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I'm reminded of a recent Yglesias essay: https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-quiet-climate-policy-enough https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-quiet-climate-policy-enough

I'm reminded of a recent Yglesias essay: https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-quiet-climate-policy-enough https://www.slowboring.com/p/is-quiet-climate-policy-enough: Most people don’t care much about climate Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked. You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs. And you see it in the polling. Reuters did a survey recently that showed 69% of Americans say the United States should take “aggressive” action to combat climate change, but only 34% would be willing to pay $100 more per year in taxes to achieve that goal. A hundred bucks is not a lot of money. People spend that on Halloween decorations. A nice dinner date could cost you more than that. If you’re buying a car, the dealer tries to upsell you on fancy floor mats that cost more than $100. Years ago, I used to be a real carbon-pricing head. It seemed (and still does) like an elegant, important solution to a major problem. Leftists would yell at me that this was too much of a neoliberal, market-oriented thing. And they’ve completely won the argument over a carbon tax — everyone agrees that imposing a really stiff carbon price is just not in the cards. There are companies like Project Vesta that accept donations for carbon capture and storage: https://www.projectvesta.org/ https://www.projectvesta.org/, but I don't see them overwhelmed with interest. The most popular vehicles sold to individuals in the United States today are pickup trucks. Nuclear energy is spectacular for the climate but politically radioactive. Vegetarianism, or even just meat-consumption reduction, is a very minority pursuit. It's hard to square many of these facts with true, widespread concern about climate change. (Note that I'm not arguing that many of the cited trends are good or desirable: but it is important to understand something before critique.)

fulafel 5y ago
Carbon pricing works and is an everyday thing over here in Europe & UK: https://ember-climate.org/data/carbon-price-viewer/ https://ember-climate.org/data/carbon-price-viewer/
- giantg2 5y ago
  One thing I question, is the equity of this solution. Don't the pricing solutions essentially price out lower income people while allowing the wealthy to be largely unaffected? It seems that would lead to a more stratified society. If it's really about reducing emissions, why not force the wealthy to use the alternatives that the lower class are economically forced to use?
  - fulafel 5y ago
    We also have fairly big income transfers in many countries, making this a somewhat orthogonal question.
  - MrPatan 5y ago
    You showed up with the wrong sign.
  - jsmith45 5y ago
    The fundamental idea of carbon pricing is that businesses right now have basically no disincentive to spewing out as much CO2 as they want, except possibly for angering a relatively small amount of people who care strongly about the environment. Why on earth would they voluntary spend the money to needed to reduce their carbon footprint? (unless they determine it is cheap enough to buy offsets or whatever to be able to call themselves carbon neutral for marketing purposes.) This also means that development of sustainable alternatives is often slowed, as they will cost more at first, even if they happen to end up being less expensive in the long run (which is unlikely to be true in all cases, but which could potentially be true in a few specific scenarios). But what are the alternatives? Simply outlawing burning of gasoline effective on some future date will be no more equitable. Putting a strict quota system on companies would also cause prices to rise and be unequitable to. I don't see any realistically implementable system that does not potentially cause prices to rise, and obviously rising prices on most goods disproportionately affects lower income people.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > Carbon pricing works and is an everyday thing over here in Europe & UK How do you measure how much it works? From 2005-2018, the US, with no carbon pricing, reduced CO2 emissions per GDP by 45% and the Euro Area reduced it by 52%. So is your claim that the 7% percentage points extra over 13 years is what Carbon pricing achieved for the EU? E.g. a gain of 0.5% per year? At this rate, after 100 years you would have achieved a reduction that is 65% better than the what the US would achieve without carbon pricing. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locations=US-EU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat... Of course in absolute terms, the US increased efficiency more over the same period (but I think percent change is more relevant, as the US started with a higher base). At the same time, the EU is facing very high electricity bills, there was a backlash at further increase in gas taxes in France, and the EU is straining to push this agenda further. Meanwhile there are electrical outages in China forcing China to rollback its coal reduction targets. So what I see is a lot of pain and political capital expended for very small gains in terms of CO2/GDP. If you have a different conclusion, then I'd love to see your methodology and the numbers you are coming up with to measure how effective this is.
giantg2 5y ago
It also seems $100 dollars per year is way easier than changing one's activities to reduce emissions. For example, cutting out meat, zero waste lifestyle, commute on a bike, etc. Although it's possible the people not willing to pay extra taxes might have a different reason. Like maybe they don't trust the government to spend it for the stated purpose, or use it efficiently.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
> Most people don’t care much about climate I don't think that's true. > Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked. I think it has worked. Numbers show overwhelmingly around the world people believe the science (even in extreme denier countries like Indonesia they number under 20%), and as your own quoted numbers show, people do want change. > You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs. Most people don't go to "rallies" because they don't see them as having a significant benefit, and they've got other things to do. It doesn't mean they don't support action. Too few people showing up to rallies, or too many "defund the police" signs at them is not the reason really significant action on climate has not happened. I don't buy the cost argument either -- costly, controversial and unpopular policies and legislation have been implemented in countries around the world with far less support than this. Democratic countries have been dragged into wars of aggression. Banks have been bailed out after causing economic crashes and destroying peoples' housing assets. Immigration policies are widely unpopular among many western countries. The list goes on. The ruling class has not had a problem pushing through their horrendously costly and unpopular agenda before, yet they're telling us the greatest problem facing humanity and their singular most important issue has somehow this one time been derailed by the selfishness of the commoners (or even more hilariously, the boogeyman all-powerful unemployed coal miner in West Virginia who doesn't believe the science and is usually a KKK member, a Nazi, perhaps a Russian agent as well, and is somehow pulling the strings of most politicians from both main political parties) Garbage. It's their usual lies and divisiveness. Pretend to be battling valiantly and working themselves to the bone to solve this problem that they don't actually want solved, and blame your neighbor for their faux failures. People need to stop the singular focus on this minority of boogeymen as though they somehow have the power to hold everyone to ransom and the only way to make progress is to reason, plead, or bully them until 100% of them think exactly the same we do. And focus on the real problem which means holding the ruling class to account. And yes, that is likely going to require some very difficult reflection of "your team" and very uncomfortable realization that they have repeatedly promised change and repeatedly failed to deliver it over the decades despite at many times having strong mandates in terms of electoral victories and holding positions of power to make changes if they actually wanted. And make bad, unpopular, and costly changes they did many times, all the while largely ignoring the problem they were repeatedly calling the greatest threat facing humanity.

fulafel 5y ago

Carbon pricing works and is an everyday thing over here in Europe & UK: https://ember-climate.org/data/carbon-price-viewer/ https://ember-climate.org/data/carbon-price-viewer/

giantg2 5y ago
One thing I question, is the equity of this solution. Don't the pricing solutions essentially price out lower income people while allowing the wealthy to be largely unaffected? It seems that would lead to a more stratified society. If it's really about reducing emissions, why not force the wealthy to use the alternatives that the lower class are economically forced to use?
- fulafel 5y ago
  We also have fairly big income transfers in many countries, making this a somewhat orthogonal question.
- MrPatan 5y ago
  You showed up with the wrong sign.
- jsmith45 5y ago
  The fundamental idea of carbon pricing is that businesses right now have basically no disincentive to spewing out as much CO2 as they want, except possibly for angering a relatively small amount of people who care strongly about the environment. Why on earth would they voluntary spend the money to needed to reduce their carbon footprint? (unless they determine it is cheap enough to buy offsets or whatever to be able to call themselves carbon neutral for marketing purposes.) This also means that development of sustainable alternatives is often slowed, as they will cost more at first, even if they happen to end up being less expensive in the long run (which is unlikely to be true in all cases, but which could potentially be true in a few specific scenarios). But what are the alternatives? Simply outlawing burning of gasoline effective on some future date will be no more equitable. Putting a strict quota system on companies would also cause prices to rise and be unequitable to. I don't see any realistically implementable system that does not potentially cause prices to rise, and obviously rising prices on most goods disproportionately affects lower income people.
rsj_hn 5y ago
> Carbon pricing works and is an everyday thing over here in Europe & UK How do you measure how much it works? From 2005-2018, the US, with no carbon pricing, reduced CO2 emissions per GDP by 45% and the Euro Area reduced it by 52%. So is your claim that the 7% percentage points extra over 13 years is what Carbon pricing achieved for the EU? E.g. a gain of 0.5% per year? At this rate, after 100 years you would have achieved a reduction that is 65% better than the what the US would achieve without carbon pricing. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locations=US-EU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat... Of course in absolute terms, the US increased efficiency more over the same period (but I think percent change is more relevant, as the US started with a higher base). At the same time, the EU is facing very high electricity bills, there was a backlash at further increase in gas taxes in France, and the EU is straining to push this agenda further. Meanwhile there are electrical outages in China forcing China to rollback its coal reduction targets. So what I see is a lot of pain and political capital expended for very small gains in terms of CO2/GDP. If you have a different conclusion, then I'd love to see your methodology and the numbers you are coming up with to measure how effective this is.

giantg2 5y ago

It also seems $100 dollars per year is way easier than changing one's activities to reduce emissions. For example, cutting out meat, zero waste lifestyle, commute on a bike, etc. Although it's possible the people not willing to pay extra taxes might have a different reason. Like maybe they don't trust the government to spend it for the stated purpose, or use it efficiently.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

> Most people don’t care much about climate I don't think that's true. > Huge sums of money have been spent in an effort to will into existence a mass social movement to tackle climate change, and it basically hasn’t worked. I think it has worked. Numbers show overwhelmingly around the world people believe the science (even in extreme denier countries like Indonesia they number under 20%), and as your own quoted numbers show, people do want change. > You can get people out to a march, but the people who come are all-purpose leftist activists, which is why you have incredible trouble imposing message discipline and preventing people from showing up with “Free Palestine” and “Defund Police” signs. Most people don't go to "rallies" because they don't see them as having a significant benefit, and they've got other things to do. It doesn't mean they don't support action. Too few people showing up to rallies, or too many "defund the police" signs at them is not the reason really significant action on climate has not happened. I don't buy the cost argument either -- costly, controversial and unpopular policies and legislation have been implemented in countries around the world with far less support than this. Democratic countries have been dragged into wars of aggression. Banks have been bailed out after causing economic crashes and destroying peoples' housing assets. Immigration policies are widely unpopular among many western countries. The list goes on. The ruling class has not had a problem pushing through their horrendously costly and unpopular agenda before, yet they're telling us the greatest problem facing humanity and their singular most important issue has somehow this one time been derailed by the selfishness of the commoners (or even more hilariously, the boogeyman all-powerful unemployed coal miner in West Virginia who doesn't believe the science and is usually a KKK member, a Nazi, perhaps a Russian agent as well, and is somehow pulling the strings of most politicians from both main political parties) Garbage. It's their usual lies and divisiveness. Pretend to be battling valiantly and working themselves to the bone to solve this problem that they don't actually want solved, and blame your neighbor for their faux failures. People need to stop the singular focus on this minority of boogeymen as though they somehow have the power to hold everyone to ransom and the only way to make progress is to reason, plead, or bully them until 100% of them think exactly the same we do. And focus on the real problem which means holding the ruling class to account. And yes, that is likely going to require some very difficult reflection of "your team" and very uncomfortable realization that they have repeatedly promised change and repeatedly failed to deliver it over the decades despite at many times having strong mandates in terms of electoral victories and holding positions of power to make changes if they actually wanted. And make bad, unpopular, and costly changes they did many times, all the while largely ignoring the problem they were repeatedly calling the greatest threat facing humanity.