probably tactically the right move given how much power labor has in Democratic politics.
        • the-dude 5y ago
          This is the first time I have seen the word labor used in the context of US politics.
          • refurb 5y ago
            Really? The unions hold a lot of power, even today. That’s why the federal and California vaccine mandates have huge carve outs for the unions. The Democrats know who butters their bread and they’re willing to give them a pass knowing they’ll retain their votes next election.
            • the-dude 5y ago
              Really. Unions, of course. But labor? No.
              • refurb 5y ago
                So you’re saying unions don’t represent labor?
                • the-dude 5y ago
                  No I said : > This is the first time I have seen the word labor used in the context of US politics.
                  • tomrod 5y ago
                    It's a fairly common term. Ie Labor day, AFL union. But it doesn't have as common of a linguistic relationship it did in prior decades. I bet it's one of those things you'll start seeing everywhere.
                  • refurb 5y ago
                    Right, you’re saying unions don’t represent labor because if they did, the constant talk about unions who the equivalent of taking about labor.
      • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        It falls under the "just transition" stuff. It's not the autoworker or coalminer's fault and they and their communities should be considered in the solution, not just trampled over, for both political reasons and for basic justice.
    • xiphias2 5y ago
      Tesla's mission statement is “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”. Even if this bill gives advantages to its competitors, Tesla wins, as electric cars get adopted faster. Also it's a huge global company at this point with lots of ammo to start lobbying, so I'm not worried about it at all.
  • perryizgr8 5y ago
    > Where’s the inconvenience? I don't want to buy a new electric car. I have a perfectly working petrol car. Why should I subsidize some rich guy's fancy new electric toy?
    • wk_end 5y ago
      Because the rest of us are subsidizing the externality of the destruction your petrol car is wreaking on the environment. ...also, given that you're calling it a "petrol" car - a Briticism - do you even live in the US? If not, you won't be the one subsidizing it in case this bill comes to pass anyway.
      • hnlmorg 5y ago
        > also, given that you're calling it a "petrol" car - a Briticism "Petrol" is the more common term. If anything, "gasoline" is an Americanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline#Etymology > In most Commonwealth countries, the product is called "petrol", rather than "gasoline" > The use of the word gasoline instead of petrol is uncommon outside North America,
      • perryizgr8 5y ago
        I don't live in the US, but I will still be subsidizing it. I work for an American corp. If the customers and owners of the company are paying more tax to Uncle Sam, they're gonna be paying less salary to me.
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      • turbinerneiter 5y ago
        I don't even have a car, why should I subsizide someone elses? They should just not have a car, like me. If that doesn't work where they live, the move to somewhere where it works, and pay absurd rents, like I do. I'm not strictly against the subsizidies, but they have sever social justice implications.
• jay_kyburz 5y ago
  Americans (and Australians) will never accept any changes that negatively impact their lives or wallets. Especially when the consequences of climate change are not clear and present. As democracies, we will simply vote out any government that asks us to change our ways. I think Covid19 demonstrates how resistant people are to change, and that they are not willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. Nearly 700,000 Americans have died as a direct result of Covid, can you imagine how many people will have to die before people give up air travel or eating beef. Covid has made me realize that no solution that asks people to wind back energy use will work, we need to push forward and develop carbon sequestration and other terrafoming technologies.
  • AniseAbyss 5y ago
    Lifestyle changes are going to be inevitable, one way or the other.
    • jay_kyburz 5y ago
      I don't think that's a given for people alive today. Climate change happens on a global scale, not a human scale. People wont "feel" it's change. I'm happy to make sacrifices, but a lot of vocal people are not. We need to stop talking about "making sacrifices". We need to get people excited about the amazing opportunities all this work provides us. It's exciting to me that we need to replant our forests. We have new power plants to build. New desalination plants! New farming technologies! So much work in so many industries, it can be an exciting time of growth if you ask me!
      • berkes 5y ago
        > People wont "feel" it's change. Oh, but 'people' feel its change. You feel it. But it is all secondary, or even further away. Coffee is more expensive. Gas (CNG) prices is already costing many households more in these summer months. Gasoline prices are at record hights. Water is increasing in price. Electricity prices are at record heights (which, is increasing my IT infrastructure bills). In many regions we cannot get certain potatoes doe to crops failing. And so on. You see the effects, when you look for em. In your wallet. On your table. In your bottom lines and revenues. So, aside from the opportunities we may see, there are effects having impact on average peoples live this very moment
• jl6 5y ago
  Probably a good idea to stop pointing to specific weather events as evidence of impending doom, because for all of their specific destructiveness, they have had essentially no impact on humanity’s general way of life. I’m not saying hurricanes and droughts and floods aren’t bad, nor that they won’t get worse, but if you set the bar for catastrophe at the current level, a lot of people are going to decide they can easily live with that.
  • rubyist5eva 5y ago
    Climate activists always tell me “weather is not climate” from one side of their mouth while also screaming about extreme weather events as proof of climate doom from the other - I just started tuning it all out.
• justshowpost 5y ago
  > we act But please act at your own expenses.
• maceurt 5y ago
  From my understanding it is almost certainly a lost cause at this point. I am not a scientist so I do not know for certain, but from what I have read at this stage even if we halt greenhouse gas emissions to zero it still won't be enough to stop the drastic changes to the Earth caused by high CO2 levels. We would have to actively removing CO2 to have any sort of chance at preventing the worse problems associated with Global Warming. Not to mention the amount of other pollutants we have released such as plastic/ microplastic that have been and continue to, disturb the ecosystem of our planet.
  • mkr-hn 5y ago
    There's a scale to the catastrophe that's coming, and that's still within our control.
  • TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    “Lost cause” makes it seem as if nothing we can do will help. But that isn’t true. There is a lot we could do that will make the world of 2100 and 2200 better than if we continue doing things as we’ve done them. The real problem is that politicians are unwilling to act. But there’s no shortage of action we could take.
    • maceurt 5y ago
      Human beings have been going down this path since the start of civilization. Human beings have been acting like this since we have had hierarchies of power and wealth. For us to solve the climate issue would require us as a species to do a complete 180. At that point we won't even be human anymore, which is why I say it is a lot cause. I assume the criteria for a solution to climate change has always included our survival as a species, but if it doesn't then I agree with the idea that it isn't a lost cause.
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• dvhh 5y ago
  Like using more nuclear power ?
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    A simple tax on fossil fuels raising the price of fuel to $10 is $20 per gallon should do nicely. If not, keep going up. To prevent it affecting poor people disproportionately, give poorer people cash.
  • lucidguppy 5y ago
    Nuclear power can't come online fast enough. We shouldn't needlessly decommission plants like Germany did. There's an opportunity cost here - we need to make "power plant factories" rather than just "power plants". So if we could make green energy factories and nuke plant factories, that would be better than making one off nuke plants that take so long to get approved.
    • pclmulqdq 5y ago
      The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. By continuing to oppose low-carbon base load power that is politically unpopular, climate activists are showing the world that they don't really believe there's a crisis. Put another way, they are saying: "there's just enough of a crisis for us to take things from you, but not enough for us to sacrifice anything ourselves." Also, with investment in nuclear plants, the cost and time to build one will decrease, but someone needs to put up the money to make that happen.
      • ZeroGravitas 5y ago
        > By continuing to oppose low-carbon base load power that is politically unpopular, climate activists are showing the world that they don't really believe there's a crisis. That's okay, who cares if some old hippies don't believe in an obvious scientific fact. We all believe it's true, right? And that's what matters, yes? Because the people who deny that climate change would be a crisis if we don't stop emitting fossil carbon are absolute idiots, at least we can all agree on that much.
• BoHerfVIJrEsq 5y ago
  > if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything There was nothing unusual. Whatever storm or heatwave or drought you might refer to, there will be significant historical precedent. Whatever it is, often history will have recorded a much worse one back before humans had added much CO2 to the atmosphere. > We need drastic measures. I'm much more worried about people saying things like this than I am about the climate.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. This same rhetoric has been repeated for decades, and has continually received the same, hostile response from the public and politicians. I'm not arguing that it's wrong or untruthful, but alarmist statements like this are a demonstrably poor tool for rousing the public into action and creating real change. Why do climate activists continually insist on using persuasive techniques that are proven to not work?
  • bjt2n3904 5y ago
    You know, if someone predicted the apocalypse was right around the corner, and the only way to avert it was to dramatically change my lifestyle in a way that was orthogonal to the catastrophe... I'd say you're peddling religion. Especially if I don't change, and the doomsday prophecies fail. (Again, and again, and again...)
    • user-the-name 5y ago
      What you want to say is, you don't believe in science.
      • cpursley 5y ago
        I really wish this phase could be banned. It's tiresome and in bad faith.
        • user-the-name 5y ago
          Is that really the problem here? Is that really what you should be focusing on?
      • neither_color 5y ago
        Science doesn't tell you what to do, only what (probably) is as can be observed and deducted. I can believe in science without believing in your call to action. These past two years have been all about another natural disaster where two sides see the same statistic and come to different conclusions about what to do about it while accusing each other of being anti science
• aww_dang 5y ago
  Another drastic emergency rationalizing further government largess. Take a few steps back from the minutiae of the arguments for catastrophic warming. Leave that to the side if you can. Is there anything more hysterical than an appeal to apocalypse? Have we seen this pattern before, where fear is used to rationalize expanded governance?
• api 5y ago
  It’s politically impossible. Even if we do it, the resulting reduction in fossil consumption here will lower their price and cause them to be burned in developing nations. CO2 is CO2 and physics doesn’t care about politics. Poor countries cannot afford the luxury of caring about the distant future and poverty is worse than most natural disasters. There is too much to be gained by exploiting cheap energy to undercut others on manufacturing cost. The rise of China is illustrative. Game theoretically this requires an “all cooperate” scenario in a game whose defection payoff increases as more cooperate. Ask yourself the odds of that in today’s world. The climate solution would be to pour massive amounts of funding and subsidies into every possible candidate for this, and into scaling and cutting the cost of the candidates that we already have. We have to get some mix of solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, batteries, etc. scaled to the point that it can beat coal and oil on the open global market. It has to be able to win on pure economics. Reducing the cost of non carbon based energy to below the cost of carbon based energy is the only solution that will “take.”
  • josephcsible 5y ago
    > Even if we do it, the resulting reduction in fossil consumption here will lower their price and cause them to be burned in developing nations. What if all of the developed nations agreed to impose punitively high tariffs on all imports from developing nations that did this?
    • api 5y ago
      First defector wins cheaper goods than everyone else. The only way it could work is if the USA, China, the EU, Russia, Japan, and all the other major powers and modern economies all formed a tight unified front. I see basically zero chance of that happening. The US, EU, and their orbit seem like the only ones that care even a little, and they are doing half measures at the very best. China pretends to care and burns more coal. Russia’s entire economy is dependent on fossil fuels, as is much of the Middle East. Then keep in mind that any measure that squeezes the middle class is going to provoke a huge populist backlash. Do anything that impoverishes working people and climate change denialists will be voted in. Make low carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels or prepare for 800+ppm CO2. That’s how I see it.
• da_big_ghey 5y ago
  assume you do not have damage to the planet as any inherent value. assume also that in rich nation like America we will probably muddle through. this is case of higher risk tolerance, i am unwilling to make a reduced quality of life now for a hedge against the future.
• wanderingmind 5y ago
  Let's see. Maybe we start with a 90% tax above 100K income to pay for climate change costs? Will that be acceptable inconvenience to folks here.
  • Monory 5y ago
    Sure, if you get billionaires to pay it, too.
    • wanderingmind 5y ago
      You are willing to pay only if someone more wealthy that you pays, but you expect people who scrape for a living to pay more for their energy and fuel expenses because it's just a mild inconvenience for the greater good?
  • sershe 5y ago
    Given the effects of tax-funded wars on drugs, poverty, terrorism, etc., I'm in - as long as the money is spent on war against Earth, i.e. earnest efforts to make it heat up faster. I'm pretty sure we only need a few $Tn and 20 years to achieve cooling ;)
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• indymike 5y ago
  》Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. This is the battle cry of those who have surrendered to fear and are willing to trade freedom for oppression.
  • tzs 5y ago
    That's what a large fraction of the winners on /r/hermancainaward say in regard to pretty much anyone wanting to take any measures against COVID. It's the battle cry of those who think that a problem isn't real or will just go away on its own with little harm if we ignore it. That doesn't work, and the longer the problem is ignored before dealing with it the more disruptive and intrusive the action needed becomes.
• sysihyk 5y ago
  > it’s high time we act > it’s time we suck it up Who are those "we" exactly? And why the other people have to pay for that desperate stuff? Hint: you could go out and plant a tree instead.